Fortune Favors

FIFTEEN

Click.

For a moment, no one moved. Higgins stood stock still, as if he had expended the last of his motive force in pulling the trigger, and now hadn’t the energy to even lower his arm. The sound of the hammer striking the evidently impotent bullet seemed to echo in the silent stillness. Then a sound intruded; the sound of Dr. Leeds laughing.

“Shit,” blurted one of Leeds’ gunmen, stepping forward and racking a round into the chamber of his pump-action shotgun. “I'll do him.”

“No.” Leeds didn’t raise his voice; he didn’t have to. The man quickly relented, backing away as Leeds continued. “No, I’ve had my little joke. You didn’t think I’d hand you a loaded gun, and take the chance that you would shoot me with it?”

Higgins sagged a little.

“When your end comes, Kismet,” Leeds continued, his voice still dripping with menace, “it will be far more…imaginative…than the swift release of a bullet in the brain.” He turned to his subordinates. “Tie them up.”

“Wait,” protested Higgins, recovering a little of his nerve. “I meant what I said. You have to believe me.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” countered Leeds. “As it happens, I haven’t figured out what to do with you. I’ll admit; your change of heart, if sincere, surprised me. Right now, I haven’t the time to figure out where your loyalties really lie, but soon…Well, I’ll have an eternity.”

One of Leeds’ men produced a roll of silver duct tape and commenced wrapping several thicknesses around Kismet’s wrists — joined behind his back — and ankles. He repeated the process with a scowling but quiet Annie, but then, following a gesture from Dr. Leeds, allowed Higgins to remain free. The former Gurkha chose not to look Kismet or his daughter in the eye, but sank to the ground, and sat with his head resting against his knees as if exhausted or perhaps nauseous.

Kismet still wasn’t sure what to make of the earlier scene. He still couldn’t believe that Higgins had betrayed them; there had to be some other explanation, and yet, he had pulled that trigger. If not for Leeds’ sleight-of-hand, rendering the weapon harmless, Higgins would have taken his life.

Kismet drew comfort from a single fact: he and Annie were still alive; anything was possible.

As soon as Annie was bound fast, Leeds waved his men off and knelt in front of Kismet. “Now, where is it?”

“Where is what?” Kismet replied with mock innocence.

Leeds calmly extended his maimed right arm and placed the tip of the hook in Kismet’s left nostril. Despite his determination not to give the occultist the satisfaction of a reaction, Kismet instinctively tried to lever his body up and away from the pinpoint of pain that radiated across his face.

“It’s out there,” Higgins said, pointing the lake. “Just offshore. That’s all he knows.”

Leeds stared at Higgins for a moment, weighing the veracity of the admission, or perhaps just trying to decide whether or not to continue tormenting his prisoner, then gave the hook a twist and let Kismet’s head fall away. The occultist rose disdainfully and began snapping orders to his confederates. When he finished, all but two of the men vanished back into the woods. Leeds and Elisabeth remained behind, as did his two newest recruits — Russell and Higgins.

Kismet could taste blood in his mouth, trickling down the back of his throat from the scrape in his nostril,minor though it was, the fresh wound somehow hurt more than the dull throbbing in his leg where the alligator had grabbed him. He spat a bright red gobbet in Leeds’ direction, not quite close enough to invite a reprisal, but nevertheless a gesture of contempt.

“I’m curious about something, Leeds. How exactly do you plan to keep control of the Fountain once you find it? I don’t care how persuasive Lizzy there is, I don’t think the government is going to put you in charge. Or are you and the ‘white power’ boys going to launch the next Civil War from here?”

Leeds cocked his head sideways thoughtfully. “The Fountain? You disappoint me Kismet. I would have thought you’d have figured it out already. The Fountain of Youth is nothing more than an intermediate goal; a means to an end. I thought I explained all this. The Fountain is just a by-product of something far more important.”

“You want the source,” Kismet said, thinking out loud. “A Seed from the original Tree of Life. Take that and you can make a Fountain of Youth anywhere you like.”

“Yes. But it is so much more than that. It is the source of…of everything. Unlimited power.”

“Oh my God,” Annie whispered.

Leeds licked his lips hungrily. “Indeed.”

She blinked at him and then seemed to regain a little of her steel. “I meant, ‘oh my God, he’s a nutter.’”

Leeds just laughed.

Kismet and Annie, still bound, were bodily carried along the top of the serpent mound to an idling pontoon boat. The craft, a commercial model used for chartered fishing trips, could comfortably seat a dozen passengers and crew, but as they were dropped unceremoniously on the deck, Kismet saw that much of the available space was filled with bright yellow air tanks and other pieces of SCUBA equipment. Four of Leeds’ hirelings crowded aboard; the rest melted back into the woods.

Kismet mentally arranged the boat’s occupants like pieces on a chessboard, testing different strategies for escape. Leeds’ thugs were pawns, but deadly ones, who would probably kill without hesitation. But what about the rest? What about Russell, could he be turned with an appeal to reason? Was Higgins beyond redemption, or would he choose to put his daughter’s safety above all else, even as he had apparently done when deciding to surrender in the face of overwhelming odds? With Russell and Higgins on his side, they might be able to overpower the four hired guns; Leeds and Elisabeth didn’t pose much of a physical threat. If Kismet tried to escape with Annie, would the two men try to stop him, or would they throw in their lot with he and Annie?

When the last of the group had crowded onto the boat, the skipper — one of Leeds’ men — nudged the throttle on the outboard and steered toward the spot where they deduced the entrance to the cavern would be found. The boat had been equipped with a very sophisticated sonar DownScan Imaging Fishfinder; the video screen painted an image of the bottom — and what lay beneath the soft accretion of sediment — in stunning hues of color. But as amazing as the technology was, it only served to verify that Kismet’s earlier conclusion about the site was dead-on; at the exact spot where the serpent mound’s tale and head would have met, the sonar identified a large round hole in the limestone of the lake bottom — a submerged cenote.

There were probably dozens just like it in the lake. Northern Florida was shot through with limestone caves like the holes in a wheel of Swiss cheese. Nevertheless, Kismet knew that this was the one; this was the entrance to the cavern described in Fortune’s letter, the place where Hernando Fontaneda had discovered the Fountain of Youth.

Leeds seemed to recognize it as well. He ordered his man to keep the boat directly above the opening. As they circled the site, Russell took off his uniform, unselfconsciously stripping down to his underwear, and then pulled on a “shorty” wetsuit. Meanwhile, Leeds addressed Kismet.

“Do you know why I didn’t just let Mr. Higgins kill you?” Kismet got the sense that it was a rhetorical question, and before he could even begin to formulate an answer, Leeds continued. “I probably should have. Ian said I should kill you—”

“The big guy with the silver tooth?” Kismet replied innocently. “I noticed that he didn’t seem to like me very much. What did I ever do to him?”

“Ah, under different circumstances, your ignorance would be amusing. Whatever happened to Ian anyway?”

“Search me. Maybe he was jealous of the magician’s new assistant and decided to hit the pavement.”

Leeds’ eyes narrowed a little. “You’re alive because you have the devil’s own luck. No, strike that. Luck has nothing to do with it. You have a touch of the divine in you.”

The comment hit Kismet like a slap.

“They never told you, of course,” Leeds continued. “You are their grand experiment. If you knew what you are truly capable of, it would skew the data, so to speak.”

Kismet felt like screaming at him. Who? Who is running this experiment? How do you know all this? Who in the hell is Prometheus? He shrugged, saying nothing.

“Ah, and that’s what I’m doing right now, isn’t it?” The occultist chuckled. “It’s fitting really. They have used you to locate the ancient mysteries so they could hide them, and in so doing, hid your own true nature from you. It’s appropriate, don’t you think, that I should reveal their secret in order to use you for my own ends.”

Russell finished pulling on the SCUBA gear and promptly stepped out over the side of the boat, dropping flippered feet first into the lake. He bobbed there for a few seconds, making final adjustments to his mask and regulator, then swam close to the boat. There was a reel of heavy nylon line attached to his belt and Russell secured the loose end to a grommet on the deck of the boat using a small carabiner.

“’I’m ready,” he announced.

Leeds was still looking at Kismet. He shook his head. “Listen to me, prattling on about irrelevant things. I was talking about why I haven’t killed you. You are still alive because you have a…a talent…yes, that’s the word. You have a talent for delivering the goods.

“We both know it’s down there, so by all rights, I should kill you now just so you don’t queer my plans with that devilish luck of yours. But no, I think it’s better to use your gift to my own advantage.” Leeds clapped him on the shoulder. “Cheer up, Kismet. If you really are what they think you are, then you’ll probably be the first one to see the Fountain of Youth.”

“What does that mean?”

Leeds nodded to his nearest hireling, and the man stepped forward, brandishing a cheap- looking switchblade which he used to slice through the tape holding Kismet’s hands together. Kismet flexed his arms for a moment, trying to restore the circulation to stiff muscles, but also stalling for time — time in which to figure out how to transform Leeds’ reprieve into an opportunity to turn the tables.

“So, you want me to dive down and find the entrance?”

Leeds’ man put away the switchblade and then bent over the pile of diving equipment. A moment later, he produced a weight belt which he buckled in place around Kismet’s waist.

“Something like that.” Leeds smiled his death’s head grin. “Once you are inside the cavern, should you succeed in reaching it, you will be on your own for a few moments. My man will follow behind you, and if he does not signal back promptly, I shall feed Miss Crane to the alligators. Understood?”

Annie seemed confused by the exchange and glanced at Kismet. He was trying to think of something to say, some words of assurance, but before anything came to him, a shove from Leeds’ goon pitched him over the edge of the boat and into the water beside Russell. Unlike Russell, who wore a bib-like buoyancy compensator, Kismet’s only equipment was a twenty-two pound weight belt. He sank like a stone. The last thing he heard was Annie's scream of outrage, before water filled his ears.

The ballast pulled him into the cenote faster than he would have believed. The pressure built in his ears rapidly; his head felt as if it were about to burst. The unexpected shove had caught him completely unprepared. He’d gasped in the instant that he hit the water, but had inhaled almost as much water as air. He flailed uselessly to get control, coughing up great clouds of bubbles from his saturated lungs, as his involuntary descent continued unchecked.

He struggled for the clasp of the weight belt; it was fastened at the small of his back, and try as he might, he could not seem to loosen it.

He saw a blur of illumination floating nearby — Russell, just a few feet away, inverted and kicking with his flippers to match Kismet’s rate of descent into the dark hole. He couldn’t believe that the officer would just let him drown, but Russell made no move toward him. His attention seemed to be fixed on the shadowy recesses of the cenote.

Kismet felt his chest start to convulse, both from the water he had ingested and the need to inhale. His ears popped, briefly relieving the agony of pressure against his skull, and in that moment, he crashed into something.

The sides of the cenote were dark and ominous, and just barely out of reach, but jutting out from the submerged face was an outcropping of slimy limestone. He had slammed into the protrusion, but was now beginning to drift away from it. He stretched out his fingers, touching the stone, but was unable to grip the slippery surface. His fingernails scraped through a layer of algae, then slipped free.

He dropped rapidly again, the pressure building in his ears. His outstretched fingertips scraped against the vertical surface of the sheer rock face, but there was nothing to grab onto, nothing to halt or reverse his descent. He tried paddling with his hands and kicking with his bound feet, to get closer to wall and find some sort of handhold.

The pressure in his head became unbearable. He gave up trying to swim. A primal, instinctive response forced him to grip his ears with either hand. He snorted through his nose, but the air pocket inside his head resisted. Suddenly he had no more breath with which to combat the increasing pressure. His lungs were empty; his diaphragm was quivering in his abdomen with the need to draw breath.

The pressure barrier broke of its own accord. Kismet opened his mouth to cry out as water rushed painfully into his ear canal, but there was nothing with which to form a scream. His head felt as if it had been ripped apart by the sudden release, and his ears were filled with an agonized ringing.

Then, miraculously, his hand caught on another ledge. A horizontal fissure split the rock face directly before him. The lip to which he was clinging was the bottom of that fissure, but he could make out no details as to what lay inside the impenetrable shadows of the recess.

He tried to reach into the fissure, but again the weight belt pulled him away. His handhold failed and he tumbled away from the ledge. The darkness of the lake bottom seemed to rise up to greet him into its eternal embrace.

When he hit the lake bottom, Kismet immediately sank up to his knees in deep muck, while the resulting cloud of silt completely shrouded him in blackness.

Impotent rage consumed him. He wrenched with his legs, trying to free them from the suction of the submerged mud. An involuntary gasp brought a trickle of water into his windpipe, triggering a violent paroxysm, yet there was no air in his lungs with which to cough. In desperation, he plunged his hands into the mud, tearing at his boots, trying to pull his feet free, but his fingers could find no purchase, and he fell backwards into the mud.

The shift in position created just enough of a gap to allow water to flow between his foot and the sucking mud, and just like that, his left foot came free, not only of the mud but also the duct tape that had bound his ankles together. With renewed hope, he wrenched his right leg. The boot stayed fixed in place, but the laces relented and his right foot was free as well.

Yet he was still a prisoner of the bottom. The mud surrounded him; everywhere he put a hand or foot, it threatened to hold him fast. It would do no good to extricate himself from the mud if he could not swim to the surface, yet even with his feet free to kick, he just wasn’t strong enough to swim to the surface with the added ballast of the weight belt. He tore at it, felt it slip around until the clasp was in the front. It came apart with astonishing ease and he kicked up, away from the mud.

He started to sink immediately. There was no air left in his lungs to buoy him up. He fought and thrashed, trying to climb through the water to the surface, but to no avail. Because he was immersed in darkness, he couldn’t tell that his vision was tunneling as his brain started to shut down. There was nothing at all to mark his slide into unconsciousness or that moment when his need to breathe became absolute and he took a deep, involuntary breath.

Through the crystalline waters of the lake, Russell’s bright dive light, illuminated every detail of Kismet' struggle for the passengers on the boat. When Kismet’s grip on the ledge failed, Annie cried aloud, “Pull him up!”

She turned to Leeds, pleading. “He's no good to you dead.”

The occult scholar watched without expression as Kismet disappeared in a cloud of silt upon touching down at the bottom. “It would seem I overestimated him.”

“You can still save him,” she cried. “Please!”

“She’s right, Leeds.” It was her father, unexpectedly rising to her defense. “He’s more useful to us alive. Bring him up and let him try again.”

Leeds looked away from the lake and fixed Higgins with an imperious stare. “Why?”

“You wanted him to find the cavern with the Fountain.”

“And he has. The ledge where his hold failed is surely the cave entrance. Major Russell will run a line inside and explore the interior to see if there are dry spaces beyond. We are nearly there!” Leeds seemed positively exultant.

Horrified and helpless, Annie could only stare into the depths and the billowing sediment cloud that concealed Kismet’s fate.

SIXTEEN

Kismet’s next memory was of coughing violently, vomiting up water from his lungs, as he lay on a hard sloped surface. He was vaguely aware of a firm hand on his right arm, but his body continued to be racked with spasms and for a moment, that single imperative was the only thing that mattered. Finally, as the fit began to subside, he began looking around.

He didn’t think about the fact that he could see until his eyes fell on a bright waterproof flashlight dangling above the gray-white stone surface beneath him. In its glow, he could make out the rest of his environment; he was in a low ceilinged tunnel — a mere crack in the limestone — that sloped up and away from the lake water, which still lapped gently at his feet. The light was tethered to the belt of the wet-suited figure leaning over him and still gripping his arm.

“I think you’re going to make it,” Russell announced.

“You saved me,” Kismet said, between coughing fits. “What the hell did you do that for?”

The major eased back on his haunches. “I think we both know that this isn’t going to end the way Leeds has planned. He’s bitten off a lot more than he can chew.”

“So, where does that leave you exactly? You save me, and then when the feds arrive and start arresting everyone, you can claim that you were one of the good guys?”

Russell shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. You probably won’t believe me when I say it, but I do have my orders. And right now, I’m doing my damnedest to follow those orders without letting that psychopath kill you.”

The admission stunned Kismet, almost as much as Leeds’ cryptic revelations about Prometheus. But before he could inquire further, Russell slid his diving mask down over his face.

“I need to get topside again. Pretty soon, everyone’s going to be down here. Leeds still has your little girlfriend and he won’t hesitate to hurt her to get you…or her father…to do what he wants. I suggest you just sit tight and wait. If you can refrain from rocking the boat, there’s a chance we all might survive this.”

With that, the man dropped back into the water, leaving Kismet in absolute darkness. He was still coughing intermittently, but in the quiet spaces in between, he tried to use his other senses to compensate for his total blindness. The musty air smelled disgusting, like something rotting, but it was breathable. The only sound he could hear was water sloshing at his feet, but the way it echoed gave the impression of being in a much larger space than what he had imagined based on his brief glimpse. Cautiously, he got to his hands and knees and then stood up.

With a hand stretched out in front of him, he started forward. The loss of a boot interfered with his gait, so he kicked the remaining one off and proceeded forward in just his socks, probing with both his toes and his outstretched hand before advancing.

He hadn’t gone more than about fifty feet when a splashing noise echoed up the tunnel, accompanied by the glow from a pair of dive lights. He glanced back to find Russell, and another figure climbing out of the water. It was Elisabeth Neuell.

She wore no SCUBA gear — save for a face mask — and no wetsuit. Instead, she was clad only in matching lacy white bra and panties; dry, the undergarments wouldn’t have left much to the imagination, and soaking wet, they were nearly transparent as well. She stripped off the mask, cursing when the rubber strap caught a strand of her golden hair, and then realized that she and Russell were not alone.

“Nick!”

For the briefest instant, her face clouded with something like worry, even fear, but then her expression transformed into a dazzlingly perfect, plastic Hollywood smile. She immediately began to shiver in the cool tunnel. Goose pimples appeared on the bare skin of her arms and she hugged herself for a moment, framing her breasts with her arms and accentuating her piercingly erect nipples. Her coquettish pose reminded him of their first meeting in Jin’s fortress — the first time she had tried to arrange his death.

Another figure emerged from the water, one of Leeds’ hirelings, likewise wearing just a face mask and underwear — Confederate battle flag boxer shorts. He was holding a dry bag, and upon seeing Kismet, quickly opened it and took out a pistol.

“Put that thing away,” Elisabeth said. She tried to sound commanding but her shivering made her sound like a harried babysitter pleading with a wayward child.

“Screw you, lady. I’m fed up with jumping through hoops for you and that damn freak. So unless you’ gonna do something with that ass ah yours ‘sides wiggling it, I think I’ll just have me a looksee at this here cave that y’all’re so wound up about.”

Kismet stepped aside as the man, still clutching the dry bag in one hand and the pistol in the other, charged up the sloping tunnel.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Russell cautioned belatedly.

The hand with the pistol came up, middle finger extended in the air. “Screw you, too. I ain’t in your army.”

Elisabeth was still sputtering with unfocused rage as the man reached the top of the rise and then stepped over, out of their line of sight.

A loud snap thrummed in the still air, followed immediately by a wet squishing noise. A grunted curse drifted back down the tunnel, and then something heavy crashed to the floor and everything was quiet again.

Kismet shared a confused look with Elisabeth and Russell, but before anyone could voice an inquiry, the pool behind them erupted in a plume like an underwater explosion, and Higgins, with a thrashing Annie locked under one arm, came into view.

Annie, who had only just a couple days earlier suffered a nearly paralyzing bout of claustrophobia, was in full panic mode. Kismet could only imagine her reaction to being ordered to dive into a dark, water-filled hole, and then told to swim into another dark hole with millions of tons of earth poised to bury her alive. He wondered why Leeds hadn’t simply just left her topside and saved himself the trouble, but then realized the obvious answer; she was the leverage that would buy continued cooperation from himself and Kismet.

Annie had not stripped down for the swim, and so now was fully clothed but soaking wet. She remained on the verge of hysteria, but when she saw Kismet she brightened a little and wrestled free of her father’s protective grasp to rush up the tunnel and embrace him.

“I thought you were dead.”

He returned her embrace, holding her tight.

Her shaking relented a little, but she continued to cling to him, refusing to look anywhere but at his face. He eased her forward and continued up the passage to see what had befallen Leeds’ hireling. Elisabeth and Russell were right behind them, while Higgins waited, alone and seemingly cast adrift, near the entrance pool.

The headstrong man stood frozen in mid-stride on the threshold of a much larger chamber. Kismet took another step forward and discovered why the man’s explorations had ended there.

A pole of wood, bristling with sharp spikes now blocked the entrance to the cavern. Kismet recalled what he had read in Fontaneda’s diary; he and the other explorers, besieged by angry natives, had turned the cavern into a fortress, with snares and booby traps as a passive defense against invasion. Evidently, he had left those measures in place, maintaining them over the years.

One of the stakes had impaled the man, who still wriggled soundlessly in his death throes like a worm on a fishhook. The man finally succeeded in pushing himself off of the deadly poniard and collapsed backwards, splashing onto the floor where the last of his lifeblood drained away. Elisabeth turned away in disgust.

Other faces now filled the entry tunnel below them; Dr. Leeds and two more of his hired thugs were advancing up the passageway.

Leeds’ gaze went immediately to the motionless form on the ground. “What is going on here?”

“Your man tried to go on ahead without you,” explained Russell. “I tried to stop him, but…something happened.”

“A parting gift from our friend Fontaneda,” supplied Kismet.

Dr. Leeds drew in a sharp breath. He whirled to face Russell, and savagely grabbed hold of the front of his wetsuit with his good hand, bringing the deadly hook on his other to the major's throat. “You saved him?”

Russell sputtered, trying to find an explanation for his actions that would satisfy the occultist, but Elisabeth spoke first. “John, there was a trap. He walked right into it.”

Leeds paused, stifling his rage. “A trap?”

He thrust Russell away and turned to Kismet. “You knew about this, didn’t you? The Spaniard did this?”

Kismet nodded and flashed a defiant grin. “Better watch your step.”

One of Leeds’ men knelt beside the body a let out a low wail. “Ah, shit. Lonnie!” Almost clumsily, he scooped up the dead man’s pistol and brought it to bear on Kismet.

“Stop it,” Leeds barked. “Put that away.”

The man, almost blubbering, pointed at the corpse. “He’s dead.”

“You men knew there was risk in this endeavor. Great accomplishments require great risks, and sometimes, great sacrifices. Your friend took a stupid risk and has paid for his recklessness. But we may yet benefit from his sacrifice.”

A wicked gleam flashed in Leeds’ eyes as he turned to Kismet. “The Fates must have a reason to keep saving you. Who am I to argue with the forces of the universe? Since you seem so eager to discover the secrets of this place, why don’t you take the lead?”

“Why should I do anything for you, Leeds?”

The occultist pointed his hook at Annie. It was answer enough.

Kismet sighed. “All right, Leeds. Let's finish this.”

Leeds’ party took a few minutes to unpack their gear and dress in dry clothes before pushing on. Russell remained in his wetsuit and carried his SCUBA gear with him, perhaps anticipating more submerged tunnels along their path. Annie had nothing to change into; her father had, against her protestations and without any preparatory measures, grabbed hold of her and jumped into the water. Still, she was better off than Kismet who had somehow lost his shoes, never mind that he looked like he’d been put through a wringer.

He stayed close to her, and that helped, but she was still in the grip of overwhelming emotions. She could not will her body to move; the nearness of the cavern walls smothered her, as did the knowledge that the only escape from this place was through stone and water. Yet, it was not just the irrational fear that stabbed at her heart.

Kismet was still alive, but how long would that last? Leeds was only keeping him around to accomplish his twisted purposes. And she was nothing more to the occultist than a lever to force Kismet — and her father as well, she supposed — to remain compliant. That realization sickened her.

With flashlights to show the way, the party advanced to the top of the rise. The spiked pole still barricaded the end of the passage like a deadly tollgate. Kismet was ordered to investigate the grisly trap while Dr. Leeds kept a firm grip on Annie's shoulder, ready to punish her at the first sign of resistance.

Kismet quickly discovered the trip wire that had triggered the trap and announced that it posed no further threat. One of Leeds’ men produced Kismet’s kukri and used the heavy blade to chop through the barrier, whereupon Leeds gestured for Kismet to proceed.

When Annie got her turn to pass from the tunnel, she discovered a wondrous underground room. Had she been slightly less intimidated by the location of the chamber, she might have been amazed by the discovery.

The walls of the chamber were a smooth, brilliantly white limestone, reflecting and amplifying the glow of the flashlights to fill up the entire area with illumination. There were a few mineral deposits — stalactites that looked like drips of milk frozen forever in time, and stalagmites that rose from the floor like anemic toadstools — which threw long, bizarre shadows against the bright walls. Flowing through the midst of the stone forest was a stream of water, seepage that had found its way down through the bedrock to ooze from the walls and ceiling.

Then Annie saw that not all of the lumps on the floor were stalagmites. There were also bones, picked clean of flesh, but still unquestionably the remains of human beings.

Kismet paused in the center of the cave and contemplated the path ahead. When Leeds approached to question him, he pointed to three separate holes in the limestone walls, passageways which each led in a different direction. “Fontaneda didn’t mention anything about this.”

“I defer to your judgment,” replied the occultist casually.

A surge of quiet terror seized Annie. If they made a wrong turn now, pushing deeper into the bowels of the earth, they might wander forever, never reaching their goal, never escaping to see the light of day.

A closer inspection revealed that the right-hand passage was merely a niche in the wall, reducing their choices by one. Kismet chose to explore the center passage, which seemed to descend slightly. He had only taken a few steps into the shallows when he called an abrupt halt. “It's another trap.”

The trip wire was hidden in debris that conspicuously littered the floor. The device, another spike trap like the first, was concealed in a depression in the wall. Only Kismet's cautious pace had prevented him from being skewered.

“Excellent,” crooned Leeds. His dark clothes were a stark contrast with the brilliant white of the cavern, and when he spoke, it was if the words were emanating from a hole in the fabric of the universe. “We're on the right path. The Spaniard would not have bothered to defend a false passage.”

“I’m going to trigger it,” Kismet announced. “Stand back.”

He pitched a head-sized rock onto the trip wire. There was a twang, followed by a snap and a blur of motion as the deadly spikes swung out of the wall across their path. An involuntary shriek tore from Annie’s chest.

Kismet extended a palm, and to Annie’s complete surprise, Leeds’ man handed over the kukri, allowing Kismet to clear the passage. She was even more shocked when, after sliding the knife blade into his belt, Kismet reached out to her.

“Come on,” he said, as if they were the only two people there. He handed her his flask. She accepted it and took a gulp, grimacing as the bourbon went down. Strangely, she did feel a little better.

He returned the container to his pocket and then gave her a hug. “Stick with me. We’ll get through this.”

Leeds made no move to interfere, but watched them with a bemused expression. “How touching. But be careful about making promises you can’t keep Kismet.”

“Oh, I keep my promises, Leeds.”

“Keeping a promise requires power,” retorted the occultist. “You are in my power, and you live or die at my command. Your life, and your ability to keep you word is dependent upon your cooperation.”

Kismet just smiled, as if he knew something Leeds didn’t, and put his arm around Annie. As they passed the splintered remains of Fontaneda's spike trap, Kismet whispered in her ear. “I swear to you, we'll get out of this, somehow.”

A ways further on, Kismet spied another spiked barrier trap. After disarming it, they rounded a corner and came to an abrupt dead end; a massive wall of rough limestone blocked their way.

Leeds strode forward, his eyes now hungry and excited. “This is not possible. We are following the correct path, I am sure of it.”

Russell also advanced and began examining the edges of the wall with his flashlight. “This isn’t part of the cave. It’s a loose rock…like a boulder. See here along the edges…it isn't connected to the walls.” He shone his light overhead. “I think the tunnel continues. There might be room to crawl over at the top.”

Kismet pulled himself partway up the boulder. “It’s another of Fontaneda's traps. He must have rigged up a portion of the ceiling to collapse. This one was an accident waiting to happen. Who knows what triggered it? But if he set one rock to fall, we have to assume that he may have rigged the entire cave to collapse if his final sanctuary was violated.”

“A chance we shall have to take,” retorted Leeds. “Or rather, I think, that you will have to take.”

Kismet's eyes narrowed but he made no retort. Instead, he continued up the rock wall. Annie watched as he picked out handholds and minute cracks in which to insinuate his fingers and toes. With each step, he left dark smudges on the white rock. The scattered chips of limestone debris, no doubt leftover from Fontaneda’s engineering project, had cut right through his socks and blood was oozing from dozens of scrapes and cuts on his feet. The injuries however didn’t seem to slow him down one bit. He pulled himself up high enough to inspect the top of the barrier then asked Russell to pass him up a flashlight.

“There must be an opening to the outside. I can feel the air moving. God, what a stench.”

Major Russell, with a loop of climbing rope draped around his neck like a bandolier, scaled the rock to join Kismet, and quickly rigged up a belaying line.

Annie was an adept rock climber, but as she watched the rest of the group ascend, she was filled with an uncharacteristic panic. They were all squeezing into the narrow gap atop the rock, directly beneath a ceiling that had been rigged to collapse with the slightest disturbance.

“No.” She shook her head when her turn came. “I can’t.”

“There’s only one way I’m leaving you behind, Miss Crane,” Leeds said, his soft tone making the threat all the more ominous. “And I don’t think Kismet or your father would approve of that solution.

Higgins decisively took the fixed rope and secured it around her midsection. “Pull her up,” he called to the men already atop the rock.

The ascent was brief, only a few seconds, but it stretched out like an eternity of torment, until at last, she found herself once more in Kismet’s embrace. He freed her from the rope and then guided her through the narrow crawlspace and helped her down the other side.

An acrid odor, an animal smell, drifted in the light breeze that wafted through the tunnel, but Annie saw no evidence of anything living in the cave, nor any sign of an exit leading to the outside. Nevertheless, the gentle movement of air gave her hope. Maybe there was another way out, just around the corner…an end to this ungodly nightmare.

Kismet took the lead again, now watchful not only of the floor, which was deliberately littered with chips of limestone, but also the ceiling overhead. Thirty yards further along, he pointed up to an unnatural pattern of cracks outlining a ten foot long section of rock.

“It's Fontaneda’s doing,” he announced. “A trap, but I can't figure out what the trigger is. Probably a pressure plate on the floor.”

Leeds was becoming impatient. “We'll have to trigger it and crawl over as before.”

“That's insane. If we drop that rock, there's no telling what might happen. The crash could cave in the whole tunnel or open a crack to the lake and flood us out. We should go back.”

Kismet’s cautionary assessment set Annie’s heart racing again, but seemed to have no effect at all on the occultist. “Find a way, Kismet. Or I'll send Miss Crane ahead in your place.”

“No, damn it,” rasped Higgins, pushing through to the front of the group. “I’ll do it.”

The unexpected declaration shook Annie out of her despair. “Dad, no!”

Her father was already striding purposefully toward the area beneath the snare. Kismet stepped in front of him. “Don't be stupid, Al. I don’t know what’s going on in your head any more, but I know you care about Annie. It won’t do her any good if you get yourself killed.”

Higgins stared back at Kismet, his expression pained and confused, as if he could no longer remember the reason for the choices he had made. He turned, looking meaningfully back at his daughter.

“Maybe it will,” he whispered.

He sprang at Kismet, catching him in a low tackle and thrusting him against the tunnel wall. Kismet rebounded and sprawled face first into the impact zone as Higgins dashed past him, running all out as if pursued by a predator.

His first step crunched loudly on the littering of limestone chips.

Every movement and noise seemed to take place in slow motion as Annie watched; the crunch of her father’s boots on the limestone chips, the sound of her own scream, distorted into a ghastly howl.

Higgins' left foot came down, six feet from where Kismet was struggling to rise, and suddenly, the floor beneath him buckled, collapsing away. He froze, his expression both terrified and purposeful.

It was the look of a martyr.

The entire section of floor beneath the cracked ceiling collapsed in chunks. Kismet too slipped forward, caught in a wave of rubble that was rushing into the newly exposed pit. A cloud of dust swirled up from the shower of rock.

Even louder than the rumble of the collapse however, was the twanging sound of a metal wire, concealed by a facade of limestone cement plastered to the cavern wall, being pulled away from the side of the tunnel.

Annie watched in horror as the singing wire exploded from the wall, working its way swiftly toward the ceiling where it would trigger the release of the enormous boulder onto her father and Kismet.

The wire went taut, like the string of a musical instrument stretched between the pit and the wall, just a few feet below the ceiling. It held there for a second, and then snapped with a final discordant twang. The loose end whipped around and disappeared into the rising cloud of dust above the pit.

Kismet felt a sting as the wire lashed across his back, but it was just one of a dozen sensory assaults that he barely noticed in his frantic scramble to get out of the shallow pit. He began clawing at the stone that was piling on top of him, trying to get free of its weight, and out of the pit before the ceiling crashed down upon him. Higgins lay nearby, half buried in the rubble. And in front of him, just a few steps away, was the far edge of pit.

Kismet grabbed the stunned Kiwi by the collar and heaved him forward. They reached the chest high wall of the pit, slipping uncertainly on the loose rubble, and desperately began clawing up the near vertical surface while overhead the rigged boulder groaned ominously.

And stayed exactly where it was.

When Fontaneda had first designed the trap, hewing the stone block out of the surrounding limestone, he had held it in place with just a few thin rock wedges, connected to the trip wire. When the wire pulled tight, the wedges would be dislodged and the block would drop, or so the Spaniard had intended. But centuries of moisture, seeping through the rock matrix and infused with mineral particles had effectively cemented the block in place. The stone remained poised overhead, seemingly ready to drop down and obliterate Kismet and Higgins, but it refused to move.

The trap was a dud.

Kismet lay on his back at the far edge of the pit, staring up in disbelief. Beside him, Higgins sat up, an expression of amazed disappointment replacing the frightened ecstasy of a moment before.

“You could have killed us all.” He grabbed Higgins’ shirtfront, but the other man just sagged in place, shaking his head miserably. He looked as if the universe, in refusing his sacrifice, had left him completely bereft and Kismet realized that maybe getting them all killed was exactly what Higgins had been trying to accomplish. The former Gurkha, the man he’d once fought beside and nearly died with, was caught in a trap of a very different sort, a web of his own desperate choices.

“Just whose side are you on, Al?” he whispered.

Higgins’ wounded expression offered no insights.

“Well done, Mr. Higgins,” said Leeds, standing on a narrow ledge that skirted the side of the pit. “Kismet's luck seems to have rubbed off on you. Fortune favors the bold. With men such as you leading the way, I cannot help but succeed.”

Kismet turned on him. “You’re insane, Leeds. These traps are getting more complex, and more dangerous. We're in over our heads, and we're all going to end up dead if we don't turn back.”

“Nonsense. We are beating the Spaniard at his own game. Keep your eyes on the prize, Kismet. Onward!” To underscore the fact that his statement was a command, not an admonition, Leeds caught Annie’s wrist in the crook of his prosthetic and pulled her along.

The tunnel turned just beyond the pit and grew increasingly cramped. The naturally formed walls seemed to close in around them, while the floor sloped up sharply. The rock underfoot was no longer the chalky white of limestone, but increasingly dark and oily, stained with a substance that reeked of ammonia and decay.

“Bat guano,” Kismet whispered to Annie. “That’s a good sign. It means there’s an opening to the surface somewhere nearby.”

He didn’t add that, for a colony of bats to come and go as they pleased, the opening would need to be only a few inches wide.

The tunnel leveled out and then abruptly ended, but this time, instead of a solid rock wall, the passage was blocked by what looked like densely packed soil. Kismet probed it with the tip of his kukri, dislodging a large chunk and releasing an almost overwhelming stench of nitrates. Fontaneda’s secret lay somewhere on the other side of an enormous heap of bat excrement.

Kismet could still feel the movement of air, and in the flashlight beams, he saw a narrow gap at the top of the mound. Reasoning that the accumulation was looser there, he started digging, using the kukri like an entrenching tool. In just a few seconds he broke through to the other side and through this hole he could see dust motes drifting in a shaft of sunlight that stabbed through the darkness of the cavern beyond.

The sight roused him. This was the chance he’d been waiting for. Though it would mean abandoning the search for the Fountain, probably allowing Leeds to seize his prize uncontested, he couldn’t pass up this opportunity to escape.

He backed out of the narrow crawlspace he had dug. The rest of the group had backed away from the shower of guano dislodged by his excavation. “It’s clear. No sign of any more surprises from our Spanish friend.”

Leeds gazed up at him suspiciously. Kismet could almost see the wheels turning in the man’s head. Was Kismet trying to trick him? He smiled and gestured forward. “Then by all means, lead on.”

It was exactly what Kismet was hoping for. He looked directly at Higgins. “It’s a pretty tight squeeze, Al. Keep Annie close so she doesn’t freak out.”

He couldn’t tell if the other man had understood the subtle message, or the implicit offer of trust and forgiveness in his tone.

Are you reading me, Al? We fought on the same side once. I dragged you out of that hellhole in Iraq. Now do this for me.

Higgins just nodded and pulled his daughter close.

Kismet crawled back into the hole and pushed through to the other side, spilling forward down a forty-five degree slope into the cavern beyond. The floor was covered in a thick layer of moist guano, like a peat bog, and his feet sank several inches as he struggled to stand up. From the hole behind him, he could hear Annie whimpering, seemingly on the verge of hysteria, as Higgins prodded her forward.

Perfect!

Kismet scrambled up the crawlspace and reached in, seizing hold of Annie’s arm, pulling her through. They tumbled down the slope together, but he quickly got her up and pointed to the shaft of sunlight streaming into the chamber, lighting the way to freedom.

That was when he realized that source of the light was at least twenty feet directly overhead. The almost perfectly round hole might have been big enough to crawl through, but it remained impossibly out of reach.

The ceiling around the hole began to ripple, like a still pond disturbed by a cast stone, and then large pieces of it came loose and started to fall — except they didn’t fall. Instead, the shapes began to flit about, swooping back and forth through the air above them. In the brilliant beam of natural light, Kismet could just make out the winged shapes.

Bats.

Enormous bats.

Bats with bodies the size of housecats and leathery wings as long as his arms. There were thousands of them clinging to the ceiling overhead and they were waking up.

Kismet knew that most bats were insectivores, subsisting entirely on winged insects that they plucked out of mid-air with uncanny precision thanks to their natural sonar. Bats could often be found near large bodies of water, where mosquitos provided an endless food supply, which was an absolute necessity since their metabolism demanded that they consume a third of their body weight daily. Most bats weighed only a few ounces. Kismet didn’t want to think about how much these monsters would have to eat to sustain themselves, but he doubted that they had gotten so large on a diet of insects alone. In fact, there wasn’t any natural explanation for how these creatures had grown to grow to such an extraordinary size.

The Fountain. It’s close!

The realization caused him to momentarily forget his disappointment at the aborted escape attempt.

Just ahead, on the wall opposite where they had come in, barely visible in the gloom and partially hidden behind the rising mass of guano, he spied another passage. He pulled Annie close and hastened toward it, even as shouted warnings from Leeds and his men, along with Elisabeth’s strident curses, began to echo in the cavern. The noise multiplied, and suddenly the air was thick with giant bats, disturbed from their rest.

Kismet bulldozed through the accumulation of guano and tumbled through into the adjoining tunnel. It was cramped, the ceiling too low for them to stand, but the passage angled up and away from the escalating din in the cavern behind them and into the unknown darkness beyond.

Except it wasn’t dark. Kismet could just barely distinguish the outline of the walls and as he drew Annie forward through the winding tunnel, the illumination reflected from the limestone surface grew increasingly brighter until he had no difficulty making out the details of their environment — striations in the color of the limestone, patches of lichen, even a distinctive trail of human footprints worn into the path of rock chips that covered the floor.

He froze in mid-step.

Although he could see, quite literally, the light at the end of the tunnel, a wave of dread crashed over him. In his haste, he’d forgotten to look for more of Fontaneda’s traps, and now he felt as if he wandered into a minefield.

He stretched his foot out a few inches beyond what would have been his normal stride, stepping into the impression left, so he assumed, by the Spaniard. It was a gamble; did those tracks mark the safe route past another trap, or were they the bait designed to lure in the unwary?

Only one way to find out.

“Annie!” He gripped her by the shoulders and tried to hold her attention. “I need you to focus. If you want to get out of here, you have to do exactly as I say. Can you do that?”

A nod.

“There are footprints on the ground here. That’s the only place it’s safe to step…at least I think so. Got it? Step only in the footprints.”

“Got it,” she whispered.

The tunnel continued for only a few more steps, then opened into another chamber that was lit up like Times Square.

He suppressed the urge to rush forward. Between the place where he stood and the mouth of the cavern, a distance of about four feet, there were no footprints. Fontaneda always stepped or leaped that final interval.

He swung his arms back and then made the leap.

One foot touched down on the hard floor and then the other. Nothing else happened. As he turned, he saw a frame of wood, bristling with sharp stakes, poised just to the right of the tunnel mouth — Fontaneda’s final trap.

“Big jump, Annie. You can do it.”

She gave a furtive nod, and then took her own leap of faith. It wasn’t her graceful best, but she made it with a few inches to spare, and fell into Kismet’s embrace. He spun her away from the trap and turned to behold the wonder of Fontaneda’s magnificent discovery.

Almost immediately, he felt a faint tickling on his skin, as if he had walked through a strand of spider web. He brushed at his face and felt the familiar sensation ripple across the backs of his hands.

Static electricity, he realized. The atmosphere was ionized like the air around a Tesla coil, and long streamers of plasma — hues of red and violet — danced in the air all around them. Kismet had the impression of standing at the edge of a bottomless pit filled with electrical energy, but then he realized that the lights below them were merely a reflection — a reflection from the mirror-like surface of a large pool that dominated the center of the cavern.

Kismet recalled the line from the letter Leeds showed him, and similar words written by a man calling himself Henry Fortune hundreds of years later.

A cavern where fire dances upon the surface of the water.

They had found it. Fortune’s cavern. The Fountain of Youth.

SEVENTEEN

Annie watched breathlessly as Kismet advanced into the cavern, and for a moment, forgot completely that she was trapped underground.

The chamber was the largest of any of the caverns they had encountered thus far. It was roughly circular, at least a hundred feet across and nearly as high. The domed ceiling was spiked with stalactites that glistened with every hue of the spectrum and even a few shades that seemed completely unnatural. The pool dominated the floor of the chamber but a walkway — about ten feet wide — encircled it to form an unbroken ring, a near-perfect circle with only one minor deviation. At the rear of the chamber, the walkway became a staircase going up four of five steps to a platform that overlooked the water and another set of stairs that led back down to the walkway. There were carvings on the wall behind the dais and some kind of pedestal, an altar perhaps, but it was difficult to make out any details because the air between them was alive with brilliant discharges of energy.

The pool was the source of the light. Veils of color, red and violet, wove intricate patterns mere inches above the placid surface.

“How is this possible?” Annie asked.

“I think it’s ionized plasma, kind of like the aurora borealis. What’s making it happen here? I have no idea. But this is exactly what Fontaneda described, so whatever is causing it must be related to the…the power of the water.” He shook his head as if trying to remember something. “Leeds talked about a source; a Seed of the Tree of Life, and how it could…I guess the word might be ‘supercharge’ ordinary water into something that can make a person immortal. Maybe there are other effects, like this plasma storm.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Fontaneda didn’t say much more about it, but we should be careful nonetheless.” He watched at the light show for a moment longer, and then glanced past her to the entrance. “Leeds’ is the real danger. We have to find the source he talked about, the Seed.”

“Then what?”

“Use it for leverage; threaten to destroy it if we have to.” He took her hand and led her out onto the walkway.

As they neared the upraised platform, they passed a cairn of hewn limestone rocks, some as large as a man’s head. At one end stood an ornately carved cross. There was a name carved on it and a pair of dates. Annie looked at Kismet for an explanation.

“Fontaneda wrote about this. In the end, his companions decided to die rather than drink…” His voice trailed off as he looked thoughtfully at the cross, and then looked down at his own hands — scraped raw and streaked with chalk dust and bat guano — and his feet which had been cut to bloody ribbons by the journey through the cave. “The Fountain didn’t just give them youth. It healed their wounds. It made Fontaneda strong; supernaturally strong.”

Then, seemingly apropos of nothing he took out his hip flask.

“You’re drinking?” Annie gasped in disbelief. “At a time like this?”

“I can’t think of a better time for a drink,” he answered with a roguish smile. Then he upended the container and let its contents dribble out onto the floor. When it was empty, he moved cautiously toward the edge of the pool.

The effects of the plasma storm seemed to increase with his approach. A tendril of light reached out and caught the outstretched hand with the flask. The tongue of energy vanished instantly upon contact, but Kismet jerked his hand back and cradled it against his chest.

“Damn thing shocked me,” he muttered, but nevertheless resumed his advance. For a moment, the cave grew dim, as if the jolt had somehow drained the static storm of its power, but after just a few seconds, it started growing brighter again. The brief respite permitted Kismet to reach his goal without being shocked again, and he knelt right next to the water’s edge. Annie, braving the storm, moved to join him.

He cautiously probed the air above the water. Wispy tongues of static reached out to him, dancing at his fingertips, but evidently not with the same intensity as the earlier discharge. He drew back his hand and flexed his fingers, trying to shake the memory of the jolt from them. “Whatever is at work here, it’s powerful.”

Steeling his determination, he held the flask out over the water. The electricity arced into him again, conducting right through the metal of the container, but he resisted the instinctive urge to draw back and instead lowered the flask into the water.

A dull moan escaped his lips as energy began surging through him. A mist of crimson plasma began to swirl around his arm like a veil. Annie reached out instinctively, intending to pull him back, but through clenched teeth he hissed, “Don't touch me.”

Through a sheer effort of will, he drew back his hand and with it a flask full of the potent water. The ferocity of the electricity began to diminish again as he moved away, his muscles still twitching uncontrollably from the shocks. A few tendrils of light clung tenaciously to him for a moment then vanished.

“Are you all right?” she asked. She wanted to reach out to him, but his earlier warning echoed in her mind. Was he now charged with electricity? Would a single touch from him knock her on her ass…or stop her heart?

He looked at her and opened his mouth tentatively, as if unsure that any sound would issue. “I will be,” he croaked.

Then they both stared down at the prize he had retrieved. She extended a cautious and reverent hand toward it, placing her fingers against the metal.

“It tingles!”

He met Annie's stare, as if asking for her approval. She nodded reassuringly. “Do it.”

Kismet raised the flask, as in salute, and then tipped it to his lips.

He felt energy crackle between the flask and his lips, and then the water was in his mouth. There was a faint lingering taste of bourbon, but as the liquid swirled and sizzled across his tongue his ability to perceive even that was overwhelmed. Then the electricity surged through his body, causing the muscles of his extremities to begin twitching uncontrollably. Yet, whereas the static on the surface of the Fountain had been painful, even injurious, the shocks he now felt seemed to revitalize and energize him. He felt the pins and needles of increased circulation in his arms and legs. The liquid, sliding down into his digestive system was like warm liquor in his throat and stomach, and he could feel it passing immediately into his bloodstream. He had taken only a small sip, but the effect was tremendous. His body was alive with energy, his nerves quivering with excitement.

He abruptly felt a profound, gnawing hunger in his belly. The spasms nearly caused him to double over in agony. He groaned a little, and Annie, sensing but not understanding his discomfort, took the flask from his hands and set it carefully on the floor.

She gripped his shoulders. “What's wrong?”

The hunger subsided to a dull throb, but a sense of fatigue quickly replaced it. Kismet felt as if vital energy was being sucked out every pore of his body, drawn down into his core; his muscles felt like jelly.

“Nick, is it the water? Is it poison?”

“No,” he whispered.

No indeed.

Not poison. Not harmful in any way, at least not in the small amount he’d imbibed

He could almost see what was happening. His bone marrow was generating blood cells at an astounding rate. His arteries and veins of his body were swelling to accommodate the invigorated blood supply. He greedily sucked in breaths, charging the newly formed red blood cells with oxygen, and those new cells raced throughout his body, delivering their payload to his cells, which in turn began growing and dividing, healing the tissue that had been damaged by injuries too numerous to count.

The process wasn’t altogether pleasant. Cells used oxygen as a catalyst, but the raw material needed for growth and regeneration was being drawn from his body’s reserves. He didn’t know what would happen once those were depleted.

Something else was happening, too. His nerves were being overloaded with sensation. At first it was a merely an annoying itch, but within seconds, the sensation racked him from head to toe — it was especially intense in his feet. The itch grew exponentially, not just on the surface of his skin, but internally, in his organs and musculature. He could not resist the impulse to begin scratching at the painful sensation. His fingernails were visibly longer than just a moment before, and he dug them into the exposed flesh of his feet.

Annie watched, horrified as the effects became starkly visible. In a matter of seconds, Kismet's hair and nails had grown longer. When he started tearing into the bare skin of his feet, she seized his wrists to prevent him, but then gasped in disbelief at what she saw next.

Under the ragged and bloodstained tatters of his socks, his feet had healed completely. Fresh, pink skin gleamed on the soles of his feet, marred only by red claw marks from his uncontrollable scratching, and even those vanished before her eyes.

The hands she held in her own were also healed. The outermost layer of skin, tattooed with scratches and scars, the physical record of the innumerable deadly encounters he had survived over the past few days, sloughed off like the shed skin of a molting reptile, and beneath it was virginal flesh, as pink as smooth as a baby’s.

Kismet hugged his arm to his chest and clenched his teeth as he rode out the deluge of sensations. He understood now. This was indeed the Fountain of Youth, but it wasn’t magic. When he’d drunk, a chemical message had gone out into his cells, stimulating them to do exactly what they did from the moment life began — create new cells and tissue to replace and repair the old. The only difference was that the water initiated an accelerated version of this process.

The sensory overload reached an almost transcendent peak then began to subside, but he could feel the potency of the Fountain’s water tingling within him. It was still active, but for how much longer?

Annie still held him tight. He slowly unclasped his arms from around his chest, and reached out to return her embrace. “It's all right,” he whispered. “I'm fine.”

He was soaked in sweat, and a chill raised gooseflesh all over his flushed skin, but in every other way, he was perfectly healthy.

Something tickled his forehead, and he reached up to discover that his normally close-cropped hair had become a shaggy mass, a prodigious mane that fell down nearly to his eyes and tickled the back of his neck. A bushy beard had sprouted on his chin and cheeks as well.

He was still marveling at the transformation when he heard the sound of laughter.

Beyond the fantastic glow of the plasma storm, Dr. Leeds stood just inside the entrance to the cavern. The rest of the party had filed in behind him and were now spread out on the walkway to either side of him. They had all made it, though the journey had taken a toll. Elisabeth’s legendary Hollywood beauty was concealed beneath layers of guano and dust. Russell was holding a hand protectively against his right side, just under the armpit — the final spike trap had caught him with a glancing blow. Higgins seemed shell-shocked, gazing across the pool at his daughter and Kismet with a desultory stare. Leeds however, looked triumphant.

Kismet launched into motion. He thrust Annie aside, into the marginal cover of the limestone cairn, and began sprinting toward the ascending stairs and the dais, where he intuitively knew he would find the Seed from the Tree of Life.

He did not see Dr. Leeds nod sharply to one of his men. The only warning he received was Annie's screamed: “No!”

Something punched into his upper back, just below the right shoulder. The force of the blow spun him halfway around. Even as the report reached his ears, he knew that he’d been shot. A bullet — a .308 round from Higgins’ Kimber rifle, though fired by one of Leeds’ thugs — ripped through his torso, splattering the cave wall with a chaotic spray of crimson.

His momentum carried him several steps closer to his goal before the agony of the wound blossomed, paralyzing him with the pain. He stumbled headlong, clutching uselessly at the cascade of his precious lifeblood. The wave of pain crested, and then just as quickly subsided as traumatic shock plunged him into a surreal state of hyper-awareness.

He could feel his heart beating, fierce and rapid with adrenaline, but each contraction of the life-sustaining muscle pumped more blood out of the ragged holes in his torso. Blood was spilling inward too, filling his chest cavity, submerging his lungs, drowning him. The brightness of the plasma storm above the pool vanished into a hazy void, filled with white noise.

Annie was suddenly beside him, embracing him from out of the darkness, whispering tenderly in his ear. He opened his mouth to tell her…what? He couldn’t seem to connect his thoughts.

Then suddenly he was no longer in the world, no longer in his body. The abyss opened up to receive him, and he had no choice but to plunge into it.

Annie reached Kismet with the report of the rifle still echoing in her ears. She lifted him in her arms, and was immediately drenched in his blood. His eyes were open, yet he seemed to unable to see her.

Tears bled from her eyes, tracing rivulets through the mask of dust on her cheeks, as she hugged him to her breast.

“Annie…”

“Nick. Oh, Nick. Hold on.” The words poured from her without conscious thought. “Don’t leave me. I love you.”

“Seed…”

The effort of speaking that one word was too much. Whatever thought he had tried to communicate slipped from his lips in a trickle of blood.

In a flash of insight, she understood what he had been trying to tell her, and what she had to do next.

She eased his lifeless body to the ground and stood and faced the stairway, but before she could take even a single step, a steel grip clamped her upper left arm. She was hauled back, away from the dais — away from the thing Kismet had wanted her to take — and then spun around to face her captor.

Dr. Leeds glowered at her. “Oh, I don’t think so. The Seed is mine.”

She struggled, trying to break his grip, but his hook-hand looped around her wrist, turning it just enough to send a burst of pain stabbing through her. With a snort of derisive laughter he thrust her behind him, into the waiting arms of her father.

Higgins held her tight, but she struggled against his embrace. He had betrayed Kismet, betrayed them all. She struggled to the verge of exhaustion against his loathsome touch, but was unable to break free. Finally, she could do nothing but sag in his arms, weeping uncontrollably.

Dr. John Leeds gazed contemptuously down at Kismet's body, and then began ascending the steps.

The cavern might have been Mother Nature’s handiwork, but the dais was unquestionably the product of human artifice. The steps were too perfectly cut to be the result of geological processes, but the real proof was the intricate carvings on the back wall; an elaborate scaled serpent, surrounded by wedge shaped marks that told a story in the language of ancient Mesopotamia. He recognized some of it, and probably could have translated it given sufficient time, but he already knew the gist of what it said. It was a familiar tale; the story of the serpent that stole the source of immortality, a legend built on the bones of what had really happened thousands of years before. It was a story that would rewrite the history books.

The priests of the Serpent cult had stolen the source — the Seed of the Tree of Life — from the god-emperor of Chaldea, the man known to the Babylonians as Tammuz, but also as Gilgamesh and Nimrod. They had stolen the source of his power and immortality and fled east — just as Cain had been exiled into the land east of Eden — and their journey had eventually brought them here, where they had built this shrine.

The head of the carved serpent protruded from the carving, its mouth agape and hollow inside. Leeds realized that it had been crafted to disgorge a trickle of water directly onto the altar, which would in turn decant its contents into the pool, but the snake’s mouth and the spout that extended over the pool were both bone dry; the water that had once fed the Fountain of Youth had been diverted.

No matter, he thought. That’s not what I came for anyway.

Suddenly, the wall of cuneiform writing exploded in a spray of stone chips. Leeds recoiled, incredulous, and turned to see Major Russell, pistol in hand, adjusting his aim for another shot.

Several reports thundered in the cavern, but none of them from Russell’s gun. The men he had recruited in Charleston had finally done something right for a change, and cut the treacherous army officer down with a concerted volley. Russell was blasted back into the wall, where he fell into a sitting position with his legs splayed out. He was still conscious, staring at his assailants in mute horror, and then his eyes turned pleadingly toward Elisabeth.

Elisabeth?

Had the ruthless bitch tried to organize a mutiny? Leeds had never completely trusted Russell, much less understood how the actress had been able to so easily win him over to their cause, but now he saw a glimmer of what was really going on.

She wanted the prize for herself. Typical. She had seduced the officer with a promise of some fairy tale life together. Perhaps she had intended to make a similar appeal to Kismet, or the brutish Higgins.

Well, let’s just nip that little flower in the bud. He nodded to his loyal hirelings and then pointed at the actress, his meaning perfectly clear.

The two men brought their weapons around and took aim at the now surprisingly defiant Elisabeth…

Suddenly Leeds’ men began twitching in place, their bodies exploding with gouts of blood.

At first, he thought it was some effect of the static storm above the pool. They had all felt its shocks upon entering, but no, this was something else.

The occultist watched in stunned disbelief as several men — all of them wearing dark military fatigues with matching tactical vests, faces concealed behind black balaclavas — swarmed into the cavern through the opening. Each man held a compact machine pistol equipped with a long sound suppressor, and they quickly moved into defensive positions, sweeping their gun barrels in all directions as if looking for targets.

Another man filed in behind the strike team, and strode purposefully toward Elisabeth. Through some trick of acoustics, Leeds could hear their voices as clearly as if they were right beside him.

“You took your sweet time getting here,” Elisabeth complained.

“You didn’t give us much time to prepare,” the man said, his voice smooth and unperturbed. “And we had to sort out a few loose ends topside.” He gestured at Russell, who still clung desperately to consciousness. “And it looks like you’ve started sorting them out down here as well.”

“He was about to take it.” She peered across the cavern and fixed her stare on Leeds. “I had to do something.”

The statement snapped Leeds out of his paralysis. Though he still had no idea what was going on, he understood that success — no, survival — depended upon just one thing.

He spun back toward the dais and charged up the steps, reaching blindly toward the altar, intent on seizing—

“No! It can’t be.”

The words were barely out before he felt a series of tiny stings all over his body, like biting wasps burrowing through his clothes and into his skin. His hook hand caught on the edge of the altar for a moment, and he saw splashes of red — his own blood — decorating the serpent’s head. Then he reeled sideways and pitched into the shimmering pool.

Annie felt her father’s hold go slack. Higgins was transfixed by the events unfolding across the cavern, staring at the mysterious strike team as if they were ghosts. She looked past him, at Elisabeth conversing with the leader of the commando element — at Russell, gut shot and bleeding out — at the pool where the diabolical Dr. Leeds floated like a piece of discarded trash — and at Kismet, dead at her feet.

Then she saw the flask. She’d left it at the cairn when she’d seen Kismet shot. There was still some of the water in it — she could heal him, save him.

She pulled away from her father and retrieved the silvery container, then knelt beside Kismet.

He wasn’t breathing. A bubble of blood sat on his lips, his last exhalation trapped within. She hugged his head to her breast, but his sightless eyes gazed right through her.

“Well that’s a surprise,” crooned a voice from just a few feet away.

Annie looked up and saw Elisabeth and her mysterious savior. Her eyes were blurred with tears and she couldn’t bring herself to look at his face.

“I guess we can finally close the book on the great experiment,” the man continued, chuckling sardonically. “Now, let’s get what we came for.”

She heard him speak again, a shout, but the words were unintelligible — an alien tongue she didn’t recognize.

“Wait,” Elisabeth said, hastily. “They’re not part of this.”

The man clucked disdainfully. “Loose ends, my dear.”

“We can debrief them, bring them into the fold.”

Annie started when she realized who Elisabeth was pleading for — Alex and herself.

“Please,” Elisabeth begged. “Hasn’t there been enough killing?”

“I’m sorry, my dear. To keep a secret such as ours, sacrifices are sometimes necessary.”

Annie felt her blood go cold as the man shouted again. The language he used may have been completely foreign to her, but she knew exactly what he had said.

Kill them.

She cast her eyes down, at Kismet’s unmoving face, and waited for the silenced bullet that would reunite them.

But the bullet didn’t come. Instead, Annie heard a strange, guttural sound burbling across the surface of the pool. She looked up and saw someone standing waist deep in water, surrounded by a corona of violet electricity.

It was Dr. Leeds, and he was laughing.

EIGHTEEN

“Guns?” The occultist, wreathed in tendrils of plasma, tipped his head back and chortled. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

The static field surrounded him like a diaphanous blanket. Energy swirled around him as if he had become the living nexus of the Fountain’s strange power. He raised his hands and light coruscated between his fingertips.

Fingertips!

His hook was gone; his maimed hand had been completely restored.

The commandos opened fire without any prompting and, despite the supernatural power surrounding him, Leeds staggered back under the onslaught, falling once more into the water. But he recovered from the attack almost instantaneously, as if they had done nothing more than push him off balance. His black garments were perforated with dozens of holes, but underneath, his skin was unmarked and radiating brilliance.

He stood again and stretched his hands in the direction of the nearest gunman. A tongue of plasma arced across the water to engulf commando, who evaporated in a cloud of red mist that was sucked back along the tendril and into Leeds’ body.

Like an angry god hurling fire at the unbelievers, Leeds reached out for another victim.

Annie felt her father’s hands close around her and he began pulling her toward the cairn. She didn’t have the strength to fight him, but she tightened her hold on Kismet’s body and refused to let go. Higgins just dragged them both, and then covered his daughter with own body.

For several seconds, absolute pandemonium reigned.

She heard shouts and more laughter from Leeds, but there was another noise — a crackling sound like a hissing live wire — that soon drowned out everything else. The harsh smell of ozone filled her nostrils, scrubbing away the sulfurous odor of burnt gunpowder.

And the light — the cavern was lit up like daylight. At the center of the Fountain, Dr. Leeds was blazing like a supernova.

Annie struggled free of her father’s protective embrace and gazed out at the chaos.

The remaining commandos continued to hurl rounds at the transformed occultist, but their resistance was merely a desperate effort to distract him so their leader and Elisabeth could escape. But instead of seizing that opportunity, the pair was trying to make their way to the dais.

Leeds seemed not to notice. He reached out from the heart of the plasma storm again, this time enveloping the still form of one of his fallen hirelings, instantly vaporizing him and consuming the resulting cloud of organic molecules. Annie felt a cold rush of horror as she realized what Leeds was doing.

He’s feeding,

Behind the veil of pervasive energy, Leeds was undergoing a startling transformation. His hair spilled over his shoulders, a prodigious beard sprouted from what had been a clean-shaven face. Beneath it all, his skin had darkened to a feverish, ruddy hue, and before Annie’s eyes, he started to swell.

Another finger of fire lanced out, striking Major Russell, whose scream was cut short as his wounded body disintegrated.

At the center of the raging tempest, Leeds’ skin stretched like an overinflated balloon, and then burst, revealing new flesh underneath. Immersed as he was in the Fountain’s waters, there was no end to the process; it just kept rebuilding him again and again, and would continue to do so as long as it had the raw materials to work with.

Tendrils of lightning began reaching out of his body, seemingly at random, without any conscious control. The plasma trails stroked the walls, disassembling stone as easily as flesh. Limestone, calcium carbonate, was nothing but than the remains of ancient life forms, compressed together by time and pressure — the perfect fuel for the fire of Leeds’ astonishing and endless transformation.

The intensity of the lightning was both blinding and deafening. It soared up into the high reaches of the cavern, dancing between the dangling stalactites like sunbeams in a crystal chandelier. The cave resonated with thunderclaps, vibrations that shook the ground and sent cracks shooting across the smooth stone.

Leeds’ clothes had been completely burned away, or perhaps vaporized and ingested like everything else, and he stood naked and exposed in the center of the pool. His skin was peeling away like bark from a tree, but as soon as it sloughed off, new flesh was revealed. Annie saw that something else had changed as well.

Dr. Leeds was growing.

When it had begun, he had been waist-deep in the pool, but now he stood like a titanic colossus with the water splashing around his knees.

Except something was wrong.

The growth wasn’t proceeding uniformly. Some parts seemed to be growing faster than others, giving the impression of a hideously deformed creature. Under his beard, his face had become distorted beyond recognition. His torso had grown bloated, top-heavy, on legs that seemed to be atrophying before Annie’s eyes. The ribbons of skin peeling away weren’t dead layers of epidermis flaking off, but living tissue that also continued to grow haphazardly. In a space of time that might have been measured in heartbeats, Dr. Leeds ceased to be anything remotely human.

And still it did not end.

The misshapen giant form collapsed back into the pool; a grotesque island of flesh that grew like a tumor, drawing still more material into itself with cataclysmic discharges of energy.

Annie felt movement against her body and cried out as something squeezed her arm.

Was this what it felt like? Was it her turn to be ripped apart, reduced to a spray of molecules and consumed by the thing Leeds had become?

But it wasn’t the jolt of an electrical discharge she felt.

It was a hand.

Kismet’s hand.

Death, it seemed, had no secrets to reveal. Kismet's plunge into the abyss of darkness was unremarkable in its similarity to countless reports given of near death experiences. His world had collapsed into a tunnel of darkness, and at its end…heaven?

And he had died, hadn’t he? His lungs had filled with blood, drowning him and causing asphyxia. His brain deprived of oxygen, shut down. The electrical impulses from his central nervous system that regulated the rhythm of his heart were cut off. Neurological flat-line; the clinical definition of ‘dead.’

And yet, every few seconds, his heart contracted within his chest.

Another source of electrical stimulation was at work within him. The mysterious element that had empowered the water of the pool to rejuvenate his cells — the very substance that reacted with that water to create the stunning plasma storm in the air above the Fountain — was generating random and discordant electrical shocks throughout his muscles.

His blood pressure had dropped to virtually nothing, no oxygen was being carried by the red blood cells that remained in his circulatory system, but something more important was going on. There were still traces of the Fountain’s water in his body, generating those tiny sparks as they went to work stimulating his cells to keep regenerating and reproducing.

What had happened to Leeds on a grand scale was happening to Kismet at the microscopic level. Damaged and ruined cells were consumed, broken down into raw material, transformed into healthy tissue.

After a time, perhaps only a minute or two, his blood vessels were whole again, his chest cavity repaired, the deluge of blood absorbed back into his body. His diaphragm twitched and the tiniest gasp of air was drawn in. His heart gave a spasm, and the blood in his arteries and capillaries and veins…moved.

Kismet sat up, like a sleeper awakening from a bad dream, only to discover that he was in the middle of a much more terrifying nightmare.

“What the…?”

He looked up into Annie’s eyes, then past her to Higgins…

Higgins! He felt a surge of anger as he recalled how his old comrade in arms had betrayed him, held him at gunpoint turned him over to Leeds…why exactly, he couldn’t remember.

Then what?

It came back to him in chunks. The ordeal on the lake bottom…traps…giant bats…The Fountain. I drank from the Fountain of Youth!

And that was it. The last thing he remembered.

He stared into the heart of the raging tempest at the center of the pool; there was something alive there, something that had once been human. “Leeds?”

Annie nodded.

The sight held him rooted in place. He could vaguely recall what he had felt after tasting the water, and thought he had at least a rudimentary grasp of the principles at work. It was probably beyond the grasp of science to explain, but there was certainly no magic to it. But what was happening in the center of the Fountain was like nothing he could have imagined.

Then he recalled something else, the thing Leeds had truly sought — the Seed.

He turned toward the elevated dais, and that was when he saw the man standing next to Elisabeth.

It had been twenty years since their last encounter, but he recognized the man as easily as if it had only been yesterday.

“Hauser!”

It was a barely a whisper, but somehow the man standing on the platform and likewise captivated, heard him.

Kismet felt a cold chill wash over him that had nothing to do with the cataclysm building in the pool.

Ulrich Hauser.

That was what the man had called himself — the man from Prometheus — the man who had somehow known all about him.

You are their grand experiment.

Ulrich Hauser had left him to die in Iraq—

Or had he?

Kismet, if I killed you, your mother would have my head.

Hauser had said that, all those years ago, just before leaving him on his own — he and Higgins had been captured, tortured — and then, for no apparent reason, they’d been allowed to escape. Had Hauser, or someone else acting on his orders, orchestrated that?

Higgins was right, he realized. I’ve never been anything but their bloodhound, their puppet. I found the goddamned Fountain of Youth, and here they are — here he is — to take it away.

Kismet had wondered if Leeds might be an agent of Prometheus; how else to explain his knowledge of a society so secret that twenty years of searching had not revealed to Kismet even a single clue regarding its existence. Leeds had used his knowledge of Prometheus to coax Higgins into joining his cause, and neither man had suspected even for a moment that their agent was already in place; the beautiful blonde — the disillusioned Sultana, the actress, the professional liar.

In hindsight, it all made perfect sense now. Elisabeth’s sham marriage to the Sultan, at the height of her career — the pirate raid on the cruise ship — there was a commonality there: the relics of the ancient world, illicitly acquired by the Sultan’s father. And then Nick Kismet — the great experiment — had wandered onstage.

She had tried to kill him, or had she really? She had seduced him — why? And then she had joined forces with Leeds, subtly goading both men into a rivalry that would not only add yet another fantastic treasure — a Seed of the Tree of Life — to Prometheus’ secret storehouse of mysteries, but would also give them a chance to put their grand experiment to the ultimate test.

God, she’s good.

“Hauser!” he shouted, getting to his feet. He felt strong, surprisingly so, given what he felt sure he had just gone through. “Not this time, Hauser. You’re not taking this one away.”

The blond man stared back at, turning his head a little as if to bring something distant into focus, and for good reason — his left eye was covered by a square of black cloth.

Well that’s new.

He started running, only peripherally aware of the tongues of fire scorching the air above him, licking the cave walls, shattering the limestone with their kiss. Hauser lurched into motion, turning back to his goal.

Kismet knew he wasn’t going to make it time, but he tried anyway.

Elisabeth stepped into his path, aiming a compact semi-automatic at his forehead. “Don’t,” she warned. “I don’t know if a bullet will even kill you now, but I’ll pull the trigger if I have to.”

There was just enough hesitancy in her voice that he believed her. “What about your experiment? What would my mother say?”

She cocked her head sideways. “You really have no idea what’s going on, do you?”

A retort was on his lips when Hauser erupted in a string of curses. His rage was so palpable that even Elisabeth winced, dropping her guard for just a moment. Kismet took the chance and brushed past her, vaulting up the steps. He ascended the dais just as Hauser wrapped his arms around the base of the altar, picked it up, and hurled it into the pool.

It took Kismet a moment to understand the reason for the other man’s rage.

It’s not there. The Seed is gone. Did Leeds…? No, someone else.

His mind turned the possibilities like the pages of a flipbook.

“Where is it?” Hauser raged. “Where in the hell is it?”

“Looks like you were late to this party,” Kismet remarked. “No Seed. The Fountain of Youth…” He glanced back at the pool and the storm; the cavern was about to implode, and when it went, that would be the end of the Fountain of Youth. “You lose. I imagine that’s a new experience for you.”

Hauser wheeled on him. “Where is it, Kismet?”

“Why should I tell you?”

For a moment, the other man just glowered at him. Then his lips pulled back in that Big Bad Wolf smile that Kismet remembered so well. “You know where it is, don’t you? What say we make a deal? You tell me where it is, and I let the girl keep on breathing.”

Kismet glanced over a shoulder and saw Elisabeth moving toward Annie, the pistol already trained on her. Higgins just stood there, rooted in place.

Kismet wanted to scream at the man. Damn it, Al. Stand up to them; she’s your daughter for God’s sake!

He turned away. “You were probably going to kill us all anyway, right? Oh, maybe you’d let me live for the sake of your great experiment, but as I recall, you have no qualms about leaving me in a room full of dead people. So why should I tell you anything?”

Hauser leaned close, nostrils flaring. “Because there are worse fates in the world than death.”

Kismet matched his stare for a moment. “Promise me that you’ll leave her alone, and I’ll tell you.”

The lupine lips curled ever so slightly. “I swear on my mother’s life.”

“Is that some kind of joke?”

Lightning crackled between the stalactites and a chunk of stone the size of Smart Car crashed down and obliterated a section of the walkway on the far side of the pool. The impact sent a tremor through the entire cavern, opening gaping fissures in the walls, from which water began to pour.

He didn’t trust Hauser, but in a few minutes, it wouldn’t matter. “Fontaneda took it back to Spain with him.”

“How do you know?” Hauser pressed.

“He wrote that he planned to hide it in the Alhambra Palace in Granada.”

Hauser fixed him with a single-eyed stare, looking for any hint of duplicity. Then, without another word he turned and fled down the stairs.

Kismet started after him, but Elisabeth warned him off. “Not another step.”

“You promised, Hauser. No harm.”

“A promise I intend to keep,” the one-eyed man assured him. “As long as you stay the hell away from me.”

He bent down and seized Annie’s arm, pulling her erect.

Kismet took another step forward, but Elisabeth waggled the gun meaningfully.

Another thunderous discharge shuddered through the cavern. The pool was boiling now, and at its center, a hideous mass of wriggling flesh continued to grow.

“Then go!” Kismet shouted. “Get the hell out of here before we all die.”

Hauser pulled Annie after him and headed for the exit where the last remnants of his commando force waited. Elisabeth however lingered. “Alex? Are you with us?”

The question seemed to perplex the former Gurkha. He stared back at her, and then turned his desolate gaze on Kismet. His lips formed words: I’m sorry.

There was only one thing left to say. “Take care of her, Al. Keep her safe.”

Higgins nodded and moved to follow Elisabeth.

“Hey, Al.”

Higgins paused but didn’t look back.

“See you in the next life.”

NINETEEN

As soon as Higgins and Elisabeth passed through the exit, Kismet started a mental ten count. He only got as far as three, when Hauser reappeared in the doorway, holding what looked like a woman’s shoulder bag, sewn of olive drab fabric.

“You probably won't die right away,” Hauser shouted. “In fact, you might not die for several years. Enjoy your stay!”

With that, he dropped the bag and took off running.

Kismet ran too, back toward the relative safety of the cairn. He threw himself flat behind the piled rocks an instant before the satchel charge detonated.

The explosion was tremendous. Kismet felt the concussion ripple through his body. He’d kept his mouth open slightly the whole time so that the overpressure wouldn’t rupture the membranes of his inner ear, but the blast left him stunned.

Because the bomb had gone off almost exactly in the entrance, fully half of the explosive energy had been directed away from the cavern. Nevertheless, the half that had blasted inward was more than enough to finish what had already begun. The already gaping cracks widened, and between them, huge sections of the wall began moving independently, undulating — collapsing.

Suddenly, Kismet’s wildly long hair bristled up on end, surrounding his head like a halo, alive with a crackle of building static. Something big was about to happen.

He threw himself flat on the shattered floor.

A bolt of pure blue-white lightning arced between the ceiling and the center of the Fountain. Overhead, the few remaining stalactites began to vibrate violently and explode in a spray of deadly fragments.

In the pool, the thing that had once been Dr. John Leeds exploded in a geyser of blood and tissue.

Annie followed unwillingly but without resistance as the one-eyed man — the man Kismet had called Hauser — led her through the cave with the bats.

Most of the winged creatures were gone, frightened from their dwelling by the release of energies from the nearby cavern, though a few still flitted about overhead. The fleeing group barely took notice.

As they passed beneath it, Annie saw that the opening overhead was larger now, giving her a much-needed view of the sky above the surface world, where she desperately longed to be.

Like the other chamber, the bat den was being reshaped by the cataclysm. The walls, riddled with fissures, were groaning, shifting back and forth like earthquake fault lines. But even more ominous was the sound of rushing waters.”

“Hurry!” Hauser urged. “The entire cavern is flooding.”

Water began to pour in; just a trickle at first, like a leak in an old roof. The tremors had uncovered ancient reservoirs — pockets of groundwater that would have naturally seeped through the rock and into the nearby lake — and was diverting them into the hollow channels of the cave network. The limestone walls were but a thin membrane, holding back a tremendous underground deluge, and as those walls fractured, an irreversible chain of geological events would transform the labyrinth into a sinkhole, ultimately expanding the boundaries of Lake George.

Though it would be no more significant than any other fishing hole on the lake, the Fountain of Youth was about to be revealed to the outside world.

None of Fontaneda's traps remained to slow their flight, but when they reached the corridor where the boulder-sized stone block traps had earlier daunted Leeds’ group, they discovered that the fragile cement holding the remaining block in place had crumbled, triggering the last of the Spaniard's defense mechanisms. They had to crawl over both of the stone blocks to escape. This time, Annie felt not even a twinge of claustrophobia; they were heading for the surface and that was good. If she hesitated, she would die, crushed by stone and water, so the only option was to keep moving.

Suddenly, a massive detonation from deep within the cavern split the length of the tunnel wide open. Annie was knocked flat by the violence of the tremor, which was an order of magnitude more powerful than the satchel charge Hauser had left behind to kill Kismet.

Nick?

She tried to thrust that thought from her mind. She couldn’t do anything about it now; she had to get out of this place. But before she could raise her head, water began pouring from the walls, and a freezing wave engulfed her.

The climactic blast lifted Kismet off the floor and flung him against the cavern wall, fifteen feet from where he had been standing. He felt as though his body had become a single massive bruise, though as he struggled to rise, the pain receded quickly, replaced by a tingling in his nerves.

He recalled Hauser’s parting shot, and wondered how long the potency of the Fountain's water would remain active within him? What if he survived everything — the crushing collapse of the cave, the rising flood of water — and wound up trapped forever, unable to find even the release of death.

Screw that.

A gleaming piece of metal lay nearby; it was his flask. The container was nearly full of water from the Fountain and the metal tingled beneath his fingertips. He stashed it in his pocket, then turned to survey the damage caused by the explosion.

Where the Fountain of Youth had once existed, ablaze with seemingly supernatural energy and a promise of rejuvenation, there was now only a void. A smoking crater, deeper than Kismet's eyes could penetrate, marked the place where it had flourished.

The mass of flesh and organic matter — otherwise known as Dr. John Leeds — had been completely immolated in the eruption. The walkway around the crater was almost completely gone, shattered beyond recognition, impassible, and littered with enormous chunks of rock falling out of the walls and down from the ceiling overhead. The pieces were falling all around Kismet; the next one might, without even a hint of warning, smash him to a bloody pulp.

He had to get out of here.

As he searched for an exit, he realized that, despite the fact that the plasma storm was no more, he could still see. Daylight was streaming in through a rent in the fabric of the cavern's dome. The explosive force of that final discharge had blown a hole in the roof directly over where the Fountain had been. It was ten feet across and getting wider as the edges continued to crumble away. As he watched, a huge block of stone, larger than the original hole, pulled away with a splitting noise. It seemed to hang indecisively for a moment before succumbing to gravity, plunging into the depths of the crater below. The floor trembled with its impact.

A surge of water abruptly exploded into the cavern. Kismet had time only to look up before the wave caught him. The rushing waters lifted him effortlessly, pitching his battered carcass against the fractured wall. It took a moment for him to regain the wherewithal to begin treading the turbulent water, and he bobbed up to the roiling surface as the water rose beneath him.

The suddenness of the collapse made him fear for Annie’s safety. How long had it taken Leeds’ group to reach the Fountain? An hour? Maybe the return trip wouldn’t take as long, but he feared the worst. Nevertheless, one way or another, Annie's fate had already been decided. It was his own fate that remained uncertain.

He tried to swim for the center of the cavern where there was the least chance of being crushed, but the swirling eddies caused by the inflow kept him all but pinned against the back wall, above where the last fragments of cuneiform remained as the only proof that anything he had witnessed here. He fought the currents with all his strength, but was already feeling a profound fatigue. His body had used up the last of its reserves; he had nothing left to give.

Someone pulled Annie out of the water and started dragging her along. She struggled to get her feet under her. Everything was happening too fast. The water was rising rapidly, swirling around her knees, but she found the strength to keep running.

The rushing waters threatened to knock her down again, but the flow of the current was pushing the fleeing group toward their goal. Although the passage was now entirely filled with water, they all knew it was the final hurdle in the path of their escape, and plunged blindly into it.

Annie felt her paralyzing claustrophobia rise again, but that was not the only source of despair. Kismet was gone; he’d been returned to the land of the living only to perish again. There could have been no escape from the collapse of the cavern where they had found the Fountain of Youth. In her heart, she was certain that she would be joining him soon, entombed forever in the constant night of the underworld. Nevertheless, she did not resist as someone took hold of her and pulled her into the water.

Unprepared for the dive, she immediately sucked in a mouthful of brackish water. The liquid ran up her nose and down into her windpipe, causing an uncontrollable spasm. Someone was holding her tight however, and she succeeded in pressing her hands to her face to avoid inhaling any more. She existed for what seemed an eternity in the dark chute, aware that he was pulling her downward, deeper, away from the surface and salvation. Then, just as abruptly, she was rising through the twilight shadows in the depths of the lake. Daylight loomed above her, closer with each passing second, yet impossibly far away.

She broke through the surface, hungrily sucking in breaths. There were dark shapes moving around her in the water. She felt a rush of panic as she recalled the alligators that had attacked Kismet earlier — but no, these were humans — the last remnants of Hauser’s assault force. The one-eyed man was there, as was Elisabeth. Then she got a look at the man who had refused to leave her behind.

It was her father. Alex Higgins had rescued her from the horror of the cave, and snatched her from the lake.

The pontoon boat Leeds had used to mount his ill-fated expedition into the depths bobbed nearby, and the survivors were clambering aboard. Higgins propelled her up onto its deck, and then hauled himself up as well.

“Get us out of here.” Hauser’s breathless command warned her that the danger was not yet past.

An outboard engine roared to life and the boat began steering away from the shore, heading out toward open water. Annie glanced back and saw the lake’s perimeter transformed in an instant.

The shoreline crumbled away, vanishing into the water, sending out waves that rocked the retreating boat. Cypress trees groaned and toppled into the newly created voids. The serpent mound, which had once pointed the way to the Fountain, seemed to come alive, crawling and undulating into the depths.

Kismet was down there somewhere — lost forever.

Despair and exhaustion overcame her, and when she closed her eyes to hold back the tears, unconsciousness quickly claimed her.

Something splashed in the water next to Kismet, not a dislodged piece of stone, but something else. For a second, it looked like a snake and he instinctively tried to draw back from it, but then he realized that it was a rope, hanging down from the darkness overhead.

What the hell…?

It was like some kind of insane practical joke; a rope appearing out of nowhere, leading — where?

He reached for the line, snaring it on his second try, and clutched it greedily to his chest, but try as he might, he could not make the ascent. His arms were just too tired; his bare feet slipped uncertainly on the wet threads. With the last of his fading strength, he wrapped the line around his waist twice, tying it off with a crude knot, and then sagged in the noose, awaiting whatever would follow.

The rope went taut and Kismet was yanked straight up, out of the water. The line was pulled in steadily, as if attached to a reel, and after just a couple seconds, the ceiling of the cavern loomed close…and then swallowed him whole.

He spent just a moment in the total darkness of a vertical shaft, before hands reached out to draw him over a stone lip and onto a ledge. There was light here; a flashlight beam shone directly onto his face.

“Come on! Run!”

The voice was familiar, but he couldn’t place it, and there was not a single reason in the world to ignore the exhortation. He took off blindly, finding his way along the tunnel by following the cone of illumination cast by his guide’s flashlight.

The escape route chosen by Kismet’s barely glimpsed benefactor was more of an obstacle course than a tunnel. The passage had been carved out by nature, streams of water seeking the path of least resistance over the course of thousands, or more probably, millions of years, burrowing through softer portions of the rock matrix, driven by gravity and pressure. There were cramped spaces only a foot or two high where Kismet had to crawl, squirming around sharp corners and through choke points. There were places where he had to climb, groping blindly in the almost total darkness to find his way up to the next passage, visible only because of the indirect light from his savior’s lamp. The only constant was that they were going up.

The entire journey lasted only a few minutes and covered a distance of only a few hundred yards, but the tremors shuddering through the rock beneath him were a constant reminder that, at any moment, the whole place might collapse on top of him, smashing him to oblivion. And then, without any hint that the end — one way or another — was close, he spilled out into daylight.

He lay in a foot of water at the bottom of a limestone depression, a naturally occurring well perhaps twenty feet across. Above him, a vertical distance of about twelve feet, he saw the tree limbs waving gently, backlit by the azure Florida sky. Dangling down one side of the pit was a rope ladder. The man that had saved him was already halfway up, and at its top, a young African-American woman was shouting down at Kismet, urging him to climb.

He struggled to his feet, slipping uncertainly on the slimy stone at the bottom of the hole. The ground continued to shudder violently, but he managed to reach the smooth rock wall and used it to steady himself as he circled to the ladder. When his fingers curled around the rope rungs, he felt a surge of energy in his tired limbs.

The ascent was like a final insult, a parting shot from the hellish underworld he had just escaped. His bare feet couldn’t seem to find a purchase on the woven fibers, and when they did, the rope pressed painfully into the soles of his feet. Every time he tried to pull himself up, his arms felt he was lifting the weight of the world. But then, as he neared the top, he saw hands reaching down to him, and at last glimpsed the familiar face of his savior.

“Joe?”

The shoreline of Lake George expanded, claiming the new depths for itself. Standing at its edge, watching as the lake poured into the newly created sinkhole, Kismet saw that the cavern which had concealed the Fountain of Youth for untold millennia had not been far at all from the boundaries of the lake. In time, perhaps a few more centuries of pounding by tropical storms, the cavern would have flooded naturally, achieving the same result.

That he decided, would probably have been a better outcome.

Farther out, he could see the pontoon boat, scurrying away from the scene of destruction, heading north toward some unknown rendezvous with more of Hauser’s Prometheus allies. The passengers were mostly just dark shapes; he couldn’t tell if Annie was among them. He decided to believe that she was, and he knew exactly what he was going to have to do to save her.

He turned to face the pair that had rescued him: Joe — the young man from Charleston who had claimed to be Joseph King’s grandson — and his companion, an equally youthful woman. It had taken a few minutes of scrutiny for him to recognize her, but when at last he had, all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place.

It was almost too much to process. He didn’t know whether to be grateful for their last minute intervention, or angry for the deception that had thrown him into the nightmare in the first place. “Are you ready to tell me the truth now?”

Joe’s expression was contrite. “I’m not really sure where to begin.”

Kismet turned to the woman. “Let’s go with an easy one then: Are you really Joseph King’s daughter?”

The young woman, who had, the last time he’d seen her appeared to be at least in her seventies, just nodded.

Kismet turned to Joe. “Father and daughter. Joseph and Candace — those are your real names?”

Joe’s mouth twitched into a nostalgic smile. “Candace was the name given to the queens of the ancient African people, the Nubians and the Ethiopians. It seemed like a good Christian name for her. I’ve been Joseph King — Joe — for so long that I don’t think of myself by any other name. When I was with Hernando, I was Jose Esclavo del Cristo Rey, but that wasn’t my real name either.”

“Joseph, slave of Christ the King.”

“I don’t know what my parents named me…” Joe trailed off as if trying to access that memory was particularly painful, then shrugged.

“You were with him from the beginning then. One of his explorers.”

Joe nodded. “I remember that I was the slave of a Moorish nobleman. After the Reconquista, I earned my freedom, but that didn’t exactly count for much back then. When the Inquisition started persecuting the Moriscos, anyone with black skin was a suspect. So I joined with Fontaneda and sailed to New Spain, hoping to find my fortune. I did, and as it turns out, a whole lot more.”

Kismet recalled Fontaneda’s account of the discovery of the Fountain and the long ordeal that followed. “He wrote about two survivors that returned with him to the Fountain, and how they chose to die rather than drink again from the Fountain. But there was only one grave down there.”

“I almost died, too.” The wistful look came back. “Can’t remember exactly why I thought that was a good idea. When I was too weak to resist, he saved me. After that…Well, as you can imagine, it’s a long story.”

“You killed Fontaneda, didn’t you?”

Joe sucked in a breath at the abruptness of the accusation, but Kismet didn’t wait for a response. “I’m sure you had your reasons, and I don’t care about any of that. Right now, I need something from you.”

Joe’s expression was no longer wistful or contrite. “Something more than saving your hide?”

“They have Annie. They want the thing that gave the Fountain its power — a Seed from the Tree of Life, and if I’m going to save her, I need to give it to them.” He fixed Joe with an unflinching stare. “So I need you to give it to me.”

TWENTY

As she traversed the wooded path leading up the hill to La Alhambra, Annie wondered how many more times she would have to make this journey.

The magnificent palace, built by Berber conquerors in the 10^th century, the very place from which Isabella and Ferdinand had, at the end of the 15^th century, set in motion the discovery, exploration and exploitation of the Americas, was like something from a fairy tale. The architecture was stunning, with arches and arabesques that looked like they belonged in a tale from the Arabian Nights. The complex, situated on a hilltop overlooking the city of Granada, had endured the tides of history, sometimes falling into disrepair only to be restored again like the treasure it was. Though it was no longer a nexus of historic events, it remained fixed in the human consciousness as a place of great beauty. It wasn’t at all surprising that the Spaniard, Fontaneda, had brought the Seed here.

That was what Hauser had told her — told them all. A child of the southern hemisphere, Annie didn’t really know much about European history.

It was the start of their third full day in Granada. Hauser had somehow arranged to have the entire complex closed for “urgent renovations,” and brought in a team of experts — art historians, architectural consultants, sonar imaging technicians — and truckloads of equipment to survey every square inch of the historic palace. Thus far, the search had yielded no results, and today promised to be more of the same.

Not that she was involved in the actual searching. Hauser brought her along for one simple reason; he wanted to keep her where he could see her. It was a constant reminder that she was his prisoner, not his guest.

Although surrounded by people, she felt completely alone. She had her own room at the nearby Alhambra Palace hotel, a luxurious suite with a gorgeous view of the city from the balcony, but someone was always with her — either one of Hauser’s men who worked rotating shifts as her minders, or the man himself. Her father was involved in the search effort, but while she saw him daily, she wasn’t permitted to talk to him.

Not that she had any particular inclination to do so.

She had figured out a few things. Hauser, and evidently Elisabeth as well, were part of the group that Dr. Leeds had told them about in Central Park: Prometheus, a cabal of intellectuals bent on hiding away the mysteries of the world; mysteries like the Fountain of Youth and the Tree of Life.

Why?

That was still a bit unclear. Maybe they didn’t trust what humanity might do with such knowledge and power—who can blame them? — or maybe they just wanted it all for themselves.

What really troubled her was the fact that her father was now working with them. She had worked out that Alex Higgins blamed Prometheus for the deaths of his teammates in Iraq during the mission in which he first met Kismet; how else to explain his willingness to throw in his lot with the psychopathic Dr. Leeds? But then he had switched again, and joined forces with the very people who dealt that blow in the first place.

She knew why of course. He was with Elisabeth now, Annie was almost certain of it. She had seen them together once or twice, walking across a courtyard or examining the magnificent arabesque and arches that seemed to be everywhere, and it hadn’t been too hard to draw that conclusion. Elisabeth might have been faking it; she was a professional actor after all, but Annie could read her dad like a book.

She wanted to scream at him—Finally got what you wanted, did you? Hope it’s worth the price you paid—but she didn’t. It hurt too much to think about his betrayal and just how costly the journey had been.

Her minder this morning was Karl, but that was the extent of her knowledge about the burly man who walked a few steps behind her. They passed through the Puerta de las Granadas and made the climb up to the Puerta de la Justicia, the original 14^th century entrance to the palace.

Hauser was there already, addressing a group of searchers that included her father and Elisabeth Neuell. “Today we’re going to have to expand the search into the Alcazaba. We’ll start with radar and acoustic imaging. We’ve got to think like this Spaniard, put ourselves in his shoes. When was he here? What places would he have had access to? Was he the kind of person who would hide it in a place of importance, or in the most inconspicuous location he could find?”

Annie tuned him out. She didn’t know whether to hope for their success or continued failure. How long would they keep looking? How long would they keep her hostage? She wondered what Alex’s defection would mean for her when the search ended, successfully or otherwise? What had Hauser said back in the Fountain cavern? Something about loose ends; was that all she was?

A sudden murmur from the group brought her attention back to Hauser, who now stood in silent consternation as one of his men whispered in his ear. His blond head came up suddenly, and his one good eye focused directly on her. Then, without another word, he strode over to her, grabbed her arm possessively, and began dragging her along as he strode into the heart of the complex.

Something was happening, something big. Annie didn’t get the sense that Hauser was angry, but he was definitely anxious about something. She offered no resistance, quickening her steps to keep up with him as they entered the Charles V palace, which housed the museum, but as they moved briskly through a maze of interior halls and corridors, some of which were an unpleasant reminder of the caverns in Florida, she felt her own anxiety mounting. Then, she saw daylight again, streaming through the arched colonnade leading to the Patio de los Leones—the Court of the Lions.

Another of Hauser’s men — not a technician, but one of the security team that had been with them since Florida — approached and quickly briefed him, using the same strange language that she had first heard in the Fountain cavern, and many times since, whenever they wanted to keep a secret from her.

Hauser nodded, and then pulled Annie around in front of himself, positioning her like a human shield. “Move. But don’t do anything stupid.”

She complied, letting him guide her through the colonnade and out into the open courtyard, with its majestic centerpiece, an alabaster fountain resting on the back of twelve white marble lions. The fountain had been the very first place Hauser had looked for the Seed.

Several members of the security team were deployed throughout the plaza. Their guns were drawn, but pointed at the ground in anticipation of further orders.

Then Annie’s heart lurched in her chest and she almost stumbled. In the center of the courtyard, standing patiently right in front of lions was Nick Kismet.

He looked consider better than he had when she’d last seen him. His wild hair was shorter now, though very full and falling over his ears, and he still wore a beard that looked just a little on the scraggly side, but he was otherwise the very picture of health. Annie actually thought he looked about ten years younger.

Of course he does.

Kismet smiled at her then turned his stare to Hauser. “Hiding behind a woman, Ulrich?” He made a clucking noise of disapproval. “But I suppose that’s always been your style. Let others do the work, take the risks — I think that’s called ‘cowardice.’”

Hauser tightened his grip on Annie’s arm, evoking a low whimper, but he ignored the taunt. “It’s not here, is it? It was never here. You lied to me.”

Kismet grinned. “Everything was so crazy — lights were flashing, the world was ending — I just said the first thing that popped into my head.”

His expression became more serious. “I needed to keep you busy for a while, somewhere I could find you when I was ready, when I finally had something to bargain with.”

“And you have it now?”

Kismet didn’t answer immediately, but looked past him as Higgins and Elisabeth stepped past the pillars at the edge of the courtyard, the latter holding her semi-automatic pistol aimed at Kismet. “Well, well, the gang’s all here.”

“Where is it?” Hauser pressed, jerking Annie’s arm again.

Kismet gave a deep sigh. “You know, I’ve been looking for you for a really long time. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, you really messed up my life.”

To Annie’s surprise, Hauser laughed. “You were never meant for normal things, Kismet.”

“See, that’s what I’m talking about. You seem to know all about me, and I know…well, nothing about me.”

The one-eyed man shook his head ruefully. “And you never will.”

“Not even if I give you what you want? The Seed of the Tree of Life?”

“Not even for that. It is important to us, but not that important. And in the end, we will have it anyway. The question you should be asking is: how much is it worth to you?” He shook Annie meaningfully.

Kismet’s eyes flitted to hers, and then to Higgins, before coming back to Hauser. “I figured you’d say something like that. Fine. Let her go and I’ll give it to you.”

“You first. Where is it?”

Kismet shrugged then took something from his back pocket and held it out on his open palm. It was a small heart-shaped silver box. He flipped it open and tilted it down to show the contents. Annie saw what looked like a large unshelled almond or maybe the stone from a peach. A faint blue light seemed to be oozing from the tiny pores that perforated its outer surface. Then Kismet snapped the lid shut on it.

“That’s a fake. You aren’t stupid enough to bring it here.”

Kismet ducked his head in feigned embarrassment. “That’s mean.”

“Where was it?” Despite the intensity of her captors hold, Annie turned in surprise, not because of the question, but rather the person who had asked it: her father.

“It’s quite a story really. You see, four hundred and fifty years ago, when Hernando Fontaneda found the Fountain of Youth, he wasn’t alone. He had with him several companions, including freed slaves who signed on as mercenaries. Fontaneda wrote that most of them died during the search. Only a few survived long enough to reach the Fountain, and only he survived to return to civilization. Turns out, that wasn’t exactly true. There was one other. You’ve already met him, Al. In fact, you saved his life back in Charleston.”

“Joe?”

Kismet nodded. “King and Fontaneda didn’t dare share their secret within anyone else. There was no telling what might happen if they did. They tried to integrate themselves into the colonies in the New World; Fontaneda established himself as a wealthy gentleman, and King was his slave. There were some hiccups at first; they nearly got caught in Saint Augustine, and had to completely start over. Over the next three hundred years they managed to work out a system that allowed them to live among the rest of us poor fragile mortals for a while without attracting too much attention. The Fountain regenerates — regenerated rather, but then after a while, the natural aging process resumes. They would stay in one place for twenty or thirty years, and then pop back down to Florida, take a sip, and start all over again somewhere else with a new name. Fortunato, Fortune, Fontaine, and always accompanied by his faithful manservant Joseph.”

“The Spaniard hated slavery,” Higgins countered. “He was an Abolitionist.”

Kismet nodded. “It was a different world. They had to stay close to the Fountain, so it was necessary to live a lie. Fontaneda never mistreated King, or if he did, it was just for appearance’s sake. I think his decision to help fugitive slaves was, in part, to soothe his sense of guilt about the situation. They were equal sharers in the secret of the Fountain’s existence, but Fontaneda lived the good life, while King was relegated to the slave house.

“Then the world changed. The Civil War ended slavery and they could no longer maintain the old lie. And King wasn’t under Fontaneda’s thumb anymore. Not that things were much better for King, but he was finally able to stop pretending to be a slave.

“He married and started a family. Not his first of course. Both men had married, fathered children, and then watched them grow old and die, never daring to reveal their secret or use it to save their loved ones. But that had always been Fontaneda’s decision. Now that King was a free man, he could do as he pleased. His wife died in childbirth — no chance to save her — but King vowed that he would not lose his daughter, Candace, I believe you met her, Elisabeth, though I doubt you’d recognize her now.”

The actress glowered but said nothing.

“Fontaneda tried to prevent King, and when that failed, he decided to take the Seed for himself — he’d figured out its importance long before that — and reveal the existence of the cavern to the world through the United Nations. I’m not sure if he meant it to be an act of altruism, or just a way to put King in his place one final time. In the end, King got the last laugh. They fought and King killed Fontaneda in self-defense — well, he says it was self-defense. Remember that strange mark on the map? Like a scar? King cut out Fontaneda’s heart, just to make sure he wouldn’t get back up again.”

Annie shuddered a little at the mental image. It was hard to reconcile Kismet’s description of King with the youthful man they had met in the Charleston cemetery, and even harder to picture Joe cold-bloodedly murdering a man and desecrating his corpse.

“How do you know all this?” asked Hauser, evidently curious in spite of himself.

“King told me the whole story, right after he and Candace pulled me out of that cave. I had figured out a lot of the ‘what’ already; King just supplied the ‘why.’” Kismet now focused his stare like a laser on the one-eyed man. “And of course, he gave me the Seed.”

“Because you asked so nicely?” Hauser scoffed.

“Because I threatened to expose their secret. When we showed up, asking about the Fountain, they knew the jig was finally up. They just wanted a chance to start over one last time, so after we left, they headed down to Florida ahead of us, used a back door — which would have been really nice to know about ahead of time — and took the Seed. Lucky for me, they decided to hang around a while longer to see how it all played out, and were there to rescue me.”

Hauser shook his head. “How nice for you. What an entertaining story. And you expect me to believe that’s really the Seed? That you just brought it here, knowing that I could just take it from you.”

“You could try. But really, why make it so difficult?” He waggled the heart-shaped box. “You want it, I want her.”

“No!” protested Annie. “Nick, you can't give it to him. You've no idea what he'll do with it.”

“I know exactly what he has planned.” He glanced at Hauser then at Higgins. “What he always does. He’ll hide it away forever. I can live with that. But I promise you this, you won’t get a thing if you don’t let her go. It’s that simple.”

“I’ll make it even simpler,” Hauser threatened. He held up his semi-automatic. “I’ll just kill you and take it.”

“Not a good idea. For starters, while I’m holding this, I’m not sure it’s possible to kill me. I can feel it working on me right now. Hell, my fingernails have grown while I’ve been standing here.”

Annie thought his hair and beard looked like they’d grown as well.

“You could probably knock me down with a bullet,” he continued. “Put me out for the count long enough to take this. But before you do, there’s something you should know.

“In addition to the Seed, this little box also contains twenty grams of C4. Not a lot, I grant you, but then that’s the idea. When I closed it just now, I armed the trigger. Open it again, and it will blow up. If you shoot me and I drop it…” he shrugged. “It might not blow up. And I’m sure you could probably bring in someone to try to defuse it — he might even succeed. But it’s just as likely that, if you try to take it by force, I’ll open it and blow it to hell.

“So, were back to the easy way. Let Annie go, and I’ll give it to you, simple as that.”

Hauser cocked his head sideways and squinted with his good eye. “You’re bluffing. You wouldn’t destroy it. And I don’t think you’d part with it either.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Kismet said, without a trace of his earlier flippancy. “I never cared about any of this. Legendary relics, mythical powers — I only ever started looking for these things because I hoped it would lead me to you.”

He spread his hands. “And here we are. I want to be done with you, Hauser. If you aren’t going to tell me what you know, then leave me the hell alone.”

Hauser regarded him a moment longer, and then broke into a wolfish grin. “Mother will be so disappointed to hear that.”

Kismet’s confident expression slipped a little. Annie thought he looked like he’d been sucker-punched. In a low voice he said: “Whose mother?”

Hauser threw back his head and laughed. “Very well, I accept your terms.”

Throughout the conversation, Annie had kept waiting for Kismet to do something, pull a rabbit out of the hat, rescue her and keep the Seed out of Hauser’s hands. Now, she saw that he was serious; he was going to give Hauser and Prometheus exactly what they wanted, and he was going to do it in order to save her.

That was unacceptable.

“Nick, don’t.” She wasn’t sure anymore what she could say or do to stop him, but she had to try. “You can’t let them have this. They might hide it away, or they might do something much worse. Power like that…I don’t know what they’ll do with it, but you can’t give it to them, no matter what they do to me.”

Kismet offered a rueful smile, but Annie saw his gaze move slowly toward…her father? “It doesn’t matter, Annie. If it’s not the Seed, it will be something else. If it’s not Prometheus, then someone else. But I can do something good, right now. I can get you out of here, and that’s all that matters to me.”

He turned to Hauser. “Just let her go. I’ll put the Seed on the ground and walk away.”

“And your explosive device?”

“Like I said, you should be able to figure out how to bypass the trigger. I’d promise to send you the code to disarm it once Annie and I are safely out of here, but you probably wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

Hauser considered this a moment longer, then shook his head. “No. It’s a fake. Has to be.”

Kismet held the box up. “Elisabeth, do you think I’m lying?”

The actress gazed back at him, almost defiantly at first, but then softened. “No. Subtlety isn’t your style.”

He nodded. “Here’s how this can work. Elisabeth comes and gets the Seed from me. One touch, and she’ll know it’s the real deal. At the same time, Al walks Annie over to me.”

Hauser nodded his assent, and Elisabeth immediately strode across the courtyard, tucking her gun in her waistband as she moved. She reached Kismet a few seconds later and placed a tentative finger on the box.

“Oh.” Her eyes rolled back in undisguised ecstasy. She stood up a little straighter, as if playing to a hidden camera. “Yes, it’s real. I can feel the energy flowing into me.”

Higgins reached Annie’s side, but she resisted him. “Damn it, Nick. You can’t do this.”

“Come on, Annie girl,” Higgins urged. His voice was strained, like a piano string tuned so tight it was about to snap. “It’s going to be over soon.”

“Is that good enough for you, Hauser?” Kismet called, his fingers tight on the box, resisting Elisabeth’s stolid efforts to take it away. “Now, let her go.”

In the same way that Annie had believed, right up to that moment, that Kismet would play some unexpected wild card to save the day and keep the prize away from Prometheus, she expected Hauser to somehow play false at the end. She was wrong on both counts.

The one-eyed man relaxed his grip on her, and her father reached out to draw her into his embrace. She was too dumbfounded to even resist.

Kismet uncurled his fingers, and surrendered the Seed of the Tree of Life to Elisabeth Neuell.

She almost ran back toward Hauser, holding the box before her with equal parts fear and awe. Higgins, half-dragging Annie, had barely gotten a few steps away when Elisabeth raced past, holding the Seed out to Hauser.

That was when everything started to happen.

Higgins, with preternatural calm, reached out and snatched the pistol from Elisabeth’s waistband. She felt it, and started to turn, but her momentum had already brought her within reach of Hauser, who was unaware of what Higgins had done and too caught up in his imminent victory.

Hauser greedily snatched the box from Elisabeth and hugged it to his chest.

Higgins spun Annie toward Kismet and gave her a shove, propelling her across the courtyard, into his arms. Then, the old Gurkha raised the pistol and aimed it at Kismet.

The rest of the Prometheus security team had instantly come alert and brought their weapons up, but none of them could seem to decide where to aim.

Hauser suddenly gave a low cry and doubled over. Then, as he straightened, he reached up with his free hand and tore the eye patch away. He winced as light flooded into the restored orb, and covered it again with his hand. That was when he caught a glimpse of Higgins, aiming a gun at Kismet.

“Dad, no.” Annie's pleas seemed to fall on deaf ears, but she did not give up. “Just let us walk away.”

“Do what you have to do,” whispered Kismet, nodding to Higgins.

Hauser fixed both eyes on Kismet. He raised the box with the Seed and waved it triumphantly. “Game, set and match, Kismet.”

“What about the experiment?”

Hauser laughed. “There was only ever one rule to the experiment; do not interfere. Oh, I’ve wanted you dead so bad I can taste it, believe me. I had hoped you would die in that Iraqi hellhole, but someone—” He rolled his eyes — his perfect, unblemished blue eyes — and mouthed a single word: Mom. “Decided that I had interfered by blowing up your ride and leaving you stranded, so she pulled strings like you can’t imagine, to ‘balance the scales.’

“Her interference made it so much easier for me to take over.” He had lowered his voice to a barely audible mutter for the aside, but then spoke clearly again. “But rules are rules. I’m not going to tell Higgins to kill you. But I am certainly not going to stop him.”

Kismet nodded to his nemesis—brother? “Then I guess I'll see you in Hell.”

As if Kismet’s words were the signal he’d been waiting for, Higgins’ thumb extended up to pull back the hammer, cocking the pistol and readying it to fire.

Time seemed to freeze. Elisabeth, standing beside Hauser, clutched his arm as if he were a prize she’d finally won. The security team around the perimeter of the courtyard had lowered their weapons again, and were watching as if hypnotized. Hauser continued to stare across the plaza at Kismet, holding the box above his head, as if daring the heavens to take it away…

And in a heartbeat, they did.

Higgins turned, swinging around slowly, almost ethereally, away from Kismet. His movements seemed almost without volition, as if he had been programmed like an automaton. His hand kept moving, smoothly adjusting, elevating slightly, and then he pulled the trigger.

The firing pin was released with a sharp ‘click’ and pivoted forward, striking the primer on the brass cartridge dead-center. The gunpowder charge ignited into a ball of expanding gas, driving the lead projectile out of the barrel at nearly the speed of sound. The bullet screamed through the air, but traveled only about thirty feet before striking its target with unfailing accuracy.

The metal box containing the last Seed of the Tree of Life rang for a split second with the impact of the 9-millimeter round.

An instant later, it erupted with a thunderclap that dwarfed the barely heard report of the pistol.

The detonation threw everyone aside like so much chaff. Kismet lay stunned in the aftermath, momentarily forgetting who and where he was. His senses returned after a blurred moment and he groped for Annie. She lay, dazed but apparently unhurt, a few feet away. Higgins lay supine, the pistol flung away.

Hauser and Elisabeth were standing, dazed and peppered with shrapnel wounds, locked together at the heart of a blazing inferno of violet light. Hauser’s arm was still outstretched, but it ended at his wrist, which was now just a ragged, oozing stump.

The flames grew around the pair like a blanket, dancing lovingly on the ravaged flesh of Hauser’s wounds. Tendrils of energy, the same hue as that which had burned in the cavern of the Fountain of Youth, caressed his skin, crackling on the stump of his maimed arm, probing into the deep shrapnel wounds, and wherever the flames lit, the injuries seemed to evaporate like smoke.

Kismet pulled Annie to him, and then together they crawled toward her father. Higgins was stirring, apparently unhurt. “Nick?” His voice was a distillation of misery. “I had to do it. Couldn’t let them have it — had to save Annie — it was the only way.”

The words struck Kismet. The betrayal in Florida seemed a distant memory, something he’d managed to push to the back of his mind in order to focus on his sole objective — getting Annie back from Prometheus at any cost. He didn’t want to think about what had motivated Higgins, and didn’t have the mental energy to second guess the man’s desperate decisions.

“It’s okay, Al.”

“I can't see.”

There was a shriek from behind them and Kismet looked up in time to see Hauser, his clothes in burning tatters but his flesh perfectly restored, thrust Elisabeth aside. She stumbled back, screaming as fingers of plasma reached out from Hauser to caress her, and then tightened around her like a cocoon.

There was a flash, and Elisabeth evaporated.

The flames arced back into an exultant Hauser. He stood there, contemplating the power coruscating down his arms and at his fingertips. Energy flowed like liquid into his nostrils and mouth, and for a moment, the fire seemed to be burning from beneath his skin, growing in intensity until the brilliance forced Kismet to cover his eyes.

He recalled something Leeds had told him during their first encounter, an idling speculation about how the miracles of Jesus Christ might be attributable to his possession of a similar Seed. Leeds had hypothesized that Jesus had somehow integrated a Seed into his own body, and that when a Roman centurion had pierced him during the crucifixion, the energies released had transformed the dying Christ into a divine being — an entity of pure energy.

That had been Leeds’ ambition all along. To find the Seed and turn himself into a god. And now it seemed that Hauser was undergoing such an apotheosis.

The Prometheus leader inhaled the potent forces, as if consciously willing them to pervade every molecule of his body, to infuse every atom of his being. As the unleashed power of the Seed grew from a violet flame to a burning white-hot fever pitch, his flesh was transmuted into living energy. Tissue boiled away, replaced by a vague outline of energy that flared brighter and brighter—

And then winked out completely.