The Vengeance of the Tau

Chapter 8

Friedrich Von Tike stared fixedly at his favorite Impressionist painting as he listened to the voice of the man sitting opposite him.

“Herr Von Tike, my company and I have been loyal to you ever since the merger,” Lars Heidelberg said earnestly. “We’ve gone along with the layoffs and cost-cutting procedures. But this we cannot overlook.”

“Is that a threat, Herr Heidelberg?”

“Not at all, sir. What is being threatened here is the very survival of the many villages on the shores of the Rhine that will be destroyed if this flow of pollutants from our company is not halted.”

Von Tike fingered the report Heidelberg had brought with him. “I find your data unconvincing.”

“How many cases of cancer will it take, Herr Von Tike? How many abnormal births? This company could never survive the backlash. No company could.”

“And do you suppose, Heidelberg, we could more easily survive the kind of retooling your report calls for? Listen to me, I purchased your company and all the others so I could expand production, not slow it. If those victims of our progress elect to sue, we will settle their cases as generously as we are able.”

“These are simple people. Even if they made the connection, they are hardly likely to …” Heidelberg cut his own words off, realizing.

Across from him, Von Tike smiled. “Precisely, Herr Heidelberg, precisely. I think you have grasped my point at last.”

Heidelberg rose and leaned across Von Tike’s desk. “Herr Von Tike, I beg you, sir, not to do this. I beg you to close these plants until the proper modifications can be implemented.”

“Your suggestions have been duly noted and will be taken under advisement,” Von Tike snapped off curtly, and rose to face him. “Now, if you will be kind enough to excuse me …”

Shoulders slumping, Heidelberg was halfway to the door when Von Tike spoke again.

“Oh, and Herr Heidelberg, I trust this conversation will be kept between ourselves.”

Heidelberg stiffened and turned.

“After all, my friend,” Von Tike continued, staring him straight in the eye, “there are your wife and children to consider. Three boys, ages eight, ten, and thirteen. The youngest has brown hair and blue—”

“Enough! You’ve made your point.”

“Good,” Von Tike said. “Now get out.”

After Heidelberg had closed the door behind him, Von Tike sat down again and reached for his pocket-sized tape recorder. He composed his thoughts before beginning to speak. Von Tike owned the controlling portion of Levenhasse, a thriving giant in the German military-industrial complex. He had made his first fortune selling major components for advanced weaponry to any country that could afford them. Oh, nothing that could be traced back in any amount great enough to do Levenhasse significant harm. Recent disclosures, though, had become a nuisance, and, worse, the fall of the Soviet Union had led to a drastic reduction in military orders. Von Tike saw his empire crumbling and was scrambling to reroute his priorities.

As a result, companies like Heidelberg’s had been swallowed in a series of monstrous gulps to expand Levenhasse’s industrial base. Many possessed inadequate and antiquated equipment. Von Tike’s engineers had updated them and increased their efficiency at the expense of dumping huge volumes of pollutants into the Rhine and its tributaries. It was a cost Von Tike found easy to accept. As far as he was concerned, all of the backward villages bordering the river could be wiped out, so long as his company’s revenues continued to rise.

Von Tike switched on his tape recorder and spoke into it. “Meeting with Heidelberg, April seventeenth. Commissioned his own report on pollutants flowing out of his plant and several others. Probably intends to approach the government with his findings now, which we cannot allow to—”

Thump …

Von Tike eased the machine away from his mouth. He looked toward the door to the conference room.

Thump …

Coming from inside it. Who was there? There was no entrance to the conference room other than through his office, and no one had passed that way.

Thump …

Von Tike rested the still-running tape recorder atop his desk and stood up. He moved out from behind his desk and started toward the conference room.

He was almost there when the door crashed inward. The force blew Von Tike backward, nearly spilling him over.

“What?” he managed. “Who the devil is—”

The scream that followed was the last discernible sound on the tape the security guards would later find. They arrived barely a minute after Von Tike uttered the scream, but it took them several more to locate the recorder, because it was hidden beneath their employer’s severed arm. The blood had rendered the recorder inoperable, and it was some time later before another was found, and the guards could listen to the last agonizing moments in the life of Friedrich Von Tike.

Javier Kelbonna stood on his balcony watching the night waves break over the shoreline. He was the master of all that he saw, all that he could see. The island belonged to him. It had been granted along with asylum after he had fled his own country in the wake of a disastrous civil war.

The world had judged him wrongly, harshly, and in the end had turned his own people against him. They had risen up in the streets, and Kelbonna had ordered his militia to use all means at their disposal to quell the violence. Then crowds had gathered to oppose him, and the militia had fired on them, regardless of whether or not the crowds were armed. Preemptive strikes were launched against the insurgent leaders’ villages. The fact that many of these raids had claimed only women and children as victims meant nothing to Kelbonna. After all, the young who did not grow up could not threaten him — the ultimate preempt.

When the Americans had interfered, with air strikes and a massive amphibious landing, Kelbonna had had no choice but to flee. A thousand of his elite guards and closest associates had accompanied him, and all now called the island their home as well. Kelbonna knew that the Americans would try for him here if given the chance, so he had turned the island into a fortress. Even a vastly superior invading force could be repelled by the defenses laid about and manned twenty-four hours a day. Sophisticated radar and sonar equipment had been installed to provide early warning of an approach by sea or air.

Kelbonna stood on his balcony with no concern for his safety at all. Even if by chance a small elite troop managed to slip through his elaborate defenses, they would still have to contend with his heavily fortified mansion. Armed guards patrolled the hallways all day long. At night, when he was within his chambers, no less than four were posted outside his door. Kelbonna was untouchable, so long as he remained on the island.

Of course, he didn’t know exactly how long that would be. Someday he would return to the Central American island country he had built from nothing and claim it for his own again. The Americans had had their chance at him and missed. How they would be sorry for what they had done…. Indeed, Kelbonna was ecstatic to learn that many thousands of them had taken up permanent residence in his former country, lured by the low prices and lush surroundings. They would become his hostages when he made his triumphant return. He would execute them one by one until the American government had made good on the wrongs they had done unto him.

Leaving the balcony doors open, Kelbonna stepped back inside the master bedroom and started to take off his bathrobe.

Rat-tat-tat …

The sound of machine-gun fire echoed in the night. Screams followed and then more fire. Orders were shouted.

Kelbonna felt a numbness in his gut.

They were on the grounds of his residence!

Since his bedroom overlooked the sea and not the front of the walled complex, he could not view whatever was going on. He rushed toward the entrance to his bedroom just as a hard knocking rapped upon it. Kelbonna threw it open to find the captain of his private guards before him.

“We are under attack, Your Excellence.”

“By whom?”

“Unclear at this time, Your Excellence. I have called for more troops. The house is secure. Please stay within your rooms until you hear different from me.”

Kelbonna nodded and closed the door, locking it. He strode to his desk and removed his own pistol from the holster resting atop it.

Poof!

The sound came as he checked the clip. He was trying to identify it when the screams of his men in the corridor beyond began to ring out. Cold fear had already flooded him when the shooting started, bursts of gunfire vying with the sounds of his men’s screams. Kelbonna discarded his pistol and instead grasped the machine gun perched by the head of his bed. He took up a combat-ready stance directly before the door.

The Americans! The damn Americans! … It had to be them, had to be!

The screaming stopped, and what sounded like a guttural, back-throat growl reached Kelbonna.

“Come on,” he urged whatever lay beyond the door softly. “Come on!”

Losing his bravado much faster than he had found it, Kelbonna had started for the balcony to climb for safety when the double-doored entrance to his bedroom exploded inward. He swung his rifle toward it and opened fire, screaming. The clip exhausted quickly, and he discarded the rifle and lunged back toward the balcony’s rail.

He was halfway over it, eyeing the sea, when he felt the scratch down his spine. Strangely, that was all it felt like, but the warm gush he sensed spilling from him and the numbness that quickly ascended told him he had been ripped open. The feeling in his legs deserted him and then his hands seemed to seize up. He tried to hold on to the railing, but there was nothing left to hold on with, and Javier Kelbonna dropped down into the night toward the rocky shoreline below.

“What am I going to do with you?” Heydan Larroux asked the man seated in the chair before her. “You know the rules, Jersey Jack, and you broke them.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Heydan Larroux pulled an old fashioned cat-o’-nine-tails from her desk and walked toward the chair. She had men outside the office, but none of them inside with her. The day she couldn’t control her people by herself would be the day she found a different line of work.

The cat was made of tawny leather, almost the same color as the elegant brown dress she was wearing. Heydan Larroux always dressed in colors that highlighted the power and sultriness of her natural features. She had long jet-black hair, which she wore stylishly permed. Her eyes were big and black, too large for the rest of her demure face. Her cheekbones were set high, and she wore little makeup and only enough perfume to let visitors know it was there. Though she was not especially tall, her firm posture and strong build gave her the illusion of height. No matter. Her people looked up to her in any case.

“I’ve got reason to punish you, don’t I, Jersey Jack?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I want none of my stuff ending up in the hands of kids. Never! You been selling to schools.”

“No money in the streets, ma’am.”

“Haven’t I always taken care of you no matter what?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I ever let bad times affect the way I treat my people?”

“No, ma’am.”

“But then you go and sell in the schools.”

Jersey Jack’s black face was dripping with sweat. He had a gold tooth right in the front which seemed to have lost its shine.

“I–I wanted to impress you with my receivables.”

Heydan Larroux slapped the cat-o’-nine-tails against the back of his chair. “And look where it’s got you.” She came back around the front. “Who am I, Jersey Jack?”

He looked up at her. “Ma’am?”

“Describe me in a word.”

It took him a long couple of seconds to come up with it. “Important.”

“People respect me.”

“Hell, yeah.”

“The police leave me alone, even though they know what I do.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Know why, Jersey Jack? ’Cause I make sure my people stay clear of the work that really pisses the cops off. Kind of like an unwritten agreement. They don’t want a war, and they know so long as I’m in charge of this end of things, they won’t have to wage one. You hearing me, Jersey Jack?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Look around you. Tell me what you see.”

Jersey Jack described her office as best he could. The vast book collection, the wood-paneled walls and matching mahogany desk. The Oriental rug that cost more than most men made in a year. The hardwood floors she’d had taken up from a house she’d lived in for the better part of her life and laid down here to remind her of her roots.

That house was a bordello that Heydan Larroux had entered at the age of fifteen, a far cry from this Southern mansion on Chappatula Street in the Uptown section of New Orleans. She had made a name for herself, and by the age of nineteen she had been getting top dollar and booking by appointment only. By the age of twenty-five she had been running the place and three others like it. And when the RICO commission had decimated Louisiana’s crime lords, she had stepped in and filled the void. She’d consolidated power and now ran it all: prostitution, gambling, drugs. Never sold to kids, though. That was the golden rule. From the lowest dealer on the ladder to the high-echelon suppliers, everyone knew the rule. Break it and you paid the price.

“I got all this by toeing the line,” she said when Jersey Jack was finished. “Ever since I started out, that’s the way I’ve done business. You’ve done a good job for me, Jersey Jack.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“You came in on that bus out of Newark two years back and told me you wanted to make something of yourself.”

“I did, ma’am. I do.”

Heydan Larroux made sure he could see the cat as she spoke. “I think we’re gonna let it go this time, but I can’t let you go out of here unmarked. I’ve got a business to run and I can’t let anyone think I was hesitant or weak.”

Jersey Jack swallowed hard. “I un-ner-stand.”

“Lift up your shirt. Turn around and hold on to the chair’s arms. Hold tight.”

He was so tense that he was shaking as he bent slightly and grasped the arms of the chair, his eyes squeezed closed. Heydan Larroux brought the cat up and snapped its tails down against Jersey Jack’s back. He gasped in pain. His upper body spasmed and went rigid. She hit him again, and blood sprayed into the air.

“I think that’ll be sufficient.”

Jersey Jack struggled to his feet, biting his lip. His shirt slid back down. His eyes were still bleeding tears.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“You won’t let me down again, will you, Jersey Jack?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Leave me.”

He turned and walked gingerly to the door, each step driving shards of pain through his back. He closed the door behind him.

Beyond this office was a private sitting room. None of Heydan’s employees, not even the highest in her chain of command, had ever been inside it. Heydan moved through the door and locked it behind her.

“Well?”

Her question was aimed at a shape sitting cross-legged in the center of a bare wood floor that had also been lifted from the first cathouse where the Larroux legend had been born. The shape belonged to an ancient woman with thin, long wisps of white hair and skin the consistency of dried parchment. The pupils of her eyes were virtually indistinguishable from the whites, looking as though they had been painted over. She had been blind since the time Heydan Larroux had met her and long, long before that.

Some said the Old One had seen enough of the Civil War to be able to write chapter and verse on the individual battles. Legend had it that she had come over on a slave ship from Africa, bringing with her the black arts from her native country. She’d had eyes then, and the legend said that she had traded them for immortality. But the dark forces she had bargained with had fooled her: while she would indeed live forever, she would continue to age and waste away until little more than her bones remained.

The Old One wore dark rags for clothes. They swam over her frail frame, as if they had outlasted the generations as she had. It seemed to Heydan Larroux that this was the very same outfit the Old One had been wearing the day they had first met. Heydan had taken her in off the street where she had been begging, offered her food and shelter. The Old One paid her debt with the only thing of worth she had. That was three years ago, and they had been seldom far apart since.

The Old One was her most trusted adviser. Never did Heydan make a major decision until she had consulted with the Old One. This ragged bag of bones was able to look with blind eyes into a pool of water and direct Heydan’s actions based on what it showed. The Old One had been proven right more times than even Heydan wished to admit. It had been the Old One who had told Larroux of Jersey Jack’s indiscretion.

How could she have known?

Heydan Larroux had stopped asking such questions long ago.

“Well?” Heydan Larroux repeated.

“What do you seek, child?”

“You know what I seek, Old One. Don’t tease me.”

“I cannot see what is not yet before me.”

Heydan tucked the folds of her Giorgio Armani dress beneath her and sat on the floor in front of the Old One. A large bowl of water rested between them.

“Take the stones,” the Old One instructed, and eased her crinkled hand outward.

In it were a half-dozen ordinary stones. Heydan took them.

“Begin, child.”

“Have I rid myself of the evil?”

Heydan Larroux punctuated her question by dropping one of the stones into the bowl.

Plop …

The Old One angled her eyes at the rippling water as if she could see. Her right ear was her good one, and she cocked it toward the water as well.

“It still comes,” the Old One told her. “Not from within. From without.”

“What do you mean?”

“Another stone, child …”

Heydan let the second one fall.

Plop …

“You have been marked. It comes for you.”

“Who?”

Plop …

“Not who.”

“Righting my wrongs didn’t help….”

“It does not approve.”

“What can I do?”

The Old One just looked at her. Heydan let the fourth of her stones drop into the water.

“Nothing. Wherever you go it will find you. Whatever you do it will seek you.”

“When?”

“For each question …”

“Yes. All right.”

Heydan closed her hand on the two remaining rocks. When they were gone, no more answers could be had before the next session. An hour from now perhaps. Or tomorrow. Or next week. With the Old One she never knew.

Plop …

The old woman listened and turned her blank gaze up at Heydan. “Soon, child. Very soon.”

Heydan heard a scream ring out from somewhere on her property. A brief burst of machine-gun fire came next, followed by an even worse wail.

“Now,” the Old One said.

Heydan lunged to her feet and rushed to a small writing desk. She pulled a pearl-handled 9mm pistol from its bottom drawer and charged for the door.

“You can’t fight this with guns,” the Old One advised.

“What am I fighting?”

The last stone splashed water from the bowl on both of them. The Old One flinched.

“What am I fighting!” Heydan demanded.

The Old One’s head raised slowly. “No answer comes to me.”

Heydan rushed through the door back into her office. The invaders were clearly inside the house now. And if the screams were any indication, the guards she had posted based on the Old One’s warnings were falling quickly despite their weapons. The sounds she heard from beyond the heavy door made her shudder. The 9mm pistol felt pitifully worthless in her hand.

The invaders were almost to the office now.

Heydan Larroux charged back into her private chamber and bolted the door behind her.

“Old One, I must—”

She stopped. The Old One was gone, only the bowl of water left in her place.

You can’t fight this….

The lavish Oriental rug that adorned the center of the floor had been pulled back enough to reveal the entrance to the secret tunnel, part of the old Underground Railroad, that ran beneath her property.

Heydan pulled the hatch up to reveal a ladder. A smell of dirt and mustiness flooded her nostrils. Gathering her skirt around her, she held it with one hand while she used the other to grasp the ladder and begin descending. She managed to get the hatch closed again behind her and was almost to the ladder’s bottom when she heard the sound of the door crashing inward in the room above.

Heydan Larroux grabbed the flashlight at the foot of the ladder and used it to illuminate the pathway. Then she charged down the narrow, sloping corridor, fearing it would not be long before whatever had entered the house would be coming down after her.

Chapter 9

“You really think this guy can help us?” Detective Hal Repozo asked Joe Rainwater.

“If anyone can, it’s him.”

“What’d you call him, a charmin?”

“That’s the toilet paper, wajin. This guy’s a shaman.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Indian for ‘medicine man,’ sort of.”

“And what’s wa-jeen mean?”

“ ‘White fuck.’ ”

It was early Wednesday morning. Almost thirty-six hours had passed since Injun Joe’s stakeout had resulted in his being first on the scene of the massacre at the Oliveras estate Monday night. A dozen heavily armed men had been carved up in a two-minute span.

“How were they killed?” Rainwater had asked Estes, the department’s chief pathologist, outside the drug lord’s mansion the previous morning.

Estes had worked through the night and looked it. His thinning grayish-brown hair was ruffled. The top buttons of his shirt were undone, and his tie was only half-knotted. He smelled of alcohol and formaldehyde. Rainwater had watched Estes sit down on the mansion’s front steps only after checking to make sure they were clear of blood. The medical examiner stuck a cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it.

“They were torn apart.”

“I saw that much for myself.”

Estes lit his cigarette and held it away from his face. “Then you know as much as I do.”

Rainwater didn’t see Estes again until he stepped outside the precinct building just after four Tuesday afternoon.

“You spare an hour?”

Injun Joe sighed. “I’m due back at ten and I got to chair a meeting of the Informed Indians’ Council right now.”

“Cut the shit, red man. I’m being serious. Something out at the Oliveras house I want to show you.” He paused. “I wasn’t all the way straight with you this morning. Guy like you deserves to know, ’spite of the orders.”

“Orders?”

“You’ll see.”

Thirty minutes later, Estes slid his car through the main entrance, past the police guards posted before the mansion. He got out and led Injun Joe across the front lawn. Almost at the mansion’s entrance, Estes knelt down and ruffled a patch of grass.

“Take a look at this.”

“At what?”

“Found it right about here after you left this morning. Sun musta dried it out.”

“Dried what out?”

Estes looked up at him. “Made a plaster impression of it. You don’t believe me, I’ll give you a look. You and nobody else. I’m staying clear of this one.”

“You talking about a footprint? That qualifies as evidence even on the reservation, Kemo Sabe.”

“This wasn’t like any footprint I ever saw. Took it to a friend of mine at the zoo over lunch hour. He thought I was playing a fucking joke on him. Said nothing owns that print ever walked on this earth. Said it looked like a combination of a bird and a lizard.”

“You find only the one?”

Estes stood back up. “I look like a douche bag to you or what? Found two more between here and the gate. This was the clearest.”

“Nothing about footprints in your report.”

“Brass thought it’d be a good idea if I kept it out. Look, two years from now I pick up my pension and do consulting work on the side. Bad time to make waves.”

“Yet you brought me back here.”

“Yeah,” Estes said softly. “Thing is, red man, you get all the weird cases, and most of the time you solve them. Serial killers, kid busters, whackos … Way I see it, whatever did this last night is still out there. I figured you had a right to know that.”

Rainwater nodded. “Any way you can give me a better idea of what this print looks like?”

Back at his car, Estes pulled a plaster impression of the footprint from his trunk. Injun Joe took it from his grasp and ran his hands over the clawed extremity.

“This was a man’s foot, how tall would he be?”

“It’s not a man’s foot.”

“Educated guess.”

“Okay. You wanna hear it, I’ll tell you: based on the angle of the bone structure and the way these, well, talons I guess you’d call them, curve inward, whatever calls this its foot would be between eight and nine feet tall. Weigh maybe two-fifty, three hundred pounds.”

Injun Joe handed the plaster impression back to him.

It was too late to bother with sleep before beginning his ten o’clock shift, not that he could have managed to even close his eyes. He stayed at his desk throughout the night, uneventfully save for a pair of phone calls. At midnight he called a number and left a message. At six a call came in that had brought him to the airport where the United Airlines ten A.M. flight out of Boston into O’Hare had just locked home against the jetway.

“What’d you say this shaman’s name was?” Injun Joe’s sometime partner Hal Repozo was asking now.

“I didn’t.”

“You grow up with him or something?”

Joe Rainwater’s face grew reflective. “Yeah. I guess you could say that.”

“I hate when you get like this. Talking mumbo-jumbo and—”

Detective Hal Repozo stopped when Joe Rainwater stiffened at the sight of a figure that had just emerged through Gate 15. Repozo followed his eyes and did a double take.

“Are you fuckin’ kidding me? …”

The figure was that of an Indian who was seven feet tall if he was an inch. His coal-black hair showed a tint of gray and was tied behind his head in a ponytail. He wore a leather vest over a blue denim work shirt and thick khaki pants with badly scuffed brown boots tucked inside them. His face was as leathery as his vest, and his eyes were black ice on a winter night.

“Hello, Joe Rainwater,” the big Indian greeted him when he was a yard away from Injun Joe.

“Hello, John Wareagle.”

The two Indians looked at each other, motionless for what seemed like a very long time. At last Joe Rainwater extended a hand. Wareagle’s grasp swallowed it.

“Thank you for coming, John Wareagle.”

“Old times’ sake, Joe Rainwater.”

After being introduced to the big Indian, Detective Hal Repozo couldn’t resist asking what was on his mind. “Hey, how you guys know each other? Same tribe or something?”

The two Indians again exchanged stares, as if each was waiting for the other to speak. It was Rainwater who broke the silence.

“I’m Comanche. He’s Sioux.”

“Is that important?”

Wareagle looked down at Repozo. “If you’re a Comanche or a Sioux.”

“Okay, what then?”

“The hellfire,” Wareagle said.

“Say what?”

“Let’s go for a walk, John Wareagle,” Injun Joe said.

Wareagle’s luggage consisted of a single shoulder bag, almost hidden by his great bulk. He shifted it from his right shoulder to the left one as he and Rainwater moved slowly through the terminal, Repozo hanging well back.

“I really meant it when I thanked you for coming,” Injun Joe started. “I know you didn’t have to. I know seeing me brings up memories you’d rather leave buried.”

“Memories are never buried, Joe Rainwater. They are pushed aside by one plow into the path of another, but always they remain.”

“I was out of line with you way back when. You were more patient than you should have been. I didn’t know, didn’t realize. If I had …”

“Past, Joe Rainwater.”

In Vietnam, Captain Joe Rainwater had commanded a company composed entirely of native Americans. Tribal distinctions were meaningless. Rainwater had been possessed by a fierce nationalism for both his country and his heritage. His would be the greatest company in the war. He would recruit the finest native Americans available.

He had crossed paths with Johnny Wareagle on several occasions when Wareagle was training with the Special Forces. Rainwater had offered him a chance to pull out and sign on with his unit, which by then was already known as Shadow One. But Wareagle had elected to stay with SF and, much to Rainwater’s dismay, ended up with the cutthroats of the Phoenix Project.

The war had ended for Rainwater and Shadow One when the company was virtually wiped out at the Tet Offensive. Rainwater came home with a limp he sweated to lose and a legacy he fought to preserve. Shadow One had been on the point of every major assault it had participated in. A record number of Silver Stars and Purple Hearts were given out, too many of them posthumously. Burning with the pride of his people, Rainwater wanted the whole country to know. He organized the American Indians Veterans Association and tracked down Wareagle in the backwoods of Maine to sign him up.

Wareagle had refused. Short and simple. Rainwater had berated him, taunted him, insisted he was letting his people down. Wareagle had listened to it all without response, obviously hurt.

“I cannot join,” was all he had said.

“Why?”

“I cannot join.”

Rainwater had left enraged. It was not until over a year later that he uncovered precisely why Wareagle had so steadfastly refused. According to all official records, Johnny had never gone to Vietnam. The unit he had served with had never existed. Johnny Wareagle, apparently, had never existed. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t march, because if someone dug around, a little too much of the Phoenix Project’s dirt might be shifted in the wrong directions.

Joe Rainwater had apologized. Johnny Wareagle didn’t seem to think it was required. Injun Joe had kept in touch with him sporadically over the years and had learned what questions not to ask.

“I’m glad I was able to come,” Wareagle said suddenly, stopping just past the security station before the entrance to the United gates. “I believed in your work back then. I believe in it now. Forsaking you made me feel as if I was forsaking my people.”

“You were under orders, John Wareagle. That takes precedence.”

“I determine precedence in my life now, Joe Rainwater. I would help you in your work still, if it were possible for me to.”

“It’s possible for you to help here. That’s more important.”

“Why did you call me?”

“Because the spirits still speak with you, John Wareagle. And I think we need them now.”

They drove out to the Oliveras mansion on Forest Avenue in Evanston, the ride agonizingly silent with Repozo behind the wheel. He remained there when Rainwater led Wareagle onto the grounds through the front gate, skirting the yellow POLICE! DO NOT CROSS! strips.

Wareagle had read Estes’s report in the car on the way over, so he knew exactly what had happened. Then, as Rainwater looked on in amazement, Johnny stopped at each spot on the grounds where Injun Joe recalled a body having been discovered.

“Four out here. Nine within,” Wareagle said suddenly.

“Right. Thirteen in all, including Oliveras.”

“Where were the footprints found?”

Rainwater brought him to the spot where Estes had lifted the clearest one, then pointed out the other two. “Leading to the house, if the indications are right.”

“What about leading back out?”

Injun Joe shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Strange.”

More uncomfortable silence passed between them.

“You couldn’t feel where the prints were,” Rainwater raised in a half question.

“No.”

“The bodies, but not the prints …”

“Show me the inside, Joe Rainwater.”

Injun Joe led Johnny Wareagle inside, talking the whole time.

“I been a cop, shit, fifteen years now. Seemed like the best thing to go into after the war. I’ve seen things in those years, awful things. And I saw worse things with Shadow One. But this, this is different.”

Rainwater stopped in the center of the mansion’s main foyer. He seemed to be grasping for words.

“I’ve heard tales of the old-time shaman summoning evil spirits to punish those who wronged the tribe.”

Wareagle smiled slightly. “As I recall, Joe Rainwater, the true old ways never held any interest for you.”

“Because I passed them off as legend, folklore — the way the tribal chiefs could keep their people, as well as their enemies, in check.”

“But you feel differently now.”

Rainwater’s expression tightened. “Nothing on this earth could have done what I found here. Nothing on this earth stands eight feet tall and leaves a print like the ones left here Monday night.”

“Perhaps you do not know the earth as well as you think you do, Joe Rainwater.”

Johnny Wareagle walked about the foyer in a wide circle. Then he started up the spiral staircase. At the top, Injun Joe moved in front of him and pointed to a spot on the Oriental runner that curved up off the stairs down the hallway.

“One body here, another four feet from it.” He kept walking. “Ten feet on, two almost right next to each other….”

“I need to see the pictures,” Wareagle said, right next to Rainwater without Injun Joe having heard his approach.

“They’re in the car.”

“Get them.”

It appeared to Injun Joe that Johnny Wareagle acted more like a cop than a shaman. He moved about the scene in methodical fashion, studying each picture within the context of the hallway. Rainwater could tell he was trying to see the scene as it had been two nights ago, just prior to the massacre. Wareagle came to the shattered door leading to Oliveras’s bedroom and stopped.

He was still standing there when Injun Joe drew up even. “I felt something when I stepped inside this house, John Wareagle. It may have been gone by then, but not its residue.”

“Not it.”

“What?”

“Not it, Joe Rainwater — they.”

“More than one?”

“At least three. Potentially more.”

“Oh, shit …”

“Two entered through the shattered front door downstairs first. The other or others launched their attack after them from the opposite end of this corridor.”

“No guards down there….”

“Right.”

“The spirits told you that,” Rainwater concluded.

“They only helped me see. The way the bodies fell, Joe Rainwater, it is clear they were under attack from both directions.”

“They got off two hundred rounds and didn’t hit a single thing except air and walls.”

Wareagle came closer to him. “But you don’t believe that, do you?”

“No.”

“You believe the bullets struck their targets but did not fell them.”

“I believe what killed Oliveras and his guards wasn’t human. Say what you will, John Wareagle, but you and I are both full-bloods. We have the old ways running through our veins, even though they run slower through mine. We know the tales of our ancestors who were able to conjure up beings from other worlds to do their bidding. And we can be sure our ancestors were not alone in this ability.”

“Times long forgotten.”

“And now, perhaps, skills recalled. We must track these things down before they can kill again.”

“Perhaps they already have, Joe Rainwater.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll show you.”

“You made my day, big fella, let me tell you,” Sal Belamo said on the other end of the line at Gap headquarters in Virginia.

“Thank you, Sal Belamo.”

“Hey, just Sal, okay?”

“Yes. Sal …”

“This gotta be the first time you and me ever talked, McCrackenballs wasn’t around. They got me manning a desk now, you know. Watchdog, overseer — some bullshit job like that. Not my style at all. I like it better out there with you boys. Hey, if you’re calling for McCracken, he left for—”

“No. I’m calling because I need you.”

“Wow, this must be something! What can I do for ya, big fella?”

Wareagle told him about the murder of drug lord Ruben Oliveras in Chicago.

“Yeah,” Belamo said, “I read about that. You ask me, it’s first-class fucking-A weird.”

“I need to know if there have been any other killings like it, Sal Belamo. Anything familiar that’s been reported any time in the recent past.”

“Check it for you pronto. And hey, big fella, just Sal, all right?”

Billy Griggs pulled his car up to the corner and looked at the pay phone he had been instructed to go to. A handwritten out-of-order card was taped across its front, covering the touch-tone buttons. Billy turned to the boy sitting in the passenger seat, reached over, and smoothed his hair.

“I won’t be long,” he said in the gentlest voice he could manage.

Then he grabbed the thick blond locks and jerked the boy’s head backward.

“Make sure you don’t go anywhere. Okay, sweetie?”

Billy let the boy nod.

“Very good,” he said, and stepped out of the car.

Normally he might have used a gentler approach, but he hadn’t been in a very good mood since plunging four hundred and fifty feet off the Golden Gate Bridge. He still ached everywhere. It was the first time, ’Nam included, Billy Boy had ever considered he might die. He had hit the water with legs in a half spread to slow his plunge, but it had still taken forever to claw back to the surface. He’d taught himself how to hold his breath for maybe four minutes in ’Nam; had to, or the gooks would have sliced his balls off and fed them to him. Down in the black of those tunnels they could hear you if you breathed, so you held it. Simple as that. It all came back to him when he hit the water, the tunnels all over again. Don’t panic, never panic. Billy was starting to lose it just before the surface, but he held on, thought of the scores he had to settle. Never mind that McCracken was the best. Billy had had everything in his favor and the big bearded fuck had still bested him. Billy wanted revenge.

He moved to the pay phone and stood by it patiently. It rang within seconds.

“Yes,” he said, receiver pressed against his ear.

“Your failure was regrettable.”

The voice didn’t sound human, because it wasn’t. It was channeled through a digitalized transfer device which totally obliterated all voiceprints. What Billy was hearing was a machine’s interpretation of human speech, only the words remaining the same.

“Hey, I explained all that.”

“Your explanations are meaningless to us.”

“I didn’t know it was going to be McCracken. No one told me it was going to be McCracken.”

“You fear this man?”

“Billy Griggs doesn’t fear nobody.”

“Too bad. Fear can be a worthwhile ally. It prevents overconfidence. It promotes reason. Perhaps if you had been scared of this man, he would not remain at large.”

“I’ll get him. You just find him for me and leave everything else to—”

“No.”

“What?”

“Do not mock me, Mr. Griggs. I have read about this man since your report reached me. He is exceptionally dangerous. He could bring us down.”

“One guy, okay?”

“Mr. Griggs, you are trying my patience. Your work for us has been most acceptable up till now. Please do not spoil it.”

Billy Boy Griggs squeezed the receiver tighter. “Hey, all I’m saying—”

“If you know as much about McCracken as you claim to, then you know what I speak is the truth. We cannot afford to have him on our trail with the attainment of our ultimate goal so close to being realized now.”

“So what do you need me for? You already said I wasn’t up to the job.”

“You are going to coordinate the assignment with some outside contractors who we feel may be the only ones who can get the job done.”

“Who?”

“The Twins.”

“Oh, Christ …”

“You’ve heard of them, I see.”

“I’ve heard they’re not human.”

“Most proficient, yes. That proficiency is needed now.”

“I won’t be responsible for their actions.” Billy wondered how obvious the reluctance was in his voice.

“You are merely their guide and our conduit. We will direct you to them and then point you toward McCracken.”

“You know where he is?”

“His options are limited.”

“Just make sure the Twins understand the score, okay?”

“Your tone disturbs me. I expected as much. Look at this as a second chance. You won’t get another. I could have made your punishment far more severe.”

“What punishment?”

“Do not underestimate the scope of our power, Mr. Griggs.”

“What punish—”

Click.

The line was dead.

Billy Griggs glided from the phone back toward his car.

The Twins. The goddamn fucking Twins….

For just an instant, Billy considered ditching this whole business. Get behind the wheel and take his boy-toy somewhere they’d never find him. Kid was a winner. Last him a few months, anyway, and then he’d find himself another.

Billy climbed into the driver’s seat and locked the door behind him. The boy-toy had slumped against the passenger door, passed out with his head low against the window. Billy had been too generous with the dope.

“Hey,” Billy said. “Hey, I’m talking to you….”

He jostled the boy-toy’s shoulder. Kid slumped like a loose sack of rags. Billy gasped. The only thing propped against the car’s door was the boy-toy’s trunk.

His head was gone, sliced clean off while Billy had been on the phone right here in public. There was blood everywhere. Billy could see it now, splotchy in the darkness.

My punishment, Billy realized, as he lost his breath and stepped from the car. My punishment….

Chapter 10

The guards began swinging open the gate at first sight of the car heading down the dirt road late Wednesday afternoon.

“You’re late,” one said to the driver, as the car inched through the entrance.

“She’s waiting, then.”

“For hours. You’ve thrown off her routine.”

“Couldn’t be avoided. The messenger was running behind.”

The woman drove the car into the kibbutz and parked it next to the memorial to the war that had seen Israel take the Golan Heights. The memorial was an old tank, still functional and well-maintained, but covered with roses, violets, and daffodils. The planters enveloped the entire bulk of its frame. The turret alone gave away what it had once been, and the contrast was intentional. On top of this battle-scarred land, an entire people had built a beautiful nation. Israel would live with the dichotomy of beauty and force forever. The symbol of the tank was enduring.

The woman climbed out of the car and took with her a hefty stack of newspapers from all over the world: major dailies from the United States, Germany, France, and England through that very day; Austria, Switzerland, and Italy through three days before. Holding the stack in both arms, she moved in a fast walk toward a cottage isolated in the commune’s rear. The pair watching over the old woman today motioned the visitor toward the wrought-iron table where the figure in the wheelchair was seated, turned away toward the trees. She plopped the stack down atop the table and straightened it.

“I’m sorry for being late.”

The figure in the wheelchair did not turn. “Leave me.”

All too glad to do just that, the woman turned and was on her way.

This kibbutz looked much like the other self-sufficient communes that were scattered all across Israel. Large fields of crops dominated the setting. Farm animals were corralled in a number of areas. The squawk of chickens could be heard for a considerable distance. Cows looked up from their grazing to utter an occasional sound. Dogs sauntered lazily about or lay in the shade of large cedar trees and the kibbutz’s numerous buildings. Many of these were small, cottagelike structures that mostly held families. A number of larger structures were actually dormitories that housed the children. Still more buildings contained offices and classrooms for the children’s daily lessons. The largest was the cafeteria where the kibbutz members took all their meals. The synagogue could be found in the second largest.

This kibbutz would also have seemed at first glance to be like all the others in terms of the residents going about their daily chores and duties. Routine provided security, not tedium. For the residents, discipline was everything.

But a closer look revealed something odd about this kibbutz’s residents: each and every adult was female. Men were nowhere to be seen. In addition to that, this particular kibbutz enjoyed no formal registration, nothing whatsoever that provided proof of its existence. All mail was delivered to a single post office box twenty miles away to be picked up every day, or sometimes every other. To those in the government aware of the commune’s existence, it was referred to simply as “Nineteen.”

The women of Nineteen could call it home for as long as they desired. Many of the residents were war widows who came to escape the violent world that was the Israeli way of life. There was ample time to get on with their lives later. For now, their spirits needed to mend, and they stayed as long at Nineteen as necessary to see this come to pass.

It was similar for female soldiers who came to Nineteen with nerve strings frayed to the very edge. Though it had been twenty years since Israel had been attacked, and a decade since she had invaded Lebanon, limited engagements and skirmishes were a fact of life. These, too, exacted a price from those who fought in them repeatedly.

Still more of the kibbutz’s residents were widows as well, but of a different sort. Spanning the scope of ages, they had lost husband or children to terrorist attacks or the Intifada. They came to Nineteen with a rage that could be calmed but never vanquished. These would spend portions of each day on the commune’s gunnery ranges firing at black cardboard silhouettes they imagined to be the ravagers of their lives, trained by the very female soldiers who had come here to put their guns down. Contradictions at Nineteen, as in life, were everywhere. There were no easy explanations. The staccato bursts of gunfire here were no different than the clucking of chickens or laughter of children. They were accepted. Part of the routine.

And the founder of all this, of Nineteen and everything it encompassed, was the old woman who lived apart from everyone else and spent much of her days scanning newspapers from all over the world. Her cottage was the only one featuring a screened-in porch. Instead of stairs leading up to the entrance, it had a ramp for her wheelchair. A pair of neat grooves were worn into either side. The wrought-iron table had been set beneath a tree in front of the cottage, and it was here that the wheelchair rested most of the day.

“Can we get you anything?” one of the guards asked after approaching tentatively when the old woman had remained still for too long.

The old woman, half-blind in one eye, her head crowned by a cloud of silver hair, adjusted the blanket over her useless legs and spun her wheelchair so it faced the table. Her hand shakily grasped her glass of mint iced tea and drew it to her lips.

“No,” she answered, placing her other liver-spotted hand atop the pile of newspapers just brought her. “Leave me.”

The guard reslung her Galil machine gun over her shoulder and backed off. It was hers and another’s day to watch over the old woman, and this was not a task any on the kibbutz took lightly. Some knew her name, but not many. Her daily chores consisted of nothing more than going over her newspapers, in search of what, nobody knew.

The old woman set her unfinished glass of tea down and began paging through her papers in the same deliberate fashion as always, while her two guards continued their silent vigil. Had the guards been watching the old woman more closely, they would have seen her lean forward when she came upon an article on page one of the Wednesday New York Times headlined “Exiled Island Leader Javier Kelbonna Slain in Bizarre Execution.”

Her hand trembled as she rapidly turned through the front section of the paper to where the article was continued. She flipped quickly through another two newspapers before an article on the fourth page of the German daily froze her. An industrialist named Friedrich Von Tike had been found murdered last night in his office.

Bizarre circumstances again.

When she moved on to the Tuesday edition of The Times, there was no need to turn the pages at all. What she sought was right there at the top of page one: a picture of Ruben Oliveras placed just beneath the headlines on the bottom half of the page: “Reputed Drug Lord, Guards, Slain in Chicago Stronghold.”

“No,” she muttered, too softly for her guards to hear. “No! …” Louder this time, loud enough to make them turn.

The old woman brushed the entire contents of the wrought-iron table to the ground in a single swipe. Her glass of mint iced tea smashed on impact, dousing the discarded papers and making her guards go rigid.

“It can’t be,” she moaned. “They’ve come back. God help us all, they’ve come back!”

Chapter 11

“Sayin Hazelhurst!”

Kamir’s call stirred Melissa Hazelhurst from her stuporous vigil before the video monitor.

“There is a jeep approaching, Sayin Hazelhurst!”

Melissa rose stiffly and emerged from the cover of the canopy down in the excavation. “How many men?” she called up to Kamir.

“Just a driver,” Kamir returned, hands cupped before his mouth to make sure he could be heard.

She swallowed hard. “Make sure all the men are at their posts. I’m coming up.”

Two of the men, though, had run off following the death of her father, leaving only seven in Kamir’s replacement team.

Melissa had spent much of last night and all of Wednesday perched on a stool set behind the nine-inch video monitor. The recording made by the camera in her father’s headpiece would have been considered brilliant under ordinary circumstances given the available light. But these were hardly ordinary circumstances, and Melissa found it little better than useless.

Running it over and over again. Different speeds, different filters … Always the same.

So often throughout the day she had wanted to give up and break down. Have the equipment packed up by the workers and flee this place. But she couldn’t, not yet.

Because something down there had killed her father. And Melissa could not leave, could not run, until she knew what it was. But maybe she already did.

The Dream Dragons …

They had been waiting for him down there. They had been waiting for the men who had killed Winchester, as well. Perhaps they were always waiting, left there by the true builders of what lay beneath the surface to deny entry to those who did not belong. We are, after all, trespassing on the past, Melissa recalled from another lesson of archaeology. But no one else would ever be trespassing here again, because tomorrow she was going to seal the chamber her father had uncovered. What might be the greatest find in the history of mankind would be buried once more, hidden before more damage was done.

Melissa reached the ladder and stretched before beginning her climb. Her legs were asleep from her being seated for too long. Her neck and shoulders ached with stiffness. She tried to rub the blood back into them and then began to pull herself upward.

Kamir reached down to help her over the rim, just as the jeep drew to within a hundred yards of the site. Her father had been clear about the possibility that rumors of the dig would draw hordes to it. And there was also the possibility that the jeep’s driver was connected to Winchester’s killers. Melissa looked on neither option favorably and made sure that the jeep’s driver would be able to see she had rifle in hand when he approached.

The man parked his jeep behind Kamir’s truck and stepped out with his hands in the air.

“Say, anybody know where I can find a cash machine around here?”

The long flight from Kennedy Airport to Istanbul had left McCracken little time to catch the next fifty-five-minute commuter flight to Izmir. He had landed barely an hour ago, rented the jeep, and pieced together the most direct route here possible, following the map obtained in San Francisco as best he could.

The armed woman standing before him was obviously not impressed or soothed by his sense of humor. She stood her ground silently.

“Okay, let’s try it this way,” he said to her, eyes trained on her rifle. “I’m Blaine McCracken and you’re fucking up royally.”

“Excuse me?”

“Every man and every gun you’ve got is in sight. You can’t do that. You can never do that. Never let the enemy see everything you’ve got.”

“Then you’re the enemy.”

“Lady, if I was the enemy, you and your boys here would already be waiting to become some future archaeologist’s find.”

Melissa felt uncertainty sweep through her. The man before her who called himself McCracken was tall and very broad. Even through his baggy, sweat-soaked white shirt she could see his upper body was sculpted into a muscular V exaggerated all the more by the stance of having his hands clasped over his head. He had a close-trimmed beard and a pair of dark eyes that never seemed to blink.

“If you’re a fortune hunter, you’ve come to the wrong place,” Melissa said, the words sounding incredibly lame even to her.

“You’re British.”

“Very observant.”

“Spent some time there myself. Didn’t make a lot of friends.”

“Somehow I’m not surprised. Who are you?”

“We’ve moved beyond the name stage. Excellent. The truth is, I’m not even sure I’m in the right place; at least, I wasn’t until I encountered your hospitality.”

“Where did you come from? How did you find out about this place?”

“There’s a map in my right-hand pants pocket. I’ll take it out and—”

“Stay as you are! Kamir will relieve you of this map.” She looked toward the foreman. “Kamir.”

“Yes, Sayin Hazelhurst.”

Kamir had started forward when McCracken spoke again.

“No, no, no! You don’t send an armed man to retrieve something from an unarmed man, especially when the armed man is carrying one of the best weapons in your arsenal,” Blaine said, his eyes gesturing toward Kamir’s M-16 rifle. “Quickest way to have the tables turned on you in a hurry. But you told him to do it, because he’s the only other one here who speaks English. ’Nother bad move on your part.”

“What should I do, then?”

“Have me pull the map from my pocket with two fingers and toss it away from my feet. Then send an unarmed man over to pick it up.”

“Are you that good, Mr. McCracken?”

“You don’t have to be that good, given this opposition.”

Melissa smirked. “Then let’s handle it just the way you suggested….”

Blaine followed his own advice precisely and watched a workman who had temporarily discarded his rifle approach to retrieve the map. The workman delivered it in tentative fashion to the British woman. She unfolded it and McCracken watched her eyes bulge.

Melissa realized instantly that it was a copy of the same map her father had entrusted to Winchester, one of the seven different ones that had sent his dig teams scouring the Mideast; maps that had once belonged to the Nazis.

She stormed forward toward McCracken, thrusting the map outward, rifle slung from her shoulder and totally forgotten.

“How did you get this?” she demanded.

“You’re breaking the rules again, miss. Approaching with a loaded gun….”

“Shut up or I’ll empty it into you! Now tell me how you got possession of this map!”

“I gather I’ve come to the right place.”

“Talk!”

“Long story. Better told in the shade over a glass of mineral water.”

Melissa backed away from him, shaking her head. “You really don’t know what this is, do you?”

Blaine gazed over her shoulder to the crater that had been dug in the ground. “I assume whatever it might be is over there, Ms. Hazelhurst.”

“Don’t call me that! Don’t call me anything! I don’t know you! I don’t want to know you!”

Again Blaine aimed his gaze over her shoulder. “What’s down there?”

“Leave! Get out of here!”

“Maybe I can help.”

“I doubt it.”

“Let me try.”

Melissa felt herself weakening, although she never could have said why. “Why should I?”

“Because it’s what I do.”

“Archaeology?”

Blaine shook his head. “Helping.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“I think you do. You’re no match for whatever it is you’re up against.”

“How could you know that?”

“Because I left a trail of bodies between the shop where I picked up this map and the Pacific Ocean, before I headed to Turkey.”

McCracken watched her stiffen.

“Judging by your reaction, Ms. Hazelhurst, I’d say that trail has extended all the way here.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” she told him.

“Won’t know that till I try.”

“You don’t understand. You could never understand.”

Blaine slid a little closer to her. “Won’t know that till you tell me.”

Melissa Hazelhurst was sitting before the tiny video screen beneath the canopy when Blaine climbed down the rope ladder into the excavation. He got his first look at the raised rectangular opening and knew that he was face-to-face with what the map obtained in Ghirardelli Square had directed him to — what Al-Akir had sought and what Billy Griggs was determined to keep from being uncovered. Back on the surface he had inspected the remains of both Winchester and Benson Hazelhurst. Hazelhurst’s corpse caught him totally off guard. He had been expecting anything, but not this.

There was barely enough left of Hazelhurst to identify him as a human being….

What could have done this to him?

“If you’re not an archaeologist, Mr. McCracken,” Melissa said without turning from the screen as he approached, “just what is it that has brought you out here?”

“It’s a little difficult to explain.”

She swung toward him. “It seems everything about you is a little difficult to explain. Let me hazard a guess, though. The way you’re built, the way you move, you must be some sort of soldier or mercenary.”

“Was. Not anymore.”

“But I’m close. Your hands are callused and that climb down the ladder didn’t even get you red in the face.”

“I guess I’m still a soldier, just not in anyone’s army except my own. I choose my own wars or—”

“Like this one?”

“You didn’t let me finish. Or sometimes they choose me. Like this one.”

Melissa Hazelhurst looked up into the big man’s black eyes and noticed the scar running through his left eyebrow for the first time. Though she couldn’t have said why, he frightened her at the same time as she found his presence comforting.

“Let me give this to you in a nutshell, Ms. Hazelhurst—”

“Call me Melissa, please.”

“Melissa. I took the place of a certain Arab agent at a shop in San Francisco. That’s where I came into possession of the map. After fending off a rather concerted attempt to remove it from my person, I flew over here and followed it to this dig.”

“A concerted attempt … That’s what you call that trail of bodies you said you left behind?”

“Everything’s relative.”

“What about this Arab agent? What’s his role in all this?”

“He thought the map would lead him to the ultimate weapon, something that would help his people settle their scores once and for all.”

Melissa’s face instantly paled. “Oh my God …”

Blaine fixed his stare briefly on the opening in the ground ten feet away.

“Was he right, Melissa?”

She swung back toward the screen, fleeing from the answer. Blaine watched her back arch as he continued to speak.

“Keep something in mind. There’s another party extremely interested in that map: the ones represented by those who tried to kill me as soon as I came into possession of it. Makes me think they’ve already got one of their own. Makes me think they don’t want anyone else joining the party.”

Melissa looked at him again. “Do you think they were the ones who killed Winchester?”

“Could be.” He hesitated. “What is this place, Melissa?”

“I … can’t tell you.”

His eyes went to the monitor screen. “Show me, then. Let me see for myself.”

“What’s it like spending your life helping people, Mr. McCracken?”

“Blaine.”

“Blaine.”

McCracken had sat down on the stool with the monitor’s remote control in his hand. He shrugged noncommittally.

“I think sometimes I do them more harm by trying.”

Melissa tried for a smile. “Not possible this time.” She eased the headphones over his ears. “We’ll run the whole thing in regular motion. It’s not very long.”

Blaine pressed PLAY and glued his eyes to the small screen. With dusk approaching, the contrast was better, but there still wasn’t much that could be made out clearly. A few times he stopped the tape and watched the portions again in slow motion. The last stretch, though, he watched frozen without expression, turning the machine off as soon as the screams were finished.

Behind him, Melissa was cringing as she lived the sights and sounds yet again.

“You saw this as it happened?” he posed.

“Yes.”

“He went on even after he saw the remains of Winchester’s killers at the bottom of those stairs.”

“My father thought he was beyond such a thing happening to him, especially inside a dig. It was like, well, it was like his home down there.”

“In the U.S. more people die at home than are murdered every year.”

Melissa swallowed hard. “My father was always cautious, almost plodding. As soon as he saw the bodies, he should have come back up. I told him to, but he wouldn’t listen.”

“I heard.”

Melissa stood at his side rigidly, staring straight ahead. McCracken angled his head to watch her.

“I’m going down there tomorrow morning,” she insisted flatly. “I’m going to seal the chamber where he was killed.”

“Before you know what lies beyond it?”

“That’s the thing, Blaine. I do know what lies behind it. I didn’t believe it before, but now I—”

“Sayin Hazelhurst!” Kamir’s shout from the rim above threw a shudder through both of them. “Sayin Hazelhurst!”

She moved out from the canopy and looked up at him. “Yes, Kamir.”

“You must come up here. Come quickly. Please!”

“Why? What is it?”

“Hurry, Sayin Hazelhurst. You must see for yourself.”

Chapter 12

The tires on all three vehicles, including McCracken’s jeep, had been slashed.

“Two more of the men are missing, Sayin Hazelhurst,” Kamir reported. “It must have been them.”

Melissa looked at Blaine. “Somebody wants to keep us from leaving.”

“Because they think you’ve seen too much,” he confirmed, “and they don’t want you spreading the word.”

“Me? What about you?” Melissa gazed down at the shredded tires. “They could have done this because of you, then. They could have followed you here and—”

“Nope,” Blaine interrupted. “Whoever did this was planted in the replacement work team your foreman hired in Izmir long before I showed up. Your father’s death and my appearance on the scene just speeded things along a bit. But relax, Melissa. The plant doesn’t necessarily know who I am.”

“And that’s supposed to help?”

“Oh yeah.”

Blaine knew the enemy would come at night, when the mounded dirt and debris pulled from the nearby excavation would make for decent camouflage, and he spent the last hour until dusk preparing for it. They had seven rifles left for six men, not including himself and Melissa. McCracken let Kamir keep the only fully automatic one and watched Melissa grab the semiautomatic A-2 for herself, handling it nimbly.

“You take a firearms course back at archaeology school?”

“These days it’s a required part of the curriculum,” she told him. “Word spreads of an especially good find and the vultures circle. More than one team recently has been ravaged by greed.”

“Wish our problems were that simple.”

The rest of their arsenal was composed of M-2 carbines dating back nearly forty years. He redistributed them among the five remaining workmen and gave Kamir instructions on exactly where the men should be placed. For his own part, Blaine was more than happy with his SIG-Sauer 9mm pistol. Sixteen shots plus one in the chamber and four spare clips.

As night fell their camp stood ready. Melissa crouched next to McCracken behind a mound of earth.

“How long?” she asked him.

“Oh, not long now.”

“How can you be so damn calm?”

“I was about to ask you the same question.”

Her eyes sought his out. Even in the night he could see they were vacant.

“Because,” Melissa started, “I don’t care what happens to me tonight. I don’t care about anything.”

“Bad idea.”

“Why?”

“Because when you don’t care, you make mistakes. Other people get killed because of your indiscretions.”

“And what do you care about?”

As Blaine looked her way again, both of them heard a faint rustling sound nearby.

“They’re inside the camp!” Melissa rasped.

McCracken touched a finger to his lips signaling her to be quiet.

“But—”

The rustling came again. Melissa swung about trying to pinpoint the source of the noise.

“Do something!” she implored.

“I am,” Blaine said, holding his gun by his side.

There was a thumping sound from very close by.

One of the workmen advanced forward with Kamir’s M-16 leveled before him. Just behind him Kamir and two more figures appeared with their hands clasped over their heads, prodded forward by a pair of rifle barrels wielded by the final two workmen.

“Silahlarinizi birakin!” the workman in the front commanded.

“He says to drop your weapons,” Kamir translated out of turn, and one of the workmen at his rear slammed him in the knee with his rifle in response.

“Shit,” Melissa muttered, and tossed her A-2 aside.

McCracken held fast to his SIG.

The man in the middle repeated his command and the workman on his right shoved his two prisoners to the ground.

“Are you crazy?” Melissa whispered Blaine’s way.

McCracken looked at Kamir. “Tell them if they drop their guns now I won’t kill them.”

“But—”

“Do it!”

Kamir obeyed reluctantly. The three gunmen laughed.

Blaine laughed with them, SIG held a little higher. The leader in the center came forward and aimed his carbine straight for McCracken’s head. He smiled and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened. The leader kept pressing. McCracken slid forward, and the two other gunmen tried to fire — with the same results. Blaine leveled his gun a foot away from the leader’s face.

“Kamir,” he said with neither his eyes nor aim wavering, “tell them to drop their guns.”

Still on the ground, Kamir gave the appropriate order. The three men’s weapons clacked to the earth. Blaine felt Melissa drawing up close on his right side.

“I removed the firing pins,” he told her. He turned his head slightly toward Kamir. “Yours, too. Sorry about that.”

“I understand, Sayin,” the foreman said.

“You knew the ones who ran off weren’t the only infiltrators,” Melissa concluded.

“And the thing I had to do was flush out the rest.”

“I’m impressed.”

McCracken moved more forward and pressed his pistol against the leader’s forehead. The man’s eyes bulged in terror.

“Tell him my gun still works,” Blaine instructed Kamir, who was back on his feet. “Tell him I will kill him unless he tells me how many more are out there and where.”

The leader spat out his pleading reply rapidly before Kamir had even completed his translation. His hands assumed the position of prayer.

“He says death at their hands will be much worse if he talks. He says he has made his peace with Allah and is prepared to join his ancestors.”

“Really? Then I guess I’ll have to come up with something more creative….”

He grabbed the man by the scruff of the neck and dragged him ten yards to the edge of the excavation the find was located within. Following his lead, the two workmen who had been taken prisoner did the same with the pair of remaining infiltrators. Melissa and a limping Kamir brought up the rear.

“We’re going to throw you all down there and then drop you through the doorway.”

Kamir translated McCracken’s words, but he didn’t have to. The trio of infiltrators sank to their knees, bowing to Blaine as if he were Allah.

Kamir was smiling. “I think they are ready to talk now.”

“Ask them how many?”

“They say they do not know,” the guide translated when the reply came. “But they think many men, easily more than a dozen.”

“Where are these men?”

“Everywhere around us,” Kamir translated gravely.

“How did they know when to make their move?”

Again Kamir listened, then spoke. “A brief flash of light was their signal.” His voice lowered. “I did not see it.”

“And how were they supposed to signal they had us?” McCracken asked in more of a rushed tone.

Kamir was halfway through the translation when the burst of bullets blazed in. Two of the infiltrators were the first to be hit by the spray, along with one of the still-loyal workmen. McCracken dove on top of Melissa and took her to the ground.

“Stay here!” he ordered her.

The third infiltrator scampered away. He stumbled and Blaine watched his spine arch when twin fusillades of bullets stitched up front and back.

They were surrounded!

Kamir had taken cover behind a stack of equipment, gun tilted around it. He aimed it into the night and pulled the trigger. It wouldn’t give.

“My rifle!” he shrieked.

“The firing pin!” Blaine said, and tossed Kamir the proper one for his gun.

He had pulled Melissa behind a mound of earth and debris before grabbing the discarded rifles. In less than thirty seconds, he managed to get three of their firing pins back into place.

Nearby, the loyal workman who had not been hit had crawled to the body of the one who had. Much to Blaine’s surprise, the man stirred, grimacing. He pointed to his shoulder as the origin of his wound. Weakened and incapacitated, he could still fight, at least shoot. Good. McCracken slid the trio of salvaged carbines their way and signaled them to take cover.

Blaine turned to speak to Melissa only to find her gone. He spotted her crawling in the direction of her jeep, tempting enemy bullets.

“Damn!”

He tried to go after her, but another cascade of gunfire pinned him down.

“Cover me!” he ordered Kamir.

“What?”

McCracken pointed to the front of their camp. “Most of the gunmen are approaching from there. Fire brief bursts in line with where I’m pointing. Order your men to watch either side. Tell them to fire at anything that moves that isn’t us.”

“Yes, Sayin.”

Blaine rose into a crouch.

“Now!”

He was away an instant before Kamir had fired his first burst, Melissa then in the process of reaching into her jeep’s cargo compartment. He got to her just as bullets shattered the window inches over her head and sprayed both of them with glass. Again he took her forcibly to the ground. They ended up on their sides staring at each other.

“Not too bright, Melissa.”

“Not as stupid as you,” she shot at him, showing a pair of neatly wrapped square packages. “You could have blown us both up.”

“Plastic explosives?”

“They couldn’t do us any good in the jeep.”

“I’m not sure they can do us any good now.”

The gunfire had reached a crescendo. It seemed to be pouring into the camp from everywhere at once. The workmen’s fire with the carbines was proving ineffectual. Kamir was holding the enemy reasonably at bay from the front, but he had already changed clips once and would have to do so again before the next minute was up, leaving him with only one in reserve.

A trio of black-clad men rushed into the camp from the left. McCracken rolled out and fired five shots from the SIG their way. Their bodies had not even gone still on the ground when another two burst in behind the wounded workman and tore him apart with automatic fire. Blaine rose into a crouch to shoot them, a pair of bullets for each.

“Jesus,” Melissa moaned, “how many of them are there?”

“Too many for us to get, and they don’t seem to be in a negotiating mood.”

A fresh burst ricocheted just over their heads.

“If it’s the find they want, they can have it!”

“Sorry, Melissa. It’s us. They want to make sure no one ever learns what you uncovered here.”

“How can you know that?”

“Logic. Just like I know since we can’t outfight them, we’ve got to get out.”

“They’ve got us surrounded!”

McCracken looked her square in the eyes. “Then we get out without leaving.”

“There?” Melissa posed fearfully with her gaze moving to the excavation just ahead of McCracken’s.

“It’s the only chance we’ve got right now.”

“No! You don’t under—”

A scream sounded from the center of the camp, and they looked through the night to see the second workman writhing on the ground, holding his midsection. His hands locked over the gaping wounds, and he shuddered one last time before death took him.

“Come on!” Blaine ordered.

Before Melissa could protest, he grabbed her arm and yanked her forward. A gunman charged them from the side, firing, and McCracken shot him in the head. Another rushed from the opposite angle and Blaine pumped a trio of rounds his way. They reached Kamir as he was jamming a fresh clip home into his M-16.

“Let’s go!” McCracken screamed over his return fire, grasping him.

“Go where, Sayin?”

“The excavation!”

“But—”

McCracken grabbed the M-16 from his hand. “Hurry! They’re hesitating!”

Blaine shoved Kamir behind him and let Melissa lead the way toward the excavation. M-16 in one hand and SIG in the other, he fired nonstop in an arc before him. He estimated that more than half of the attacking team had already perished for their efforts. The remainder of the opposition were choosing their way cautiously now. They could afford to do so, since they believed that they had their targets hopelessly pinned down, leaving them with no reason to rush.

Melissa clutched the two tightly wrapped packets of plastic explosives to her, as she nimbly descended the rope ladder with Kamir just above her. She unshouldered her semiautomatic rifle and handed it to him when they reached the bottom.

“Hurry!” she yelled up to McCracken, who had just clambered over the rim of the pit.

Blaine took the rungs so fast that he seemed to be sliding down rather than climbing. At the bottom he emptied the last of the M-16’s second clip into the top of the dangling rope ladder. All twenty feet of it dropped downward. Any pursuit that came now would have to come in a straight twenty-foot drop. He grabbed the severed ladder and brought it with him to the opening of the find. Melissa dropped the bulk of it down inside and wedged the topmost part beneath the unearthed stone tablet to hold it in place.

“You can’t go down there!” Kamir pleaded.

“No other choice I can see, and you’re coming with us.”

As Kamir started to protest, a bullet thumped into his thigh and he pitched sideways with a grunt. Another slammed him in the chest and spilled him to the ground. The gunman had dropped downward at the edge of the rim for his next shots, but Blaine found him in his sights before the man could get another round off. Two more bullets from the SIG caught him in the head. McCracken snapped a fresh clip home.

Melissa was kneeling next to Kamir. His breathing sounded wet. Saliva slipped through his mouth, stained with blood.

“It is better this way,” he managed.

“We’ll carry you,” Melissa insisted.

“No.” He looked at Blaine. “The rifle, hand it to me.” And, as McCracken placed the M-16 in his trembling grip with the final clip loaded, “I will cover you.”

McCracken nodded and placed the ejected clip from Melissa’s semiautomatic A-2 next to him. Melissa touched the dying man’s shoulder.

“Thank you, Kamir.”

“You are brave like your father, Sayin Hazelhurst. Go now. And may God be with you.”

“Too much to ask for, I’m afraid.”

Shapes darted about the rim, bullets fired wildly down into the pit. Kamir fired a token burst their way. McCracken eased Melissa ahead of him onto the ladder.

“The explosives,” he said, gazing one last time at Kamir before he started down after her.

“I have the packs.”

“We’ll need them.”

“For wh—” And then she realized his intention. “No, we can’t!”

“We have to. If we don’t blow the entrance after us, they’ll follow us down. We’ll be right back where we started, worse even.”

“We’ll be trapped!”

“One step at a time, Melly.”

“Listen to me!”

Gunfire silenced her as she hit bottom with McCracken a second behind. The chamber’s near-total darkness lasted only as long as it took Melissa to switch on the pair of powerful flashlights she had tucked in her vest.

“Give me the explosives!”

Melissa obliged reluctantly, her face a white oval in the utter darkness of the chamber.

The Dream Dragons, she thought. That’s what I’m going to find down here. That’s what I’m finally going to have to face….

“God help us …”

“That was the same tone Kamir used,” McCracken realized. “What gives? What is this place?”

“An entrance.”

“An entrance to what?”

The flashlights parted the darkness enough for him to see the terror in Melissa Hazelhurst’s expression.

“Hell,” she said.

Chapter 13

“Did you say hell?” McCracken asked, dumbstruck. Melissa tried to turn away and he grabbed her arm. “That’s what all this secrecy is about? That’s the great find your father spent all these years searching for?”

“You don’t believe. I didn’t, either. I … didn’t want to.”

Above them, Kamir’s bullets continued to echo, certain not to last for much longer.

“We don’t have much choice, in any event,” Blaine said, unwrapping her packages of plastic explosives.

“You’re still going to seal the entrance?”

“We let them come down here after us, we’re dead. You wanna choose?”

“There’s got to be something!”

“Right. I’m holding it.”

McCracken had the first packet open now. The explosives looked like a chunk of khaki-colored clay. The detonator was wrapped in plastic alongside.

“Nice equipment. My compliments. Transistorized detonator would suit our needs better, though.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Depends on how long it takes you to locate that secret passage out of here your father found.”

Melissa’s eyes swept the darkness around the chamber. “It must have closed after we pulled … him up. Damn!”

“How long?”

She thought fast. “A minute! I’ll need a minute.”

McCracken wedged the detonator into the first mound of plastique and set it to 1:00. “That’s all you’re gonna get.”

He repeated the process with the second mound and wedged both of them against the front wall, making sure the opening above was centered between the two packets of explosives. The blast would blow the walls outward in a way that would ensure that the entire ceiling would collapse, filling this chamber with tons of rubble.

Kamir’s protective gunfire, meanwhile, had ceased. The enemy would be on its way down into the excavation above soon, if they weren’t already. McCracken activated the first detonator and the second right after it.

:59,58,57 …

“Oh, Melly, the clock’s ticking and we’re gonna take quite a licking if you don’t find that doorway.”

She was feeling with her hands about the same area where her father had been standing right before he found the hidden door, fighting to recall what little the tape had shown her.

:40,39,38 …

McCracken was at her side now, pistol aimed upward, ready to fire at any shape that showed itself. At last she found something that felt like a handhold and pressed. With almost no effort at all, a large portion of the massive wall receded outward with a grinding sound. She aimed her flashlight down and saw the staircase her father had died on. She looked back at Blaine.

:26,25,24 …

He nodded, and she stepped through the threshold onto a small plateau at the top of the stairs. McCracken stopped just behind her and started to work the door closed again.

“Why bother?”

“So no unfriendly boulders follow us down here. Blast percussion alone could shatter the foundation of these steps, if we leave an airway.”

It took almost no effort at all to ease the door back into the wall until the seal was tight.

:08,07,06 …

McCracken pressed Melissa against the wall and shielded her with his frame an instant before the explosion sounded.

Melissa had been around many blasts in her life from the time she was a child, but never anything like this. It felt as though she were on the inside instead of the outside, and the whole of her innards rumbled and shook with the debris caving inward in the chamber beyond. She pressed herself closer against McCracken. She couldn’t catch her breath. The world was shaking around her. Then there was silence, utter and empty.

She felt Blaine McCracken ease her slowly away from him.

“Only one way to go now,” he said.

And together they gazed down the steep steps into a black abyss.

“How many steps down was your father when …”

“Forty.”

“You’re sure? It’s important.”

“I counted from the tape.”

The stairs were just over four feet wide. The walls on either side of them stretched upward into the darkness; the effect created that of a tunnel funneling down. McCracken started to descend, flashlight carving a slim pathway of light from the darkness. The air was cold and … empty. Yes, he thought, that was it. Not damp or musty or dry — just empty.

Blaine took the steps carefully, testing what lay ahead of him the way a man on a tightrope might. His own silent count was approaching the thirty mark, when he heard Melissa gasp.

“Easy,” he soothed, as his flashlight joined hers on the bottom of the staircase.

The beams captured the bloody residue of what might have been Benson Hazelhurst.

Melissa had drawn to within a single step of McCracken. “It happened ten more steps down. That’s where my father was killed.”

Blaine drew his flashlight slowly along the remaining twenty stairs lying between them and the bottom.

“Back up,” he told Melissa.

She didn’t question him this time. McCracken retreated upward a few steps, staying in front of her. His hand rubbed against either wall the whole time, feeling for any sort of change in their surfaces. He had retraced a dozen steps when he stopped and took his hand from the wall.

“We’ll be safe now,” he said without further explanation.

“What? What are you talking about? We can’t get out this way. You said so yourself.”

“That’s not why we’re climbing up.”

“I don’t understand.”

Blaine leaned over and felt about the steps.

“What are you looking for?” Melissa asked him.

“A decent-sized chunk of stone or rock.”

“What for?”

“I want to test something out.”

“Let me see what I can do.”

She pulled a hammer and chisel from her shoulder pack and chopped away at a section of the wall. A fragment the size and shape of a wide shoe came free in her hands, and she gave it to McCracken.

“You said your father took ten more steps,” he said, gazing downward.

“Yes, from where you were standing. Not anymore.”

Blaine aimed the flashlight that way. “Okay.” He counted the steps out in his mind, then gave his flashlight to Melissa. “Aim both beams straight down,” he said, adjusting her hands. “Right there.”

He stood in the center of the step, the fragment of the wall held in both hands. He tested its weight and then measured off an underhand toss. Melissa watched it float out of his hands and impact on the same step Benson Hazelhurst had reached when his screams began.

Suddenly huge segments of both walls slammed inward toward each other, starting six steps down from them and continuing all the way to the bottom of the staircase. It happened so fast that it took an extra second for Melissa to see the gray steel spikes that had popped out in evenly spaced rows along both walls.

The deadly steel teeth glimpsed in the recording, she realized. Once again the Dream Dragons had proven not to be real. But the nightmare continued.

The walls closed together, with the length of the spikes the only distance left between them. Then they began to chum sideways, working against each other.

Melissa thought of her father trapped between them and felt consciousness briefly sliding away.

The spikes had been fitted on each wall symmetrically to create gaps that merged when the walls melded. The pressure exerted was incredible. Anything caught between them …

“My father,” she said over the ear-wrenching grinding sounds beneath her, picturing him impaled by the spikes and then torn apart. She shuddered. A lump rose into her throat and choked her breath.

“You okay, Melly?”

“The others, too,” she managed faintly.

“And not a monster in sight.”

Suddenly the spikes receded into their hidden slots and the movable walls slid back into place. Impossible to tell where the deadly sections began and ended.

“You knew,” she said suddenly.

“The walls felt different after a certain point. Chalkier, not as cold.” His expression softened. “And I had the advantage of viewing the tape of your father a lot less emotionally.”

“We’re still trapped.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t what?”

“Where are your archaeological eyes, Melly? Grooves were cut in those walls to match up with the steps. Accordingly, a gap was left on the bottom where there were no spikes.”

“So?”

“So that’s how we’re going to get through. Like this,” McCracken said, lowering himself onto his stomach. His body was suspended across four different steps like a snake’s.

“The walls will crush us.”

“No. Even if the trap springs, we can make it. It’ll be a tight squeeze, but we can still make it. And if we avoid putting any pressure on the trigger points, the walls might not be activated at all.”

She tried to smile. “You do this kind of thing every day?”

“Every other.”

McCracken squeezed her shoulder and dropped once more to his stomach, single flashlight in hand. The flatter he made himself, the more evenly his weight would be distributed, thereby increasing his chances of not tripping the trap. He slid down to the last step reached on his original descent and gazed back at Melissa. She had lowered herself just as he had.

“Grab my ankles now and hold on. Let me pull you. Don’t raise your head, and keep your eyes closed.”

McCracken started on again, feeling her dead weight tugging behind him, thumping down the steps in his wake. He pulled himself across the last step Benson Hazelhurst had touched, especially wary now. If his assumptions were correct, pressure on any of the steps remaining to the bottom would activate the deadly spiked walls. The movable walls extended several steps higher to ensure that entire parties would be caught in the trap once the member most advanced had sprung it. That accounted for the bodies of Winchester’s killers all lying at the bottom.

Blaine’s torso crossed over the death-promising steps effortlessly, finding a rhythm.

It was working! It would work!

Blaine’s hands probed ahead, easing his slithering descent. He could hear Melissa’s soft moans behind him, could feel her hands latch around his ankles. The next moment he sensed her fingers had slipped off, and she lost her grip on one of his legs. She began flailing around, searching to regain her hold.

“No!” he started. “No!”

It was too late. In struggling to regain her grip, Melissa had dropped the entire weight of her shoulders on one of the deadly steps. The spikes snapped outward once more in the next instant, as the walls slammed toward each other. Blaine felt them stop with barely an inch to spare above him. Then the grinding began. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth …

“Stay down!” he yelled up at Melissa, never sure if she heard him.

The spikes scraped at the top of his clothes. He could feel them flirting with his hair. Above him Melissa was screaming. Blaine tried to push himself backward toward her, probe out with his feet and hope that she retained enough reason to grab on to his ankles once more.

“Come on, Melly,” he said, knowing she couldn’t hear him. “You can do it. You can do it….”

McCracken got one of his legs too high and a pair of spikes sliced through his flesh. He grimaced, but kept pushing his feet backward until he struck something.

“Grab hold, Melly!” he yelled above the awful grinding. “Do you hear me? Grab hold!”

It took another second, but she latched on even tighter than before. Then he started his downward motion again. Before him, his flashlight illuminated the spikes gnawing the air. He had the sensation he was trapped in the mouth of some great beast, fighting to avoid its teeth.

At last his hands touched a hard stone floor at the foot of the stairway. He dropped the flashlight and the beam swirled to one side, catching more mutilated remains in its spill. McCracken continued to squirm along the floor and felt his hands swishing through the blood and gore the deadly trap had discarded down here yesterday. He steeled his mind against the stench and focused on Melissa’s hands still locked on his ankles. He was safe, but she was anything but.

Blaine angled to the right and kept pulling. He was able to gaze back now and saw her stiff form thudding down the last of the steps, only her booted feet and ankles still beneath the grinding spikes. She cleared the final step too dazed to know she was safe. Her hands still held his ankles in a desperate grip. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut. Blaine turned onto his back and sat up.

“It’s over,” he said, loosening her hold on his legs. “We made it.”

She opened her eyes and looked up at him with a blank stare. He gently lifted her to a sitting position and cupped her chin in his hands.

“Are you okay?”

Still rigid, she pulled herself to her knees and then stood up. Behind them, the spikes snapped back into their slots and the walls receded.

“I … think so.”

Blaine wrapped an arm around her shoulder and eased her away from the carnage. He stopped to retrieve the flashlight he had dropped and aimed the beam down the corridor to the left. The corridor sloped downward, but beyond that, the light showed nothing. It could have gone on forever or ended a hundred feet away.

“You’re hurt,” Melissa realized, seeing the blood seeping through his torn pants leg. “Let me have a look at that.”

She leaned over and inspected the gash. “I’ll need to dress and bandage this. Sit down.”

Blaine did so gingerly, as Melissa pulled a first-aid kit from a large pouch in her vest. McCracken was astonished.

“What else do you keep up your sleeve, or should I say vest, Melly?”

She ignored his attempt at humor. “You don’t believe it, do you?” she asked him, and started to clean the wound with alcohol-soaked cotton. “You don’t believe we’re standing very near to the entrance to hell.”

“I’ve seen hell plenty of times, Melly, and it’s got nothing to do with secret underground passages.”

“Oh, but it does,” she continued, starting on the bandage and dressing now. “You see, centuries before Christ was even born, our ancestors had no knowledge of a fallen angel named Lucifer. Instead they believed in the concept of two equal gods, one good and the other evil. Ancient writings tell of a vast underground temple where the evil god made his headquarters. The concept of it is nothing new. Archaeological dig teams have been searching for centuries in the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq.”

“But we’re in Turkey now.”

“Yes. And that explains why it was never found until Hitler sent teams scouring the entire world for mythical artifacts. Several of those teams were responsible for the maps that fell into my father’s possession. But only one of them found what Hitler was most resolutely looking for.”

McCracken climbed back to his feet. “Let’s get going.”

Their flashlights chewed through the darkness to reveal a well-finished corridor with a dirt floor and plenty of headroom. But two hundred yards down from the foot of the deadly stairs, a wall rose up before them to block their path.

“Maybe we took a wrong turn somewhere,” McCracken said.

“Wait a minute,” Melissa said softly.

She moved to the wall on the corridor’s right-hand side, adjacent to its apparent finish. She felt about it with both hands, searching for a switch or trigger similar to the one her father had discovered in the entry chamber.

“Shine your flashlight over here.”

McCracken obliged and watched her rubbing and wiping with a cloth grabbed from her pack. A brush came out next, along with a small precision scraping tool. She gave Blaine her flashlight to hold as well and went to work.

“What is it?” he asked, as the shape of something was being revealed beneath her work.

“Another doorway.”

“Any knob there you plan on cleaning off?”

“There’s writing on this door, instructions for how to open it.”

Her work continued for several more minutes, Blaine powerless to do anything but hold the lights and aim them in the direction she pointed. He saw the shapes and outlines of ancient letters and symbols.

“I’ve got it!” she pronounced triumphantly.

“The missing key?”

“Just as good. The instructions on how to obtain entry are very explicit. See these up here?”

McCracken shone the light in the direction Melissa was pointing to just over her head. He could see something, though nothing that made any sense to him.

“I think so,” he said anyway.

“According to what I’m reading, this is the first of five stages. There should be …” Melissa stretched her hand upward, probing about the bulges and finely chiseled shapes. “Yes! Here it is!”

Blaine watched her move what must have been some sort of lever down from the vertical to the horizontal position. It locked with a click. Melissa read on, tracing the ancient instructions with her fingers, wiping and blowing long-collected debris out of her way. This time she placed her palm against what looked like a fist-sized circle on the doorway’s right side. The circle receded behind her push and disappeared into the door.

Melissa traced down and quite a bit to the left, where she needed both her hands to twist a pair of arrows so that their points were crossed. Again the click was distinctive. Another few feet lower she found purchase on the underside of a raised L-shaped fragment and removed it from the wall. Probing farther down the right, she located the slot tailored for it. It slid in as neatly as a key into a lock. Still following the instructions, Melissa turned it.

Click.

“One more to go,” she said, crouching down now as she read on with her fingers and eyes. “This one’s the most complicated. I’ve got to turn two of these symbols — here and here, I think — at the same time. Let’s see …”

Blaine watched her hands feeling for the proper grip.

“That’s got it. Okay, here we—”

McCracken tensed in that instant and threw himself into motion just before the dual clicks sounded together.

“—go.”

He grabbed Melissa by the shoulders and yanked her sideways a millisecond before the huge door rocketed forward. It slammed into the wall directly before it. Fragments blew off and fell to the ground. The entire world seemed to shake. Then the door snapped backward into its slot as quickly as it had shot out.

Melissa clung to Blaine. “How — how did you know?”

“The five stages. There was no reason to be so specific about the amount, unless there was a sixth one only those who knew what to look for could find, after they skipped number five.”

“Down here,” she said, after crouching to better view the lowermost section of the door. “This must be the sixth instruction.”

Melissa read on, tracing the outline of the characters with her fingers. A few times she whisked dust and debris away with her brush to clear the way for her flashlight.

“Simplest of all,” she told Blaine, and twisted a square raised fragment on the door to the left. Instantly the door began to open toward them with a slight grating sound as its bottom rubbed against the ground.

Melissa rose to her feet. A flood of cold, dank air surged outward, enveloping both her and Blaine. She grasped his arm involuntarily. He had his flashlight on and aimed through the widening space.

At last the door stopped moving. McCracken handed Melissa back her flashlight and eased tentatively forward. Their beams swept before them, illuminating shapes in the darkness ahead. Blaine’s eyes narrowed, squinted.

“My God,” Melissa said.

Chapter 14

The chamber was a massive cavern that seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction. A huge array of crates, wooden boxes of varying sizes, and steel drums lay directly before Blaine and Melissa. Beyond these were barrels that looked like beer kegs and black ten-gallon cans. Most of the containers were unmarked, but a few had faded writing on them in German. There were also symbols, one predominant, on some of the wooden crates: a swastika.

“The Third Reich,” Blaine said, following Melissa’s eyes to it.

She turned and looked at him. “What is this place?”

“A storage chamber, Melly. The Nazis must have made it farther than you thought and then proceeded to appropriate this chamber for their own use almost a half-century ago.”

“Then all this …”

“Weapons, unless I miss my guess. And I don’t plan on opening any box to find out.”

He had heard all the stories about the undiscovered reserves of the Nazi war machine. Until now, though, he had totally discounted them as paranoid rhetoric. The Nazis had this, the Nazis had that. They were close to developing this, they were close to developing that … Then the war had ended and little of it had ever been found.

Because they had brought much of their stockpile here and left it for safekeeping.

The floor was arranged in the neat precision that any ordnance or records officer would be proud of. No wasted space. Everything had been neatly catalogued and arranged in this cavern to await the rebirth of another Reich.

“All this must have been stored in the war’s waning days by the cadre of officers who had long given up on Hitler,” McCracken explained. “It must have been his maps that directed them here, but they didn’t come looking for hell: they came looking for a place to hide the best of their arsenal.”

McCracken stopped when his flashlight beam illuminated a large vacant area of the floor, the only empty space of that scope in the entire chamber.

“And it looks like part of it is missing,” he continued, as he moved in that direction.

The space in question was thirty feet square. He knelt down and examined the ground.

“Crates of some kind, it looks like. Can’t tell how many or when they were moved.”

Melissa approached him slowly. “You’re saying somebody came down here and removed something the Nazis had stored for their own future use.”

“And whatever it is, we’ve got to figure it’s the pick of the litter,” Blaine added, thinking of all the rumors surrounding the massive unfinished arsenal of the Nazi war machine.

Melissa walked about the perimeter of the vacant area. Several times she knelt to smooth the hard-packed dirt floor with her hand.

“There’s something else,” she said finally. “I think the crates that were stored here were removed in two separate shifts years, even decades, apart. Watch.”

She placed her flashlight on the floor. Its beam cut through the darkness, hugging the ground.

“See,” Melissa said, still kneeling.

“See what?”

Her finger guided his eyes. “Follow the beam and you can tell that the back section of where the crates were has a shallower depression than the front.”

Blaine steadied his eyes. Melissa was right. The difference was slight enough to be almost nonexistent, but it was undeniably there, occupying perhaps a fifth of the total area.

“Shallower,” Melissa continued, “because that set of crates didn’t have nearly as much time to settle as the rest. The others remained here far longer.”

“Until very recently, perhaps?”

“Almost certainly. Why?”

“It fits, that’s all. Whoever dispatched that hit team in San Francisco wanted to make sure no one else found this place, because they must have found it first.”

“We know they didn’t get the missing crates out the way we got in,” Melissa surmised, realizing that their discovery meant there had to be another way out, after all.

“For sure, Melly. But how did they?”

The helicopter hovered over the site of the find. The directions had been precise, and the pilot had had no trouble in locating it. The man in the front section of the American Bell JetRanger turned behind him to the lone passenger in the rear.

“We’re too late,” he said in German into his headset.

Beneath them, the chopper’s floodlight illuminated a depression in the ground, like a sinkhole that had collapsed in on itself.

“Maybe not,” the second man muttered, following his gaze downward.

“What do you mean?”

“The entrance was destroyed by a blast from the inside out.”

“You’re saying he could still be down there? You’re saying he could still be alive?” The man in the rear stole another gaze downward. “Impossible!”

“We know who we are dealing with here. Anything is possible.”

“For our sake, for our survival, we must hope so.” He paused. “What do we do now?”

The man in the front twisted his shoulder so he was facing the JetRanger’s rear. “The only thing we can do: keep looking.”

“Blaine,” Melissa called to him, after they had been searching for ten minutes.

“On my way,” he said, the sweep of his flashlight advancing ahead of him.

She was standing not far from the area where the crates had been stored.

“Look at this,” she said, holding something out to him.

“A notebook,” McCracken realized, as he drew closer. “Handwritten in German.”

“Think it has anything to do with our missing crates?”

“Maybe. I found it under some dirt in the same general area. Hasn’t weathered the years well, I’m afraid. Paper’s dried out and warped. Ink’s gone. Not salvageable, least not all of it.”

“What about some?”

“With the proper equipment, it’s possible,” she said, sliding the notebook into her pack. “That is, if we ever find the way out of here.”

“I’ve got faith in you, Melly.”

They moved off again in separate directions to check for hidden openings, doors, or hatchways. The chamber was so large that adequate inspection of the walls could be achieved only from very close up, especially given the limitations of their flashlights. They felt about and tapped the walls, hoping for the telltale hollow sound of a passageway beyond.

The minutes stretched on, with no results. Melissa had abandoned her check of the walls and had moved back toward the area where the crates had been removed from. A pair of tarpaulins partially covered a neat stack of coffin-sized crates, and she pushed against one.

An entire row slid backward behind the pressure.

“Blaine!” she called. “These crates are empty,” she continued when he rushed over. “A facade.”

“To cover a passageway?”

“Let’s find out.”

Melissa joined McCracken in hoisting the empty crates aside. Beneath them the ground resembled the dirt floor covering the rest of the chamber. Melissa bent down and scooped away a portion with her trowel.

“There’s something solid underneath this!” she reported excitedly. “Made of wood, I think!”

Fully exposed, the secret hatch was fifteen feet square, easily large enough to allow all the materials they had found to be raised or lowered through it. McCracken found handholds in all four corners. The hatch didn’t seem to be hinged; it was simply set in place over the opening to be lifted off or pushed upward by a team of workers.

With only himself and Melissa to hoist the hatch, though, the weight of it seemed dead and immobile. They gave up trying to lift and attempted to drag it off instead. The hatch resisted, gave slowly at first, and then receded behind their determined pull. Leaning over the side, both shone their flashlights downward. Dull, dirt-encased steel shimmered slightly back at them from a drop of about twelve feet.

“Some kind of hydraulic platform,” McCracken said to Melissa. “That’s how the Nazis got everything up here.”

“Through a passageway that must originate back at the surface,” she followed hopefully.

McCracken used one of the discarded tarpaulins to lower Melissa down and then rested a steel keg atop the tarp’s edge so he could lower himself after her. At the bottom he had the feeling he was looking upward from his own grave, waiting for the diggers to begin tossing the dirt upon him. The high-ceilinged corridor that led away from the platform was wide and curving.

“Let’s go,” Melissa said, taking the lead.

A hundred feet along, the floor suddenly grew uneven, layered with mounds. The walls and ceiling were lined with fissures and cracks. McCracken drew ahead of Melissa, while she hung back to make a closer inspection.

“This looks like the result of an explosion. Normal wear and tear could never—”

“Wait till you see this,” Blaine interrupted, standing dead still just around the next bank in the corridor.

Melissa drew up even and shone her flashlight ahead. Before them the corridor seemed to have collapsed on itself. The passage was blocked.

“Oh, no,” she muttered.

“And we’ve got company.”

“What?”

“Over there on the right.”

She turned her light that way and saw three long-dead shapes with their backs resting against the remnants of the wall. She moved toward them just behind Blaine. The dead, dry air of this underground chamber had mummified the corpses, which had a thick layer of flesh, like tanned leather, hardened over them. Their clothes draped over their remains in tatters. Bulging teeth and shrunken lips made it seem as though they were smiling. Their eyes were dry-rotted spheres. McCracken knelt down and inspected an old Mauser pistol lying near one of the corpses. Something upon the corpse’s wrist caught his eye, and he shone his flashlight directly against it.

“Then the Nazis blew up their own escape route,” Melissa concluded in exasperation. “It makes no sense!”

“Even less than you think, Melly,” Blaine said, looking her way. “These aren’t Nazis, they’re Jews.”

McCracken showed her the withered etchings that looked as if they were embroidered onto the mummified wrists. The numbers were no longer intelligible, but the size and location of the mark made for sufficient indication by themselves.

“Auschwitz,” Melissa realized.

“Or a reasonable facsimile.”

“Slave labor left here to die?”

“Not exactly. All three were killed with bullets to the head,” Blaine said, after completing his inspection of the other two bodies.

“Killed by the one the pistol was next to, who then took his own life. Is that it?”

“Apparently. But not before they blew up the tunnel to make sure nobody else could ever retrace their steps.”

“Except somebody did.”

“How long would you say these corpses have been here?”

“Between forty and forty-five years.”

“The end of World War II, then. And you said the crates in the cavern were removed in two shifts, decades apart.”

“There’s got to be another route!” Melissa finished, hope returning to her voice. “Let’s start looking.”

Melissa returned to the vast storage chamber and focused her mind on the construction of the cavern about her. The Nazis could not possibly have built this chamber. They simply made good use of something they had discovered, something that fit their needs perfectly. Melissa forced her mind to focus on her father’s research, on some of his final words, spoken just in passing, deemed unimportant at the time …

What were they?

Egyptian! That was it! He had said that the construction reminded him of the pyramids, and the dating bore him out. Successive generations normally build new edifices squarely atop the previous foundations. Logically, there should be a chamber built above the exact center of this one. By pacing off the dimensions of the chamber she was able to pinpoint that spot.

“Up there,” Melissa gestured.

Blaine shone his fast-fading flashlight upward to follow her hand. “I don’t see anything.”

“There’s an exit up there, I’m sure of it, but it’s been covered up. If not by the original builders, then by the Nazis.” She stopped for a moment. “The trick right now is climbing up.”

“Leave that to me.”

Actually, they did the work together. Melissa dragged over a collection of the crates used to camouflage the large hatchway. Though empty, they were still plenty firm enough to support the weight of a person. McCracken stacked the crates to create a pyramidal stairway rising up to the ceiling forty feet up. Then, once atop the highest crates, he and Melissa were able to stretch their arms above their heads, searching for indications of a hatch or door.

“Got it!” Melissa told Blaine.

She clawed away at the dirt and debris affixed to the underside of a fold-down hatch. Blaine watched her locate the handhold and yank. The hatch popped downward.

Melissa first hoisted herself upward and then lent Blaine a hand. The chamber they had uncovered this time was circular in design, with a fifteen-foot ceiling. A single corridor led from the room, and Melissa took the lead into this passageway. It made sense that it would bring them back to the surface, since whoever had removed the second batch of the missing crates must have used this same passage. Their only fear, an unspoken one, was that this person or persons might have blown up that exit, too, after it had served its purpose.

When they were not far along the passageway, their last remaining flashlight flickered and died. The darkness around them became total.

“Melly,” Blaine called softly.

“Take my hand.”

“Keep talking. Where — Wait a minute, got it. At least I hope it’s yours.”

But he wasn’t able to hold it for long. The height of the corridor dropped considerably, and they were forced to crouch their way along the slightly uphill grade. McCracken took this as a sign that they were heading back to the surface. That hope made the darkness and claustrophobic feeling tolerable, and before long he fell into an uneasy rhythm.

“Can you smell it?” Melissa said all of a sudden. “Can you smell it, Blaine?”

At first he could smell nothing besides what the ancient earth gave up. Then a whiff of freshness entered his nostrils. Air! Wonderful, glorious air bled from the open sky! Air coming from not too far ahead.

“Greatest scent in the world,” he told her.

The cramped passageway hit a steep grade at the last, and they emerged through a wide fissure camouflaged by underbrush into a dry riverbed.

“Any idea where we are?” Blaine asked Melissa, after she had helped him through.

“I think so.”

“Good.”

“Not really. We’re twenty-five miles from civilization, and that means—”

Wop — wop — wop — wop …

Melissa’s eyes followed the sound to the sky. A floodlight pierced the darkness, streaming toward them. The helicopter hovered for a brief moment, then continued on. Her first instinct was to rise up and signal it for help. But McCracken grabbed hold of her and took her down to the hard-packed earth of the dry riverbed’s bank behind the meager cover of a nest of bushes.

“Stay low. Don’t move,” he told her.

The chopper sped closer. Its floodlight reached for them in the night.

“But who—”

“Don’t speak!” McCracken ordered. The light came closer.

“Our fuel is low,” the man in the JetRanger’s front reported. “We should head back.”

The passenger frowned. “We must fear the worst.”

“No. Trust me.”

“With our destiny? That is what it comes down to now, that and nothing else.”

“It can still be salvaged.”

“Not without help. Everything we have worked for hangs in the balance. Years, generations. We were so close. And now …”

“We will find it.”

“How?”

“Leave it to me.”

The guard at the gate, shotgun strapped to his shoulder, had been expecting Billy Griggs and waved him straight through. The black wrought-iron fence surrounding the estate was ten feet high. The individual bars were finished with arrowheadlike tops, and Billy had heard it said that the Twins sharpened one for every kill they successfully completed.

Probably not many left dull at this point.

The big house itself was hidden from sight beyond the gate, visible only once a visitor got fifty yards down the curved entry road. It was palatial in all respects, Victorian in design and color. The shade was a subtle mauve, the angles on the house gentle and curved. Billy parked his car and climbed the marble steps, where another pair of guards stood attentively.

“They’re waiting for you,” one said, “by the pool. Straight through the foyer to the house’s rear.”

Billy nodded and entered the mansion. The dozen guards on the property were not there to protect the Twins. No.

They were here to discourage them from leaving until their services were required.

The house was dark, and Billy proceeded through the foyer, which was like a luxury hotel’s lobby, to the house’s rear. There was a sunroom filled with plants beneath a roof of glass. Battling the plants for space was an incredible array of weightlifting equipment, everything shiny chrome. A bar loaded atop a bench press had been packed with just under four hundred pounds. The unused plates were stacked neatly, meticulously, upon steel-pegged weight trees. There were several more modern muscle-building machines as well, a few that Billy had never seen before. The entire rear wall was glass, and Billy could see the pool beyond it. One of the sunroom’s set of sliding glass doors had been left open. Billy stepped through them.

The Twins were lying side by side on the baked asphalt surrounding the pool, no towels beneath them. The pool was crystal blue, and the water ruffled in the stiff breeze. Beyond them, at the far side of the pool, lay more weightlifting equipment, spillover from the cluttered sunroom. Billy advanced tentatively to within ten yards of the Twins and then stood there, waiting. In normal circumstances the sight of two men lying there with massive chests and arms, abdominals layered like washboards, would have aroused him. But these were the Twins.

Suddenly they rose to their feet together, motions easy and deliberate. They stood side by side, huge V-shaped upper bodies blocking the view of most of the weightlifting equipment behind them.

“Hello, Billy,” they said in perfect unison, lips mirroring each other’s.

“Did you know I was coming?”

“We were told to expect you,” one said.

“What have you brought us?” the other followed immediately.

“A difficult assignment.”

“No assignment is difficult,” they said together, the harmony unnerving.

“Challenging, then.”

“We’ll be the judge of that.”

“Blaine McCracken.”

The Twins looked at each other. Their chest muscles rippled and danced. It was the most emotion Billy had ever heard of them showing.

“I have his file with me,” Billy told them.

“We don’t need it.”

Again the Twins looked at each other. Then they smiled: together, as with everything else.

“Just tell us where we can find him.”