Prime

THIRTY-SIX

The Chess Team dropped from the sky like avenging angels descending from the heavens, but no one took note of their arrival. They were silent wraiths, moving through the darkness, like their namesake pieces on a game board, maneuvering for maximum strategic effect, preparing and pre-positioning for the battles that would surely come.

Their LZ was just north of the bulbous white temporary structure that had been erected over the ruins of the Maragheh Observatory. Ironically, their ultimate destination also happened to be the best place to land their parachutes, well away from the orchards and vineyards that lined the outskirts of the city. While it was possible that they might have escaped notice in the agricultural fields, it was equally likely that they might spook a dog or do something else to wake up the occupants of the nearby farmhouses.

Working quickly, they established two concealed over-watch positions, each about a hundred yards from the white dome. Dawn was lightening the sky as they finished this task, and they hastily retreated into the camouflaged dugout blinds. King crowded into one with Knight and Bishop, while Queen and Rook took the other.

As the day passed, they studied the exterior of the observatory, following the movements of the archaeologists and researchers who came and went without ever suspecting that there were never less than two gun barrels trained on them at any given time. The observers took careful notes, assigning a number — and in some cases, a nickname — to each person they saw.

King’s greatest fear was that Rainer would show up during the day, when the team didn’t dare move from concealment, but that did not happen. Most of the people who visited the site exhibited a familiarity that could only indicate that they were employed there.

Dusk fell, and activity at the site dwindled to nothing, but the team remained where they were for two hours more. King would have preferred to wait until well after midnight, but time was a critical variable. He keyed his mic. “Queen, meet me at the door.”

“Roger. Moving.”

In the display of his night-vision device, he saw her, a bright human shape rising from the grass like some kind of spirit emerging from out of the ground, but in the near total darkness, she was virtually invisible to the unassisted eye. She stayed low to the ground, but hastened toward the dome.

King also rose from hiding. “Bishop, you’re with me.”

The big man didn’t say a word, but unfolded himself from the cramped burrow, and fell into step right behind him. They crossed the open ground in less than a minute and joined Queen at the large doorframe set into the west side of the dome, which provided the only access to its interior.

Queen tried the door — locked — and then produced a set of lock-picking tools. King felt a momentary twinge at the sight; Parker had always been his go-to guy for opening doors, and watching someone else do the job was a reminder of the hard choice to leave his friend behind. He still believed it was the right decision, and he hoped Parker would eventually understand that.

The door knob yielded to Queen’s efforts, and she eased it open a crack, watching and waiting for an alarm to sound. When that did not happen, she swung the door wide and moved inside.

The interior of the dome looked little different than the surrounding terrain. There were few structures inside; all that remained of the Maragheh Observatory were the cut stone foundations and a few crumbling walls. The trio of intruders fanned out, familiarizing themselves with the ruin under the dome, identifying several places where the archaeological team had begun the two-fold task of excavation and restoration, and more importantly, verifying that the site was not being actively monitored with remote surveillance devices. After about ten minutes of reconnaissance, they regrouped at the first dig site and descended a cut stone staircase into a sub-chamber.

A scattering of artifacts — strange devices and machines that had once been used to map the night sky — were arrayed on folding tables, but there was no indication that the room had once been a repository of documents. King photographed everything with a digital camera, then gestured for the others to follow him back out.

The second site, another subterranean chamber, had been only partially excavated, but the artifacts that had been recovered were strictly utilitarian — cooking utensils and pots, plates and cups. They moved on.

The next site was very different. The vast stone room had been completely excavated, revealing a maze of wooden shelves, the wood splintered and decaying, but nevertheless laden with ceramic tubes and leather chests. More interesting however, was a collection of tables with a dizzying array of modern laboratory equipment and hibernating computers.

King swept the room with the beam of his flashlight, which had been equipped with a dark filter that emitted only infrared light — invisible to the naked eye. He saw paper tags, inscribed with elegant modern Persian script, affixed to the shelves.

“Bishop. What do those tags say?”

The big man scanned a few of them. “Numbers and letters.”

“Some kind of filing system?” ventured Queen.

King nodded and gestured to the tables at the center. “See if you can find the catalogue.”

Bishop stared at him. “Me?”

“You’re Iranian aren’t you?”

“I grew up in Illinois.”

Queen snorted in amusement.

Behind his night-vision goggles, King rolled his eyes. “I read your file. It says you speak Farsi.”

“I took a couple of classes. I know how to order coffee and ask for the restroom.” Bishop heaved a sigh. “I’ll do my best.”

As Bishop began flipping through notepads and ring-binders, perusing their contents with no evident confusion, King decided that his teammate was either selling himself short or he had picked up more in those classes than even he realized.

“I’m looking for anything written by al-Tusi, right?” the big man said after a few minutes. “There’s a lot here. Is there any way to narrow it down?”

Before King could initiate a call to Parker, his earpiece crackled with an incoming transmission. It was Rook. “King, there’s a vehicle approaching. You’re about to have company.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

The passage of time did not cool Daniel Parker’s ire. Instead, the longer he sat, alone with his thoughts, chewing the gristle of his bitterness, the more convinced he became that his old friend had forsaken him. Why exactly, he could not say. Maybe King was enamored with his new teammates…maybe just having me around reminds him how badly he bungled the last mission…

Yes, that had to be it.

Maybe he’s trying to cover his ass, put the blame for the screw-up in Myanmar onto me, somehow.

Damn him.

He didn’t buy for a second King’s story about needing him to decode the Voynich manuscript. King didn’t really believe there was anything worthwhile in the mysterious old book; its only value to him was the fact that Kevin Rainer seemed to care about it.

That thought gave Parker pause. Maybe King wasn’t a believer, but Sasha definitely thought the book was important, and that was reason enough to take it seriously.

After the team exited the plane 30,000 feet above northwestern Iran, the stealth transport had headed for Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey. The plane was refueled and refitted for the eventual extraction of the team. Parker found an unused office near the airstrip, and as he listened in on the team’s radio transmissions, he went to work on the riddle of the Voynich manuscript.

He reviewed Sasha’s notes more thoroughly, and he discovered that his initial perusal had only scratched the surface. Sasha Therion had been thinking about the Voynich problem for a long time, and she had recorded her musings in a personal journal. Parker scrolled through the entries, going back to the day that she had been contacted by Scott Klein and told of Cipher element’s discovery in Ramadi:

There is a new lead on the Voynich manuscript. A page has been found among documents captured from an insurgent cell in Iraq, and preliminary findings indicate a connection between the manuscript and plague research. While it is a tenuous connection, it supports my hypothesis that VM contains information that might offer insight into the origin of life.

Parker couldn’t recall Sasha mentioning any such hypothesis. He did a search of the journal, and found an entry from nearly two years earlier.

He was surprised to learn that her CIA contract had been primarily for the purpose of cracking the Voynich code. He had always assumed that it was just one of many projects she consulted on. Based on that new information, he realized that deciphering the Voynich manuscript had become Sasha’s entire reason for living. He skimmed through the subsequent entries until he found something more substantial.

“Bacon” had to be Roger Bacon, a 13^th century Franciscan friar who was often credited as the father of scientific investigations. His published writings included detailed reports of his experiments with lenses, acoustics, botany and even a primitive form of gunpowder. One popular theory held that Bacon was the author of the Voynich manuscript, and indeed many of the illustrations in the manuscript were similar to known examples of his work.

The Elixir of Life? Parker had missed that reference during his earlier reading. It was difficult to believe that the ever-pragmatic cryptanalyst’s quest to decode the Voynich manuscript was anything but an academic exercise; this idea seemed so fanciful, and yet, he could not disagree with her simple logic. The complexity of the Voynich code demanded that its contents be of exceptional value.

Subsequent entries in Sasha’s journal variously restated that hypothesis, but evidently her insights had not been sufficient to crack the code. He skipped forward to the most recent entry — made less than an hour before the disastrous raid and failed rescue attempt in Myanmar. Parker read it again, this time from this new perspective.

Parker realized that he had been holding his breath.

Sasha’s long effort to understand the Voynich manuscript was nothing less than a quest to divine the secret of life. It had become her sole purpose for living.

In a rush of understanding, Daniel Parker realized that his own purpose was to help her succeed.

“Damn you, Jack,” he muttered under his breath. “You’d better bring her back in one piece.”

As if in response to his utterance, a voice blared from the radio: “King, there’s a vehicle approaching. You’re about to have company.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

Sasha felt as though her head was about to implode.

The variables had multiplied beyond her ability to enumerate them. They were coalescing in her consciousness, becoming a veritable black hole of chaos and uncertainty that consumed her thoughts. Her sleep had been erratic; there were huge gaps of time in her memory; dark periods where she must have slept deeply, but she felt exhausted and physically ill. Her techniques for tuning out the world — working through prime numbers, performing complex mathematical operations in her head — seemed beyond her ability now. She barely understood where she was; even the simplest of sensory inputs were scrambled in a fog of confusion.

She sat in the back of a large vehicle, an SUV of some kind. There were five other men there. Four of them had been on the plane; Chinese men, whose tailored suits did not quite conceal their true identity as thugs working for the triad. They had told her their names, but that information had already vanished beyond the event horizon. The fifth man had been picked up shortly after their arrival. He was different; he cowered fearfully in his seat, nursing superficial wounds that oozed blood. Sasha sensed that he was not there of his own volition.

A prisoner. Like me.

The realization slipped away, engulfed by the blackness of chaos.

Some time later — perhaps just a few minutes, perhaps days or weeks — she became aware of someone tugging at her arm. The SUV had stopped, and all of its passengers, save for her, had already disembarked. She allowed herself to be coaxed from her seat, but as soon as she was standing on the rough ground outside, she felt her legs go weak. She tried to lean against a fender, but the man holding her arm did not permit this; he drew her toward the front end of the vehicle.

She gradually came to understand that it was nighttime. The headlights of the SUV were illuminating a rather plain looking metal door set into a much larger white structure. The man — the prisoner — was propelled forward, and one of their captors barked a rough order. The prisoner fumbled with a ring of keys, and after a few moments, he succeeded in unlocking the door, after which they all filed in. Sasha and her minder brought up the rear.

Flashlights came out, but their beams revealed little about the interior of the white structure. Sasha wasn’t paying any attention. This new experience only compounded her sense of dislocation; the dark tumor of uncertainty throbbed in her head, consuming even her desire to know what was happening.

The group descended a flight of carved stone steps, and they halted at last in a room that might have been the office at a construction site. One of the men barked something, and then repeated himself, but Sasha paid no heed until she felt someone shaking her arm violently. Through a monumental effort of will, she fixed her gaze on the man who had been speaking.

“Tell him what you want.” The man spoke in a harsh, clipped manner, possibly a result of his relative unfamiliarity with English but more probably because he was a man of violence, used to getting his way with bellicose displays of aggression.

“What, I—?” Sasha shook her head. What was he talking about?

“We bring you here to Maragheh, like you ask. You say you need writings.” He gestured forcefully at the prisoner. “Tell him which papers you need.”

Maragheh. That was important, and she struggled to remember why. “Al-Tusi,” she murmured. “In Nasir al-Tusi’s writings, is there anything that describes how to construct an urghan?”

The prisoner, a middle-aged man with a full head of gray hair and a bushy beard, looked at her blankly for a moment, and he seemed on the verge of answering in the negative, but a menacing growl from one of the other Chinese men gave him pause.

“An urghan, you say?” He bent over a table and began flipping through a ring binder.

This simple act of compliance was a lifeline to Sasha in the midst of the whirlpool. Maragheh.Al-Tusi. The urghan.

These were not variables. They were the constants that anchored her to the world; they were known quantities and values that, while not yet completely understood, were fixed properties.

The manuscript.

Yes.

The Voynich manuscript was the ultimate constant. The knowledge locked within its mysterious cipher text would not change once she decoded it. It would be the same tomorrow as it was when al-Tusi had first written it down. But she would change.

The book was the irreducible prime factor that would enable her finally to balance the equation of her life…of the very nature of human existence. She believed this to be true with every fiber of her being.

I need to be here…right now…in this moment.

She willed herself back from the swelling tide of chaos and straightened, at long last taking in her surroundings. She knew that she was in the ruins of the Maragheh Observatory, which now rested inside a protective geodesic bubble that preserved its ancient stones and the scrolls and codices from the ravages of the elements. The man — the prisoner — was an Iranian, and probably one of the archaeologists or caretakers of the facility. Her Chinese captors had rightly deduced that they would not be able to simply walk into Maragheh and find what they needed lying out on a table. Sasha wondered if she would even recognize the document when it was finally procured.

“This must be it,” the prisoner announced, tapping a page. “A treatise on the mathematical nature of harmonies. Al-Tusi’s authorship is suspected, but not proven. It appears nowhere else, and it is not mentioned in any other writings of the time.”

“Get it,” ordered the leader.

The man moved into the maze of shelves, followed closely by one of the Chinese men, and then he returned a moment later with a copper tube. The lead captor snatched it from his hands and handed it to Sasha.

“You must wear gloves,” admonished the Iranian, but before he could explain why, a savage blow to the gut put him on his knees, hunched over and moaning in pain.

Sasha witnessed the violence with detachment; her attention had already become focused on opening the case and teasing out the roll of parchment inside. The outermost curl, which had received the most exposure to the environment, felt stiff and cracked a little at the edges when she began to unfurl it, but above that, the vellum had, for the most part, remained supple. She carefully unrolled the document and spread it out on a tabletop.

It was immediately evident that she would not be able to read it; the careful and elegant script looked to her untrained eye like Arabic, but the accompanying illustrations filled her with hope. This was, unquestionably, a set of instructions for building the device that had been recovered from Guo’s crypt. One illustration even showed the levers, marked with Voynich characters, and each one was connected by a line to the pipes of varying length contained in the body of the urghan. Though she could not grasp the specific musical tones that the pipes were intended to produce, Sasha could already see the mathematical progression that al-Tusi had employed. Given enough time, she might be able to work it out in her head, but she felt certain that, if afforded access to a computer and supplied with translation tools, she could build a virtual replica of the device, and with it, at long last, she could decode the Voynich manuscript.

“This is it,” she breathed.

The lead captor did not appear to appreciate the gravity of her discovery, but he understood well enough that they had accomplished their objective. He dipped a hand into the folds of his jacket and produced a pistol, which he promptly trained on the other captive.

The Iranian’s eyes grew wide, and he threw his hands up in a supplicating gesture. “No. Please. I did what you asked.”

The Chinese man glanced at Sasha again. “You need him for anything else?”

Sasha blinked, not fully comprehending the question. The man might be able to help her translate the document, but there were other ways to accomplish that. What she really needed was a computer; her computer. “I don’t think so.”

That was answer enough for the Chinese man. He adjusted the barrel of the pistol so it was trained between the captive’s eyes…

And then he abruptly pitched backward onto the ground. Before any of his cohorts could react, they too went down, pistols and flashlights clattering to the floor, the latter describing wild and random arcs of illumination before coming to rest.

Sasha stood motionless, unable to fathom what had just happened. She picked up the flashlight she had been using to inspect the document and swept it around the library. Her beam found a large figure, dressed in desert camouflage and heavily laden with military gear, emerging from behind one of the shelves. His face was partially obscured by a night vision device, and at the touch of her flashlight beam, he raised a hand to shade his eyes. Sasha saw that he held a gun in the other hand; wisps of smoke were issuing from its long barrel.

“Miss Therion!” The voice, a man’s voice, came from another direction, and she turned to see two more similarly dressed figures moving toward her from a different part of the room. “It’s Jack Sigler. Are you all right?”

Sigler?

She remembered him. One of the Delta commandos who had accompanied her in Iraq, and had tried to rescue her in Myanmar.

Her head started to pound with the effort of processing what had just happened. More variables. More chaos.

But this time, she was able to resist the pull of the vortex. She now had the key to unlocking the manuscript, and with it, the secret of the Elixir.

The solution was within her grasp. Soon, she would have the means to balance the equation, and at last, wipe away all the uncertainty.

THIRTY-NINE

King heard a voice, a low whisper. It was the Iranian man, the hostage they had saved from a triad bullet, cowering on the floor, mumbling incoherently… No, not mumbling…talking into a cellular phone.

“Bishop!”

Bishop darted forward and smacked the phone from the man’s hand, sending it flying across the room to shatter against a wall. He brandished the barrel of his carbine, thrusting it toward the man’s face. “Who did you call?” he barked, and then he repeated the question in Farsi.

The fearful hostage muttered something in the same tongue and then continued pleading.

“What did he say, Bish?” asked Queen.

“He called the police. They’re probably on their way.”

“Damn.” King continued forward until he was standing in front of Sasha. His gaze fell on the unrolled parchment. “It that it? Is that what you were looking for?”

She nodded.

King let his carbine hang from its sling and took out his digital camera. He snapped several photographs of the document before rolling it up and stuffing it into a pocket. “We need to get out of here, now.” He keyed his mic. “Rook, Knight, sitrep.”

Both men succinctly reported that everything was clear outside the dome.

“Deep Blue, this is King. It looks like we’re going to be needing that extraction soon.”

The electronic voice responded immediately as if anticipating the request. “Understood. The bird left the ground five minutes ago. ETA to the rendezvous point is twenty mikes.”

“Roger, out.” He turned to the Sasha again. “Where’s Rainer?”

She gave him a blank stare, as if unaware that he was addressing her, but then she snapped out of it. “He didn’t come. He thought the Iranians would be suspicious of a Westerner.”

King felt only a flicker of disappointment. Taking down Rainer would have been the icing on the cake, but rescuing Sasha and recovering the information to decode the Voynich manuscript was nothing to sneeze at. He gestured to the bodies on the floor. “Who are they?”

“Triad foot soldiers,” muttered Queen.

Sasha nodded. “Posing as a Chinese cultural delegation.”

That made sense. Iran and China had a cozy relationship, with the latter buying most of the former’s oil exports, keeping the regime flush with cash in spite of the sanctions imposed by Western nations. King hoped Queen’s assessment was correct and that they hadn’t just killed actual Chinese diplomats; one international incident was more than enough.

“Queen, stay with her. Bishop, check these guys for a set of keys. We’re gonna borrow their ride.”

Bishop jerked a thumb at the Iranian hostage. “What about him?”

King regarded the frightened man. “Let’s hope that when the police get here, he remembers to tell them that we’re the good guys.”

They hastened out of the library chamber and back to the dome’s entrance. Knight and Rook were waiting for them at the SUV — a Toyota Hilux Surf — and without any discussion, they piled inside. Bishop settled into the driver’s seat and started the engine, while King, in the front passenger seat, busied himself with establishing a satellite data-link. The others crowded into the rear, with Knight and Rook taking the door seats.

By the time they reached the edge of the open area surrounding the ruins, King had started uploading of the images of the al-Tusi document to Parker. Now, if they didn’t make it out, the secret to decoding the Voynich manuscript would survive. Nevertheless, he was cautiously optimistic about their prospects. It would take a while for the police to arrive, and hopefully by then, they’d be long gone, en route to the remote pick-up location several miles west of Maragheh.

His good feeling lasted about a minute, the length of time it took for Bishop to navigate through the maze of exterior ruins and around old foundations to the paved road south of the dome. There, in the small parking lot, waited another vehicle identical to their own. Several men with Asian features stood vigilantly around its exterior, and as Bishop drove past them without slowing, they all began moving, shouting and gesturing animatedly at the departing SUV.

King felt a knot of dread in his stomach. “Miss Therion, how many men were in that cultural delegation?”

Sasha seemed blissfully unaware. “About a dozen. Why?”

King sighed and shook his head. “One of these days, everything is actually going to go according to plan; I truly believe that. Bishop…drive like hell.”

FORTY

Parker felt a wave of relief at the news of Sasha’s rescue, but that did little to dull the sting of having been cut out of the operation. He couldn’t begin to imagine the hell she’d gone through, and the fact that he wasn’t there to comfort her only compounded his bitterness.

The computer chirped an alert, signaling that a download was in progress. He waited until the transfer was complete and then opened the file. There it was; Nasir al-Tusi’s instructions on how to build the device that would decode the Voynich manuscript.

He scrolled over the text, cutting and pasting it into a translation matrix, and in a matter of only a few seconds, he was able to read the Persian scholar’s words in English. He skimmed the introductory paragraphs and focused on the specifications for the urghan. Sasha had already constructed a virtual replica of the exterior body — the wooden sounding chamber that would amplify the musical tones — and the bellows system that supplied air to the pipes. All that was missing was the pipes themselves. Al-Tusi had fashioned them out of wood, and provided extensive information about the size, thickness, and shape of the pipes. The units of measurement were unfamiliar to Parker, but as he read on, he saw that even that detail was unimportant. The last section of the roll contained information on how to verify that the urghan was tuned correctly; each character of Voynich script corresponded to a specific note on the Persian harmonic scale.

Almost trembling with excitement, he began inputting the values into Sasha’s program for the virtual urghan. With each addition, the program transferred the information into the deciphering subroutine, seeking out every instance where the Voynich character occurred, and replacing it with an alphanumeric character based on the musical scale, but Parker did not check it until the last value had been entered.

He had hoped that the manuscript’s secrets would simply pour off the pages, but the book did not give up its treasure so readily. The output was an incomprehensible jumble of letters and numbers. He tried different variations on the musical scale, but each time the result was the same.

That wasn’t a surprise really; all he had done was employ a common substitution cipher, and that approach had been tried innumerable times. There was an added layer to the Voynich code.

He returned to the al-Tusi document and read it again. Aside from the appearance of the unique script, there was nothing to explicitly link the urghan to the manuscript. The explanatory paragraphs focused mostly on the mathematical properties of music. Then he noticed the final paragraph.

“When once you have fashioned the organ, the music of the book may be understood with the indivisible numbers, each one in turn and one for each number, in the language of civilized men but according to the fashion of the infidel.”

Parker gaped at the words on the screen. The ‘book’ could only be the Voynich manuscript, but what did the rest mean? The numbers part seemed straightforward enough; assign each musical note — as represented by the Voynich script — a number and then employ an alphabetic substitution.

Language of civilized men? To al-Tusi, the civilized world was the world of Islam, and the common language of Islam, even in Persia, was Arabic. That made sense, and offered one possible explanation for why the manuscript had resisted all previous decoding efforts. But something about that explanation nagged at him.

Of course!

Arabic, like many Middle Eastern languages, was written from right to left. The Voynich manuscript however was clearly written in the manner of the Western world, from left to right. That was what al-Tusi meant by “in the fashion of the infidel.” The original text had been composed in Arabic, but then written backward, in the Western style, to confuse the uninitiated reader.

But the difference in language and composition style did not sufficiently explain the mystery. Read forward or backward, the text output from the manuscript remained without any sort of recognizable pattern.

He read the clue again. Indivisible numbers. The only whole numbers that could not be divided were the primes. Each one in turn. Could that be it?

A standard substitution cipher assigned a value for each letter of the alphabet: A=1, B=2 and so forth. With a cipher wheel, you could change the starting point: A=4, B=5 and on until you started the numbers over so that X=1, Y=2 and Z=3, but even this substitution could be easily defeated by looking at the frequency of certain oft-used letters. There were other ways to tweak the system, such as by using a keyword variation, but frequency analysis remained the Achilles heel of any substitution cipher. However, one way to render the cipher nearly unbreakable was to change the substitution pattern with every letter, rotating the cipher wheel a prescribed number of places with each letter. That way, letters and numbers would not correspond with any regularity.

Had al-Tusi done that, using prime numbers to adjust the cipher pattern with each new letter?

Parker plugged the new parameters into the decipherment subroutine and let it run. He tried to keep his expectations in check, and braced himself for yet another disappointment. When the screen finally displayed the results, he was stunned to discover that he was able to do something that nobody had done in over seven hundred years.

He was reading the Voynich manuscript.

FORTY-ONE

Bishop stomped the accelerator but had to brake just as quickly, when a sharp hairpin turn loomed ahead.

“You do realize,” he said in a low voice that was not altogether unlike the sound of rocks grinding together, “that just because I was born in Iran, it doesn’t mean I know my way around.”

Before King could respond, Deep Blue’s voice came over the net. “Bishop, I’m tracking you on GPS. I’ll guide you to the rendezvous point.”

“Well that’s handy,” Rook said.

“The road continues straight for about a quarter-mile, then there’s another sharp turn to the left.”

The play of light on the embankment behind them betrayed the fact that the second SUV was moving; they weren’t going to be able to just slip away. Bishop floored the gas pedal again, racing down the straight stretch, but before he got to the turn, a pair of headlights dawned in the rearview mirror.

King glanced back. “Knight, see if you can’t shoot out their radiator.”

Knight answered with a nod, and depressed the button to roll his window down as he twisted around in his seat. But as he started to lean out, something smacked into the rear window, shattering it. There were several more loud noises, the hammer-strike sound of bullets striking the rear of their stolen SUV. Knight pulled back without firing, and everyone ducked low, but Rook immediately popped back up, and aimed through the opening where the window had been. The sound-suppressed weapon made hardly any sound; the only indication that he was firing was the sudden storm of hot brass shell-casings that started pelting the other passengers.

The headlights started swerving back and forth as the other driver tried to evade the incoming fire, but then Bishop reached the turn, and for a moment, the pursuing vehicle was again lost from view.

King listened in as Deep Blue advised Bishop about the road ahead. There was another short straight stretch, followed by a hard right, but beyond that the road was straight for almost half-a-mile. King saw city lights ahead on the right; in less than a minute, they would be driving through an Iranian suburb.

“Let’s take ‘em on,” suggested Rook. “We’ve got the firepower.”

Queen chimed in as well. “I agree.”

King felt like saying. Great. When this is a democracy, I’ll be sure to count your votes. But instead, he just shook his head. “Negative. We can’t risk getting pinned down here. Shoot back if you can, but we’re not stopping.”

The headlights reappeared behind them, just as they came alongside the residential area. If the police were not already on their way, they would be as soon as the people in those shops and houses heard the sound of shots from the triad soldiers’ guns…or as soon as they started catching stray bullets.

“Bishop!Hard right now!” The electronic voice of Deep Blue crackled strangely, as if the software used to mask his identity wasn’t sure how to interpret his urgency.

There was a broad paved boulevard running almost parallel to the narrow access road on which they now drove, but neither Bishop nor King saw any sign of the turn Deep Blue was telling them to take.

“Turn,” Deep Blue repeated, even more stridently. “Right turn.”

With unexpected suddenness, the road ended and merged onto the main thoroughfare…going the wrong way.

Bishop realized his mistake a moment too late. He stomped on the brake and hauled the wheel hard to the right, but it was an impossible angle, and the stolen SUV had too much momentum. The brakes locked, and there was a tortured scream of metal and rubber as the Toyota went into a spin.

The next few seconds were a blur of movement, but when King’s disorientation passed, he became aware of honking horns and the headlights of traffic on the main road swerving around the now stationary SUV. He also saw a pair of headlights coming from a different direction, and he realized they were the lights of the pursuing Hilux Surf, still on the access road, but about to reach the intersection. The vehicle carrying the team had spun around too many times to count, but had come to rest facing back the way they’d come.

“Bishop! Go!”

The big man, thankfully, didn’t ask him to specify a direction, but cranked the wheel hard to the left and stomped on the accelerator.

Nothing happened.

The spin out had caused the engine to stall.

Bishop frantically threw the shift selector into neutral and jiggled the keys until the whining noise of the starter sounded, but the engine refused to turn over. He tried again, once more with no success.

“It’s flooded!” Rook shouted from the back seat.

King didn’t think it was possible to flood a modern fuel-injected engine, but Bishop didn’t challenge the diagnosis. Instead, he pressed the accelerator to the floor and held it there as he tried the starter once more.

The engine roared to life with a plume of blue smoke, and the smell of burning petroleum wafted into the interior through the shattered rear window, momentarily overpowering the pervasive sulfur odor of gunpowder. Bishop threw the SUV into gear and they lurched into motion, joining the flow of traffic heading west, at almost the same instant that the vehicle carrying the Chinese thugs reached the intersection.

Their pursuers had to slow to make the turn, but the spin-out and stall had cost Chess Team several seconds of their lead. The pursuing headlights continued to get closer until Bishop was able to build up a head of steam.

King couldn’t see the speedometer, but it felt like Bishop was doing close to seventy miles an hour. He swept around the other vehicles on the road like they were standing still, weaving in and out, and sometimes creating his own lane with a blaring horn. Unfortunately, the pursuing vehicle didn’t have to contend with the same obstacles, because Bishop was clearing a trail for them, and so despite his best efforts, the gap continued to close. Two hundred meters…a hundred…fifty.

The triad thugs hadn’t fired at them again, and King thought he knew why; they wanted Sasha back — alive and preferably unharmed. But if the pursuing vehicle got much closer, the gunmen inside would be able to shoot out their tires and bring the chase to an abrupt end.

“Rook. If they get any closer, use those cannons of yours to take them out.”

Rook grinned as he drew his Desert Eagle pistols, and then leaned over the back of his seat and took aim. Before he could fire though, the SUV swerved left, out of his field of view, and made a move to overtake them.

Without prompting, Knight aimed his XM8 out the window and tried to hit the Surf’s front tires. He squeezed off a few shots, but the moving target eluded him, and his rounds just sparked off the vehicle’s chassis or burrowed harmlessly into the pavement.

Now the Surf was beside them, only a few yards away and nearly even with them. Knight gave up trying to hit the tires and instead aimed at the windshield, which he could now see was already fractured with a spider web pattern from earlier impacts.

Something was happening on the far side of the vehicle, but because his attention was fixed on the picture in his gun sight, Knight didn’t see what the others did: a figure had crawled out of the rear driver’s side window and was clambering onto the roof of the SUV. Queen saw it and so did Rook. The latter leaned over his fellow passengers and tried to aim his Desert Eagle up at the man on the roof, but before he could fire, two things happened almost simultaneously: Knight fired a burst from his carbine that shattered the front passenger window and filled the interior of the chasing vehicle with lead, and the figure on the roof coiled like a spring and then jumped.

The pursuing SUV abruptly veered right, evidently out of control, and ground against the side of the team’s vehicle. Just as quickly, it rebounded and careened to the left, going off the pavement to smash into the exterior of a building. The members of Chess Team barely noticed the demise of their pursuers however; their attention was consumed by the crunch of something heavy landing on the roof of their vehicle.

“We’ve got a stowaway!” Rook shouted.

Bishop reacted immediately by tapping the brakes. Everyone inside was hurled forward by the sudden deceleration, and King expected to see their unwanted passenger thrown from his perch like a stone from a catapult, but that didn’t happen. Instead, something crashed down on the windshield right in front of Bishop, but somehow, impossibly, it refused to be dislodged.

King stared at the outline of their attacker, splayed out on the other side of the glass, arms and legs stretched out, feet digging into the narrow seam between the hood and the windshield, and he understood how the man, seemingly in defiance of the laws of physics, had managed to hang on.

Man was perhaps the wrong word.

The thing clinging to the front of the SUV was human in the literal sense, but one look told King that this was no ordinary foot soldier of the Chinese mob. The head and unkempt hair were that of a Burmese youth, perhaps in his mid-twenties, but the arms and legs were grotesquely muscled, straining at the fabric of the man’s clothes. The torso was malformed, as if he had been taken apart and reassembled by someone who had only the vaguest grasp of human anatomy.

This was one of the monstrosities they had fought in Myanmar — a frankenstein — but unlike those, this one seemed to be a new-and-improved model.

The thing dropped its head low and peered into the interior of the SUV, swiveling its gaze back and forth, searching for something.

It was looking for Sasha.

It found her.

The thing released one of its clutching hands, drew back, and punched through the windshield. The blow would have broken a normal person’s hand, but this creature was in no way normal. The fist smashed out the upper corner of the glass, folding it over like a dog-eared page in a book. Just as quickly, it grasped the exposed metal of the Surf’s roof in both hands and then braced its feet against the hood as if getting ready to lift something.

That something was the SUV’s roof. With a torturous shriek, the metal skin of the Toyota began peeling back like the lid of a sardine can.

King brought his XM8 up and let lead fly. The already compromised windshield fractured into a web of cracks, and beyond it, the bullets tore into the monstrosity’s chest. Blood, erupting from the exit wounds and blown back by the wind, sprayed across the windshield, but the thing barely flinched from the wounds. Driven by rage and augmented by a stew of chemical enhancements, it shrugged off the lethal wounds like they were mosquito bites, and commenced giving the Surf a ragged sunroof.

Rook stabbed one of his Desert Eagles in the direction of the thing’s exposed head, but even as he pulled the trigger, unleashing a thunderclap of noise in the semi-enclosed space, the creature moved. It ducked out of the way, and then with a gymnast’s agility, vaulted from the hood, up and over the opening to land behind the gap, impacting the roof with such force that the vehicle bounced on its suspension.

For a moment, King thought the frankenstein had been thrown clear, but a moment later the shredding of the car resumed. He twisted around, trying to get a shot at the thing, but it stayed out of view, using the curl of torn metal like a shield. King knew the 5.56-millimeter ammunition from the XM8 would pass through the thin sheet like it was tissue paper, but so far the high-velocity rounds hadn’t done much to slow the monster down.

“Rook, blast that fucker!”

Rook didn’t wait for a clear shot. He aimed the Desert Eagle at a spot roughly in the center of the roof and fired into the headliner. The entire chassis rang like a bell as the .50 caliber round punched an enormous hole in the roof. Rook adjusted his aim to a point twelve inches behind the hole and fired again. He didn’t need to hit a vital organ; a bullet from the Desert Eagle could rip off limbs.

The tearing stopped.

Suddenly Knight’s window was filled with the creature’s head and shoulders. Blood streamed from dozens of wounds, but the thing was relentless. It had swung down from the roof and was now reaching into the Surf, stretching its fingers out to snare Sasha’s arm.

Knight was pinned against his seat by the monster’s bulk. Rook threw both arms around Sasha, trying to pull her back, but the prodigiously strong creature effortlessly dragged him along. Queen was the only thing between the frankenstein and its prey; she threw an uppercut that snapped the thing’s head back. The monster gave a low growl and shook its head, shrugging the punch off as effortlessly as the bullets, but in that brief instant, Queen did something that no one expected. She reached under the shredded fabric of the monster’s shirt, closed her fingers around the tubes that curled like external veins between its head and chest, and pulled. The tubes came free like clumps of hair, with scraps of bloody flesh clinging to the ends.

The frankenstein’s limbs went rigid for a moment, like it was being electrocuted, but whatever Queen had done, it was still not enough to permanently stop the beast. With an agonized howl, it resumed pulling Sasha across the interior.

Queen kept raining blows into the thing’s face, pummeling it unmercifully, but the monster did not relent. It drew its human prize closer, pinning Queen’s arms down and crushing her against the already immobilized Knight.

King twisted around and tried to find something to shoot at, but in the tangle of bodies, there was no way to separate friend from foe. Instead, he reversed his hold on the carbine and slammed the butt of the weapon into the monster’s head. There was a sickening crunch of bones breaking, but the creature refused to die.

Bishop stomped on the accelerator again, and as the Surf lurched forward, he swerved to the left. Locked in a mortal struggle, the other passengers were barely aware of the maneuver. None of them saw the delivery truck in the lane beside them.

The side panel of the truck was like a solid wall outside the windows of the SUV as the two vehicles scraped together with a hideous grinding noise, and then suddenly the Surf shot forward again, breaking free of the momentary effects of friction.

Rook and Sasha fell back as the creature’s efforts abruptly ended. The frankenstein — or rather what was left of him, head and shoulders — toppled forward into the SUV and landed in Knight’s lap. The monster’s lower torso and legs had been crushed and sheared away by the collision with the delivery truck.

For a few seconds, everyone just stared in disbelief at the twitching remnants of the monster. Then Knight, with a shudder of revulsion, pushed the bodiless corpse away, inadvertently putting it right into Queen’s arms.

“Oh, hell no!” She shoved it back at him.

King put an immediate stop to the gruesome game of hot potato by reaching back and heaving the remains out the open window, and for a moment thereafter, they all just slumped in their seats, too physically and mentally drained to say a word. Even Rook seemed unable to add his customary pithy insights.

It was Bishop that finally broke the silence. “Guys, we’ve got another problem.”

That was when King heard the sound of sirens in the distance. Behind them, weaving through the traffic on the road and quickly gaining ground, was a long serpentine chain of flashing police lights.

FORTY-TWO

King counted seven different sets of flashing lights, the nearest perhaps two hundred meters behind them. Then he became aware of something else; Deep Blue, was telling them that they’d missed a turn.

In the mayhem of the battle with the frankenstein, the task of navigating the unfamiliar roads hadn’t seemed all that important. “Sorry, boss man,” he broke in. “We’re a little busy here.”

“The road you are on will end in less than half a mile. You have to turn around.”

Bishop glanced over at him. “Now he tells us.”

King masked his concern with a sigh of mock-frustration. “I guess you should turn around.”

“Yep,” agreed Bishop and slammed on the brakes.

King was thrown forward against the dashboard, and he heard a collective howl from the back seat as everyone succumbed to the sudden deceleration. The Toyota skidded forward, enveloped in the tumult of noise and a noxious cloud of rubber smoke, and then it drifted across the road. It almost went into a spin, but Bishop kept making minor corrections with the front wheels to keep its nose forward until most of the momentum was gone. When the SUV was nearly at a complete stop, he let off the brakes and cranked the steering wheel hard to the left.

King felt his center of gravity shift and thought for a moment that the Surf was going to roll, but Bishop knew what he was doing. He stomped the gas pedal down, racing out of the turn, and headed back the way they’d come…and right down the throat of the advancing squadron of police cars.

For just a moment, King thought Bishop was going to challenge the Iranian National Police to a game of chicken. It was just the sort of thing Bishop might do, and — live or die — King felt certain that his teammate would never ‘lose’ in such a game. The police however, had no intention of playing along; as the Surf swung around to meet them, the lead chase vehicles broke formation and spread out to block both lanes. It was a hasty affair, and King felt sure that they could blast through with a minimum of damage. Unfortunately, the Toyota wasn’t the only vehicle on the road, and now a traffic jam several cars deep was piling up in front of them. Bishop, undaunted, kept accelerating toward the impasse.

Rook leaned forward, staring into the sea of bright red brake lights. “Ummm…”

King resisted the urge to comment, waiting to see what fancy evasive maneuvers Bishop would employ to get them past the barricade. As they closed the gap however — eating up the distance in mere seconds — King started to question his assumptions about Bishop having a plan…or for that matter, being sane.

A millisecond or two after passing what King thought surely must be the point of no return, Bishop nudged the wheel to the left. The Surf missed the rear bumper of a stopped car by millimeters as it veered into the opposite lane, now cleared of traffic thanks to the roadblock.

The next few seconds were like an amusement park ride from Hell. King was thrown sideways by the sudden turn, and then pitched forward as the SUV slammed into the front end of a blockading police cruiser. The impact sent the smaller vehicle spinning, but barely slowed the Surf. Bishop cut back and forth, attempting — not always successfully — to thread his way through the maze of vehicles. The Toyota’s bumper absorbed most of the damage, but each impact crumpled the fenders and the hood, and as Bishop slipped past the roadblock and into the now wide-open lane, King saw wisps of steam rising from the front end.

“There’s a turn coming up on your left,” Deep Blue intoned.

Bishop saw the side road, which angled away from the opposite lane, before anyone else. Without warning, he cranked the wheel over hard. To his credit, he managed to keep all four tires on the pavement, but everyone inside was subjected to more punishment. Over the screech of the controlled skid, the sound of gunshots was audible, but none of the rounds found their mark, and as Bishop straightened the wheels, the tumult momentarily diminished.

“Stay on this road,” Deep Blue said. “It will get you to the pick-up zone.”

“How far?” King said.

“Twenty klicks, give or take. Senior Citizen will meet you there.”

King covered his microphone so that only Bishop would hear him. “Can we make it that far?”

Bishop glanced at the dashboard where the temperature gauge was starting to climb, and then shook his head.

Behind them, the police had regrouped and were now filing onto the side road to resume the pursuit. Even if they were able to reach the rendezvous, the police would overtake them as soon as they stopped.

They needed a new plan.

King glanced up, through the gaping hole the frankenstein had torn in the roof. Somewhere up there, a supersonic stealth transport plane was racing to a rendezvous that Chess Team would never make.

Suddenly, he realized the answer was staring him in the face.

He twisted around to the others. “Queen, get Sasha into a STARS harness. Rook, Knight… We need to turn this thing into a convertible.”

Rook was the first to figure it out…or at least the first to say something. “Tell me you are not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

“It’s fundamentally the same thing we were planning to do anyway.” King wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince Rook or himself.

“I can think of one pretty fundamental difference,” Rook grumbled.

Knight rolled his eyes and started digging in his pack.

“Don’t be such as sissy,” Queen chided. “It’s probably not the craziest thing you’ve ever done.”

She had already retrieved the large rucksack that contained the STARS gear, and after digging out a rig of nylon web belts identical to the ones they were all wearing, she rested a hand on Sasha’s shoulder to get her attention. The cryptanalyst, who had been practically catatonic since the battle with the frankenstein, nearly jumped out of her skin.

“Hey, it’s okay.” Queen’s manner was surprisingly soothing, a striking contrast to the tone she’d used with Rook. “It’s all going to be over in few minutes.”

She’s right about that, thought King. One way or another.

While Rook and Knight set to work, affixing small shaped charges to the door posts and support beams that held the SUV’s roof in place, King called Deep Blue and told him the new plan.

There was a long silence.

“Deep Blue, did you copy my last?”

“I copied, King. I’m just not sure it will work.”

“Unless you’ve got a better option, we’re going to make it work.”

“I admire your ‘can-do’ attitude, but this is a question of physics. I’m not sure this can be done. Or that you will survive it.”

King eyed the temperature gauge. The needle was creeping toward the red zone. “No time to discuss this,” he said. “We’re going ahead with it. Let Senior Citizen know. King, out.”

“Jeez, it sounds like you’re asking grandpa for a ride,” Rook muttered. “We really need another name for that damn plane.”

“Put it in the suggestion box,” King replied. “Give me some detcord. I’ll get the front.”

Knight passed forward a spool of what looked like thick orange wire, but which was actually Primacord — plastic tubing filled with a thread-thin strand of the high-explosive compound pentaerythritol tetranitrate. King reeled off about two feet and carefully cut it with his KA-BAR.

“All set here,” Queen announced, giving Sasha’s harness a final cinch for good measure.

As King wrapped a length of detcord around the front doorpost on his side, Rook and Knight signaled that they were ready to go. There was a blast of warmth from the Surf’s vents. Bishop had turned on the heater in an effort to bleed off some of the rising engine heat. It was a stopgap measure, and one that wouldn’t keep up with the spiking temperature from the near constant acceleration. King tied the detcord off and then pressed a small blasting cap into one end of the tube. He repeated the procedure on the driver’s side, awkwardly reaching past Bishop to do so, and then settled back into his seat.

“All set.”

“Get down if you can.” Knight’s voice was eerily calm, but everyone took his admonition seriously. “Three… two… one… Fire in the hole.”

The charges all detonated simultaneously with a noise as loud as a gunshot, but the smoke and heat of the small explosions was whisked away in the rush of air that swept through the now exposed interior of the SUV. The roof, cut loose from its supports, was gone, skittering along the road in their wake.

King now had an unobstructed view of the landscape in all directions. They had left Maragheh behind and were now traveling through the lightly wooded countryside. That was something in their favor at least. The open road meant almost no traffic to impede them, but it also meant there was nothing to slow down the pursuit. Behind them, the line of flashing colored lights swerved around the remains of the Surf’s roof; the lead police car was perhaps only a quarter-mile behind them.

Queen passed King a pair of heavy-duty locking carabiners, both of which were connected at intervals to a long rope that sprouted from the rucksack. Everyone in the back seat was already clipped in. He hooked one to Bishop’s harness and then secured the remaining one to his own.

Despite the noise of rushing air, King could now hear a rapid ticking sound, the noise of the engine block starting to expand as it heated up. In a few seconds, one of the pistons would probably seize and the motor would stall, leaving them at the mercy of their pursuers.

“Rook, send up the balloon.”

Rook pulled a shapeless mass — it looked like an enormous deflated red football — from the rucksack and held it over his head. “Ladies and gentleman, in preparation for our flight, please make sure that your seat backs and tray tables are in the upright position, and I want to stress this, make sure that your seat belts are not fastened.”

There was a whooshing sound as the object in Rook’s hands suddenly expanded, filling up with pressurized helium. The wind whipped against the inflating bladder, but Rook held on until it was nearly bursting at the seams. When he let go, the rush of air seemed to yank it straight back, but as soon as it was clear of the Surf, it started rising, trailing a heavy line out behind it — the same rope to which they were all attached. There was a weird zipping sound, like two pieces of fabric rubbing together, as the cable spooled out from the rucksack. The balloon rose up and out of sight, and then with a twang, the line went taut.

Sasha gaped in disbelief, finally overcoming her shell-shocked paralysis. “That balloon isn’t big enough to lift all of us.”

“Nope,” agreed Rook, sounding almost miserable. “But grandpa is.”

“What?”

King heard a new voice over the radio. “Chess Team, this is Senior Citizen. We have visual contact. Hang on to your nuts.”

Queen gave a derisive snort…and then she was gone.

FORTY-THREE

In 1950, the CIA and the Air Force decided to tackle the problem of how to quickly retrieve personnel who were deep in enemy territory, well beyond the range of the helicopters of the day and in areas that were too unsafe for a plane to land. The ultimate product of that endeavor was the Fulton surface-to-air-recovery-system — STARS — named for inventor Robert Fulton Jr. who had spent nearly a decade designing and refining the system. It was known more commonly by the nickname ‘Skyhook.’

Subsequent advances in aircraft design and stealth technology, as well as improvements to air-tracking radar systems employed by unfriendly nations, had rendered the Skyhook system effectively obsolete; there were much better ways to rescue downed pilots and deep-cover agents, much safer and much more pleasant ways.

The principle behind Fulton’s system was fairly simple. A transport aircraft would make a foray into enemy territory and airdrop a package containing all the necessary equipment: a harness, five hundred feet of high-tension rope, and a self-inflating balloon. The man on the ground would don the harness, connect himself to the balloon and then send it aloft. The whole process could be accomplished in just a few minutes. Once the balloon was in the sky, the plane would make one more pass, driving straight at the balloon. A special trap attached to the nose of the aircraft would snag the rope and yank the man into the sky.

That was where the really uncomfortable part began. The first thing the person in the harness would experience was sudden rapid acceleration — zero to two hundred miles an hour in the blink of an eye. The elasticity of the rope alleviated some of this effect, but the G-forces involved were enough to make some people black out. Next, came the high-altitude double whammy: freezing temperatures and low air pressure. While the plane beat a hasty retreat back to friendly skies, the unlucky CIA asset would experience the equivalent of climbing an Alpine mountain in the space of a few seconds. Last but not least, there was the spinning; an object trailed at high speed through the air had a tendency to spin like an out-of-control kite. This spin could induce dizziness, nausea or even unconsciousness. Fortunately, there was an easy way to stop the spin: the disoriented man dangling at the end of the rope needed only to extend his half-frozen arms and legs, spread-eagling like a body-surfer, until the air crew in the plane managed to reel in their catch.

Capture and torture by the enemy was almost a preferable alternative.

Officially, the Air Force ceased using the Skyhook in 1996. Unofficially, the equipment and the capability to employ the Skyhook was maintained by the Joint Special Operations Command as a ‘just in case’ measure.

No one had been especially thrilled by King’s suggestion that they use the Skyhook to whisk them out of Iran, least of all King himself, but with time and resources in short supply for the team, and with secrecy a paramount concern, Deep Blue had signed off on it. There was the matter of retrofitting Senior Citizen to accommodate the thirty-foot long horns that would be used to snare the balloon — no simple task since the craft was designed for super-sonic travel. There was also the question of whether the pick-up line could hold the weight of six passengers; it was theoretically possible, but the system had never been used to pick up more than two men at a time.

What was most certainly not in the original plan was deploying the STARS from inside a moving vehicle while being chased down a rural highway by half the Iranian National Police force.

In a rare instance of serendipity, the forward momentum of the Toyota actually made things easier. Like with a kite pulled along by a running child, the line pulled taut, and the balloon — which was festooned with blinking infrared lights — cut through the sky in an almost perfectly straight line, providing an easy target for the pilot sitting at the controls of Senior Citizen.

Unseen by anyone on the ground, the stealth plane came from out of the west and streaked across the sky. Even without the constantly updated GPS coordinates supplied by the mysterious entity known only as Deep Blue, the pilot would have been able to find the target vehicle simply by following the string of flashing red and blue lights trailing behind it.

The pilot banked the aircraft to the right, carved a tight turn in the sky and with his computerized targeting system, locked onto the balloon. The plane advanced unerringly toward the blinking lights, and then, with textbook precision, it snared the balloon in the V-shaped trap.

One at a time, like an unraveling chain-stitch, the six passengers in the SUV were plucked from their seats. The empty vehicle cruised forward a few hundred yards before veering off the road and crashing into a stand of trees. By the time the police cars arrived, the plane, still trailing the Chess Team plus one, was already several miles away.

Because they were already traveling forward at about seventy miles per hour, the effect of the sudden acceleration was considerably reduced, though understandably, this was of little comfort to the six people dangling daisy-chained from the nose of the aircraft.

King had imagined that being jerked out of his seat would feel a little like what happened when his parachute opened during a jump — a sudden bone-jarring snap. He would later reflect that his erroneous assumption had been for the best; if he’d actually known what to expect, he never would have gone through with it.

For several long seconds, he struggled through a barrage of sensory inputs, all of them unpleasant. Biting cold ripped into him, blasting his face with such intensity that he couldn’t breathe, much less open his eyes. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that he was spinning uncontrollably, but the accompanying disorientation, coupled with the relentless assault from the wind, confounded his efforts to take any sort of action to arrest the spin. Mustering his last vestiges of will power, he unclenched his limbs from the protective fetal curl he had instinctively assumed, and extended his arms.

The sense of vertigo started to abate after a few moments, emboldening him to stretch his legs out as well. Now, instead of corkscrewing through the sky, he felt himself bouncing up and down, buffeted by invisible currents of air. He felt like he was trying to swim up Niagara Falls, but there wasn’t a single thing he could do to end the ordeal.

Then, almost without being aware of the transition, the pervasive Arctic blast and the jarring turbulence stopped, and he felt something solid beneath him. His face felt like a frozen mask, but he managed to open his eyes enough to see two men in cold-weather flight suits dragging him up a metal ramp and into the relatively protected interior of the stealth transport’s cargo hold.

There was a loud whine and a deep rumble as the ramp began moving, and then a metallic thump, completely cut off the howling of the wind.

At first, he didn’t see anyone except the crewmen, and a wave of panic crashed over him. He tried to ask them for an update, but the words wouldn’t come out. One of the men said something, a reassuring comment that barely registered through the lingering fog of the experience, and then King was wrapped in a heavy blanket. There were other blankets strewn about the floor of the hold, and after a few more seconds, he realized that nestled within each of the shapeless heaps was one of his companions.

He did a quick count. Five altogether.

They’d made it.

He huddled his arms around his torso, pulling the blanket tight, and savored the warm feeling of relief that came with that realization.

Eventually, they emerged from their cocoons, imbibed hot beverages supplied by the flight crew and displayed fits of outrage at the nightmare they had just gone through — some of it was directed at King, and not all of it was playful. King kept his distance, focusing his attention on Sasha, who seemed practically comatose; he wondered if she actually understood that she had been rescued.

When the plane touched down at Incirlik Air Base half an hour later, and the team members roused themselves and prepared to disembark. Rook loudly announced that the first thing he was going to do was kiss the tarmac. Sasha just sat in her seat, staring blankly ahead, as if she was waiting for further instructions. King gently grasped her arm and coaxed her to rise.

As they descended the ramp, a van rolled up and Daniel Parker jump out to greet them. King felt a moment of apprehension at the sight of his old friend. He had been so focused on the mission in Maragheh that he had completely forgotten about their earlier tense exchange.

But if Parker was nursing a grudge at having been cut out of the mission into Iran, he gave no indication. In fact, he barely seemed to notice King at all. He raced up the ramp and homed in on Sasha like a moth to a flame, his earnest face concealing none of his eagerness. He managed to stop himself before crashing into her…or hugging her.

“Sasha!” he said, unable to contain his excitement. “I did it… Well, you did. Your program and al-Tusi’s writings.”

She regarded him like he was crazy. “What are you saying?”

“The Voynich manuscript! You solved it!”

For the first time since meeting her several days earlier, King saw something like life in Sasha’s eyes.

FORTY-FOUR

King had the distinct impression of being a third wheel. On a unicycle.

Parker had always been an open book emotionally. He wanted to be alone with Sasha; King could read that in his friend’s face as clearly as he could discern that Parker was mostly over any resentment at having been sidelined.

It had been the right decision, but King knew that one of the burdens of leadership was that you couldn’t make everyone happy.

As far as Parker’s crush on Sasha was concerned, King would have happily stepped aside to let his friend try out his best moves, though he didn’t think Parker stood much of a chance with her. Where Sasha had earlier appeared indifferent to that kind of attention, she now seemed to occupy an entirely different plane of reality where Daniel Parker did not even exist. There was only one thing that mattered to her now: the Voynich manuscript.

King was also very interested in learning what the mysterious document had to say, though for a much different reason.

He considered the mission in Iran to have been only partly successful. Yes, they had rescued Sasha and retrieved the key to deciphering the manuscript, but one goal had eluded him, perhaps the most important objective, at least on a personal level. Kevin Rainer was still at large.

King didn’t think his former CO cared much about the contents of the book. Rainer’s motives were purely mercenary, but King felt sure that Rainer’s big paycheck was connected to the matter of deciphering the Voynich manuscript. Understanding exactly why the man wanted it might give King the edge he needed to accomplish that one remaining mission objective.

While the rest of the team had gone off in search of food, beer, hot showers and a place to crash, King had accompanied Parker and Sasha to the office where a digital version of the book, with its secrets revealed at last, was displayed on the screen of her laptop computer.

Parker quickly recounted how he had used the information from al-Tusi’s treatise along with Sasha’s own deciphering software to crack the code. Sasha nodded, as if the explanation validated a cherished belief, but then dismissively turned her attention to the computer.

King glanced over her shoulder and read a few lines. Deciphered or not, the book was still incomprehensible to him.

“What’s it say?” he asked Parker.

Without taking his eyes off Sasha, Parker said, “Let me give you some background first. The book was actually written by two men: al-Tusi and Roger Bacon.”

“Bacon, I know that name from somewhere.” King could almost hear Rook making a crack, probably in his best approximation of Homer Simpson, so he quickly added: “Some people think he was the guy who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays, right?”

“No, that was Sir Francis Bacon. Although the two men had very similar interests, they lived about four centuries apart. Roger Bacon was a Franciscan friar who lived in the thirteenth century. It’s long been thought that Bacon might have been the author of the Voynich manuscript; now we know it for certain.

“In 1247, Bacon was living in Paris, lecturing at the University, when he made an unusual discovery. He was conducting experiments with ground quartz lenses and realized that in addition to their other properties, the crystal could be made to vibrate at different frequencies — musical frequencies, like the way a soprano can make a wine glass vibrate and shatter. Even stranger, he discovered that when they were aligned with each other and facing in a specific direction, the effect was much stronger. He repeated his experiments in different places throughout Paris. When he compared the results, he realized that the crystals were pointing him toward something.”

“What?”

Parker shook his head. “Bacon didn’t know, but he decided to share his findings with another scientist; one of the most learned men in the world at that point in history.”

“Nasir al-Tusi.”

“Bingo. Of course, al-Tusi was a Muslim and theoretically an enemy, so they had to correspond in secret, using coded messages. Al-Tusi recreated Bacon’s experiments from Mosul, where he was living at the time, and based on the results, they were able to triangulate a possible source for the effect, a place they called ‘the Prime.’”

“Where was it?” King asked.

“They didn’t record the exact location, but it was somewhere in southern France. The maps of the day weren’t very precise, and they were relying on the crystal devices to guide them. Al-Tusi journeyed west, in disguise of course, and they met at the source to conduct further experiments.” Parker took a deep breath, as if gathering his courage to broach the next topic. “That was when things got really weird. Bacon began to notice strange plants, like nothing he’d ever seen before, and he had quite literally written the book on botany. Eventually, he realized that there was a connection between the appearance of the plants and the timing of the experiments with the crystal devices. He tried different frequencies, and he was able to produce different varieties of plants, as well as lichens, mosses, fungi — all of them different than anything he or al-Tusi had ever seen before. There was only one explanation that made any sense; somehow, the plants were being spontaneously generated.”

“Wait…what?”

“Life from lifelessness,” Sasha said, not looking away. “They found the source; the Elixir of Life.”

“I guess you could call it that,” Parker said. “It wasn’t a magical power like the Philosopher’s Stone, but a combination of being in the right place and triggering the right frequency.”

King shook his head in confusion. “Back up. Life from lifelessness? What does that mean?”

“One thing science has never been able to adequately explain, is where life came from. All life on Earth — every single living thing down to the tiniest microbe — comes from a living parent organism. If the theory of evolution is true, then all life probably traces back to one single organism — an amoeba or something — that got the process started, but no one can explain how that happened. Scientists have been able to create conditions where amino acids and protein molecules will naturally occur, but they’ve never been able to make the final leap — to bring them to life.”

“You’re saying that Bacon and al-Tusi found a way to do that? With…what? Crystals and music? Sounds pretty New Age to me.”

Parker however nodded enthusiastically. “It’s not so farfetched. There have been all kinds of studies to show that music can influence plant health. It happens at a molecular level. The crystals weren’t even important. It was the music, or rather the specific harmonic frequencies that produced the effect. Al-Tusi built his pipe organ so that they could pin down exactly which musical notes did what.”

“Is it possible that their experiments were just creating some kind of funky mutations in the plants that were already there?”

“Maybe. Even that would be a pretty significant discovery for the time, but they tried to control for all the variables, and they were convinced that they were actually giving life to inanimate matter.”

“Okay, let’s say I believe all that. What’s Rainer’s angle?” King turned his gaze to Sasha. “You were with him. Did you get a sense of what he wants from all of this?”

Sasha’s eyes remained riveted on the screen, as if the information there was far more interesting than anything King had to say. She clicked to the next page, her eyes moving back and forth as she read.

“Black Death,” she said finally. “The plague. Guo Kan, the Chinese general who fought with Mongols, got his hands on an al-Tusi’s urghan. His experiments with it created the organism responsible for the Black Death outbreak in the fourteenth century.”

“That’s exactly why Bacon and al-Tusi encoded the manuscript,” Parker added. “It’s a how-to manual for creating new kinds of life. They were afraid of what might happen if it fell into the wrong hands.”

“I thought that could happen only at that one special place, the prime location.”

Parker shrugged. “The effect is most pronounced at the source. They weren’t able to replicate their experiments when they left the area. But maybe there are other places on Earth with the same properties. Or maybe it just takes longer to see results; the Black Death didn’t show up until several decades after Guo’s death.”

King pondered this possibility for a moment then switched gears. “Does the book say what’s so special about this ‘Prime’ place?”

“Bacon speculated that it might be some kind of confluence of Earth energy. He had only a vague understanding of what that meant, but we know there are invisible rivers of geo-magnetic energy called Telluric currents that run through the whole planet. Crystals — like the ones he was using — align themselves magnetically. Maybe that provided the extra boost needed to start life.”

Sasha shook her head. “The Prime is important because it is the original source. Every living thing on Earth is mathematically connected to it.”

There was a hint of mania in her voice, and King knew he had to tread carefully. He had no idea what she was talking about, but Parker was nodding. At least it makes sense to someone, he thought. “So, bottom line, if the wrong person goes to this Prime place and plays the wrong song, all hell breaks loose, and that’s a bad thing. Do Rainer and company know all this?”

Sasha appeared to consider for a moment. “I don’t think so. That wasn’t the direction they were going. But they understand that the urghan is the key to deciphering the manuscript.”

King’s hand moved to his pocket where he’d stashed al-Tusi’s parchment. It was the only one of its kind, aside from the digital copy he’d sent to Parker.

The Voynich manuscript…the Prime location…the origin of life on Earth — none of that was really important. What mattered was that Rainer needed the information on that parchment, and King knew the rogue Delta operator would move Heaven and Earth to get it.

When he came for it, King and Chess Team would be waiting.

FORTY-FIVE

King was wrong in one respect. Parker had been glad to have him in the room, because it had given him someone to talk to. Sasha didn’t seem the least bit interested in conversation. After King left, Parker watched her reading and tried in vain to come up with a way to break the awkward silence. He was surprised when she spoke up.

“You figured this out?”

He shook his head quickly. “No, you did all the work. I just plugged in the variables from what al-Tusi wrote.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything.” Something like a smile twitched across her face, and she nodded toward the door through which King had just passed. “Do you think he understood any of it?”

“Jack’s a smart guy. But truthfully? It’s a lot to swallow. The source of life? It seems a little farfetched.”

“You’re right.” She looked at the screen thoughtfully. She was silent for a long time. “I want to go there,” she said finally. “To the Prime. I want to see it for myself; to know if it’s true.”

Parker stifled an urge to laugh. She was serious. “I think Jack has a different set of priorities.”

She crossed her arms, looking almost petulant. “Your team was supposed to be helping me, remember?”

“Sasha, we solved it. Isn’t that enough?” He already knew the answer. The quest to understand the Voynich manuscript had come to define her life, and now, with the ultimate goal in sight, he was telling her to back off. He sighed. “You said that all life is mathematically connected to the Prime. What did you mean by that?”

“Why do you ask?”

“If I’m going to sell Jack on the idea of finding the Prime, I’m going to need a more persuasive reason than just to satisfy your curiosity.”

It must have been the right thing to say, because when she looked at him, there wasn’t a trace of irritation in her expression. “Life is a mathematical process. Each of us is the product of countless permutations that began with the Prime event.

“Think about your own life as a mathematical expression. You are the product of DNA from your two parents. And they are each the product of two. We are each the result of millions of such computations, and our DNA contains all those factors.”

He nodded to indicate that he understood, but he still didn’t see what she was driving at.

“But at some point, the process flips. The branches of the family tree start coming together and the number of factors reduces down to primes.”

“Adam and Eve.”

She inclined her head. “Figuratively speaking. Somewhere in history, all humans share a common ancestor, or, put another way, a prime factor. Of course, the prime factor for humans is just one point on a much larger continuum, but that too can be mathematically reduced to a prime factor—the Prime factor.”

“Okay, I get that. Everything starts with something, chicken and egg. But that’s not what you meant by a connection, is it?”

She pursed her lips. “Life is more than just the mathematical distribution of genetic material. There’s something else involved that we still don’t understand; some component or catalyst that got the whole thing started. It’s in every living thing; it’s what separates living cells from organic matter and a living human from a dead corpse. And the really remarkable thing is that this life-force — whatever you want to call it — is the same now as it was at the beginning.”

“You mean it’s the same kind of energy, right?”

She shook her head. “The same energy, undiluted and indivisible.”

“How is that possible?”

“It’s like using one candle to light another. The original candle might die out, but as long as you keep lighting candles, it’s the same original flame you started with. It goes on forever.” She turned her head. “Are you familiar with quantum entanglement?”

“Two particles interact, then separate but remain connected, no matter how far apart they are.”

“Everything in the universe is entangled because all the matter in the universe originated with a single event, the Big Bang. But living things are quantum entangled in a very specific way, linked to the Prime event. Every living thing on Earth is connected, through time and space by quantum entanglement, to the Prime. It’s like we’re all plugged into it by an invisible extension cord. Do you see now why finding and protecting the Prime source is so important?”

Parker certainly did. “I’ll take this to Jack. I’ll make him understand.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“If he doesn’t, then I guess we’ll have to go with Plan B.”

FORTY-SIX

The phone on Domenick Boucher’s desk started ringing as soon as he stepped into his office, almost as if the caller somehow knew that he had arrived to start his workday.

That couldn’t be a coincidence.

Like everyone else in the civilized world, Boucher had begun to think of his desk phone as a relic from another age. He hardly ever used it. He was so accustomed to using his encrypted digital phone that he preferred to make calls with it, even when in his office, and anyone who might want to contact him directly, would almost certainly know that and have used his cellular number.

With a frown, he picked it up and cautiously said: “Hello?”

“Good morning, Director Boucher,” said an electronically distorted voice. “This is Deep Blue.”

Boucher’s forehead creased in concern. He was one of a select few who not only knew about Deep Blue — the one man the President trusted enough to run his new super-secret black ops team — but he also knew the man’s true identity. Chess Team however, had no ties to the Agency, and Boucher couldn’t think of a single reason why Deep Blue would contact him like this. There were other, much more direct routes of communication.

“I’m listening,” he finally said.

“The team recovered your missing contractor last night.”

“Sasha Therion?” Boucher’s anxiety eased measurably. “Alive and well, I hope.”

“That remains to be seen. There’s been a new development.”

Boucher listened without interruption, and when Deep Blue finished, he simply said: “I’ll make it happen.”

He then hung up and called for an emergency meeting with all senior department heads. Ten minutes later he addressed a conference room full of harried-looking staffers.

“As you all are no doubt aware, a few days ago one of our own, Field Officer Scott Klein, was murdered by a group of traitors. Sasha Therion, one of our contracted cryptanalysts was abducted in the same event.

“I’m pleased to say that last night, a Delta team rescued her. The team also recovered information relating to the development of an unspecified biogenic weapon.”

He briefly glanced at the Director of Sci/Tech, the only man in the room who knew the full details of what Sasha Therion had been sent to find. The man’s face creased in confusion at the seeming incongruity. No one else knew anything about the Voynich manuscript or what it purportedly contained, nor did they need to know.

A ripple of relief circled the room like a crowd wave at a sporting event. Boucher let them savor the news for a moment before dropping the other shoe. “At approximately 0900 Zulu time this morning — so about eight hours ago — our contractor and a Delta operator named Daniel Parker, went AWOL from Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey. Their purpose is unknown, but it is believed that they might be on their way to the south of France, looking for a component necessary for the manufacture of the aforementioned biogenic weapon.

“It isn’t known at this point if Therion or Parker were involved in the original incident. They could be acting as free agents, or they might even be working under the assumption that they have the best interests of the nation at heart. Regardless of their motives, it is imperative that they be found and taken into custody.

“The Delta team will be handling the operational aspects; our job is to provide them with actionable intelligence — review video camera feeds, cell phone calls, get our assets in airports and train stations… Hell, get out a damn Ouija board, if it will help track them down.”

Boucher let that sink in for a moment before concluding. “Coordinate with my office for sectors of responsibility. Let’s make this happen, people.”

Boucher retreated back to his office and spent the rest of the morning assigning specific tasks to the different departments of his agency. He didn’t expect immediate results; it would take several hours to collect enough data to get started, and perhaps days to sift through it all. Worst of all, there was no guarantee of success, especially considering for whom they were searching.

Parker had received the very best training in escape and evasion techniques; if he didn’t want to be found, he wouldn’t be.

FORTY-SEVEN

Rainer thumbed the button on his phone to end the call. He turned to face his employer with a satisfied grin. “We just caught a break that might make up for the disaster in Iran.”

The other man, who had been lounging on a couch and idly watching television, looked up with a frown at the implicit insult. “I work with what I have. We both agreed that it was too risky for you to make that trip. Obviously, our gangster friends weren’t up to the task of taking on the US Special Forces, but to be fair, we didn’t know they would be there.”

Rainer suppressed a chuckle. He had known; he had even said as much, but the billionaire had dismissed his concerns, claiming that Sigler and the others were almost certainly dead in Myanmar. Rainer hadn’t believed that for a second, if for no other reason than that he and Jack Sigler had unfinished business.

Still, going to Iran had been a risk he wasn’t eager to take, so he’d bowed to the other man’s wishes. While the triad soldiers, in the guise of a Chinese cultural delegation, were getting their asses handed to them, Rainer and his men had been indulging in a veritable smorgasbord of pleasures afforded to guests of the five-star Renaissance Shanghai Pudong Hotel, where they had been holed up since their escape from the facility in Myanmar.

He waved off the excuse. “My agency contact reports that Sasha has gone off the reservation, and she’s got help from Danny Parker.”

“Should that name mean something to me?”

“Parker was in my unit. He’s a good soldier and a smart guy, but I think he has a soft spot for Sasha. You know, she says ‘jump’…well, it sounds like he jumped.”

The billionaire still didn’t get it. “Why has she left?”

“The official word is that it has something to do with — get this—‘biogenic weapons.’ Does that sound familiar?”

The man’s eyes flitted back and forth as he pondered the news.

Rainer went on. “I think our girl solved the problem, and learned something important from the book. The Company is looking for her and Parker in the south of France.”

“France? What on Earth could be there?”

“I guess I’ll find out when I run her down,” Rainer answered confidently.

“Your decision to implant the RFID tracking chip in her when she was unconscious was fortuitous. That bit of foresight is going to pay off a huge dividend.”

“Yeah, well that’s me. Mr. Prepared. Speaking of which, I don’t want to get caught flatfooted like those jokers in Iran.”

His employer just smiled. “I think I can help you with that.”

FORTY-EIGHT

Daniel Parker breathed in the cool air and turned slowly to take in the panoramic vista laid out before him. Thousands of years ago, the Ardèche River had cut through the soft limestone landscape, leaving a deep gorge, and although the river’s course had changed long ago, the place still remembered. He felt that it remembered something else too, something much more ancient.

Sasha got out of their rented Renault, but she didn’t seem the least bit aware of the magnificent scenery. Her attention was completely fixed on the strange device she placed on the hood of the car — really nothing more than a board on which several irregular looking quartz crystals hung suspended by fine copper wires. Roger Bacon had once possessed such a device, and he had probably stood with it on this very spot.

They had built Sasha’s version of the crystal array shortly after arriving in Paris, though hers was an upgraded model. The bare copper wires were spliced to a length of speaker wire that trailed from the microphone jack of her laptop computer. All she needed to do was push a button, and the computer would play a harmonic frequency that would vibrate in the crystals. The computer would then translate those vibrations into a graphic display, allowing for a much greater degree of precision than Bacon could ever have hoped for.

Sasha studied the display as she adjusted the position of the crystal device, just as she had done in Paris, from the roof of the hostel where they had spent their first night, and several times thereafter, to verify that they were on the correct path, following in Bacon’s footsteps.

They kept to the back roads and avoided human contact. Parker knew they were being hunted.

He gazed once more at the wooded slopes that ran up to the sheer walls of the gorge, wondering if they were being watched right now, and if so, by whom.

Sasha made a disapproving sound as she fiddled with the device. He watched her for a moment, marveling at her single-mindedness, then finally he asked, “What’s wrong?”

She pointed at the looming cliff wall to the north. “The signal is strongest in that direction, but it’s not strong enough.”

He circled around the car and looked over her shoulder. Based on her earlier calculations, they should have been practically on top of the Prime source, but sure enough, the crystals weren’t vibrating with the feverish intensity he expected. He turned the crystal array back and forth, but the action only had the effect of further diminishing the vibrations. He returned them to their original position and stared in the direction in which they were pointing.

Had Roger Bacon and Nasir al-Tusi been confronted with such a puzzle?

“Right at the cliffs,” he muttered. He tilted the array up, toward the place where the rock face met the sky, but once more the signal strength faltered.

No, not up, he realized with a growing sense of excitement.

He tipped the array so that it was angled down.

The pattern of oscillations on the screen practically exploded with intensity.

“You did it,” Sasha said, almost breathlessly.

He savored the rare praise. Despite all that he had done for her, Sasha still seemed unable to think of him in anything but the most utilitarian terms. He was a tool to help her accomplish her purpose, just as the CIA, the Delta team and even Rainer and his triad allies had been, each in their own way and without even suspecting it. This wasn’t a cynical calculation on her part; it was just how she was.

Driven.

His initial physical attraction to her had cooled somewhat over the course of their days together, but his fascination with both her intellect and her personality had grown stronger. She was an enigma, a puzzle even more intricate than the Voynich manuscript, and just as he had solved it, he would also solve her. He would give her what she wanted, and when she had it, he would unlock that part of her that was capable of compassion, friendship…and love?

Well, he could hope anyway.

Her elation faltered. “But I don’t understand. We have to go down? How is that possible?”

He scooped the array up and tucked it under one arm, then picked up the computer. “Let’s go find out.”

They left the road, skirted a small field of grape vines, and pushed into the pine forest. Parker thought he could feel the crystals vibrating against his skin. It was probably his imagination, fueled by the anticipation of success, but with each step forward, he could sense the energy of the Prime rising out of the ground, invigorating him and filling him with possibilities.

The woods ended abruptly at the foot of the cliff. Parker checked the array again; if the crystals were to be believed, the Prime lay somewhere within the limestone wall, perhaps fifty feet below them.

“Do you suppose this is as close as they got?”

Sasha’s brow furrowed, as if she had never considered this possibility.

“We could test it here,” he continued. “Try one of the formulae from the book. If it works, we’ll have our answer.”

She shook her head. “No. They found it. The book said they found it. You read it, too.”

He knew she was right. While the Voynich manuscript had been short on details about what and where the Prime was, nothing in the account suggested that Bacon and al-Tusi had been stopped short of their ultimate goal. They had found it; somehow, they had found a way into the Earth’s interior.

They skirted along the wall, scanning the rough limestone face for some shadowy niche, crevice or crack that might conceal a cave entrance. What they found instead, barely a hundred yards from where they started, was a door.

It was so incongruous that, for a few minutes, Parker could only stare in disbelief. There was a gray metal door with a U-shaped handle above a metal box with numbered buttons, pasted into a gap in the cliff face with dark concrete. It looked like the entrance to a utility corridor at a mall or an amusement park. Then he remembered where they were, and he realized what lay on the other side of the door.

He turned to Sasha, unable to contain his excitement at this revelation. “This is Chauvet Cave.”

She blinked at him, the name evidently ringing no bells.

Parker laid an almost reverent hand on the door.

Discovered in 1994, Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave was the site of what was arguably the most impressive example of paleolithic art on Earth. Carbon dating of charred timbers — wood used for fires to illuminate the cave for the artists — dated back more than thirty thousand years, making the paintings in Chauvet Cave the oldest known examples of human artwork. The walls of the cave were adorned with extraordinary detailed images of horses, bears, panthers — more than a dozen different species of animals, many extinct. Some of the paintings seemed to represent mythical creatures, chimera combinations of beasts that had never actually lived on the planet, or perhaps, like the plants painted in the Voynich manuscript, had existed only here and only for a brief time.

He had read about this place in National Geographic. What was truly remarkable about the cave was how well it had been preserved. Similar discoveries across Europe, such as at the one at Lascaux, had been severely degraded by thousands of visiting tourists, but almost immediately after its discovery, Chauvet Cave had been locked up tight. Even the scientists authorized to conduct research on the site had to observe stringent procedures to minimize their impact.

Parker felt his excitement roll back like the tide. “‘Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further,’” he muttered.

“What’s that? Something from the manuscript?”

He shook his head. “No. It’s from the Bible…the Book of Job. Bacon and al-Tusi might have been able to get closer, but this is the end of the line for us.”

“It can’t be. We haven’t come this far to be turned back now. Can’t we break in?” She looked around, belatedly checking to see if they were being observed.

Parker balked momentarily at the cavalier suggestion; it wasn’t just the illegality of the action — he did illegal things on a routine basis in the interest of a greater good — but rather the immorality of it. This was a sacred place; a treasure to be preserved, not desecrated.

Yet, what if the very reason it had been venerated by those ancient artists was because it contained the thing they now sought? What if those primitive cave painters had, perhaps even without really knowing it, intuitively recognized that this place was a source of life?

The source of life.

Sasha was right. They had come too far to turn back now.

He stared at the door a moment longer, trying to think of the best way to get past it. He hadn’t been able to bring along explosives for a breaching charge; he didn’t even have a Swiss Army knife.

“Something’s not right here.” He turned to Sasha. “The original entrance to this cave was sealed up by a landslide about twenty thousand years ago. That’s why it’s so well preserved.”

“So?”

“So, this entrance wasn’t discovered until just a few years ago. And I would be willing to bet money that Bacon and al-Tusi didn’t come this way.”

“Then there’s another entrance?”

“Maybe. But I think there’s another answer; an answer worthy of the men who wrote the Voynich manuscript.” He offered her an outstretched hand. “Do you trust me?”

He saw immediately that she did not, not unreservedly. His heart sank like a stone. After everything he had done for her, all the risks and sacrifice… She still couldn’t find it in her heart to give him the benefit of the doubt. She stared at his hand warily, but finally took it, clasping his fingers as if to indicate that she would comply, but only on her own terms. Parker struggled back from the event horizon of his emotions, and he gave her hand an awkward squeeze. Then, he led her back the way they’d come.

Parker set down the computer. In response to an unspoken question, he said: “What do we know about the Prime? It’s a place where harmonic frequencies can be used to radically alter the composition of matter, right?”

“You don’t mean…?”

“It’s what the alchemists were always looking for. They understood the connection, but they didn’t have the technological know-how. We already know that wave energy can have an effect on the states of matter; what do you think a microwave oven does? It causes water molecules to vibrate, which releases heat.”

Her eyes began darting back and forth, processing his suggestions, calculating. Then her expression changed.

Not just her expression.

He felt her hand shift in his, sliding up so that their palms were facing.

Then the moment passed. She let go and knelt at the computer, once more consumed by calculations that had nothing at all to do with him.

He heard the sound of her fingers tapping on the keyboard, but then he heard something else that drew his attention away. It wasn’t a distinctive sound, more of a change in atmosphere than anything else, but it chilled him nevertheless. He scanned the tree line and saw movement.

Then he saw people, and before he could utter even a word of warning, he recognized one of the men striding toward them.

Kevin Rainer.

FORTY-NINE

For just a few moments, Sasha felt the sublime satisfaction of a balanced equation. Order had come into her world at last. The Voynich manuscript had given up its secrets, and in so doing, had shown her the underlying arithmetic of the entire universe. She deftly entered information into the virtual urghan, instructing it to play a combination of notes — a specific low frequency sound — and then hit the key that would turn data into music.

The next sound she heard however was not a deep resonant bass tone, but a human voice; the voice of her former captor. “Hello again.”

Even before she could look up, a lighting bolt of pure chaos ripped through her. No. Not now. Not again.

Rainer and four other men stood in a semi-circle around her and Parker. She recognized two of the men — the two rogue Night Stalker crewmen — but the other two were not really men at all; short but massively muscled, they were the hideous science projects that the Chess Team had dubbed ‘frankensteins.’ The renegade soldiers were armed with compact machine pistols but the frankensteins needed no weapons.

Parker had gone rigid beside her, as if straining to hold back an eruption of fear or rage — probably rage — but when he spoke, his voice was flat, emotionless. “Kevin. How did you find us?”

“I took the liberty of tagging your little girlfriend when she was my guest.”

“GPS trackers have a very limited range. You couldn’t have known we’d be coming here.”

Rainer smiled. “You hear all kinds of funny rumors these days. For example, I heard that you might be thinking of changing careers. I just might have a place in my organization for you, especially if…” He nodded toward Sasha. “…you can help me babysit our girl genius.”

Sasha squeezed her eyes shut.

Go away!

The words were a silent scream in her head.

Go away. Leave me alone. Let me finish.

“Here’s how I see it,” Rainer continued. “You’re on your own right now. Jack is looking for you; he knows you’re here in France. How long do you think you can stay ahead of him? Come with me and you get to spend as much time with her as you want. You’d like that, right?”

“Just like that?” said Parker. “I’m supposed to believe that you would trust me?”

“Danny, you’ve always had a lousy poker face. I can see the wheels turning in your head. You know this is the best option.”

Sasha barely heard the words being exchanged between the men, the striking of a bargain in which she was merely an object. Parker was no different than any other human variable; unpredictable, inconsistent and driven by animal passions and irrational emotions. He wasn’t interested in helping her resolve the equation, but only in possessing her.

Chaos swirled around in a haze of white noise.

No, not white noise…a real sound, vibrating through her bones.

Her eyes flew open.

The others hadn’t noticed it yet; they were too consumed with their mundane game of life and death.

The ground beneath her was rippling faintly, like the surface of a pond disturbed by a cast stone. She turned her head slowly and saw that the effect was spreading to the limestone face of the cliff. The dull white rock seemed to be shimmering, as if made of fog.

It’s working!

The door to the Prime was opening, just as Parker had said it would. So close.

The thing she had sought for so long — the solution that would balance the equation of existence — was about to be taken away from her by another damnable human variable.

Rainer drew in a deep breath and then let it out with a dramatic sigh. “Maybe I was wrong about you, Danny. Here’s the thing. We’re leaving with your girlfriend. You can come along, or I can put a bullet between your eyes. Seems like a simple choice to me, but…” He shrugged.

“Don’t make me go,” Sasha whispered, barely able to get the words out. She reached up and found Parker’s hand. She squeezed it tight. “Please.”

He looked down at her, his earnest face hiding none of his fear and concern…his affection. Then he turned his eyes back to Rainer and muttered. “Could use a little help here, Jack.”

Confusion flickered across Rainer’s face, but before it could give way to comprehension, there was a loud smack, and the head of one of the frankensteins blew apart in a fine red mist.

FIFTY

In the instant that the bullet from Knight’s Barrett M82 sniper rifle erased the frankenstein’s head, King and the rest of the team broke from cover and swept toward the rock wall. They bounded forward in pairs. King and Bishop stopped and fired off a few rounds, aiming high so as not to hit Parker and Sasha, while Rook and Queen raced forward a few feet, and then they would switch roles.

Knight managed to get a second shot off before Rainer and the others could fully process what was happening, but this time his bullet only grazed the target.

They had debated how to best use that first decisive shot; eliminate Rainer, cutting the head off the snake as it were, or take out the frankensteins. The latter won out. Based on their experiences with the monstrosities in Burma and Iran, the frankensteins were the bigger threat. Deprived of leadership, they could still wreak unimaginable harm.

As he hit the ground, rolling left and coming back up into a prone firing position, King saw that the decision to target the frankenstein had yielded the expected results: Rainer and his men were retreating, Parker had thrown himself over Sasha and they were huddled near the rock face, and the sole remaining frankenstein, bleeding copiously from its left shoulder, was charging headlong toward Rook and Queen. King turned the barrel of his XM8 toward the creature, but before he could get a shot off, Rook came up with one of his enormous Desert Eagle pistols.

His first shot caught the frankenstein full in the chest, the .50 caliber round staggering the creature back like a battering ram. For most living things, it would have been a lethal shot — it probably was for the chemical-crazed frankenstein as well, but Rook didn’t take chances. He fought the massive pistol’s recoil with a two-handed grip, brought it level and fired again. This time, there was no uncertainty about the outcome; the bullet tore off the top of the abomination’s skull.

King swung his barrel back toward Rainer, but the rogue Delta commander and his men were zigzagging back into the tree line, returning fire blindly to cover their escape. King got off a few shots before the running men disappeared into the boughs.

“Rook, Queen, go after them.”

King wanted to give chase as well — hunt the rabid Rainer down and personally put him out of everyone’s misery once and for all — but first he had to make sure that Parker and Sasha were okay. He had used them, dangled them in front of Rainer like bait, played them like pawns in his own private chess game, and even though everything seemed to have gone according to plan, if anything happened to them, it would be on his head.

He keyed his microphone. “Irish, this is King. I’m coming to you.”

Parker had known the risks. When he’d come to King in Turkey and asked for permission to take Sasha on some kind of treasure hunt, King had seized on it as an opportunity not only to lure Rainer into the open but also perhaps to smoke out any security leaks at CIA and JSOC. Nevertheless, he had been forthright with respect to the dangers he and Sasha would be facing.

“It will have to look absolutely real,” he had told Parker. “You’ll be unarmed, no support, the CIA will be hunting for you. We’ll try to stay one step ahead of you, but if Rainer makes his move and we’re not ready…”

Parker had obviously been concerned about putting Sasha at risk, but he understood what was at stake. “Make sure that doesn’t happen.”

It had been a close thing, but the plan had worked. Thanks to Parker’s stealthy radio calls, the team had finally gotten ahead of Rainer and been waiting to spring the trap. Now King just had to make sure that Parker and Sasha were okay.

“Danno!”

Parker raised his head just a little, mindful of the fact that bullets were still flying not far away. “Cut it pretty close, Jack.”

King breathed a sigh of relief. Sasha looked a little freaked out — when didn’t she? — but both were unhurt.

“Come on. Let’s get you guys out of here.”

Sasha’s head came up. Her gaze flitted between the men for a moment, then her eyes locked on Parker. “This was a setup?”

Parker gave a heavy sigh. “Sasha, I’m so sorry. We had to flush Rainer out. It was the only way.”

She kept staring at him with such intensity that King feared his friend might melt, figuratively at least, from the rage she was putting out. He wondered if this was a risk Parker had considered when he’d agreed to the plan.

Sasha abruptly dropped her gaze and looked around furtively. Then, moving quicker than King had ever seen her move, she grabbed her computer and hurled herself toward the looming rock wall…

And vanished.

King’s mind refused to accept what he had just seen.

Parker however reacted instantly. “Sasha!”

He too bolted right at the wall, and this time, King knew that his eyes had not deceived him. Parker had not ducked behind a bush or slipped into an unseen crevice in the cliff face. He reached the wall and kept right on going, as if it were no more substantial than smoke.

Disbelief hit King like a physical blow, leaving him numb all over.

You saw what you saw, he told himself. It’s a trick — smoke and mirrors — nothing more.

But if it was a trick, it was a damned good one.

“Okay, Danno,” he said. “How’d you do that?”

He took a step toward the place where the others had disappeared. He extended a hand. Where he expected to feel solid rock beneath his fingertips, he felt only the barest of resistance, like the push of air from an electric fan.

“Smoke and mirrors, my ass,” he muttered, and with a deep breath to fortify his courage, King took another step forward.

FIFTY-ONE

Rook saw movement in the trees and followed it with the business end of his XM8. The Desert Eagles were great for putting down those inhuman freakshows but not very accurate past about thirty meters.

The right tool for the right job, as Grandpa Tremblay always used to say.

A head appeared from behind a trunk — one of the rogue Night Stalkers — and Rook squeezed the trigger.

“That was for Houston, motherfucker,” he muttered as the distant figure slumped to the ground. He searched for another target but saw nothing.

“Let’s go!” Queen urged.

Rook gave a terse nod. There were still two more debts to collect on the balance sheet for Alpha team. Rainer owed a lot of other men for the pain he’d caused, but unfortunately, they would be able to kill him only once.

They crept into the woods, moving quickly but cautiously, and emerged at the edge of a small vineyard. Rook glimpsed movement in the rows of vines, but the running figure stayed low, depriving him of a target.

Rook stared at the perfectly straight parallel rows of vines, seeing them for the trap they were. “We go in there, and we’ll be easy pickings.”

Queen groaned at the pun. “Really? That’s the best you’ve got?”

Rook shrugged then gestured to the perimeter of the vineyard. “Do we go the long way around?”

“You’re asking me?”

“You’re the Queen.”

“Now that’s funny,” she returned, deadpan.

He chuckled to hide an unexpected feeling of embarrassment; he hadn’t meant it as a joke. Keeping his carbine trained on the vine tops, he struck out along the edge of the field.

He had gone only about twenty feet when something hissed through the air right in front of him, accompanied by the simultaneous report of a pistol. As he threw himself flat, he realized that the shot had come from the woods, behind him.

Damn it! They suckered me.

As he scrambled on all fours for the concealment of the vines, the ground all around him started exploding, bullets striking like lightning bolts to the accompanying thunder of gunshots. Dirt sprayed into his face, stinging like the bite of wasps, forcing him to close his eyes, but he nevertheless brought his carbine up and returned fire.

Someone grabbed his shoulder.

He gave a yelp and twisted around to meet this new threat, swinging the gun like a club, but through the ringing in his ears and the pounding of his heart, a female voice reached out to him. “Slow down, hero. I got him.”

Rook slowly unclenched, breathing heavily to damp down the deluge of adrenaline. He opened his eyes and saw Queen kneeling over him. “Which one?” he finally managed to say.

“Not Rainer.” There was a trace of disappointment in her voice.

“You saved the big fish for me? How thoughtful of you.”

“Fuck that. The asshole shot me, remember? He’s mine.”

Rook got to his feet and then flashed a grin. “Not if I see him first.”

With that, he wheeled around and sprinted headlong into the vineyard. It was a stupid, cocky thing to do, but so far, luck had played a more decisive role than caution in keeping him alive. Besides, Rainer was alone now.

In his peripheral vision, he glimpsed a flash of gold — Queen’s blonde locks, trailing behind her as she matched his pace in the next row over. He threw her a wink, and then reached down into his deepest reserves and put on an all-out burst of speed.

He spied movement ahead; Rainer had broken from the cover of the vines and was racing for the parking area where Parker’s rented Renault had been joined by two Volkswagen Eurovans.

Rook tried to get the fleeing man in his sights, but he couldn’t hold a bead while he was running, and if he stopped for a better shot, it might give Rainer the extra few seconds of lead time he needed to reach his van…

Rook saw that his quarry was going to make it to the vehicles anyway. He loosed a burst in the direction of he nearest van. It rocked a little under the impact of the 5.56-millimeter rounds and then lowered a few inches, as the air rushed from two of its tires.

Rainer threw up a hand in a reflexive, if futile, attempt to protect his head from bullets and flying debris, but he did not falter. He darted between the parked vans and disappeared from view.

Rook let his go of his XM8, allowing it to hang by the sling, and drew one of his pistols. Even if Rainer somehow got the other van rolling, one .50 caliber Action Express round would shut it down, and one more would shut him down. That was the great thing about the Desert Eagle — like with horseshoes and hand grenades, you didn’t have to score a direct hit to get the job done. The recoil was a son-of-a-bitch — he really needed to see about getting some kind of wrist brace — but it wasn’t nearly as bad as being on the other end when the trigger was pulled.

He expected to hear the van’s engine turn over at any second, but all was silent. He reached the parking lot, Queen still matching his full sprint, and charged toward the vehicles, the Desert Eagle thrust out ahead of him like a battering ram.

Something moved out from behind the furthest vehicle and Rook fired. The pistol bucked in his hands, and the round tore into flesh in a spray of red, but Rook kept his gaze steady on the target, waiting for Rainer’s dead body to hit the ground.

The shape did not fall.

It wasn’t Rainer.

With a howl of primal rage, the wounded creature stepped into full view. It was a frankenstein.

Rook skidded to a stop, not twenty feet away. His bullet had nearly taken the thing’s arm off; it would die eventually from shock and blood loss, but its rage would sustain it long enough for it to do some real damage.

Rook steadied the pistol in both hands, and fired again…and again. Beside him, Queen had likewise stopped, and she was emptying her carbine into the thing’s chest. The frankenstein pitched backward.

Then another one appeared to take its place…

And another…

And another…

FIFTY-TWO

Bishop wasn’t normally given to making loud, emotionally-charged utterances. Most soldiers believed it was a good thing to vent some of their pent up rage with outbursts of colorful language, but Bishop knew that even a small crack could weaken a dam, and if the dam holding back his anger ever failed… Well, he didn’t like to think about what might happen. The safer course was to meet every surprise, every disappointment, every reversal of fortune, the same way: with silence.

Once in a while, though, he would make an exception.

“What the—”

He had been looking away, watching the tree line for enemy activity, and so he had missed Sasha and Parker disappearing into the rock wall. He almost missed King’s exit as well; he turned just in time to see King plunge into the stone face as if it were merely a curtain stretched over an opening in the wall. For a few seconds, he told himself that was exactly what he had seen, but when he approached the cliff and extended his hand, his fingers immediately encountered solid rock.

No, that wasn’t quite right. It didn’t feel solid exactly; more like stiff clay. He pressed harder and his fingers went in up to the first knuckle, but then stopped abruptly as if he’d hit something harder.

The substance was warm to the touch, almost uncomfortably so, and when he pulled his fingers free, he discovered that even that little bit of plasticity was gone from the rock; it had hardened once more into brittle chalky limestone.

“—fuck?”

He keyed his mic. “King, this is Bishop. Do you copy?”

Nothing.

He glimpsed movement from behind and whirled to find Knight jogging toward him, the enormous Barrett cradled in his arms. Knight’s normally serene visage was twisted with concern; he had overheard Bishop’s transmission, and the distinctive silence that had followed. “What’s wrong?”

Bishop just gaped at the cliff face, silent mode re-engaged, but only because he didn’t have the words to explain what he had just seen.

“Where’s King?”

Bishop pointed at the wall. “He just…walked through it.”

“Walked through it?”

The big man nodded. “Like a ghost or something.”

“A ghost.” Knight’s forehead creased. “Bishop, you sound like my grandmother.”

Bishop had no reply, but continued to probe the wall with his hands.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Knight came over to stand beside him. “So, is there a secret passage or something?”

The noise of gunfire — distant, but still close enough to warrant keeping their heads down — curtailed further discussion. Rook and Queen had engaged Rainer and his men. Knight opened the bipod legs for his Barrett and got down behind the weapon, ready to meet any threat that came their way, but Bishop went back to studying the rock. He felt a growing anxiety that had nothing to do with bringing down the rogue Delta operators.

King was inside the rock. There had to be a cave or a hidden tunnel entrance, but damned if he could find it. Had King gone in willingly? Was he in danger right now?

“Shit!”

Knight’s rare expletive brought Bishop back to the moment. He wheeled around and saw the reason for his teammate’s oath. Two figures — Queen and Rook — had broken from the cover of the pines and were bolting across the clearing toward them.

His concern deepened. It wasn’t like those two to run from anything.

A frankenstein appeared behind them.

Why hadn’t Rook dropped it with a couple of shots from his hand cannons?

Two more of the monstrosities emerged on the heels of the first, and the situation became clearer to Bishop.

There were two more behind those, and then more. Suddenly, the clearing was filled with the lumbering once-human things, moving so fast that Bishop couldn’t accurately count them — at least ten, maybe a dozen, maybe more than that.

Knight’s Barrett boomed, the muzzle brake throwing up a huge cloud of dirt as it vented the hot sulfurous gases that propelled a .50 BMG round with lethal accuracy into one of the monsters.

The sniper rifle thundered again, but without the same effect; the frankensteins were moving too fast for him to sight them in.

Queen and Rook were only a few seconds from reaching them, and their pursuers were just a few more.

“Knight! Let’s go!” Bishop shouted.

“Where?” Knight must have intended it to be a rhetorical question, because he didn’t look up from his grim but futile task.

A good question. King had gone into the rock, but they couldn’t follow…

There was another way. He remembered the door they had passed when moving up on Rainer and his men; a door that led straight into the cliff, and to some old cave beyond. If they could get inside, that door would become a kill zone where they could repel almost any attack, even from the prodigiously strong frankensteins.

There was no time to explain all of this to Knight, so he simply reached down and plucked the smaller man up and threw him over one shoulder. The abrupt action startled Knight, but instead of struggling, he clutched at the rifle.

“This way!” Bishop shouted as he started running along the base of the cliff. He didn’t look back to see if Queen and Rook were following.

The door seemed further away than he remembered — probably a trick of his battle-heightened perceptions.

Knight had stopped struggling against him almost immediately, but he didn’t speak until Bishop reached his goal. “Put me down,” he said calmly. “I’ll hold them off while you get the door open.”

Bishop complied without comment, letting his teammate slip to the ground. Queen and Rook reached them at almost the same moment. Four of the frankensteins were about a hundred feet behind them.

“Keep moving!” Queen was breathing so hard, she could barely get the words out.

Bishop shook his head. “We can make our stand here…inside.”

“You got the key big guy?” panted Rook.

Bishop raised one foot and slammed it against the door, just below the U-shaped handle. The door buckled, practically folding in half around his boot, as it swung inward, revealing the darkness beyond.

“I guess you could knock,” Rook said.

A piercing shriek filled the air as the cave’s intruder alarm activated.

“Or ring the bell.”

Bishop swept them all through the opening with one mighty arm; with his other hand, he fired his carbine into the approaching enemy. He didn’t wait to see if his shots had any effect. He whirled and plunged headlong into the cave behind his teammates.

A narrow passage lay just beyond the door, and Bishop was forced to squirm through the tight throat of stone. Then, without warning, he was birthed into a great black void.

The oppressive darkness lasted only a few seconds. One by one, the tactical flashlights mounted to their carbines flared to life. Rays of tightly focused brilliance stabbed through the still air without really illuminating anything, but Bishop got the sense of being in an enormous enclosure, as big as an aircraft hanger. The floor alternated between loose chips of rock and a smooth surface that looked almost polished, but riding above both was a narrow bridge of steel plate — part of the conservation effort designed to minimize impact on the cave. The sweep of the lights revealed other discrete details: pillars of limestone and other minerals that stretched from floor to ceiling; stalagmites that seemed to be erupting from the floor like milky white mushroom clouds. One of the lights revealed something else, something that at first glance appeared to be moving, but was in reality an image painted on one wall — a buffalo or bison that appeared almost to be running. The illusion was gone even before Bishop could register it; the lights were sweeping back the way they’d come, shining on the narrow slit leading to the doorway.

Something was moving there.

Rook fired his pistol. The entire cavern rang with the noise of the discharge, and the acrid smell of burnt gunpowder obliterated the earthy odor of ancient stone. The shape in the entry twitched grotesquely with the impact, but then the figure began moving forward once more.

Rook fired again, and this time the damage was unmistakable; the bullet cratered the frankenstein’s forehead.

Impossibly, it kept advancing.

Rook fired out the last of his magazine, but the monstrosity just seemed to absorb each hit as if it was impervious.

There was an ear-splitting report as Knight fired the Barrett straight into the thing’s chest, nearly tearing it in half. This time it went down permanently, as did the frankenstein right behind it. But even before the bodies hit the steel decking, a third creature rushed forward and lifted the fallen body, holding it between itself and the Chess Team like a shield.

Bishop realized now why the first frankenstein had seemed invincible; it had been dead all along, and its body had sheltered the advance of its brothers through the chokepoint of the cave entrance.

Rook and Knight hastened to reload, while Bishop and Queen kept up a withering barrage of fire from their carbines, but the invading force just shrugged off the damage as they poured unhindered through the gap.

FIFTY-THREE

The darkness surrounding King was becoming substantial. At first, he attributed this to some lingering vestige of claustrophobia, but as the air became viscous, like syrup clinging to his limbs, he realized that it was the literal truth. The strange effect that had opened this passageway into the Earth — science or magic, or maybe a little of both — was receding; the stone was returning to its solid state.

The realization triggered a surge of panic, and he started clawing his way forward, swimming as much as running. Abruptly, the resistance vanished. He stumbled forward, sprawling face down on hard stone.

What just happened?

He knew the answer. The rational part of his brain stodgily refused to embrace the reality of the experience, but what other explanation could there be?

Understanding the Voynich manuscript and securing the Prime had never been his highest priority, but he had been paying attention when Parker and Sasha had told their tale of medieval scientists discovering the secret source of life and using music to change the very nature of the physical world. If even a little bit of what they had told him was true…

I just walked through a solid rock wall!

There was a faint glow directly ahead, and King heard raised voices, conversing heatedly just a few yards in front of him.

“You have to let me do this,” Sasha urged.

“And you can,” Parker said. “Once Jack has secured the area.”

“And what if he can’t? What if Rainer kills him? Kills them all?”

Frowning, King got to his feet, and with his hands extended ahead, probing the darkness, he moved toward them. He could see their silhouettes now, lit by the glow of Sasha’s computer.

He brought his carbine around and switched on the attached light. The high-intensity LED bulb revealed a tunnel, cut and smoothed by the passage of some ancient subterranean river long since diverted, sloping gently downward, and standing partway down the slope were two human shapes.

Parker threw up a hand to shade his eyes, but Sasha seized on the moment to break free of his restraining hand. She charged ahead, deeper into the passage.

“Stop her, Danno!”

Parker was already moving. He caught her by the shoulder and spun her around. King could see the desperation in her eyes. She struggled in his grasp, her efforts becoming more frantic as King drew near.

“It’s right there,” she pleaded. “The Prime. I can fix everything, if you just let me go.”

“Sasha…”

King reached them. “Miss Therion, I’m sorry, but you have to come back with us.”

Sasha looked at him for a second, and then turned the full force of her gaze on Parker. She pointed ahead into the darkness. “The Prime is right there. It’s why we came here.”

King sensed that his friend’s resolve was starting to slip.

“Danny, please let me. My whole life has been leading up to this. Don’t let him stop me.” She reached out and placed her hand over his heart. “You promised to help me.”

Parker’s restraining hand fell away. With a sigh of resignation, he nodded down the tunnel. “Go.”

“Damn it, Danno.” King reached out to restrain her, but Sasha was already forging ahead, deeper into the darkness. He started after her, but then felt a hand pull him back.

“Let her go, Jack.” Parker’s voice sounded weary, defeated. King tried to pull free, but what had at first been only Parker’s token effort to forestall him abruptly became something more resolute. As he tried to wrench himself free, Parker yanked him back hard enough to spin him into the wall.

The impact stunned him, but not as much as the evident betrayal. Parker, too, seemed surprised by what he’d done; he took a step back and raised his hands. He knew he had crossed a line, and now he had to decide whether to retreat and do some damage control, or commit with both feet.

“I don’t have time for this shit, Danno.”

King started forward, but Parker moved to block his way. “Jack, just let her do this. It’s important to her.”

“The last time someone screwed around with this stuff, it killed half the world’s population, remember? You told me that. The Black Death? The Prime is dangerous.”

The flame of Parker’s resolve flickered, but then he shook his head. “That was different. Sasha knows what she’s doing. I have to let her try.”

“Well I don’t.”

King advanced again.

Parker, with arms akimbo, tried to block the passage, but King stepped to one side and lowered his head like a charging linebacker. He plowed into Parker, staggering him back, but even as he fell, Parker closed his arms around King, taking him to the ground in a bear hug.

Parker grunted from the impact, but instead of letting go, he wrapped his legs around King’s, hobbling him, and then he started grappling for a better position. King quickly recognized what was happening, but before he could do anything about it, Parker had rolled him over and slipped an arm around his neck.

King knew how to break free of such a hold, and Parker knew how to prevent him from doing so. For several seconds, they struggled without appearing to move more than a few inches at a time. They had fought each other often in training, and sometimes just for the hell of it; they knew each other’s best moves and Achilles’ Heels. Neither man could hold an advantage against the other long enough to achieve a decisive victory. Experience told King that exhaustion would be the decider, and that was something he couldn’t wait for.

He slammed his head back, driving the back of his skull into Parker’s face. There was a white flash of pain, accompanied by a ringing in his ears, but he also heard the crunch of bones smacking together.

Parker let go and scrambled back. “Shit, Jack.”

In the diffuse glow from King’s light, he saw Parker holding a hand to his mouth, and bright drops of blood seeping through his fingers. “Shit,” he repeated, the words distorted by the injury.

“You just can’t let go, can you?” Parker continued, the accusation pouring out in an accompanying fountain of blood. “No wonder you didn’t want me on your team.”

King shook his head, and winced as another wave of pain spiked through his head. “Danno, we can talk about this later, but right now, you need to get her back. The Prime is dangerous. Don’t let her mess around with it.”

“Damn it, Jack. Would you just fucking back off for once? You don’t have to be in control every God damned minute. It’s not like the world is going to end.”

A deep rumble shuddered through the cavern, throwing both men to the hard floor, and showering them with dust. The tremor lasted a few seconds, and when it stopped, King could hear the sound of the cavern walls groaning with the strain of holding up the earth.

The air was thick with falling dust, giving the beam of King’s light the illusion of solidity but reducing its effectiveness. He could just make out Parker, struggling to rise a few yards away.

Between them, stretching from one wall of the passage to the other, was a shadowy line that swallowed the light whole, and as he peered into it, King saw that it was getting wider. The tremor had opened a fissure in the cavern.

The earth rumbled again, and King’s side of the passage dropped six inches, with an accompanying shower of dust. Over the crushing of rock, other noises were audible, muffled but no less distinctive — the sound of gunfire.

“You were saying, Danno?”

FIFTY-FOUR

Twenty-five meters further down the tunnel, Sasha Therion had reached her destination. While King and Parker fought, she had pressed forward, using the laptop screen to light her way. She arrived at a small, unremarkable looking cavern.

She saw a few stalagmites, looking like deformed white mushrooms growing out of the floor, but the feature that immediately drew her attention was man-made. In the center of the chamber, someone had laid down a circle of stones, each about the size a man’s head. It looked like it might have served as a campfire ring, but instead of charcoal remnants, the entire circle — about six feet in diameter — was filled with soil, and poking up from the crumbly surface were the desiccated fibrous stalks of plants that had once grown here, in defiance of all the laws of nature.

This, she knew intuitively, was where Bacon and al-Tusi had conducted their experiments. This was the Prime — the place where life had begun — or as near to it as any human had ever come.

Not in this cave of course. When the spark of life had first caught, some three and a half billion years ago, the surface of the Earth had been a very different place. The land mass that would eventually become the continent of Europe would not be thrust up from the Earth’s mantle until hundreds of millions of years later. The calcium carbonate that comprised the limestone walls of the cave network itself was an accretion of organic material — the skeletons of aquatic life forms settling to the ocean floor and compressing into sedimentary rock — and so the cave itself could not have existed prior to the genesis of life on Earth. Life had not begun in this cave, nor had it necessarily begun in the physical space the cave now occupied, but there was nevertheless something important about this place, something that was not bound to the fickle whims of geology.

There were many places like it, places long known and revered by humans even before the rise of civilization — power spots, rivers of invisible Earth energy, ley lines, vortices. They were places where the laws of nature could sometimes be bent, if not broken altogether. On a day lost to time, so long ago that the span of years was incomprehensible to the human brain, those laws had been distorted in a very special way, at this particular place, and the tinder of life had become a wildfire.

Sasha stood above the ring of stones, one hand extended as if she might be able to feel the unique energy of the Prime.

Oddly enough, she could feel something…a tingling in her skin, like the vibration of a tuning fork. She closed her eyes and savored the moment.

She had, at long last, arrived at a solution, discovered the common factor that would enable her to simplify the impossibly complex variables of the human equation. She had found the Prime.

She sat cross-legged in front of the stone circle and set her laptop in front of her. As she opened the hinged screen, she realized that the strange vibration wasn’t coming from the Prime, at least not directly. It was coming from her computer, which was still streaming out the tonal frequency that had — in conjunction with the proximity of the Prime — made it possible for her to pass through solid matter. Now, the ground upon which she sat was starting to resonate to the same frequency, growing warm as the molecular bonds holding the stone in a solid state began to loosen.

She quickly closed the sound file, but at that very moment, an explosion ripped through the softened rock.

Fifty meters away and about ten meters above the Prime location, the Chess Team had forced their way into Chauvet Cave and were now fighting for their lives. As the frankensteins poured through the entry, Bishop fired a 40-millimeter high explosive grenade from the XM320 launcher attached to his carbine. It had been an act of pure desperation; Bishop had known that the grenade might trigger a cave-in, collapsing the entrance and sealing them inside, but he had judged that a preferable fate to being overrun by the frankensteins.

What he could not have known was that the floor beneath him had been undergoing a subtle transformation; the stone was softening, and in some places, it had turned completely into a molecular slurry. When the small grenade detonated, its explosive energy ripped into the weakened stone and shattered it.

A section of the ceiling right above Sasha was pulverized, raining a fine powdery grit down onto her. Beyond that impenetrable dust cloud, long black fissures were appearing in the limestone as the cavern started tearing itself apart.

Sasha’s sense of triumph was also on the verge of self-destruction. She huddled over the computer, taking shallow breaths to avoid inhaling too much of the choking dust, and fought back the rising tide of panic.

The solution, literally within her grasp, was about to be stolen away again, this time forever.

No. I won’t let that happen.

She opened her eyes. The air still felt thick, but she could see the computer screen, and that was all she needed. Putting her face close so she could see the keyboard, she began inputting the solution.

She had worked it all out during the days that she and Parker had been on the run. The Voynich manuscript had provided her with all the information she needed about the musical notes that had the greatest effect on the Prime, so it had been a simple thing to isolate the relevant frequencies.

“Sasha!”

Parker’s voice reached out through the gloom, but she ignored it. She didn’t need his help anymore, and she certainly didn’t need an unpredictable variable showing up now, not when she was so close to the solution.

“Sasha, are you there? Can you hear me?”

Go away.

She didn’t say it aloud at first, but when his inquiries became more urgent, she realized that her refusal to acknowledge him was making him more persistent, and might embolden him to interfere with what she was trying to do. “I’m fine, Danny.”

“Thank God.” The walls groaned again, releasing another small shower of dust. “Where are you? Keep talking so I can find you.”

“No. Don’t come any closer.”

“Why not? What’s wrong?”

“I found the Prime. I can fix everything, but you need to just leave me alone for a little while, okay?”

There was a long pause, and Sasha was just starting to believe that maybe he had complied with her request when he spoke again. “Sasha, what are you talking about?”

She sighed. His questions were making it hard for her to concentrate, hampering her efforts to enter the new frequencies. Why couldn’t he just go away?

“Sasha, what is it you are trying to fix?”

Exasperated, she smacked her palms against her thighs. “Everything! I’m trying to fix everything, okay? Does that answer your question?”

“And how are you going to do that?” He was speaking softly, but at the same time his voice was getting louder as he moved closer, trying to pinpoint her location in the near-total darkness. Maybe he couldn’t see the glow of the computer screen in all the dust. She decided not to answer any more of his questions.

“How is the Prime going to help you do that?” he continued. “Are you trying to come up with your own Elixir of Life? Something to heal everyone?”

“Ha!” It was out of her mouth before she could think to suppress it. She clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle any further outbursts, then she went back to typing. Almost done…

Parker must have heard her. “Something else then? Not a cure for disease, but maybe a new disease? A new Black Death? Is that what you want Sasha? You can tell me. I can understand why you might feel like you need to do that.”

His declaration surprised her. “Really?”

“Sure. I get it. Life sucks sometimes.”

“It’s the chaos I can’t stand. It was all just a big mistake.”

“What do you mean by ‘a mistake?’”

She realized that he was toying with her, trying to keep her talking so he could find her. She shook her head, trying to shut him out. She went back to work.

“Sasha, tell me more about the chaos? I need to know more if I’m going to help you fix it.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” she said, speaking slowly so as not to enter the wrong data.

“I might. You like things orderly, right? Precise? That’s why you’re a mathematician. You like solving equations. You like things that make sense.”

Maybe he does understand.

“And people… Well, people are unpredictable. And with everything you’ve been through, I think it’s perfectly understandable that you want to…you know, bring some order to the world. Let me help.”

“I don’t need your help,” she declared. She could hear his footsteps crunching through the grit on the floor.

“Of course you don’t. But I want to help. I want to be a part of it.” Sasha felt his presence beside her. He knelt next to her and peered at the screen. “What are you working on there? Are you going to use the Prime to create a new plague? Is that how you’re going to fix things?”

She looked over at him. His face was a mess of dust and blood, and he looked positively ghoulish in the diffuse glow of the computer screen, but there wasn’t even a hint of accusation or condemnation in his eyes.

“No,” she said finally. “The plague isn’t a solution. It’s just another variable; unpredictable like all living systems.”

“Go on.”

“Life was an accident, Danny. It was a mistake. A statistical impossibility that somehow happened anyway.”

“Some people would call that a miracle.”

She shook her head. “Not a miracle. Just something that happened; a random spark that caught fire and is destined to burn itself out.”

“I know it might seem bad sometimes, but it doesn’t have to be that way.”

“It doesn’t matter.” She felt no emotion now. No fear at what would happen, and strangely, no satisfaction. “Three and a half billion years, that’s how long the fire has been burning. We think we’re so important — the center of the universe, but the universe doesn’t even know we exist. Life is a plague, an infection that threatens the perfection of the universe. And it all started right here, with the Prime. But I know how to solve the equation.”

“How?”

She looked into his eyes. “Simple math. You subtract known values from the equation until nothing is left.”

His mouth formed the word: subtract.

“The Prime isn’t just this place, Danny. It’s the constant that makes all the variables possible. It’s fixed in all dimensions, time and space.”

“Then how are you going to…to solve it?”

“The Prime is only one factor. There is another; the frequency that made life possible. We’ll never know what caused it…the wind maybe? Cosmic rays? Who knows, but it was the catalyst. The frequency and the Prime combined to equal life. I can’t subtract the Prime from the equation, but I can nullify the frequency, and that will change one factor to zero.”

“Nullify?” He nodded slowly. “You’re going to create a phased wave to dampen the original one. And if, as you say, we are all linked through time and space to the Prime, eliminating one factor will pull the plug for us all. For all life on Earth.”

She gazed up at him, impressed by how quickly he had figured it out. “You’re very intelligent. I wish I’d met you sooner.”

He smiled and patted her on the shoulder. “I want to hear all about this, but first we need to get out of here, okay?”

“No need,” she said. She could feel it now, a tingling in her skin…an itch like pins and needles. “It’s already started.”

Parker jerked back as if he’d been stung. “Sasha, you’ve got to stop it. Turn it off now.”

She gazed back at him. “Turn it off? Why would I—”

Her voice caught in her throat as the itching sensation blossomed into a spike of pain — a baptism in liquid fire.

The agony was transcendent, but it lasted for only an instant. Then the calculation was complete, and Sasha Therion was no more.

FIFTY-FIVE

Bishop had called out, warning them of what he was about to do. It was madness to fire a grenade inside the cavern, even as vast as it was, but what choice was there? The frankensteins had taken the entrance and were massing for an assault that Chess Team would never be able to repel. No one answered, and evidently taking the silence as assent, he had leveled the launcher and fired.

Queen heard the hollow pop as the spherical package of high explosive shot down the tube. She curled into a defensive ball in anticipation of the chaos that would follow.

The grenade exploded right in front of one of the monstrosities. There was a dull thump and a cloud of acrid smoke, and then the shockwave hit.

Queen was well outside the grenade’s kill zone, but the energy of the blast slapped her to the ground and reverberated in her gut. She thought that was the worst of it, but then the ground beneath her fell.

She scrambled away from the crumbling floor, flinging her arms out in a desperate attempt to find a handhold, but everything she touched was moving, falling into the abyss that had opened beneath her.

Yet she was not falling.

She felt a strain in her right arm, the burden of her body weight suspended by that single appendage, and she realized that she must have snared something solid…but no, her fingers were curled into a fist around empty air.

“I’ve got you, babe!”

She couldn’t see the face of her savior, but there was no mistaking the voice. Rook had somehow managed to snare her wrist, and now he held her, dangling over the brink of the newly formed fissure.

With a mighty heave, he pulled her up. She felt the rough stone edge of the abyss scraping against her body, and then she was on solid ground again, collapsing on top of her rescuer.

She pushed him away. “If you ever call me ‘babe’ again,” she rasped. “I’ll cut your balls off.”

“Hey, slow down chica,” he replied smoothly. “We should get to know each other better before you try getting in my pants.”

With a growl, she snared his goatee in the darkness. She pulled him close, stopping just an inch from his face, causing him to suck in and hold a quick breath. If he puckered, their lips would touch.

“Keep dreaming, big guy.”

She let go of his beard, and he smiled broadly. “If I dream about you, I’m going to have more nocturnal—”

The rest of his quip was lost as a peal of thunder boomed through the cave, and both of them scrambled back from the edge of the fissure. Then the noise sounded again, and Queen realized that it was the report of Knight’s Barrett.

Squinting through the dust and smoke, she could make out pinpricks of light, marking the locations of Bishop and Knight respectively. Both men were firing across the cavern, over the yawning void of the fissure where at least five of the frankensteins were shaking off the effects of the grenade and preparing to move.

Queen breathed a curse, and raised her carbine. Bishop’s grenade had improved the odds a little, but it hadn’t been the equalizer they needed.

She played her light toward the fissure that had nearly claimed her. It was a good fifteen feet across, a ragged split in the limestone, sloping down almost vertically, with few handholds. An ordinary man would not have dared attempt to leap across the gap. Even an Olympic long jumper would have been daunted, but the frankensteins, fueled by steroids, and fearless, would be able to skip across it like girls playing hopscotch on a playground.

The expected charge however, did not come. Instead, the creatures moved out along the perimeter of the cavern, keeping to the shadows and staying low behind stalagmites for cover, heading for the narrow end of the crevasse.

“They’re trying to flank us,” she shouted, and the implications of that realization hit her like a slap. When the frankensteins crossed to their side of the cavern, the team would be trapped.

“They’re smart,” Rook remarked in a low voice. “Too smart. Like they’ve got some kind of hive mind.”

She had been thinking the same thing.

“Well, your highness, any bright ideas?”

“All for one,” she said, nodding toward Knight and Bishop. “We fall back as far as we can and form a defensive line. If they want us, they’re going to have to get through a wall of lead.”

FIFTY-SIX

A wail of disbelief escaped Parker’s lips as Sasha collapsed in front of the stone circle. He didn’t need to touch her or check for a pulse to know that her life force had been completely extinguished.

He wanted to reach out to her, to hug her empty shell to his chest and demand that the heavens give her back, but he knew that to do so would be to join her.

She had found her answer, a solution to the incomprehensible equation of life with all its unpredictable chaos. Even if his rational mind balked at the idea, he could not argue with what he now beheld — Sasha, dead in an instant.

As if to affirm the testimony of his eyes, he felt a strange tingling in his skin.

He took a step back in alarm. The sensation faded but only a little and only for a moment. Whatever Sasha had done, it was still happening…and it was spreading.

He saw her computer, discarded and all but forgotten beside her body, but still functional. A thing of metal and silicon, it was immune to the anti-life power she had unleashed, and it would sit there casting its ambient glow until the battery died, a process that might take an hour or two…long after everything else on the planet had ceased to exist.

He had to get to the computer, turn off that sound and undo what Sasha had done.

But if he failed, if he died trying, there would be no second chances for humanity.

He spoke into the microphone taped to his shirt collar. “Jack, are you there?”

There was a momentary pause, and then King’s voice, breathless, sounded in his ear. “I’m here, Danno.”

“I’m sorry, Jack. I should have trusted you.”

“Save it for later, buddy. I heard everything. You gave it your best try.”

“She did something to the Prime, Jack. Turned it against itself. I have to get to her computer to turn it off. You heard what she said. If I can’t stop this, everyone dies. Everywhere.”

“Then stop it. Do what needs to be done, Danno.”

“Listen to me, Jack. If this thing kills me before I can get clear, someone else is going to have to finish it. Do you understand?”

King was silent for few seconds then simply said: “Roger.”

“I’ll keep talking so you know what to do.” Parker took a deep breath. The tingling sensation was getting stronger even though he had yet to take a step. “If I stop talking, you’ll know what it means.”

He lurched forward and instantly the itch became a fire burning on his skin, deepening into his muscles. One step forward, two… Despite his promise to keep communicating, the words were stolen away.

Another step…

He stood over Sasha’s corpse, reached past her… The pain was deep inside him now, but his extremities felt numb and cold. He stretched out his hand, closed his fingers over the hard plastic of the laptop. He couldn’t tell for sure if he was gripping it; his fingers had no sensation whatsoever, but through the haze, he could see the screen moving between his outstretched arms.

With what felt like the last of his strength, he staggered back down the passage, away from the Prime. Each step brought a measure of relief from the pain, but the coldness remained in his extremities.

“Jack, I have the computer.”

He thought he heard his friend say something, “Thank God,” perhaps, but he couldn’t be sure. Something was happening to his hearing, to all his senses.

He peered through the fog now clouding his vision and stared at the computer screen. A sound file was playing from the virtual urghan, playing a single note in an endless loop. Below the graphical representation of the wave, he saw numbers: 7.83.

That’s it, he realized. The frequency of life—7.83 Hz.

“It’s the Schumann Resonance!”

He couldn’t tell if King responded, so he kept talking.

“It’s a constant waveform produced by the friction of the Earth’s surface rotating beneath the ionosphere. You can’t hear it — it’s below the audible range for human hearing, but it’s everywhere, all the time, and has been for billions of years. Some scientists called it the ‘Earth’s heartbeat.’”

Like a beating heart, Sasha had stopped it with something akin to defibrillation. It was a simple matter of wave dynamics; when two oppositely phased waves of the same frequency met, they cancelled each other out completely. It was the same principle used in sound-dampening headphones.

That was what Sasha had done; she had dampened the frequency of life, and plunged the Prime into deathly silence.

He tapped a few keys and shut down the waveform, trying to explain what he was doing to King, and wondering if it would make the difference.

The sudden flare of pain in his muscles told him it hadn’t.

“It’s not working,” he rasped, and then he realized why. Sasha had stopped the beating heart of the Earth. It wasn’t enough to stop the phased wave; he needed to start the heartbeat again.

His fingers fumbled uncertainly on the keyboard, making the adjustments that would play the Schumann Resonance again. A sine wave began oscillating across the screen, but that was the only change.

“It’s not working. I think it needs to be closer to the Prime.” He wasn’t sure if the words were even coming out or if he was just imagining them. “There’s a ring of stones… I think that’s the marker. I’m going to try to put it there. You’ll know if it works because we’ll all still be here.

Gritting his teeth, he lurched forward, straight into the eye of the storm.

FIFTY-SEVEN

King heard every word.

When the fissure had first opened, separating him from Parker, he had lingered there, wondering if he should try jumping across. Before he could make the attempt, he heard Parker’s voice in his headset, and he knew that whatever else had happened between them, his friend was still trying to do the right thing.

Confident that Parker was doing everything possible to coax Sasha away from the brink of madness, King turned his attention to what seemed like a much more immediate concern. The report of gunfire drifting down into the crevasse painted an incomplete picture, but it was enough for him to realize that the effort to capture or kill Rainer had taken an unexpected, and evidently dire, turn. Somewhere up above him, his teammates were fighting for their lives.

He played his light on the walls of the crevasse. It was almost vertical, but the break was irregular, with nubs of stone sticking out everywhere. What he could not see was the top; there was no telling how high he would have to climb.

He was just getting started on the ascent when he heard a crackle of squelch in his ear, followed by Parker’s voice.

“A new Black Death? Is that what you want Sasha? You can tell me. I can understand why you might feel that’s necessary.”

What the hell?

Parker had opened the channel intentionally so that King would know what was happening. King didn’t understand half of what was said, but he could quickly discern two things: Sasha Therion was bat-shit crazy, and Parker was doing his damnedest to rein her in.

King listened intently but kept his focus on the task at hand, moving slowly, methodically, patiently up the wall. The noise of fighting grew louder, and King realized that the crevasse did not lead outside, but rather connected with another cave where the battle was taking place. The good news was that the climb would be over soon.

The bad news was that he had no idea what he was about to step in.

When he reached the top, he kept his head down for a moment, wary of not getting caught in a crossfire. Off to his left, on the far side of the fissure, the team had just opened fire on a horde of the malformed creatures that were swarming toward them. Over the cacophony, King heard something else; a voice…a familiar voice…

Rainer’s voice.

“Hold your position. Stay behind cover. Let them burn through their ammo.”

Who’s he talking to?

At that moment, Parker’s voice sounded in his ear. “Jack, are you there?”

He didn’t respond right away. If he was close enough to hear Rainer speaking, then he was close enough to be overheard. He lowered himself down below the edge of the crevasse and whispered. “I’m here, Danno.”

“I’m sorry, Jack. I should have trusted you.”

King’s mind sifted through what he had overheard. He recalled Sasha saying something about chaos and how life was a mistake, and the realization had chilled him. What had she done? “Save it for later, buddy. I heard everything. You gave it your best try.”

“She did something to the Prime, Jack. Turned it against itself. I have to get to her computer to turn it off.”

King heard Rainer’s voice again, almost simultaneous with Parker’s. “Now, advance. Stay in a single file line. Continue to use the dead for cover.”

Rainer was talking to the frankensteins through a radio headset just like the one Chess Team used. Not merely talking to them, but directing their movements, guiding them strategically, the way a chess player might maneuver pawns on the game board.

“You heard what she said,” Parker continued. “If I can’t stop this, everyone dies. Everywhere.”

King heard, and on some level he understood what his friend was telling him, but there was nothing he could do to help. “Then stop it,” he said. “Do what needs to be done, Danno.”

“Listen to me, Jack. If this thing kills me before I can get clear, someone else is going to have to finish it. Do you understand?”

Parker’s appeal stopped him cold. What was happening down there?

He shook his head. There was nobody better suited to dealing with whatever it was that was happening at the Prime than Daniel Parker. “Roger.”

He pulled himself up again, peeking over the edge quickly to locate Rainer. He found his former CO, illuminated by indirect light from some kind of electronic device — a GPS unit or a PDA. Rainer’s eyes were fixed on the scene playing out beyond the fissure, where his remaining force of four frankensteins were preparing to overrun Chess Team.

As stealthily as possible, King levered himself up onto the floor of the cave, never taking his eyes off Rainer. He brought his carbine up, but in the darkness, he couldn’t get a good shot. He abandoned the effort, and in a smooth motion, he sprang to his feet and charged.

Rainer must have heard the ground crunching underfoot or sensed movement in the air, for at the last instant he swung around to face King. There was confusion in his eyes, as if he still didn’t comprehend what was happening, but as King slammed into him, he threw up a defensive arm that somehow struck King in jaw. Then, in a tangle of limbs, both men went down.

The PDA flew out of Rainer’s hand, shattering against the floor, its light instantly extinguished, but neither man noticed. King tried to get his hands around Rainer’s throat, but a fierce punch rocked him back and sent stars shooting across his vision. As he tried to shrug off the blow, Rainer squirmed from beneath him, and launched a flurry of blows — fists and elbows — most of which missed completely or glanced off King’s gear. A few however found their mark, and King’s head rang with the impacts.

He lowered his head to his chest, trying to make himself less of a target and clutched at Rainer. His fingers tangled in the other man’s shirt, then managed to snare one of the flailing arms. He tried to twist it around, but Rainer was not so easily subdued. The rogue Delta officer did not try to wrestle free of the hold, but spun around in the direction King was trying to turn him, and drove his body back into King’s chest, slamming him into the cave wall.

The breath was driven from King’s lungs, and his arms flopped uselessly to his sides, his nerves buzzing. Rainer whirled and drove a fist into his gut. King doubled over, partly from the piston-like force of the blow, and partly in a desperate attempt to trap his foe’s arm, but Rainer had already pulled free. With a savage growl, he gripped King’s shoulders and heaved him to the floor, descending on top of him with another crushing impact.

King felt a stab of pain in both biceps as Rainer straddled his chest and drove his knees down onto King’s arms, pinning him. Then, Rainer’s hands closed around his throat, and a darkness that had nothing to do with the absence of light began to close over King.

Rainer leaned forward, close enough that King could feel the man’s breath on his face. “Jack. I’ll be damned. You threw me a party. Used that little bitch as bait to draw me out. I’m impressed.”

King would have spit a curse in the man’s face, but the breath to do so had been driven from him and the choking hands kept him from drawing another. He struggled to free himself, to get even a moment’s respite, but Rainer’s position was unassailable. King felt his limbs start to tingle from oxygen starvation, growing cold and numb.

Then, as if in answer to a prayer he had not even thought to utter, Rainer’s grip went slack. He moved his hands away from King’s throat and held them up, flexing them before his face.

“What the hell?”

The rush of oxygen brought King back from the brink of despair. His arms were still tingling…no, not just his arms… Every square inch of his body was pins and needles, and the sensation was deepening, becoming a painful itch.

Through the fog in his head, he heard Parker speaking, and realized that what he was now experiencing had nothing at all to do with the beating he’d received. Rainer was feeling it too.

Whatever Sasha had done to the Prime was spreading, growing in intensity.

“There’s a ring of stones… I think that’s the marker.” Parker was saying. “I’m going to try to put it there. You’ll know if it works because we’ll all still be here.”

A low wail of pain came over the radio, grunts of exertion and agony, and then an abrupt silence.

Danno!

King heaved against Rainer. Distracted by the strange pain that was creeping over his extremities, the other man was slow to react, while King’s grief and rage opened a vein of untapped strength. He got one of his arms free and wrapped it around Rainer’s waist, and in the same motion drove his feet against the cave floor.

Locked together, they rolled once, twice…and then suddenly there was no ground beneath them, and they plunged into the void.

FIFTY-EIGHT

King had accomplished one of his objectives in the first moments of his struggle with Rainer. The destruction of the PDA had not only severed the link between the frankensteins and their leader, but it had also deprived them of their collective intelligence. Now, instead of four creatures working with a single mind, they were four wild beasts.

In every other way, they remained just as dangerous as before.

With a howl, they broke from cover and charged.

Knight felled one with a cannon-loud blast from the Barrett.

The other three continued, undaunted.

Rook leveled his Desert Eagle at the nearest target and squeezed the trigger again and again. The Action Express rounds hit with such energy that the frankenstein seemed to come apart before his very eyes.

The remaining two kept advancing.

With a bestial roar of his own, Bishop leapt forward and met the charge head on. He towered a full head taller than the monstrosity he faced, but the frankenstein did not show the slightest awareness of the fact. Its eyes locked onto Bishop, and it stretched its arms out to him, looking in that moment exactly like the iconic Hollywood character that had inspired its nickname.

As the two men met — one driven by steroids and inhuman surgical alteration, the other fueled by an almost incomprehensible primal rage — the frankenstein tried to seize hold of Bishop’s arms, perhaps intending to rip them from their sockets, but Bishop was too quick. Instead of drawing back to avoid the reaching arms, he stepped in close and hugged the thing’s face to his chest.

There was a sickening crunch and a wet tearing noise, as Bishop twisted its head completely around.

Only a few seconds had passed since the frankensteins began their final attack, and for those few seconds, Queen had felt completely useless. While she had stood by waiting for something to do, her teammates had seized the day and destroyed the enemy.

Not completely destroyed, though. One frankenstein remained. It had dodged Rook’s bullets and slipped past Bishop, even as the big man had torn its brother’s head off.

Knight brought the Barrett up, bracing it against his hip and firing point blank. The round punched a fist-sized hole clear through the creature’s abdomen. The frankenstein staggered back a step, but before Knight could fire again, it started forward, seizing the barrel of the rifle. There was an audible hiss as the thing’s skin blistered against the hot metal, but the frankenstein ignored the pain and pulled the gun, along with an unbalanced Knight, forward into its reach. The wounded beast seized Knight’s arms, stretching them out like a child preparing to rip the wings off a captured fly.

Queen ran at the creature, pummeling it with the butt of her carbine, but she was disdainfully swatted away. She sprang up, desperate to do something…anything…that might keep Knight alive long enough for one of the others to come to the rescue, but she’d lost her carbine in the fall. She groped for the knife sheathed to her combat vest, but her hand found something else instead, a hard cylindrical object.

Yes!

Knight’s cry of pain galvanized her. She leaped onto the frankenstein’s back, wrapping her right arm around its head as Bishop had done, and clawed the fingers of her free hand into its eyes.

Though virtually immune to pain, the frankenstein reacted instinctively to the threat to its eyesight. It let go of Knight and reached up to defend against this new attack. Queen dug deeper, driving a finger between the orb and the eye socket, eliciting a howl of rage.

That howl was just what she had been hoping for.

“Cover up!” she shouted.

She dropped her left hand, using it to hold herself in place, and then jammed the object she’d been holding with her right hand into the thing’s open mouth.

With a sharp hiss, the M14 incendiary grenade ignited and transformed the frankenstein’s head into a miniature sun.

She threw herself back, scrambling to put some distance between herself and the bloom of white hot fire. Shading her eyes, she circled around to check on Knight.

He had heeded her advice and gotten well clear of the creature before the grenade had ignited, but even though he was several meters away from the blazing pyre of flesh, he was rubbing at his skin.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” He managed a wan smile as he looked up at her. “Weird thing though; I’ve got pins and needles all over.”

That was when Queen realized that she did too.

FIFTY-NINE

Two things saved King’s life.

The first was the shape of the fissure. The rift narrowed with depth, coming together at a seam so tight that a piece of paper could not have slipped into it. As he and Rainer fell, still locked together in combat, the shrinking gap between the walls caught them like friction brakes, slowing and ultimately halting their downward plunge.

The second factor that had made the difference between life and death was Kevin Rainer. Positioned as he was beneath King, Rainer’s body cushioned the eventual impact just enough to spare King from serious harm. King was bruised, battered and bloody, but none of his injuries were life-threatening.

The same could not be said for Rainer; King’s body drove into him like a hammer, forcing him deeper into the fissure than seemed possible, leaving him sandwiched between slabs of limestone about three inches apart. The pressure crushed the man’s ribcage, driving nails of bone through his lungs and into his vital organs.

King felt the walls pressing in on either side of him as well, and he started to panic. He was afraid to move, fearful that doing so might cause him to slide deeper into the crevasse, to a place where it would be impossible for him to get free. Then he felt the tingling in his skin, and he knew that being trapped in stone was the least of his worries.

His awareness of what was at stake did not make his task any easier, but Rainer’s body was a stable platform from which to begin clawing his way out of the abyss. With each inch he climbed, the press of stone against his chest diminished.

There was light now, bright but indirect, pouring down from high above to reveal his destination: the dark passage that led to the Prime.

Parker’s words came back to him.

If I can’t stop this, everyone dies.

Parker hadn’t been able to stop it, though.

King’s skin was burning, and the tingling was sinking deeper into his limbs. He wondered how much worse it would get before the end.

Pulling himself up into the tunnel was like sticking his head in a furnace, only in this case, the fire was inside him. He gritted his teeth against the pain and forced himself to move forward.

His brief respite from the darkness ended when he started down the passage, but there was a faint glow ahead, and he fought through the blossoming agony toward the beacon.

It was a computer — Sasha’s laptop. He saw that much from a distance, but it was only when he got closer that he saw Parker’s body crumpled in front of it.

There’s a ring of stones, Parker had said. I think that’s the marker. I’m going to try to put it there.

Further down the tunnel, King saw another body — Sasha’s — lying prone in front of the stone circle. It was tantalizingly close; Parker had fallen just a few steps from the Prime.

If this thing kills me before I can get clear, someone else is going to have to finish it. Do you understand?

He understood.

King reached for the computer, but even as his fingers closed on the hard plastic, his legs simply gave out.

No, damn it!

He planted his elbows on the hard stone and pulled himself forward, one ahead of the other, over and over again, until he reached Sasha’s lifeless form. The stone circle was just beyond her, but he could go no further.

With what he thought was surely the last of his strength, he flung the laptop toward the stone ring that marked the location of the Prime, and then collapsed in pain. His body curled up, feeling ready to implode, but then, as though he was suddenly touched by the divine, his pain faded. Still wary, he sat up.

The cave was silent.

His body felt untouched by the destructive force that took Sasha’s and Parker’s lives.

The world — he noted with a hint of surprise — had not come to an end.