The Bone Labyrinth

17

Kowalski lay perfectly still in his bedroll. He had awakened a few moments ago to find his arm pinned under the bulk of the gorilla. Baako snored gently, curled into a ball with his head nestled in the crook of Kowalski’s arm. Maria slept on Baako’s other side, spooning the little guy from within her sleeping bag. One of her arms was draped over the gorilla’s shoulders with her fingertips resting on Kowalski’s cheek.

He feared waking them, knowing the horrible day that awaited them both. Though he didn’t know the time, he suspected it was early morning. According to Major General Lau’s timetable, someone would soon be collecting Baako for his operation. Kowalski pictured the tortured chimpanzee, trussed up with its brain exposed and wired to monitoring devices.

Fuckin’ bastards…

He stared at the small face on his arm, noting the tiny twitches of Baako’s eyes as he dreamed. Past the gorilla’s shoulders, Maria breathed evenly and deeply, her lips slightly parted. Slumber relaxed her features, making her appear even younger. He found himself fixated on the length of her eyelashes.

His heart ached to keep them safe, but all he could do for now was let them sleep, to have this final moment of peace together… if only for a little longer.

He extended his gaze beyond the cage to the row of cameras positioned along the ceiling. He followed them back to the large steel doors at the other end of the cellblock. A crimson sign glowed from the shadows back there. He squinted at those letters.

Though he didn’t read Chinese, he was certain they were the same characters he’d seen back at the vivisection lab, hanging above the curve of windows that overlooked the habitat of the gorilla hybrids. Yesterday, as he had eyed those lumbering beasts, he had spotted a steel door at the ground level of their pen, sealed off by a cage of thick bars.

That’s gotta be the same door.

He studied the pens that made up this cellblock. He now understood the heavy gouges in the concrete, the thick manacles hanging from the walls.

They must do tests on those creatures here.

He remembered the tallest of the bunch, the gorilla with a broad back of silver fur, how easily it had tossed that bloody arm up at them, fury glowing in those eyes and reverberating from its howl. The beasts might be naturally savage, genetically prone to hostility and aggression, but Kowalski was certain of one other detail about them.

They’re damned pissed at their makers.

And probably for a good reason.

As if sensing his thoughts, an exceptionally loud roar burst from back there, ululating up into a piercing scream.

Maria’s body jerked at the noise, her eyelids popping open, her face wrenching with fear as her brain fought to catch up. Baako responded in kind, balling tighter for a clenched moment, then exploding to his feet in a low, wary crouch. He chuffed his anxiety, his gaze sweeping everywhere at once.

“It’s all right,” Kowalski told them both.

Yeah, it was a lie, but what the hell else was he going to say?

Maria took several shaky breaths, then sat up and placed a hand on Baako’s hip. “Calm down,” she cooed to him. “I’m here.”

Baako hooted once, then lowered to his haunches. With his large brown eyes fixed on the steel door, he hugged one arm nervously around his hairy knees and reached back for Maria.

She took his hand and pulled him closer.

Kowalski used this moment to wiggle out of his bedroll and slowly climbed to his feet, stretching kinks out of every muscle in his body.

“What time is it?” Maria asked.

He shrugged. “Morning, that’s all I know.”

She licked her lips and looked to the other side of the cellblock, to the double set of doors that opened out into the rest of the subterranean facility. Though she didn’t say a word, he read the worry shining from her face. She pulled Baako more firmly to her side, as if by sheer will alone she could keep him from harm.

Baako shivered under her arm, clearly sensing her tension and fear.

She turned to Kowalski. “What are we going to do?”

“You’re going to cooperate,” Kowalski answered her bluntly, seeing no reason to sugarcoat the situation. “Any other course will only get you killed, and Baako will still end up under the knife. At least with you alive, you can be there for him — even if worse comes to worst.”

His words did nothing to dim that shine of dismay in her eyes. And he didn’t expect they would. He spoke more for the benefit of those who might be watching and eavesdropping on their cell.

Let them think we’re going to play ball.

He shifted his back to the cameras and lifted one hand. He wanted to offer Maria a measure of hope, though it was admittedly a thin one. He formed three letters with his fingers.

[GPS]

A deep crinkle formed between her brows as she tried to understand. He knew she must have wondered what had happened to Baako’s wristband with the GPS unit embedded in it. He had kept quiet about its fate until now, fearing any hint might expose his actions yesterday.

He glanced over to the cold pile of dung in the corner of the cell. He was glad the maid service in this place was so lax, not that the Chinese would have discovered anything in that pile except for some ground-up bits of rubber.

Yesterday, while he and Baako had eaten — or mostly pretended to — Kowalski had had the gorilla bite apart the band, enough so that Kowalski could peel out the GPS unit. The electronic device was barely the size of penny. Once it was removed, Kowalski had Baako hide the excess bits of chewed-up rubber in his dung. Afterward, Kowalski had secretly planted the device in a place where it had the best chance of being ferried up to the surface, where hopefully the unit’s signal would be detected again.

He touched the bandage still taped to his face. He pictured Baako’s faux attack, remembering his own fumbling flight from the cage, how he had bobbled into the guard who had opened the door to let him out. With the guard focused on the angry gorilla, it had been easy to slip the GPS unit into the pocket of the man’s uniform. With luck, the guard would exit this place when he got off duty, returning aboveground. If anyone was still monitoring that tracker, it would lead them to that man — and hopefully to this place.

Kowalski kept his hand shielded by his body and formed three more letters with his fingers, naming that guard.

[GAO]

Kat spoke rapidly, her voice rushed with excitement and urgency. “We just picked up a ping off the tracking band.”

“Where?” Monk asked.

“I’m sending you the location and real-time plotting of its path right now.”

As Monk waited, he looked out the window of the hotel, which was located less than half a mile east of the Beijing Zoo. He had requested a room on the highest floor, which afforded him a view all the way to the spire of the aquarium and the zoo’s northern gate. Over the past night, he and Kimberly had taken shifts to monitor the military presence over there, watching with binoculars for any significant change in troop movements.

Overhearing the phone conversation now, Kimberly pulled on her jacket. A moment ago, she had been speaking to her husband back in Virginia, her voice turning warmer, a soft smile playing about her lips. Monk could tell when the woman’s three-year-old daughter was put on the phone. Kimberly’s words became even sweeter, higher-pitched. Monk had two daughters of his own and easily recognized that mix of worry and love.

“You should have the information now,” Kat said.

Kimberly joined him, looking over his shoulder at the phone’s screen. A small glowing blue dot marked the first reappearance of the tracker’s signal, and a dotted line continued in a path across a map of Beijing.

“That’s odd,” Kimberly murmured.

Monk glanced to her.

“That first ping is about a mile southeast of the zoo.” She swung around and opened her laptop. Her fingers danced across the keypad, bringing up satellite maps and various data windows. Finally she made a small, disgruntled sound.

“What is it?” Monk asked.

“That location is a former restaurant. It was shuttered back in 2012 and never reopened.” She closed her laptop and pointed to the door. “Let’s grab our gear and go.”

He understood her haste as another blue dash slowly extended the trail across the city map. They had to reach that path before the signal vanished again.

Monk grabbed his pack and joined Kimberly at the door. They hurried to the elevator and dropped down to the lobby. Once in a taxi, Kimberly offered her assessment.

“For the signal to have reappeared so far away from the zoo, I wager that restaurant must be the site of one of the entrances that leads down to the Dìxià Chéng, the Underground City.”

Monk remembered her telling him about the old warren of cold-war-era bomb shelters that extended for almost a hundred square miles beneath Beijing, connecting most of the major city sites.

“So you’re thinking they’ve moved Kowalski and Maria through those tunnels?”

“It only makes sense. In the past, the Chinese army often used those tunnels to hide their troop movements. Back in 1989, the army transferred soldiers through those same passageways during the Tiananmen Square crackdown, to hide their maneuvers from the rest of the world.”

“And I imagine those same passageways could be used to transport construction equipment just as readily, allowing the Chinese to construct new underground facilities without the world growing any wiser.”

“It wouldn’t be hard to pull off. Some of those tunnels are said to be as wide as four-lane highways, large enough to accommodate tank battalions.”

As the taxi turned a corner, Monk monitored their progress. “We’re just a quarter mile away.”

Kimberly leaned forward and spoke rapidly to the taxi driver in Mandarin, pointing where they wanted to go. She then settled back to her seat.

“Looks like we’re headed toward a residential district,” she said. “One of the old hutong neighborhoods.”

“Hutong?”

“They’re neighborhoods made up of narrow streets and alleys, formed by a maze of interconnecting siheyuan, the traditional Chinese courtyard homes. I’ve ordered our driver to get us as close as possible. Then we’ll have to continue on foot.”

Monk frowned. “Why would they be moving Kowalski and Maria through such a residential area, especially if Baako was still with them?”

“I don’t know. But it’s a concern.” She turned and eyed Monk up and down. “As is your appearance in such a neighborhood.”

He nodded. I won’t exactly blend in there.

“Hang on.” Kimberly shifted around and began pulling items from her backpack. She passed him a ball cap with Chinese characters embroidered on it, a pair of dark sunglasses, and a blue paper surgical mask. “Put these on.”

Monk fingered the mask. He had seen many locals wearing them as protection against the ubiquitous air pollution in Beijing. The cap, sunglasses, and mask would do a fair job of hiding his features, especially if he kept his head down.

As he tugged the ball cap over his bald scalp, Kimberly barked again to the driver and pointed to the next intersection.

Looks like this is where we get off.

Kimberly offered Monk one last bit of advice. “Let me do all the talking from here. These neighborhoods are notoriously insular and wary of strangers, especially foreigners.”

The taxi stopped at the curb. Kimberly paid the driver in cash, and they both climbed out. Monk took in his surroundings. Across the street spread a typical commercial area of Beijing, with tall hotels surrounding a large pedestrian shopping center.

Kimberly led Monk in the opposite direction, into an alley lined by brick walls. It was so narrow the two of them could barely walk shoulder to shoulder. Within steps, it felt like he had left the modern world behind and entered a sliver of Beijing’s past. The outermost layer seemed to be made up of tiny shops, selling tobacco goods, antiques, or brightly colored candy. The next layer felt more personal, as communal teahouses took over the storefronts and the scent of burning incense rose from a small neighborhood temple.

“A little farther,” Kimberly whispered under her breath after glancing surreptitiously at his phone’s map.

As they moved into the heart of the hutong, Monk caught occasional glimpses into the residences’ courtyards, spotting small gardens, overloaded clotheslines, and a number of pigeon coops.

Shadowing his phone with a palm, Monk noted that the signal had rounded a corner ahead and was now coming toward their position. He showed the screen to Kimberly.

She searched around and tugged him into a small art shop. It was barely large enough for the two of them. They had to squeeze between racks of calligraphy brushes, stacks of paper, inkwells, and stamping stones. The proprietor — a small wizened woman who could be anywhere from sixty to a hundred years old — smiled, showing only gums.

Kimberly spoke softly to the old woman, her tone deeply respectful. With his back slightly turned from them, Monk concentrated on his phone, watching both the screen and the open doorway.

Finally, the moving blue dot reached their position — and passed. At the same time, a tall figure wearing a PLA uniform strode across the storefront and continued down the alleyway.

Monk waited several breaths, watching for any other soldiers or some sign of an armed escort covertly leading Kowalski and Maria through this neighborhood. The only others who appeared were a chattering line of small kindergarten-aged children, likely heading to school.

Monk glanced back to Kimberly and motioned for her to follow him. He exited the shop, hearing Kimberly offer parting words to the proprietor in apologetic tones. Back in the narrow street, Monk nodded toward the soldier as the man turned the next corner.

“Signal’s coming from that guy,” Monk whispered as they trailed behind the children.

Kimberly searched behind her, then back to the next corner. “What do you think?”

He knew her concern.

This could be a trap.

Someone could have found that tracking device and was using the soldier as a decoy to lure anyone who might be monitoring its signal.

Like us.

Monk weighed the risks as he followed their target. The smart move would be to pull back and reassess the situation, but after nearly a day of wringing his hands and waiting, impatience trumped caution. He knew that the best chance of rescuing the others was during the first twenty-four hours. The dead student found in the meadow of the Yerkes Primate Center was testament to the ruthlessness of those running this operation.

For all I know, that soldier could be the one who shot the young man.

“Well?” Kimberly asked.

Monk increased his pace, knowing there was only one way of truly getting any answers.

“Let’s take him down.”

Maria tensed as the double doors at the end of the hall banged open. She gained her feet, stepping between Baako and the cage door. A forklift appeared, carrying the same crate used to transport Baako yesterday.

“Looks like our time’s run out,” Kowalski mumbled, his face dark with anger.

A four-man team of soldiers accompanied the forklift. They all carried rifles, but one held an electric cattle prod.

Baako pushed against Maria’s side, cowering at her thigh, clearly remembering that crate and the pain of those fiery shocks. He reached an arm to Kowalski, silently asking for protection.

Kowalski took Baako’s hand and faced the group that came forward.

As the forklift drew abreast of their pen, another soldier hopped out of the cab. He called an order to the driver, who lowered the crate toward the ground. Maria recognized Chang Sun, dressed in a crisp uniform, his black hair slick and wet as if freshly showered. She was surprised to see the man instead of his younger brother, Gao. From the man’s scowl and stiff back, he was clearly irritated at being assigned the menial task of fetching Baako.

He waved a guard to unlock the cage and barked to the one holding the cattle prod. Both soldiers snapped to obey. The cage door was quickly opened, while rifles bristled toward them and sparks spat from the end of the electric prod.

By now Baako was quaking all over. Kowalski winced, glancing down to his hand, which was being crushed within Baako’s frightened grip. Still, the man didn’t let go. Instead, he stepped forward and confronted Chang.

“You’re not putting him in that crate again,” Kowalski said. “He stays with us.”

Chang’s scowl deepened.

Maria stepped forward and supported Kowalski’s position. “If Baako’s undergoing surgery this morning, getting him too stressed could have adverse consequences. I’m sure Major General Lau wouldn’t—”

Chang cut her off, yanking out a large pistol holstered at his waist. Maria immediately realized her mistake. She shouldn’t have mentioned Lau, remembering the friction she’d witnessed between the two officers. She also recognized the weapon in Chang’s grip. It was a tranquilizer gun.

Kowalski lifted his free hand, ready to press their case. But before he could speak, Chang aimed his pistol — and fired.

The feathered dart shot between her and Kowalski and struck Baako in the shoulder. He yelped and swatted at it, knocking the needle free. But it had already delivered its dose. Hooting in fear, Baako let go of Kowalski’s hand and retreated toward the back of the pen.

Maria went after him.

Kowalski followed at her heels, swearing sharply.

She dropped to her knees as Baako huddled in the corner. He balled up tightly, his dark eyes wide and shiny with panic. She scooped him to her chest, cradling him.

Kowalski joined her. “It’s okay, little guy.”

Baako turned to the man. With shaking limbs, Baako lifted his fists, tapping the knuckles and swirling them slightly.

[Together]

“I’m not leaving you,” Kowalski promised. “We’re a team.”

“That’s right,” Maria said, not sure how much Baako understood, but infusing as much reassurance into her voice as possible.

Baako’s gaze swung between the two of them, his eyes already glazing over as the sedative began to take effect. From the rapid response, she imagined the dart had contained M99, a potent tranquilizer commonly used on zoo animals.

As Baako began to slump, he unfolded his fists and formed an OK sign with his fingers before he then swept his hands out into a new sign. His gaze wavered between her and Kowalski. Even weakly delivered, she recognized that faltering sign.

She caught Kowalski’s eye, seeing that he also understood.

Baako was correcting the man’s earlier words. Instead of We’re a team, Baako signed We’re a family.

“You got that right, little guy,” Kowalski said firmly.

As if knowing his message was understood, Baako’s head fell back, and his limbs dropped heavily to the cold concrete.

Footsteps approached behind them.

Maria glanced over her shoulder to find Chang standing there.

“He’s calm now,” he said with a slight sneer of disdain. “No stress.”

Kowalski lunged to his feet, about to tackle the officer. But Chang held his ground and swung the dart gun toward the big man’s chest. Maria grabbed Kowalski’s forearm, urging him to restrain himself. M99 was highly lethal to humans; even a couple drops could kill almost instantly.

Kowalski continued to glare, but he settled more heavily to his heels.

Chang’s gaze turned to Maria. “You will come with us.” The dart gun poked toward Kowalski. “He will stay here.”

“No way,” Kowalski warned darkly.

Maria took his wrist, knowing this was not a battle they could win. “It’s okay. I can look after Baako.”

Kowalski breathed hard through his nose, looking ready to argue, but even he must have realized the futility of it. With a huff, he mumbled, “Fine.”

With the matter settled, three of the soldiers pushed into the pen and manhandled Baako’s bulk over to the forklift. Maria followed, cradling Baako’s head, making sure he wasn’t banged up by the rough treatment. Though she knew he was in store for much worse this morning.

She pictured the brutalized chimp from yesterday. As much as that treatment had horrified her, she could not escape her own shame. Was her treatment of Baako any kinder? She had kept him caged, letting him out for the occasional romp in the woods and testing him at every turn.

She remembered his last sign.

[We are family]

Tears rose as guilt squeezed her heart. As he was rolled limply into the crate, Maria rested a palm atop his head, knowing how special he was.

You should be free.

A soldier forced her away from the crate, and the barred door was slammed shut with a rattle of steel. Chang marched her toward the exit as the forklift followed them.

She glanced back to Kowalski, who stood alone in the pen. His gaze was hard upon her, silently urging her to stay calm. As added measure, he lifted his hands and repeated Baako’s sign.

[Family]

She nodded to him, taking his message to heart. They were all in this together. Still, a fear followed her through those double doors, a premonition of doom. The feeling persisted as they headed toward the vivisection lab.

How can any of us survive this?

From a block away, Monk watched their target cross the street. It looked like he was headed toward a five-story apartment complex on the edge of the hutong neighborhood.

Home sweet home.

Kimberly realized this, too, and they both increased their pace to close the distance. They didn’t want to lose the man within that sprawling complex. The signal of the GPS unit was only so precise. If they lost sight of their target, it could be difficult to discern his exact apartment.

They followed the soldier across the street, dodging the bustling flow of morning traffic. Ahead, the man stopped at the small courtyard entrance to the complex.

Monk hadn’t anticipated that. With no other choice, they continued on their path toward him. They couldn’t risk raising suspicions by suddenly stopping or turning around.

Kimberly pointed toward a bus stop bench in front of the complex.

Monk kept his head lowered and adjusted the surgical mask higher up his nose. They crossed within steps of their target and settled to the bench. Kimberly kept at Monk’s shoulder, taking his hand as if they were a couple heading to work.

In the reflection off a window of a parked car, Monk watched the man strike a match and light a cigarette. The soldier had purchased the fresh pack from one of the hutong shops. His attitude to the proprietor had been brusque, bordering on rude. The soldier was clearly agitated. He took several long drags on the cigarette, then pulled out a cell phone.

Kimberly’s fingers squeezed tighter on Monk’s hand. The soldier spoke loud enough to be easily overheard, his tone full of anger and frustration. Clearly something or someone had royally pissed the man off.

Monk pictured Kowalski. He knew from experience how exasperating the big guy could be at times — but also surprisingly clever, too. It must have been Kowalski who had planted that tracker on the soldier, using the man as a courier for the GPS unit to bring it aboveground.

Now to turn that to our advantage.

Kimberly leaned closer, resting her cheek on Monk’s shoulder as if she was exhausted. She whispered in his ear. “He’s talking to his brother. From the sounds of it, the guy here must’ve been kicked out of his workplace pending a military review. Said he was interrogated for hours by someone from the Ministry of State Security.”

She paused, listening further. In the reflection, Monk saw the man drop his cigarette and grind it under his heel. With a final angry burst, the man cut off the call and headed into the complex.

Monk waited until the soldier was out of direct sight before rising with Kimberly.

She kept close to his side. “Sounds like someone has it in for this guy. Maybe his brother, too. Someone named Lau. A woman who outranks them both.”

Monk took in this information, wondering if that friction could be used to their benefit.

“If I had time to check my intelligence sources,” Kimberly continued, “I could probably figure out who that woman was. Might give us a clue as to what’s going on here.”

“First things first,” Monk whispered.

They rounded the corner into the central courtyard. It was open to the sky above, with tiers of railed walkways lining the inside of the space.

Their target crossed to a set of stairs and headed up.

Monk kept to the corner. He dropped to a knee to retie a shoelace while watching the soldier. The man reached the second floor gallery and set off down the row of apartments, finally stopping at the seventh door. Standing there, he reached into a pocket and pulled out a set of keys. As he did so, something silvery flew out, glinting brightly in morning sunlight. It dropped to the man’s feet, drawing his eyes and raising a deep frown on his face.

Monk pulled back out of sight. He stared up at Kimberly, reading the same realization in her face.

It had to be the GPS unit.

We’ve been made.

Maria watched helplessly as soldiers hauled Baako out of the crate and dropped him onto a wheeled gurney. They then rolled his limp form toward the towering doors of the vivisection lab. She kept alongside him, making sure he was still breathing. Fear drove her heart into her throat, along with a grim realization.

Maybe it would be better if he died on the operating table.

Such an end would be far kinder than the miserable existence that awaited him after the surgery. Tears again threatened, but she fought them back, refusing to give in to defeat.

Past the doors, the vivisection lab was far busier than before. Most of the activity surrounded one of the stainless steel tables. A team in blue scrubs prepped a pile of surgical packs. One tool, sterilized and sealed inside a crinkled plastic bag, caught her eye.

A battery-powered bone saw.

Her knees weakened at the sight.

Two of the operating team came forward to relieve the soldiers of their burden. They rolled Baako to the station and slid the gurney next to the operating table.

Maria hurried to stay with him, fearing that they would drive her off. Instead, one of the nurses came forward and handed her a cap and surgical mask. The offer indicated she would be permitted to observe Baako’s procedure — his mutilation, she reminded herself. The nurse must have recognized her distress and gently touched her elbow in sympathy before returning to her duties.

Maria stood there with cap and mask in hand, suddenly wanting to flee, to turn her back on what was about to happen. But instead she lifted the elastic blue cap and snugged it over her head, tucking in loose strands of hair.

I won’t abandon you, Baako.

She stepped forward as he was dragged from the gurney to the table. His wrists and ankles were secured in padded restraints, an act that she found odd. She shifted forward until she could grip his hand. She felt the thick leather pads of his fingers, ran her thumb over the line of fur at the edge of his palm. It was baby soft, a reminder that he was really just a child. She remembered holding this hand in the past, gently bending those fingers, teaching Baako his first words.

One of those was Mama.

Tears rolled down her cheek now. She couldn’t stop them. She couldn’t even wipe them away, refusing to let go of Baako’s hand with both of her own.

Oh, my sweet boy, what have I done?

A commotion drew her attention back to the tall doors of the lab. The familiar figure of Jiaying Lau appeared. Dayne Arnaud accompanied her. The French paleontologist looked haggard with bags under his eyes. He nodded his head at something Jiaying was saying.

Maria kept hold of Baako as she faced Jiaying.

The major general looked well rested, a small smile of satisfaction fixed on her face. As she arrived, she spoke to a tall man in surgical scrubs, likely the head surgeon. They exchanged a few words, then Jiaying nodded and dismissed the man back to his preparations.

She continued over to Maria. “It appears we’re right on schedule this morning. I appreciate your cooperation.”

Cooperation?

Maria wanted to tackle the woman, gouge her eyes out. Instead, she glanced over to Arnaud, whose face mirrored her own dread.

Jiaying surely sensed her mood, but chose to ignore it. “At the moment, it’s your further cooperation that I’d like to discuss.”

“I’m not leaving Baako,” she said firmly.

“And I wouldn’t expect otherwise, Dr. Crandall. In fact, the surgical team believes you can be of great help this morning.”

She frowned. “Help? How?”

“They’ll be performing a modified version of the Montreal procedure, where the craniotomy and electrode placement will be done with the patient awake.”

“Awake?” She could not keep the horror from her voice.

Jiaying lifted a palm, trying to reassure her. “It is safe and relatively painless.” She pointed to the lead surgeon. “Dr. Han will use a drug to reverse the tranquilizer, then switch over to a propofol intravenous drip. After applying a local anesthetic scalp block, they’ll be able to perform the craniotomy under a light sedation. Once the brain is exposed, they’ll fully wake the patient. And that’s when your expertise will be needed.”

“For what?”

“To talk to your research subject.”

Despite the brutality of it all, Maria understood what was being asked of her. “You want me to challenge Baako with questions as you stimulate various parts of his brain with electricity.”

She nodded. “From those responses, the research team will build a highly accurate map of the brain’s architecture. It will help them plant those electrode needles in the most critical sections for future neurological testing.”

Maria swallowed. As appalling at it sounded, it made cold clinical sense. She tried to imagine Baako awake, with his head clamped to this table, his skull cut open. No wonder they had put him in ankle and wrist restraints. He would be terrified, looking to her for solace and comfort.

How can I face those eyes, so full of trust and love?

She wanted to refuse, but she also knew she had to be here for Baako.

Still, a moan escaped her. “Please, don’t do this.”

“I do not discount your concern, Dr. Crandall, but science must be dispassionate. We each have a role to play here.” Jiaying motioned to the French paleontologist. “This morning, Dr. Arnaud will be doing a thorough analysis of those hybrid Neanderthal remains found in Croatia. Once we’re finished here, I’ll need you to join him, to help harvest as much viable DNA from those bones as possible.”

By now Maria had begun to tune Jiaying out. She couldn’t think beyond what was about to happen to Baako. Nothing else mattered.

Fingers suddenly gripped her arm, snapping her attention back to Jiaying, who continued speaking. “—to ensure your cooperation.”

“What?” she asked with a confused shake of her head.

Jiaying drew her by the arm toward the back of the vivisection lab. “I was explaining that there would be a price to be paid for failure. But perhaps showing you will have more of an impact.”

Maria was taken to the windows that overlooked the grim habitat known as the Ark. Once again, she found herself staring into the boulder-strewn pit. She searched below but failed to spot any of the hybrid creatures. Likely they were slumbering in those dark caves that lined the walls. Still, she noted the pile of broken bones on the floor, all gnawed clean. She remembered the severed arm being flung against the window. A smear of dry blood still stained the glass.

Then movement drew her attention to the side, toward a cage in front of the massive steel door below. That vault eased open, and a tall figure was shoved into the waiting cage. He fell to his knees as the door resealed behind him. His face turned up toward the windows.

Kowalski…

“We’ll have little need for your gorilla’s caretaker after this morning’s operation,” Jiaying explained. “Except as an incentive to your cooperation.”

Maria understood, her gaze returning to the pile of bones.

I help them… or Kowalski dies.

A small sound drew her attention back to the lab. She turned to find Baako stirring on the table. A bleary, frightened hoot escaped his throat as he tugged at one of his wrist restraints. They must have already given him the reversal drug to the tranquilizer, partially waking him.

Jiaying looked in the same direction. “Time to get to work, Dr. Crandall.”

Now or never…

From the apartment courtyard below, Monk watched the soldier bend down and reach for the GPS unit. They were running out of time to act. Monk knew they only had a narrow window before their target figured out what had been planted in his pocket.

Monk started to lunge toward the stairs, but Kimberly grabbed him by the arm.

“Let me,” she whispered. She drew him back and stepped forward. “Follow my lead.”

As Monk trailed her, she set off at a brisk but unhurried pace toward the staircase. Once there, she climbed the stairs, all while chattering angrily back at him in Mandarin, plainly chastising him. While this was clearly an act — playing the angry wife to a recalcitrant husband — her eyes cast daggers at him, urging him to keep his head down, his manner calm and subdued.

Monk tipped the brim of his cap lower. Over the years, he had learned a life lesson from Kat. A wife is always right. And in this case, even an invented one.

They reached the gallery that ran along this level of the complex. Apartment doors stretched ahead. Still scolding Monk, Kimberly continued toward the soldier, who was on one knee, examining the GPS unit in his fingers.

With his head down, Monk glanced around, noting several other residents leaning on railings or smoking and gabbing with neighbors. In the courtyard below, a handful of children laughed and played at a small swing set.

Monk recognized how foolhardy his first impulse had been. If he had charged headlong toward his target, all hell might have broken loose. Or at the very least, their cover would have been completely blown.

Though at the moment, both outcomes were still a distinct possibility.

Ahead, the soldier took out his cell phone, preparing to report on his discovery.

Not good.

Kimberly reached his side first, barking at him to get out of her way. Apparently she was as skilled at delivering a tongue-lashing as she was with her espionage talents.

The soldier rose quickly and mumbled apologetically. He turned to his apartment door and jangled his keys into the lock. As he pushed the door open, Kimberly shouldered into him from behind and knocked him sprawling across the threshold. She followed him inside.

Monk dashed to keep at her heels.

“Close the door,” she ordered as she stepped forward and kicked the steel-shod toe of her boot into the soldier’s forehead. His head snapped back, and he went limp — out cold for the moment. “Get his weapon. Haul him inside.”

Kimberly stepped past his prostrate form and withdrew a Glock from a holster under her jacket. She quickly swept the one-bedroom apartment, while Monk stripped the soldier of his sidearm. He then grabbed the man by his shoulders and dragged him into the living room. The motion drew a moan from their captive.

“Patient’s waking up,” Monk whispered.

Kimberly tossed him a roll of duct tape. Monk wasn’t sure if she had found it or if she simply had it on her. The woman was spookily prepared.

Monk taped the man’s mouth, then wound several loops around his wrists and ankles. As Monk trussed up their captive, Kimberly searched the soldier’s body, removing items from various pockets of his uniform: a folded map, a chain of electronic keycards, a wallet.

She checked the latter. “Say hello to Gao Sun. From his papers and rank insignia, he’s a first lieutenant in the Chinese army.”

By now, the man had grown clearheaded enough to glower at them. Monk kept a knee on his throat, putting firm pressure there.

“What now?” he asked. “While this isn’t my first rodeo, you obviously know this country far better than I do.”

She studied their prisoner. “He’s not likely to give up anything vital. From what I read about the events in Croatia, the Chinese assault team members committed suicide before allowing themselves to be captured or interrogated.”

“So what do we do with him?”

She lifted her Glock while taking a pillow off the sofa. “We can’t risk him getting free or someone finding him.”

Monk wondered if she was truly hard-hearted enough to kill the man in cold blood. “Wait,” he warned.

He stood and crossed back toward the door. He retrieved the cell phone the man had dropped. He tried to access it but found it locked.

Kimberly noted his frustration and held out her hand. “Let me see it.”

He passed her the phone.

She examined it. “It’s fingerprint protected.” She turned to their captive, and with Monk’s help, got his thumb on the sensor. The screen bloomed to life. She swept through a few screens, then nodded. “I can change the password manually from here, so we can access it whenever we want without needing his fingerprint.”

“Perfect.”

She passed him back the phone. “What do you want to do with it?”

“To buy a bit of insurance.” Monk stepped back, accessed the phone’s camera feature, and snapped a shot of the duct-taped form of Gao Sun.

“What are you doing?”

“You mentioned this guy’s last call had been to his brother. From the content of that conversation, I wager his brother must also work at that place under the zoo. Having possession of Gao might come in handy.”

“You may be right.” She crossed to a table holding a set of framed photos and picked one up. “I saw this earlier.”

Monk stared at the photograph of two men, arms around each other’s shoulders, smiling broadly, both in uniforms. One was Gao. “That other must be his brother,” he said.

With a nod, she pulled free the photo, folded it into a pocket, and tossed the empty frame on the sofa. “How do we proceed from here?”

Monk pulled out his satellite phone. “Time to rally the troops that Painter sent. I’ll assign someone to babysit our friend here while we go check out that entrance into the Underground City.”

“It’s sure to be a maze down there.”

“But we know where to head—toward the zoo.”

“Let’s hope that’s enough.”

Monk agreed, appreciating the enormity of the search ahead of them. As he dialed the phone, he hoped they weren’t too late already.

Hang in there, Kowalski…

With his back to the steel door, Kowalski tried to ignore the stench of the habitat around him. It smelled of meat gone bad, mixed with an unwashed muskiness. The cloying reek was reminiscent of his days mucking barns at the Riverdale Stables in the Bronx for extra cash, specifically when an old mare had died in her stall during a summer heat wave.

Still, it’s not the stink that’ll kill me.

He placed a hand on the archway of rock that separated the steel door behind him from the wall of bars in front. Heavy tracks outlined a door of his cage. He pictured that tracked section trundling upward, exposing him to what lurked inside the Ark.

Earlier, he had spotted Maria at the curve of windows high above, standing alongside the uniformed figure of Major General Lau. He was certain the Chinese were using him as leverage against Maria.

He stepped to the bars — each as thick around as his wrist — knowing his fate if Maria didn’t cooperate.

This assessment was reinforced as shadows stirred from a cave ten yards away. A large shape shambled into view, knuckling on both arms. The gorilla’s fur was as black as soot, thick and heavy over its shoulders, sleeker over its hindquarters. The beast had to weigh over seven hundred pounds, most of it muscle. Its forehead came to a peaked top above prominent brows. It sniffed a couple of times at the air, then lowered that dark gaze toward him.

Kowalski noted a shiny metal band around its neck, weighted down by a steel box at the hollow of its throat. He guessed it was a shock collar for controlling these beasts.

He retreated a step, keeping away from the bars.

The small movement produced a dramatic reaction. The gorilla charged toward him. Kowalski cringed, fearing that massive creature could barrel straight through the bars. But at the last moment, the beast skidded on its hind legs, turning slightly to come to a rest on its rear.

It leaned that flat face against the bars, huffing strongly enough for Kowalski to feel the draft on his cheeks. It then howled, its maw stretching wide enough to bite a basketball in half, baring foot-long yellow fangs. The bellow shook his rib cage, pounded his skull.

Kowalski clamped his hands over his ears.

And here I was starting to like apes.

Then suddenly that massive shape fell away from the cage — or rather, it was knocked away. Another took its place.

Kowalski recognized the silvery sheen to the fur of this newcomer’s back. It was the beast he had noted yesterday, the one ripping into the remains of some lab worker. This fellow was easily half again as big as the other, weighing over a thousand pounds. The first gorilla rose from where he had been bowled aside and reared up on its hind legs, thumping its chest with the palm of one hand.

The older silverback grunted once in that one’s direction. The result was immediate. The black-furred gorilla dropped to all fours, twisted around, and retreated.

Apparently the boss of this joint had made his point.

The silverback turned back to Kowalski and settled to its haunches, staring straight at him. There was no outburst, no howl, no threat — just that steady unblinking gaze. It was far more unnerving, especially with the glint of malicious cunning in those eyes.

Kowalski kept his back against the steel door, taking the measure of the other. The silverback sat there, nearly unmoving. Only its thick chest rose and fell in an easy rhythm, the very picture of patience. He couldn’t imagine the Chinese wanting to engineer smarter versions of these half-ton monsters. Especially as this beast’s plan was easy enough to read and practically flawless.

It needed only to wait for the dinner bell to ring.

18

The pilot of the Gulfstream G650 radioed back to the cabin. “Folks, just a heads-up. We’ll be landing in Cuenca in thirty minutes.”

Gray glanced out the window to the low-hanging moon in the night sky. He checked his watch. Though the flight time had been nine hours, with the time change, they would be landing only an hour later from when they had left Rome.

He glanced back to the spacious cabin appointed in leathers and exotic woods. The cabin could accommodate a dozen people, but at the moment, it was only the four of them. At the back, Roland was once again buried in a pile of books, though most of his time was spent with his nose stuck in Kircher’s journal. Lena assisted him with his research, the two often murmuring with their heads bent together. Seichan had spent most of the flight dozing on a reclined seat across the aisle from him. She rolled to her side with a grumble of irritation at the pilot’s interruption.

Gray appreciated her exhaustion. He had also taken a four-hour nap, knowing they would have to hit the ground running once they reached the remote town of Cuenca, located high up in the Andes. He had been in contact with Painter a few minutes ago, learning that the fate of Kowalski and Lena’s sister remained unknown, but Monk was following up on a possible lead. That left Gray to pursue the historical trail left behind by Father Kircher, to search for a lost city in the jungle.

From Kircher’s journal and annotations on his map, his colleague Nicolas Steno had ventured out to South America and returned with the rough coordinates of the city’s possible location. Despite Kircher’s belief, Gray still doubted that this city of ancient teachers — those Watchers mentioned in ancient texts — was truly the mythic site of Atlantis. So he had used the remainder of the flight to pursue his own research into the history of this region.

Motion drew his attention to the back of the cabin. Lena came forward with a book in hand. “Roland wanted me to show you this before we landed,” she said as she joined him.

She settled into the seat opposite him and placed the book on a small table bolted between them. She opened to a page displaying a rock with a labyrinth carved into it. It was the same maze gilded on the cover of Kircher’s journal, a pattern found throughout the world at various ancient sites.

“This is a piece of polished diorite,” Lena said, “discovered in the jungles near Cuenca where we’re headed.”

Gray leaned closer. So the labyrinth was found even here.

“A native tribesman gave this carved stone as a gift to Father Crespi.”

He looked up. “The missionary? The one who came out here because of his own interest in Athanasius Kircher?”

She nodded. “His mission was located at the Church of María Auxiliadora, or Mary Our Helper. Another church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, like the Marian sanctuary where Kircher hid Eve’s bones.” She let that sink in before continuing. “Over the course of his fifty years here, until his death at the age of almost ninety, he accumulated a vast collection, artifacts given to him by the Shuar natives of the region. He stored the collection at the church, some seventy thousand items in all.”

“Where did such a haul come from?”

“According to the tribesmen, they were taken from an extensive cavern system buried under the jungle. Roland believes these artifacts came to Father Crespi’s doorstep not by mere chance, but because the priest had made inquiries of the natives about such a place in the jungle.”

“But he didn’t have the coordinates we have now.”

“He didn’t. Likely Father Crespi had gleaned enough from his research about Kircher to bring him to this general region.”

“But not to the doorstep of this lost city.” Gray nodded to the book. “What else was given to him?”

Lena flipped through the book, showing him other artifacts: seven-foot-tall mummy cases that looked vaguely Egyptian, full suits of Incan parade armor, shelves of Ecuadorian pottery, rolls of silver and gold sheets adorned with images that seemed incongruous for the area.

Lena pointed out those anomalies. “According to archaeologists who examined the collection, the motifs and representations of many of the artifacts seemed to better fit other cultures — Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian.”

She opened to a picture of a copper sculpture of a winged man with a lizard’s head. “For example, this is clearly the figure of Nisroch, a god of ancient Assyria, a Mesopotamian civilization dating back four thousand years ago.” She turned next to a set of golden plaques covered in a linear script. “And here are samples of proto-Phoenician writing. Experts have identified other pieces of the collection bearing Egyptian hieroglyphics, Libyan and Punic writing, even Celtic symbols. Father Crespi became convinced that these objects were proof of a connection between a lost civilization hidden in these jungles and the rest of the ancient world, a connection that predated recorded history.”

She fanned through the book, stopping at another set of photos. “Even stranger, the natives also brought him steel-hard copper gears, along with strange brass tubes that showed no rifling. All examples of a metallurgy beyond the local tribes’ technical abilities to produce.”

Gray took the book and looked through more photos of Father Crespi’s collection. Much of it was gold tablets and scrolls, depicting a kaleidoscope of astrological figures, pyramids, and gods. One gold plate even showed a bent-backed figure writing with a quill pen.

He shook his head. “Surely some of this must be fake.”

Lena shrugged. “Father Crespi admitted as much, believing that over time the natives might have crafted some of these gifts to please him. But even he could tell the forgeries from authentic items. I mean, who would freely give up so much gold just to fool an old priest?”

As proof, she flipped to a page that showed a yard-long golden crocodile with large rubies for eyes. It had to be worth a small fortune, certainly not something a native would craft as a simple forgery.

“Whatever happened to Father Crespi’s collection?” he asked.

“That’s a mystery all its own. After he died in 1982, his collection was quickly dispersed. Most of it ended up locked away in museum vaults on order of the Ecuadorian government. You can only view them with special permission. Other pieces ended up at an Ecuadorian military base of Cayambe, deep in the jungle.”

A military base?

Lena glanced to the rear of the jet’s cabin. “And according to Roland, rumors persist that some key pieces were taken and shipped off to the Vatican.”

Gray leaned back in his seat. “If that’s true, it sounds like Father Kircher wasn’t the only Catholic priest who was trying to keep something secret.”

But what were they trying to hide?

“For any more answers,” Lena said, “we’ll have to find that cavern system noted on Kircher’s map, the one marked with a labyrinth.”

From across the aisle, Seichan spoke with an arm over her eyes. She must have been feigning sleep while he and Lena had talked, eavesdropping on their conversation. “All of this sounds like nothing more than folktales, rumors, or treasure-filled dreams.”

“Maybe not,” Gray said.

Seichan lowered her arm and turned toward him, arching an eyebrow doubtfully.

While the others had studied various pieces of the puzzle, he had spent the past few hours researching the possibility of the existence of a lost city buried in the jungles of these mountains.

“It’s been well documented,” he said, “that a vast cavern system does tunnel through the Andes in this area, stretching an immeasurable distance. Large sections of it were photographed and mapped by the British-Ecuadorian research team back in 1976.”

“The one headed by Neil Armstrong,” Lena said.

“He was the honorary president of that expedition. While they found no lost city, the group did discover the remains of an old tomb in those caverns, along with identifying hundreds of new species of plants, bats, and butterflies.”

Seichan rolled her eyes. “Still, like you said, they found no lost city. And like I said, it’s folktales.”

“I’m not so sure. There’s a persistent legend about this region, of secret caverns that hold a vast library of metal books and crystal tablets. According to accounts of a man named Petronio Jaramillo, a Shuar tribesman took him to those caverns when he was a teenager. This was back in 1946. Afterward, fearful that it might be looted, he kept its location secret for decades. He finally agreed to guide a handful of people to its location, but only with the assurance that Neil Armstrong would participate in this latest venture, too. Then in 1998, within weeks of this scheduled trip, he was assassinated outside his home.”

Lena cringed. “Assassinated?”

“Some believe it was done to silence him. Others that he was murdered while someone tried to extract his secrets. Either way, the location died with him.”

Lena took the book from the table. “Do you think Father Crespi’s collection could have come from that same place?”

“Possibly. From there or maybe from tunnels that connect to that lost library.”

Seichan stretched in her reclined seat. “So why did that assassinated guy insist that Neil Armstrong be part of this new expedition?”

Gray shrugged. “It could be the man wanted someone whose status and name were beyond repute. Or maybe there was another reason. I still find it odd that Armstrong would’ve agreed to be a part of either expedition. He wasn’t an archaeologist. And after the Apollo 11 mission, he became somewhat of a recluse, doing only a handful of interviews. So why become involved in any of this?”

“I think I may know,” a voice said behind him.

Roland had quietly joined them, his eyes glassy with exhaustion and amazement. He clutched Kircher’s journal to his chest while gazing toward a window, where a full moon was perfectly framed.

“Why?” Lena asked him.

“Because of the moon… it’s not what we think it is.”

Roland ignored their incredulous reactions. He struggled to find the words to explain what he had found buried within Father Kircher’s journal.

No wonder the reverend father had kept all of this secret.

Just forty years prior to the reverend father’s discovery of Eve’s bones, the Inquisition had sentenced Galileo to death for daring to suggest that the earth was not the center of the universe. The revelations written within Kircher’s journal would have equally doomed the man and anyone associated with his discovery.

“If the moon isn’t what we think it is,” Gray asked, “what is it?”

Roland lifted Kircher’s book. “The reverend father came to the conclusion that the moon is not a natural object.” Before anyone could object, Roland stood straighter. “And I agree with him.”

Seichan pulled her seat upright and swung around to face them all. She pointed toward the window, toward the full moon. “You’re saying that’s not real.”

Roland sank into a seat amidst the group. “I spent all night researching details I found in Kircher’s book. Seeking ways to disprove his conclusions. But instead, I only found more corroboration.”

“Maybe you’d better take us through this,” Gray said, nodding to the book. “What did you learn?”

“It’s not just what I found in the reverend father’s journal.” He looked to the shining face of the moon. “Have you never wondered why during a total solar eclipse the face of the moon fits exactly over the surface of the sun? Doesn’t that perfect visual alignment seem like an odd astronomical coincidence?”

From the others’ expressions, he saw that this odd fact had escaped them.

Like it does most people.

“That phenomenon happens because the moon is 400 times smaller than the sun, while sitting 1/400th of the distance between the earth and the sun.” He shook his head at the amazing relationship. “And that’s not all. The moon precisely mirrors the annual movement of the sun. A midsummer full moon will set at the same angle and place on the horizon as a midwinter sunset. Again, doesn’t that symmetry seem to defy coincidental chance?”

“But that doesn’t make it fake,” Lena said softly, as if talking to a madman.

And maybe I am… maybe I’ve fallen too far down the rabbit hole.

Still, he refused to relent. “Researchers aren’t even sure how the moon formed. The current hypothesis is called the Big Whack theory, that some object the size of Mars impacted with the earth early in its formation and knocked enough material into orbit that it formed the moon.”

“What’s wrong with that theory?” Gray asked.

“Two things. One: astronomers all agree that such a planet-sized impact would have set the earth spinning faster than it does today. To compensate for that and to make their theory work, they hypothesized a second impact to our planet, this one striking from the opposite direction with the same force.”

“To brake the faster spinning of the earth.” Gray’s brow furrowed at the improbability of such an event.

“Even astronomers admit there is no actual evidence of such an impact having occurred. Which brings us to the second problem of the Big Whack theory. It concerns the strange amount of material ejected from the earth that coalesced into our moon.”

“How is it strange?” Gray asked.

“Because once the dust settled, the earth ended up with a circumference precisely 366 percent larger than the moon’s. Doesn’t that percentage seem odd to anyone?”

“The number 366.” Lena frowned. “That’s almost the same as the days in a year.”

“In fact, the earth rotates 366 times during one trip around the sun.” Roland looked down at the journal in his lap and traced a finger along the labyrinth of ancient Crete gilded on the cover. “It’s why the Minoan astronomer-priests of Crete divided a circle into 366 degrees. The Sumerians did the same, further dividing the degrees into 60 minutes and subdividing those minutes into 60 seconds.”

“Like we do today,” Lena said.

“Except we rounded this to an even 360 degrees,” Roland corrected. “But back to the moon. There are other oddities concerning our sister satellite: how it’s lighter in mass than expected; how its gravitational field has stronger and weaker patches; how its core is abnormally small. Yet without this strange moon, there would be no life on this planet.”

Lena frowned. “Why’s that?”

“Biologists believe that the gravitational pull of the moon — which produces tidal changes and tidal pools — is probably what helped early aquatic life transition onto land. But more important, astrophysicists know that the mass of the moon orbiting our planet helps to stabilize the earth’s axis, to keep it at a slightly tilted angle toward the sun. Without the moon’s presence, the earth would wobble more, leading to extreme fluxes in temperature and weather, making it almost impossible for complex life to form.”

“So without the moon, we wouldn’t be here,” Seichan said. “But at the same time, its perfect symmetry and existence defies rationality. Is that what you’re saying?”

Roland shrugged, letting them reach their own conclusions. “Maybe that’s why Neil Armstrong became involved in all of this. Maybe he experienced something during his time on the lunar surface that compelled him to pursue this line of investigation.”

Gray frowned, glancing toward the full moon framed in the jet’s window. “NASA’s missing two minutes,” he mumbled.

Everyone stared at him.

“What missing two minutes?” Seichan asked.

Gray wasn’t sure how much weight to give to Roland’s revelations. Still, Neil Armstrong’s puzzling participation in this archaeological expedition reminded him of another mystery concerning the Apollo 11 mission.

“I heard a story from a colleague, an astrophysicist who worked at NASA,” Gray explained. “During the televised moon landing, a pair of cameras supposedly overheated, resulting in two minutes of radio silence. Afterward, sources claimed that NASA was covering something up, something Armstrong and his fellow astronauts witnessed upon landing. This was substantiated later by a retired NASA communications engineer, who admitted that the event was deliberately staged to hide something found on the lunar surface.”

“What?” Lena asked. “Like extraterrestrials?”

“That’s one of the theories floated.” Gray turned to Roland. “But others believe they were covering up some mystery tied to the moon itself.”

“Maybe they were right.” Roland admitted. “Father Kircher certainly became convinced there was something miraculous about the moon. He spent pages and pages exploring this possibility in his journal.”

“What else did he learn?” Gray asked.

Roland gripped the old book with both hands. “Most of it centers on the strange symmetries between the earth and the moon. For example, can you guess how many times the moon orbits the earth over the course of 10,000 days?”

No one bothered to answer.

“It’s 366 times,” he said. “And that number is important in so many other ways. You could almost consider it the fundamental code for our planet. And that’s been known for far longer than you could imagine.”

“How long?” Gray asked.

“Do you remember that staff we saw with Eve’s bones?” He pulled out his phone and brought up the photograph that Lena had taken of the remains, showing those bony hands clutching a length of carved mammoth tusk. “The reverend father named this de Costa Eve, or the Rib of Eve. And if you look closely, you can almost make out small gradations inscribed along its length.”

He zoomed in and passed the image around.

“What about it?” Gray asked.

“It’s marked that way because it’s an ancient measuring tool.”

“To measure what?” Seichan asked.

“Everything. It may be the key to our very world.”

Gray gave him an exasperated look, but Roland forged onward.

“Back at the chapel in Italy, I measured the staff’s length,” he said. “It’s 83 centimeters long.”

Gray shrugged. “So just shy of a meter or yardstick.”

“That’s right, but—”

“Oh, my God!” Lena suddenly blurted out, cutting him off and drawing their attention. “That length! I know what you’re getting at. It’s not a regular yard like we use today. It’s a megalithic yard.”

Roland nodded at Lena. “Precisely. I came across that same term while cross-referencing some of Kircher’s claims.”

“What’s a megalithic yard?” Gray asked, searching between Roland and Lena.

Lena spoke excitedly. “There was a Scottish engineer back in the thirties. I can’t remember his name…”

“Alexander Thom,” Roland filled in.

She nodded and rushed on. “He was surveying megalithic ruins throughout Scotland and England and noted how those prehistoric builders had laid out their giant stones along lunar or solar lines. Curious, he did a statistical analysis of ancient Neolithic sites across both the UK and France and noted a strange anomaly. Basically they all seemed to have been constructed using a standard unit of measurement.”

“The megalithic yard,” Roland explained. “It’s the same length as the staff held by Eve. That length appears again and again throughout history and cultures. The old Spanish vara, the Japanese shaku, the gaz of the Harappan civilization of ancient India… they’re all very close in length to this megalithic yard. Even going back to the ancient Minoans of Crete. A thousand Minoan feet is equal to 366 megalithic yards.”

“That number again,” Gray mumbled.

“And if I remember right,” Lena added, “the area found within the sarsen ring of Stonehenge is exactly a thousand square megalithic yards.”

Seichan turned to Lena. “How come you know so much about all of this?” she asked, plainly wondering how a geneticist had come upon such knowledge.

“Maria and I had studied markers such as this, indications of knowledge spreading globally during Paleolithic times. All of this ties to our hypothesis that there was a small band of people who helped with mankind’s Great Leap Forward, guiding the path to modern civilization.”

“Like the Watchers that Roland mentioned before,” Gray said. “Those otherworldly teachers from ancient scripture.”

Seichan scowled. “So what you’re saying is that some universal unit of measure was shared between societies, spread by these Watchers.”

Gray stared down at the phone’s screen, at the bones of Eve. He studied the unique features that marked her as a hybrid between early man and Neanderthals.

Am I looking at the face of one of those Watchers?

He finally returned his attention to the others. “But what’s so important about this length? Why is it the key to the world, like you said before?”

Lena stepped up and tried to explain. “Because the megalithic yard was calculated from the dimensions of the planet… specifically on the circumference of the earth.”

“Even Father Kircher came to realize this.” Roland opened the journal to a page of calculations surrounding an illustration of the sphere of the earth. “You can see here how the reverend father divided the circumference of the earth into 366 degrees, then sliced those degrees into 60 minutes, then again into 60 seconds. Here at the bottom you can see his final calculation, where he determined the length of 1 second of the earth’s circumference.”

He tapped that final number.

“It’s that same sequence again—366,” Gray noted.

Seichan stared down at the page, too. “But how could these prehistoric people have come to know the circumference of the Earth and calculate something like this?”

“Most likely by indirect means. All of this could have been derived by simply using a string, a pebble, and a pole.” Roland turned to another page in the journal showing a crude pendulum. “Father Kircher diagrammed it out here, using the planet Venus as a positioning point.”

“Roland may be right,” Lena added. “We already know ancient builders were wise to the movement of the stars, and many early cultures revered the planet Venus. Take, for example, the Neolithic ruins of Newgrange found in Ireland. Its builders positioned its doorway to allow Venus to shine its light inside their structure on the winter solstice.”

Gray sat back. “So you believe that somebody calculated this megalithic length based on the circumference of the earth and eventually shared it as a universal unit of measurement.”

“That’s what Father Kircher believed,” Roland said. “He recognized these bones were ancient, that there was something not quite human in their conformation, and that the artifacts found with the remains — the length of ivory, the perfectly sculpted sphere of the moon — showed advanced knowledge of astronomy.”

Gray sat back. “And after coming to this realization, he secretly sought to learn more about these people.”

Roland nodded. “But being a pious man, he also sought support from religious texts. He came to believe that the Bible also hid clues about those special numbers we were talking about.”

“How do you mean?” Gray pressed.

Roland swallowed, almost fearful of revealing the ultimate truth he had discovered in Kircher’s journal. He imagined the reverend father must have struggled even more.

“Are you familiar with the term gematria?” he finally asked. After getting shakes of heads all around, he explained. “It’s a Babylonian system of numerology that was adopted by the Hebrews, where each letter is assigned a number, giving words extra meaning based on those numbers. It became the root of a medieval cabalistic system of interpreting scripture. Later, Christians also embraced this mystical way of looking at the Bible. And as Father Kircher was a mathematician, such numerology would have interested him. From the ramblings in his journal, he became fixated on one specific number and its connection to the Bible.”

“What number?”

“A prime number. 37.” He returned again to the page showing the length of Eve’s Rib tied to circumference of the planet. “At first I thought Father Kircher was merely rounding this number—36.6—to an even 37, but he also references what Lena and I saw above the grave of Adam back in Croatia.”

He flipped through the images on his phone until he came across the splay of palm prints above the Neanderthal male’s grave.

“If you count the number of prints, you’ll find 37 of them.” Roland turned to Lena. “You also took a picture of a similar star-shaped petroglyph above Eve’s grave, but those palms were more numerous. I don’t have that photo, but could you count the number of prints that make up Eve’s star?”

Scrunching her brow, Lena pulled out her own cell and searched until she found the proper image.

She tallied the number of prints and lifted her face when done. “There’s 73.”

Roland nodded. “Father Kircher noted the same in his journal.”

“The numbers 37 and 73,” Gray said. “They’re mirrored prime numbers.”

“What Father Kircher called stella numeros… or star numbers, because of the patterns they formed.” Roland fanned through a section of the journal. “He also used gematria to tease out hidden messages from the Bible, coming to conclude that the number 37 was fundamental to understanding the Holy Scriptures.”

“How so?” Gray asked.

“A few examples. The word faith is used 37 times in the Gospels. Also if you convert the Hebrew word for wisdom — or chokmah—into its cabalistic equivalent, you get the numerical value of 37.” He glanced to Lena. “You’ve been searching for the roots of human intelligence. And the only word found in the Bible that equals 37 is chokmah.”

Her face grew thoughtful. “Wisdom.”

He turned to the others. “Father Kircher lists many other such biblical ties to the number 37, but his most compelling comes from the very first line of the Bible, from Genesis. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.”

Roland revealed a journal page with the same verse written in Hebrew, under which the reverend father had inscribed the numerological equivalent for each Hebrew word.

“If you total up this line of cabalistic numbers,” he said, “you get 2,701.”

Gray frowned. “How’s that significant?”

Roland turned to the next page and revealed what Father Kircher had calculated.

Gray shifted closer. “It’s those same mirrored primes multiplied together.”

“The reverend father’s star numbers.” Roland nodded. “Such a discovery seems beyond pure statistical chance, especially given that Father Kircher pursued this a step further. He found out that if you took this same verse, multiplied each letter’s value by the number of letters, then divided that figure by the same with the words’ values, he came up with another number that defies rational explanation.”

Roland handed the journal to Gray so he could double-check the reverend father’s mathematical calculations and the final number circled at the bottom.

Gray’s voice rang with a note of astonishment. “That’s pi.”

“A number that was well known during Father Kircher’s time.”

Lena sat back, speaking softly, almost distracted. “Maria and I studied the history of pi for our dissertation about the roots of intelligence… using it as a marker for the evolution of knowledge. The earliest approximations of pi actually go back to the Babylonians.”

Roland took back the journal. “So it appears that not only are those star numbers buried within the first verse of Genesis, so is the numerically significant value of pi.”

Gray reached forward and took the book. He flipped back to the page to the earth’s illustration. He tapped the final calculation written on the bottom: 36.6 Costa Eve. “As you mentioned, this also rounds up to 37. A number that — if you’re right — seems to connect the sun, moon, and earth together with the precision of a Swiss clockmaker.”

Lena’s face had gone noticeably paler. “It might not just be the stars.”

They all turned to her.

“That same number is also buried in our genetic code.”

Lena had been fearful of broaching this matter. As soon as she had heard about the significance of the number 37, she had recalled something she had read in an academic journal back in 2014. While she had wanted to dismiss the article as a statistical anomaly, she now began to wonder.

Roland stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

She looked down at her hands. “Nearly all life on the planet uses DNA as its coding material, but there’s a code within that code, one that is beyond mutation and change. It’s the complex set of rules that govern how DNA produces proteins. Recently a biologist and mathematician, working together, discovered a series of perfect symmetries buried in that code. A pattern all based on the multiples of a single prime number.”

“Let me guess,” Gray said. “37?”

She nodded. “I remember one example from the article: how the atomic mass of every amino acid that makes up our bodies — all twenty of them — is a multiple of 37.” Lena gave a small shake of her head. “The odds of this pattern emerging by random chance were calculated to be one out of a decillion, which is 1 followed by 33 zeros.”

“So in other words, slim,” Seichan added.

Roland frowned. “You don’t even have to look so microscopically to see that connection to our biology. All you have to do is consider the normal temperature of the human body.” He stared across the group. “It’s 37 degrees Celsius.”

Silence settled across the cabin.

Gray finally spoke, his voice hushed. “If all of this is true, we’re talking about a single number that defines everything. Connecting our DNA and our bodies to the very movement of the sun, moon, and earth.”

“But what does it all mean?” Seichan asked.

He shook his head, as much in the dark as everyone else.

“If there are any answers,” Roland said, “they’ll be found here.”

The priest had shifted again to Kircher’s journal, returning to an image he had shown them earlier. It was the section of South America with a labyrinth drawn atop a subterranean lake. It was where Kircher believed Atlantis was hidden. Lena recalled the history of this region, hinting at a lost city buried under the mountains, a place of inexplicable treasures, where ancient libraries stored books of metal and crystal.

Could there truly be such a place?

Seichan echoed this question. “How can you be so certain about all of this?”

Roland pointed to the journal. “Look where we’re headed, at the latitude marked on the map.”

Gray leaned closer and read those coordinates aloud. “3.66.”

Roland smiled. “Anyone want to claim that’s random chance?”

The pilot radioed back. “Buckle up, folks. We’re beginning the final approach into Cuenca.”

Lena twisted around and peered out the window. Ahead, the dark forest vanished into a patch of brightly lit homes. She returned her focus to the spread of jungle and the sharp-edged peaks in the distance. Somewhere out there could be hidden the greatest discovery in mankind’s history.

Still, a part of her wished the plane would tip on a wing and head away, knowing all the bloodshed that had led them here, reminding herself that Maria was still in danger.

Lena drew her gaze up to the moon, at the mystery hanging in the night sky. Beyond all the talk of calculations, she remembered Roland’s first comment about how the face of the moon perfectly covered the sun during a total eclipse. It was a symmetry of orbital movements and celestial sizes that defied common sense. Yet it had hung there for millennia, offering up this miracle to whomever dared to look and wonder.

She also recalled Gray’s comment earlier, about how all of this — the sun, the moon, and the earth — seemed designed by a Swiss clockmaker.

A chilling question rose to her mind.

If true, who was that clockmaker?

The jet shook as the landing gear was engaged.

Maybe we’re about to find out.

Inside the shadowy hangar that neighbored the main airport of Cuenca, Shu Wei stabbed her dagger under the cowering man’s ear, angling the blade up. His mouth opened to scream, but death claimed him before any sound could escape. His body toppled backward, sliding off her knife and collapsing to the concrete floor.

She turned away, wiping the blood from the blade with a rag. She had gained the information she needed from the man. Her targets had flown off in a rented helicopter forty-five minutes ago, heading out into the jungle. The group had left with only a hired pilot, destined for a site deep in the mountains, where they were scheduled to meet with a pair of local guides of the Shuar tribe.

She tugged free an iPad from a pocket inside her jacket. It was the device she had discovered in the smoky university office back in Rome. It belonged to Father Roland Novak. During the flight here, a digital forensics expert had reviewed everything on the unit’s drive. Most of the information pertained to a medieval priest, Athanasius Kircher, including vast volumes of the man’s work. Little of it seemed pertinent to this hunt, except for the image she had viewed from the start. She brought up the screen again.

It was a map of Ecuador, with a specific spot pinpointed on it.

Her target’s rented helicopter was flying to a site near that same location.

She frowned, wishing the group had waited until morning before beginning their jungle search. She had hoped to narrow the gap with them here in Cuenca, to ambush them while they slept.

Still, she had prepared for this eventuality.

She crossed to the ten men assembled near the hangar door. She had handpicked each member of the strike team. They all belonged to the Chengdu Military Region Special Forces, all part of her current unit, code-named Guˇ. They had earned that title, Falcon, due to the unit’s notorious ability to hunt down and eliminate their targets with the ruthlessness of a true bird of prey.

I will not dishonor that name this night.

Her second-in-command joined her. Sergeant Major Kwan stood a head taller than her, his limbs thick with muscle, his face crisscrossed with old scars, his dark hair tied in a short tail. Many called him the Black Crow, due to his penchant for taking trophies from those he killed: rings, wedding bands, snips of hair, even a pair of slippers. She had once asked him about this quirk. It wasn’t to glorify the kills, he had told her, but as a measure of honor, respecting the lives of those he took.

Over time, she had grown to trust the man, more than any other. He in turn never showed any resentment of her position, age, or gender, a rare and welcome sentiment.

“The helicopter is fueled,” he said, his voice deceptively soft and quiet for such a rocky countenance. “Engines are being warmed.”

She nodded her approval, staring past the tarmac to the dark mountains.

Then let the hunt begin.

19

It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.

Maria clasped tightly to Baako’s hand. Because his wrist was bound in restraints, all she could do was squeeze his fingers. The heat of his skin was feverish. Though his eyes were glazed under a light sedative, he still silently pleaded with her, trying to understand what was happening to him, wondering why she was allowing this to be done to him. Tears rolled down from the corner of his lids. He could move little else with his skull clamped to the operating table by a ring of stainless steel.

An electric shaver glided across his scalp, wielded by one of the nurses.

It had been almost ninety minutes since she and Baako had been delivered to the vivisection lab. The preoperative preparations were interminable, involving a comprehensive physical, multiple blood tests, even an MRI. As the procedures ran on, Major General Lau had finally left with Arnaud, escorting the French paleontologist away to begin his study of the Neanderthal bones stolen from Croatia.

Then moments ago, a lab tech had returned with the results of a spinal tap. The lead surgeon — Dr. Han — had reviewed them. With everything seemingly in order, he had given the go-ahead to proceed with the surgery.

As the nurses continued their preparation of Baako, Dr. Han waited with a syringe of lidocaine, ready to perform a local anesthetic scalp block once they were finished. Other members of the team began to open surgical packs.

Baako hooted hoarsely at her.

“I know you’re scared,” she whispered to him. She bent down and kissed his fingertips. She let go of his hand long enough to cross her fists and press them to her chest.

[I love you]

She took his hand again — just as one of the nurses tested a piece of equipment. The ripping buzz of the surgical bone saw made her flinch. Baako reacted more severely. He bucked in his restraints, both straining to see what was making that noise and to escape it. His frightened grip came close to breaking her fingers.

Still, she held firmly to him. “Baako, I’m here. Look at me.”

His panicked eyes swiveled wildly but finally settled on her.

“That’s right. I’m not leaving you.”

More tears wet his cheeks. He mewled softly, the sound shredding her heart.

She struggled for any way to offer him solace, her mind whirling with thoughts of breaking him free. But she knew the futility of such hopes. There were guards posted outside the lab. Also, during Baako’s MRI, Maria had returned briefly to check on Kowalski, whose life balanced on her cooperation. He was still trapped in that cage on the ground level of the habitat. Except he was no longer alone. A large male silverback squatted before the door to his confinement. Other hybrid beasts stalked behind the leader of the pack.

Knowing the fate that awaited Kowalski if she did not cooperate, Maria had no choice but to be compliant, to do what was expected of her.

What else can I do?

She stared into Baako’s eyes, willing him all her love, trying to maintain a brave face for him. But she knew his senses were far more acute, his well of empathy as deep as any human’s. In his pained gaze, she could see his effort to communicate with her. But with his arms locked down, he was all but mute. While he could spell a few words with his fingers, he could not express the true depth of his fear and confusion, which only seemed to heighten his distress.

Baako’s fingers squeezed incrementally tighter on hers. He pressed his lips together and halted his soft mewling for a single breath, then continued again — only this time the sound coalesced into two repeated syllables.

“Ma… ma…”

Maria swallowed, feeling her legs give way. Even the surgical staff heard this utterance. Faces turned to the patient on the table. Murmurs of amazement spread among them. While gorillas did not have the vocal apparatus for true speech, Baako clearly had the ability to mimic a sound he knew well, one imprinted on his heart.

“Mama,” he repeated, his gaze fixed to her.

Maria could restrain herself no longer. She collapsed to her knees, her cheek pressed against Baako’s fingers. Sobs racked through her, rising out of the depths of her soul.

Somebody help us.

“This search could take all day, if not all week,” Monk said.

He stood at the threshold of Dìxià Chéng — Beijing’s Underground City — and studied the arched passageway that headed off from the bottom of the stairs. The tunnel was painted hospital white, stained with streaks of green mold. The floor was swamped in ankle-deep black water. He was happy to be wearing the paper mask over his nose and mouth, imagining what pathogens must be wafting about this claustrophobic place. Even through his mask’s filter, the air reeked of algae, fungus, and rot.

Kimberly handed back his phone. “I doubt this will help us find our way through here.”

The phone’s screen glowed with a spotty diagram of this subterranean warren, a map supplied to them by Kat. His wife had compiled a rough composite of the eighty square miles that made up the Underground City, leaning on her sources in the intelligence community. But Dìxià Chéng had been dug out a half century ago, and over time it been sliced and diced apart by the ongoing extension of Beijing’s subway system.

In the end, Kat admitted, the map’s only our best guess.

To make matters worse, her sources had found no evidence that the Underground City actually reached the Beijing Zoo, which lay a mile or so off from the shuttered noodle shop overhead.

After ambushing Gao Sun, Monk had gathered Painter’s extraction team to this shop. It was the first location where the GPS signal had reappeared. They had broken into the abandoned restaurant through a rear window, and after a quick search, they discovered a set of stairs in the basement leading down to the Underground City. According to Kimberly, this access point was one of a hundred entrances into the sprawling maze.

But the steel door found at the bottom of the steps looked new, clearly a recent addition. It was electronically locked, but a swipe of the magnetic keycard taken from Gao Sun had successfully opened it.

The capture of Gao Sun also proved to be a source of additional information. Through her contacts, Kat was able to discover his brother’s name: Chang Sun. The man was a lieutenant colonel with the PLA, trained at the Academy of Military Science. His immediate superior, Major General Jiaying Lau, also came out of that same academy. Kat had forwarded a photo of the woman, standing stiffly in a starched pine-green uniform. The major general was likely the source of the griping and anger displayed by Gao during his earlier phone conversation with his brother, Chang.

So it seems we now know the major players, but how do we find the bastards?

A splashing drew Monk’s attention forward. One of the extraction team returned out of the darkness. Monk had sent four commandos forward to canvass the immediate area. The fifth was back at Gao’s apartment, babysitting and safeguarding that extra bit of insurance.

“All clear,” the man reported. “But you should see what we found.”

The five men handpicked for this mission by Painter were all Chinese American Army Rangers chosen for their ability to blend as seamlessly as possible into the populace. To further disguise their presence on foreign soil, they were all outfitted with PLA uniforms, including Monk and Kimberly.

When in Rome…

“Show me,” Monk said.

The ranger — a stocky sergeant named John Chin — led the way down the flooded tunnel, passing by cramped rooms full of rusted skeletons of bicycles and mold-encrusted pieces of furniture. The narrow tunnel slowly sloped upward, taking them out of the water and onto drier ground. The perpetual gloom dissipated as a glow grew brighter ahead.

Monk soon found himself standing with the other rangers: two steely-eyed brothers named Henry and Michael Shaw — and a smaller commando who went simply by Kong. Monk wasn’t sure if the latter was his actual surname or a nickname based on the man’s size.

Kimberly gasped slightly, surprised by what lay at the end of the narrow passageway. It had emptied into an enormous tunnel, large enough to allow a tank to roll down the center of it. The walls and arched roof were painted a spotless gray, lit by a rail of sodium lights overhead. The tunnel stretched in both directions, burrowing north and south, fading around curves in the distance.

“I’m guessing this is the right road,” Monk commented. “And lucky for us, Gao left us transportation.”

A Chinese army jeep — a BJ2022 half-ton off-roader — sat parked next to the smaller tunnel. It was painted green with a crimson PLA star emblazoned on the front doors. Gao Sun must have parked the vehicle here before heading up top and walking the rest of the way to his apartment.

Kimberly reached into a pocket and pulled out the set of keys taken from their captive. “So who’s up for a road trip?” she asked with a small smile, which spread across the assembled group.

They quickly loaded inside. Kimberly took the wheel. If they ran into trouble, her pretty face and quick tongue were their best assets to get through any checkpoints.

Monk climbed in the back, squeezing between the Shaw brothers in order to better hide his presence. As extra insurance, he tugged his cap lower and his mask higher. Still, he knew such efforts would survive only the most casual inspection.

So be it.

He leaned forward and pointed to the north, in the general direction of the zoo. “Head out. Let’s see where this road takes us.”

The engine roared to throaty life, trebling off the concrete walls.

He sank back into his seat.

And let’s hope we’re not too late.

Baako feels the fire burst atop his head.

He thrashes in panic and pain, but his arms and legs are stuck. He can’t move his head. All he can do is roll his eyes, trying to see. He had watched the tall man lean over him with a needle in his fingers.

Baako knows needles. Mama sometimes poked him, giving him treats afterward: bananas covered in honey.

But this hurts more… so much more.

He looks to Mama now. She holds Baako’s hand. She says soft words, but her cheeks are wet. He smells her fear. The scent cuts through the sharper smells and finds him, pushing his own terror higher.

Mama, make it stop. I’ll be a good boy.

But it doesn’t stop. The needle sticks him again and again around his head, leaving behind a pool of fire each time.

Finally the man goes away.

Mama pushes closer. “You’re okay,” she tells him.

He must believe her, but he swallows and swallows and can’t make the pounding in his ears stop. Then slowly the fire fades across the top of his head, leaving a coldness that makes his skin feel dead and thick.

He doesn’t like this any better.

“You’re my boy,” Mama says. “You’re my brave boy.”

She says these good words, but her eyes weep. She brushes his brow, but by now that coldness has seeped even there. He can barely feel her fingertips.

“Sleep now, my little boy,” she whispers to him, like she did so many nights back home. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

She looks at the tall man who plays with a milky bag that connects to Baako’s arm by a plastic rope. Baako feels everything grow lighter, like he’s floating. He remembers a blue balloon that Mama let him play with. Outside, the string had slipped from his fingers, and the balloon went up and up into the sky.

He is that balloon now.

Mama’s face blurs and fades away.

He hoots, trying to tell her to stay.

Mama, don’t go.

Then blackness.

As Baako’s body slumped to the tabletop, Maria finally let go of his hand. She stepped from the table and hugged her arms around her chest, shivering with cold certainty. She had watched the terror and agony as Baako endured the anesthetic scalp block. But at least he was now asleep, sedated under the short-acting effect of the propofol drip. His chest rose and fell evenly, looking peaceful for the moment.

But such rest would not last.

The operating team — which consisted of two surgeons and three nurses — was already draping his form. They would keep Baako sedated only long enough to slice a flap of his skin off his scalp and perform the craniotomy. Once his skull was cracked open and the brain exposed, the drip would be turned off, and Baako would waken in a matter of minutes.

Then his true nightmare would begin.

Unable to watch these final preparations, she strode back to the curve of windows overlooking the hybrid habitat. She placed her forehead against the glass, staring below. Kowalski remained trapped in the cage by the habitat’s exit, while the hulking occupants of the pit waited at the threshold, led by the massive silverback. Behind the bars, the big man looked like a rag doll compared to the half-ton beast.

Maria wondered how the researchers controlled such aggressive specimens. She placed her palms against the glass. Was this barrier even thick enough to prevent them from battering out of there? Surely they could climb the rocky walls to reach the height of these windows.

A scuff of shoes drew her attention around. One of the nurses — a young woman with bright eyes — joined her, sipping from a glass of ice water, taking a break before the final stage of the operation. It was the same nurse who had showed a bit of sympathy when Maria had first arrived. The woman nodded to the window, perhaps noting her attention.

“They cannot reach here,” she said. Her words were whispered, but not as if she were afraid of sharing secrets. She seemed naturally soft-spoken. She pointed to a row of large boxes positioned below the level of the windows. “They broadcast on a frequency coded to the animals’ collars.”

Maria had noted the steel bands around the hybrids’ necks. “They’re shock collars?”

“That is correct. The signal generates a shield over the habitat, just under the level of the windows.”

Maria nodded her understanding. If the beasts climbed too high and reached that invisible barrier, they would be jolted with electricity and driven back to the floor.

“And for emergency…” The nurse pointed to the left, to a locked cabinet holding a tranquilizer rifle. There was a latched gate in the neighboring pane of the observation window. “But do not fear. The guns have never been used. You are very safe.”

Maria did not bother to point out the irony of this last statement. She stared down at Kowalski. He spotted her and lifted an arm. She placed her hand on the glass again, trying to reassure him that she was doing her best to keep him safe, too.

Behind her, Dr. Han barked out an order, making the nurse jump. The woman gave a hurried bow toward Maria — then dashed to obey her superior. Maria turned and saw that Baako was now fully draped. The surgical team stood off to the side, scrubbing up for the procedure.

A cold dread settled over her.

So it begins.

“Well, that doesn’t look good,” Monk said from the backseat.

As Kimberly rounded the jeep past a long curve, a wooden barricade cut across the wide tunnel ahead. It was topped by rolls of razor wire and had a sentry shack guarding the gateway through it. Beyond the barrier, a small parking lot held a handful of jeeps and motorcycles.

“What do you think?” Kimberly asked as she slowed their approach.

“That barricade pretty much matches the southern border of the zoo overhead,” he said. “So I’m guessing that’s where we need to go.”

During the drive here, Monk had been monitoring their progress via an accelerometer built into his satellite phone, but after the first quarter mile, their path had shot beyond the boundaries of Kat’s map, passing into no-man’s-land. Along the way, countless smaller passageways branched off, including a tunnel or two even larger than this one. It was a veritable maze. With no road signs to guide them, they had simply continued along a path that best aimed for the park.

At least it seemed to have worked.

But now a new challenge presented itself.

Up ahead, the road through the barrier was blocked by a row of waist-high steel pylons. A sentry stepped out of the guard shack to meet them.

Showing no hesitation, Kimberly glided their vehicle toward the gateway. As she braked to stop before the line of pylons, the sentry came forward to meet her, looking bored and unconcerned. He likely recognized the vehicle, so didn’t bother to unhook the assault rifle from his shoulder.

Clearly this buried station did not get much action.

The sentry reached the vehicle and leaned over to the driver-side window.

Monk kept his head low, pretending to be half asleep, just another soldier reporting for duty. Kimberly spoke firmly to the sentry, twisting away from him as she reached for her knapsack, feigning an attempt to find papers or orders.

While she did so, the man poked his head through the window and took stock of the others in the jeep. Monk felt one of the Shaw brothers shift a hand to his sidearm.

Hold steady, he silently urged the ranger.

Before anyone else could make a move, Kimberly lashed out and hooked her arm around the sentry’s neck. Catching him off guard, she easily jabbed his throat with a syringe, and an explosive puff of CO₂ pneumatically injected a powerful sedative into his bloodstream. She held him for the several breaths it took to knock him out.

Sergeant Chin used that time to hop out of the front passenger seat and rush to the guard shack. He searched the panel inside, then hit a button with his fist. The pylons blocking the way lowered into the road. He hurried back, then took the limp form of the sentry and hid it inside the shack.

“He’ll be out for at least an hour,” Kimberly said as she eased the jeep through the barrier. “But we’ll need to move fast. It won’t be long before someone finds this gate unguarded.”

Outside their vehicle, Chin continued on foot, flanking their route toward the parking lot, watching for any other soldiers. Beyond the parking lot, the tunnel ended at a towering set of roll-up doors, tall enough to accommodate a double-decker bus. A dump truck stood backed up to that door, suggesting it was a loading dock for this facility. Chin popped up to check the truck’s cab, then dropped and signaled the all clear.

Kimberly parked their jeep, and they all off-loaded. She pointed to a smaller door to the left of the larger one. A blue key reader glowed next to the knob.

She pulled out Gao’s keycard again. “Let’s hope this works here, too.”

“And pray there’s no additional biometric sensors,” Monk whispered. “Palm readers, retinal scans.”

Kimberly shrugged. “If necessary, we can always drag that sentry over here. Use his hand or eye.”

True…

Monk appreciated the woman’s ability to think on the fly. Kat chose well in picking her. Kimberly crossed to the key reader and waved Gao Sun’s stolen card over the glowing surface.

The lock disengaged with a sharp click.

“Simple enough,” he muttered.

She tugged the door open — only to find herself facing a startled man in a blue workman’s uniform. His cap bore the same insignia as on the dump truck’s door. The worker fell back in surprise, mumbling apologetically. His gaze swept across the assembled group of uniformed figures and moved out of their way.

Kimberly gave a small bow of her head in thanks and stepped through. Monk hung back, adjusting his sunglasses higher on his nose, praying his use of shades in this underground world didn’t set off any alarm bells in the man — but it wasn’t that man Monk should have worried about.

Chin followed Kimberly. As the sergeant crossed the threshold, Monk noted the change in the key reader next to the door. Its glow flared from blue to an angry crimson.

His heart sunk.

Oh, crap.

A loud klaxon erupted from sirens above the doorway and spread off into the distance.

Kimberly swung around, her face registering shock, but also understanding. The doorway must have sensors built into it, requiring anyone passing through to have a keycard on their person.

The truck driver tried to flee, but Chin pistol-whipped the man from behind, dropping him with a single blow.

Kimberly waved to Monk, staring upward. “Get inside! Now!”

A heavy security gate had begun dropping across the doorway. The Shaw brothers dashed across the threshold. Monk followed, rolling on a shoulder to get under the lowering barrier. The last of them, Kong, lunged with surprising speed, diving on his belly and sliding under the edge. Then his belt snagged on the door’s metal sill, stopping him midway.

Panic etched the man’s face.

No, you don’t.

Monk snatched the gate’s bottom edge with his prosthetic hand and braced himself against the grind of gears, knowing he could hold out for no more than a breath. Chin grabbed Kong’s arms and yanked the man through the narrowing gap, falling backward and using his body weight to haul his smaller teammate to safety. The metal barrier dropped with a resounding clang at Kong’s heels, sealing them in.

As the alarm bells continued to ring, Monk tossed aside his sunglasses and faced Kimberly with a heavy sigh.

So much for simple.

Maria stared at the tableau before her.

With the first wail of the sirens, the surgical team had frozen in place around the operating table. Dr. Han stood poised with a blade in hand. He had just made his first incision across Baako’s shaved scalp.

Maria could not take her eyes off the trickle of blood that trailed from the three-inch-long cut. She felt numb all over, barely registering the alarm. Still, her mind whirled, wondering what had happened.

Faces turned to the tall doors at the other end of the vivisection lab. Concerned murmurs rose from among the team, plainly unsure if they should proceed with the surgery or not.

Before anything could be settled, Maria made the decision for them. Reacting more than thinking, she rushed the table, determined to protect Baako, even if it only meant delaying the inevitable. She kneed Dr. Han behind the legs, dropping him to the floor, while snatching the scalpel from his fingers. She grabbed the back collar of his scrubs and pulled him close.

She poised the tip of the blade at his carotid.

“Wake Baako up!” she yelled at the remaining staff.

Dr. Han struggled as his initial stun wore off. She stabbed the point of the blade through his skin, drawing blood. He stiffened again.

“Now!” she hollered.

Finally one of the team moved. It was the nurse who had shown her kindness earlier. The young woman shifted around and clamped shut the sedative drip.

“Pull his catheter, too,” she directed the nurse. She then glared at the others. “Free him!”

No one moved, so she twisted her fist in Dr. Han’s scrubs and pushed the blade tip deeper. He gasped in pain, then shouted at his staff, clearly ordering them to obey. Like Maria, he probably realized there was nowhere she could go with the patient. So why not cooperate?

As she continued to threaten with the blade, the surgical drapes were yanked off Baako’s form, and the leather straps unbuckled from his limbs.

“Bandage up his incision,” she ordered the assistant surgeon, her voice growing meeker, more uncertain as her initial adrenaline surge began to wane.

Still, the doctor obeyed and closed the wound with butterfly bandages, then taped gauze sponges over the site. By the time he was finished, the sirens had gone silent.

In the quiet, the others looked at her, waiting for her next instruction.

Maria faced them, overwhelmed by one question.

What do I do from here?

Major General Lau stood in the eye of the storm.

Upon first hearing the alarms, she had followed protocol in the event of a security breach and proceeded directly to the communication room of the complex. Six men manned the curve of tables under a wall of video monitors. The largest screen glowed with a three-dimensional map of the facility’s four levels, encompassing miles of tunnels and hundreds of acres of research labs, office and storage spaces, living quarters, and countless other rooms and miscellaneous halls.

The site of the breach was at the complex’s southern gate, where the facility merged with the old warren of bomb shelters and tunnels of the Underground City.

“How many intruders are there?” Jiaying demanded of Chang Sun.

“Unknown for the moment.” The lieutenant colonel cupped an earpiece as he monitored reports from the security teams closing in on that location. With his other hand, he pointed to a grid of monitors. “We’re pulling feed from the nearby cameras now.”

On the indicated screens, images rolled in reverse. Finally, one of the technicians raised a hand.

“Over here,” Chang said.

She joined the lieutenant colonel at that station. The technician ran the footage from the moment of the breach. The feed came from a camera facing the loading dock. She watched a group barge inside and assault a worker at the threshold.

Chang reached past the tech’s shoulder, froze the image, then tapped each of the faces on the screen. Blue boxes outlined them and zoomed into fuzzy close-ups.

“Six of them,” he said, finally answering her earlier question. “One woman, five men. All wearing army uniforms.”

Jiaying leaned closer. “Are they our people?”

She did not dismiss the possibility that the Ministry of State Security had ordered a covert challenge to the base’s security. Still, she sensed this was no drill.

Chang offered corroboration by pointing to one of the outlined faces. The man had removed a pair of sunglasses, revealing his foreign features. “They’re Americans,” he said, glancing over to her. “I’m sure of it.”

Anger burned through her at such a trespass. “Where are they?”

He sighed in exasperation. “After the breach, they moved beyond the surveillance net around the loading bay door. But they can’t stay out of sight for long. If another camera fails to pick them up, one of my teams will flush them out.”

“How many security personnel do you have on the premises?”

“Over a hundred.” Chang straightened. “And with all gates locked down and extra guards posted, they’re trapped inside. It’s only a matter of time before we find them.”

She nodded, forcing her breath to slow. While she was perturbed at this assault, a part of her was relieved. She had suspected the Americans had sent operatives here, but until this moment that threat had been hypothetical, an unknown variable beyond her control. Now it had become quantifiable, a hazard she could eliminate, possibly even turn to her advantage.

“Zhōngxiào Sun!” a technician called out sharply to Chang.

Jiaying crossed with the lieutenant colonel to the new station, hoping the intruders had been spotted. But the screen revealed a view into the vivisection lab. She frowned at the sight of Maria Crandall holding a hostage at knifepoint, clearly interrupting the surgery.

Jiaying shook her head sadly at the woman’s misguided efforts, clearly ignited by her compassion for her test subject.

I expected better from a fellow scientist.

Then again, too often Americans had proven themselves to be soft when they should be hard. They were too coddled, too certain of their superiority, too blind to the new millennium’s shift of global powers.

Unlike in China, where hard lessons were taught at a young age.

It seems your education is sorely lacking, Dr. Crandall.

“Connect me to that lab,” she ordered.

Chang instructed the tech, who tapped a few keys, then handed back a wireless microphone. “You’ll be able to hear any responses over the monitor’s speakers.”

“Very good.” She lifted the microphone to her lips. “Dr. Crandall, if I could have your attention.”

On the screen, Maria backed a step, dragging the surgeon with her. She glanced toward the ceiling speakers.

“I see you appear panicked, but let me assure you that the sirens are merely a drill,” she said, using the lie to smother any hope of rescue. “Still, I should inform you, as a matter of protocol, all rooms are locked down.”

This last was not a lie.

There was nowhere Maria could go.

“You and your test subject will be fine, Dr. Crandall. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for your companion.”

Maria glanced back toward the wall of windows behind her.

“You were given ample warning,” Jiaying said.

Now it’s time to learn your lesson.

Kowalski kept to his feet inside the small cage, unnerved by the sudden silence after the blaring sirens. He had been penned in here for nearly three hours, coming to view his prison as nothing more than a vending machine for the beasts outside. When the sirens first erupted, he had been certain it was the dinner bell being rung, marking his end.

And he wasn’t the only one bothered by the noise.

The klaxon — echoing loudly across the cavernous habitat — had roiled up the massive gorilla hybrids. Some retreated for the shelter of the caves, their heads bowed away from the noise. Others shifted closer, tightening around their leader. The half-ton silverback continued to squat outside the cage door, clearly unperturbed by the ruckus. The only sign that the beast had heard anything was when it had glanced over a shoulder and glared toward the windows.

Even Kowalski had stared up toward the curve of glass, hoping to catch sight of Maria, wondering the same thing over and over again.

What’s going on up there?

By now he feared the surgeons had finished with Baako’s operation. He wished he could console Maria, to offer her his support, as meager as it might be. He also tried not to think about Baako’s fate, which only served to tighten the knot of anger in his gut.

Motion drew his attention back to the furry mountain at the door. The silverback had begun to rock slowly on its haunches. Kowalski met its dark gaze, which never left his face.

It’s like the bugger knows something.

Kowalski pressed his back more firmly against the solid steel behind him, wishing he could melt through it. Then a loud grind of gears erupted above him — and the cage door began to trundle slowly upward along its tracks.

Oh, shit…

20

In the copilot’s seat, Gray searched the jungle below their rental helicopter as it swept higher into the mountains. Though it was an hour shy of midnight, the brilliance of the full moon glistened off the dark green canopy, which was woven through by swaths of silvery mists. The terrain below looked untouched by man, broken into deep crevices and pierced by jagged outcroppings of granite.

He glanced at the aircraft’s altimeter. The small town of Cuenca, from which they’d departed, lay at the eight-thousand-foot level. Where they were headed now — some forty miles due south of the town — was even higher in the Ecuadorian Andes.

Lena’s voice reached him through the radio built into his headphones. “It’s hard to believe anyone would build a city way out here.”

“It’s not that implausible,” Roland argued. “During my research, I discovered Ecuador has many attractive qualities. First, its soil is exceptionally fertile due to the amount of volcanic activity, which makes it perfect for farming. The region’s also the site of four ancient migration routes through the Andes, connecting the Amazon rain forest to the Pacific Ocean. It’s the literal crossroads of this continent. Even the Inca empire settled on Cuenca as their northern capital.”

“Sounds like a popular place,” Seichan mumbled with thick sarcasm.

Roland ignored her and continued, “More significant, Ecuador is the only source of balsa wood in the world.”

“Balsa?” Lena asked.

“The lightweight material was used to construct the old seafaring boats of this region, going back millennia. So if someone was looking for a temperate place to make their home and possibly serve as the launching pad for a migratory culture, Ecuador would suit them perfectly.”

Gray took this all in, picturing such a lost civilization, remembering the book Lena had shown him, full of photos of Father Crespi’s collection, antiquities that seemed to have come from all corners of the world.

“And last of all,” Roland said, “in the ancient Amerindian tongue, the phrase Old Andes translates as Atl Antis.”

“Atlantis?” Lena said, her voice a mix of shock and doubt.

Even Gray looked over his shoulder to search Roland’s face for any sign that he was joking.

Roland merely shrugged. “That’s what I read.”

The pilot cut in, his English thickly accented by Spanish. “That clearing up ahead, señor, is as close as I can get to the coordinates you gave me.”

Gray returned his attention to the mist-shrouded forest. He spotted no break in the canopy ahead. The terrain looked as inhospitable as ever. Then he made out a tiny pit within that tumultuous dark green sea.

He couldn’t possibly mean—

“You can land this bird there?” Seichan asked, clearly incredulous.

“Sí, no problem.”

The pilot dove the small aircraft toward the small glade. It was open to the sky, but surrounded by towering trees. Mists filled the clearing, erasing any sign of the ground.

Gray clutched a handgrip as the pilot swung the helicopter around, bringing it to hover above the opening. He then swiftly descended. The rotor wash whipped the surrounding branches, which appeared to be only inches from the whirling blades. The pilot looked unperturbed as he continued down, sinking the aircraft into the mists.

Blind now, Gray held his breath, waiting for the rotors to dice into the trees and send them plunging to a fiery crash. Instead, after a stomach-sinking drop, the skids safely kissed the ground.

The pilot looked toward him and repeated. “No problem.”

Easy for you to say…

Relieved, he clapped the pilot on the shoulder, silently thanking him, then turned to the others. “Everybody out.” He checked his watch. “Our guides should be here soon.”

I hope.

While en route, Roland had made contact with Father Pelham, the priest at the Church of María Auxiliadora in Cuenca, the man who took Father Crespi’s place at the mission. Like Crespi, the current father was well regarded and loved by the local Shuar tribes. With the support of the Vatican behind him, Roland was able to get Father Pelham to contact a nearby Shuar centro, a village of some twenty families not far from where they wanted to go.

If anyone knew this terrain and its secrets, it would be the local Shuar.

But gaining their cooperation from here might prove to be a challenge. The tribes were notoriously suspicious of foreigners. People still vanished within these forests, succumbing to predators, poisonous snakes, or disease. But no one denied that a few of those travelers likely met their ends at the hands of the tribesmen in the darkest corners of the jungles, where headhunting and cannibalism continued. Even the occasional tsantsa, or shrunken head, made its way to the black market from these shadowy forests.

As they all unloaded, Lena pulled deeper into her jacket. “It’s so cold.”

Roland agreed with her. “Certainly not the steamy jungle I expected.”

“It’s the elevation,” Gray explained, waving an arm toward the towering canopy shrouded in mists. “At this height in the mountains, the jungle turns into a cloud forest.”

The air was also incredibly thin, forcing him to breathe harder.

Stepping away, Seichan stared off into the darkness beyond the reach of the helicopter’s lights. “It’s like another world.”

Gray unsnapped a flashlight from his belt and shone the beam into the forest. It illuminated the heart of a lush green landscape. Cloud forests were notorious for their damp abundance, and this was no exception. The trunks, branches, and vines were covered in feathery crusts of mosses. Orchids grew on every surface in myriad shades and subtle curves of petals. Ferns sprouted not only from the ground but also from branches overhead. Even the leaves dripped with algae.

And throughout it all, wisps of mist and shreds of heavier fog hung in the air or gently snaked through the branches and canopy. The air here was exceptionally thin, making his lungs strain and his heart beat faster. Still, the soft breezes easily carried forth the rich scent of loam underfoot, interlaced with the flowery perfume of night-blooming flowers.

It was another world.

To enter here felt like trespassing.

As the helicopter’s engines quieted down to cooling ticks, the forest came alive with the burring buzz of insects, the brittle knock of branches in the canopy as something fled their arrival, and the occasional spirited call of a bird. It was a reminder that it was not only green life that thrived here. These forests were home to large predators, like jaguars and anacondas, but also tapirs, sloths, peccaries, and all manner of monkeys.

A flock of parrots took wing from the forest edge and spiraled across the glade, calling down their complaints before vanishing again.

Lena tracked them, then stared over to Gray. “It’s beautiful.”

“And dangerous,” Seichan warned her, clearly trying to dampen the geneticist’s enthusiasm, to keep her focused. “Such beauty is nature’s way of luring you into a trap.”

Lena looked aghast.

Gray hid a smile as he sidled next to Seichan. “Maybe ease up a bit. Remember we need the others’ help.”

She slipped her hand into his, leaning closer. “We also need them alive.” She raised her lips to his ear, her breath warm on his neck. “Besides, I was being easy. I didn’t even mention the snake tangled in the branch above her head.”

Gray looked up and searched until he spotted an emerald length spiraled along a limb. “Poisonous?” he asked.

“From its triangular head, some sort of pit viper.” She nestled closer as he tried to pull away and warn Lena. “Don’t worry. It’s too cold at the moment to be a threat.”

Gray was not entirely convinced. Doubts weighed on him. “Maybe it would be better to wait until morning before traipsing into the jungle with some headhunters.”

Seichan pulled back and stared at him. “No, you were right before. We’ve spent ten hours getting here and shouldn’t waste any more time. Besides, if we discover this lost cavern system, it won’t matter if it’s day or night once we’re underground.”

True, but first we have to find that place.

“We’ve got company,” Roland said, moving closer to the two of them, drawing Lena with him.

To their right, two figures stood quietly at the forest’s edge. Gray could not say how long they had been there. It was as if they had suddenly materialized out of the shadows.

Wary, he signaled the others to stay put and advanced toward the pair.

The taller appeared to be a Shuar elder. His face was pocked with tribal scars and traced with geometric tattoos across his cheeks, chin, and forehead. His gray hair was braided behind his gaunt shoulders. He stood bare-chested, except for an elaborate neckpiece of feathers, seedpods, and what appeared to be bones.

Next to him was a smaller figure, a boy of twelve or thirteen. His dark hair was shaggy and unkempt. Though barefoot like the older man, he wore baggy shorts and a green T-shirt with a Notre Dame leprechaun on it. He offered Gray a wide, enthusiastic smile, a counterpoint to the grave countenance of the elder.

“Hello,” Gray said and introduced himself. “Do you speak English?”

The boy nodded. “I am Jembe.” He waved to the older man. “This is Chakikui. I will speak for him, tell him what you say.”

“Thank you,” Gray said, glad to have a translator. “Do you know Father Pelham at the Church of María Auxiliadora?”

The boy’s grin grew even larger. “I like him very much. He taught me English and Spanish at the mission school.”

Good. A personal connection might help.

“Father Pelham told us that you might be able to guide us to some caves in this area.”

Jembe nodded his head vigorously. “Caves, yes. Many caves under the mountains.”

The elder interrupted, speaking dourly, never taking his eyes off Gray.

Jembe listened, then translated. “Uncle Chakikui says he knows the caves you seek.”

Gray let out a breath, reassured.

“But he will not take you,” the boy added, looking stricken. “If you try to go there, our tribe will kill you.”

With his message given, Chakikui turned and headed back into the forest, drawing Jembe with him, who cast an apologetic look back toward Gray.

He watched the pair vanish into the darkness.

So much for that personal connection.

“Wait!” Roland yelled. He rushed forward upon hearing the elder’s declaration and warning. “Please!”

He joined Gray, who stopped him from plunging into the forest after the pair.

“Careful,” Gray warned. “Those two may not have come alone. If you spook them, you could get an arrow in the chest.”

Roland refused to relent, stepping in front of Gray. “I am Father Novak,” he called out into the darkness. “I’ve come a long way. Please!”

Not knowing what else to do, Roland opened his jacket and exposed the white Roman collar of his station. If Father Pelham was well regarded, perhaps that respect might extend to another who wore that collar.

He waited, standing there with his chest exposed, all too cognizant of Gray’s earlier warning.

Finally, without even a rustle of leaves underfoot, the shadows coalesced into the returning figures of the elder and the boy.

The older tribesman stepped forward, his gaze fixed to Roland’s collar. He spoke sternly, but with a measure of forbearance.

Jembe translated. “Chakikui says he will listen. Because priests have shown kindness to our tribe.”

Roland recognized the boy’s use of the word priests… as in plural. The elder was certainly old enough to have been alive during the time when Father Pelham’s predecessor ran the mission in Cuenca. He decided to play that card now.

“You knew Father Carlos Crespi,” he said. He noted the elder’s eyes narrow at the mention of the missionary’s name and pressed his case. “We come this night to honor the good father’s memory, to hopefully carry on his duty in these forests.”

Jembe relayed Chakikui’s skeptical response. “Many come after the gold.”

“Not us,” Roland insisted. “We come for knowledge. To find a city of ancient teachers, a place of learning.”

He pulled out Father Kircher’s old journal from the inside of his jacket and showed the gilded cover to Chakikui and the boy. The elder’s attention focused on the labyrinth, his eyes narrowing again, as if in recognition.

Interesting…

“We have heard stories of caverns that hold many books like this,” Roland said, remembering Petronio Jaramillo’s tale of a lost library buried underground. “Can you take us there?”

The elder spoke, giving a disconcerting shake of his head. Jembe looked equally grim as he translated. “Chakikui says he took another to those caves. Long ago. He says it was a mistake.”

Roland glanced at Gray. Could this be the same tribesman who took Jaramillo to those caves back in the forties?

“It is forbidden to go there,” Jembe said, continuing to share the elder’s words. “Even to honor Father Crespi.” The boy made the sign of the cross at the mention of the father’s name. “May he rest in peace.”

Roland sighed and wiped his brow, struggling to find a way to convince the elder to cooperate. He had noticed during this entire exchange that Chakikui’s eyes kept returning again and again to the book in his hand.

Hoping it might be the key to gaining the elder’s support, he held forth the journal. “Another reverend father wrote this book. Hundreds of years ago. Like Father Crespi, he sought out this lost city of ancient teachers.” Roland flipped through the pages until he came to the map of South America with a labyrinth marked on it. “He said for us to seek out this place.”

Chakikui stepped closer, holding out his hand. Roland let him have the journal. The elder searched through other pages. He paused at a page where Father Kircher had copied down the star petrogylphs found above the graves of Adam and Eve.

Chakikui whispered to Jembe.

The boy turned hopefully toward Roland. “Chakikui asks who is this other father? He says there is one name — another father from long ago — that will open the path to those caves.”

Roland felt a surge of relief and certainty. “His name is Father Athanasius Kircher.” He pointed to the journal. “Those are his words, his writings.”

Chakikui closed the journal and handed it back to Roland. He turned away, casting back a final verdict, which the boy shared.

“That is not the one.”

The pair began to head into the forest again.

At a loss for words, Roland did not know what else to do to convince the man.

Gray pushed past Roland. He reached for the elder’s shoulder, but then retracted his hand before making contact, fearing such physicality might be mistaken as a threat.

“Wait,” Gray blurted out. “This other father… Was his name Nicolas Steno?”

Roland stiffened, realizing his mistake.

Of course.

Father Kircher had never set foot on this continent. He had been too infirm in his later years, so he had sent an emissary, a younger man capable of such a hard journey, his dear friend Nicolas Steno. But could it be possible for the oral history of the local Shuar tribe to still remember such a man, to still revere his name?

The answer came as Chakikui faced them again, his eyes glinting brightly. “Nikloss… Steno?” he said, searching their faces.

Roland nodded.

Chakikui let out a long breath, as if he had been holding it for decades. He then whispered to the boy.

Jembe nodded as the elder turned away. “He will take you to the home of the ancient ones, to the city of the Old Andes.”

Roland barely heard the boy’s translation. Instead, the last words of the elder rang in his head. He had recognized Chakikui’s use of the Amerindian translation of Old Andes.

Atl Antis.

He turned to the others, who all wore varying looks of shock, having heard it, too.

Could it be true?

Lena followed behind Gray and Roland, with Seichan trailing them all.

After they had trekked through the rain forest for forty minutes, all of her clothes clung to the crevices of her body — not from sweat, but from the perpetual cold dampness trapped under the high canopy. The moisture dripped from branches, pooled under mats of decaying leaves, and hung in the air. With every breath, she drew in that clamminess. Even her lungs had begun to ache, as each inhalation grew more ragged in the thin air.

She strained to keep close to Gray, who carried a flashlight. It cast enough light to illuminate their way through this green tunnel under the canopy. Still, her eyes often drifted to the darkness to either side. The forest rustled, creaked, and buzzed, breaking out occasionally with the sharper hoot of a monkey or a whistling cry of a bird. Her thoughts ran with other imagined threats hidden behind that cloak of darkness, mostly dwelling on snakes.

The shifting tendrils of mist only added to her unease.

Makes the whole forest feel like it’s moving.

A sudden cry pierced the night, full of leonine rage, sounding both distant and close at the same time. She stumbled forward to get closer to the others.

Jembe drifted back to her, leaving the older tribesman to continue leading them through this trackless forest. “Jaguar,” he informed her. “Lots of them around here. But they won’t come closer. We are many and making lots of noise.”

Lots of noise?

Barely anyone said a word for the past fifteen minutes. All she heard was the sound of breathing and the soft squelch of their boots in the damp loam.

Jembe patted her arm, his eyes shining on her, plainly infatuated. “I protect you,” he offered. “I’m fast. Like my name. It means humbird.”

“Hummingbird?” she asked with a smile.

He bobbed his head proudly, imitating the flit of a bird with one hand. “Very fast.”

“I’m sure you are.”

They continued on for what seemed like miles, traipsing up steep paths and winding down switchbacks. Twice they had to ford fast-flowing streams over moss-slick rocks. The last time the water had been thigh-deep.

Then slowly a louder roaring grew ahead of them.

What now?

Before they could reach the source of that thunderous rumbling, Chakikui drew them to a stop at the crest of a ridge. Jembe translated his warning.

“Past here, the land is forbidden. Guarded by…” Jembe struggled for the word. “By devils.”

As proof, Chakikui stepped to a tall standing stone at the ridgeline. Its surface was encrusted with lichen, but the side facing them was clear enough that they could recognize a crude figure engraved into the rock. The petroglyph had been drawn by scraping through the dark outer varnish of the boulder to reveal the white stone beneath, casting a ghostly quality to the image.

“A devil,” Jembe said, scowling at the depicted beast.

The figure stood upright on its hind legs, with claws raised high, growling menacingly at them.

Lena pushed forward. “It’s not a devil,” she said with awe. A fingertip traced the muzzle and the rounded ears; then she glanced to the others. “It’s a cave bear. Similar to what we saw painted underground in Croatia.”

Roland nodded. “She’s right.”

She shook her head. “But the Paleolithic territory of Ursus spelaeus did not extend to South America,” she whispered. “This image shouldn’t be here.”

“Unless someone drew it from memory,” Roland offered.

She stood up and stared past the crest. Beyond the totem marker, more boulders were strewn down the steep slope ahead. Even from her perch, she spotted other petroglyphs scratched into those rock faces. Most of the designs were abstract: geometric shapes, fanciful whirls, even what appeared to be sticklike writing. But there were also many more animals: snakes, birds, jaguars, monkeys, and a giant horned and hoofed beast that could be a bison.

No wonder such a place spooked the local tribes.

Chakikui blocked them with an arm, relating another reason for the forbidden nature of this area. Jembe explained, “Father Nikloss Steno. Long ago, he say to let no one come here. Not unless they know his name.”

“Why?” Gray asked.

Chakikui frowned and answered with the boy’s help. “Dangerous.” The elder patted his bare chest. “To body and to spirit.” He waved to encompass more than the forest. “And to world.”

The elder stared at Gray, clearly seeing if he still wanted to continue.

“I understand.” Gray waved onward. “Show us.”

Before obeying, Chakikui raised his hands to his mouth and let out a sharp whistle, not unlike a birdcall.

Jembe explained, “He sends the others away. Back to our village. They cannot come with us.”

Lena peered into the dark forest.

Seichan looked unsurprised. “We’ve been followed since we left the helicopter. I figure at least a dozen.”

Shocked, Lena continued to stare over her shoulder as they all headed down the slope, following Chakikui.

Roland hiked beside her. He swept an arm to either side of their path. “According to Jaramillo’s account of his journey to the lost library, the trail to its entrance led through a maze of carved boulders.” He pointed toward the distant roaring of water. “A path that ended at a storm-swollen river.”

As Chakikui continued down, the canopy began to thin overhead, shredding apart to allow the bright face of the moon to show in glimpses and pieces.

Lena craned up at the brilliance, happy for the extra light, but also weighed down by Roland’s earlier assessment of that satellite. She remembered the strange synergy of alignments and proportions that defined the relationships of the earth, moon, and sun.

Roland noted her attention skyward. “Makes me wonder again about Neil Armstrong’s involvement in all of this.”

“How so?” she asked.

“Maybe he truly did experience something strange up there.” He gazed in wonder at the moon. “Maybe that was what drew him to join that British expedition? A desire for the truth. We know he had been in touch with the first expedition’s organizer, a Scottish engineer named Stan Hall — a man who had also been in contact with Petronio Jaramillo. Hall was also the one organizing the second expedition with Armstrong before Jaramillo was assassinated.”

By now any further discussion became more difficult as the roar of water grew deafening. Ahead, the river came into view, shining silver in the moonlight. It cascaded along a series of cataracts down a rocky cliff and pooled into a crystal-clear basin. From there, its course continued over another sheer drop, becoming a thunderous waterfall that disappeared into the forest far below.

Gray checked his satellite phone as they neared the riverbank.

“Strange,” he muttered.

Lena moved closer. “What?”

“The GPS shows we’re generally right on the mark. At the same longitude and latitude noted on the map in Kircher’s journal. Except look at this.” He tapped a compass in the lower right corner of the screen. “This is a magnetic reading, not the result of any satellite feed.”

Lena saw that the needle jiggered clockwise and counterclockwise, spinning erratically.

Before anyone could comment, Jembe called to them. He stood with Chakikui beside the wide pool. Misty droplets from the cataracts sparkled over their figures.

As she and the others joined the pair, Chakikui pointed to the other side of the river, to a cliff face that rose on the far side.

“The entrance is through there,” Jembe explained.

Lena squinted but failed to see anything but sheer rock.

Roland let out a small groan. They all turned to him. “Look near the waterline. I can make out a shadow of a tunnel entrance. Only the top foot of it is showing. I think that’s what they’re talking about.”

“So the entrance is flooded,” Gray said.

“What else did you expect?” Seichan said with a sigh. “If this is Atlantis, wasn’t it supposed to have been sunk under the water?”

Gray gave a sorrowful shake of his head. “Looks like we’re going to have to swim.”

Lena’s reaction was stronger. Her breath quickened and her heart began to pound with trepidation. She remembered another set of flooded tunnels, a place she had barely escaped from the first time.

Roland must have sensed her fear and offered his support. “At least this time we’re not being shot at.”

The wind whipped and snapped at Shu Wei’s clothing as she fell through the well of mists. She studied her landing zone, searching through goggles fixed with night-vision equipment. The gear was toggled and attuned to pick out heat signatures.

Below her, the largest object glowed a fiery crimson, marking the location of her target’s helicopter, its engines still warm, casting off a discrete signature against the cool background of the cloud forest.

Smaller pools of fire marked the other members of her strike team as they spiraled down, parachuting into the forest clearing.

Finally, a brighter spark bloomed at ground level. It marked a flare ignited by her second-in-command, Major Sergeant Kwan. He had landed and was signaling the all clear.

She pulled her chute’s cord and heard the satisfying flutter of fabric unfurling above her head. Then her body yanked hard into her rig’s straps as the canopy snapped open. Her plummet from the single-engine jump plane far overhead braked swiftly. She expertly manipulated her lines to follow the others in a tight spiral into the small clearing.

Moments later, she skirted past the glowing bulk of the helicopter and landed with a soft bump to the forest floor. Cutting loose her canopy, she shed her rig, removed her goggles, and took in the scene that presented itself.

Major Sergeant Kwan knelt over a body sprawled facedown beside the aircraft. A shotgun rested a meter from the figure’s outstretched arm.

Kwan straightened. “I had no choice but to take out the pilot.”

She frowned. It was disappointing. She had hoped to interrogate the man before dispatching him. But ultimately it wouldn’t matter.

“The targets are already gone?” she asked.

He nodded and stood, but not before she noted him pocketing a locket of hair, a trophy he must have cut from the pilot’s head. With each death, the Black Crow always demanded his toll.

She didn’t scold him for it and stayed focused on the task at hand. “How far ahead are they?”

“Best estimate. No more than forty minutes.”

So, closer… but not close enough.

Still, she was content with their progress. The team could have come by helicopter and made better time, but the noise would have carried far, alerted their quarry. It was worth the sacrifice of minutes to maintain their cover.

“We’ve already disabled the aircraft,” Kwan said. “The enemy won’t be leaving the way they arrived.”

They won’t be leaving at all.

She stared off into the shadowy forest. Her team would go dark from here, moving forward with night-vision gear.

“Have Zhu and Feng head out,” she ordered.

The two were her team’s best trackers.

Kwan gave a bow of his head and headed off to get everyone ready.

Shu Wei stood quietly, listening to the whisper of wind, the whirring of gnats, and the twitter of distant birdsong. She imagined the number of predators hidden in the dark forest, while certain of one detail…

The true threat to her targets had just arrived.

With everyone ready, Kwan eyed her, awaiting her signal.

Very good.

She stepped into that shroud of darkness.

Now to end this.

21

I have to do something…

Maria stood with her back to the arch of windows that overlooked the hybrid habitat. She kept her fist snarled in the collar of Dr. Han’s scrubs and a scalpel held at his neck. From the corner of her eye, she had watched the grate to Kowalski’s small cage begin to rise, exposing him to the beasts below.

The giant silverback still remained squatted on his haunches a yard away, patiently waiting for its meal to be let loose.

Maria searched for a way to help Kowalski. Her gaze settled on the locked cabinet that held a double-barreled tranquilizer rifle. She called over to the surgical team, pressing the scalpel more firmly to Dr. Han’s throat.

“Someone unlock that case!” she ordered.

A figure rushed forward. It was the young nurse who had shown herself to be the most cooperative of the group. She reached the case, tapped a code into its electronic lock, and opened the door.

Maria shoved Dr. Han away. As the surgeon stumbled and fell to his knees, she tossed the scalpel aside and snatched the double-barreled rifle from its rack. She had been trained with such weapons as part of her orientation at the primate center. She quickly checked to see if the rifle was preloaded. She was relieved to find a pair of feathered darts resting in the chambers of the two barrels.

Still, she grabbed and pocketed another pair of capped darts from a tray on the cabinet’s bottom shelf, then secured the rifle and pointed it at the surgical staff. “Stay back,” she warned.

A small groan drew her attention to the operating table. Baako stirred and lifted his bandaged head from the crown of stainless steel that had once trapped his skull. His eyes fluttered as the short-acting sedative cleared his system. Dazed, he rolled and fell off the table, but he had enough wits to catch himself. He landed on all fours and twisted in her direction.

The nurses and surgeons cleared out of his way.

“Baako,” she called to him. “Come to Mama.”

He hooted and scrambled toward her, staying low, still woozy.

Not daring to wait any longer, she swung to the gated casement built into one section of the observation windows. She struggled with the latch, trying to free it while staring below.

By now the door to Kowalski’s cage stood fully open. The big man remained within the shelter, his back to the steel door. The silverback had also stayed put. It still squatted at the threshold, like a cat crouched at a mouse hole, waiting for its prey to run out.

But Maria knew this standoff could not last.

As she continued to fight the latch, Baako reached her side and leaned hard against her hip. Perhaps noting her attention, he lifted his face enough to peer below, too.

“C’mon,” she said, swearing at the damned latch.

The young nurse joined her. She shifted Maria’s panicked hands aside and freed the casement with an experienced series of turns and tugs on the latch. The two-foot-wide window slid open.

“Thank you,” Maria mumbled.

She lifted the rifle through the opening, but she had taken too long.

Down below, Kowalski burst out of his cage.

Bring it, you fucking monkeys…

Kowalski dove low through the open door. He had waited as long as possible, knowing the patience of the beast outside would not last forever. When a low rumble of irritation had flowed out of that massive chest, Kowalski took this as a signal. As the silverback lifted an arm and reached toward the cage, Kowalski was already in motion.

He ducked that meaty paw and rolled under the raised arm. Once past the mountainous bulk, he shoved to his feet and leaped away.

Other beasts crowded their leader, but Kowalski’s sudden flight had them momentarily confounded. Momentarily being the operative word. Still, some were startled enough — likely still on edge from the blaring sirens — to stumble out of his way. Or maybe they feared the silverback enough not to claim the prize that the massive beast had set his sights upon for these past three hours.

No matter the reason, Kowalski took full advantage of it to break through the cordon of muscle, bone, and teeth and get into the clear.

Behind him, an ear-shattering bellow erupted.

He didn’t have to glance back to know its source. Instead, he sprinted for the section of the habitat that offered the best refuge, where boulders littered the floor amid concrete trees.

A new noise rose in counterpoint to the roar: a heavy thumping.

Kowalski reached the rock-strewn section of the habitat and skidded around, coming to a stop. The silverback stood before the open cage. Thwarted, it had reared up on its hind legs, pounding its wide, leathery chest with both fists in a dramatic display of gorilla rage. Ropes of spittle flew from its lips as it bared razor-sharp teeth evolved to rip flesh from bone.

Panting, Kowalski crouched. He struggled for his next move, expecting that half-ton bulk to come charging in his direction, as unstoppable as a freight train under a full head of steam. He searched for any place to hide, even for a breath or two.

I have to keep clear of that—

Then something barreled into him from behind, shattering his ribs with a cracking flare of agony. The impact tossed him headlong across the floor. He twisted in midair and crashed down onto his uninjured side. Beyond his toes, he spotted a familiar black-furred gorilla, the same one who had confronted Kowalski at the cage door earlier, before being shoved aside by the silverback.

Apparently the bastard still held a grudge.

The howl of fury echoed up to Maria’s perch at the open casement window. It rose from the dark-furred gorilla hybrid who had bowled into Kowalski, knocking him out of his hiding spot. The beast vaulted over a boulder and dove at Kowalski, going for the kill.

Maria jerked her rifle’s aim from the silverback to the more immediate threat. She fired at the younger male gorilla, but feared she was already too late.

Kowalski rolled to the side at the last moment, just missing getting smashed under the plummeting bulk of the gorilla. Still, as the beast landed, it lashed out with a hand and grabbed Kowalski’s thigh. His body was whipped forward like a rag doll.

Maria centered her rifle and peered through the telescopic sight, unsure if the first dart had struck the beast. She squeezed the trigger again. The rifle blast stung her ears, but she resisted blinking, concentrating. This time she spotted red feathers sticking out of the neck of the gorilla.

The male let go of Kowalski and pawed at its throat, knocking the barb away.

Its face swung up toward her, guessing the source of the assault. It rose to its feet and roared at her — then stumbled back. Tripping a step, it dropped heavily on its haunches.

For the tranquilizing effect to be that fast, her first shot must have also hit it. She hurriedly cracked the rifle open and reached inside her pocket for another load of darts. In her fumbling haste, one of them slipped between her fingers and dropped to her toes. Swearing, she slapped the other one into the weapon’s chamber.

On the floor of the habitat, the young male collapsed to its side, its huge limbs going slack. But that beast wasn’t the only threat.

Before she could finish fully reloading, the silverback bellowed its rage, rising to its full height. Even now Maria balked at its sheer size. While she understood the genetics that had birthed such a monster, her mind still struggled to accept it. She pictured the giant bones she had been shown yesterday, of Meganthropus, one of man’s earliest ancestors, and recognized it wasn’t only that hominin’s massive size that had been engineered into these hybrids — but also its savage and xenophobic nature.

The silverback lowered to a fist and charged toward Kowalski. The man was still down on all fours, rattled and bruised. There was no way for him to get out of the way in time.

She fought her rifle through the window and fired the one loaded dart at the thundering beast, but the gorilla was moving too fast. She caught sight of a red bolt of feathers ricocheting off the limb of one of those faux trees.

Damn it…

She lunged for the other dart abandoned on the floor, but she knew she could never reload in time.

Someone else realized the same.

Before she could stop him, Baako leaped from her side and flung himself headfirst through the window. At the last moment, he hooked a hand on the sill, swung around, then dropped in a series of halting falls toward the floor, catching brief fingerholds on the coarse-hewn rock wall.

Maria called down to him. “Baako! Come back!”

For the first time in his young life, Baako ignored her.

Monk huddled with Kimberly in the empty office. Sergeant Chin guarded the door while the Shaw brothers and Kong kept watch out in the halls.

“How much longer?” Monk asked.

Kimberly tapped furiously at a keyboard. She had already wired and plugged her satellite phone into the computer terminal via a side port. “Okay, I’ve accessed the security cameras. While I can’t shut them down, I can add to their feed.”

“Do it.”

She brought up her phone’s video folder and broadcast a stored file into the security camera’s feed. “This should do it.”

Monk nodded, clutching the radio in his hand. He had secured it from a guard whom they had ambushed shortly after entering the facility.

“I’m also going to scroll information at the bottom of the image I’m sending out,” Kimberly said. “It’ll list your radio’s secure channel.”

“You can do that?”

As answer, she simply frowned back at him.

Monk held up his other palm. By now he should’ve known better than to question his partner’s abilities. “Okay, then let’s hope this broadcast reaches the right audience.”

It appears I must do everything myself.

Jiaying Lau leaned on a table, her nose not far from the monitor’s screen. She did her best to ignore the chaos inside the facility’s security hub. She had already fielded calls from the Ministry of State Security and the deputy director of the Academy of Military Science. Word of the security breach had plainly extended beyond the borders of the facility.

She could guess the source of that leak.

Behind her, Chang Sun shouted orders into a radio, lighting a fire under the teams who were searching for the intruders. When he found them — which he would with time — he would certainly use their capture to make himself look good, while undermining her role. She could all but smell the ambition wafting from the sweat on his brow.

Still, she kept her focus on another potential embarrassment, another black mark threatening her record. On the monitor, she had watched everything tipping toward ruin within the vivisection lab. Dr. Crandall had secured a tranquilizer rifle and was attempting to aid her companion in the Ark. The matter should have already played out to its bloody end, a necessary lesson for Maria.

Then, even worse, Baako had leaped through the window and dropped into the heart of the Ark. Jiaying had spent considerable resources to obtain that unique specimen, including losing a valuable covert asset in the process. To end up with her prize torn to pieces by her own hybrids could prove more than disastrous to her career — she could end up with a bullet through her skull for this failure.

She pounded a fist on the table, intending to deal with this situation personally. But before she could turn away, a smaller window popped up in the corner of the monitor. She leaned closer. The new grainy video showed a soldier strapped to a chair. A pistol was pressed to his temple by a captor who stood out of view.

“Enlarge that image,” she ordered the tech.

Murmurs rose behind her, coming from the other stations. A glance around revealed the same video playing in the corner of all of the camera monitors. Chang joined her, his eyes pinched with confusion.

“What is this?” he asked.

“You tell me.” She pointed to the screen. “This is your system.”

“Someone must have hacked into it.”

He shifted closer as the technician zoomed into the new feed. The image grew enough to reveal the face of the threatened soldier. Jiaying recognized the familiar features, even with a mouth gag in place.

“Is that your brother?”

Chang balled a fist at his side. “Gao…”

Jiaying pointed to the scrolling number at the bottom of the screen. It was a demand to call a secure radio channel. She could guess who would answer that call.

“Can you trace where this is coming from?” Jiaying asked.

Chang exhaled sharply. “Yes. It will take a minute or so.”

But would the Americans still be there by then?

Chang gripped the technician’s shoulder, both urging him and threatening him to obtain that information swiftly. The man typed vigorously, chasing through screens.

Jiaying glared at the monitor. “As I suspected all along, it appears your brother was the source of the leak. Whether inadvertently or not, he must have led the enemy to our doorstep.”

Chang seethed, clearly recognizing the same.

She turned and jabbed a finger into the lieutenant colonel’s chest. “So clean up your brother’s mistake. Lure those intruders out into the open by any means necessary and eliminate them.” She glanced toward the feed from the Ark. “I’m heading off to protect our assets before all of this comes to ruin.”

She stormed out of the security hub, intending to regain control, but her mind already ran through various contingencies if matters grew out of hand.

During the construction of this facility she’d had countermeasures covertly built into the infrastructure. She would not be brought down. She would not suffer the dishonor of this facility being wrested from her hands.

If I fall, we all do.

The radio buzzed in Monk’s hand.

Looks like it’s showtime.

He climbed into the electric vehicle they had commandeered: a military green truck with an open bed in the back. Sergeant Chin took the wheel, while Kong and the Shaw brothers hauled the unconscious Chinese driver into a neighboring lab.

Monk lifted the buzzing radio as he joined Kimberly in the front seat. “Call’s coming on the secure channel. Seems your message was received.”

He leaned closer to her as he pressed a speaker button so his partner could listen in and translate if necessary.

A voice answered sharply in Mandarin.

Kimberly whispered. “He’s demanding to know who we are.”

Monk lifted the radio, trusting the caller spoke English. “You know who we are. And I’m guessing this is Zhōngxiào Sun.” He hoped he had pronounced the rank of lieutenant colonel correctly. “Brother to Gao Sun.”

There was no response. As radio silence stretched, Monk tapped Chin’s shoulder, setting the truck in motion once the Shaws and Kong were aboard, jumping into the back bed.

Monk cast a worried glance toward Kimberly.

If this didn’t work—

Then an answer came, the speaker’s words stiff with fury. “This is Lieutenant Colonel Sun. If you wish to live, you will turn yourselves in immediately… and free my brother.”

Monk heard the catch in the other’s voice at the end.

Good.

Kimberly had obtained additional information about the two brothers from her intelligence sources. Chang was the older of the two, married, with a young daughter. Gao was single. The pair had lost both their parents when they were teenagers and joined the army shortly thereafter, rising within the same unit. Kimberly estimated that such a tragedy and circumstance likely bonded the two very closely.

Now to turn that to our advantage.

Monk raised the radio. “If you ever want to see your brother alive again, you’ll listen to what I have to say.”

As he waited for a response, the truck swept down a long hallway, passing a series of sophisticated labs, chock-full of stainless steel equipment and cages. So far they had encountered only a handful of personnel. It seemed the alarms had triggered some sort of facility lockdown.

“What are your demands?” Chang asked tersely.

“Simple. You help us. We help you.”

Another long pause, then Chang’s voice returned, softer now. “How?”

“If you assist us, we will leave your brother safe, and with ironclad intelligence that will implicate Major General Lau as a co-conspirator in all of this. She will be the scapegoat. For every win you help us achieve over the next hour, she loses.”

Monk held his breath. The success of this plan hinged on the animosity between Chang and his superior, but would professional ambition outweigh loyalty in this regard?

“How do I know you can do what you claim?” Chang asked.

“Have we not penetrated your facility?” Monk asked. “That should be proof enough of our skill and expertise.”

“But why should I trust you?”

“You don’t have much choice. If we fail to give an all clear to our operatives in Beijing, your brother’s body will be discovered near the U.S. embassy, with clear evidence that he was trying to escape to that safe zone.” Monk ratcheted up the threat. “And on his remains will be found evidence implicating you and your wife as American spies.”

Monk let that sink in for several breaths, then finished. “Listen. If we get what we want, you turn out to be a hero, while Major General Lau is taken down. We fail, and you suffer along with your family, while Lau basks in the glory of stopping us. The choice is yours, Zhōngxiào Sun.”

This time, there was not even a pause. “What do you want me to do?”

Monk grinned at Kimberly, then spoke. “Tell us where the others are and clear a path for us to them.”

Kimberly had her satellite phone out. She pulled up a schematic of the facility that she had hacked from a computer terminal earlier.

As Chang passed on the necessary information, she nodded. “Got it,” she whispered. “I know where they are.”

“What else?” Chang asked bitterly.

“Just one more thing.”

“What?”

Monk told him, then signed off.

Kimberly faced Monk, letting out a long sigh. “Can we trust him?”

He pointed ahead. “We’re about to find out.”

As they set off on the path given them, another worry set in.

What if we’re already too late?

The ground trembled as the massive silverback pounded toward Kowalski. Still, on his hands and his knees, he couldn’t do much more than brace himself against what was to come. Still, he rolled toward the snoring bulk of the younger black-furred hybrid sprawled to his left, doing his best to seek any shelter.

Fat lot of good it’ll do me.

Then a screeching howl echoed throughout the habitat, seeming to come from every direction at once as it reverberated off the rock walls. The cry was full of anger and threat.

Now what?

He lifted his head to see the silverback skidding to a stop a yard away. It leaned on one arm while craning around for the source of the sound.

Kowalski did the same while taking the chance to retreat farther back, crawling toward the boulder pile in the center of the habitat.

Then he spotted a dark shadow bound away from the wall below the observation windows. The shape moved swiftly, leaping and racing toward Kowalski. It took him half a breath to recognize Baako.

No…

What was he doing down here?

With a final hurdle, Baako landed in a crouch next to Kowalski. Panting, the little guy faced the mountain of muscle only yards away. He lifted to his feet and thumped his chest with both fists, challenging the alpha beast of this habitat.

Not smart, kid.

“Baako, go!” Kowalski yelled, waving an arm, which triggered a fresh flare of agony from his broken ribs. “Get outta here!”

Baako held his ground.

The silverback remained rooted in place, clearly trying to comprehend this intrusion into its domain, not to mention the defiant posturing of such a small creature. But the confusion quickly wore off, replaced with irritation and anger.

A bellow burst from its wide chest. The half-ton beast lunged forward and lashed out with a thick arm — but Baako was no longer there.

The young gorilla leaped high, springing and somersaulting over the silverback’s shoulder to land on the monster’s rump.

The silverback reared up, flinging around.

Baako jumped away as another arm came swinging at him. This time he failed to get completely out of the way in time. An elbow clipped his hip and sent him flying. Still, he managed to twist before landing and rolled on a shoulder, tumbling across the floor.

The silverback thundered after him, pounding its fists into the rock.

The other denizens of the habitat — initially stunned by the strangeness — slowly reacted. With the silverback’s attention diverted elsewhere, they closed toward Kowalski.

Not good.

He continued his retreat toward the boulder field while watching Baako flee from that avalanche of muscle and claw behind him. Kowalski reached the rock pile and ducked behind a boulder. In one hand he grabbed a chunk of stone and in the other a concrete limb that had broken off one of the fake trees. He intended to go caveman on these monsters if necessary.

He flattened his back against the rock, noting Baako had begun to slow, clearly tiring out. The silverback now huffed at his heels.

Kowalski cringed, afraid to watch; then Baako juked to the left, ducking clear of the other’s path. The silverback could not turn so swiftly. The momentum of all that mass could not match Baako’s lithe agility. Still, the silverback heaved around and skidded through loose shale, bunching its tree-trunk-sized legs under its bulk. Before even coming to a stop, it bounded after Baako, who was unfortunately aiming straight for Kowalski’s hiding spot.

Kowalski rose into view, waving Baako off, pointing to the open window.

“Get your ass up there!”

Like everyone else in his life, Baako ignored him.

The little guy made a final leap in his direction, his arms straining for Kowalski, but luck and speed could last only so long. The silverback caught Baako by the ankle and swung his small body to the side, ripping Baako away from Kowalski’s reach.

No!

Pain rips through Baako’s leg as his body is wrenched around. The rock walls blur. Still, he knows he must keep struggling. Deep in his chest, he knows anything else is death.

Still caught, his body is flung high above the monster. The beast is a horror out of one of Mama’s bedtime stories. It intends to swing him down and smash him to the floor. Knowing this, Baako wriggles around and bites the hand clamped to his ankle.

A roar rises; the grip loosens.

Baako yanks free and tumbles toward the ground. His arms and legs flail, seeking some way to catch himself. Then monstrously powerful fingers snatch him around the waist, grabbing him out of the air, squeezing so hard that he cannot breathe.

The monster has him again, bellowing with rage and blood. Jaws open wide. Fangs dive for Baako’s throat. His eyes roll in terror, finding a face far above, so scared like him.

He gets enough breath to hoot to her.

Bye, Mama…

Baako’s final feeble bleat reached Maria, shattering her heart.

She squeezed her rifle’s trigger in a maternal need to protect, but the pin struck an empty chamber. She had already used the last of the tranquilizer darts, reloading three times during the brief battle below. She had concentrated her fire upon the silverback, but the beast had moved too fast, escaping the darts. The only shot that had struck home was one that hit a lumbering female that had gotten too close to Kowalski’s hiding spot.

The sting of that impact had been enough to frighten the creature away, but it would take another minute or so for the sedative to knock it out.

That’s if one dart was even enough for such massive beasts.

With an empty rifle and no more ammunition, she could do nothing but watch the silverback prepare to rip out Baako’s throat.

Suddenly a large rock flew through the air and struck the silverback between the eyes. The beast paused long enough to look up, more surprised than hurt by the assault.

Kowalski mounted one of the boulders, bearing aloft a club of concrete.

“Pick on someone your own size, you furry bastard!”

Not that I’m your size…

Even standing on the boulder, Kowalski was dwarfed by the towering silverback. It still clutched Baako, the little guy forgotten for the moment.

“C’mon!” Kowalski challenged the beast, beckoning with his weapon, hoping it would let Baako go.

The silverback stepped toward him, then stumbled slightly to the side. It caught itself by grabbing at one of the concrete trees. Branches snapped under its teetering weight. The beast fell to a knee.

What the hell…

The rock he’d pitched couldn’t have done that much damage. It was like wafting a pea at a bull.

Still, the silverback let go of Baako and planted a fist on the ground to keep itself upright. Free now, Baako scampered over to the boulders.

Kowalski glanced around. The other beasts had frozen in place, apparently intimidated by their alpha being so stunned. The silverback dropped to a hip, weaving in a struggle to stay up. Only then did Kowalski note the bloom of red feathers sticking out of the silverback’s rump.

He glanced to Maria. Had she managed to nail the bastard after all? But she looked equally shocked.

She shouted down to him and pointed toward the steel door. “Run! One dart’s not enough to knock it out!”

Maria realized what must have happened. Earlier, she had never found the tranquilizer dart she had dropped on the floor. She now understood what had become of it.

Before Baako had leapt into the Ark, he must have snatched the abandoned needle. Back in Lawrenceville, she had taught him about tranquilizer guns, as they were used as a common means of restraint at the primate center. She had wanted him to understand that the animals incapacitated in such a manner were not dead, but only sleeping.

Still, she was never sure how much he had understood.

Apparently it was enough.

Below, the silverback continued to totter, struggling to shake off the sedative’s effect.

Taking advantage of the situation, Kowalski and Baako took off toward the steel door that led out of the Ark. As they ran, the other gorillas began to stir, drawn by the motion, likely growing more confident with the silverback incapacitated.

She swung to the young nurse who had helped her before. “You have to get that door open for them.”

The nurse looked forlorn. “I cannot. Not from up here. Someone has to be down there and place their palm on the reader outside.”

And we’re all locked in here.

With a sinking heart, she turned back to the window. Kowalski and Baako continued their flight for the door, drawing the hybrids after them.

But they’re going the wrong way.

As Kowalski dove into the cage that enclosed the exit door, he heard his name shouted, in a voice full of urgency and fear. He glanced over his shoulder.

Maria called to him. “I can’t open the door from up here! You have to get back to me.”

Something tumbled out the window and unfurled along the rock wall.

A fire hose.

She clearly wanted them to climb out of here.

Easier said than done.

Kowalski lowered his gaze to the growing wall of fur and muscle gathering outside the cage. There was no getting through that crowd. While he might be able to create enough of a distraction to allow Baako to make a break for it, he doubted the young gorilla would leave his side.

Baako tugged on Kowalski’s arm, drawing his attention. The gorilla splayed out his thumb and pinkie and thrust his hand down in a clear sign.

[Stay]

Before Kowalski could react, Baako bounded out of the cage and loped straight toward the herd. He favored one leg, but he still managed to leapfrog through the group at the last moment, agilely avoiding a few surprised attempts to grab him.

So much for not abandoning me.

As the hybrids closed toward him, he tried tugging at the cage door, but it was locked in its tracks.

Then a fearsome bellow shook through the cavernous habitat, rising from that monstrous silverback.

Kowalski retreated to the steel door, consoled by one thought.

At least Baako got away.

Baako drops the broken stone club and flees.

A breath ago, he had snatched the tool from the floor and crossed to the monster. He found its eyelids hanging low, its breathing deep. Without slowing, Baako had leaped and swung the length of rock with all the strength in his arms. The club had shattered across the ridge above those dull eyes, snapping them fully open again.

Earlier, he had wanted it to go to sleep; now he needs it awake.

A roar chases Baako across the floor again. Pain shoots up his right leg, so he runs on all fours, needing to go fast. The monster rages after him.

He flees not toward Mama… because Mama is safe from the monsters.Instead, he heads toward another member of his family.

Kowalski gritted his teeth, expecting the worst as he heard the silverback thundering again in his direction. He did not expect to see Baako suddenly vault over the wall of hybrids that held him trapped. The young gorilla hurtled past that group, struck the floor, and shot headlong into the cage.

Kowalski caught Baako in his arms, but the impact slammed him against the steel door, knocking the air from his lungs. Still, he hugged tightly to Baako.

Past the kid’s shoulder, the mass of gorilla hybrids shattered apart as the silverback burst through them like a freight train. Still dazed, the beast could not stop fast enough and crashed sidelong against the opening of the cave door.

Kowalski cringed from the impact of that mountain of flesh, fearing it might still crush them. Instead, the silverback’s bulk rebounded off the wall, bowling more of the hybrids out the way.

Baako grabbed Kowalski’s hand and tugged him toward the open doorway.

He understood.

Let’s get out of here while the getting is good.

They fled past the stunned bulk of the silverback and through the chaotic confusion of the others. But he knew such turmoil wouldn’t last forever.

He raced across the floor, ignoring the agony lancing from his left side.

When they reached the wall under the windows, Kowalski scooped Baako by the waist and tossed him onto the fire hose. Furry hands caught hold, but Baako glanced back, hooting his worry.

“Go! I’m right behind you!”

As proof, Kowalski grasped the hose and followed as Baako began climbing.

From three stories above, Maria called down at them. “Hurry! They’re coming!”

He didn’t bother to look. What good would it do? He hauled with his arms and dug with his toes. He envied Baako, who scampered up and reached Maria well ahead of him.

As Baako ducked through the window, Maria’s face appeared. He read the fear etched across her features, saw the urging in her eyes.

Hurry.

As Maria watched, a score of the gorilla hybrids bounded toward them. Even the silverback rolled to its feet, bellowing and looking in their direction. Baako’s blow — followed by the chase and the impact against the wall — must have raised the creature’s blood pressure enough to shake off the sedative.

It began lumbering toward them, drawing stragglers in its massive wake. With the pack’s bloodlust spiked higher, several of the beasts began to attack one another, the larger creatures ripping into the smaller ones, demonstrating again the level of savagery inherited from their engineered genes.

By now Kowalski was halfway up the hose, but it wasn’t high enough.

Maria glanced to the row of steel boxes positioned below the arch of windows, remembering the nurse’s description of the electrical barrier coded to the silver collars around the hybrids’ necks. The invisible shield was meant to keep the animals confined below, shocking their collars if they climbed too high.

Kowalski wore no such collar.

“You have to get above the electrical fence,” she warned him.

He frowned up at her, not understanding.

“Just keep going!” she urged.

He put his head down and fought faster, struggling to gain ground. Then his grip slipped and he slid a full yard before grabbing hold of the hose again.

He hung there, catching his breath, as the first hybrid reached the wall below him. Luckily it was one of the smaller ones, standing at best seven feet. It jumped and swatted at Kowalski, brushing the man’s heels with its fingertips.

That immediate threat was enough to further stoke the fire under Kowalski. He clawed his way up faster, but he was clearly in pain. Sweat beaded and ran down his grimacing face.

The larger beasts reached the wall below and began to climb the hewn rock, digging nails and toes into crevices and pits.

He’d never make it.

Then the hose shifted beside Maria.

She glanced back and saw that Baako had grabbed its length. He tugged, trying to draw Kowalski up faster by hauling on the hose.

Why didn’t I think of that?

She braced her feet against the wall and added her strength.

Then the young nurse joined her. Others of the surgical team came to their aid, rallying together, momentarily setting aside their differences. They had all watched the valiant battle below and honored that effort now. Even if it all came to naught once the dust settled, at the moment they refused to lose the man to the beasts below.

Working together, they reeled Kowalski up to the window.

He grabbed the sill with one arm, then the other, but he looked too weak to haul himself over the casement. Maria let go of the hose and pulled him the rest of the way through. He fell heavily to the floor and rolled onto his back.

His lungs wheezed with each breath, but he gasped out, “What… what were you saying about some fence?”

A frizzling electrical pop sounded from beyond the window, accompanied by a sharp cry of pain. Maria caught sight of a hybrid tumbling from its perch on the wall. As it fell, a spiral of smoke trailed from the steel collar around its neck. The other beasts either stopped in place or dropped heavily to the floor.

“Doesn’t matter now,” Maria said and bent down to assist him to his feet.

Baako rushed over and bear-hugged the large man once he was up.

“Thank you for keeping Baako safe,” she said.

Kowalski kept a protective hand on the young gorilla’s shoulder. “Think it was more the other way around.” He turned and glared at the surgical team. “Any of you going to try to stop us from leaving here?”

Small shakes of heads answered him — not that it mattered.

“We’re locked in here,” Maria explained. “Ever since the sirens blew.”

“So we’re still trapped.”

She touched his elbow. “But at least we’re safe for the immediate—”

The lights flickered and went out, sinking the lab into darkness.

No one spoke until Kowalski finally muttered, “You had to say that.”

Baako moved to her side and grabbed her arm. He didn’t like the dark, but after several tense breaths, crimson emergency lights flared along the top of the walls.

She let out a sigh of relief.

Kowalski offered another thought. “Maybe with the power off, we can get out of here.”

He rushed across the length of the room and tugged at the giant steel sliders, but they still refused to budge. He put his fists on his hips, frowning at the doors as if that would open them.

Baako’s fingers tightened on Maria’s arm. She looked down and saw that his gaze was fixed to the fire hose, which still ran from the wall to the casement window.

Its length twitched and thrummed.

Oh, no.

She turned toward the window as a massive scarred hand reached into view and grabbed the sill.

With the power off, the electrical fence was down.

Backing away in horror, she warned the trapped group. “They’re coming!”

22

Gray gasped at the cold as he waded into the dark pool, shattering the perfect reflection of the stars and moon in its mirrored surface. The others followed, splashing after him. Chakikui and Jembe remained on the bank behind him. The elder had honored his pledge to bring them to the lost city.

Apparently that obligation ended at its doorstep.

Left to their own now, Gray led the three others across the pond. He had to swim the last of the distance to reach the mouth of the tunnel that opened in the cliff face on the opposite bank. With the way ahead flooded, there was only a foot of clearance between the waterline and the roof of the tunnel.

As he reached the entrance, he discovered his boots could touch bottom. Ducking his head inside the tunnel, he lifted a waterproof flashlight high.

“Down a ways deeper, it looks like the roof lowers even more,” he warned.

“Can we get through?” Lena asked.

“Don’t know. We may have to swim and explore for air pockets.”

She did not look happy about this prospect.

He wasn’t exactly thrilled himself.

Roland waded next to Gray. “From Petronio Jaramillo’s account of his journey to the lost library, he claimed he did have to swim underwater to reach it.”

Seichan waved them onward. “Enough talk. The only way we’ll know if anything is actually down there is to just go look.”

He heard the clear skepticism in her voice. And she was right. This might all be a wild-goose chase, but the only way they would know was to do what she suggested.

Just go look.

Gray pushed into the tunnel, half swimming along the passageway. The air inside was dank, smelling of wet rock and moss. The beam of his flashlight illuminated some distance down the passageway and shone far into the crystal-clear waters, making it appear as if he floated in glass.

Murmurs rose behind him as they proceeded single file, with Seichan bringing up the rear.

“The walls,” Lena whispered to Roland. “They look too smooth to be natural.”

Gray ran his fingertips along the roof, realizing she was right. The passageway also ran too straight. They continued in silence, mostly because the water soon rose above their lips. Gray kept his nose high, breathing hard through his nostrils, feeling a panicky edge of claustrophobia set in. From the harsh noises behind him, he wasn’t the only one.

Then as he took another step forward, the floor vanished under his boot. Caught by surprise, his head slipped underwater. His flashlight came with him. The beam revealed a set of steps leading down from here.

He twisted and rose back to the surface, careful not to hit his head. He lifted his lips high enough to speak. “Stairs,” he gasped out. “Everyone stay here. I’m going to swim down and see if there’s any way forward.”

“Be careful,” Lena managed to sputter out.

Gray intended to do just that. He chided himself for not thinking of renting scuba gear in Cuenca. Then again, who knew if there were any dive shops in that remote mountain village? Either way, if this was as far as they could go unequipped, they could always return tomorrow with proper gear.

Still, a sense of urgency nagged at him. He wanted to blame it on the long plane ride getting here, but he knew it was more than that. Trusting his gut, he took a deep lungful of air and dove underwater.

Kicking hard, he followed the beam of his flashlight down the steep stairs. Silt disturbed by his passage wafted around him, clouding the clear waters. As pressure built in his ears, he finally reached the bottom of the stairs and discovered another dark passageway extending ahead.

He paused, debating whether to continue or turn back.

Clenching his jaws, he pushed off the last step and swam ahead, both drawn forward by the mystery and impelled by the tension behind him. Small chambers opened to either side. The sweep of his lights revealed obscure objects buried in silt and caked with algae. With no breath for sightseeing, he forged on without stopping.

Still, the rooms were clear evidence of prior habitation.

At last the passageway ended at another stair, this one rising in a tight spiral.

He cast his beam up, his lungs aching for air. He knew he was at the point of no return. Literally. He had enough breath to make it back to the others — or he could take his chances and continue forward.

He remembered Roland’s account of Jaramillo’s story. The man had claimed there was a way through, but that was decades ago, when Jaramillo was a boy. Still, there was no telling if this subterranean system had flooded more thoroughly over the passing years… or if these tunnels were even the same ones traversed by the young Jaramillo.

Gray shoved aside these doubts, trusting another’s advice instead.

Seichan’s words echoed in his head.

Just go look.

Seichan slid past Roland and Lena, scraping along the walls to reach the front of the line. She pointed her flashlight down into the depths. Clouds of silt blocked the beam, hiding even the top step of the flooded stairs.

He’s been gone too long.

Over the years, Seichan had been given ample evidence of Gray’s competence, of his ability to survive the direst situations. But at this moment she was sure he was dead — not because of any failing of his, but because she didn’t deserve the happiness she had found with him. Prior to meeting him, her life had been a solitary one, free of attachments. Though it was rife with bloodshed and terror, it had also made sense to her, requiring no moral ambiguity. Alone, it had been easy to armor herself against the world.

But that was no longer true — and she had conflicted feelings about it.

She sometimes found herself lying next to him in bed, watching him breathe, teetering between holding him tight in her arms to keep him safe and wanting to smother him with a pillow so she could be free.

In this moment, though, she had no moral ambiguity, only certainty and determination. She swept her flashlight through the murk, her heart pounding in her ears, knowing what she wanted.

Get your ass back here, Gray. Don’t you leave me.

As if summoned by this thought, the clouds of silt blew thicker toward her. Then a glowing shape dove up. She fell back, giving him room.

Gray surfaced, raising his lips and nose to the tunnel roof. He sucked in great gulps of air. She grabbed him — not caring if he was still out of breath — and pulled those cold lips to hers and kissed him deeply.

He initially stiffened, surprised — then scooped an arm around her and drew her closer. When he pulled back, his eyes glinted with amusement.

“So you were worried?” he teased.

She pushed him away. “Only because I goddamn well know you couldn’t have held your breath for that long. You must’ve found something.”

Lena spoke up behind her. “What did you find?”

Gray grinned back at the woman. “I hope you’re a strong swimmer.”

How much farther?

With her lungs screaming for air, Lena followed at Roland’s heels, her gaze fixed to the glow of Gray’s flashlight ahead. The man led them up a spiral staircase that seemed to go on forever. She began to dribble bubbles from her lips to ease the strain in her chest, to fool her body into thinking she was about to take a breath.

Then Roland shifted to the side, coming to a stop above her. She shot past him and her head burst out of the water and into open air. She took several desperate breaths.

Thank God…

Seichan surfaced next to her. She exhaled one hard breath, looking little bothered by the long swim.

Irritated, Lena turned away and did her best to gain her bearings.

They had risen into a flooded chamber. The stone ceiling stretched a yard above their heads. After the confines of the tunnel, the extra room and breathing space felt cavernous in comparison. A wide set of stairs climbed out of the water ahead of her.

Gray held his flashlight high as he kicked toward the steps.

Lena followed with the others.

Once there, Roland helped her climb out of the pool and onto the stairs. He craned around. “It’s warmer in here,” he noted.

She realized he was right. Even soaked to the skin, she felt the warmth and humidity of the place, more like what she had expected to find in a jungle rain forest. There was also a distinctly sulfurous scent to the air.

“A sign of geothermal activity,” Gray explained, glancing over to Roland. “Didn’t you mention this region of the Andes was unusually volcanic?”

“That’s right. It’s why the soil here is so rich.”

Seichan shook excess water from her clothes and limbs. “No wonder whoever built this place chose these tunnels. Comes with built-in heat.”

Lena pointed to the steps. “Where do these lead?”

“Come see.” Gray set off again. “I explored only as far as the top of this staircase. To make sure it wasn’t merely a dead end.”

Roland clicked on his flashlight to better illuminate their way up. The stairs ended at a wide landing. As she reached the top, she halted next to Roland, who had frozen in midstep.

The beam of his flashlight blazed across an archway ahead, framing a long hall. The arch was made of gold, sculpted into an elaborate scaffolding of bones and skulls, all appearing to be human. Over time, the humidity and sulfur had left a darker tarnish in the sculpture’s deeper crevices, but the bulk of gold remained brilliant.

“Amazing,” Roland sighed out.

And macabre, she added. No wonder the natives who stumbled upon this place deemed it to be dangerous, especially with the stench of brimstone in the air.

Lena felt a shiver of trepidation as she crossed under the archway.

The others seemed to have no such qualms. Gray led them forward, casting the beam of his flashlight down the long hall. The passageway hewn from the rock was wide and tall enough that a pair of elephants could have marched down its length side by side.

“Look at the walls.” Roland washed his light from roof to floor. “They’re covered in writing.”

Lena drifted closer, studying the rows of script. With only a cursory glance, she recognized Sumerian writing, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Mayan glyphs, and strings of Greek letters. The languages were stacked one upon the other, rising all the way up the wall and down the length of the hall.

“It’s like what we saw in the Chapel of Saint Eustace,” Roland said.

Lena remembered the writing that Father Kircher had inscribed on its walls and what it represented.

The history of the written word…

She crouched and studied the bottommost row of writing — which was clearly the oldest. Here were the same sticklike characters she had seen inscribed on the standing stones in the cloud forest. She ran her fingertips along a few of those lines.

Am I looking at the very first written language?

She stood and stared at the others. “This must be some sort of record of the evolution of language.”

“I think you’re right.” Roland set off down the hall, his gaze continuing to sweep everywhere. “And I wager Father Kircher got his idea about how to decorate his chapel from this place… which suggests Nicolas Steno must’ve walked this same hall and returned to tell his friend about it.”

Gray searched the walls. “This certainly validates Father Crespi’s claims. There’s no doubt that these ancient builders had communication with the rest of the world.”

Lena stared ahead, trying to picture what might lie beyond the reach of their lights, remembering the stories of a vast cavern system buried under the Andes, spreading far and wide under the continent. She sensed this was only one entrance to this place. According to the natives, Father Crespi’s artifacts had come from throughout the surrounding jungle and rain forest, pulled from caverns, tunnels, and vine-covered ruins.

Seichan pointed. “Looks like the tunnel comes to an end up there.”

They continued forward and discovered another set of stairs — spiraling down and away. They stopped and gathered at the top.

Roland sighed. “Let’s hope this doesn’t take us back into another flooded section.”

“Only one way to find out.” Gray headed down, leading them around and around.

Lena held her breath, expecting with every turn to find a black pool of water reflecting back their light. But as they continued to wind down, the stairs remained dry.

Roland voiced a significant concern. “Surely we must be well under the water table by now.”

The thought drew a shiver from her.

Gray touched the walls. “This region of the structure must be sealed off from the surrounding floodwaters.”

Lena found little consolation from this observation.

Finally the stairs ended and dumped into a circular room. It was as tall as the previous hall and wide enough that the beams of their lights barely illuminated the far side.

Seichan proved to have sharper eyes than hers. “Looks like another set of stairs lead out of here.” She glanced to Gray. “Going even farther down.”

Lena barely gave that shadowy side a glance. Neither did Roland, who cast Lena a look with his eyebrows held high. He crossed with her along the curving wall, which was cut and notched into thousands of small niches. The spaces sheltered sculptures of various animals, from as small as her thumb to as large as a full-size horse.

“It’s like the gallery we discovered in Croatia,” Roland said.

She nodded dully. “Only that was a fraction of this size.”

Curiosity and awe drew her forward. She spotted animals representing every facet of life, from every corner of the world. Beetles with iridescent shields of crystal, golden-legged centipedes, crocodiles encrusted with emeralds, monkeys furred with filigrees of copper strands, bison and deer sprouting horns of ivory, scorpions armored in plates of black iron.

The upper levels were dominated by multitudes of birds, all feathered with crystal shards in a kaleidoscope of hues: hawks, sparrows, eagles, pelicans, hummingbirds. Some rested in nests or perched on golden boughs. Others inexplicably hung in midflight within their niches.

On the lowest tiers, life from under the sea or underground was captured in the finest details: porcelain fish, chains of ants, copper-colored lobsters, silver worms burrowing through spheres of quartz, and on and on.

Her gaze whirled at the overwhelming abundance.

“It’s a record of life on the planet,” Roland said, clearly awestruck. He pointed toward a hippopotamus sculpted of gold with black diamonds for eyes. “Including many that aren’t indigenous to this continent.”

“I think it’s also a record of art,” Lena added. “The skill to sculpt this garden of life demonstrates hundreds of techniques, encompassing artistic practices from across many cultures. From the smelting of various metals, to the cutting of crystals and gems, to the working of enamels and porcelains.”

Lena swept her arm to cover the room. “In many ways, this represents the evolution of knowledge as thoroughly as the hall of writing above.”

By now, they had circled the room and reached the set of far stairs. These steps led straight down instead of corkscrewing. Even from the landing, the beam of Roland’s flashlight reflected off the surfaces of whatever lay below.

“More gold,” Gray noted.

Lena needed no urging to head down, drawn not by the promise of treasure, but by the curiosity of what would be revealed next. The stairs were wide enough for them to proceed shoulder to shoulder. Breaths were held as the view into the next chamber opened up.

As they reached the bottom, Roland made the sign of the cross, then touched Lena’s arm. “We’ve been here before.”

Afraid to enter, Roland kept to the edge and shone his light around the room. The space was the same size and shape as the gallery above, but here every surface — floor, walls, ceiling — was covered in beaten gold and decorated with elaborate mosaics of crystalline tiles. It was like stepping into an illuminated medieval manuscript. Even the motifs were similarly Gothic with the rendering of people and animals in a stylized, stiff form, all set amid elaborate whorls of vines, trees, and bushes.

Still, there was a distinctly familiar element to it all.

Lena understood, too. “It’s like someone took those cave paintings in Croatia and replicated them in gold and jewels.”

He nodded and followed her as she entered with the others.

The walls showed a riotous display of life cavorting around them: lions, herds of deer and bison, galloping horses, even a cave bear rearing up on its hind legs. But here, set among the animals, were smaller figures, clearly men and women.

Roland stepped closer, examining the features of one, composed of tiles no larger than the nail of his pinkie. He hovered a finger along a prominent brow and glanced to Lena for confirmation.

“I think it’s supposed to represent one of the Neanderthal hybrids, like Kircher’s Eve,” she whispered. “From the way they’re depicted here, it’s like these people are trying to protect or preserve the animals. But I think the art is meant to be more metaphorical.”

Gray joined her. “How do you mean?”

“I think it’s showing these people defending life in all its forms, perhaps as guardians of the future.”

“Like the Watchers described in ancient texts,” Roland realized.

“Or Plato’s Atlanteans,” Lena added.

“And they went by other names, too,” he said and continued as the others all looked at him. “When I was reading about Crespi’s belief in a lost civilization in Ecuador, I came across references to the Theosophical Society, which was founded in the late nineteenth century. They believed that a small group, what they called the Brotherhood of Saints, were the secret driving force behind mankind’s development, by guarding and disseminating knowledge.” He nodded to Lena. “Much like your own hypothesis of ancient teachers rising from the hybridization of Neanderthals and early man.”

Seichan stood a few yards away, her face lifted high. “Watchers, Atlanteans, Saints, or whatever you want to call them… If these are guardians, then it’s easy enough to tell what they were guarding against.”

Roland understood. He craned his neck and stared beyond the animals and their handful of defenders — to the figures that loomed menacingly above. Back in Croatia, these figures had been ominous shadows cast by sculpted stalagmites. But here the enemy was depicted in as much detail as the beasts and their guardians.

He shifted his light to better illuminate those figures. They were shaggy-headed and giant-boned. Under craggy brows, their eyes shone with a fiery bloodlust. They attacked the animals around them with clubs and crude spears. But Seichan had stopped at the most gruesome portrayal: a pair of giants ripping apart a child, tearing the little one limb from limb.

“What are they supposed to be?” Gray asked.

“I don’t know.” Roland frowned. “Maybe these creatures were meant to be metaphorical, too. Some portrayal of the brutality of ignorance, illustrating what these guardians were defending against.”

Lena shook her head. “No. The detail and conformation of these large figures are too accurate. Look at their faces, the rendering of their limbs. I think this was a real enemy.”

Gray looked aghast. “Who?”

“Perhaps a competing hominin tribe, another branch of mankind’s past. We know early man lived alongside more than just Neanderthals. There were small pockets of other tribes.”

“But a species this large?” Seichan asked.

Lena shrugged. “Some offshoots of Homo erectus were considered to be veritable giants. Like a species called Meganthropus, or Large Man.” She waved a hand to encompass the ring of art. “I think this is a depiction of a real war with this other tribe, a fight for the future of mankind, a battle between brawn and brain, between ignorance and intelligence.”

Gray reached toward one of those monstrous figures. “If you’re right, this enemy might have been the driving force that eventually united the Neanderthal hybrids. Without this external threat, the tribe of ancient teachers might never have been forged.”

Lena nodded. “Perhaps such a danger also explains why these teachers needed a home of their own. A place to retreat from the world where they could study and learn in peace, preserving what was important while occasionally venturing forth to share that knowledge.”

Roland stared toward yet another staircase on the far side of this room. “But what happened to them? Where did they go?”

As they all headed toward those dark stairs, he feared they might never know the truth — but he was equally scared they would.

Gray led everyone down the wide stairs. The steps seemed to stretch forever ahead of him. He calculated they must be at least fifteen to twenty stories belowground. He pictured their group winding down into a dry well with water surrounding them on all sides.

How far down does this go?

He swiped sweat from his brow. Each level grew perceptibly hotter, the air heavier with sulfur, as if they were descending into hell.

Finally the end of the stairs appeared ahead. A silvery brilliance shone up from the bottom. Initially, he thought there was some light source down there, but once he reached the last few steps, he recognized that the radiance came from their own lights, reflecting off crystal surfaces.

“Incredible,” Roland murmured.

Like the golden room above, this chamber was circular, about the same size, only here every surface was covered in crystals. The floor and walls were tiled in what looked to be quartz sheets, set off with gems and other colored crystals. The ceiling featured a moonless starscape created by chunks of quartz set within plates of obsidian. A colonnade of crystal pillars supported it all, appearing Gothic in design with pedestals and capitals adorned with gems and linked one to another by arches.

Under those arches stood a circle of doors encrusted with jewels, their jambs sealed with black wax. Two of the doors — one on each side of the room — had been pried open. Broken bits of their seals littered the floor.

Roland headed to one, Lena to the other.

Gray and Seichan moved together toward the room’s center, drawn by what stood in the middle of the space.

Roland called from one side. “It’s a library.” His light glowed from inside the room. “There are hundreds of bookcases in here, all gold-plated and spreading on and on. And so many books…” He knelt down. “There’s one on the floor, like someone pulled it off a shelf and left it there. Maybe the handiwork of Jaramillo.”

“I found the same over here,” Lena reported from the opposite side, using her own flashlight. “Golden shelves. And I can make out more rooms beyond this one.”

Roland examined the abandoned book. “No wonder Jaramillo never returned this to the shelf. It’s got to weigh twenty kilos. The covers are made of a blackish metal with pages that look like thin sheets of copper. The writing inside is indecipherable, but it appears to be the same linear script we saw on the standing stones aboveground and along the bottom row of that hall of languages.”

Lena called out, her voice full of awe. “My books… the books over here are composed of fine sheets of a crystalline material, meticulously etched. I can make out geometric shapes and strange designs in them, along with what I swear look like mathematical formulas.”

Before the two could wander deeper into those libraries, Gray ordered them both to return. “I need everyone over here.”

He and Seichan had stopped at the room’s greater mystery.

Standing in the center of the room was a long dais sculpted from a large block of translucent quartz. A human skeleton sculpted of gold rested on top, each bone and joint perfectly rendered. The figure lay on its back, holding a familiar length of golden rod.

“What do you make of this?” Gray asked Roland and Lena as they joined him.

“That must be the Rib of Eve, like we saw carved of ivory at the chapel.” Roland ran the beam of his light over its shaft, illuminating the fine striations that marked this ancient yardstick, a length associated with the circumference of the earth. His voice grew hushed with awe. “There’s a reference in the Book of Revelation. Chapter 21, verse 15. ‘The angel who talked with me held a golden reed to measure the city, its gates, and its wall.’ Could this be that same golden unit of measurement?”

No one answered.

Instead, Lena focused her light on the breadth of the skeleton. “That’s odd,” she mumbled.

“What?” Gray could tell from the skull’s conformation that it was a representation of a Neanderthal hybrid, but from Lena’s reaction, she must have discerned something else about it.

She gave a small shake of her head. “The physiological detail is amazing… but it’s also wrong.”

“Wrong how?” Seichan asked.

“Look at the pelvis.” She concentrated her light. “One half is anatomically female, but the other half is clearly male. There are the similar discrepancies throughout the skeleton, a blending of feminine and masculine conformations.”

Gray frowned.

Strange.

Seichan shifted over to the head of the dais, where a waist-high column stood. “And what’s this supposed to be?”

Gray joined her. The pillar’s top surface was cut at an angle, displaying a symbol they had all seen before. It was a six-pointed star, composed of 73 pieces.

“It’s the same as the petroglyph that marked Eve’s grave,” Lena noted. “Only instead of palm prints, this one is made up of metal and crystal marbles.”

“What’s it doing here?” Roland asked.

“I don’t know,” Lena admitted. “But the prominent placement must be significant.”

Seichan shrugged. “Or maybe someone really liked playing Chinese checkers.”

Gray picked up one of the metallic marbles from its concave socket, wanting to examine it more closely. As soon as he lifted it free, a deep tonal chime sounded, reverberating from all around, as if a gong had struck the crystal room.

Everyone froze.

“Put it back,” Lena urged.

Gray obeyed and dropped it back in place. They all held their breaths — but the ringing chime sounded again a moment later.

“Too late.” Seichan dropped to a knee and examined the pedestal. “You triggered something, and now there’s no putting the cat back in the bag.”

Gray pictured the walls of water surrounding this dry well. Was this some sort of booby trap?

Maybe we should’ve heeded Chakikui’s warning about this place.

Another chime sounded.

Seichan squinted at the base of the pillar. “Look at this. I can make out thin threads of copper or gold running from the sockets on top. They disappear into the floor.”

Gray dropped to a knee and concentrated his beam into the column. “She’s right. It’s likely the triggering mechanism.” He stood and studied the pattern on top. “And this may be the way to stop it.”

“How?” Lena asked. “Are you thinking this is some sort of test?”

“Maybe.”

She grew thoughtful. “Like a puzzle, a challenge of one’s knowledge.”

He nodded. “Perhaps to continue from here, the builders required you to prove yourself worthy.”

Seichan crossed her arms. “Then I suggest you don’t fail.”

As if emphasizing that warning, the room rang out again, louder this time.

“I… I think that one came faster,” Roland noted.

Gray searched around. If the interval is growing shorter—

Roland finished his thought. “I think it’s acting like a timer.”

Gray found all their eyes upon him. He took a deep breath, knowing they were depending on him to solve this riddle. He concentrated again on the star pattern, remembering Seichan’s reference to a board of Chinese checkers.

But what are the rules of this game?

With the line already crossed, Gray plucked up the metallic ball again, feeling its heft and weight in his palm. He turned to Roland. “You said the covers in your library were made of a dark metal. Would you say this is that same material?”

Roland examined it closer and nodded. “I think so.”

Gray removed one of the quartz-like stones from the display and held it toward Lena. “And these are crystal, like the books in the other library.”

“Do you think that’s significant?” Lena asked.

“Maybe.” He held the marbles in his two palms, noting the difference in their weights. “There’s a pattern of opposites here. Opaque and translucent. Metal and crystal.” He nodded to the golden skeleton. “Male and female.”

He sighed heavily, feeling he was close to understanding something but couldn’t quite get there. He knew one of the reasons he had been recruited into Sigma was because of his unique ability to see patterns where no one else could, to make connections between disparate elements, to see the whole amidst the parts, the forest from the trees.

Maybe I’ve lost it. Maybe this time I get lost in those woods.

The chime pealed again, setting his teeth on edge.

“Opposites,” he mumbled, knowing that was the answer.

Metal and crystal…

Dark and clear…

Heavy and light…

Male and female…

He sensed he was close. He struggled to find other polar properties inherent in the mystery presented here. He picked up another of the metal spheres and rolled it next to the first one. They clicked and stuck together.

His eyes widened. “They’re magnetic.”

He stared at the marble in his other hand.

And the crystal ones are not.

It was another set of opposites.

He closed his eyes.

But what’s the significance?

As another gong sounded, he ran everything he knew about the past two days through his head. His breathing grew more labored. Knowing he was running out of time only added to his tension. What was it about opposites that kept slipping out of his grasp?

Then his eyes snapped open.

Not just opposites…

He stared down at the skeleton, at this blend of male and female, the two sides of the same coin.

“They’re mirrors of each other.” He turned to the others. “I think I know what to do.”

Seichan looked dour. “You’d better be right. Something tells me this is a pass-or-fail test.”

The room rang again, definitely louder and faster now.

Gray studied the pattern atop the pillar.

What if I’m wrong?

“Where did they go?” Shu Wei asked the boy, looming over his small frame.

His left eye was already beginning to swell from where Major Sergeant Kwan had pistol-whipped the kid. Her second-in-command held the same weapon against the temple of the old tattooed tribesman, who knelt beside a pool of water fed by a cascading stream.

Her strike team had ambushed the pair after sweeping through the forest, following the trail of her four targets. Her group had traveled dark, only using night-vision gear. They had no trouble tracking the others through a forest riddled with mists. The ground was perpetually damp, making it easy to follow their footprints.

Still, once her team had arrived, they had discovered the tracks had vanished at the river’s edge. Her team’s best hunters — Zhu and Feng — had searched the far banks, attempting to pick up the trail again, but they had returned and reported no sign of the others.

While the two had been gone, she and Kwan had done their best to extract information from the pair of natives. But their captives had proved stubborn. She had quickly come to realize the elder did not speak English, so she had concentrated her attention on the boy.

Tears streamed down his face now, but his eyes shone with defiance. She pulled out a dagger from her boot and drew its dull side along his cheek — then reversed the blade with a flick of her wrist.

“I’ll not ask again so politely,” she warned.

The old tribesman spoke from the riverbank. The boy glanced over to him and answered, sounding angry. The gaunt man repeated his words in a commanding tone.

The boy sagged, closing his eyes for a moment, then opening them again. He pointed to the far side of the pool, toward the shoulder of a high cliff.

“They went there,” he said. “Down into the forbidden place.”

Shu searched but saw only sheer rock. She hefted her dagger higher. “Is this a trick?”

The boy sighed in exasperation and waved toward the water’s surface. “Cave… at the bottom.”

She squinted, then spotted the flooded entrance to the mouth of a tunnel. “They went in there?”

He nodded his head, then lowered his chin in shame.

She grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him to the riverbank. “You’ll show us. Take us.”

He pulled free, his fear making him strong. “No. Too dangerous.”

“Show us or I’ll skin the old man while you watch.”

She nodded to Kwan, who drew out a filleting knife. She knew from firsthand experience his skill with such a blade. The knife had freed many tongues — both figuratively and literally.

The boy visibly swallowed, looking at his toes.

She dropped to a knee and lifted his chin with the point of her dagger. She softened her voice, turning it silky. “We do not wish to hurt either of you. Once this is over, we’ll leave your forests. You can go about your lives as if nothing has happened.”

The boy took a deep breath. It didn’t look like he was convinced, but he turned his gaze guiltily to the pool. “I will take you.”

Good.

She stood and faced Kwan. “Leave Zhu here with the old man. To ensure the boy’s continuing cooperation.” She nodded across the pool. “We’ll dig the others out of that hole ourselves.”

He nodded.

She pointed to his filleting knife. “Keep that handy.”

Her aunt — Major General Lau — demanded that she learn what the others knew before dispatching them. She intended to do that.

And to allow the Black Crow to collect his trophies.

23

At least Chang Sun did as we asked.

Monk searched the stretch of dark hallway ahead of them as their commandeered truck raced down its length. Only the occasional glow from an emergency beacon illuminated their path.

After learning where the Chinese were holding their captives, Monk had ordered Chang to cut the power to the facility — both to add to the confusion and to help hide their passage through the underground facility. Additionally, as instructed, the lieutenant colonel had diverted any search teams away from their vehicle’s path.

Still, not trusting Chang, Monk kept everyone focused. In the open bed behind him, the Shaw brothers guarded their flanks, while the smallest of their team, Kong, crouched with his assault rifle balanced on the tailgate, watching their rear.

“We’re almost there,” Kimberly reported. She held up her satellite phone, the screen aglow with a schematic of the subterranean lab complex. “Take the next right turn.”

Sergeant Chin nodded from behind the wheel and leaned hard as he took the sharp corner into a narrower passageway.

“There should be a ramp ahead that’ll take us down to the level where they’re holding Dr. Crandall and Baako.” Kimberly looked grim. “But we’re still a good way off from where Chang said they’ve caged Kowalski. Some place called the Ark.”

Monk pointed ahead. “Maria first, then Kowalski.”

Chin pushed their truck faster, as if sensing Monk’s fear.

I hope we’re not too late.

Gunfire suddenly erupted from up ahead, explosively loud in the confined hallway. Rifle flashes flared out of the darkness. The truck’s windshield splintered as Monk grabbed Kimberly and pulled her low. Chin began to slow their vehicle, but now was not the time for caution.

“Floor it!” Monk hollered. “Keep going.”

Answering gunfire chattered from the truck bed. Monk leaned out the passenger window with his sidearm clutched in one hand. He aimed toward the enemy. He didn’t know if this was a trap set by Chang or if their truck had accidently stumbled upon a search team.

Either way, Monk knew this ambush would cost them valuable time.

That is, if we survive it…

As he began firing, he cast out a silent command to those he had come to rescue.

Hold out a little longer, guys.

Kowalski tugged on the handle of the giant steel sliders that trapped them in the vivisection lab. They refused to budge — then a horrendous rip of metal and glass drew his attention back over his shoulder.

A massive dark shape loomed beyond the observation windows. A furry hand gripped the frame of the smaller casement window and tore it completely out, taking most of the surrounding pane along with it. The sudden release caused the gorilla to lose its precarious perch. As it fell, it took more of the window with it.

Through the wide opening, the rank musk of the habitat flowed into the lab.

Maria huddled against the wall next to Kowalski, holding Baako’s hand. The rest of the surgical staff cowered on his other side.

A scraping and scrabbling echoed to them as the fire hose twanged and vibrated. More were coming, scaling the rock wall toward the large opening.

Kowalski searched the lab, eyeing the smaller stainless cages, but the bars were too thin to offer any protection. He had witnessed the strength of these monsters. They’d tear into those cages as if they were made of cardboard.

A beast roared, sounding right below the window.

Maria grabbed his arm, her eyes pleading with him to save her and Baako.

He squeezed a fist, knowing he had to do something, even if it only delayed the inevitable. “Stay here,” he ordered everyone.

“What are you—?”

Kowalski didn’t bother answering Maria, afraid that if he explained it would only make his plan sound even more futile. He pushed away from the doors and back into the lab. He rushed along the row of surgical tables to the abandoned site of Baako’s operation and snatched a tool from the instrument table. With weapon in hand, he dashed next to the tautly strung fire hose. Its length continued to jolt and shiver.

Here goes nothing.

He flicked the switch on the battery-powered bone saw, relieved to hear it buzz to life in his hand. He had noted the tool earlier. It wasn’t all that different from the cordless reciprocating saw he had in his garage back home.

He raised the oscillating blade and sheered into the rubber and woven fabric of the hose. Once through, the hose snapped, and its end snaked away, vanishing through the shattered window. An aggrieved howl followed, accompanied a moment later by a satisfying heavy thud from inside the habitat.

Kowalski grinned, imagining the beast’s surprise at being cut loose. Still, his effort would buy them only a little time. The habitat’s rock walls were pitted enough to make them scalable, especially for beasts with such simian strength and agility.

He turned away, hoping it was enough.

A loud huff of aggression drew his attention back around. A monstrous hand rose into view and grabbed the lip of the broken window. Even under the meager light, Kowalski recognized the lighter hair on the back of that clawed mitt.

It was the silverback.

Oh, hell no…

With a fist pressed to her throat, Maria watched as Kowalski lunged toward the windows. He lifted the stolen bone saw and slashed the small blade across the large knuckles.

A thunderous yowl exploded. The beast yanked its sliced limb away — but not before grabbing hold with its other hand. Still perched, the silverback reared fully into view, filling the expanse of windows, looking even larger up close. It balled its injured hand and drove its arm like a piston into the window, smashing through the neighboring pane, widening the opening even more.

The blow knocked Kowalski down, sending him skidding on his backside. Still, he kept hold of the bone saw. He waved it defensively at the bloody fingers while scooting away on his rear, pushing with his legs.

Baako let go of her hand and bounded to his aid.

Maria chased after him.

Baako reached Kowalski first. He grabbed the back of the man’s collar and dragged him farther away. But the giant paw groped deeper and caught hold of Kowalski’s boot. The silverback yanked hard, throwing the man onto his back.

Kowalski swiped with his saw, but its buzzing had died. When he had hit the floor, the battery pack had been knocked free.

Maria snatched it from the floor as she closed the distance. “Kowalski! The saw!”

He understood and slid it toward her. His face looked desperate as he tried to kick his way free. All the while, Baako hung on, trying to keep Kowalski from being dragged through the window.

Maria slapped the battery pack in place, powered it on, and stabbed it down at the fingers. The blade sliced deep, hitting bone with a grinding complaint. As blood spattered, the fingers loosened and batted at her. She dodged the blow, but the saw jolted from her grip and skittered across the floor, sliding under a neighboring set of cages.

Kowalski used the moment to roll to his feet, snatch Baako by the upper arm, and head away from the windows. Maria kept alongside them. All three reached the giant sliders and slammed into it. They rolled around to face the consequences of their action.

It wasn’t good.

The silverback gripped both sides of the window and thrust half its body through the shattered opening. The beast howled at them, with jaws stretched wide and fangs bared. As spittle flew, the roar deafened her, the breath reeking of meat and blood.

My God…

It began to claw its way inside.

Knowing this was the end, she pressed her back against the steel slider — only to feel it shift behind her. Startled, she fell forward and turned. The giant doors continued to glide along their tracks.

Kowalski pushed her toward the opening. “Go!”

She tried to obey, but the surgical staff had the same idea, crowding forward in a desperate attempt to escape. Then a single shot rang out, and Dr. Han came stumbling backward, breaking out of the group, looking confused and stunned. He fell to his knees, then to his side — exposing a bullet hole through one cheek.

A clutch of Chinese soldiers stormed inside. Maria spotted Jiaying Lau standing with Dr. Arnaud out in the hallway. The major general held a smoking pistol in her hand. She looked stunned, gaping past Maria.

By now, the silverback had dragged its bulk fully into the lab. Shaking with fury, it rose up onto the knuckles of both stiff arms. Behind it, more shadows rose into view.

Jiaying finally shouted, her voice rising on a note of panic. The soldiers opened fire. Another grabbed Maria’s arm and hauled her out the door with the rest of the surgical team. She knew her rescue was not out of humanitarian compassion, but merely an attempt to protect an asset.

Kowalski followed in her wake, pushing Baako ahead of him.

The gunfire continued, accompanied by howling. Maria knew the soldiers did not have enough firepower to hold back the beasts for long. Jiaying must have realized the same and barked an order. The men out in the hall snapped to obey their commander and rolled the giant sliders closed, leaving several of their comrades trapped inside.

Without pausing, Jiaying set off down the hall, where a jeep waited at an intersection. “Hurry,” she commanded. Though her voice was firm, her face had drained to a pallid hue.

Arnaud strode alongside Maria. “Lau collected me earlier. She was coming down here to deal with you before the power went out.”

Deal with me?

“She witnessed your attempt to free your friend,” he explained, casting a worried look toward Kowalski — and for good reason.

Once down the hall, Jiaying swung around and leveled her pistol at the man. “Dr. Crandall, get your animal aboard my jeep.”

Maria froze in place.

“I’d do as she says,” Arnaud warned her.

Kowalski nudged Baako closer to her. “Take him.”

Before she could move, something heavy slammed into the steel sliders down the hall, hard enough to make the ground shake from the impact. The upper track of the door bent outward.

Kowalski stepped over and blocked her view. “Go,” he urged her.

Both of them knew — whether Maria complied or not — Jiaying would shoot him.

“Go,” he repeated, remaining amazingly calm.

Arnaud touched her elbow, trying to get her to obey.

Knowing the paleontologist and Baako would suffer if she refused, Maria took a step away from Kowalski, then another, shadowed by grief and guilt.

Soldiers escorted her away, but Jiaying remained behind.

As Maria left, Kowalski never broke eye contact with her — even when the steel sliders were rammed again, further buckling the tracks. The beasts had almost broken through.

Jiaying raised her pistol higher — when another crash sounded.

This time from behind Maria.

She turned in time to see a truck ram into the parked jeep, sending it careening away. The truck braked to a stop, sliding slightly askew. Chinese soldiers rose into view from the back bed, where they had been braced for the impact. They whipped up assault weapons and fired at Maria’s group.

She cringed, ducking over Baako to protect him.

To either side, her Chinese escorts toppled to the ground.

Even Jiaying cried out, blood flying from her shoulder as she was knocked to the ground. Still, she managed to fire — but not at the newcomers. Arnaud fell against Maria, his eyes wide with shock. Blood poured from his throat. He tried to speak but only ended up coughing more blood, sinking heavily in her arms.

She carried him down. “Hold on.”

But by the time she lowered him to the floor, his body sighed out its last breath, his eyes stared leadenly upward.

No…

Kowalski pulled her away.

A voice shouted from the truck. “Everyone over here! Double time!”

The speaker leaned out the passenger window. It took Maria a startled moment to recognize him. The last time she had seen the man was back at the primate center.

It was Kowalski’s partner, Monk.

As she struggled to comprehend his sudden presence, a new volley of shots rang out, this time coming from the hallway behind the truck.

More soldiers were coming.

Kowalski pushed her toward the truck. “Move.”

Needing no further urging, she ran with Baako. Kowalski trailed, wheezing loudly from his injured ribs.

Before they could reach the safety of the truck, another crunch of steel sounded from down the hall, coming from the direction of the vivisection lab. She glanced back as one of the sliding doors popped out of its track and crashed against the opposite wall. Dark, hulking shapes pushed into the hallway.

Kowalski grabbed Maria’s arm. “Time to get out of here.”

They crossed the last few steps to the flank of the truck. Kowalski swung her up into the back bed, then leaped in alongside Baako. Once they were aboard, the truck jerked into reverse and sped backward.

One of the disguised soldiers waved them all down as shots pinged off the tailgate. “On your bellies.”

They obeyed and the truck gained speed; then the back end suddenly heaved upward, setting her heart to panicking, but the vehicle was only reversing up a ramp. The truck fishtailed at the top, then set off forward.

Spats of gunfire chased after them, but quickly died away.

Still, Maria remained on her belly, an arm over Baako, who hugged Kowalski in turn, all three of them nestled together, a family again.

But for how much longer?

Nearly blind with pain, Jiaying clutched the wheel of the damaged jeep with one hand. She cradled her other arm as agony lanced through her in fiery waves. A bullet had shattered her right shoulder, leaving the limb useless. Blood continued to pour down her side and through her uniform.

But I’m still alive.

And for that she should consider herself lucky.

No, not luck, she reminded herself—perseverance.

It had taken all her strength to push past the agony of the gunshot and keep moving. Once the truck with the Americans had sped away, she had used the shadows of the dark hall to hobble around the corner and over to the abandoned jeep. She fell behind the wheel, hoping the earlier collision hadn’t damaged the batteries or engine. A twist of the key returned a satisfying purr of its electric motor. She righted the front end and raced quickly away.

And not a moment too soon.

As she rounded the first corner, a large shape bulled into the intersection behind her. Even crouched, it filled the hallway, bellowing with rage and bloodlust. The roar chased her far into the complex.

She drove hard, putting as much distance as possible between her and the escaped beasts. Only then did she focus on a new plan. She needed medical attention and a place to regroup. She knew where to go.

Still, by the time she neared her destination, she was faint and nauseated. Her jeep swerved erratically under her weakening control, but the security hub appeared ahead. Its door stood open.

She braked to a hard stop and rolled out, almost crashing to her knees as pain flared. She leaned on the side of the jeep for several breaths, then hobbled the last of the way over to the open door.

She found the hub’s commander where she had left him.

With his back to her, Chang Sun stood at the center of the darkened room. The hub’s scatter of emergency lights reflected off the glass monitors, giving the space a hellish quality. Anger at the sight of him helped center her.

He had failed her at every level.

As she stumbled inside, she finally noted the hub’s technicians. They all lay slumped over their stations; another was sprawled at Chang’s feet. Blood pooled across the floor, reflecting the crimson glow of the emergency lights.

“Ah, there you are,” Chang said as he turned. “And here I thought I would have to hunt you down.”

He lifted a pistol in one hand.

She searched her own holster but found it empty. In her haste to escape earlier, she had lost her sidearm.

He noted her effort and turned his weapon so she could see the pistol’s slide had popped, then set it down on a table. He was out of ammunition. He must have emptied the clip while dispatching the technicians. He stepped forward, raising an arm as if to embrace her.

She knew better, but she refused to back away, to show any sign of dishonor by retreating.

His other arm whipped forward and impaled her in the gut with a long dagger. She coughed — less from the pain, more from the impact of his savage thrust. He drove the blade higher, seeking her heart. Something finally popped inside her, causing her lungs to suddenly find it impossible to breathe.

He yanked the blade back out and let her slide to the floor, her back coming to rest against the doorjamb.

He calmly stepped back, cleaned the blade, and returned it to its sheath — then recovered his pistol and polished the gun in the same judicious manner. Once satisfied, he bent down and placed the pistol into her limp fingers. He intended to pin the deaths here on her, to blame her for the escape of the Americans. Her name would forever be associated with failure and betrayal, her worst nightmare.

Her gaze sought his, recognizing in his cold eyes an ambition that far outshone her own.

He crossed to one of the stations and yanked several large levers. The hub flared into brightness as power returned to the facility. The monitors began flickering as the servers rebooted.

Dazed, she failed to comprehend what he was doing.

As if sensing her dismay, he explained. “I’ve already summoned the army. Now that the Americans have served their purpose, they can be properly dispatched. With their deaths, my triumph will be all the greater, my loyalty undeniable.” He glanced to her. “No matter how the Americans might try to slander me afterward.”

He read the confusion off her face.

“They threatened to plant false evidence against me if I refused to cooperate. Promised me glory if I should submit to them.” He scoffed loudly. “As if I would ever bow to such dogs. Instead, I will use them to forge my own glorious path, so shining that it won’t be disputed. Perhaps it may cost my brother his life, but his memory will live on through me, through my children and grandchildren.”

Jiaying’s eyelids drifted low in defeat as she realized how far she had underestimated the man.

This is my fault.

She also knew this shame must be hers to correct, even if it left her forever dishonored. She used the last of her strength to crawl her hand over to her pocket. As darkness closed around her, she reached inside to her phone and fingered open a compartment built into the back of the case. She did not need to see the glowing button that lay hidden there. She pressed her thumb against the fingerprint sensor atop it.

She had to hold it there for a full ten seconds. It was a precaution against accidentally activating the countermeasures she had covertly engineered into the design of the facility. She had them planted in the event of a foreign incursion into her labs, but also in case she should ever need to exact retribution upon an enemy.

She had never imagined a scenario where both situations would arise together.

How shortsighted I’ve been…

Darkness closed around her, dimming the fiery pain. By now she could not tell if her finger was still on the button or if even those ten seconds had fully passed.

Finally she slipped fitfully away, never learning the truth.

The acuteness of that agony followed her into eternity.

As the lights bloomed back to life along the length of the hall, Monk felt a sinking in his gut.

This can’t be a good sign.

The turncoat, Chang Sun, must have had a change of heart about cooperating. Monk had already suspected as much after they were ambushed earlier. It was why he had ordered Kimberly to find another exit, fearing that Chang would have bolstered his forces down at the loading bay where his team had first entered the facility.

Kimberly pointed ahead. “There should be an elevator at the far end of this hall, another hundred yards or so. It leads up to a public building located in the zoo. Some nineteenth-century manor house called Changguanlou.”

“She’s right,” Maria called out from the truck’s bed, speaking through an open window in the rear of the cab. “Major General Lau has an office up there.”

Kimberly turned to Monk. “The zoo is likely closed or evacuated. But once aboveground, we’ll have to be careful not to draw—”

She was cut off as a series of massive explosions erupted.

Sergeant Chin fought to control their truck, sideswiping through a row of red biohazard buckets. Smoke rolled toward them, coming from the direction of the elevators. Then the lights flickered and died, sinking them into darkness.

Chin drew the truck to a halt and flipped on their vehicle’s headlamps.

Through the pall of smoke and rock dust, the twin beams of their lights revealed a roof collapse at the far end. Slabs of broken concrete and twisted support beams blocked the way forward. In the distance, the facility continued to groan and crash. Faint screams echoed to them.

“What the hell?” Monk whispered.

Kimberly shook her head. “Someone must be trying to destroy this facility, to bring it all crashing down.”

“Who? Chang?”

She frowned. “I don’t know. It makes no sense.”

Kowalski offered his own viewpoint, calling from the truck bed. “I don’t care who’s doing it! Let’s get our asses out of here before we become pancakes.”

Monk nodded. “What about the way we entered, the loading bay? It’s two levels deeper. It might still be open.”

Kimberly lifted her satellite phone and examined the station’s schematics. “We can try, but…” Her voice died away.

“But what?”

“That path is going to take us straight through the area where those gorilla hybrids are loose.”

Monk exhaled. “Great… but I don’t see we have any other choice.”

Kimberly agreed and instructed Chin on where to go.

They were soon racing back the way they had come, the beams of their headlights drilling through the smoke. All the while, the facility continued to crumble and crash around them. Kimberly did her best to guide them, but she had to continually recalculate their route, sending them zigzagging around collapsed hallways or skirting fires that had broken out.

More and more people began to appear, some in lab smocks, others in uniforms. All were dazed, bloody, or panicked. A few soldiers took potshots at them, but their efforts were halfhearted. Chin took to beeping his horn, chasing stragglers out of his path, while rifle blasts discouraged the more persistent.

Down one side hall, Monk spotted a pool of sunlight. He called for them to stop, only to discover a collapse that had broken through to the surface. Unfortunately, the way up was too narrow, too treacherous to climb. Even as he examined it, the opening began to crumble in on itself.

Still, for a moment, to see the sky was both heartening and disappointing.

So close, yet so far.

They continued onward — only to come upon an even stranger sight. As they sped toward an intersection, a ghostly row of shapes raced through the smoke and vanished.

“Were those wolves?” Monk asked.

Kimberly stared toward the cab’s roof. “While the zoo might be evacuated, the animals are still up there.”

Monk pictured the roof collapses creating sinkholes within the various habitats above, allowing the beasts to escape their confinements and flee underground. More and more evidence of such incursions revealed themselves as they headed deeper into the heart of the facility.

As the truck swept along, movement drew Monk’s attention into a shattered lab. He caught a glimpse of a pair of lionesses dragging a body behind a table. Down another dark hall, the yip-yipping cackle of a pack of hyena echoed ominously, punctuated by a sharper scream.

Chin hunched further over the wheel and got them moving even faster.

“Take the next ramp,” Kimberly ordered, pointing ahead.

Chin obeyed, only to find the lower level raging with fires, the halls choked by an oily smoke. Brighter explosions echoed off in the distance as additional gas lines and propane tanks blew in a fiery chain reaction, spreading ever wider.

“Can we make it through here?” Monk asked.

“It’s the only way to reach the exit below,” Kimberly explained.

Monk stared out at the hellish landscape, knowing the savage fires here would soon burn through significant support structures, bringing more of the facility crashing down on their heads.

They had to keep moving — and quickly.

As they entered into this subterranean inferno, something large and angry bellowed back at them, the noise echoing all around, making it hard to tell where it originated.

But what made that noise was incontestable.

Kowalski moaned from the rear bed. “They’re here.”

24

Another loud chime reverberated across the crystalline chamber, reminding Gray that he was running out of time. He studied the star-shaped pattern formed of thumb-sized spheres of black metal and white crystal, reviewing all his options.

I have to get this right the first time.

While he concentrated, Roland paced one side of the golden skeleton. On the other, Lena stood with her arms nervously crossed. Seichan merely waited on the far side of the waist-high pillar that supported this mysterious pattern.

“Having second thoughts?” she asked.

“I think I’m on my hundredth,” he answered, offering her a tired smile.

“Then hopefully the hundred and first will be the charm.”

He hoped so, too, but he knew it would take more than charm to solve this.

Over the past few minutes, he had turned the pattern over and over again in his head. He had asked twice to see Father Kircher’s old journal, which Roland carried in a waterproof sleeve. He spent time studying the Jesuit priest’s calculations, knowing the man’s particular fascination with numerology, both the pure mathematics of prime numbers and the cabalistic mysticism of gematria.

Gray ran through the multitudes of opposites inherent in the puzzle.

Bright and dark…

Heavy and light…

Black and white…

Metal and crystal…

Fundamentally he kept circling to the same conclusion.

They’re all mirrors of each other.

“That has to be it,” he mumbled. “Mirrored pairs.”

“What are you getting at?” Lena asked. “Maybe if you explained it to us, we could help.”

Another loud gong shook the room.

Seichan frowned. “That was only ten seconds apart from the last one. At the rate these intervals are shortening, you have less than a minute to solve this puzzle or forfeit the prize.”

Gray pictured the walls of water surrounding this dry well at the heart of the lost city. He swore he could feel the hydraulic pressure of all that dammed water, but he knew it was only his internalized frustration.

“Maybe you should talk it out,” Seichan offered. “You’re not alone here.”

He nodded. He had planned on testing his theory with them, but first he had wanted to firm it all in his head. He finally relented and pointed to the star-shaped spread of small spheres.

“From the symmetry here, the answer must be tied to mirrored opposites. You can see it on the board, represented by black metal and white crystal, but the same repeats outward to the libraries on either side of the room.” He motioned to the two open doors. “One contains books crafted of metal. The other holds texts carved of crystal. But there’s another mirrored pair buried within this design, one tied to mathematics, specifically to prime numbers.”

Roland nodded to the board. “The 73 pieces to this puzzle. That’s a prime number.”

“And we know the mirror to that prime number is 37, which as we discussed before apparently has levels of significance from our DNA to the movement of the stars.”

“Still, what does 37 have to do with this particular puzzle?” Seichan asked.

“Because of that.” Gray turned and pointed to the golden skeleton on the glass dais. “This sculpture also hides a mirrored pair, mixing male and female conformations to form a whole. That’s the answer.”

He read the confused expressions as another chime shook the room, this one loud enough to rattle gems loose from the capitals of the surrounding pillars.

Time was running out.

Lena and Roland looked as anxious as he felt, while Seichan simply appeared impatient, fully trusting him, waiting for him to go on.

Taking strength from her confidence, he continued, “Back at the gravesites in Croatia, Eve’s grave was adorned with this same star-shaped pattern of 73.”

Lena nodded. “And the bones of male Neanderthal hybrid—Adam—were marked with the smaller star pattern of 37.”

Gray hovered his palm over the puzzle. “You can plainly see Eve’s star depicted here — composed of 73 pieces.” He stared hard at the others. “But where’s Adam’s smaller star?”

No one answered.

He pointed. “It’s here, waiting to be revealed, to make this pattern as whole as those golden bones.”

The room shook again with a booming chime, cracks skittered up the walls.

“Just show us, Gray,” Seichan warned, looking around. “Now or never.”

He knew she was right. Setting aside his misgivings, he began shifting the crystal and metal spheres into their proper locations, slowly revealing the smaller star within the larger.

Gasps rose around him as the others began to see the pattern, too.

Lena’s voice filled with wonder. “The two stars… they are both here.”

Gray hurried, sensing what was coming. Before he could finish, another clang of metal on crystal echoed forth. But this one didn’t stop. It amplified louder and louder, rising up toward a final crescendo.

He rushed to roll the last marble into place, completing the design. As he did so, a bright crystalline note hung in the air, vibrating the room’s very molecules, then collapsed into a deathly quiet.

They all held their breaths, but nothing worse transpired.

“You did it,” Lena finally exhaled.

The group stared down at the completed design.

Gray had gathered the 37 crystal spheres into the larger star’s center, forming Adam’s smaller star within Eve’s.

“The pattern,” Roland said. “One star within the other. Representing the male within the female. I think it’s supposed to mirror the act of procreation… of life, of the promise of generations to come.”

But that was not the only revelation that the pattern heralded.

Beyond the waist-high column that held the completed pattern, the far wall cracked open, parting along two plates of quartz that covered the stone. A new passageway opened before them, exposing another set of dark stairs going down.

No one moved for a full breath.

In the silence, an immense ticking echoed up from that threshold.

Seichan finally spoke, but even she whispered. “Let’s hope that’s not another timer, some countdown to doom.”

Fearing she might be right, Gray got everyone moving. They headed toward the stairs. Gray stopped at the top and shone his light down the long flight, but he could not make out the bottom. He felt a trickle of trepidation at trespassing here, but he remembered Seichan’s recommendation upon first exploring this lost city.

Just go look.

That sentiment had been the driving force behind humanity’s progress across the ages, a simple imperative fueled by our innate curiosity: to discover what was around the next bend, over the next horizon. It was that same inquisitiveness that impelled us to explore who we are, where we came from, and where we are headed next.

Gray took one step, then another, leading the others downward.

As they descended, the air filled with energy. It tingled his skin and coursed through the static of every hair on his body. He could even smell it, like a summer breeze during a lightning storm.

When he finally reached the last step, he stared into a vast chamber that opened before him. His mind struggled to comprehend the sight before him. In shock, all he could do was get out three simple words.

“Oh, my God.”

The sudden silence disturbed Shu Wei.

Since surfacing within this subterranean city, she had been greeted by a distant ringing of bells. She had once hiked the Himalayas and had heard similar chimes echoing faintly off the mountains, often rising from monasteries many kilometers away. She took the bells as a promising sign and followed their periodic tinkling as she led her team up from the flooded antechamber and down a long hallway inscribed with row upon row of ancient languages.

The bells grew ever louder and clearer, ringing with the certainty that she was closing upon her targets at long last. She welcomed that moment, knowing she outnumbered the others nine to four.

Plus I have the element of surprise.

While traversing this buried city, she had continued to keep her team moving silently, using minimal light. Here in perpetual darkness, she could not rely on night vision alone, as some ambient light was necessary for such gear.

Then, a moment ago, when they had been crossing a chamber decorated with animals sculpted of precious metals and gemstones, a loud ringing of chimes cut off abruptly. She had lifted a fist, calling a halt, suspicious at the sudden silence.

Several of her teammates used the moment to gaze at the wealth stored in the chamber. Even her eyes fell upon a gold panther with emeralds for eyes. After she had gained the information she needed from her targets and dispatched them, she would return here.

Maybe the Black Crow will not be the only one returning home with a trophy.

She glanced over to Major Sergeant Kwan, who kept a grip on the native boy’s shoulder. Her second-in-command did not even glance once at the treasures here. Then again, his trophies were of a more personal and particular nature.

As the silence stretched, she finally relented and lowered her fist.

Bells or not, it was time to continue their search. She headed for the next set of stairs, ready to flush her targets into the open and put an end to this mission.

Kwan swore, drawing her attention. The boy had broken free of his grip and fled down the steps, moving as swiftly as a gazelle, vanishing into the darkness below. Kwan pointed his pistol, then lowered it, knowing the boy was gone.

Shu Wei stepped beside her second-in-command. She didn’t deride the man, nor did she console him, as she knew Kwan’s failure was punishment enough.

Ultimately the boy’s escape would do little harm to the mission. Even if he reached the others and alerted them, thus removing the advantage of surprise, her team still outnumbered the enemy. And from the information gained by interrogating the boy and old man, her team had arrived with vastly superior firepower.

“Keep moving,” she ordered. “But proceed cautiously.”

With the enemy alerted, she did not intend to be ambushed.

As she headed down, a moment of petty irritation flared at the boy’s small act of betrayal. Once this was over, she would free the Black Crow to collect full payment for this stain upon his honor. From the way Kwan walked stiffly beside her, all but trembling with fury, he would exact his revenge most coldly.

Roland gaped at the impossibility that rose before him. It was as if he had stepped into a clock designed by the Lord himself. A loud ticking echoed off the walls of a cavernous space, a perfect sphere of open air that dwarfed the group gathered at its equator. They were perched halfway up one curve of the wall. The roof arched smoothly above, stretching as high as the first level of the lost city, while the floor delved as deeply below.

The entire vastness was covered in beaten gold.

He was also enthralled by the energy trapped within the dark space. He felt it coursing across his skin, his hair, hanging in the air itself. He watched bluish coruscations skitter softly across the roof and crimson scintillations dance along the mystery below.

But it was what rose before them in the middle of the space that defied reason, that unhinged his senses. Between those plays of energy hung a massive sphere, filling a quarter of the cavern space. One half appeared to be the same blackish magnetic metal that bound the books in the library; the other was quarried of the same white quartz found in the opposite library. The two surfaces were not smooth like the walls, but inscribed with meteoric impacts defining large lakes and low mountains.

“It’s supposed to be the moon,” Lena said.

He inwardly nodded, afraid to move, lest what he saw vanished.

They had all stopped at a ledge that circled the room’s equator. A series of tiered levels continued down from here. But none of them dared venture farther, as if innately sensing that this was beyond all of them, that they were trespassers upon a sight they were not yet ready to view.

He continued to study the giant sculpture of the moon. It hung in the room with no support. He could not fathom what energies suspended it — perhaps some mix of magnetism and charged forces.

Equally inconceivable were the details captured in this rendering. Every lunar mare, crater, mountain, ridge, fault, and channel was carved upon the surface in perfect clarity. And it wasn’t just the crystalline surface, which clearly represented the day side of the moon. The hemisphere of dark metal was also similarly inscribed and sculpted, revealing the hidden face of the moon’s dark side.

Seichan stared up at that metallic surface, her eyes pinched with disbelief. She kept her voice to a whisper. “How could that be? How could these ancient builders know what was on the other side of the moon?”

Gray noted another mystery. “It’s turning. The sphere, it’s slowly but definitely turning.”

Roland realized the man was correct. The moon wasn’t just hanging in space, but it was incrementally rotating. Again the loud ticking struck his ears, making him think of a giant clock, reminding him of something he had read.

“Sic mundus pendet et in nullo ponit vestigia fundo,” he whispered.

Lena glanced at him, but only for a moment, before returning her attention forward.

He translated the Latin: “ ‘Thus the world is suspended, resting its feet on no foundation.’ Those words were written by Father Kircher, inscribed on a clock he devised, one driven by magnetism. It was a hollow glass sphere full of mineral oil, which held a copper globe of the earth suspended inside, slowly turning, marking time.”

“Do you think he got that idea from here?” Lena whispered.

“I don’t know, but Father Kircher believed it was such forces that drove the motion of the planets.” Roland pointed beneath the giant moon. “But undoubtedly Nicolas Steno must have been here and reported his discovery.”

Filling the bottom of the gold-plated cavern was a labyrinth of raised copper walls, easily as tall as a man, as if inviting one to walk into that maze. However, the entire structure was flooded with a dark fluid, almost to the top of its walls.

“It’s similar to the labyrinth gilded on the cover of Kircher’s journal,” Gray said.

“A pattern found throughout history and around the globe,” Roland added, “but this maze is clearly more elaborate, expanded upon, more intricate and convoluted.”

He pulled out Kircher’s journal and held it up, letting them all compare the maze below to the labyrinth on the cover.

Roland turned to Lena and read the understanding shining on her face. He touched her arm in thanks. “You were right from the very beginning, Lena.”

Could it be true?

While Lena struggled to fathom all the mysteries and impossibilities found here, she recalled her first comment upon seeing the labyrinth on the damaged copy of Kircher’s journal, the one they had found in the caves of Croatia.

She repeated those words now. “It’s like a cross-section of a brain.”

Roland nodded.

She studied the more elaborate design below, noting every coppery curve and fold of those walls. They composed a perfect rendering of the gyri and sulci — the hills and valleys — that made up the human cortex and cerebrum.

“It is a cross-section of a brain,” Roland whispered. “One that is afire with energy.”

Lena watched the faint crimson tracery coursing along the copper walls, as if the entire structure were some ancient battery.

And maybe it is.

“But what does it mean?” Gray asked. “A cross-section of the brain supporting a suspended globe of the moon?”

Lena shook her head, remembering Roland’s description of the extraordinary, almost impossible to comprehend symmetry and dimension of the earth’s only satellite. A globe that produced the tides that supported life, a sphere of such perfect mass that it stabilized the spin and axis of the earth so the planet could become an abiding and secure home for complex organisms to evolve into an intelligence that could look to the skies and wonder.

She stared down at the depiction of the human brain and felt tears rising in her eyes. While she could not answer Gray’s question, deep down she knew the wordless truth, sensed the enormity of both what was designed here and what lay beyond these walls.

Roland tried to explain. “Maybe what we’re looking at here is these ancient teachers’ attempt to comprehend God.”

Lena sensed he was close to the truth, but the mysteries here ran even deeper than that, like how the dark side of the moon could be rendered in such detail by these ancients.

Roland sighed, perhaps realizing the same. “Or maybe all of this…” He waved an arm, encompassing not just this chamber of mysteries, but the greater mysteries beyond. “Maybe it’s another ancient intelligence’s attempt to communicate to us, to leave behind a message for us to discover, burying it both in our DNA and in the movement of the sun, earth, and moon.”

“But what’s the message?” Lena asked.

Gray offered one conjecture. “Physicists have always been baffled by how strangely — almost impossibly — the universe seems to be fine-tuned for the creation of life. Take electromagnetic force. It has a specific value that allows stars to produce carbon, the building block of all life. Likewise, the strong nuclear force, which holds atoms together, is also perfectly balanced. If it were a tad stronger, the universe would be made up entirely of hydrogen. A tad weaker, there would be no hydrogen.”

Lena understood. “If any of those constants were different, life would not exist.” She turned to Gray. “But how does what we’re looking at fit into all of that?”

He sighed. “I’m not entirely sure. But I think these ancient teachers built all of this as a model to show us that life too is a fundamental law of nature. Ultimately we were meant to discover these connections — these ratios and symmetries that tie our bodies to the larger universe — and to begin to comprehend a greater truth.”

“Which is what?” Roland asked.

“That we’re special.” He pointed down to the labyrinth of the brain. “That maybe the universe is centered around the creation of intelligent life, in the creation of us. That we are a fundamental law of nature.”

Silence settled over the group as they contemplated this possibility.

Roland finally mumbled, “No wonder Father Kircher hid this knowledge.”

“The world was not ready,” Lena added.

And maybe it’s still not.

Roland nodded to the labyrinth below. “Nicolas Steno, later in his life, ended his pursuit of paleontology, ceasing his examination of fossils.” He turned to them. “Do you know what he devoted the final years of his life to studying?”

Lena shook her head.

Roland turned and stared below. “He studied the human brain.”

The ticking of this massive clock suddenly took on a new note, more frantic, less steady. It took Lena a full breath to realize the new cadence was actually footsteps, racing down behind them.

She turned to find a small shape flying at them.

“Jembe?”

From the boy’s sudden appearance and breathless descent, Gray immediately knew something was wrong. Seichan stepped over and caught Jembe before he plunged headlong into the mysteries below.

He panted, his eyes wide upon what was suspended in the room, momentarily struck dumb.

Gray took his chin and drew his gaze to his own face. “What’re you doing here?”

Jembe pulled his chin free and glanced back. “I run fast…” He flitted a hand through the air. “Like a hummingbird. But here is very dark.”

Only now did Gray note the dark trickle of blood down the boy’s forehead. He must have struck his head while trying to find them.

Jembe clutched Gray’s jacket, gasping. “Bad people coming. They have Chakikui.”

Gray straightened, staring up.

Was it the Chinese again?

Seichan wondered the same. “They must have followed us.”

But how?

Gray pushed that question aside and asked a more important one. “How many, Jembe?”

The boy held up ten fingers. “Another is still with Chakikui.”

And all likely armed to the teeth.

He yanked out his SIG Sauer as Seichan did the same. But the odds were not good.

Two pistols against a fully equipped strike team.

“We’re too exposed in here,” Gray said and started moving everyone up, pulling the boy behind him.

“What about hiding in the libraries?” Lena offered, hurrying alongside him. “Those rooms go on and on, maybe circling all the way around this space.”

Roland nodded.

Even Seichan liked the plan. “It’s our best chance. We could secure the others while we play a little game of cat and mouse with our guests across the rooms.”

As they reached the top step and reentered the crystal chamber, Gray pointed toward the metal library, hoping the gold-plated cases and bulletproof books inside would offer some shelter. He momentarily considered sending everyone into the crystal library, while he and Seichan lured the marauders the other way, but the strike team might send searchers in that direction. If that happened, the others would be defenseless. So he stuck to his original plan.

He passed Seichan his flashlight. “Take them.”

“What’re you going to—”

“I’ll be right behind you.”

She nodded and herded everyone toward the open door, taking the light with her.

Rushing through the dark, he crossed back to the gold skeleton and the completed pattern atop the dais. In the past, Nicolas Steno must have successfully closed the doors to the moon room by scrambling the marbles and resetting the mechanism.

Gray didn’t need to be that thorough. He reached and merely switched a metallic sphere for a crystal one. With the pattern disrupted, the doors began to close with a soft sighing of hidden gears.

Hurry up…

He glanced to the stairs that led down here. Through the darkness, he spotted a faint light flowing from above. The enemy was approaching cautiously, likely edgy, knowing the boy would have alerted them. Still, he needed more time, so he raised his pistol and fired twice in that direction, hoping the threat would give the enemy reason to pause.

Finally the doors sealed shut behind him with a grinding thud.

He waited a full breath in case the mechanism needed time to reset. Then he reached over and plucked one of the metal balls from its socket. As before, a loud chime immediately sounded, a strike of metal on crystal.

With the timer again activated and the countdown restarted, Gray fled low across the floor, hoping to make it through the library door before being spotted.

No such luck.

A spatter of gunfire erupted from the stairwell, cracking and ricocheting off the quartz tiles at his heels. He dove across the library’s threshold and rolled farther into the room.

Seichan was there to pull him to his feet. Together they raced behind the nearest bookcase, putting that wall of metal-plated books between them and the door.

“The others?” he asked.

“Two rooms back and to the left. Told them to keep moving if we can’t hold them off here.”

Another of the chimes echoed.

She grumbled at him. “Like a team of commandos wasn’t enough of a threat?”

He showed her the metallic sphere still in his palm. “If need be, I can reset that timer. Maybe even use the marble as a bargaining chip. And in the worst-case scenario, I end up creating the world’s biggest distraction.”

“You like to live loose and fast, Gray.”

“Right now I’ll just take living.”

Furtive movements sounded out in the next room. Something rolled across the threshold, bobbling and spinning across the tiles.

A grenade.

Okay, now that’s a better bargaining chip.

Seichan grabbed him, and they both dove away.

Lena involuntarily ducked at the sudden blast. Even from two rooms away, a flare of brilliance reached their hiding place, etching the shelves and the threshold of the door ahead.

She crouched with Roland and Jembe behind a bookcase. Roland shaded a small penlight with his palm, his face lined by worry.

The boy tugged at her sleeve. “Ms. Lena,” he said, trying to get her attention.

She realized he was probably scared. He had been clinging to her, trying to get her to listen to him. She put an arm around him.

“We’ll be okay,” she tried to reassure him, though it felt more like she was trying to convince herself.

“No. I must tell you.”

She turned and read the urgency in his eyes. “What?”

He told her.

Roland heard him, too, and grabbed her arm. “We have to warn the others.”

Seichan groaned and picked herself up off the floor. The explosive device hadn’t been a grenade, but a flashbang meant to stun and soften an enemy. If not for the shelter of packed shelves, she would have been blinded. But the concussion and noise still felt like a giant had slapped both sides of her head with its palms.

Gray looked no better as he rolled to a low crouch, his pistol raised.

They had retreated to the next room. Gray took one side of the door while she kept to her feet on the other. She spied high while Gray remained low, both of them searching the room they had vacated.

Shadows shifted out there.

Gray fired once — earning a satisfying cry of pain. It wasn’t a mortal wound, but it got their attention.

Guessing the enemy came equipped with night-vision gear, Seichan reached to her belt and thumbed loose a small penlight. She flicked it on and whipped it out into the shelves. It wasn’t exactly a flashbang, but the sudden flare of brilliance would momentarily blind their sensitive night-vision equipment, stinging any eyes wearing such gear.

“Smart,” Gray whispered.

The penlight also revealed a pair of enemies, who fled from that well of brightness. She and Gray both fired. She hit one in the meat of his upper thigh, sending him flying behind a case. Gray clipped the other under his ear, dropping him flat.

One down.

But the enemy was not so easily cowed. Other forces were flanking wide, keeping out of sight. There were too many. She knew it was time to retreat even farther and get the others moving even deeper.

Before she could turn, lights flared brighter, flowing in from the crystal room, a strange crimson flickering.

Then gunfire erupted — at first sporadically, then more fiercely.

Shouts and screams rose, full of blood and pain.

What the hell?

A black uniformed shape came hurtling toward them, straight between two bookcases — then the man’s throat exploded, sending him flying forward. A long arrow protruded from his throat. He crashed to the floor, snapping the shaft. The victim crawled toward them, gasping, then his back arched, foam flecking his lips.

She glanced down to the arrowhead on the floor.

Poison.

Footfalls erupted behind her. She swung around with her weapon raised.

“It’s Lena and Roland,” Gray warned before she fired.

The boy came with them.

Gray waved them all to the side.

Lena exclaimed breathlessly. “It’s Jembe’s tribe.”

Seichan glanced to the boy, who nodded vigorously.

“Chakikui told me to take the bad people in here. So I do, but he also say in secret that my people are in the forest. I try to tell you.”

Seichan realized the boy was right. After hearing about the threat, they had all bum-rushed the skinny kid up the stairs and into hiding.

A ringing chime scolded her, sounding much louder now.

As it faded, she noted the fierce firefight had died down to sporadic bursts, echoing from deeper in the library, coming from neighboring rooms as the ambushers drove the Chinese farther back.

“What now?” Roland asked.

“We have to hightail it out of here,” Gray said.

“Why?”

“I dropped the ball.” He showed Seichan his palms. “In this case, literally. I had the marble in my hand, but when that flashbang blew, I lost it.”

Of course, you did. Nothing was ever easy with Gray.

He studied the dark room, his expression grim. They didn’t have time to find and replace the lost puzzle piece, especially with an unknown number of enemies still waiting in the shadows.

Another chime sounded, full of dire warning.

“We’ll have to make a run for it,” Gray announced. “Jembe, you find one of your people. Let them know to clear out, too.”

The boy nodded.

Gray clapped him on the shoulder and turned to everyone else. “Ready?”

No one was, but they had no other choice.

“Let’s go.”

Gray lifted his pistol and swung around the doorjamb. He rushed low in the next room; the others followed his example. He skirted around the dead man and out past the towering bookcases. He paused behind the last one, eyeing the door that opened into the crystal chamber.

It appeared unguarded.

More bodies lay on the floor, both in this room and beyond the threshold; most wore black commando gear, a few only loincloths. Several torches burned out there, abandoned in the crystal chamber.

Deeper in the library, gunshots occasionally rang out.

But that wasn’t what worried Gray.

The crystal chamber quaked with another resounding clang.

Time was almost up.

Knowing they could wait no longer, he burst toward the open door. But a dark shape leaped into view at the last moment. Jembe yelled out in his native language. Gray skidded to a stop — with the point of a poisoned arrow poised at his chest.

The tribesman had heard Jembe and shifted aside. The tall man spoke rapidly to the boy as the group fled the library. Jembe pointed up the stairs. The man nodded, cupped his lips, and cast out a loud warbling whistle, recalling his fellow tribesmen.

Gray gripped the warrior’s forearm in thanks. Any further demonstration of appreciation would have to wait. “C’mon,” he ordered the others.

As he sprinted for the stairs, the final chime sounded, rising again toward the same dire crescendo. Once it reached its peak, the ground bucked under his legs, sending him sprawling. The others fared no better; only Jembe kept his balance.

Around them, plates of obsidian crashed down from the ceiling and shattered into sharp shards. Pillars rocked and cracked.

Gray got everyone up. “Move!”

Behind him, natives dashed out of the library.

Gray led them all up the stairs and across the next chamber, the one covered in elaborate mosaics. As the world continued to shake, tiles rained to the floor, dissolving the images of animals and their caretakers from the walls.

A roaring rush echoed behind him.

Water.

His ears popped as the air pressure spiked higher. He pictured floodwaters filling the mysteries below and rising rapidly toward them, squeezing this only pocket of air.

As he fled, one certainty grew.

Atlantis was sinking for a final time.

“We must go,” Major Sergeant Kwan warned Shu Wei.

She stood amid shadowy bookshelves as cold water washed over her boots. The quaking had toppled shelves all around, knocking loose massive volumes bound in black metal. The brown-skinned natives who had ambushed her team had already fled the rising tide.

A part of her wanted to remain here, to accept her defeat with a measure of grace and honor, but a larger fire burned inside her.

For revenge.

Limping on a twisted ankle, she set off. Kwan came forward and helped her, hooking an arm around her waist. Normally she would have shunned such assistance, taking it as a sign of weakness, especially for a woman in the army.

Instead, she leaned more heavily into him, sensing his support was born of more than mere loyalty. His strong arm held her firmly. She would reserve her own strength to deal with her enemy.

She intended to become like the man who held her.

To become a Black Crow, a merciless force who took what was owed.

By the time they reached the exit to the library, the waters had risen to her thighs. Kwan now half carried her, wading swiftly. But a familiar figure blocked the way out.

The old tribesman held a stretched bow, balancing an arrow on his thumb.

It seemed she was not the only one seeking revenge.

Kwan lifted his assault rife with his free arm, but before he could fire, a sharp twang sounded from the right. An arrow pierced his wrist, knocking loose his weapon. Before he could recover it, his body was slammed forward, impaled from behind by a long spear. Blood coughed from his lips.

As Kwan splashed face-first into the water, Shu Wei toppled to the side.

Hands grabbed her from behind, lifted her to her feet, and held her there.

She could have tried to fight, but her waterlogged gear weighed her down and her left leg throbbed in pain.

Instead she stood firm, ready to accept death.

The old tribesman remained at the door, his bowstring tautly drawn.

She stared defiantly back at him as he let his arrow fly.

Gray raced down the long hall inscribed with ancient languages. Huge cracks had split the rows of script. Ahead, an entire section of the floor had broken and shifted askew. As he fled with the others across this shattered landscape, the ground continued to tremor, warning that the worst was yet to come.

I don’t want to be here when that happens.

He pictured the city crumbling away into a watery grave.

He slowed to help Lena, noting she had begun to falter. Seichan tried to assist Roland, but he shook her hand loose.

“I can make it,” he gasped out.

The only ones who seemed unfazed by the long, desperate sprint were the clutch of warriors behind them. If anything, the natives appeared to be holding back, making sure Gray and the others made it to safety. Especially Jembe, who danced back and forth through them like an excited puppy, but fear shone brightly in his eyes.

Finally the group reached the flight of stairs that led down to the city’s flooded entrance. Without slowing, they flew down the spiral stairs. Gray ran a palm along the outer wall to keep his balance.

Suddenly the steps became dangerously slippery, coated with wet moss. His fingertips found the same on the walls. He realized the flooding here must have receded, as the surrounding water table drained into the city’s lower levels.

Gray began to slow, wary of the slick and treacherous footing.

Then a huge boom shook the stairs, accompanied by a mighty cracking of rock. Fist-size stones came bouncing and careening down from the upper levels, along with an occasional boulder the size of a pumpkin.

It was all coming down.

Forgoing caution, Gray ran faster, doing his best to avoid being hit from behind by the larger rocks. The group finally piled the rest of the way down and reached where the stairs vanished underwater.

“Everyone stay together!” he hollered. “Help your neighbor if needed!”

He sent Lena ahead, then Roland.

Jembe pushed Seichan from behind, shoving both palms on her rump. “Go!”

Gray didn’t argue with the boy and grabbed Seichan’s hand. Together they dove into the water and swam down the last turns of the spiral and along a straight tunnel.

Lena and Roland kicked ahead of them, fighting to get free.

Finally they all reached the short flight of stairs that led up to the exit tunnel. They surfaced one after the other, gasping for air. Earlier, the narrow passageway had been flooded almost to the roof. Now the waters splashed around their calves. Exhausted, they marched single file along the final stretch and back to the river pool.

Night breezes, cool and clean, greeted them. The skies shone brightly with a full moon and the wide luminous band of the Milky Way. They crossed the pool and crawled onto the opposite bank.

Gray noted the black boots sticking out from behind a bush, likely the guard who had been left with Chakikui. Seichan removed her pistol and kept it handy, ready in case any of the commandos should make it out.

Gray appreciated her caution, though he doubted they had to worry. He watched the natives file out and join them.

Jembe sat down heavily next to him.

“Where’s your elder?” Gray asked. “Where’s Chakikui?”

Jembe stared toward the mouth of the tunnel. Gray realized the old man must still be down there. He sat up straighter, but Jembe patted Gray’s knee.

“Chakikui is old.”

Gray glanced at the boy, believing his words were a callous dismissal.

Instead, Jembe added. “He is wise. He knows many ways out.”

Roland overheard this. “The natives who brought Father Crespi those myriad artifacts claimed there were many ways into those tunnels full of treasures.”

Gray hoped they were both right.

He owed that old man for his life… for all their lives.

Lena sat with her arms around her shins, looking little relieved by their narrow escape. Her eyes remained haunted. He could guess her concern.

She was safe — but her sister was not.

25

Maria crouched in the bed of the truck as it raced through the fiery level of the subterranean complex. She clutched a wet handkerchief over her mouth and nose, soaked from a soldier’s canteen. It helped filter the smoke, but the heat still seared as the vehicle careened wildly around corners. She slid back and forth across the truck bed, hugging tightly to Baako and holding a cloth over his muzzle.

He whimpered and shivered.

Kowalski dropped on his other side and embraced them both under one large arm. “I’ve got you, buddy,” he assured Baako, bracing his legs to keep them somewhat steady. “It won’t be much longer.”

She hoped he was telling the truth. Her eyes stung, and her lungs burned with every breath. Still, at least the heat would hold any of the hybrid gorillas at bay. Unfortunately, from the periodic loud bellows, the pack was nearby.

Maybe not on this level, but certainly the next.

As she stared up, she tried to picture bright sunshine, fresh air, cool breezes. Through the smoke overhead, something large wafted past, riding the overheated thermals, a bird from the zoo trying to escape the inferno into which it had been accidentally swept. She never saw exactly what it was before it vanished, but she hoped it made it free.

I hope we all do.

Through the small window in the back of the cab, she heard Kimberly shout to the driver, “We’ll never make it to the next ramp!”

Maria clutched harder to Baako, despairing.

“But there’s a staircase up ahead,” the woman continued. “Stop there. We’ll have to go the rest of the way on foot.”

The news both relieved and terrified her. She glanced around at the stoic faces of the soldiers. They all looked equally grim.

The truck raced another thirty yards and skidded to a hard stop.

“Off-load!” Monk shouted. “Make for the stairs!”

Kowalski helped her out of the bed, groaning and favoring his left side, but still keeping a firm hold on her. Baako leaped lithely beside them. Once everyone was out, they headed in a tight group to the smoky entrance to the stairwell. A slight breeze blew up from below, chasing some of the smoke away. By the time they reached the bottom step, the air felt almost cool.

Monk flicked on a flashlight, muffling its beam with his other hand.

“Stay behind me,” Kowalski ordered her.

Monk led the way, flanked by his team and trailed by Kimberly.

Maria kept hold of Baako’s hand, keeping him at her side. At some point his bandage had dislodged, exposing the bleeding laceration atop his scalp. Worry for him remained a constant ache in her chest.

As they headed off, Maria recognized some of the landmarks here. They were not far from the vivisection lab. A booming crash made her jump and turn. Far down a dark hall, a smoldering fire glowed menacingly back at her, revealing that a section of the floor above had burned through and collapsed into this level.

“It’s all starting to come down,” Kimberly warned.

They set a faster pace, eschewing caution for speed.

After several panicked turns, Baako suddenly clutched her hand and drew her to a stop. Only now, past the pounding of her heart, did she hear a familiar bleating and hooting. Baako tugged her toward a nearby door. She wanted to rush on, but she knew what Baako wanted. With his free hand, he grasped the handle. Already unlocked, the door opened.

“What are you doing?” Kowalski asked, waving for the others to halt.

Baako ducked inside. She had no choice but to follow, drawing everyone with her. Inside was a waist-high row of stainless steel cages. Most were empty, but three of them held young chimpanzees, no more than two years old; a fourth held an older female with gray fur and sagging breasts, likely a breeding female for the lab. The chimp reached an arm through the cage bars toward Maria.

“We have to keep going,” Kimberly warned.

Instead, Baako crossed to one of the cages and rattled it. He turned and chained a string of signs together.

[Open… go… together]

“No,” Maria said. She pointed to herself, to Kowalski. “We must go.”

Baako looked forlorn, likely picturing his own confinement in the pens earlier. He continued to clutch the bars. A chimp, no more than a year old, reached up and grasped one of his fingers.

“Oh, fuck it,” Kowalski said. He started undoing the complicated latches. “Baako’s not going anywhere without them.”

Maria joined him.

Kowalski growled at the others. “Help us.”

Soon all the cages were open. Kowalski carried one chimp in the crook of his arm. Baako held an older one by the hand. The female hurried to the youngest and clutched the infant to her chest.

Monk stared at them, shook his head, and headed back to the door. One of the soldiers stood guard and waved them to stop. He retreated inside and drew the door closed, holding them all in place. He lifted a finger to his lips.

They all froze.

Something massive thundered down the hall. Maria felt the ground shake, picturing one of the hybrid gorillas. Then it swept past and away. They waited ten full breaths before the soldier risked peeking out. Somewhere in the distance a series of loud screams burst forth, accompanied by fresh gunfire and a roar full of blood and fury.

The soldier glanced back at them. “All clear… for now.”

They piled out of the kennel room and headed away from the ruckus behind them. The telltale musk of the hybrid’s passage still hung in the air. As the hall turned, the next passageway proved to be a long straight shot, lined by a few sealed labs. Maria realized that if Baako hadn’t diverted them into the kennel, the group might have been caught out in the open by the rampaging hybrid.

Kowalski must have realized the same and patted Baako on the shoulder.

They hurried down the length of the hall, slowing only once they neared the far end. Kimberly leaned to Monk, but her words carried back to Maria.

“The loading bay should be around the next corner. It’s sure to be guarded by Chang’s men.”

Monk turned and signaled his team. They secured the butts of their rifles more solidly to their shoulders.

Kowalski tried to pass her his small chimp, grimacing at those small arms tightened around his throat. She helped him, freeing the frightened creature and nestling it against her chest. She also reached out and took the older female’s hand, drawing her close.

Kowalski signed to Baako.

[Fast]

Baako grunted and drew his young chimp up onto his back, where it balanced with its thin arms hugging the gorilla’s neck. Baako modified Kowalski’s last sign.

[Very fast]

“You got it.” Kowalski lifted a shotgun that Monk had handed him earlier.

Monk glanced back to Baako with a small grin. “That son of yours is a chip off the old block.”

The words were meant to be good-natured jibe, but Kowalski seemed to take them at face value.

“Yeah, he’s a good kid.” Kowalski pointed his shotgun forward. “Let’s do this.”

Monk headed around the corner, leading the others. A short hallway dumped into the larger, cavernous loading bay area. He kept everyone close to one wall, trying to stay out of sight for as long as possible. His ears strained for any sign of the enemy, but all he heard were the echoing groans, sharper explosions, and sonorous crashes of the imploding complex behind him.

Ahead, all was quiet, but his nose picked out the traces of a fetid musk through the persistent reek of smoke.

It set his teeth on edge.

He finally reached the threshold of the loading bay and studied the rows of towering racks. Several had toppled over, spreading outward like a cascade of dominoes before coming to a stop, dumping their contents into heaps of broken crates, scattered barrels, and crushed boxes.

Monk had a filtered view of the exit on the far side, where light shone into the space. The giant doors of the dock — which had been closed before — now stood halfway open, likely cranked up enough to facilitate a fast evacuation. Lamps from the Underground City’s roadways glowed outside.

Still not spotting any activity, Monk took a deep breath and moved out into the loading area, skirting between the dark rows, sticking to the shadows as best he could. As he edged past a pile of tumbled cardboard boxes, the view fully opened.

Oh, crap…

Uniformed bodies lay everywhere, torn, ripped, and trampled. Blood slicked the floor and sprayed the walls. Weapons lay spent, a few still smoking and steaming in the pools. Some had limbs gripping them, but no bodies.

In the center of the carnage, a large furry mound lay sprawled facedown. Half its skull had been blown away, likely from the impact of a rocket-propelled grenade. Monk searched and spotted the long black tube of a launcher, abandoned near the crank for the loading doors.

“So much for Chang’s reinforcements,” Kimberly whispered at his side.

Monk hoped the lieutenant colonel was among the dead, but he had a more immediate concern. Beyond the door, the parking lot had emptied out. The frantic evacuees must have commandeered anything with wheels and fled. The only remaining vehicle was a large blue dump truck.

He turned to Kimberly, who also was staring at the massive loader. “We need the keys.”

Likely the only reason the truck was still here was that the keys were with the driver. Monk recalled Sergeant Chin pistol-whipping the man shortly after their team entered. They had rolled his unconscious body behind a pile of wooden pallets.

But was he still here?

Monk squinted and spotted a pair of boots.

He sighed with relief. “On my mark, I’ll go for the keys. You get everyone aboard that truck.”

She nodded.

He glanced to the others to make sure they all understood, then hissed a recommendation. “Haul ass.”

He turned and sprinted out into the open. He aimed for the stack of pallets as the rest of the team rushed headlong toward the open bay doors. Monk came close to falling several times, his boots slipping on the blood-slick concrete.

A splintering crash drew his attention back around.

Sliding on his boots, he looked over his shoulder.

A massive shape bulldozed through a mountain of crates and boxes, scattering them and toppling more of the towering racks as it burst out of its hiding place. It leaped the last of the obstructions and landed heavily on its back legs and one forearm. It hunched for a breath, exposing the saddle of silver fur across its back. Then it heaved high and let loose an ear-shattering roar. One fist pounded its chest, sounding like thunder.

Holy sh—

Monk scrabbled away from it. “Keep going for the truck!”

He twisted around and ran for the driver’s body. He heard the beast crash back down to all fours. He felt the ground shaking underfoot as it pursued him, drawn by his shout. The pools of blood trembled all around.

Monk dove at the last moment, flying through the air. As he landed, a massive fist slammed down atop the stack of pallets, smashing through them with an explosion of broken wood.

Monk reached out, snatched the ankle of the driver, and rolled away from that savage blow. He crouched over the body as splinters peppered him, expecting to feel the beast’s other fist flatten him to the floor.

Instead, a booming shout rose from near the loading bay doors. “Hey, asshole! We’re not finished yet!”

Kowalski watched the giant silverback wheel toward him, likely recognizing his voice, remembering its former adversary — or meal, as the case may be.

He hauled the length of the rocket launcher to his shoulder.

Now I feel properly dressed.

A moment ago, as the beast thundered toward Monk, Kowalski had split from the others and sprinted to the RPG launcher abandoned near the exit, snatching up two grenade rounds from the floor nearby.

He had quickly loaded one and now pointed the weapon’s muzzle at the silverback as it swung to face him. Still, he waited until Monk finished pawing at the body under him. Finally his partner leaped to his feet and dashed toward the smaller side door.

The silverback dropped to one arm, glaring over at Kowalski, its breath heaving from the bellows of its lungs. From the shine of those dark eyes, the beast definitely knew him.

Kowalski centered his aim.

Hard to miss this shot.

With Monk clear, Kowalski fired, the explosion deafening. A trail of smoke spiraled away from the tube and sailed toward the silverback. But the beast rolled to the side at the last second, clearly recognizing the weapon’s threat from the demise of the dead beast on the floor. This one clearly learned from past mistakes.

Missing its target, the grenade struck the far wall and detonated with a flash of fire, blowing away a chunk of concrete.

The silverback continued its defensive roll and ended back on all fours, ignoring the spray of concrete shards pelting its back.

Kowalski didn’t have time to reload, so he turned tail and did what Monk had instructed them to do.

Haul ass.

His partner had already reached the truck’s cab and climbed into the driver’s seat. The truck’s engine growled to life, spewing out gouts of black smoke from its diesel engine.

Kowalski raced toward the back loader of the truck. He caught sight of Monk’s worried face in the large side mirror. He knew the source of his partner’s concern. In that same reflection, the silverback came bounding into view. Its hind legs slid in the slippery blood; then it charged toward him.

“Go!” Kowalski hollered, swinging the launcher to get the truck moving.

He sprinted faster, his gaze fixed to the side mirror. The silverback filled that reflection, roaring at him, throwing off ropes of drool as it bared its fangs.

Kowalski knew he wouldn’t make it, especially as the truck finally got a head of steam and started speeding up. With every step, his cracked ribs tore more deeply into his side.

He stumbled, his strength giving out.

Then gunfire spattered from the dump truck’s bed. Rounds whined above his head, aiming for the silverback. Monk’s teammates must have climbed out of the cab and into the back bed, trying to help Kowalski.

The effort spurred him to keep going.

Finally he reached the bumper and grabbed the rungs of a ladder welded along one side. His fingers slipped loose. Unbalanced, he used the last of his strength to fling himself headlong toward the ladder. One hand caught and snatched hold.

The toes of his boots dragged as the truck kicked up faster.

He glanced back.

The silverback thundered toward him. Its tough hide and thick bones were impervious to the rifle fire. One arm reached toward him, but he cracked the beast across the knuckles with the tube of the rocket launcher.

The arm dropped, but the beast continued its pursuit.

Kowalski tossed the launcher up into the bed, needing both hands to climb the rungs. Once secure, he pulled his dragging boots up onto the bumper and scrambled quickly, but the truck still accelerated too slowly. The silverback narrowed the distance, reaching again for him as he clung to the rungs.

Then the rocket launcher protruded above the back tailgate and pointed toward the silverback. Kowalski craned up, confused, especially seeing who wielded the weapon. It was Maria. But the only grenade round left was still tucked in the back of his belt.

Still, the silverback noted the implied threat.

A loud boom startled Kowalski, almost making him lose his grip.

The silverback had a similar reaction, dodging and rolling to the side like it had before, believing it was being fired upon. But it was only Maria kicking the tailgate with her boot, mimicking a grenade launch.

Kowalski hung from the ladder, staring at the silverback. It had come to a stop and bellowed at them, possibly realizing it had been tricked.

Kowalski lifted an arm and gave it a one-fingered salute.

Better luck next time, chump.

“Hold on!” Monk called from behind the wheel.

Kowalski turned the other way.

Ahead, trundling toward them was a convoy of military vehicles, running side by side, filling the tunnel ahead.

It was the Chinese army.

Kowalski sighed.

Now who’s the chump?

With Kowalski safely aboard, Monk slowed the truck. He tried to ignore the convoy closing down on them as he turned to Kimberly.

She frowned deeply. Ever since the truck had started moving, she had been studying the sketchy map of the Underground City supplied to them by Kat.

“The army is coming from the direction where we first entered the Underground City.”

Monk drew the truck to a stop. “So we aren’t leaving the way we entered.”

“No.” She glanced over her shoulder. “But there’s an intersection we passed about a hundred yards back.”

Monk remembered. The cross tunnel had been larger than this one. “Where does it lead?”

“No idea. It’s not on Kat’s map.”

“Okay, let’s go see.”

Eyeing the rearview mirror, he set the vehicle into reverse. The silverback had come to a halt fifty yards past the cross tunnel. By now its angry bellowing had drawn more of its kind into the tunnels. Hulking dark forms lumbered along the passage to join their leader.

“You’ll have to make that turn fast,” Kimberly warned.

No kidding.

Still, Monk kept his speed moderate. He wanted to make it look to the convoy as if he was only a lowly truck driver trying to escape the mayhem, maneuvering to get out of the army’s way.

Then gunfire chattered from the front vehicles. Rounds splintered the cab’s thick windshield and pinged off the front grill.

Okay, that’s not going to work.

As he picked up speed, Kimberly ducked lower and removed a set of binoculars from her jacket. She studied the convoy, taking stock of the threat, then swore under her breath.

“What?”

“In the front jeep. Lieutenant Chang Sun.”

You’ve got to be kidding me.

Kimberly scowled. “He must have taken off during the chaos and met the incoming convoy. He’s likely the one who summoned them.”

And now he’s coming with the cavalry to play hero.

Monk raced their vehicle faster in reverse, chased by the convoy. Gunfire erupted over the top of the cab as Sergeant Chin and his men returned fire from the truck bed.

Everyone else, including Baako and the group of rescued chimps, were also back there. The thick steel walls surrounding the bed should keep them as shielded as possible.

Monk kept his focus on the side mirror as he raced backward. In the reflection, he saw the other massive hybrids had reached their alpha leader and gathered at the silverback’s side. The gunfire, along with the approach of lights and vehicles, kept the group wary — but not likely for long.

The silverback fixed his dark gaze upon their truck. It hunched on all four limbs, shoulders thrust forward, waiting for them to return, perhaps believing they intended to go on the offensive.

Sorry to disappoint you, dude.

Monk reached the intersection and braked hard. He cranked on the wheel, fishtailing the back end slightly to come to a stop with his front end pointed toward the side tunnel.

Turned askew now, Monk had a clear view toward the approach of the convoy. Lights blazed toward him.

“What are you waiting for?” Kimberly asked.

Monk held the brake and gunned the engine, revving it to a throaty growl, choking the space with exhaust. He held his ground until he could make eye contact with Chang Sun, who sat in a passenger seat of an open jeep.

Kowalski called from the back. “They’re coming!”

He wasn’t talking about the Chinese.

Monk watched Chang Sun sneer with satisfaction.

Good enough.

Monk let loose the brake and hauled on the wheel. Tires screamed, rubber smoked — and the truck shot off down the other tunnel.

As he had hoped, the convoy had been so focused on the large dump truck, which mostly filled the road, that they had failed to note the hulking army lurking in the shadows beyond their vehicle.

In his mirrors, Monk watched those two forces collide.

The massive gorillas pounded into the jeeps and trucks, leaping over trunks to rip soldiers from their seats, tearing through the canvas of troop carriers.

The tunnel made a sharp turn ahead, and he lost sight of the battle.

He finally turned his full attention forward.

Now where do we go?

After twenty minutes of traveling through ever-darkening tunnels, Maria allowed herself to breathe. She sat in the bed of the dump truck, surrounded by warm, furry bodies.

Baako leaned against her with a dozing chimp nestled in his lap. On her other side, the older female nursed her infant. In her arms, Maria cradled the small one-year-old, his tiny head resting trustingly on her shoulder. His soft breath brushed the hollow of her throat.

She remembered when Baako was this young.

Kowalski sat cross-legged against the side of the dump truck, staring at her.

“What?” she whispered.

He shrugged. “You look good.”

She stared down at her disheveled condition, then frowned at him.

Right.

He wiped a palm over the stubble of his scalp. “I mean, you look… I don’t know, content. Like you know where you fit in the world.”

Her frown softened into a smile. “Maybe.”

At least better than a few days ago.

“You look good,” he repeated, leaning back, letting his eyes close, but not before a slight grin played about the corner of his lips.

She knew this time he wasn’t talking about contentment. But she didn’t press the matter and accepted the compliment, more flattered than she had a right to be.

The truck’s engine suddenly coughed once, jolting the bed — then twice more. Finally it gasped out a last gout of exhaust smoke and died.

She straightened, twisting around.

Monk called back through the back window of the cab. “Out of gas. Think the fuel tank got punctured by a stray round at some point. But Kimberly knows where we are. There’s an exit a half mile ahead. We’ll have to hoof it from here.”

With Kowalski’s help, Maria got everyone moving and off-loaded.

Once on the ground, they set off down the shadowy tunnel. Monk led with a flashlight. Its single beam was enough to illuminate their way.

After several minutes of hiking, Kimberly pocketed her phone and stared ahead. “The exit is near the Forbidden City. Once there, I’ll head up with Sergeant Chin. We’ll fetch a vehicle.” She glanced over to Maria’s charges. “Perhaps a paneled van to help ferry our unusual cargo. With attention likely to be focused back at the zoo, we should be able to slip out to the countryside and arrange an evacuation. Still, we should—”

“Quiet.” Monk cut her off and covered his flashlight with his palm. He motioned for them to retreat to the side.

“Now what?” Kowalski groused.

Then Maria heard it, too.

The growl of an engine. Lights appeared behind them, rounding past the far bend. The vehicle surely had spotted the abandoned dump truck.

Monk clicked off his flashlight and turned to Kimberly. “Is there any place nearby to hide?”

“Not that we could reach in time.”

Monk swore and waved everyone down. His men dropped to a knee, leveling their weapons, guarding Maria and the others.

The vehicle drifted toward them, then stopped ten yards away. The glare of the headlamps blinded them, but it was clearly a Chinese military vehicle. The open-air jeep had a shielded machine gun mounted on the back, which swiveled toward them.

A soldier called over. “There is nowhere else you dogs can run.”

Maria recognized that superior tone.

From Kowalski’s groan, he knew the man, too.

That bastard has more lives than a friggin’ cat.

As the jeep’s engine continued to rumble loudly, Chang Sun remained hidden behind the machine gun’s shield, plainly intending to keep whatever lives he still had left. The coward must have fled the altercation at that crossroads and come after them, intending to claim the glory of their capture.

Sergeant Chin test-fired a few rounds at the driver, but even the windshield proved to be bulletproof. More firepower was needed.

Kowalski began to lift his RPG launcher, but Chang strafed a line of fire in front of Monk’s men.

“Remain where you are,” Chang warned. “And I might let some of you live. To be paraded and prosecuted as American spies.”

Kowalski lowered his weapon.

“But I have no need for the animals,” Chang said. “Send them forward so I can dispatch them quickly.”

Maria stepped in front of Baako, her stance easy to read.

The muzzle of the machine gun shifted toward her chest.

“You’d better do as he says,” Kowalski growled. “It’s better that Baako die here than be brought back to some lab.”

Maria breathed heavily, remaining stiff. Finally she sagged, knowing he was right. She turned to Baako and signed to him.

[I love you]

He whimpered and hugged tightly to her.

“Now!” Chang barked.

Kowalski yelled back at him. “Let them say good-bye, you jackass!”

Maria dropped to her knees and embraced Baako, as if trying to envelop him completely. She held him for a long breath, but she must know Chang had only so much patience. She finally let him go and encouraged him to take the chimpanzees around to the front.

Baako carried the two little ones, while holding the hand of the mother who nestled her infant to her chest. They moved out between the beams of the jeep’s headlamps, becoming shadowy silhouettes against that glare, as if already ghosts.

The gun barrel lowered toward the group.

Maria leaned into Kowalski’s chest, hiding her face, bracing herself against the coming gunfire.

“It’s going to be okay,” Kowalski told her.

This was no lie.

With everyone focused toward the front of the jeep, no one paid any attention behind it. A patch of shadows grew darker back there, bunching to form a massive hulking shape.

Chang wasn’t the only survivor of that earlier altercation.

The silverback crept silently upon its escaped prey. The beast was clearly injured, dripping runnels of black blood. One arm hung at its side, a dead weight. It drew up behind the jeep. The occupants, deafened by the rumbling engine, remained unaware.

Monk encouraged their group to retreat.

Chang must have believed they were clearing away from the slaughter of Baako and the chimps. “It will be over soon,” the bastard promised.

It certainly will be.

A massive hand grabbed Chang from behind and plucked him out of the machine gun mount. The shock of the sudden assault strangled the man for a breath. Then he twisted around and caught sight of what held him.

He finally screamed.

Panicked, the driver leaped out of the jeep, only to take two well-placed rounds through the forehead from Chin.

The silverback ignored the blasts and lifted Chang’s struggling body to its mouth. It planted the man’s skull between its molars — then slowly clamped down with a sickening crunch of bone.

After Chang went limp, the silverback tossed the body into the shadows and lowered to a fist. It glared over the top of the jeep at their group.

Kowalski already had his rocket launcher loaded and positioned atop his shoulder, the sights fixed on that massive bulk. There was no escape this time. The silverback glowered at him, huffing, building up steam for a fight.

Bring it.

Then a shadow blocked Kowalski’s view. A furry hand rose and pulled the muzzle of his launcher down. Baako stood with his back to Kowalski, facing the giant.

The young gorilla rose as tall as he could. He signed to the other, pointing both fingers up, then toward the silverback.

[Go]

The silverback hunched lower on its one good arm. Blood pooled beneath its half-ton bulk. That dark gaze swept from the defiant stance of Baako to the lowered weapon.

Baako repeated his sign.

[Go]

The silverback grunted, sagging in exhaustion, then lumbered heavily around. It slowly limped back into the darkness.

No one moved, fearing it might return.

Finally Maria dashed forward and hugged Baako.

Kowalski remained wary. He didn’t know if the silverback had backed down because of its injuries, or from Baako’s sign of defiance, or because of the peaceful act of lowering the weapon.

Likely all of the above.

No matter the reason, it appeared to be truly gone, disappearing into the shadows, perhaps to become some future urban legend, a monstrous yeti of Beijing’s underworld.

Kowalski passed Monk his launcher and crossed to Baako. He clapped the gorilla on the shoulder. “Look who’s the new alpha around these parts now.”

Baako swung an arm in good-natured play, but he ended up smacking Kowalski hard in the side.

“Ow! Watch those ribs.”

Baako lifted his brows high, worried he had truly done him harm.

Kowalski reassured him. “It’s okay. Remember we’re—” He formed the F sign with fingers and traced a circle.

[Family]

Baako nodded vigorously, chuffing his understanding. He looked from Maria, back to Kowalski — then tapped his thumb against his forehead, looking earnestly up at him.

[Papa]

“Hey, whoa there, buddy.” Kowalski backed a step. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

26

“That’s the official story out of China?” Gray sat across the desk from Painter Crowe, the director of Sigma. “A gas leak?”

Painter tilted back in his chair, using both hands to comb his fingers through his hair. “That’s what you’ll hear on CNN and Fox News about the devastation at the Beijing Zoo. But no one’s fooled in the back channels. China is being allowed to save face in return for their cooperation in exposing any other operatives within the U.S. academic fields.”

“And you trust they’ll be thorough?”

“Of course not, but it’s a start at cleaning house. In addition, China has agreed to sign the moratorium against any further research into the engineering of the human genome.”

Gray raised a skeptical eyebrow.

Like signing a paper will stop them.

Painter shrugged. “The genie is out of the bottle. All we can try to do is rein in such research as much as possible. Even the two Crandall sisters have discontinued their research using animal hybrid models.”

“What about the other asset that came out of China?” Gray asked.

“Gao Sun? Our current guest at a black-site detention center?”

Gray nodded. Monk’s team had returned with the soldier, to answer for his murder of an Emory University student at the primate center. With the chaos surrounding events at the zoo, no one was bothering to look for the soldier. The prisoner had been transferred to a covert facility, to serve out a life sentence.

“He’s fully cooperating,” Painter said. “Though he’s still not talking.”

Gray frowned, not understanding.

“I should say he’s still not able to talk. Kowalski clocked him good before they left China. Broke the man’s jaw and knocked out four front teeth. And that was only one punch. Monk pulled Kowalski off the guy before he could do any real damage. Still, Gao’s jaw was wired shut. He’ll be taking all of his meals through a straw for several weeks.”

The bastard deserved far worse.

“And what’s the word from Ecuador?” Gray asked.

“Father Novak gained permission from the Vatican to take up residence at the Church of María Auxiliadora in Cuenca. He’ll be overseeing the archaeological excavation of the lost city. The boy Jembe is helping him coordinate with the local Shuar tribes. He remains optimistic that they’ll be able to recover significant artifacts.”

Gray nodded. It sounded like Roland was on his way to assuming the role of Father Crespi, while continuing to follow the footsteps of Athanasius Kircher.

“It’s a shame we lost both sets of Neanderthal hybrids’ remains,” Painter added. “We could have learned much from the DNA of those bones.”

Gray wasn’t so sure.

Maybe it was for the best.

He pictured the massive sculpture of the moon suspended in the golden cavern. For the thousandth time, he wondered what had become of those ancient builders. Had they died off or had they found a new place to hide? Then again, maybe they had simply ventured forth and assimilated into the world at large, joining the rest of humanity on its journey into the future.

He considered the graves found in Croatia, the last remnant of those ancient Watchers on the European continent. Sigma may have failed to preserve those hybrid bones, but if Roland was successful, the discoveries out of Ecuador held the potential to alter our understanding of man’s place on this planet — and possibly beyond.

Gray ran through a handful of additional inquiries and questions with Painter, then headed home. He took the Metro, where he picked up his bicycle and sailed through the dark streets.

Overhead, the moon was no longer full, but the mysteries locked in its symmetries and dimensions still hung in the night sky, welcoming anyone to explore, to question, to look beyond the next horizon.

Gray reached his apartment complex and locked up his bike. He crossed the moonlit greensward to his front door, ready to set aside such mysteries for the night.

He opened the door and found the apartment empty and dark. For a panicked moment, he believed Seichan was gone. Lately he had sensed her unease in the quiet moments of their shared life, as if she wasn’t quite ready to accept it — or maybe believed she didn’t deserve it. She tried to hide such misgivings, thought perhaps she had fooled him, and he let her believe it.

Over time, he had grown to know her nature, respecting her hard upbringing, accepting her suspicions. In many ways, she was a feral creature, barely tamed, one that would not respond well to force or demand. So he simply let her have the space to work through the demons of her past, being there when she needed him and backing off when she didn’t.

He crossed the dark apartment, recognizing from the faint hint of warm candles that he was not alone after all.

He opened the master bath door to find Seichan draped in a steaming tub, her naked body barely hidden under a layer of bubbles. An iced bottle of champagne rested on the floor nearby, along with two crystal flutes. The only illumination came from a ring of tall candles.

He smiled, recognizing this scenario, remembering their time ensconced in a hotel room overlooking the Champs-Élysées.

Seichan lifted an eyebrow, as if reading his thoughts. “I believe we were rudely interrupted before.”

He began shedding his clothes, more than ready to be here for her now.

Who the hell needs Paris?

Kowalski slapped a fat fly off his forearm, certain it was carrying some exotic disease.

What’s taking so long?

He glared up at the morning sun as it beat down like a hammer into the jungle glade. On the other side of the green meadow spread a row of raised platform tents, their accommodations for the past three days as the group acclimated to the weather and the challenges ahead. They had arrived in this rift valley, nestled between volcanic peaks, for a particular introduction.

“How much longer?” Kowalski groused to the girls.

Lena and Maria knelt on either side of Baako, preparing him for his first day. The twin sisters doted on the young gorilla, as if about to send their child off to kindergarten. Then again, Baako wore the same exasperated, frightened, and excited face of a typical kindergartner.

Tango sat in the grass nearby, panting, tongue lolling. Maria had brought the Queensland pup to help ease Baako’s transition.

After events in China a month ago, Maria had decided to begin the process of releasing Baako into the wild, choosing the protected gorilla reserve of the Virunga National Park for his home. She and her sister planned on spending the next six months in the Congo, helping with his transition. They were supported by a team of local zoologists who were familiar with such matters and who were also doing the same for the group of chimpanzees rescued from the lab. Most of them were still too young, but they were being cared for until they were old enough to make that leap into the wild.

Kowalski had come along, too, using up two weeks of vacation. He also planned on visiting a few times while Maria remained here. He remembered last night, sitting on his tent’s veranda, watching the night skies glow from the lava pooled in the cone of Mount Nyiragongo to the north. They had shared cold beers and remained together until dawn — but not always on the veranda. The beds were surprisingly nice.

Yeah, I’ll be coming back.

“Okay, I think we’re ready,” Maria said, straightening up with her hands on her hips. “Are you, Baako?”

The gorilla lifted both arms and clenched a pair of fists at his shoulder.

[Brave]

“I know you are,” Maria said.

She took him by the hand and guided him toward the forest’s edge, trailed by Tango. One of the local zoologists, Dr. Joseph Kyenge, waited in the shadows. Beyond him, the hulking forms of a small band of gorillas, maybe five or six, watched curiously from the fringes of the forest as their group approached.

A few hooted at them.

The plan was for the zoologist to help make some introductions. It was better that this was done by a stranger than either sister. It was the first step in breaking that bond so Baako could live free.

Kyenge dropped to a knee and offered encouragement. “Come, Baako, come.”

Maria let go of the young gorilla’s hand. Baako stood there a moment, then glanced back to Tango, chuffing toward his friend.

Maria spoke softly, while signing. “Baako, Tango can’t go with you. This isn’t his home.”

Baako looked to the forest, then retreated over to Kowalski, lifting both arms for a hug.

He dropped to his knees for a proper good-bye.

Baako nestled into his chest, making a soft, plaintive sound.

“Hey, bud, it’s going to be okay.” He ran a palm over the gorilla’s head, feeling the new growth of stubble from where he had been shaved, noting the healed scar there. “What’s wrong?”

Baako leaned back but continued to look down. He gave a sad shake of his head while thumbing his chin once, then repeated a one-handed version of his earlier sign.

[Not brave]

Kowalski felt his heart break a little. He took Baako by the shoulders and made him look at him. “You are the bravest kid I know,” he said, not bothering to sign, trusting Baako to understand well enough. He pointed to the gorillas in the jungle. “Any of them give you trouble, they’ll have to answer to me.”

Baako hugged him, pressing the top of his head into Kowalski’s chest. Though he trembled less, Baako remained unsure.

Kowalski dropped to his rear in the wet grass, keeping the next conversation private. He patted his chest and lifted his thumb to his forehead, fingers high.

[I’m your papa]

Baako’s brows lifted hopefully.

Kowalski placed a palm on Baako’s chest, then saluted the same hand down to an arm cradled at his belly, resting it there and staring hard at Baako.

[You are my son]

Baako’s eyes widened. Then he lunged hard into Kowalski, knocking him back, rolling with him in the grass, and aggravating the taped section of ribs.

Wincing, Kowalski finally managed to sit up. “Okay, now that’s settled.” He waved brusquely toward the forest. “Go make some new friends.”

Baako bounded up and raced happily toward his new life.

Shu Wei woke out of a fever dream — and into a nightmare.

Her senses returned in bits and pieces. She smelled forest, her own blood. Mucus dripped down to her lips, stinging. The world swirled in hues of green leaf and blue sky. Her stomach ached, rising bile in her throat. She had no sense of time, remembering the past days fitfully.

Where am I?

She recalled Kwan falling, of her body being lifted and held. She remembered the arrow striking her in the stomach. She tried to stare down, but she could not move her head. She felt a stiff board under her back and tried to shift her limbs, but failed in this effort, too.

Why am I tied down?

She remembered being dragged through water, then passing out. When last she had woken, her body had been racked with fever, her body burning brightly. She vaguely recalled a bare-breasted woman applying a mud-colored salve across her stomach. It hurt so much she had passed out again.

Now I’m awake… still alive.

She took deep breaths through her nose, unable to speak as her mouth was bound. Still, a moan escaped her.

Then a familiar face rose into view.

It was the old tribesman again. He spoke to someone out of view. Shadows fell over her body as more gathered around.

She struggled, thrashing.

Let me go.

The natives ignored her. The old man lifted a curved bone needle that trailed a length of sinew. She kept hearing one word over and over again.

Tsantsa.

She struggled to understand. If the tribe had healed her, what did they want now?

Another familiar face leaned over her and seemed to recognize her confusion. It was the boy. He lifted an object into view. At first she thought it was a wizened and leathery piece of native fruit, but then she spotted the sewn lips and eyelids, the fall of dark hair. It was a shrunken head.

But not any head.

The face bore a unique pattern of scars.

Kwan.

The savages had turned the Black Crow into a trophy.

The boy lifted the shrunken head higher and named the object in his hand, smiling brightly. “Tsantsa.”

Understanding dawned on her. She tried to scream, feeling the sting across her lips. She stared at Kwan’s sewn mouth and knew the same had been done to her.

But the natives were not finished.

The old man leaned over her, lifting his thick needle — and reached for her eyelids.