Threshold

What made the deception worse was that his words fueled tensions around the world. Hate crimes against Arab-Americans would increase. Violence in the Middle East and Israel would continue. And actual terrorists, bolstered by the belief that some of their own had wounded the heart of the American military, would find their ranks replenished.

As Duncan took a breath, a daring reporter used the momentary silence to shout a question. “Senator Marrs has laid the blame for the deaths of several thousand United States citizens on your shoulders. How do you—”

Duncan’s frustration got the better of him. “Senator Marrs is a self-serving vulture,” he said, then immediately regretted it. His own anger was eating him up. He had no desire to be here. To be lying to these people. He needed to take action, not manage his reelection PR. Screw the upcoming election, he needed to get things done.

But his hands were tied. He knew that. Every action the president made during a crisis was scrutinized. Too much time fulfilling the duties of Deep Blue would garner unwanted attention for the team for whom secrecy was tantamount. When the Chess Team, when the world, needed Deep Blue the most, his duty as the president always got in the way.

As the sea of stunned reporters wrote down the quote that was sure to be the next morning’s headline, he said, “Thank you. That’s all for now.”

Duncan took the stairs down from the podium two at a time, catching the press off guard. Silence lingered for a moment before the din of questions came. Leaving the loud voices behind, he approached Keasling and Boucher. “This is a waste of time,” he grumbled.

Boucher matched the president’s stride as he walked back to The Beast. “It’s your job, sir.”

A Secret Service agent opened the rear door. Duncan paused before entering. He looked back over at the press who were being held at bay by a line of military security. It all seemed a ridiculous circus to him. He met Boucher’s eyes. “I know, Dom. I’m just starting to see things a little differently.”

Duncan climbed into the dark interior of the car and slid into the shadows. Before the Secret Service agent could close the door, Boucher climbed in next to him.

Duncan sighed. “What?”

As The Beast pulled away, Boucher smoothed his mustache and said, “Tom, this will all blow over.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“He’s a hot-air bag. People are going to realize that when the dust clears. They always do.”

“You’re assuming the dust will clear.” Duncan looked out the tinted, bulletproof window. The ruins of Fort Bragg passed by as they headed for Pope Air Force Base. “We don’t even know what we’re up against.”

“We will,” Boucher said, filling his voice with confidence. “You’ve got the best team—”

“An incomplete team.”

Boucher nodded. When Deep Blue was unavailable it took a team of CIA analysts and strategists to replace him. But the team could never operate at full efficiency without Deep Blue directly involved. When the CIA team handled ops they still needed executive approval on the big calls—decisions that could not be made from a press conference podium—the delay could cost lives. Having Deep Blue in the game gave the team real-time executive power. Fleets could be diverted, air support called in, or political pressure applied with a phone call.

“Even without you, they’re still the best. They’ll get the job done.”

“And if they don’t? If Marrs continues to control the airwaves?”

“He won’t.”

“You going to make him disappear?” Duncan said, a grin showing on his face.

“Don’t need to,” Boucher said before switching on the TV. It wasn’t Marrs on the screen. It was Duncan. “Senator Marrs is a self-serving vulture.”

“You came out swinging. The American people will remember you’re a fighter. And so will Marrs. He’s not going to want a second round.”

“I hope you’re right, Dom.”

“I’m a spook. I’m always right.”

TWENTY-THREE

Rome, Italy

“THE TEMPLE OF Saturn,” Pierce said as they rounded the ruins of an ancient temple that had been reduced to a foundation and eight columns supporting a worn but still impressive pediment. “The Senate and people of Rome restored what fire had consumed.”

“What?” King asked as he looked up at the impressive columns.

“The inscription,” Pierce said, panning his flashlight beam across the text etched into the pediment. “The original temple, which was the oldest structure in Rome, built in 498 B.C., was dear to the city. And when it burned down they rushed to rebuild it. In fact, they were in such a rush that one of the columns was placed upside down.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

“For the builders more than the temple,” Pierce said. “It’s rumored those responsible were killed in the Coliseum.”

“The wrath of Saturn,” King said.

Pierce shook his head. “The wrath of Rome. Saturn was the god of agriculture.”

Pierce narrated the history of Rome in hushed tones like a conspiratorial tour guide. They continued onward from the temple, following the serpentine path as it twisted past what little remained of the Milliarium Aureum. It was once a statue of Augustus Caesar where all roads in the Roman Empire were said to begin, but had long since been reduced to a marble base.

Next came the Arch of Tiberius, which was little more than a foundation for an arch, whose history and significance had been long forgotten. Beyond the arch, they walked along the side of the Basilica Julia, which stretched out on their right. A long line of marble steps led up to a large rectangular area filled with rows of foundation pylons and a mash of scattered stones and blocks. The building, which housed shops, courts, and banks had once been a favorite gathering place for Romans. So much so that checkerboards had been found carved into some of the steps. But the building held no interest to Pierce, whose narrative ended as soon as they were past that stretch of ancient city.

He paused at the corner of the Basilica Julia and raised his hands toward three, tall, fluted columns glowing orange in the nighttime lighting. The columns, which looked like they could fall apart in a stiff wind, still held a piece of entablature on top. “I give you the temple of Castor and Pollux.”

“Castor and Pollux,” King repeated, recalling his Greek history. “They were twins who helped defeat the Tarquins.” His eyebrows rose. “Also the sons of Jupiter, aka, Zeus, aka the legendary half father of Hercules. This could be it.”

Wasting no time, King hopped the fence, climbed the shambled staircase, and entered the ruins, which were raised up several feet atop what remained of the foundation. As Pierce debated following—this was a major breach of archaeological protocol—he noticed that King had his weapon drawn. Knowing King would not do so without reason, he climbed over the fence and followed his friend into the remains of the ancient temple.

Entering a clearing at the center of the temple ruins, Pierce found King quickly moving from one feature to the next. Foundation stones, step fragments, wall remains—nothing escaped his scrutiny. “Any particularly interesting history I should know about?” he asked.

“Nothing outstanding. The location of the temple is supposed to be where Castor and Pollux came to water their horses after their successful battle. The Senate gathered here for a time and later housed a few different Roman offices, but nothing extraordinary.”

“And nothing related to Hercules.”

“Just the lineage.”

“Then what should I be looking for?”

“Honestly, I was kind of hoping there would be an engraving like we found beneath Gibraltar.”

“The Herculean Society’s symbol.” King frowned. He’d hoped Pierce’s lead would be more substantial, but they were searching for a location that had been kept secret in the heart of Rome for thousands of years. It wouldn’t be found that easily.

Slowed by the loud revelry of nearby late-night Roman parties and the rumble of vehicles, both of which kept King on edge for intruders, they spent an hour searching every nook and cranny of the site.

And found nothing.

Sweating from the humid Roman heat and discouraged by the apparent dead end, King sat on a stone and looked up at the cloudy sky. Silhouetting the temple’s three columns, the moon’s glow had just begun to pierce the thinning cloud cover.

Pierce sat next to him. “Sorry. This was the best I could come up with.”

“Don’t beat yourself up. I asked you on a hunch to find something that might not even be here. This was my idea.”

“Your hunches typically save a lot of lives.”

“Not always the ones that matter.”

Pierce stood. “Well, we’ve looked everywhere at this site. I think we should check out the temple of Jupiter. We’ve got a few hours of darkness left.”

After walking a few steps, Pierce turned around and found King still sitting. His eyes were fixated on the three columns. “What?”

“We haven’t looked everywhere,” King said before standing and heading for the columns.

Pierce realized what King was about to do and attempted to voice a protest. “King, wait. You can’t—”

But King was already scaling one of the outside columns like a champion logger. Pierce flinched as he heard crumbs of column falling onto the marble base. If Augustina finds out about this, he thought, she might turn me in herself.

After reaching the top of the column, King inspected the exposed top and then climbed on top of the entablature, scouring it with his flashlight.

Pierce waited below like a nervous teenage vandal, bouncing his foot and scanning for onlookers. He could hear King above, moving about. The scrape of plastic on stone preceded a clunk as something fell from above. Pierce cursed in his mind as he began to wonder if bringing King here had been a mistake. His thoughts stopped when he realized that King had fallen silent. He looked up expecting to see King inspecting something with his flashlight, but saw nothing.

King’s flashlight was off.

For a moment, all he could hear was his own shaky breath, but then a loud scrape sounded from above and a rain of debris sprinkled onto his hand. As he pointed his flashlight up he saw King descend in a blur. King landed next to him, grabbed Pierce’s flashlight, and switched it off.

“What’s wrong?” Pierce asked, his heartbeat pulsating hard in his throat.

“Guards. Four of them coming this way. Two from the north. Two from the east.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Keep looking.”

Pierce looked astonished. “What?”

“I saw something.”

“Up there?”

“To the northeast. It looks like a pit beneath a modern covering, across from the Basilica Julia.”

Pierce took a sharp breath and whispered, “The Lacus Curtius.”

“You know what it is?”

“No one really knows for sure. It’s been covered over with ancient stones and it has yet to be excavated. Probably never will be.”

“Why’s that?”

“Politics. Some in Rome believe archaeology does more harm than good. Every request I know of involving an excavation of the Lacus Curtius has been declined. But it’s said to be the entrance to a chasm. There are several stories about the site’s origin and name. One has Mettius Curtius falling into the pit during a battle with Romulus. Another has a horseman, Marcus Curtius, throwing himself, horse and all, into the pit because an oracle deemed it would save Rome. And another—”

Pierce took another quick breath, which King knew signified a revelation. “What?”

“It’s said that Gaius Curtius supposedly dedicated the site in 445 B.C. after…” He looked at King, barely seeing him in the darkness. “A lightning strike split the earth, forming the pit.”

“Lightning…”

“The favored weapon of Zeus,” Pierce said. “At the time, Zeus would have been seen as the source. That it’s not mentioned in the historical record—”

“Means it was erased.” A soft scuffing hit King’s ears. He put a hand on Pierce’s shoulder and pushed him down to a crouch.

“What is it?” Pierce asked with a rushed whisper.

“I must have missed two of them.”

Pierce listened, willing his ears to open wider. Then he heard them. Two sets of footsteps climbing over the pebble-covered ruins. But the sound wasn’t from outside the temple of Castor and Pollux, it was from within.

And close.

King leaned in to Pierce. “If one of them gets off a shot or shouts a warning, the others out there”—he motioned to the forum with his head—“are going to have an army of police descend on us. And even if we do escape, security will be beefed up for a long time to come. When was the last time you were in a fight?”

Pierce felt like he might vomit. “You fought all my fights for me.”

“Not this time,” King said. “I can’t be in two places at once. All I need is a few seconds.”

The shuffling shoes came closer, this time complimented by a pair of equally hushed voices speaking Italian. “When I tap you, count to three Mississippi, then go. Don’t hold back.”

“Okay.”

The tap came thirty seconds later, when the sound of footfalls was only a few feet away, just on the other side of the foundation they were hiding behind. Pierce counted.

One Mississippi …

Two Mississippi …

TWENTY-FOUR

Chaco Province, Argentina

THE SHOULDER-DEEP WATER of the Negro River slowed Bishop and his team, but also helped quiet their approach. It didn’t, however, help the nerves of the team following his leadership. Designated Bishop’s Pawns One through Five, they followed his orders without question. But that didn’t stop them assigning two men to watch the water for crocodiles. Not that their night vision goggles could penetrate the river, which really was as black as its name implied.

During the daylight hours Bishop and his team, dressed as tourists, split into three teams of two, casually seeking out a sixty-seven-year-old man named Miguel Franco and his forty-five-year-old son, Nahuel. The pair lived together in downtown Resistencia with the single son supporting his out-of-work father.

Casual interviews with neighbors, local bars, shops, and churches revealed that the pair often spent nights camped out on the Negro River where the father would make up for his unemployment by catching a haul of fish, sometimes enough to sell at the local market.

Bishop could feel several of those large fish swimming circles around his legs. He pushed through them, closing on the campfire that revealed the team’s two targets sitting on a small sandy beach, lines cast and fishing rod handles buried in the sand. A half-finished twelve-pack of beer sat between them, which complicated the fact that a shotgun, presumably for warding off crocs, lay in the younger man’s lap. He had no doubt that anything bigger than a fish emerging from the water would be greeted by an explosion of lead pellets.

Making a mental note to wait for the men to move away from the firearm, Bishop paused by a log as the team gathered behind him. He turned to whisper the game plan when a snapping branch somewhere in the jungle cut through the cacophony of nighttime calls.

His first thought was that a jaguar or croc might be stalking the group, but they were hidden from the shoreline by thick vegetation. It could just as easily be a wild boar … or a person.

The team fell silent as one, all listening for another sound. For thirty seconds there was nothing but silence. Then it was broken by the elder Franco’s loud, drunken laugh. As Miguel’s amusement dulled to a chuckle Bishop again heard movement.

This time he brought his handgun up and aimed it at the jungle. Timing an approach to coincide with surrounding noise was a hunting technique used by only one predator on the planet.

Man.

TWENTY-FIVE

Taipei, Taiwan

KNIGHT LOOKED GOOD dressed in black slacks and a dark blue button-down silk shirt. As he approached Mackay Memorial Hospital, flanked by two of the five Delta operators assigned to him, he wore a large grin required by his cover. As a wealthy benefactor looking to donate money to the hospital and to the Presbyterian church that ran it, the plan was to tour the facility where he would meet an exceptional ninety-five-year-old man, Walis Palalin, who for the past twenty-five years had spent three days a week volunteering in the children’s ward. Apparently, the man had lost his son in this very hospital twenty-five years ago and had been paying tribute to him ever since.

Upon meeting the man, Knight would offer a million-dollar donation—if Mr. Palalin would accompany him to a dinner. Right then and there. No delays. Just the two of them and Knight’s two security guards.

Once in their vehicle, getting the man onto a ship and back to America would be a simple thing … if the man’s health didn’t become a factor. He had a clean bill of health and could very well live another ten years—perhaps longer—but the emotional jolt of being kidnapped could undo the man’s well-being fairly quickly, especially if he was on any medication, which is why the missing three members of Knight’s team were rummaging through Palalin’s apartment looking for any medications or supplements that the man needed.

The industrial hospital wasn’t exactly inviting-looking. Surrounded by the neon glitz of Taipei, it had a depressing facade. But the smiles Knight got from the women he passed on the sidewalk as he approached the front entrance were enough to lift any male hospital visitor’s spirits. Of course, in Taiwan they could be working women, but it was still mid-afternoon, so he doubted it. Ten feet from the concrete staircase leading up to the double-door entrance, he saw a stunning woman. She turned, met his eyes and smiled.

As he returned the woman’s smile, he noted that hers had frozen and become forced. The woman, dressed in a dark gray power suit, turned fully toward him. He noted her open jacket and the two items attached to her belt.

A badge.

And a gun.

With one hand the woman drew her sidearm.

With the other she spoke into a radio Knight hadn’t noticed before.

TWENTY-SIX

Asino, Siberia

THE DISTINCT SMELL of a cow pasture rolled over the open hill and wafted past Rook. Despite being a distasteful odor to many people, it reminded Rook of his home in New Hampshire, where he grew up down the road from a cow farm. He couldn’t see the farm itself, but the smell and distant cattle calls placed the farm somewhere on the other side of the green grassy rise to his left. To the right was a forest of pine and birch trees that was home to bears, reindeer, and, judging from the continuous buzz of chain saws, a thriving forestry business. The odors, combined with the cool mid-morning air, felt invigorating.

As Rook, dressed as a local in dirty work pants and a thick gray wool sweater, walked down the road toward town, his team followed along in the forest, wading through a sea of bright green ferns. Fortunately, the three targets lived on the outskirts of town, in a home that backed up to the forest. Rook would approach from the road, posing as a local in need of car assistance. When he was invited in to use the phone, he would drug the group and his team would abscond with them, each pair carrying one of the two women and one man—all that remained of the Chulym people. A truck hidden two miles away in the forest would transport the group to an airfield where a small plane, operated by a local CIA operative, waited to whisk them (with two landings to refuel) to neighboring Georgia, where a much faster transport would take them to the United States.

It was one of the more complicated and slower extraction plans Rook had seen, but that was to be expected when kidnapping three people from a country that wasn’t exactly on hugging terms with the United States. Quiet and careful was preferred to loud and fast in this case.

A sign ahead, written in Russian, read, “Thank you for visiting Asino. Population 28,000.” Rook quickened his pace, knowing the turn onto his targets’ street was only a mile ahead. He wanted to get this over with and the long trek home started.

The trees on the side of the road shifted under a breeze. A fallen tree caught in the grip of a second squeaked loudly as entwined limbs rubbed against each other. The sudden foreign noise returned Rook’s attention to what he could hear and he noticed something had changed. The cows had fallen silent. Perhaps feeding? But the distant whine of chain saws had quieted as well.

Kafer’s voice filled his ear. “Rook, RP-One here. Do you he—”

Rook muted his earbud as the sound for which Kafer had broken radio silence for struck his ears. Still distant, the deep bass staccato was easily identifiable as not one but several approaching helicopters.

Big ones.

TWENTY-SEVEN

El Calvario, Colombia

UNDER THE COVER of darkness, Queen and her team of operators watched the small mountainside town of El Calvario through night vision goggles. Few lights remained on and many of those bore the telltale flicker of television sets. The town was at rest. And when they woke in the morning, two of them would be missing. But despite the town’s quiet demeanor, it bore the scars of a violent past, most recently as the epicenter for a magnitude 5.9 earthquake in 2008. Six people had died. Hundreds more were injured. But the buildings in town took the brunt of the damage. Those that had collapsed remained so and many others, including the tall yellow church, had cracked walls or bent frames.

The two men—the last speakers of Tinigua—had been citizens of El Calvario since they were born. The first, Edmundo Forero, was born sixty-nine years previous and was the oldest resident in town. The second man, Tavio Cortes, born sixty-four years ago, had been a neighbor of Edmundo’s, and as a result picked up the language that he and his mother spoke. The language that now only the two of them knew.

The challenge for Queen and her team was that despite being close friends, Edmundo and Tavio now lived on opposite sides of town, which wasn’t just a matter of horizontal distance, but also vertical. El Calvario’s main drag rose straight up the mountainside at an amazingly steep angle. The obvious choice was to split the team in two, taking both men at the same time. But Queen had seen more than a few bullet holes in buildings and knew the area had seen some violent unrest. Despite the gross exaggerations about Colombia being a haven for terrorists and drug runners, these elements did exist in the fringes of civilization, and the town had clearly seen some firefights in its past. What made this a challenge for the team was that people who experienced violent events tended to prepare for the next encounter.

Queen’s team moved as one. Like a black-clad anaconda stalking its prey in the darkness, they moved in a fast single-file line, weaving through the tight alleys between the turquoise and white homes. They gathered beneath the tall stilts supporting their target’s back porch. While three men kept watch below the porch, two more followed Queen up the stairs.

Queen, along with QP-One and -Two, huddled by the back door for a moment while she picked the lock. Once inside, she drew a tranquilizer gun and moved through the home, heading for the living room where the TV flickered. Just as she hoped, Edmundo lay asleep in a reclined chair, a beer in one hand, a cigarette burned to the nub in the other.

“Bastard is lucky to still be alive,” QP-Two said.

Queen took aim and shot him in the chest. The old man’s eyes launched open, wrinkling the flat, leathery brown skin of his forehead. He stood, saw their black masks and night vision goggles, and before he had time to fully register what he’d seen, fell face forward into Queen’s arms. She handed him to QP-One and -Two, who carried him outside and down the steps to where the others still waited.

As Queen walked down the steps, she activated her throat microphone and spoke. “Queen here. Edmundo Forero is ours. En route to second target.”

“Copy that, Queen,” came the voice of Dominick Boucher, who was sitting in for Deep Blue until he was able to free himself from the media shit storm.

“Out,” she said before disconnecting. With a quick hand signal she motioned for the team to move and they were off again, working their way through the town with Edmundo in tow. As hoped, the old man’s light frame combined with the downward climb allowed them to move just as quickly.

Reaching the bottom of the hill, they stopped at the edge of the main street. Tavio’s home, and their LZ, lay on the other side. But before they could make a move, a loud car engine roared at the top of the street. It was followed by the squeal of braking tires and the shouts of men. While the team fell back, Queen chanced a look up the mountain road and saw three jeeps, large machine guns mounted on each, and fifteen armed men flooding into Edmundo’s home.

Ducking into the shadows, she activated her throat mic again. “Mission has been compromised. Local authorities were tipped off.”

She didn’t wait for a reply before switching off and prepping her UMP submachine gun. She suspected they wouldn’t escape without a fight. A second set of engines, coming from below, confirmed her fears. She turned to the Delta team behind her and pointed to Edmundo. “Leave him and be ready to haul ass.”

The old man was placed on the ground were he would sleep peacefully through the chaos that would soon add more scars to the town.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Rome, Italy

THREE MISSISSIPPI!

Pierce stood, bolted out and around the debris they’d been hiding behind, raised his fist, aimed, and threw the only punch he was sure he’d get to make. Aiming was difficult in the darkness, but he saw the silhouette of a head and tried to direct his fist just below. Strike the throat … strike the throat … strike the—contact.

The impact was solid, knuckles on bone.

Not a soft throat.

And it took all of Pierce’s self-control to not shout out in pain. His fist ached and his arm tingled. But he had made contact.

A dull thud sounded as the attackee collapsed at his feet.

Pierce’s adrenaline surged as he realized he’d taken the guard out with a single punch to the head. For a moment he understood the rush King must feel when on a mission. Then King’s flashlight clicked on revealing the man he had attacked.

He was young and unconscious, dressed in a pink dress shirt, holding a black dress coat in his flaccid arms.

Not a guard.

The light drifted toward the body at Pierce’s feet. When he saw the face, he stepped back with a hand to his mouth. “Oh God.”

King moved to the pretty young woman and checked her pulse. She was alive, which was good for her and his friend’s psyche. “She’s alive,” he said, then took her by the arms. “Get the guy.”

They dragged the couple who’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time behind the remains of the temple’s interior walls. King could see Pierce was distracted over hitting the woman. “It had to be done,” King said. “If you didn’t do it, I would have.”

“So this was a ‘can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs’ situation?”

King nodded. “Sometimes you have to be a bad parent to be a good parent.”

Pierce let out a quiet “Huh” as a memory of King’s sister returned. “Julie used to say that.”

With a grin, King said, “So did my dad.”

Pierce looked at his fist with a grin. “It was a good punch.”

King clapped him on the shoulder. “Would have made Jules proud.”

They both fought against laughing. They both knew that Julie had been a strident feminist who believed men and women should be treated equally in every way, including combat. Which is why she worked so hard to defy the system and become a fighter pilot. She really would have been proud.

King led him back to the northwest corner of the temple. To the north and east they could see the security guards closing in on their location—flashlights giving away their positions. King knelt down and motioned to where they’d hid the bodies. “They’re here for them.”

“You’re sure?”

“Well, maybe not exactly them, but they’re probably expecting to find drunk socialites pissing on a column, not…” King held up his weapon, letting it finish the sentence for him. “Let’s go.”

The series of foundation stones remaining within the long rectangular ruins of the Basilica Julia hid the pair as they snuck around the guards. They stopped directly across from the Lacus Curtius and looked to the right. The two guards, walking away from them toward the temple of Castor and Pollux were oblivious to their presence. But the guards approaching from the other side were now facing them, albeit from more than one hundred feet away. King quickly judged the distance and the intensity of the flashlight beams and decided it was too risky.

Then he saw all four flashlights turn toward the temple of Castor and Pollux. He grabbed Pierce’s shirt and pulled him up. “Let’s go!”

They hopped the small black fence and crouch-ran across the footpath. The ruins on the other side, along with a short, low-hanging tree, provided ample cover. Concealed again, they headed for the ancient pit long since covered. King was surprised to find the structure built over the pit to be constructed of metal poles and beams. The thing was solid and held a large flat roof at an angle to divert rainfall. They crawled beneath the low roof and inspected the site.

Aged rectangular blocks of white marble were laid out in grids on either side of a circular, layered pit. Two layers led down, like steps, to a flat, stone base. A stone on the top of the pit’s far side had been moved out of alignment with the rest, ruining the circle.

It was, in every way, unremarkable. Despite its mysterious origins, King could see nothing that made this site worthwhile … or worthy of a rain guard when the rest of the far more extravagant forum was left to brave the elements. “Why is this covered?” he asked.

Pierce scratched his head. “I’ve heard that before it was covered rain would collect there—” He pointed to the small basin. “And would leak through to whatever is beyond. They feared erosion would undermine the stability of the site and possibly the surrounding sites as well, so they covered it up. Why do you ask?”

“Just seems odd. What do you think is down there?”

“Aside from a chasm created by Zeus’s lightning bolt? The entire area surrounding this hill was a swamp before Rome was built. Today it would have been a protected wetland. They drained the swamps and built the city. Best guess is it’s an underground lake. This whole area of the city is probably full of underground rivers, too. Without the swamps, the whole system might be dry now, but really, who knows.”

King sighed. None of this was helpful. He stood to get a better look at the pit and hit his head on the low-hanging ceiling. The metal sheet sounded out like a gong. “Shit,” he whispered, knowing the guards would soon be upon them.

Ignoring the panicked whispers of Pierce and the distant voices of the guards, King focused his attention on the pit. Once again, there were no markers of any kind. Then he looked up at the ceiling. Its plain surface held no clues, either, but the two I-beams supporting the ceiling did. They were separated by five feet, each crossing over the circle of stones. He mentally stripped the ceiling away and pictured the I-beams over the circular pit.

King jumped into the pit, scouring every surface for something more.

“Did you find something?” Pierce asked, joining him at the bottom of the two-foot-deep depression. “The guards will be here any second!”

“The I-beams,” King said. “From above, they cross over the circle.”

Pierce saw the image in his mind. The symbol of the Herculean Society. But not quite. The circle was broken. “Help me move this,” Pierce said, taking hold of the misaligned stone. “Pull it back into the circle!”

The guards’ voices grew louder. Commanding. They’d found the bodies and discovered they hadn’t passed out, but had been knocked out. The squeal of distant sirens—police and medical—converged on the forum, which would soon be an inescapable quagmire of men in uniform.

And the stone wasn’t budging.

“We’re trying to force it,” Pierce said. “Maybe it’s a more complicated lever.” He placed his hands on top of the stone like he was about to do CPR chest compressions. “You pull. I’ll push.”

As the legs and feet of the approaching guards came into view, King nodded.

Pierce put his weight onto the stone and felt it drop a fraction of an inch. King pulled and the stone shifted easily, completing the circle and the Herculean Society’s symbol. They let go and moved back. The stone began shifting back into its previously unaligned position. It clicked into place as a flashlight cast it in yellow light.

The first guard to arrive drew his weapon and pointed it beneath the low ceiling where he thought he’d seen moving shadows. But the pit was empty and looked untouched. He stood and scanned the area, finding no one but his partner. If someone had been there, they were gone now.

TWENTY-NINE

Washington, D.C.

DOMINICK BOUCHER HAD been wrong.

Not only had Marrs not backed down, but he’d responded to the vulture comment like something out of a Tazmanian Devil cartoon, spinning madly from rally to news station to rally again. With a beet-red face, he shouted at the media. At crowds. At the television audience. And despite the flying spittle and shaking jowls, people were listening.

He turned the self-serving vulture comment around on Duncan. “If one senator keeping the president accountable is enough to make him crack, how is he going to lead the nation?” he had said.

When the media picked up on the fact that Marrs was also responding in anger, he spun the story. “I’m responding to a man who has failed this nation several times. A man who’s inaction has led to the deaths of our children. I should be angry. Every good citizen of this nation should be angry. At Duncan for not preventing the attacks and at the people who perpetrated them. But who is our president angry at? Me! The office needs transparency. It needs accountability. If he can’t handle it, well…” With that he threw up his hands.

The man provided enough sound bites and accusations to keep the media and the public focused on Marrs and, as a result, on Duncan. His hands were bound more than ever now. The media requests didn’t stop coming. There were protesters surrounding the White House grounds and more arrived every hour.

Alone in the Oval Office for a few minutes before meeting with a slew of advisors on a range of issues arising because of the current crisis, Duncan looked out the row of windows. The south lawn, trim and neat like a marine’s head, stretched out before him. The trim grass annoyed him. Nothing was that clear cut anymore. In the Rangers there were good guys and bad guys. Black and white. Right and wrong. He had successfully carried on that tradition through the Chess Team. But now … now there were other battles, unnecessary battles that had to be fought. With Marrs. With the media. With public opinion.

And given the sensitivity of the Chess Team’s mission, he couldn’t fight back. He couldn’t say he had teams spread out around the world, infiltrating the territories of sovereign nations in order to kidnap the sole survivors of ancient languages. If that got out it might start a war. And it would certainly ruin his presidency and provide a lifetime of fuel to Marrs’s smear campaign. Hell, it might make Marrs look enough like a hero that he could be the next president.

Let him try, Duncan thought. After learning the truth behind the threats against the country—mythical monsters, gene-splicing madmen, Neanderthal viruses, and stone golems—the man would resign with his tail tucked between his legs.

But right now Marrs had freedom to act. Freedom to say what he wanted to whomever he chose. Freedom to disappear if he chose. And for those reasons, Duncan envied him.

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in.”

He heard the door open, but he didn’t turn around. A woman’s voice said, “They’re ready for you, sir.”

“I’ll just be a minute,” he replied.

After the door shut, Duncan looked down at his right hand. He held his M9 Beretta; the same one he had used as an Army Ranger. The weapon had saved his life a few times, but it couldn’t help now. As much as he might like to have Marrs stare down the barrel of this gun, a different solution had to be found; one that would not only put an end to the recent attacks and catch those responsible, but also free the team up so they could really function as a cohesive unit. Only then would the American people be safer.

Duncan opened a drawer on the Resolute Desk, placed the handgun inside, and locked it. Before heading toward the door, he looked around the Oval Office, and for the first time during his presidency, the space felt cramped.

THIRTY

Rome, Italy

THE LAST THING King saw before descending into total darkness was a shrinking crescent of light above him. He realized that they’d fallen through a triggered hatch that was now quickly, and quietly, closing. All thoughts of the hatch left his mind as his body impacted against a cold stone floor. He landed at an odd angle, which compressed his ribs near to breaking and knocked the wind out of him.

Unable to speak, he listened as Pierce whispered his name. “Jack … Jack, where are you?”

A bright light struck his face a moment later as Pierce switched on his flashlight.

Seeing King squint from the light and in pain, Pierce said, “Sorry,” and moved the light away, revealing a nondescript stone tunnel. After King caught his breath and was helped to his feet, he looked at Pierce, who seemed unfazed by the fall.

Pierce noticed King’s attention and questioning gaze. He smiled. “I landed on my feet.”

King shook his head. The bookworm archaeologist was becoming a catlike Tomb Raider while he, an elite soldier, became a potato sack.

When Pierce’s grin turned cocky, King said, “At least I didn’t hit a girl.”

Pierce had opened his mouth to issue a retort, but stopped short and then deflated. “Hey, what happened to ‘you have to be a bad parent to be a good parent’?”

King shrugged. “I was trying to make you feel better.”

Pierce forced an unsure smile as King used his conscience against him. “B.S. You’ve hit girls.”

“Not like that,” King said. “You coldcocked the kid.”

“Kid!” With a laugh and a raised fist, Pierce said, “Better watch it, or you’re next.”

“Don’t make me tell Queen you hit a girl,” King said as he found his flashlight on the floor, picked it up, and switched it on.

The light cast a now serious George Pierce in bright, white light. “That’s not even funny.”

King gave him a firm pat on the back. “C’mon, let’s find out which layer of hell we’ve dropped ourselves into.”

King led the way, flashlight out, gun at the ready. The tunnel, a simple brown tube tall enough to stand in and just wide enough for the pair to stand side by side, led down at a steady angle.

“We must be under the Lacus Juturnae by now,” Pierce whispered.

But King wasn’t interested in what lay above. He wanted to know what waited below. The color of the tunnel ahead shifted from dark brown to a dirty, mottled white with splashes of color. Pierce’s eyes went wide with recognition and he rushed past King.

The walls of the tunnel were covered in mosaic tiles, many chipped or fallen away, but enough remained so that the pictures could be pieced together. Blocky shapes slightly more detailed than a sixteen-bit Nintendo game formed pictograph story lines. King couldn’t make them out, but Pierce deciphered it aloud.

“Look here, at this swamp,” Pierce said. “This must be the land Rome was founded on.” He counted the hills in the image, whispering the numbers to himself. “The seven hills of Rome. The original settlers had villages on each hill, but they eventually drained the swamp and formed the city.”

He moved on, looking at a large image of a woman, whose beauty was impossible to hide, despite the rough condition of the wall.

“Who is she?” King asked.

Only fragments of the name spelled out in ancient Greek above the woman’s head remained, but it was enough. “Acca Larentia. We found her.”

They moved faster, all but ignoring the images of Rome’s early development and battles. The tunnel ended in an arched doorway that led to a T junction. They passed through and found a second arch to the left, leading into a small chamber, and a second hallway to the right. Not wanting to proceed too quickly, King entered the small room and cast his light side to side, stopping at the room’s only feature—a marble tomb. They approached the tomb and found a relief of a woman on its lid. Acca Larentia.

“She’s been here the whole time,” Pierce said, his voice full of the same kind of wonder that Rook displayed when assembling a new weapon. Pierce reached out to touch the woman’s face, but was stopped by a guttural clicking growl. The sound was organic, but inhuman.

King spun and fell to one knee, aiming both flashlight and handgun toward the entrance.

A cloaked figure in the doorway flinched away from the light and blocked its face with the loose fabric of its black sleeve. Clearly uncomfortable in the light, the creature stepped back but made no move to retreat or advance. It simply stood there, crouched and swaying slowly side to side.

Waiting.

King recognized the creature. The cloak and bits of gray face and arm he could see were exactly what Rook and Queen had described. A wraith. One of Hercules’s mysterious gofers. Despite the wraith having an aura of evil, King knew it meant them no harm. He lowered his weapon and aimed his flashlight to the floor.

Free of the intense white beam, the wraith stood taller and lowered its arm. In the dim light reflected off the room’s brown walls, King could make out the lower half of the creature’s face. There was no nose to speak of, simply a horizontal slit in its skin. And its mouth, well, there wasn’t one—just a patch of wrinkled gray flesh.

For a moment, King felt pity for the wraith. It had clearly once been a human being, but now … it was a monster. Then it turned, motioned for them to follow with its hooded head, and hopped up onto the hallway wall. It crawled away like a four-legged spider. Or, King thought, like a gecko.

Keeping his weapon ready, King and Pierce followed the wraith, which paused when they fell behind. It led them through a confusing maze of tunnels through which neither man could retrace his steps. Some tunnels were plain stone bearing no markings of any kind. Others housed portions of ancient columns, ruined busts, and half-buried arches.

“These are the ancient layers of the city,” Pierce said. “We’ve been so afraid to hurt what was on top we never thought to look beneath. But cities this old are always built on layers. This is the stuff of legend.” He looked at King. “This was the Rome that Hercules would have known. Before the Caesars. Before the Coliseum. Before the vast empire.”

King was about to respond when he heard a voice. A woman. He stopped at a crossroad and listened. The sound distinctly came from the right-side tunnel. He cocked his ear toward it, as did Pierce.

“Sounds like an Italian accent,” Pierce said.

A second voice, also feminine, but higher pitched and American replied. King’s heart pounded. Fiona! He took one step down the hallway when a darkness swept above them and descended before them like a wall of shadow. King raised his pistol at the wraith’s head and slowly brought his light up toward its face.

As the light grew closer to the skin of its face, the creature let out a low shriek. King could see its slit of a nose vibrating as the call slipped out.

Sensing a violent conclusion to the stand-off, Pierce backed away.

As King continued to bring the light up, the wraith did something unexpected. Instead of shying away from it, it leaned into the light, fully exposing its face and revealing its large, oval eyes with black, quarter-sized pupils. The light caused it immense pain, which could be seen in its deeply furrowed brow, but it refused to back away. Its actions told King that despite being hurt by the light, it would not be intimidated by it. He also noted that it was not at all concerned about the handgun.

Pierce took another step back and was suddenly in the grasp of a pair of large hands. He let out a shout that spun King around. A man he had never seen in person stood behind Pierce, holding him in place. He was tall and burly, but well dressed in a black casual suit. His face was chiseled and hadn’t been shaven in perhaps a week. He had a barrel chest and a confident gleam in his eyes that either came from always being in control of a situation, or from being an expert at pretending to be.

King lowered his weapon. It would do him no good. “Hercules.”

“Please,” the man said. “Call me Alexander.”

THIRTY-ONE

Chaco Province, Argentina

BISHOP WAITED FOR the sound to come again, but the jungle had gone silent—tense—like every living creature knew something bad was about to happen. They sensed it, just as Bishop and the five Delta operators with him sensed it. But what was going to happen, he had no idea.

Closing his eyes, Bishop relaxed in the dark water, focusing all his attention on his hearing.

He listened to the jungle. The large palm leaves of the trees overhead scraped against each other. The river bubbled as it rolled over rocks on the shoreline.

He listened to his men. Silent. Waiting.

He listened to the targets, Miguel and Nahuel Franco. Bishop opened his eyes. The Francos had gone silent, too.

Bishop peeked up over the log that hid him from their line of sight and saw both men still sitting on the sandy beach. But Nahuel was holding the shotgun and Miguel had produced a revolver. At first glance, Bishop thought the men had heard the same sounds in the jungle, but when he took a closer look he realized the awful truth.

They were looking toward him.

Not the jungle.

Bishop turned to his men and spoke quickly. “Ditch your weapons and night vision. Do not engage. Do not speak. I will come for you.”

He ducked under the water and disappeared into the darkness.

BP-One blinked twice in surprise. Then he nodded and passed on the orders. The team quickly put their weapons and night vision goggles into the water and let them sink to the muddy bottom. They’d all been warned that the Chess Team did things a little differently, but had yet to experience it firsthand. It seemed Bishop’s Pawns were about to get their first taste in truly unconventional warfare.

After a minute passed and Bishop had not yet surfaced, BP-One thought, suicidal warfare. Then he became distracted by the row of rifle muzzles sliding out of the jungle. Following orders, the team silently raised their hands.

Ten darkly clad Argentine National Gendarmerie soldiers exited the jungle, keeping their weapons trained on the intruders. Bright lamps from within the jungle and from the sandy beach filled the river with daylight luminosity. “Mantenga sus manos hacia arriba y salir del agua. Ahora,” one of the men commanded, his voice firm and in control.

Only BP-Three could speak fluent Spanish, but he remained silent, following Bishop’s orders to the T. Instead, he translated through his actions, stepping out of the water and entering the jungle, motioning for the others to follow. As BP-One stepped out of the river, he glanced back one more time, wondering how Bishop had remained submerged for so long. He could have swum away, but the river was wide and long. Anywhere he surfaced would have been seen.

While the Delta team was restrained in plastic zip-tie handcuffs, three of the ANG soldiers scanned the river, looking for signs of movement. They scanned with flashlights, highlighting every inch of the water’s surface and the far shoreline.

When five minutes had past, BP-Two shot BP-One a nervous glance. They were all wondering the same things: Where is Bishop? And is he dead?

* * *

WHEN BISHOP DUCKED beneath the water he released all the air in his lungs and sank to the bottom. Finding a tree trunk, he slid underneath it, wrapped his arms around it in a great bear hug, and squeezed for all he was worth. Just as his body began to crave more oxygen, the ANG soldiers had made their move. Bishop watched as lights lit the scene above, but failed to pierce the ten-foot-deep black water. When the flashlights began panning across the river, his body shook with the need to breath.

That was five minutes ago.

He’d been in the water for seven.

At the four-minute mark he had been unable to fight his body’s natural urges any longer. His mouth snapped open and his lungs filled with water. But no bubbles rose to the surface. With no air in his lungs, Bishop’s drowning went completely unnoticed. As his body convulsed he focused on one thing—hanging on. For three more minutes he continued to drown, his body dying and regenerating over and over again. It was a torture unlike anything he’d ever endured before. Having a limb torn off, even nearly losing his head, had been less agonizing than this. Because no matter how well he knew he would survive, his body believed it was dying.

The lights moved away from the river a minute later and then faded as the group moved off. After waiting another full minute, until the light had fully extinguished, he let go of the tree trunk and rose to the surface. It took all of his mental energy to rise slowly out of the water, to allow the water to drain fully from his lungs before taking a breath, but he managed the task. His resurrection from the watery grave was silent and unnoticed. He crawled onto the shore, mentally and physically exhausted. Ten seconds later, thanks to his regenerative abilities, Bishop stood, full of energy and feeling fine—as though nothing had happened.

Despite that, his psyche had taken a beating. He hadn’t just tasted death, he’d shared a meal with the Grim Reaper himself. Bishop rolled his neck, took a deep breath, and pushed the memory of drowning out of his mind. A fear of death would not help him retrieve his men, especially when it was likely he would survive his death several more times before the night was through.

He shed the majority of his wet clothes, improving his mobility without losing any stealth thanks to his dark skin. He also left behind his night vision goggles, which were not appropriate for running. The only weapons he kept were his silenced sidearm and KA-BAR knife.

The jungle tore at him as he ran through the darkness, but he gave the momentary pain no heed as his body quickly healed every superficial wound. He didn’t slow until he heard angry voices speaking Spanish. Seven of the ANG soldiers had stopped to perform an impromptu interrogation before bringing the men in officially. When he peeked through some brush and saw his men bound and on their knees, he wondered if they would be brought in at all. When the man questioning brought his handgun up and shot BP-One in the leg, it was all the motivation Bishop needed to act.

Over the shout of pain from BP-One, no one heard the whistle of Bishop’s KA-BAR knife sailing though the air. But they saw the end result as the seven-inch blade buried itself into the interrogator’s leg. The man shouted and fell, clutching the knife.

Bishop followed the knife’s path, charging from the jungle with his silenced Sig Sauer raised. Aiming for the soldier’s body armor, he squeezed off two shots, dropping a second man. The rounds didn’t kill the soldier, but the impact, like punches from a young Mike Tyson, took away his breath and will to fight. The five remaining men opened fire, riddling his body with bullets.

Flesh flew.

Blood sprayed.

But still he charged.

As he fired four more shots, aiming through blood-coated eyes, Bishop saw abject fear enter the eyes of the remaining ANG soldiers. Suddenly, three of the four men fell to the ground, where Bishop’s Pawns One through Five, who had easily freed themselves from the plastic cuffs, made short work of them, each following Bishop’s lead in subduing but not killing the soldiers.

The last standing ANG soldier unloaded at Bishop’s chest. As Bishop felt the bullets enter his chest and exit his back he worried that one might strike the crystal that kept him sane. He leapt forward with a yell, fearing insanity more than death, and struck out with his fist. Despite his arm taking three rounds, it regenerated by the time it struck the man’s helmeted head. Despite the helmet dulling the blow, the man crumpled to the jungle floor, unconscious.

Bishop grunted as the intense pain from being shot innumerable times overpowered his adrenaline. He fell to one knee, clenched his eyes shut, and waited for the wounds to heal. The pain was replaced by a fiery itch and then faded completely. He stood up, a bloody, but hale, mess of a soldier and looked at his team, who were staring at him.

BP-One looked at the unconcious ANG soldiers, then back to Bishop. He grinned. “You do realize how entirely fucked up that was?”

Bishop nodded. “Tip of the iceberg.” He pointed to BP-One’s injured leg. “Can you make it to the LZ?”

“It’s not going to heal on its own, but I can make it.”

Bishop headed out. His team had survived, but the mission was a failure. And he’d nearly lost everything. Had the crystal been destroyed … He made a mental note to find a way to keep the crystal better protected and started the long trek home.

THIRTY-TWO

Taipei, Taiwan

THE WOMAN IN the power suit leveled her weapon at Knight’s head. When he dove to the side, she fired. The round whistled past his ear—he could feel its heat—and struck a passing taxi.

As he hit the sidewalk and rolled, Knight heard the taxi’s tires squeal over the screams of fleeing pedestrians. The vehicle’s driver lost control, possibly hit by the round meant for him. The woman shouted something in Chinese that he couldn’t make out as he got his feet under him again. He spun toward the woman, drawing a weapon of his own, and when her body lined up in his sight, he pulled the trigger without hesitation. The silent round sailed out of the gun, striking the woman in the throat. The dart, meant for Walis Palalin, dropped her to her knees as she held her throat in surprise. She slid down the stairs on her back, stopping on the sidewalk.

He opened her suit and inspected the badge. National Police Agency. How did the Taiwanese police force know we were coming? Knight thought.

But there was no time to figure that out. A loud engine announced the presence of a large gray van, its side stenciled with the Chinese text that translated to: SWAT.

The Taiwanese SWAT were elite fighters who were not just brutally efficient, but also masters in hand-to-hand kung fu combat. Knowing that a full squad of heavily armed and highly skilled men would burst from the back of the van at any second, Knight scoured the street for some hope of escape.

The taxi that had been shot sat empty and running. The owner had stopped on the curb and limped quickly into the hospital, a trail of blood marking his passage. He had taken a round and, being at a hospital, wasted no time in seeking help. In doing so, he’d left Knight the perfect getaway car.

He turned to his two teammates. “Get to the taxi!”

Shrieking tires followed by hard metal bangs and angry shouting voices filled the air behind Knight. The SWAT van had stopped and expelled the men inside, who were now shouting at him to stop. But stopping was impossible, both because he couldn’t afford to get caught, but also because he was airborne, leaping over the hood of the taxi.

He landed on the driver’s side and hopped into the front seat of the still-running vehicle. As his teammates opened the back doors and jumped in, a sound like thunder erupted behind them. But there were no storm clouds, only twenty men opening fire with automatic weapons.

One of the Delta operators in the backseat shouted in pain, struck by a round. As the cloud of bullets ate up the back of the vehicle, Knight knew it wouldn’t be long before all three men were reduced to tenderized, indistinguishable meat. He slammed the car into drive and hit the gas.

Bullets pursued them as they shot out into the road, turned left, and merged with traffic. Sirens could be heard converging on their location. Escape in the taxi, which was easy to spot with its shot-up back, would be impossible. As the rubber of the left rear tire sheared off and rolled away, Knight stopped the vehicle in the middle of the road and ran to the black sedan parked to the side.

He opened the driver’s side, sat down, and started the engine of the team’s car. He looked back as his teammates entered the vehicle. One man was bleeding from the shoulder. Nothing serious. But what he saw rounding the corner behind them was very serious. The SWAT team had run on foot, entering the street fifty feet back. Knight rolled down his window and tossed a small object into the ruined taxi.

He hit the gas, drawing the attention of the SWAT team, who had been focused on the taxi. They adjusted their aim, but before a round could be fired, the taxi exploded, sending metal fragments and a ball of fire into the air. The SWAT team ducked for cover and missed Knight’s quick left-hand turn.

Knight slowed his pace, took several turns, and merged with the busy city traffic. Of course, their car had been seen and would have to be abandoned shortly. But as police vehicles swarmed past them, headed toward the explosion, the team took comfort in the fact that their car’s tinted windows hid their identities. Driving toward the team’s rendezvous point at one of the city’s many ports, Knight activated his throat mic and contacted the other members of his team. “This is Knight. Abort mission. Meet at the port in thirty. We’re bugging out.”

“Copy that, Knight. We had no— oh shit!” Knight recognized the sound of bullets striking metal and glass. He could hear shouts. Angry at first. Then desperate. The return fire was loud in his ear. Then everything went quiet. And he knew what that meant.

The rest of his team was dead.

THIRTY-THREE

Rome, Italy

“I’M AFRAID THAT’S impossible,” Alexander said, leading King and Pierce into a nearby storage room. He sat on a tarp-covered crate while Pierce inspected the remnants of an old worn statue and King paced. The wraith had gone, but they knew it lurked nearby.

“Nothing’s impossible,” King replied.

Alexander laughed. “Now that you have encountered some of the strangeness our world has to offer, you fancy yourself an expert on what is, and what is not, impossible?”

“Just let me see her,” King said, his voice less demanding than the first time he’d asked to see Fiona. “She’s diabetic and needs insulin.”

“I noticed the insulin pump and have taken steps to see that she is provided with refills when required. If I allowed you to see her it would brew hope of rescue among the others. Hope would lead to discontentment, unruliness, and anger. Right now they are content prisoners. Right now, they are safe.” Alexander crossed his arms. “So it is as I said before, impossible.”

“The others?” Pierce asked, turning from the statue. “How many people have you kidnapped?”

“Fifty-seven. But kidnapping implies a negative intent,” Alexander said. “I am saving their lives.”

“By keeping them in a subterranean tomb?” King asked.

“You were charged with keeping just one of them safe,” Alexander said. “And we know how that turned out. Until the matter is cleared up, they must remain under my guard. They will be safe in the secret places that only my people and I know about.”

“The Herculean Society?” Pierce asked.

Alexander gave a nod and a grin. “Your old friends, yes.”

King hated to admit it, but he agreed with Alexander. His methods were shady, as they had been in the past, but what he was doing wasn’t any different from the mission the rest of the team had undertaken; to protect the last speakers of ancient languages, they had to be stealed away and hidden. The difference was that Alexander employed inhuman helpers and kept the prisoners in the dark, both figuratively and literally.

Alexander leaned back, his large elbows resting on another crate. “Of course, your presence here debunks my claims of safe refuge.” His eyes, brimming with a mixture of cockiness and annoyance, glared at King. “How did you find me?”

“You didn’t mean for us to find you?” King asked.

“Not at all.”

King explained how they pieced together Alexander’s two separate mentions of a promise to someone—a promise he was now breaking by getting involved with the problems of the world. He related the logical jump to Acca Larentia and the hints about her burial place not in what history said, but in what it was missing. When he was done, Alexander looked stunned.

King noticed the ancient man’s flabbergasted expression. “What?”

“I’m … impressed.” Alexander sat up straight. “I thought you were simply a man who knew how to kill people.”

“I’m that, too,” King said.

“Dare I ask if you could have been followed?”

King thought about his unease while in the ruins of the Roman Forum. He’d felt a presence watching them, but he was sure it was the guard’s they had encountered that his instincts had detected. “We weren’t followed.”

Alexander didn’t look convinced. “These are strange times. The rocks themselves can have eyes.”

“Only Lewis knew exactly where I was headed,” King said. “We weren’t followed.”

“Mmm,” Alexander said, still not entirely convinced, but moving on. “You say you entered through the Lacus Curtius?” Alexander asked.

Pierce nodded. “A ladder might be a good idea, though.”

Alexander smiled. “It’s a favored entrance of the Forgotten. They don’t need ladders.”

“The who?” Pierce asked.

“The cloaked men you have encountered. They are as ancient as I am, but lost their voices and souls long ago.”

“Who were they?”

“Test subjects,” Alexander said. When he saw the angry stares of both King and Pierce, he added, “Unending life has slowly peeled away my curtain of immorality. I do not see things the way I used to when I was young. When I was mortal. I wasn’t all that dissimilar from Richard Ridley.”

King pictured Ridely, the head of Manifold Genetics, who had tried to unlock the secrets of immortality. The man’s pursuit of godhood had been ruthless. Human experimentation left victims insane and nearly impervious to harm. Thousands more had come close to death when Ridley’s actions resulted in the mythical Hydra being reborn. No price was too steep, and in the end he achieved his goal of immortality, but lost his company, his men, and his fortune. But he was free, and had all the time in the world to make a comeback. He pictured Alexander in a similar role and the image frightened him. Thank God he’s on our side.

Alexander continued. “The Forgotten are proof of this. I keep them to remind me of what I could be. What I have been. And what the cost of my failures can lead to.”

King waited for the account to continue, but Pierce had already put the pieces together. “They killed Acca. The Forgotten?”

A sudden sadness swept over Alexander. He stared at the floor. “Could you believe it still stings after all this time?” He looked up at them. “They are prone to madness on their own. Desperate with thirst. Hundreds died at their hands in the early years, before Acca was killed. Since then I have kept them sated with a supplement that replaces their craving for blood.”

“You’re not saying they’re vampires,” King said.

Alexander shook his head. “Not in the traditional sense, but it’s possible they’re responsible for the legend.”

“My God…” Pierce said.

“Their hands are covered in pores, each containing a small, strong, and hollow tendril. Thousands of them. This is how they walk on walls. It’s also how they drain blood through their victim’s skin.” He demonstrated by grabbing his own arm with his hand. “May you never end up in their embrace. It is an awful thing.”

For a moment, King wondered if that was a veiled threat, but the distant look of heartbreak had returned to the man’s face. He’d witnessed Acca’s death.

“How did it happen?” King asked. “With Acca?”

“She stumbled across my lab. She was always curious. Always searching for answers. It’s part of what I loved about her. But it also got her into trouble. When she found them, locked behind bars, they hadn’t eaten in weeks. They were starved and pitiful-looking. Assuming they needed water, she held out a cup. Her act of mercy resulted in her death. The water spilled to the floor. They drank her dry.”

Alexander sniffed a deep breath through his nose and stood, his body thick, towering, and strong. All thoughts of the past were gone. “Enough of this. I’ll have one of the Forgotten escort you out at a secure location.”

King raised an eyebrow. “To quote you: ‘impossible.’” To punctuate his statement, King placed his hand on the handgun tucked into the front of his pants.

“You realize that’s useless in here, yes?” Alexander said, showing no fear of the weapon.

“But it will hurt,” King said with a grin. “A lot.”

Alexander chuckled and relaxed. “What do you want?”

“The same thing everyone locked away in your dungeon wants,” King said. “Hope. And if you have them, answers.”

Alexander walked past King and Pierce, entering the dark hallway. “I don’t know everything. But I can point you in the right direction.”

King fell in step behind Alexander. “That’s all I need.”

THIRTY-FOUR

Asino, Siberia

ROOK RAN DOWN the street, headed for the turn onto his targets’ road. He had no intention of giving up the mission because the Russian military happened to be flying overhead. The choppers had yet to arrive, but they would soon. The chop of their rotor blades pulsed through the forest as they grew closer. With his earbud back in place, Rook contacted his team again. “Give me a sitrep.”

“Rook, this is fubar,” RP-Two came back. “These helos aren’t flying by. They’re circling.”

What the fuck? Rook thought. It explained why he’d been hearing them for so long, but had yet to actually see one of the helicopters. But had the team? “What are we dealing with?”

“Unknown. We’ve seen shadows through the trees, but haven’t got a clear look. Best guess is that there are three of them, though.”

Rook’s earbud crackled to life again, but the voice didn’t belong to the five men on his Delta team. “Rook, this is Dominick Boucher. Queen reported mission compromised. Bishop has gone silent. We have reports of shots fired and men down in Taipei. Abort mission. Abort mi—”

Boucher’s voice was drowned out by the sound of an explosion. A pressure wave shot out of the forest carrying a cloud of pine needles. The shouts of his men followed the boom. “Rook, they’re Werewolves! Fully armed. Shit, they’re right on top of us!”

Gunfire ripped through the forest as the five-man Delta team returned fire. But Rook knew it was hopeless. Werewolf was the nickname for Russia’s Ka-50 Black Shark attack helicopter, so named because it seemed only a silver bullet could knock it out of the sky. They were heavily armored tank- and jet-killing weapons of war. With an armament that included antitank missiles, aerial rockets, air-to-air missiles, and an array of machine guns, three of which was severe overkill for taking out a five-man team.

Unless they knew who they were up against, Rook thought.

“Abort mission!” Rook shouted. “Lose them in the trees and—”

The buzz of two miniguns ripped through the forest.

Rook held his breath.

A loud cracking filled the air as a tree fell. It swished to the ground and struck with a boom.

Labored breath came through his earbud, followed by a voice. “RP-Two through Five are down! Two of the helos are on me. One is headed your way!”

Rook had been so stunned by the battle being waged in the forest that he still remained rooted in the middle of the country road. But there was nowhere to hide. Running toward the choppers was suicide and they clearly had thermal sensors to help locate warm human bodies in the cool forest. The road stretched on endlessly in either direction. And across from the forest was the open hilly pasture of the cow farm. Armed with only a handgun and three grenades, hidden beneath his thick sweater, he would last only as long as it took for the gunner to line him up and pull the trigger.

Knowing he didn’t have time to find cover, Rook decided to hide in plain sight. He leaped a short barb-wire fence into the pasture and ran up the hill. As he pounded up the soft loamed hillside, a second explosion blasted apart the forest. The missiles being fired, meant for tanks, had no doubt reduced Jeff Kafer, his friend, to slurry. Rook’s rage carried him up and over the hill just as a lone helicopter rose up over the forest and bore down on him.

He quickly turned his run into a walk, joining the fringe of a large, spooked cattle herd. He looked over his shoulder. The obsidian helicopter looked absolutely evil, its two wings carrying enough firepower to fight a war. But he just watched it approach; hoping his lack of fear and his clothing would make the gunner think twice. As the helicopter banked sharply and circled the hilltop, he knew his plan had worked. At least for the moment.

The helicopter swiveled around and returned, facing him head on. As it descended, the herd panicked and broke into several stampeding groups. Confused, the cows ran over each other, making a mess, their anxious moos drowned out by the coaxial rotor chop.

Rook could see the pilot and gunner giving him the once over so he used his very real anger over the death of his team and channeled it as the fictitious owner of a panicked herd of cattle. With a beet-red face he let loose with a string of Russian curses, violently gesticulating at the helicopter and the scattering cows. When the helicopter remained rooted in place he got bold, picking up a small stone and lobbing it at the chopper. It struck the windshield and made the men inside laugh.

The helicopter rose up and flew just over his head, reuniting with the others still circling the forest. Rook watched them for a moment, but when two military trucks full of soldiers rumbled down the road, he retreated toward the farmhouse, where he hoped to find some kind of vehicle. As he neared the home, a vehicle wasn’t waiting for him. Instead it was a man speaking on a mobile phone and raising a double-barrel shotgun at him.

Rook stopped when he saw the weapon. He tried to hear what the man was saying, but became distracted by the chop of rotor blades growing louder. Not just one, but all three choppers were returning. Before Rook could speak, think, or move, the rising sound of approaching war machines was drowned out by the blast of two shotgun shells.

THIRTY-FIVE

El Calvario, Colombia

HIDDEN IN THE shadows, Queen and her team watched as four more vehicles entered the town from the low side road. They stopped near the bottom of town, fifteen feet below the team’s position. But something was different about these vehicles. They were SUVs, perhaps 1990s models, black and mud-covered from off-roading in the jungle—not military. The twenty men who exited the vehicles were armed with a variety of semiautomatic and automatic weapons, but nothing the Colombian military was known to use. Most were dressed in olive green, like the fifteen men at the top of the rise, but the hodgepodge of uniforms smacked of militia. The anger in the men’s faces revealed who they truly were: drug runners.

And the military was not welcome. Whether or not the military knew the runners had set up shop nearby wasn’t clear, but they were about to find out. Queen was about to make sure of that.

While the drug runners had no idea the team was there, the military was certainly seeking them out. And more might be on the way. They needed a distraction, and a big one, first to get across the street without being seen, and second to make it through the jungle to the LZ where a UH-100S stealth Blackhawk transport helicopter waited to whisk them back to friendly territory. It would be a dangerous flight over hostile terrain, but the still classified chopper was invisible to all but the naked eye and piloted by a “Nightstalker” from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. They were the most highly trained pilots in the world and Delta had first dibs.

But even the best pilot in the world is no good when your body is full of bullets.

Queen relayed her plan to the team. After being greeted with wide eyes and dropped mouths, the team glanced at each other and then nodded to her. For the first time in her life, Queen could clearly read a man’s mind. They thought she was nuts. That the chick Delta operator with the skull brand on her forehead no longer feared death and was going to get them all killed.

In part, they were right. She didn’t fear death. The problem with their assessment was that her fear of death was conquered long before the events of the previous year.

She left the team where they were and snuck into a neighboring home. The two-story house was old and the floors bent at odd angles. If another earthquake struck the area she had no doubt the building would collapse. But it would serve her needs, barring any earthquakes.

After inspecting the first floor and finding an older couple asleep in a bedroom at the back of the house—where they should be safe—she headed upstairs. Stepping on the outside edge of the staircase, she quietly made her way up. A quick check of the two upstairs rooms revealed no other occupants.

A second-floor window faced up the hill, giving her a clear view of the military jeeps. The men were now exiting the Forero residence, guns raised and heading straight toward them. She had no idea if the military was working with the drug runners, or if the groups simply tolerated each other, but neither side had fired a shot, despite now being in clear view of each other. Fearing that one side might back down from a fight, Queen raised her UMP, aimed it at one of the jeeps and squeezed off two separate three-round bursts. The six bullets pinged off the jeep, sending military men diving to the ground. Moments later they responded as predicted, by opening fire on her position.

She ran.

The window behind her exploded, sending rounds and glass shards into the far wall.

The barrage was followed by a second, much closer demonstration of firepower. The drug runners, fearing an attack, opened fire. Both sides were now fully engaged.

As Queen entered the upstairs hallway, a little voice came out of the darkness in the back bedroom. “Papa?”

Queen’s eyes went wide as she saw a little boy, no older then seven, standing in the bedroom doorway, rubbing his eyes and looking nervous. How she had missed him she had no idea, but she couldn’t leave him here. If he were to walk in front of the window from where she’d fired, the military would cut him down.

With two fast strides, she reached the boy, threw him over her shoulder, and leaped the banister. She landed on the stairway with a hard thump, and jumped the rest of the way down. At the base of the stairs, the boy’s papa stood ready with a shotgun.

Their eyes met for a moment and came to an agreement. He could see she was helping the boy, and given her professional gear, and perhaps the fact that she was a woman, decided to trust her. The man lowered his shotgun and took a step back. Queen put the boy in his arms and said, “Permanecer abajo hasta que la batalla ha terminado.”

She paused at the door way and added, “Gracias.”

The man tilted his head forward as he headed to the back room with the boy. “Y a usted.”

As Queen rounded the back of the house she came nose to barrel with one of her men’s submachine guns. He drew it back without pause and met the other four, whose weapons were trained on the street side of the alley. Anyone who entered would be torn apart. She tapped the men on the shoulder, getting their attention, and then led them around the building to their right. The alley on the other side emerged five feet behind the last of the drug runner’s vehicles. The men were using the car doors and rear ends as shelter when reloading.

Queen paused at the front corner of the house. “Stay low, move fast, and try not to get shot.” She finished the statement with a fiendish grin that intimidated her teammates but also brought smiles to their faces. Queen was nuts, but she was so good at it. And it gave the team a supernatural confidence.

They struck out into the road, ducking low. With the drug runners’ attention on the top of town and their bodies hidden by both darkness and the black vehicles, they moved without being seen.

That is, until one of the runners ducked and turned around, intending to reload his weapon. Instead he took a silenced bullet to the center of his forehead courtesy of Queen’s sidearm. Before his body had slumped to the pavement, the team had entered the other side of town. Two minutes later Queen lead her team into the jungle. Another fifteen and they were airborne, heading north over the jungle and wondering what kind of hell the rest of the Chess Team had been dropped into.

THIRTY-SIX

Rome, Italy

“WHY DON’T WE start with what you know,” Alexander said as he led King and Pierce into a large circular chamber. The fifty-foot-diameter room had three arched exits, was lit by rows of recessed lights, and its tan walls and floor were polished to a shine.

But it wasn’t the finished sheen of the room that held King’s and Pierce’s attention, it was the gallery of objects held within.

Like a museum, the space was filled with glass display cases, glass-domed pedestals, and even a few finely preserved statues. King also noted that the room held several security measures similar to the most high-tech museums—ceiling-mounted cameras, infrared sensors, ultrasonic sensors, and motion detectors. He glanced back at the entrance they’d come through and saw several circular bars hidden in the floor and in the top of the arch. Should something be taken from its place, the room, which was really more of a vault, could be locked down.

King focused on Alexander’s questions while Pierce quickly wove through the displays, looking at the contents with wide-eyed fascination. “We know they’re some kind of golem,” King said, feeling stupid as he did. That they were fighting golems still seemed ridiculous, despite who he was talking to.

Alexander sat in what looked to be a very old chair, its frame built from thick wood. Its leather back and seat cushion were faded and cracked. “Go on.”

“They’re part of Jewish folklore and are created by speaking the word ‘Emet’ and destroyed by the word ‘met.’ Any inanimate objects can be animated, but clay is preferable.”

Alexander waited for more, but when King didn’t speak, his eyebrows slowly rose. “That’s it?”

Pierce’s voice interrupted. “Are these apple seeds?” He was leaning over a pedestal, peering through its glass top.

“They are,” Alexander replied.

Pierce stood up straight, like he’d just been struck by something. He looked at Alexander. “Not from the Garden of the Hesperides?”

“The same. And before you ask, they have great healing properties, but do not grant immortality.”

Pierce mumbled excitedly to himself and continued his journey around the room.

“How much more is there?” King asked. “What don’t we know?”

“A great deal,” Alexander said. “The tales of rabbis using the ability of words to bring golems to life is simply one of the more modern documented usages of a very ancient power. It is something long forgotten by most of the world and buried in many of our ancient languages. Despite being only a fragment of something much larger, the ability to bring the nonliving to life, it is the most commonly used application of the ancient power and can be easily traced through history.

“In the sixteenth century, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, a rabbi in Prague, is said to have brought a golem to life to protect his community from the Holy Roman Empire, which had decreed that all Jews should be cast out or killed. You know the story, yes?”

King nodded.

“It was a skill either taught to him by his predecessors, but used infrequently, or documented in a text the rabbi found. Either way, the knowledge was passed down to the rabbi through a line of Jewish ancestors going back to ancient Israel, where a well-known Jew could manipulate the elements with his words. But the knowledge is older than Israel. The Jews who had fled Egypt took the knowledge with them, led by a man who seemed to have mastered many elements of this ancient power.”

“You’re talking about Moses?”

Alexander gave a nod.

“And the ‘well-known Jew’ who could manipulate the elements?”

“Jesus. Who could walk on water, turn away storms, and, if you believe it, rise from the dead.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it,” King said.

Alexander chuckled. “He would have liked you, King. You have a lot in common with Thomas.”

King looked incredulous. “You knew Jesus?”

“I met him.”

“And you heard him speak this language?”

“No, but others did. Some claimed to understand it, hearing his words as simple commands. Others were dumbfounded by it.”

“So, what, Christianity is founded on a magical charlatan?”

“Jesus spent his childhood in Egypt, as did Moses, so it’s possible both men found some ancient source of knowledge and used what they learned to perform amazing miracles. But their mastery of the ancient language and its powers went far beyond the creation of golems. It could just as easily be argued that they had supernatural instruction.”

“Hey!” Pierce shouted from the other side of the gallery, where he stood in front of a lion skin that hung on the wall. He gripped its curly black hair in his hands, close to pulling it out from excitement. “Is … is this?”

“I wore it in Nazca,” Alexander said. “But it was one of many I wore in my early life. When I was still a hunter.”

King cleared his throat. “So the source of this power is in Egypt?” King asked, hoping to keep the conversation on track.

“The trail leads to Egypt, where golems were used as slaves, along with the Jews, to help build the pyramids. Once you understand that golems were fairly common in the ancient world, you can trace their history and involvement in ancient cultures around the world. The pyramids in Central America, Stonehenge, Easter Island—”

“The ziggurats of Sumer.” King could finally see where Alexander was going. The ziggurats of Sumer were mankind’s first truly amazing construction projects. It was also the cradle of modern civilization, giving us our first written human language, cities, and code of laws.

“And it is there, in Babylon—the capital city of Sumer—that we discover how this ancient language was lost to humanity, hidden within the scores of languages developed shortly after that period of history.”

The answer came to King before Alexander could speak it. “The Tower of Babel.” King knew the biblical account well enough. God, upset that the people had built a tower to reach Heaven, had confused the population’s language and scattered them around the planet. And he didn’t buy a word of it.

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“It’s another Jewish myth given a few verses in the Bible.”

“Not just the Bible, or more accurately, the Pentateuch. It is also mentioned in the Book of Jubiless, Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews, the Greek Third Apocalypse of the Baruch, the Midrash, Kabbalah, and the Qur’an. The Sumerians tell the story as Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. But perhaps most interesting are the Central American traditions. In one, a tower is built that will allow Xelhua, a survivor of a great flood, to storm Heaven. But the tower is destroyed and those who built the tower had their language confused. Then again from the Toltecs; a tower known as a zacuali, is built by the survivors of a deluge, but once more their language was confused and they were scattered around the planet. The ancient history of the world is recorded very similarly in most cultures, including a great flood, the Tower of Babel, and, most importantly, a protolanguage that every human being had been speaking since the dawn of Homo sapiens.”

* * *

THE DIM LIGHT wasn’t exactly easy to read by, but it was better than nothing. The same could be said for Fiona’s reading material—a three-week-old copy of the New York Times. After reading the movie and book reviews she searched for a comics section, but found none. What a rip-off! She had hoped a little humor might distract her from the growing tension of those around her.

The revelation that she knew about the wraiths before being imprisoned made her a pariah. Her confidence about being rescued by her father, whose identity she refused to divulge, only made the others more skeptical of her presence. Some thought she was a spy. Only Elma continued to speak to her.

A hand bearing the mark of the Herculean Society took hold of the open newspaper and pulled it down. Elma’s head poked over the top. “Any interesting news?”

Fiona lowered the paper to her lap. She sat cross-legged on her cot, wrapped in a blanket. Still dressed in her black pajamas, she looked like a typical girl about to be tucked in by her mother. But she was not a typical girl, and Elma, as nice as she was, could never be her mother. Though kind, she lacked patience, a sense of humor, and an imagination. King had her beat, hands down. “If you consider movie reviews news, then yes.”

Elma blew air through her lips, a noncommittal sound that was neither laugh nor disapproval. She sat on the bed, bending the mattress toward her weight, which seemed heavier than usual. “The others have been talking,” she said.

Fiona had been observing the group since her arrival, watching their movements and listening to conversations with her keen ears. There was a subtle pecking order that kept things orderly, but also created a kind of caste system. Certain prisoners ate first, bathed first, and made decisions for the group. With so many different cultures represented, it seemed the one with the most dominant social structure had been adopted. They had become an underground society with rings of social position. Elma was on the outer ring, mostly for the kindness she’d shown Fiona. Buru, who was speaking to a group of men, had pulled away from Fiona and maintained his position at the society’s core.

But Buru had not forsaken Fiona. The information Elma occasionally delivered came straight from Buru. Which is what made Elma’s next words so worrisome. “They want to get rid of you.”

Fiona sat up straight. “What? Why?”

“You frighten them.”

“I’m just a kid.”

“Since your arrival, you have shown greater strength, knowledge, and resilience than any of them. They believe you are either here to watch us or are the cause of all this.”

“What are they going to do? It’s not like you can have me transferred to another cell.”

Elma just looked at her gravely.

They’re going to kill me, Fiona thought. Her face filled with fear, but it was momentary. Anger came next. “You just let them try it,” she whispered through gritted teeth.

Elma’s hands shot up in frustration. “You see! Even as these people plot to kill you, you show them to be cowards.” She sat quietly for a moment, then asked, “Where does this strength come from?”

Fiona had never thought of herself as strong. She just got by. She adapted. Life on the reservation hadn’t been easy, starting with: “My parents died when I was little. I was raised by my grandmother. But I think I took care of her just as much as she took care of me.”

“Life without parents can be tough,” Elma said, “but you—”

“A year ago, my reservation was attacked. More than three thousand people were killed, including my grandmother.”

Elma’s hand went to her mouth. The Siletz Reservation attack was well known around the world as the worst terrorism attack since the World Trade Center. “The news said there was a survivor, but never gave an identity. It was you?”

As Fiona nodded, Elma reached out and touched her face, then her hair, as though to confirm that this little girl was in fact a Native American. “It’s no wonder you’re tough…” She stood up. “This will change everything. You don’t have to wo—”

The chamber shook. The lights hanging from the ceiling swayed.

As the pounding of giant feet grew louder, Fiona shuffled back against the wall. She knew the sound. “They’re coming for me,” she said.

Elma looked at her, eyes wide. “Who is coming for you?”

Fiona pointed in the direction of the noise, toward the back of the chamber. “They’re coming for us all.”

The back wall of the chamber broke apart, falling into rubble. A tunnel was revealed. A whispering voice came from the tunnel. The crumbled wall shifted into two piles and began taking shape. As two hulking bodies of stone emerged, Elma filled her lungs to scream.

* * *

ALEXANDER CONTINUED HIS explanation. “Which takes us back to the very beginning and the very first recorded mention of a golem, ‘The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.’”

“Adam?” King did nothing to hide his continued skepticism.

“Adam is represented in the ancient stories of many cultures. Try not to get hung up on the Judeo-Christian baggage and try to see the truth. The Bible, and other sources, say that God spoke the universe into being. Light, earth, water, life, all came from His words. And man was formed from dust. We are all golems, but have retained the life imbued to us.

“So this is what, the language of God?”

“Call it what you want,” Alexander said. “But it is the protohuman language, and with the right speaker, it is capable of amazing, and terrible, things.”

“Is that why you broke your promise,” King pointed to the entryway they’d come through, “to her?”

“What humanity does to itself is of no concern of mine,” Alexander said, his voice suddenly harsh. “I, unlike some”—he glanced at Pierce—“am a protector of history.”

Pierce had moved closer, his attention captured by the new twist in the conversation. “You’re an eraser of history.”

“To preserve it, sometimes it must be forgotten. The past does not belong to the present. Should your grave be exhumed in a thousand years, would you want your body dissected, put on display, or any number of other crimes committed against the dead done to you?”

King thought about how he felt standing over his mother’s grave. He understood Alexander’s point. Life was sacred and our bodies, in death, were as well. He also understood the man’s motivation. “You knew them,” he said.

Alexander looked at King and then to the shining floor. “There are men I knew on display in museums. Men who would find the treatment of their bodies scandalous.”

“But what about what we can learn from the past?”

“What man learns, he soon uses to destroy. The fascination with uncovering secrets is simply a craving for power. And this situation is no different. The protolanguage was disseminated for a good reason. It should not be in the control of modern man. It is a rape of history that cannot stand.”

“That’s it?” Pierce said. “That’s why you’ve been running around the planet collecting people? To keep someone from learning this ancient language?”

“And to protect their lives,” Alexander said. “They are the last speakers of ancient languages. Their knowledge—their lives—are precious to me. Whoever is doing this is desecrating everything I have sworn to protect.”

“Then you don’t know who’s behind the killings?”

“No,” Alexander said. “Nor do I know how this language truly works. But I have identified a man—a genius physicist and former rabbi, who dabbles in genetics and biology as well, who might be able to—”

Pierce suddenly stepped closer. He looked nervous. “Do you two feel that?”

King trained his senses on the physical world around him. He could feel a gentle vibration tickling his body. He’d been so caught up in the conversation that he’d missed it. “Is there a subway nearby?”

Alexander shook his head no, and stood to his feet. “The land is protected above and below.”

“Protected from construction,” Pierce said. “But from attack?”

“Every entrance is watched by heat sensors and motion detectors,” Alexander said. “There is no way in without my knowing.”

“What if someone created a new way in?” Pierce asked.

A flash of concern appeared on Alexander’s face.

“Fiona,” King whispered.

Alexander burst into motion, running out of the gallery, back the way they had come. King followed close at his heals, knowing the immortal man was going to protect the people he’d worked so hard to hide away. Pierce lingered a moment, not wanting to leave the room of archaeological treasures behind, but then followed.

As they entered the maze of hallways the vibrations became intense enough that they had to stop moving to remain standing. When the shaking dissipated and the rumbling of stone quieted, a new sound filled the tunnels—a woman screaming.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Washington, D.C.

PRESIDENT TOM DUNCAN sat at the head of an executive table in a West Wing conference room. Seated with him were twenty-seven advisors on everything from the school system to the space program—apparently every sector of the country was feeling the pinch. But none greater than the economy.

“People are staying home,” Claire Roberts said. She was one of five top financial advisors. Her expertise lay in foreign investments and lending, but she was rarely ever wrong. “People are choosing to watch movies online rather than go to the theater. They’re driving less. Buying less. And if it keeps up, they’ll all start losing their jobs.”

“C’mon,” said a firecracker of a man. Larry Hussey, Duncan’s domestic economic advisor, was eternally optimistic and, without fail, disagreed with Roberts. “Internet sales are up. Way up. The market will self-correct when the crisis is over. The American people are still consuming, just in the privacy, and safety, of their own homes.”

Roberts sighed and looked at Duncan. “He’s right about Internet sales. The economy is hanging on, but it’s by a thread. Here’s the difference. When the average American goes out to buy a book, they don’t just spend eight dollars on a paperback. They spend between three and five dollars on gas unless they’re driving a hybrid. They buy a chai latte or frappachino. A large percentage of those people end up eating at restaurants afterward and another chunk of people will go see a movie as well. To buy a book online requires no gas, shipping is often free, and there are no opportunities for residual spending.”

“It might solve the country’s credit card debt,” Hussey grumbled.

Roberts raised her voice. “The vast majority of online sales are made with credit cards.”

Hussey slouched a little. Though the man would never verbalize defeat, Duncan recognized the body language.

“That leaves us with the question of ‘why’ and the potential solutions,” Roberts continued. “The why is simple. In normal times of crisis, war for instance, people spend less money on nonessentials. Movies, books, music. Luxury items. All the entertainment industries take hits to the pocketbook. People feel unsure about the future and instinctively hoard a little bit. But what we’re experiencing here is something a little different. People are afraid to go out. They’re afraid to congregate in large groups because that might make them targets. After all, if Fort Bragg can be hit hard, what’s to stop the bad guys from striking a concert, or football game, or a packed movie theater? Even church attendance is down, and that normally goes up during wartime.”

“Solutions?” Duncan asked. He hated the question because he had his own answer: to personally hunt down and catch whoever was behind the attacks. Instead he was stuck deciding what to do about the population’s spending habits. There might be ways to ease the problem, but he knew damn well that the only real solution was to rain down a healthy dose of Deep Blue justice.

“People are afraid,” Roberts said. “We have to make them feel safe. Encourage cities to increase patrols. Address the nation. Talk about the progress being made in tracking down the ‘evil doers.’”

“What progress?” Hussey said.

Roberts rolled her eyes. “Exaggerate if you need to. The point is people won’t go out. They won’t congregate in places with other people if they feel like it puts them in the crosshairs.”

“You’ll need to appeal to their wallets as well,” Hussey said. “Making them feel safe is one thing, giving them incentive to spend will pull people off their couches and out of their homes.”

“Larry…” Roberts said. She apparently knew where Hussey was headed and wasn’t comfortable with it.

He waved her off. “It’s a good idea, Claire.” Then continued. “Suspend sales and meal taxes for a week. Maybe two. Some people won’t be able to resist. And when nothing bad happens to them, the rest will follow.”

“That would require a lot of state cooperation,” Duncan said.

“Mm-hmm,” Hussey said. “We’d likely have to reimburse their losses. But it could prevent a financial meltdown.”

“Sir,” Roberts said, trying to interject.

But Duncan liked the idea. “Get it done.”

Roberts sighed. It was her turn to deflate. “Why don’t you tell him whose idea that was, Larry.”

Hussey’s face went pale.

The door to the conference room opened. Duncan’s secretary entered and fought her way through the packed space. Duncan knew by the serious look on her face that she had an important message to deliver, but he needed an answer from Hussey, too. “Spill it, Larry.”

“I thought you would have known,” Hussey said. “It was on the news.”

“I’ve been a little distracted,” Duncan said. The secretary was almost there.

“The idea was Marrs’s.”

Fuck. Marrs was going to eat this up. Not only had he already committed to the idea in front of all his advisors, it was also a good idea. He couldn’t back out on it just because it came from Marrs first.

His secretary whispered in his ear. He flinched, having forgotten she was incoming. “Dominick Boucher called. Wants you to make contact asap.”

The nation’s economic woes took an instantaneous backseat. “Make contact. Those were his words exactly?”

The secretary nodded.

It was a key phrase they had established. It meant that Boucher needed to have a chat with Deep Blue. And that meant it was mission related, and, he looked at his watch, it was far too soon for the teams to have reported in. And that meant something was wrong.

Duncan stood.

A sea of voices rose up with him.

Documents had to be signed. Approval given. The nation managed. And Marrs’s plan had to be put in motion. None of it could happen without his John Hancock.

He stood rooted for a moment, torn between his conflicting duties. Manager and warrior fought a battle for his attention. His pulse quickened. He could feel it in his neck. The voices of his advisors were like needles in his eardrums. He had to take action. Every cell in his body cried out for it.

But that wasn’t what he signed up for.

He held out a hand, silencing group. “One at a time. Quickly.”

As the first form was handed to him by Larry Hussey, the form that would set Marrs’s plan in motion, Duncan turned to the secretary and said, “Call Boucher. Tell him I’m digging a trench and will call him when I’m done.”

“Digging a trench” wasn’t code for anything, but he knew Boucher would understand. No one liked digging trenches, but they could save your life when the mortars started flying. And if the crisis wasn’t ended soon, the skies would be clouded with rounds.

* * *

DUNCAN ENTERED THE empty situation room, hidden in a basement of the White House, and sat down at the head of the empty executive table. Using a small remote control, he dimmed the room’s lights and sat in darkness. After rubbing his eyes, he leaned forward on his hands, rubbing his temples. It had taken him forty-five minutes to sign all the required paperwork.

In that time, the news networks had already caught wind of Marrs’s seeming ability to dictate presidential policy. And the press along with Marrs had brewed a firestorm. Marrs called the decision to use his suggested tax pause a smoke screen, an attempt to distract people from his failings. The man could turn anything, even his own ideas, into an attack.

The loudest pundits called him a traitor. A warmonger whose policies on terror endangered the nation. Comparisons to Hitler and Stalin were casually hurled by men seeking higher ratings. Marrs led a rally in Washington, D.C., shouting for justice and shaking his fist.

Duncan wanted nothing more than for Marrs to come to his office and try shaking that fist face-to-face. But instead he had to remain measured and calm. “Defuse the powder keg,” his advisors said. Settle. Appease.

It was all bullshit.

The man was brewing fear, contaminating the people with it and making sure Duncan’s assurances of safety were ignored. He would probably derail his own tax pause idea, too, but would not be held accountable for it.

But every time the American public’s focus turned away, Marrs brought them back with wild allegations or bolder calls to action. The most recent one being impeachment. He’d heard the same call to action a year previous when the nation faced a killer pandemic thanks to a weaponized strain of the Brugada syndrome used in an assassination attempt on his life. He had taken drastic measures—quarantining the White House staff and hundreds of U.S. citizens against their will. The rumbles died down when a cure had been provided, but the whispers never faded. With new ammunition, the guns of impeachment fired again.

He didn’t fear impeachment. It was a ridiculous notion championed by the minority. But they were loud and persistent. They kept the national attention focused on him, binding his actions. The fools were unknowingly crippling his efforts to find the people responsible for the attacks.

He hit a second button on the remote. A blue screen lowered from the ceiling, stopping behind him. Once lowered, a bright light backlit the screen, making it glow and casting him in a silhouette that disguised his identity. He switched on the laptop in front of him and established a secure video feed with Dominick Boucher, who had been overseeing the team’s latest batch of rescue missions. He stood in Delta’s tactical HQ and was surrounded by an array of stations with men and women watching satellite feeds, monitoring endless flows of information from news, police, and military sources around the world. It was the intelligence heart of every Delta operation. One that he normally commanded.

Boucher’s white mustache twitched when he faced the screen. It was a telltale sign that things were not well. “Dom, what’s the score?”

There was no “What took you so long?” No annoyance in Boucher’s eyes. The man knew the score: Deep Blue was the president of the United States and he sometimes had shit to do. Instead, he simply cut to the chase. “Bad guys four. Us, zip. We’ve been played. The authorities in Taiwan, Russia, Colombia, and Argentina knew we were coming.”

Duncan’s mind spun, trying to figure out who knew enough to reveal their hand. The list was short.

“I don’t think we have a snitch,” Boucher said, as though able to read Duncan’s thoughts. “We tracked down calls to several other countries that resulted in troop mobilization. All were on our list to hit next. Whoever did this only knew we would be looking, but not where we were going first. They were shooting scattershot, hoping to hit us.”

“Which they did.”

Boucher’s mustache twitched again.

“How bad is it?”

“Bishop’s team was captured, but escaped without being identified as U.S. military.”

Duncan felt some of his tension slip away.

Boucher quickly added, “But not before wounding seven Argentine National Gendarmerie soldiers.”

His tension returned with a vengeance, squeezing the small of his back.

“Queen and her team escaped after instigating a gunfight between the Colombian military and a bunch of drug runners. Both sides received casualties, but there were no reports of our team’s involvement.”

None of this was good, but so far it was manageable. Any claims of U.S. involvement from these countries could easily be denied. But Boucher’s face grew grim. He had worse news to report.

“Knight’s team took three casualties when Taiwanese SWAT struck their position. The bodies aren’t identifiable, but the Taiwanese are claiming they’re ours. The tipster apparently told them as much.”

“And Rook?”

The mention of Rook’s name turned Boucher’s face to the floor. “They were attacked by three Ka-50 Black Sharks. His team is dead. Same story as Taiwan. Can’t be I.D.’d, but they’re claiming the men are ours.”

“What about Rook? Is he—”

“Unknown.” Duncan tapped his keyboard. “Satellite imagery was intermittent at the time, as satellites passed in and out of range. But we have a few shots of him.”

Duncan’s screen filled up with satellite images. He combed through them, looking at the three black helicopters from above. There were images of explosions in the forest, Rook running up a hill, and then facing off against one of the Black Sharks. But in the five minutes following, there was nothing. The next image showed a mass of troops running north, through the cow pasture. Using his remote connection, Boucher circled a small area on the last image.

Duncan zoomed in on the circle, seeing a splash of red on a patch of yellow grass. “Is that blood?”

“Looks like it,” Boucher said. “We believe Rook was shot. Here, listen for yourself. This was his last message before we lost communication.”

Rook’s voice came through the computer. He sounded shaken and out of breath. “They’re all dead. My team is KIA. And I’m bleeding out. So don’t come looking for me. Tell Queen—”

The connection cut off.

“We’re not sure what happened,” Boucher said. “But he’s gone without a trace.”

Duncan sat back in his chair. Allegations from Russia, Taiwan, and Argentina would soon become public. And though he could deny the citizenship of the men killed in action, it wouldn’t convince the Russians, who might very well see the incursion as an act of war. And it didn’t feel right.

No matter how it played out, the allegations would add fuel to the media firestorm. Despite all that, he couldn’t keep his mind far from the safety of his team. Three were safe. Rook was MIA. But there was still one unaccounted for.

“What about King?”

THIRTY-EIGHT

Rome, Italy

WHAT ROME WOULD later deem a small, localized magnitude-four earthquake shook the underground tunnels. Dust fell from the ceiling, stinging King’s eyes and further obscuring his view of the dim hallways lit by the occasional electric bulb.

Following Alexander proved to be difficult. The man was faster than he looked, and his intimate knowledge of the tunnels made every footfall well placed. He also seemed to be unaffected by the dirty air, which congested King’s and Pierce’s lungs.

The three emerged into a larger hallway, free of dust, and picked up speed. Shrieks of the Forgotten suddenly drowned out the screams of dying people. Somewhere ahead, Alexander’s guardians were fighting back. But King knew it wouldn’t be enough.

He also knew there was very little the three of them could do against the golems he’d seen. But he would rather die than not try.

Alexander stopped in front of a door that had been torn off its hinges. A body, cloaked in black flew out and struck him in the chest. They both fell back hard against the tunnel wall. The Forgotten shook off the impact, spun to its feet, and dove back into the room with a shriek.

As a wound on his shoulder quickly healed, Alexander stood and took a small bottle from his pocket. It looked like the small liquor bottles they served on airplanes. He drank the contents down and turned toward King. “Stay here. It’s not safe for you.”

Then his body shook with a strange kind of energy that made his eyes gleam with intensity. With a battle cry, he charged into the room.

King approached the door, his weapon drawn and ready. The tunnel shook with a massive impact, causing him to catch himself. He looked back at Pierce, who shook his head. The message was clear: don’t go in. But he had to. This was where Fiona and many other people had been held, and not one of them was screaming now.

Thinking of Fiona, King spun around the doorframe and pointed his weapon inside the room. His eyes took everything in, but his mind took several seconds to process what he was seeing. The floors, walls, and ceilings oozed with overturned cots, human body parts, smeared flesh, and a thick coat of crimson blood.

Fighting in the center of it all were two Forgotten, Alexander, and one very large stone monster constructed of ancient marble columns, bits of arches, tiled wall, and a worn bust for a head. The golem was more refined than the one King had seen before. It wasn’t just humanoid, with arms, legs, and a head, it also had fingers for gripping. The giant was hunched over, a Forgotten clinging to its back. It swung its arms side to side, trying to grasp the dark cloaked creature, but couldn’t reach.

Alexander dove at the golem’s leg, sweeping it out and knocking it off-balance. The second Forgotten descended from the ceiling, adding weight to the golem’s back and knocking it to the floor. The chamber shook as the several-ton giant fell. But when it did, King was allowed a clear view of the back of the room.

Two more golems walked toward the rear of the chamber, where a large tunnel awaited. They flanked a man, dressed in black. He was tall, bald, and white. But other than that, distance and violent vibrations made any details impossible to glean.

There was his enemy, the man who had killed fifty innocents and countless others around the world. King burned with rage. The man who had killed Fiona and everyone else held captive by Alexander.

King took aim. Despite the distance and shaky footing, he knew he could make the shot. “Hey!” he shouted, wanting to see the man’s face before he put a bullet in it.

As the golem on the floor struggled to stand under the strong hold of the Forgotten and Alexander, the man slowed his pace and stopped. The golems to his sides did as well.

“Turn around!” King instructed.

As the man complied, King’s eyes were drawn away from his face by what he held in his hands. A small limp body with long black hair.

Fiona.

King was instantly unsure of his aim. Hitting the man somewhere wouldn’t be an issue, but he couldn’t guarantee a clean headshot. And he wouldn’t take the risk.

The gun lowered in his hands.

The man raised a hand, giving King a wave. The gesture brought King’s attention back to his face. As the man backed into the darkness of the freshly made tunnel behind him, King caught a quick glimpse of his face. “No…”

Pierce looked over King’s shoulder and saw him, too. “Oh God.”

Both men recognized him.

Richard Ridley.

Ridley grinned at them as the two golems with him sealed off the tunnel with their bodies and returned to their former, solid, lifeless stone forms. The madman whose genetic tinkering turned Bishop into a regen, who tortured Pierce, and killed scores of people in the name of scientific progress, available to the highest bidder, had returned.

King’s mind whirled. Ridley must have know about Fiona. Why else would he take her? His foster daughter had just become a human shield for the vilest man on the planet. He fought against the twisting in his gut. He couldn’t let himself be consumed by worry. Ridley knew King, knew what he was capable of and the force he commanded. He would keep her alive, at least long enough to complete whatever it was he was doing.

A shout pulled him back to the situation at hand, which was far from over. The golem on the floor regained its footing and tossed one of the Forgotten into a wall. There was a loud crack as it hit. Though King doubted it was dead, it would clearly not be rejoining the fight any time soon.

Alexander flew through the air next, landing at King’s feet. “Run!” He shouted at King. “To the gallery.”

King saw the golem stand, gripping the Forgotten in its stone hands. The ancient dark specter shrieked as it was pulled in two directions. As he turned and ran, following Pierce, King heard the shriek rise in pitch and volume before it was cut off by a wet tear.

“Go!” Alexander shouted from behind as he fled the room behind King.

A pulsing vibration filled the tunnel, growing in intensity. A sickening impact followed as the golem crashed through the wall behind them. King allowed Alexander to pass him in the tunnel, knowing Pierce was likely to get lost. He looked over his shoulder as the golem righted itself and gave chase.

King fired his weapon over his shoulder. He knew the bullets would have no effect on the creature, so he aimed for the lightbulbs, darkening the tunnel behind them as they moved. He wasn’t sure if the monster had eyes to see with, but it was all he could think to do.

Besides run.

Thirty seconds later he was out of ammo. Despite the darkness, the tight confines of the tunnel and its eight-foot height, the golem closed the distance. It lunged at King, reaching out for him with its heavy hands.

King rounded a sharp corner and was knocked forward by the impact of the golem striking the wall. Had he not reached the corner, he would have been crushed like a frog under a steamroller. He gave a quick look back at the golem, which he now noted was dark red in color, smeared with the dead Forgotten’s blood, and bolted for the archway entrance to the gallery.

Pierce, with wide, panicked eyes, waved him on. “He’s going to lock it down!”

King ran for the arch, remembering the metal beams hidden at the base and top of the entryway. The ground shook at his heels as the golem gave chase once more. With a glance over his shoulder, King saw a large hand reaching out for his head.

Then he was through the door.

Alarms sounded. Metal screeched. The room shook.

King fell to his stomach, rolled over, and scrambled to his feet, ready to keep running. But it wasn’t necessary. The golem’s stone arm had been sheared off. It lay on the floor as inanimate rubble.

The one-armed golem slammed into the thick bars twice, but had no luck. It wouldn’t be getting through.

Alexander appeared at his side raging with anger. He shouted and punched a marble statue of himself, breaking it in two.

King marveled at the man’s power. Whatever he had drunk before joining the battle had boosted his strength amazingly. But it hadn’t made him impervious to harm. The hand he’d just punched with was a crumpled bloody mess.

“It seems we share a common nemesis,” Alexander grumbled as his hand stitched itself back together.

King nodded. “Ridley.” He looked at Alexander. “You mentioned a physicist-ex-rabbi who might be able to help. Still think so?”

Alexander looked at his fully healed hand, his nerves calming. “He’s in Haifa. Israel. At Technion Institute of Technology. He shouldn’t be hard to find.”

Alexander led the way out of the gallery, explaining that they would exit into one of his Roman homes, where they could rest and coordinate. As they left the gallery amid the chaos of sounding alarms, flashing lights, and the occasional slam of stone golem against steel bars, King and Alexander failed to notice Pierce pause at one of the gallery displays, taking the ancient contents and hiding them in his pocket.

THIRTY-NINE

20,000 feet

KING LOOKED OUT the window of Alexander’s Gulfstream G550. The Mediterranean sparkled like an azure crystal, twenty thousand feet below. Alexander sat next to him, his eyes covered by a blindfold. The man was sound asleep, looking like nothing more than a tired businessman on his private jet. Pierce had insisted on coming, but King wouldn’t place him in harm’s way again, so he remained behind in Rome.

King leaned back in his seat, closing his eyes. Despite the freakish things he’d witnessed in the past few days, his thoughts were on family. He’d been trained in combat, survival, and intelligence gathering, but none of that prepared him for the emotional upheaval he’d been going through. His dead mother had been resurrected while his deadbeat father was redeemed and returned from jail. Add to that the revelation that his parents were in fact Russian spies, and then the kidnapping of a girl who called him Dad despite him not wanting the title and doing a piss poor job of protecting her.

Giant killer golems had some fierce competition for his attention.

Thoughts of Fiona came to him as vivid images. She’d been wary of him at first, waking up in the backseat of his rental car. She remembered flashes of the attack, of a man who had saved her from the wreckage, and then King. He did his best to smile at her, to put her at ease, but he’d never been good with kids. Then, his awkward first words to her—“You’re a girl”—had made her laugh. He still didn’t know why he said that. It had just come out, as though she’d just been born to him.

In the following months their relationship grew fast as Fiona lived on base, under their protection. She brought smiles to a team that faced horrors on a regular basis. Her presence was a blessing, especially when their reeducation began.

But an injection of stress came into the mix thanks to the child welfare office. The job of foster father fell on him like a piano dropped from twenty stories above. His studies suffered as he became distracted by his new, parental duties. Sparring matches became a painful reminder of his inadequacies. And though he didn’t feel up to the task, Fiona took to the idea and ran with it. It was a responsibility King never wanted, but was duty bound to take on.

What surprised him the most was that now that she had been taken from him, he was terrified he might lose her for good. Because despite all his fears, discomfort, and doubts, he’d become smitten by her. He wanted his parents to meet her. He wanted to finish reading The Hunger Games with her. His career-oriented five-year forecast was in disarray because it now involved a girl he had no right raising. And he knew child services would agree.

King checked his watch. The others should have completed their missions by now. He powered up his cell phone, which he’d shut off during his and Pierce’s nighttime search of the Roman Forum, and found eight messages, which was an unusual amount since only seven people in the world had his number. He ignored the messages and dialed the number he knew would get him answers.

The line clicked as the connection was established. After a single ring, a familiar feminine recording asked him to leave a message. He gave his name, “King.”

The feminine voice followed with, “Voice print confirmed,” and the phone began ringing again.

The ringing was quickly replaced by the voice of Tom Duncan, Deep Blue. “Where have you been?”

King immediately heard the tension in Duncan’s normally relaxed voice. Things were not going well on the home front. “Rome. I’m on my way to Haifa now, with Alexander Diotrephes.”

Duncan’s voice brightened. “You found her?”

“She was here, but … I lost her. Alexander had fifty people, all speakers of dying languages, hidden beneath the Roman Forum. They’re all dead now.”

King heard a whispered curse on the other end before Duncan’s voice returned in full. “What’s in Haifa?”

“A physicist slash rabbi Alexander thinks can help.”

“What do you think?”

“I’m rolling with the punches,” King said. “How about you? Are the others back yet?”

“Knight, Queen, and Bishop are en route as we speak. They should be ready to deploy wherever you need them within four hours.”

King could hear the man had more to say, but was having a hard time spitting it out. He’d noted Rook hadn’t been included in the last sentence and followed the lead. “What happened to Rook?”

Duncan sighed. “The foreign countries we deployed to were tipped off. They knew we were coming.”

King winced. Rook had gone to Russia.

“Queen’s and Bishop’s teams made it out intact. Knight took three casualties. And Rook … his team is down and he is MIA, possibly KIA.”

Killed. In. Action. They were words King dreaded hearing, especially about members of the Chess Team. His chaotic emotions began to swirl again, threatening to overpower his soldier’s mask.

Then he realized a connection. “He was able to follow me, too. He took Fiona and killed the others. Controls the golems.”

“You know who’s doing this?” Duncan asked.

“Richard Ridley.”

“Son of a bitch…” Duncan was silent for a moment. “I’ll have every law enforcement agency in the country on the lookout for him in case he returns to the U.S., and I’ll have Boucher coordinate with any foreign agencies still willing to talk to us.”

King was about to ask what had happened, but came to his own conclusions. If several countries had been tipped off that U.S. soldiers were kidnapping their citizens, provable or not, an international drama would be unfolding. That, combined with the post-attack-on-U.S.-soil madness that must be consuming the country, Duncan had his presidential hands full. He decided not to press the issue. “If I find anything in Haifa, I’ll let you know.”

“Ditto on Ridley,” Duncan said. The statement was followed by a click and a dial tone. The man was busy.

King hung up the phone and dialed a second number. Aleman answered it almost immediately. “Aleman here.”

“Lew, it’s King. I just wanted to check in on my parents.”

“Dropped them off at the hotel. Your father seemed pretty excited about the continental breakfast. They asked a lot of questions about you. Lots of questions. If they weren’t your parents I’d think they were digging for intel.”

For a moment, King worried that it could be true, and then decided it was. His parents now knew his job was a lot more interesting than they had previously believed. They probably wanted to know everything about him. “So what did you tell them?”

“The truth. That you’re on the Special Ops Galley Team—and let’s face it, that’s about as threatening sounding as ‘the Chess Team’—and your current mission has you scouring the globe for truffles.”

King grinned. The humor felt good. “Uh huh.”

“But once we got to the hotel they wanted nothing to do with me. Asked me not to come back. Said they’d be fine.”

“That’s odd,” King said.

“What’s odd about it? They’ve been apart for what, ten years? And now they have a few days in a hotel. I’m telling you, they’re going to get a lot of use of the ‘Do not disturb’ sign.”

King let out a laugh. “Thank you, Lew. You have just managed to overshadow all the awful things I’ve seen with something worse.”

“Any leads on Fiona?”

“We just missed her in Rome.”

“You’ll get her back.”

King had no reply. His confidence waned with every new discovery.

“Take care, King.”

“Copy that.”

King hung up the phone and thought about his family. He was eager to see his parents again. To catch up. To re-form lost bonds and heal old wounds. More than anything, he wanted his parents to meet Fiona. Together again, they could use a grandchild to dote on, and Fiona, missing her grandmother deeply, could use a pair of caring grandparents in her life. It would do them all good, even King.

But first he had to find Fiona and bring her home.

He turned toward the window. The blue waves below grew larger as the plane descended for a landing at Ben Gurion International Airport.

FORTY

Haifa, Israel

THE HOUR AND a half drive from the Tel Aviv airport to Technion was quiet and uneventful. Views of the Mediterranean were spectacular during the long coastal trip. And Haifa turned out to be the kind of quiet, café-filled town that college students adored. The only hiccup was that King had to leave his weapon behind; even the mighty Hercules had to submit to customs when leaving the ultra-secure airport. Alexander drove a black Mercedes that had been waiting for him in an airport garage. He maneuvered through the streets and highways like a local. King remembered the ancient man’s tale of meeting Jesus and realized he had likely made this trip several times in the past, perhaps on horseback, or even in sandals. The man might be just as comfortable anywhere in the world.

As King began to think about what he would do with twenty-five hundred years of life, they pulled into a campus parking spot and stopped. The campus was a sea of white buildings and green trees. But there wasn’t a student in sight. Like zombies to a shopping mall, most of the student body had been drawn to a science symposium being hosted on the other side of campus.

King noted Alexander’s familiarity with the campus and commented, “You’ve been here before?”

“I’ve taken classes actually,” he replied.

“With Davidson?”

“He would have been a child when I attended.” He opened the front door of the tall white building that had five long windows stretching the full length of its facade. He held the door for King, allowing him to enter first. A receptionist greeted the pair as they entered.

Alexander approached her with a smile, showing her a faculty I.D. card that had been waiting for him in the Mercedes’s glove compartment. She read the card, which identified him as a professor from the medical department. “I’m looking for Professor Davidson,” he said in Hebrew.

She returned his smile and pointed him toward the elevator. “Fifth floor. Turn right off the elevator. Second door on the left.”

“Thank you,” he replied.

Thirty seconds later they exited onto the fifth floor and headed for Davidson’s open door. The man’s voice filtered out as he spoke on the phone, his back to the door. King knocked twice and then entered, followed by Alexander, who closed the door behind him.

Amzi Davidson, who wore a bright yellow button-down shirt rolled to his elbows, held up a finger indicating he’d be right with them. The office was sparse. A small desk, a bookcase on either side of the door, and two metal-framed chairs were the only furniture. A large window looked out over the campus and provided a clear view of a modern art sculpture that looked like a metallic obelisk. The two other walls in the room held giant whiteboards. Multicolored notes in Hebrew, equations, and drawings filled both boards, which were stained gray from being erased over and over without actually being washed.

Davidson hung up the phone and spun around with a smile. His gray eyes, shrunk by the thick, black-rimmed glasses he wore, were excited. But the genuine smile on his face fell when he saw them. He squinted at them. “You’re not from the medical department,” he said in Hebrew.

“No, we’re not,” Alexander replied, also in Hebrew. “May we continue in English for my friend?”

Davidson glanced at King. “Sure,” he said in perfect English, his face brightening. “Are you with the press?”

“Afraid not,” King said.

The man soured. “Then what’s this about?”

Alexander took a seat and cut right to the heart of the matter. “Golems.”

Davidson leaned back slowly. A pen appeared in his hand and went to his mouth. “What’s the application? Is this for a theory?”

“Real-world application,” Alexander replied.

Davidson plucked the pen from his mouth. “Well, I’m afraid that while the written word is powerful, it is not that powerful. It cannot grant life.”

“What about the spoken word?” King asked.

A grin came to Davidson’s face. “So you are seeking the opinion of a physicist and an ex-rabbi?”

King’s and Alexander’s silence answered the question. Davidson looked at his watch. “Very well. I have a few minutes. I must warn you, however, to not expect two diverging theories. My research in religion and science have come to the same conclusion.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Alexander said.

“Then let’s start at the beginning. The big-bang theory attempts to answer how the universe was first formed, but it doesn’t answer the bigger question: Why does the universe exist? Because of this, it’s a hollow mathematical model. It assumes everything came from nothing, ex nihilo, and states that the universe had a beginning. But there is another option: the universe has always existed.”

He stood and erased a portion of the whiteboard, marring his yellow sleeve. He wrote out an equation: 0 = 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 …

“This is the mathematical statement that shows the big bang is impossible. The sum of nothing, is nothing!”

He erased some of the plus signs and added minus: 0 = 0 − 0 + 0 − 0 + 0 − 0. “This is the Null Axiom, developed by Terence Witt, which states that the difference of nothing is nothing, meaning everything is made of nothing. Thus, the universe never had a beginning because it is nothing, which is also limitless and timeless.”

Davidson checked his watch. “Limitless also describes my thoughts on the matter and I need to speak at the symposium in an hour, so rather than blather on about nonexpansion, cosmic microwaves, decaying photons, or eternal equilibrium, I’ll cut right to the theological meat of the matter.

“Null physics mathematically describes the speaking of the reality into existence. In the same way the press spins a story by changing the context of facts, the nonreal is made real by the words of a creator spinning the context of limitless nothingness and telling a story.”

King rolled his head from side to side. “So … if God”—he made air quotations with his fingers—“spoke existence into being, what language did He speak?”

Davidson burst into laughter. When he saw neither of his guests sharing in the moment, he stopped. “You’re serious? The language of God?”

“Quite,” Alexander said.

The pen reentered Davidson’s mouth. “Some have speculated that DNA is the language of God. It has a coding system—an alphabet if you will—rules of spelling and grammar as well as meaning and purpose. In many ways it resembles computer code. And ninety-seven percent of it is considered junk, meaning we have yet to figure out what it says. It also obeys Zipf’s law, which simply shows that when words from a document, say a novel, are graphed by the number of times they appear in a book, from most popular to least popular, you get a straight line. DNA broken up into words and listed by popularity align perfectly with Zipf’s law. Shazam, it’s a language!”

“But we can’t speak the language of DNA,” King said. “We can’t verbalize it.”

“In your case, you don’t have to. It’s already present, but if your speech spins the context…” His eyes brightened. “Researchers at the Hado Institute Australia have shown how words can affect the physical world. Spoken words create vibrations. Each word has its own unique resonance—its own pattern of vibration. They spoke different words, both positive and negative, to water before freezing it, transforming it into its crystalline state. Water exposed to the words ‘angel,’ ‘beautiful,’ and ‘life’ formed dazzling, symmetrical crystals. Water exposed to words such as ‘dirty,’ ‘devil,’ and ‘death’ became malformed, cracked, and burst, almost like something had exploded from within.

“A sound wave is, in essence, a disturbance moving through a medium, shifting energy from a starting point to an ending point. And where there is energy, there is information. We detect sound waves through our ears, which transfers the information to our brain, where it is translated into sound. But there is more information in sound than our brains can decipher.”

“If sounds are affecting the physical world around us, why are we not noticing?” King asked.

“We are limited by what we can sense. In the same way that our ears cannot hear the information conveyed in every sound, our other senses might miss the results. Take steganography for instance.”

King nodded. He was familiar with the use of steganography in military applications. World War II microdots, Morse code in fabric patterns, and sign language hidden in photographs had all been used in military history. In more modern applications, terrorists had used the technology to communicate through coded message board avatars.

Davidson opened his laptop, tapped the keys, and brought up a Web site. He showed them a photo on the screen.

“Though this looks like an ordinary photo of an oceanside park, it is much more. By adjusting the pixels minutely, you can encode text or other photos within an image and it is imperceptible to the human eye. Decoded, this picture reads…”

He clicked on the image, which opened a page of text:

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

“Poe,” Alexander said. “Part of his sonnet to science. Cute.”

Davidson waggled his finger. “Perhaps even more applicable to your query is the spectrogram.”

King sat up straighter. Much of what the professor had said either sounded like bunk, or he already knew. But spectrograms were new to him and he suspected the man was about to uncover a nugget of truth.

“As I mentioned before, sound carries more information than the human ear can perceive. A spectrograph is a visual representation of a sound wave. Most times it’s innocuous, but images, and messages, can be coded into sounds and, in theory, into words. There is a video online…” Davidson spun the laptop around, showing them a YouTube video titled “Alien Abduction Caught Live on Ustream.”

King winced, fearing Davidson was a crackpot.

The facial expression didn’t go unnoticed. “Have no fear, this is just an example of clever marketing.” He played the video, which showed two men talking about aliens and abductions before one of them moved to the kitchen where a star chart, and an alien in the window, awaited. What followed was a creatively made abduction scene featuring bright lights and a wavering, high-pitched sound.

“That sound you hear is much more than a simple noise. It is an image.” Davidson quickly located a file online, downloaded it, and opened up a small software package. He ran the sound through the software and an image of several vertical and horizontal lines was shown. He zoomed in on a portion so the lines could be more easily seen.

The lines meant nothing to King, but Alexander figured it out. “Binary. Tall lines represent the number one. Short lines … zero. Or vice versa.”

“Exactly right,” Davidson said. “Within the sound is a binary code, which translates into English. A Web site I believe, which leads to another site. All part of an alternate-reality game.”

Davidson stood and erased the equations he’d written on the whiteboard. He picked up a red pen and wrote as he spoke. “So we have deduced that, one, there is much more information in sound that we can perceive. Two, sound is capable of altering the physical world, implying that said extra information exists. And three, ninety-seven percent of DNA is a mystery to us. Who’s to say the right DNA, carried as information in a sound wave and applied to the physical world, couldn’t affect life in the nonliving? Of course, if this were used to create a golem there would be other concerns.”

“Such as?” King asked, trying not to sound over interested.

“Traditionally, a golem created for less than noble purposes will become more and more evil each time it kills. But the dark energy that consumes the golem remains with its creator, even after its destruction. Any subsequent golems created will be corrupted as well. It’s said that golem masters often die with black hearts, their bodies and souls corrupted. It’s all hearsay of course; you know how it is with history.”

Alexander wore a funny grin. “I do.”

“Perhaps the stories are a warning,” Davidson said, “to not use the life imbuing language?”

King and Alexander glanced at each other. Given what they knew, it seemed a likely scenario.

Davidson saw the look they shared. He sat up straight. “You’ve discovered this language, haven’t you?”

“No,” King said.

“We’re just researching the idea,” Alexander added quickly.

“For a movie.”

This last statement totally deflated Davidson’s excitement. He was about to ask them to leave when King’s phone rang. He answered the phone, “I’m here.”

“We found Ridley,” Duncan said on the other end.

“Where?”

“London. Security camera caught a glimpse of him at Heathrow Airport.”

“Was Fiona with him?”

“She’s not in the shot, but that doesn’t mean—”

“I know. And it doesn’t matter. We’re going to London.”

“I have every available resource tracking him. Call me when you land.”

“Will do.” King hung up the phone and looked at Alexander. “He’s in London.”

Both men stood. Alexander opened the door to leave. Davidson stopped them with a clearing of his throat. “Who’s in London?”

“Brad Pitt. Thanks for your help,” King said, then exited the room.

The professor, who now wore a broad smile, said, “If you see the press on your way down, send them up.”

King stopped and leaned back into the office. Something about Davidson expecting press coverage put him on edge. “You never did mention why the press was coming to see you today.”

“I published my theory. Null physics and the Spoken Creation. Technion put out a press release yesterday. I’m giving a speech on the topic in”—he looked at his watch, his eyes widening—“forty-five minutes.”

King tensed. If Davidson had made his theory public and Ridley discovered it, he would instantly see where the research would eventually lead. He had already wiped out every ancient language that might be used to reproduce the so-called language of God. But if modern science were to uncover the language again by studying the effects of sound on the environment, then …

Davidson saw King’s sour expression. “What? What’s wrong?”

“I’m afraid you may have painted a very large target on your—”

Movement outside the large office window caught King’s attention. The metal obelisk that had been standing outside was hurtling toward the office like a spear.

“Get down!” King shouted, diving for the professor.

A second later the obelisk crashed through the window with the force of a wrecking ball.

FORTY-ONE

Washington, D.C.

TOM DUNCAN SAT behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. His suit coat hung over the back of his chair, his sleeves were rolled up, and his tie dangled loosely. He looked like any other hardworking president, except for the fact that he was leaning back in the chair, staring blankly at the ceiling. For all the power his office granted him, he found himself momentarily immobilized. As the eyes of the world watched his every act outside the rounded walls of the Oval Office, scrutinized every word, every inflection of his voice, every facial expression—looking for a flaw—inaction became the safest course of conduct. With the wolves circling and out for blood, anything he did might make them attack.

What made this hard for Duncan was that he was also a wolf. As a former Army Ranger he excelled when in the movement. As president he applied his energy to the challenges faced by the country, and as Deep Blue, he focused his military mind on the Chess Team’s missions. But now he could only monitor and advise. A deeper involvement could expose and endanger the team. The Chess Team was hidden but not buried, not black. There had been no reason to hide their existence from the government he ran. But now …

The time for a new direction, a new plan, was upon him.

Hard choices and big changes needed to be made.

So he retreated to his office, cleared his mind of the media, of Marrs, and searched for solutions.

Before he could focus his thoughts, the phone on his desk rang. Its digital chime didn’t get a chance to finish as Duncan sat up and hit the speakerphone button. The White House switchboard had been given strict instructions to allow calls from a very short list of people through, each with a unique ring. This one belonged to Dominick Boucher.

“What’ve you got?”

“I’m faxing it over now.”

The full-color fax machine behind the desk blinked as the incoming file transferred.

“Is this about Ridley?”

“Yes sir,” Boucher said. “Two major developments. He rented a gold Peugeot 307 Cabriolet from Europcar at Heathrow. Europcar GPS chips all their cars and we tracked it to Wiltshire County.”

Duncan recognized the name. He’d been there once, in college, as a backpacking tourist. “Stonehenge?”

“We believe so, yes.”

“But why?”

“I couldn’t tell you that for sure, but if he’s interested in ancient languages, perhaps there is more to Stonehenge than we know. Something that hasn’t been uncovered yet. The site is incredibly old and we know very little about the people who built it. Whatever it is must be important because he’s taking bold risks to get it.”

“Are Queen, Bishop, and Knight ready to go?” Duncan asked. Keasling was on the task of debriefing and briefing the team, getting them geared up and ready to drop wherever King needed them.

“Well, that’s why I’m sending the fax. Development number two. I’m not sure we should send them to King.”

Duncan’s forehead scrunched. He looked at the fax machine. What is Boucher sending?

The gears of the fax machine finally kicked in, sending a single piece of paper through and coating it with hot toner. An eight-by-ten photo rolled out. Duncan snatched it up. A couple dressed in tank top vests and cargo shorts appropriate for warm weather archaeology smiled for the camera. Behind them were groups of people—locals, interns, and other science types—milling about. And in the background was what looked like a very large, very old staircase partially covered by vegetation and snaking tree roots.

“What am I looking at?”

“The photo was uploaded to Flickr an hour ago, and you can see in the bottom right the date stamp is today. So this is fresh. The structure in the background is la Danta Pyramid in El Mirador, Guatemala—the largest ever built by the Maya, and even bigger than the great Cheops pyramid at Giza.”

“That’s all well and good, Dom, but what’s the significance.”

“I don’t want to tell you what to see, in case we’re wrong. I want you to—”

“What the hell,” Duncan whispered as he saw a familiar face in the image. The man was walking behind the couple, carrying a backpack. No one paid him any attention. He wore the same comfortable smile he did in the brochures his company had published. But his presence in the image made no sense. How could Richard Ridley be in England and Guatemala at the same time?

“I take it you found him?”

“How’s this possible, Dom?”

“I’m afraid that’s a question your team is best suited to answer, but his presence at both locations, as impossible as it seems, solidifies his apparent interest in ancient sites around the world. Shall I divert Queen, Bishop, and Knight to Guatemala?”

“Do it,” Duncan said. “I’ll inform King.”

FORTY-TWO

Haifa, Israel

A STREAM OF Hebrew curses flew from Davidson’s mouth as he lay beneath King on the floor of his office. Their bodies were coated in glass and plaster from the ruined ceiling. But it wasn’t the destroyed office that held either man’s attention, it was the glistening metal lance tip that had stabbed through the window and far wall. Twenty feet of stainless steel separated into vertical ribs that normally made the structure appear to be rotating, had impaled the building.

On his back, staring up at the glistening structure, Davidson recognized what it was. “It’s the obelisk.”

Alexander reached a hand beneath Davidson’s desk. “Take my hand.”

Davidson reached out and was snagged by Alexander, who easily pulled the physicist out of harm’s way and into the hallway. King crawled out behind him and stood in what little remained of the office. He instinctually reached for his weapon before remembering he was unarmed.

Shuffling forward through the sea of glass, he chanced a peek out of the window. While twenty feet of the obelisk had impaled the building, its remaining sixty-two feet were jutting out the side, like a giant spear. A large chunk of concrete clung to the end, where it had been ripped out of the ground. Gravity began to work on the protruding end, pulling it down. The force both bent the obelisk and caused the tip to tear into the ceiling. Flakes of plaster crumbled down on King’s head.

“I don’t understand,” Davidson said with a shaky voice. “Why would someone want to destroy the obelisk?”

“They weren’t trying to destroy the tower,” Alexander said.

Davidson fell silent, wondering what he meant.

“I didn’t see anything outside,” King said.

Alexander twisted his lips. “They’ve most likely assumed he’s dead.”

King agreed, but he knew they were far from safe. “They’ll check to be sure.”

“What are you talking about?” Davidson shouted. “Who are ‘they’ and who will they assume is dead?”

King reached down and pulled Davidson to his feet. “I was trying to tell you before, Professor. You’re a target now.”

The man’s eyes went wide behind his thick glasses, but not from King’s statement. He was looking beyond King, down the hallway. King spun and saw what appeared to be a large reptile. Something about it seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place it. The creature was built similarly to a komodo dragon, but its back was tan with brown stripes and its underbelly was white. Aside from its eight-foot length, sharp teeth, and clawed toes, what bothered King the most was the look of menace mixed with intelligence in its eyes.

A long forked tongue flicked out of its mouth—tasting them from a distance. Knowing it was here for Davidson, King looked for an escape route. The only door between them and the lizard was another office. The hallway behind them was blocked by the obelisk.

As a breeze tickled King’s cheek he turned toward the broken window. The ribbed obelisk continued its slow bend toward the ground five stories below. It was the only way out.

He turned to Alexander. “Take him through the window.”

“I’ll fight the beast,” Alexander replied, rolling up his sleeves.

“Sorry, Herc,” King replied. “I’m not strong enough to carry him.”

Davidson blanched. “Carry me?”

Alexander grunted in defeat, then took Davidson and slung him over his shoulder. “See you in Elysian Fields, King.” Then he was moving. He ran through the destroyed office and leaped out of the window. Davidson screamed the entire way until Alexander took hold of one of the stainless-steel ribs and swung them atop the structure.

King turned back to the lizard and shouted. It had already charged, moving silently over the linoleum floor. As it reared up to strike, King saw its claws, retracted for silent movement, reemerge and swipe toward his neck.

King ducked the blow and sidestepped, allowing the creature’s momentum to carry it past him and into the obelisk. It struck with a force that reverberated through the entire structure.

Alexander stumbled, still holding Davidson over his shoulder. He managed to remain upright and continued moving toward the slowly lowering base.

Unsure of how to fight the giant reptile, King struck out with a hard kick to its back, hoping to break its spine. But the string of vertebrae simply flexed with the impact and then pushed back. King fell to the hallway floor. As he righted himself, the lizard hissed at him and then bolted into the office. Despite King’s attack, the lizard only had eyes for its target.

Davidson.

King scrambled to his feet and gave chase. As the creature climbed onto the obelisk, King dove out, snagging its tail. The lizard lurched back, unable to pull King along with it. With one arm wrapped around the thick, but stubby tail, King reached out with his free hand and picked up a shard of glass. He swung it high and stabbed it into the beast’s lower back, slicing open his hand in the process.

The creature wailed and violently shook its back end. King thought the lizard was trying to shake him free, but as he fell to the floor, still holding the tail, he realized it had shed its tail. The open wound where the creature’s tail used to be oozed a few drops of blood and then dried. Like many lizards in the world, this one could shed its tail to distract predators while it escaped. But King wanted nothing to do with the still wriggling tail in his hands.

As the lizard ran out the window, he climbed on to the obelisk and gave chase.

Davidson let out a shout when the monster appeared behind them, its legs flailing out to each side as it charged down the obelisk. His shout was cut off as Alexander’s shoulder rammed his gut. Had there been any air left in him, he would have screamed again as he and Alexander went airborne.

Alexander leaped into the air, landing on the concrete base of the obelisk, sixty-two feet from the physics building. The sudden weight sped the obelisk’s descent. But not fast enough. The lizard was nearly upon them.

King shouted at the beast as he pursued from behind, but his hurled words did little to slow it down. He wouldn’t reach them in time. Alexander was on his own.

Turning to face the creature, Alexander showed no fear for his life, but without knowing the creature’s capabilities he wasn’t sure if he could protect Davidson. But he didn’t have to. Gravity provided a temporary solution as, fifteen feet from the ground, the obelisk finally gave way and bent quickly. Just before the base struck the cobbled walkway that stretched up the center of the Technion campus, Alexander jumped away with Davidson. The pair fell five feet and rolled away from the concrete base as it crashed into the hard ground.

The obelisk’s impact shook the structure, bouncing the lizard into the air. It landed on its side, and then slid off the edge, falling ten feet to the ground.

When the obelisk dropped away beneath King, he fell forward. Pain pulsed through his body when he landed on his stomach. Now lying on the obelisk, his descent didn’t slow. The steep incline pulled him over the smooth metal ribs like it was a giant slide. Using his hands to keep himself centered, King left a smear of red behind him—blood from his wounded hand.

He saw Alexander take off running with Davidson still over his shoulder. He was headed to a nearby construction site where piles of sand and stacks of cement bags waited to form the foundation of a new building. A moment later, the giant lizard lunged after them. It moved swiftly, but seemed slightly off balance, perhaps from the fall or because of its missing tail.

King rolled onto the cobbled walkway and onto his feet, giving chase. He could see Alexander and Davidson in front of the lizard, and the construction site beyond. Seeing the sand triggered his memory. He’d seen something like this before, only small enough to hold in his hand. It was a sandfish, a species of skink native to Iraq. While on a stakeout in Iraq, before being assigned to the Chess Team, he had watched the small creatures and marveled at their abilities.

That’s why he knew, without a doubt, that sand was the wrong place to be with a killer sandfish.

* * *

THE CONSTRUCTION SITE was a labyrinth of building materials and equipment. Alexander ran through the maze, not just searching for a way through, but also for the perfect place to stop. He found it between two stacks of cement bags. The bottleneck would allow him to confront the lizard head on, and hopefully give Davidson enough time to make his escape.

He skidded to a stop, his feet sliding through the deep sand covering the construction site. He put Davidson down. The man was panicked and clung to Alexander’s back like a child not wanting to be separated from its mother. He’d seen the beast behind them and feeling his legs go wobbly beneath him, knew he couldn’t outrun it.

“Why are you putting me down? Keep running!”

Alexander pushed him away. “You go. I’ll stop it.”

“But—”

“Go!”

The look in Alexander’s eyes and the boom of his voice triggered Davidson’s feet. He bolted deeper into the construction site. Though he quickly disappeared from view, his high-pitched squeaking breaths could be easily tracked, and Alexander had no doubt the creature would be able to follow his scent as well. The man was oozing fear pheromones.

Then the creature appeared. Thirty feet away. It paused on the sand, flicking out its tongue.

When it charged, the lizard didn’t focus on Alexander’s head, or torso, or any other vital location a predator might strike. Instead, it was looking down, at his feet.

Not at my feet, Alexander thought. In front of them.

Before he could figure out the meaning of the charging lizard’s strange attack, it leaped into the air. Alexander raised a fist to strike the beast’s head, but never got a chance to swing. The lizard arched its back and began a face-first descent toward the sandy ground. Its body began wriggling back and forth, slowly at first, then building in speed until almost a blur.

It struck the sand like an Olympic diver, and just as gracefully disappeared into the sand as though it were liquid. Alexander felt a slight undulation beneath his feet.

The lizard had passed beneath him!

He spun around and saw the creature emerge from the sand twenty feet away. Without pause, it continued in its relentless pursuit of Davidson. Alexander gave chase, fueled by his anger at being outsmarted by an oversized reptile.

* * *

DAVIDSON STUMBLED AS he ran—if you could call it running. His legs felt useless, as though in a dream. His hand landed on a stack of metal beams, but the weakness in his legs had moved to his arms and he fell forward, striking his head. Still on his feet, but dazed, he struggled forward. His vision narrowed. His head spun from a mixture of pain and fear.

Then a voice cut through his body’s fear-induced stupor. “Davidson, it got by me!”

Though he’d only just met the man, he recognized the voice as belonging to the inhumanly strong Alexander.

He felt a thump inside his chest. Then another.

His vision suddenly returned. His head cleared. And his muscles not only lost their gelatinous weakness, but they itched with energy. The knowledge that the creature was almost upon him had triggered an adrenaline rush. But it was too little, too late.

The lizard had found him.

It rounded the corner at top speed, its short legs flinging out in wide circles as it ran.

Two things saved Davidson’s life. First, he ran. Second, the creature’s missing tail removed its ability to stabilize its body. A combination of speed and not enough room to make a wide turn sent the lizard rolling into a large pile of sand. A layer of sand sheared away with the creature’s impact, creating an avalanche that quickly buried the upended beast.

Davidson saw this and paused, a smile creeping onto his face.

The smile disappeared when the large sandfish launched from the sand pile, once again moving at top speed. Realizing he wouldn’t escape this attack, Davidson let out a scream of horror.

Then he was struck hard.

Davidson fell to the ground. Alive. He looked up and saw King standing in his place as the lizard lunged.

The monster struck King in a blur and both fell, landing on Davidson’s feet. Pinned beneath the weight of King and the lizard, he shouted and clawed at the ground, pulling himself out from the tangle of bodies. Once free, he quickly stood.

Expecting to see the lizard tearing King apart, he glanced back as he began to run again. But the creature lay motionless. Davidson stopped. A long metal pole entered the lizard’s mouth and exited out its sheared-off tail. A giant lizard shish kabob!

A grunt emerged from beneath it. King was alive. “Think you could get this thing off of me?”

Davidson took hold of the pole protruding from the creature’s mouth and lifted. But he only managed to wiggle the heavy reptile.

Alexander arrived a moment later, quickly understood what had happened, and lifted the lizard away with little effort. Davidson just stared at him in awe. He felt like he’d met David and Goliath, but they were on the same team.

Alexander helped King to his feet. “I’m impressed,” he said with a smile.

King grunted. Unlike Alexander, his body couldn’t heal quickly, and he knew the pain he felt now would only intensify over the next few days. He looked at Davidson. “Unless you know a fancy physics trick for becoming invisible, we’re going to have to take care of you the old-fashioned way.”

FORTY-THREE

Again, 20,000 feet

AFTER GIVING DAVIDSON a wad of cash, putting him up in a random hotel under a false name, and telling him to stay put until told otherwise, King and Alexander had returned to the airport and took off for England.

King hung up his cell phone and paced in the small open space at the front of Alexander’s Gulfstream jet. He was trying to wrap his mind around the idea that Ridley was in two places at once, which meant that one of them was an impersonator. Either that or they were—he hated thinking it—clones. That there could be more than one Ridley was bad on its own. But it also meant they had no idea where Fiona had gone. If there were two Ridleys, there could be three. There could be fifty.

And Fiona could still be in Rome. The entire trip to England could be a massive waste of time. But it was all they had. And even though this Ridley might not have Fiona, he might know where she was being held.

But what was the point? Try as he might, King couldn’t pin down Ridley’s endgame. He decided to review what he knew. Ridley was creating and using golems to do his dirty work, yet they were tools, not the goal. But they hint at the goal, he thought. The sandfish was nothing new. Ridley had created genetic monsters before. But had the sandfish been created in a lab or manipulated by the strange protolanguage? These were all symptoms of something larger, but he couldn’t think of what that might be.

He focused his attention on what he knew about Ridley. He was a genius, ruthless beyond comparison, and considered no person his equal. The man had a god-complex to the point of successfully achieving immortality through science. Likewise he had now learned to grant life, at least temporarily, to inanimate objects. While Davidson had given them some insight into the science that gave the ancient language world-altering capabilities, he had yet to—

King’s thoughts froze on the words “world altering.” In a sense, that’s what Ridley was doing. Living statues, giant lizards, copies of himself. He was manipulating reality. But how far could it go? How much could he manipulate and to what extent? Could he become a god? As soon as the question formed in King’s mind he knew the answer.

Yes.

Ridley would be immortal and hold the keys to life, death, and to some extent, creation. He would be a god and much of the world would bow down and worship him. But that couldn’t be the end. Not for a man like Ridley. He was interested in power. In domination. But he was just one man. It might take him centuries to build a large following and he wasn’t a patient man. There had to be something else.

With his mind spinning with theories, King headed back to his seat. His body ached and he needed to rest. Alexander sat at the rear of the plane, his seat tilted back, and his eyes closed. King marveled how the man was able to fall asleep so quickly when there was so much to think about.

He sat down across from Alexander and sighed.

“Unforeseen complications?” Alexander asked.

King jumped at the man’s voice. It seemed he wasn’t sleeping at all. “You could say that.”

Alexander opened his eyes and sat up. After pushing a button on his armrest, a stewardess entered from the front of the plane. “Yes sir?”

He held up two fingers. She nodded and disappeared.

“In your … experiments with Hydra’s blood. When you created the Forgotten and made yourself immortal, did you ever…” King searched for the right words. They all sounded ridiculous. Then again, so did immortality. “Duplicate yourself?”

As usual, Alexander took the question earnestly, without laughing or even cracking a smile. For him, nothing was out of the realm of possibility. “No. Never. Removing the head, in Ridley’s case, and in mine, would simply render the body dead. Regeneration would begin at the neck. Splitting into two unique selves is not an attribute of Hydra’s genes.”

“So he couldn’t just hack off a body part and grow a new self?”

“He is limited by the DNA of Hydra, and if he did his job correctly, regeneration is the only gene he transplanted into himself.”

“So it’s not possible?”

“I didn’t say that. There are species that have the ability to split in two, creating two separate entities, which can later split again. Earthworms for instance. If he continued to modify his genetic code, well, anything is possible. What resources were available to him after the Hydra incident?”

“Manifold was shut down,” King said. “His funds were frozen. But he likely had secret accounts. Facilities no one knew about. It’s possible that Manifold Genetics is operating under the radar.”

King adjusted his body in the seat. Despite the plush cushion, he couldn’t find a pain-free position. “Like you said, anything is possible.”

The stewardess returned with a tray. Two glasses and a dark brown, one-ounce bottle, sat atop it. She placed the tray on the foldout tabletop in front of Alexander. “Anything else, sir?”

“No, thank you. How long until we land?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

He tilted his head in thanks and she left without looking back. Once the cabin door was closed again, Alexander continued. “Where is the second Ridley?”

“Danta Pyramid in Guatemala.”

“Interesting,” Alexander said, rubbing his chin.

“You know the place?” King asked, and then thought, Of course he does.

“It’s a Mayan city stretching over ten square miles that was consumed by the jungle. I’ve been meaning to visit, but haven’t had the chance.”

King felt a mild surprise at the ancient man not having been everywhere in the world.

“What’s interesting is that like the ancient pyramids in Egypt and the Tower of Babel before it, the construction techniques that allowed the Mayans to build a pyramid of such magnitude remains a mystery. Of course, you and I know that golems were used as laborers in the old world. And that several other ancient architects used the same method for building wonders all around the world.”

King saw where he was going with this. There was a connection. “Including Stonehenge.”

Alexander opened the brown bottle and extracted a dropper. A tan liquid with tiny swirling flakes filled the glass vial. He dropped five drops into each glass. “It would appear he is visiting the ancient sites for some purpose, perhaps in search of information or relics that might add to his knowledge of the protolanguage.”

Both men sat in silence for a moment. Alexander focused on the steps they would take upon landing. King’s mind drifted back to Fiona. He looked at Alexander, the oldest man on the planet and asked, “Do you have any children?”

The question took Alexander by surprise. He turned to King, with a lopsided smirk. “Children?”

King waited for more.

“There was a time, before I was immortal, that I wanted children. Acca and I tried to conceive, but she was barren. I never did get an heir. As it turns out, I didn’t need one. But there hasn’t been anyone worthy of bearing my children since.”

“You … haven’t been celibate all this time?” King asked.

Alexander gave a gentle laugh, which escaped his nose as a sniff. “For fifteen hundred years, yes.”

King couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Alexander was wealthy beyond belief, handsome, could speak a number of languages, live anywhere and do anything. And he’d chosen to live underground and alone for fifteen hundred years? It didn’t add up. It didn’t seem … human.

Alexander could see what King was thinking and ended the line of question with a preemptive statement. “I have seen and done everything imaginable with the opposite sex. After nearly a millennium of indulging, some things lost their novelty, starting with the primal act of procreation.”

“You are an old man,” King said with a grin.

Alexander smiled. “Very old.” He looked out the window for a moment, and then turned back to King. “While I may not be able to answer the questions of a new father, I can tell you this with confidence: for men like us, nothing is impossible.”

King’s smile widened, but wasn’t fully genuine. Despite being flattered that the immortal Hercules was starting to think of King as an equal, he still felt unsure about being a father. The problem wasn’t whether or not he could be a father, but whether or not he should be a father.

Alexander picked up both glasses and swirled them around until the tan liquid dispersed in the water. He offered one to King.

“What’s this?” King asked.

“You look tired.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Alexander smiled. “You don’t trust me yet?”

“I don’t think I ever will,” King said, and he meant it. Alexander, unlike Ridley, was a patient man. He’d already lived more lifetimes than Ridley could imagine. And though he had no concrete evidence, he suspected Alexander’s involvement in tracking down Ridley was more than altruism or one immortal protecting the world from another. The man had an endgame, he was sure of it. But finding out what that was would have to wait. For now, Alexander was an essential asset in stopping Ridley. After all, Alexander had coexisted with mortals for thousands of years without enslaving the human race. But that could change, King knew, and for that reason, Alexander needed to be watched closely.

Alexander gave a chuckle and made a face that said, “I’ll drink first.” He swigged the water down and grinned. He also looked much more rested and energetic.

“If you weren’t immortal,” King said, “that gesture might mean something. What’s in it?”

“It’s a homeopathic mix. My own. I cannot say what it contains. In the wrong hands it could be very dangerous.” Alexander looked out the large round window next to him. The rocky shore of England wasn’t far off. “When we land we will be moving fast. And since I have yet to see you sleep or rest that mind of yours, you will need some help to keep up.”

King wanted to argue, but couldn’t. As well trained and physically fit as he was, without rest his body would start to work against him. He already felt fatigued, and if things got rough in England, he might become a liability. He took the drink and swallowed it in two gulps. It tasted like mildly sweet water with a touch of—

A burst of energy hit him and brought an involuntary smile to his face. He felt rejuvenated and awake. And his mind was clear and focused. It wasn’t the adrenaline boost he’d seen Alexander give himself in Rome, but it was amazing. He could see how this tonic in the hands of the military could cause trouble. An army that didn’t require sleep to be at its peak would be a very dangerous thing.

“Feeling better?” Alexander asked.

“Much,” King answered.

“Good,” Alexander said, “because from now until we finish this fight, we won’t slow down.”

FORTY-FOUR

El Mirador, Guatemala

THE HELICOPTER LURCHED downward. Wind and rain beat against its black shell. Dark clouds blocked the rising sun while lightning coursed through the sky, illuminating the jungle beneath in a continuous strobe. A streak of lightning flashed past, striking a tree below with a burst of sparks. The immediate boom generated by the bolt as the super-heated air around it expanded into a shock wave pushed the chopper to the side.

Hell had temporarily taken up residence in the airspace above northern Guatemala.

The chopper’s three passengers weren’t fazed by the inclement weather, but the pilot, Luis Azurdia, was terrified. However, the bonus offered to him by his three wealthy clients was too generous to pass up. During the rainy season, travel to El Mirador was nearly impossible by land, and the site was mired with mud, flash floods, and few options for overnight stays. Tourists were few and far between as a result. The money Luis stood to make from this flight would cover the rest of the rainy season.

A second flash of lightning filled the cockpit with blinding light a fraction of a second before a resounding crash filled the air. Luis’s heart pounded. He’d never flown in a storm like this. Hell, if it was raining most tourists would cancel their trip.

He looked back at his passengers, hoping to see them fidgeting nervously, praying for fear in their eyes. If they called off the flight he might still be able to get that bonus. But the big Arabian man appeared to be meditating with his eyes closed. The skinny Asian man bobbed his head to music supplied by iPod earbuds. And the woman, her striking blond hair and forehead covered by a blue bandanna, simply looked out the window with a scowl. She, at least, looked like she wanted to be someplace else, but the storm was not on her mind.

Queen focused on the jungle below, watching an endless sea of trees. El Mirador was one of the most remote locations in Guatemala, which allowed the ancient Mayan city to remain fairly unexplored until 2003, when a team of archaeologists set up camp and began excavating the overgrown city. Despite the area’s natural beauty, the mysterious location they would soon explore, or the potential danger that awaited them there, her thoughts were half a world away.

In Russia.

With Rook.

News of his team’s extermination had been a blow to all of them. The men were comrades and friends. But Rook’s M.I.A. status was especially disturbing. He was more than a friend. She had worked hard denying her feelings, fighting against them as hard as any mythical creature they had faced, but with Rook missing, possibly dead, she couldn’t bury how she felt. And right now, she felt pissed.

She had petitioned to be freed from the mission in order to track down Rook, and if possible, rescue him. But she had been denied by Deep Blue himself. The mission came first. She knew Rook would agree, but it didn’t loosen the knot twisting in her stomach. To lose him now …

She shook her head, willing herself to not think it. She would find him when this was over.

What bothered her most was that despite being brave in almost any scenario, neither of them had the guts to talk about their feelings for each other. Ever since their kiss a year previous she had sensed his quiet discomfort around her. But they never spoke of it. Like the hardships of battle, they swallowed it. Buried it. Because they both knew that love on the battlefield could get people killed.

She realized now that soldiers died on the battlefield either way. And now Rook may have as well; a fact that would not have changed if their relationship had become romantic. At least then he would have died knowing, she thought, and then forced a new thought: I’ll tell him when I find him.

A flash of light made her squint and look away from the window. As thunder rolled over and through the helicopter she glanced toward the cockpit and made eye contact with Luis. He looked desperate and pale.

“I— Is the storm too much?” he asked, sounding hopeful.

She grinned. “Not at all.”

As a frown came to his face, Queen added, “We are more than halfway there, yes?”

“Sí,” he said with a nod. “We are almost there.”

“Then we will be on the ground shortly and the storm will most likely have passed or dulled by the time we leave.”

Luis thought for a moment before smiling and nodding again. “You are right.”

As Luis turned his eyes forward again, Knight plucked his earbuds free. “Almost there?”

“Yup,” Queen replied.

“You okay?”

“Fine.”

“She’s worried about Rook,” Bishop said, eyes still shut.

“We’re all worried about him,” Knight said. “But—”

Bishop opened his eyes and glanced at Knight. “Seriously?”

Knight opened his hands with a shrug. “What?”

Bishop responded by raising his eyebrows.

After a moment of thought, Knight realized what was being communicated. “Really?” He leaned forward and looked at Queen. “Really? Rook?”

The slightest of grins showed on Queen’s face. She slugged Bishop’s shoulder and turned to Knight. “I don’t want to break that pretty jaw of yours, Fancy Nancy, but I will.”

Knight was all smiles until Luis’s voice came over the headset. “El Mirador at three o’clock,” he said as he spoke his next words. “We made it.”

Queen, Bishop, and Knight leaned over and looked out of Queen’s window. For endless miles in the distance the jungle grew in a flat sheet of green, but here it rose up high into the sky, as though mountains had sprung up in the middle of a plain. But they weren’t mountains. They were ancient temples and pyramids built by the ancient Mayans. Near the peak of the tallest rise, the jungle cleared enough to see the dirty white stone hidden beneath. To most, the site felt both ominous and wondrous.

To Queen, Bishop, and Knight, it was something else entirely. For each knew that if they found the man they were looking for, it would become a place of violence and death not seen since the ancient Mayans soaked the forest floor with the blood of human sacrifice.

FORTY-FIVE

Amesbury, England

A GRAY HAZE hung over the late-afternoon sky, threatening to descend and cover the landscape in fog. If not for the patchwork of green and yellow fields on either side of the road, the day would have been depressing. Despite the gloom, the drive from Heathrow International Airport in London had gone smoothly, once again thanks to the plush black Mercedes awaiting King and Alexander.

King found himself riding shotgun as usual. Alexander knew the way and enjoyed driving his cars fast, which didn’t normally bother King, but a driver that can’t be killed may not take as much care as a mere mortal.

To distract himself from the breakneck driving, King opened his cell phone and placed a call he’d been avoiding. Not because he didn’t want to speak to his parents, but because he didn’t know what to say. There was no time for a conversation and calling just to check in seemed wildly inappropriate given the fact that his mother was supposed to be dead and his father had been recently freed from jail.

“Hi honey!” his mother answered on the second ring.

“Hey Mom.”

“Have you found them yet? The men behind the attack?”

King grinned. It was business as usual with Lynn. “You know I can’t tell you anything.”

Alexander took a right turn at a fork in the road. Stonehenge loomed to the left. After driving through the city and now the country, the megalithic monument seemed out of place, like it had been transported from someplace far away. Then his phone rang. After looking at the caller ID screen, Alexander answered the call with a hushed voice.

King strained to hear what he was saying, but Peter’s voice shouted from the background in his own phone. “Is he in Iraq? That’s still a hot spot for these kinds of things.”

“Are you in Iraq, dear?” his mother asked.

King sighed. There was no harm in telling them he wasn’t in Iraq and it would stop them from worrying. “No, I’m not in Iraq.”

“Will you be?”

“No, Mom, Iraq is not on my radar.”

“Oh good. Good.”

With the monotony of the conversation already getting to him, and a desire to eavesdrop on Alexander’s conversation, King spoke quickly. “Listen, Mom. I was just calling to make sure you were both okay, that you’re both safe.”

“Oh, we have nothing to fear here,” Lynn said. “We’re safe.”

They entered the parking lot across the street from the monument and pulled into an empty space. A large red, double-decker tour bus pulled up behind them. Eager to get out of the car and not thinking about what might be outside, King exited the Mercedes and was greeted by an amplified voice.

“Welcome to Stonehenge, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for choosing London Hills Tours.”

King closed his eyes and sighed. Maybe she hadn’t heard. She certainly hadn’t reacted. “Mom, I have to go now.”

“Okay, hun. You’ll call back when you can?” she asked. “Don’t make us worry.”

“I won’t. I will. I have to go. Love you.” King ended the call as Alexander finished his own.

“Just the two of us,” King heard him say. “A few days, and make sure it’s dry. Good.”

Alexander hung up the phone, slid it inside his pocket, and exited the car.

“Dinner date?” King asked as he exited as well.

“Reservations of a sort, but not for food.” Alexander closed his door. “Nothing to concern yourself with.”

But King was concerned. Everything Alexander said and did raised more questions, and with each unanswered question, his trust of Alexander ebbed. Who was he talking to? Who were the two people he mentioned? And what were these secret reservations? The only reason Alexander had to keep secrets from King—who wasn’t interested in money, power, fame, or immortality—was that he wouldn’t like what he heard.

“Throwing me a surprise party?” King asked, searching for information without an outright confrontation.

But Alexander acted as though he hadn’t even heard the question. “I can hardly remember my parents,” he said. “But I know I’m glad I didn’t have a cell phone when they were alive.” He shook his head with a grin.

King saw through the phony smile and understood the meaning behind Alexander’s deflection: back off. Not one to back down from anyone, including immortals, he was about to push the subject when a mob of tourists exited the tour bus. Some went to the visitor’s center for pamphlets, restrooms, and drinks while the rest made a beeline for the subterranean passage that led to the other side of the road and a spectacular view of the stones. Other than the new arrivals, the parking lot was largely empty, save for a few cars. By Stonehenge standards, they had the place to themselves.

The air smelled of wet grass and car exhaust—a strange mix of nature and civilization that reminded King of more than a couple battle zones. But it was mildly cool and comfortable, despite the dreary weather.

“Sorry if I blasted you,” the tour guide said as she exited the bus. She was tall, all smiles, and had a tangy British accent. Her short brown hair was partially tied back in a ponytail. When she smiled, her thin eyes became squints and her lips became slivers of pink. “Saw you gabbin’ on your cell.”

“Ah, no worries luv,” Alexander said.

King flinched and glanced at Alexander. While his accent was spot on, they hadn’t discussed any kind of cover.

“Locals are ya?” she asked.

“Born an raised in Amesbury,” Alexander replied. “But my friend here’s a highlander fresh out of the mountains. Never seen the stones before.”

“Ohh,” she said flirtatiously, sidling up next to King. “A Scotsman, eh?”

King did his best not to roll his eyes and said, “Aye.”

“Well if you have any questions about Stonehenge, I’m the one to talk to. Never mind the guides in there,” she said, motioning to the visitor’s center. “They’re dead from the neck up.”

King couldn’t help but smile at the woman. Making sure to keep his accent, he said, “Are all the lassies in London this highfalutin?”

She gave King a funny look and laughed. He knew he was laying on the Highlander role-play a little thick, but he intended to come off as flirtatious. Given the broad smile on the woman’s face, he was succeeding.

“I just know my shit is all,” she said and then motioned to her bus. “Been top banana on this crimson cruiser for five years now. And no one knows more about the wonders of Wiltshire County than me. It’s why I get top whack for my tours.” She nudged King in the ribs. “But I’ll give you handsome gents a first-rate tour on the house.”

King extended his hand. “The name’s Calum. And my counterpart here is Humphrey.”

The woman giggled. “Bit of an old-fashioned name, eh?”

“He’s older than he looks,” King said.

She shook his hand. “Lauren Henderson. Owner and operator of London Hills Tours.”

“You know,” King said. “There is something I’ve been wondering about.”

Lauren cocked her head to the side. “Oh? And what might that be?”

“I’ve asked Humph a few times, but when it comes to history, he’s something of a dolt.”

Alexander chuckled and began wandering toward the tunnel entrance, scanning the parking lot, the visitors, and the site across the street. While listening to the conversation, he was also watching for anything unusual. King and Lauren followed him.

“Are there any examples of words, umm, spoken language being used to manipulate the elements?”

She stared at him for a moment, then cracked a big grin. “You highlanders are into some cheeky stuff.” She elbowed him again. “Ahh, I’m just winding you up.”

They stopped in front a tall green sign at the tunnel entrance. “So, just to be clear, you’re asking about magic, right? Casting spells?”

He hadn’t considered magic as a term to describe what Ridley was able to do, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that’s exactly what it was. And with the realization came the epiphany that the mythology of magic most likely developed as a result of this ancient language. And there may have been genuine magicians who had learned certain phrases that allowed them to do amazing things.

“Aye,” King said. “But specifically spoken magic. Is there any association with Stonehenge?”

“In fact, there is,” she said, excitement in her eyes. “It’s said that the bluestones were quarried in a remote region of Africa and were brought first to Ireland by giants.”

“Giants?” King asked. “Stone giants?”

Lauren’s smile disappeared for a moment, her train of thought ruined. “I dunno. Giants are giants.” Her smile returned and she continued. “But the man responsible for bringing the stones from Ireland to Britain was none other than the grand wizard Merlin himself. If you’ve got the time, you can read about it in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae Merlini, the Prophecies of Merlin. Stonehenge was referred to as ‘the giant’s circle’ back then, on account of being built by the giants.”

Lauren had just confirmed a slew of suspicions: Merlin’s spoken magic and giants that smacked of golems. It all made surreal sense. What King didn’t understand was that when he spoke again, his voice shook like he was being rattled around in the back of a bus.

Then he realized what was happening.

The ground was shaking.

FORTY-SIX

El Mirador, Guatemala

QUEEN, KNIGHT, AND Bishop exited the tour helicopter and entered a hellish nightmare. Blinding flashes of lightning pulsed in the sky. Rain whipped by high winds stung their exposed skin. A loud hiss created by rustling palm leaves and rain filled the air, broken by the occasional boom of thunder. But the storm had its bonuses. With no other tourists on-site and the science team weathering out the storm in their tents, they could explore the site without interference. Or so they hoped.

After taking their cases, which contained equipment no tourist should have access to, they left Luis behind and headed into the jungle. The pilot was happy to remain safe and dry inside the chopper.

A clearing full of large sturdy blue tents sat just inside the jungle, buffeted by the elements. Rainwater, diverted by tarps, flowed away as small streams that had already eroded the topsoil. Muffled conversations could be heard as the science team took cover from the storm. A large tent, this one built on top of a wooden platform four feet off the ground, lay at the center of the site. Given its size and the effort taken to protect it from flooding, Queen pegged it for the site’s laboratory and headed for it. If Jon Hudson, the archaeologist behind the excavation, was anything like the scientists they’d collaborated with in the past, he’d be hard at work despite the inclement weather.

The wooden steps creaked under the weight of Queen, Bishop, and Knight as they entered the tent, but the man inside showed no reaction to their approach. He sat with his back to the door, hunched over a worktable. He suddenly reached out his hand, snapped twice, and pointed. “Get me a clean brush, will you?”

Queen saw the brush in question, picked it up, and handed it to the man. He immediately went back to work, brushing dust from a shattered Mayan relief.

“Thank you,” he said. “It’s nice to see not everyone is hiding away because of a little storm.”