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  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 re
scued 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.”