by Nick Thacker
“There,” Ben said, pointing.
Julie followed his finger. A man stood outside the plane’s window, directly on the tarmac, holding a sign that said Bennett.
“Looks like Mr. E saved us the hassle of having to go through the terminal,” Ben said.
“Us? That sign only has your name on it.”
“Guess Mr. E’s trying to tell us he wants the wedding to happen sooner rather than later,” Ben said.
Their wedding had been planned — and postponed — three times now. No matter when they attempted to put something together it seemed that life got in the way. And more often than not, their version of “life” getting in the way was really someone, somewhere, trying to kill them.
“Well, I’m ready when you are.”
Ben frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean? We’re going to get married here? At an airport?”
“I’m ready to get off the plane, Bennett,” Julie said. “That’s what I meant.”
He nodded, blinking a few times, and Julie wondered again just how many of the rum and cokes he’d enjoyed.
The flight attendant came directly to their seats before the plane had reached the terminal, and she escorted Julie and Ben to the front of the plane. “We had a request for you two to disembark before our other passengers. There’s another plane waiting for you, and you both have clearance to head directly there.”
“Thank you,” Julie said.
The woman took them to the front of the plane just as the door opened. They were led to a set of stairs at the end of the jetway, and they took these down and onto the tarmac. The man holding a sign was there, introduced himself, and asked them to follow him.
They walked a few hundred feet to a hangar where there was a Learjet idling nearby, and Julie and Ben climbed the stairs into this smaller jet. Inside, the fuselage was painted white, faux leather and wood trim decorating everything in sight. Ben immediately crashed into a seat on the aisle side and pulled out his phone.
“Message from Archie,” he said.
“Yeah?” Julie asked. “Go for it.” She sat in the seat across the aisle from him, buckled her seatbelt, then waited for Ben to press play.
“Ben, Julie,” Archie’s message began. “I hope your flight went well. I am on my way to the university, where I can spread out and have access to the library there. I will call again when you arrive at your next destination, wherever that may be.”
Julie saw Ben looking at her. She shook her head, as if to say, nothing to report. She hadn’t heard from Mrs. E or her husband about where they were headed next. Chances are they didn’t know either, and the plane would begin flying south until they’d had a chance to track down Garza’s helicopter once again.
“Anyway, I wanted to let you know about something. I have been thinking about our ‘plan,’ or at least our goal. It — it remains a long shot, but I think I may have a way to achieve it.”
Again, Ben looked over at Julie. She smiled.
“I can explain more, but I need to research the layout of the city. Please allow me a few hours, and I will fill you in then.”
The message ended, and Julie spoke first. “Sounds like we’re getting somewhere.”
“Hope so,” Ben said. “But if not, we’re going to have to hope Mr. E can track that chopper.”
21
Victoria
Victoria Reyes zipped through the campus quad and back to her office. Her lunch had been cut short because of a cryptic, vague voicemail that she’d gotten on her phone.
Professor Reyes, the message began. We need to talk. Please call me at this number and do not mention this call to anyone.
She might have put it off, ignored the message until later, but there was something intriguing about the man’s voice — deep, careful, articulate. A hint of a South American accent, but impeccable English. Somewhere between 50 and 70 years old.
She ran the phone number through a spam-filtering app on her phone, just to see if the number was publicly registered to anyone. She was surprised to find that it was, and even more surprised to discover who that caller was.
Archibald Quinones.
She knew the name — Quinones was an esteemed historian living in Brazil, and he had published papers on the Jesuit fraternity and their relations with the Spanish Crown and Incan populations during the years of the conquests. She had read them with interest, filing them away in her mind as the sort of thing that might prove useful someday, yet not critical to her current projects.
Victoria had always been what her father called ‘book smart.’ Studious, engaged, and interested in everything. She’d excelled in school, where reading and memorization abilities were strengths, and she had both in spades. Somewhat of an autodidact, she had a near-perfect memory for historical facts, and an uncanny ability to build a tapestry of history based on seemingly disconnected pieces and threads.
In her work, she often referred to the wealth of human history as a ‘never-ending quilt,’ an ongoing collection of stories and characters and settings that was constantly being reworked, patched up, fixed. It was her dream to finish this quilt, to piece together the entire web of human history, connecting all the dots and patches together in a perfect, linear story.
This, of course, was impossible. But that had never stopped Victoria. She’d been married, divorced, completed three undergraduate degrees and two graduate-level degrees, finished with honors each time, been recognized as one of the nation’s top history talents under the age of 50, and she was still only in her mid-thirties.
Her success was nothing short of meteoric, and she’d been offered jobs and speaking engagements more often than she could count.
But her passion, and her goal, was simple: understand the story of our lives. Her mission in life was larger than a position at a prestigious university or having her face on the cover of a bestselling book. She intended to solve humanity’s greatest mysteries, and to do it in a single lifetime.
She didn’t have time for dating, though there were plenty of suitors. She didn’t have time for writing books, though she wrote more words per week than most of her graduate students. She didn’t have time for many things, including maintaining a social life.
But she had time to talk to historians like Archibald Quinones. The Jesuits had always been an enigma to her — a group of men within the Catholic Church who had originally existed as the strongmen of the Pope during the Spanish conquest. The men tasked with protecting and securing the myriad secrets of the Vatican. The order had evolved over the centuries, but her interest in the order was as strong as ever.
She reached her office and pulled out her phone once again, dialing the number Quinones had given her. She sat behind her desk, shook her computer’s mouse to wake it, and waited for the man to answer.
“Hello?”
“Ar — Mr. Quinones,” she began.
“Please, call me Archie. Ms. Reyes, I presume?”
“Yes. Thank you. I —” she realized she had no idea what to say. “I love your work.”
There was a chuckle. “Well, thank you for that. But it is because of your incredible work that I reached out to you.”
“My work?”
“Yes, indeed. Your paper on the similarities between fraternal orders among world religions was very well-researched.”
“Thank you, Mr. — Archie. I’m flattered you took the time to read it. And thank you for reaching out. I have always wanted to have a discussion with you.”
“Well, that discussion certainly must happen. But today, I unfortunately have little time for that — instead, I need to ask for your help.”
“Of course,” Victoria said. “Anything.”
Archie paused on the other end of the line. “Ms. Reyes, I need your help to make sense of a… set of events that have transpired.”
“Events.”
“I have four friends in the United States that are under attack. Two have been kidnapped. I believe the two others are being hunted and are in significant
danger.”
“My God, Archie,” Victoria said. “You need — you have to call —”
“Please, there is more. Trust me, if there were anyone I could call whom I believe could help there, I would. But my hands are tied, and I believe the only way to find them — where they’ve been taken, or where the others need to go — is to find more information.”
Victoria waited, listening to the sound of the older man breathing. He was pausing, thinking. Trying to decide if he trusts me?
“Victoria, if I may. I believe the kidnapping has something to do with the Catholic Church.”
Victoria sat up straighter in her office chair. If she’d been drinking tea, she would have spat it out across her desk. “The Catholic Church.”
“Yes,” Archie said. “As you know, I am a member of the fraternal Society of Jesus — a Jesuit Catholic. If the case were any different, I would never accuse the Church of such a thing. But… I strongly believe they are working against my friends, and — I cannot stress this enough — I have no reason to believe my friends have done anything wrong.”
“I see,” Victoria said. She was twirling a strand of her light-brown hair between her thumb and forefinger. An old habit that she fell into in times of stress or deep thought. “You are part of a fraternal order — one of many within the Church. Could these people — the ones after your friends — be part of a different sect? One that might… want something within the church to change?”
“Almost without a doubt, yes. The Church is far too large and dispersed to be able to coordinate a singular attack such as this. Besides, I believe that if the Vatican somehow could come together in this way, united on one front against my friends, they… would not really stand a chance.”
“True,” Victoria said. “So tell me — what is it the Church wants? And why kidnap your friends because of it?”
Another pause, this one longer. Victoria sensed she was about to be told something Archie wished to keep to himself. She was about to check her phone’s screen to see if the call had been disconnected when Archie spoke again, his voice nearly a whisper.
“Ms. Reyes, have you ever heard of the Book of Bones?”
She gripped the phone tighter in her hand, fingers white. Her mouth fell open.
22
Victoria
The Book of Bones.
Victoria hadn’t heard that name in over five years. She had heard it mentioned in the same breath as other lost works of antiquity, like the Ab Urbe Condita Libri, the Quixotic homage by Shakespeare, Cardenio, and plenty of individual works by Aristotle. The Book of Bones, or the Hermocrates, was a lost work of Plato, but many believed it had never even been written. In her professional career, her research required references that were real, thus she had spent little time on it.
“I thought Plato never started Hermocrates,” she said.
“That is what I believed as well,” Archie said. “Hermocrates, as you know, was to be the third dialogue in his series of discussions that included Timaeus and Critias. Since Critias ended mid sentence, we believe that Plato died before he could even start Hermocrates.”
Victoria waited, knowing it was better to allow a professor and professional thinker time to talk, to allow their ideas time to emerge on their own.
“But we always assumed that he died before finishing Critias. What I believe — what my friends believe — is that he stopped working on Critias because the message of Hermocrates was far more important.”
“Can you explain that?”
“Yes. There is a longer story, but my friends were involved in an incident in Egypt about a month ago that led me to study this ‘Book of Bones.’”
“A name given to it by conspiracy theorists and fringe scientists,” she scoffed. Hermocrates, like Timaeus and Critias, was the name of an actual historical figure, a Syracusan politician who no doubt would have been featured prominently in Plato’s dialogue.
“True, but in Egypt, my team found what they believed to be a journal that referenced the original manuscript.”
“So he wrote The Book of Bones — the Hermocrates — instead of finishing Critias?”
“We think so. Further, he never allowed it to be copied and recorded as he had done with his other works. The Book of Bones contained powerful enough information — information that Plato would have wanted kept close to him — that he never allowed it out of his sight.”
“Then how did your team in Egypt get their hands on it?”
“That — that is a long story,” Archie said. “For another time. But they intercepted a journal that contained pieces of the manuscript — copied, of course —”
“Then how do they know it’s accurate? Or genuine? Anyone could have faked a —”
“I am sorry, Victoria. I know how intrigued you are surrounding the details, but we may not have much time to get my friends back. If you can suspend your disbelief for a brief few moments, I promise you we can discuss the intricacies of what I am telling you at a later date.”
Victoria smiled. She would indeed enjoy some face-to-face time with an esteemed colleague. Perhaps she could even get the department to cover the cost of traveling to Brazil. “Deal,” she said. “From now on, what you say is truth.”
“Thank you. The journal, unfortunately ended up in the hands of an Interpol agent, and we believe it is essentially gone — lost in an unorganized vault of evidence. But the information contained within that journal… the referenced pieces of the original manuscript of Plato’s Hermocrates… Victoria, they were experiments.”
“Experiments?”
“Yes — Die Glocke, the Nazi bell, was apparently a weapon of some sort, originally described in Hermocrates. The woman who originally owned the journal was a descendant of Sigmund Rascher, the Nazi scientist who —”
“That’s… gruesome.”
“Yes, it is. Worse, we believe this woman was planning a larger… experiment. Something similar to the bell, but on a much larger scale.”
Victoria enabled the phone’s speaker mode and placed it on her desk, face-up. She opened a note-taking app on her computer and began typing.
“But this call is not about that woman. Her experiments, thankfully, are over. Instead, I would like your help finding this Book of Bones. Plato’s ‘lost’ dialogue, Hermocrates.”
“Okay,” Victoria said, “I would be happy to help. But tell me, Archie — why now? Why is it crucial that the Catholic Church find the Book of Bones? How does that help find your friends?”
“The man who took them explained it thus: his client, whom we believe to be some organization embedded within the Catholic Church, was told to find the book. He knew that my friends were the best option they had at finding it.”
“Okay,” she said. “Makes sense. But… why? What’s in the Book of Bones that —”
She stopped. Blinked twice. Stared at something she’d just written on the screen.
> Book of Bones (Hermocrates) — ‘unfinished’ book by Plato
> Trilogy:
> > Timaeus: Speculation about the human world; introduces Atlantis
> > Critias: Details fall of Atlantis; hubris. Description of Atlantic island
>> Hermocrates (Book of Bones): Details…
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
“Sorry? What was that?”
“I just… I think I may know what they want.”
“The… Church?”
“Well, whoever’s after your friends. I believe there’s another piece to the saga of Atlantis, and Plato stopped his work on Critias because he needed to tell us something. Needed to warn us.”
“And you know what that is?”
“I — I think I do.” She looked again at her notes, then picked up the phone, turning off the speaker mode. “I believe the Book of Bones is about the people of Atlantis. Specifically, their capabilities. Each book of Plato’s gets more and more granular, more specific. Timaeus describes Atlantis and the ideal state, Critias deals with the island, the geogra
phy itself, and therefore Hermocrates will describe what the Atlantean people were like. You said the book describes their experiments?”
“Yes, it does. At least the section my friends saw.”
“Well, I believe there is more in the book similar to that. But above all, and why Plato was terrified enough to cut Critias short and finish Hermocrates, is that the book not only describes what the race of Atlantis was like, it described what that race is like.”
“Are you saying —”
“I am. I believe that Plato wrote The Book of Bones not because he wished to detail a race of humans that had fallen, but to detail a population that was still there.
“And,” she added. “I believe that the Church thinks they’re out there somewhere, and they wish to find them.”
23
Reggie
Reggie’s arms and legs were tightly pressed against a hard surface. He pulled and bucked with his legs, but nothing moved.
He couldn’t see.
He didn’t know if his eyes were open and registering darkness or if they had been injured. He couldn’t feel anything.
He tried to scream, pulling against the ties as hard as he could, but he was shocked to hear his voice reverberate quickly through the tight space he was in. It sounded as though the ceiling was directly above him, mere inches away. He pulled his head up, reaching with the only movable appendage he had available.
He was right — the ceiling was hard, and it was barely an inch above his head. He suddenly felt the urge to vomit. He began breathing more heavily, his lungs straining against the thin air.
Where the hell am I?
The box pressed in on him. He felt it growing smaller. Is all of this part of my imagination?
He suddenly realized what the box reminded him of, and the feeling of nausea returned.