THE
SEVENTH
STONE
A Thriller
PAMELA HEGARTY
Sky Castle Publishing
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost;
that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
- Henry David Thoreau
This book is a work of fiction. The author doesn’t actually know any maniacal pharmaceutical titans set on creating a new religion even if it means purging millions of lives. Although unsung heroes are no doubt saving the real world as you read this, the characters in this book are imaginary. Much of the history, including the Biblical references to the Breastplate of Aaron, is real.
THE SEVENTH STONE, Copyright © 2011 by Pamela Hegarty. All rights reserved. Produced in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews. Contact Sky Castle Publishing at [email protected]. For more information, go to skycastlepublishing.com and pamelahegarty.com.
ISBN 978-0-9630791-0-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011917818
Cover Image: Cat’s eye emerald superimposed on photo of the Helix “Eye of God” Nebula. Helix nebula image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA.
“You shall make the Breastplate of judgment. Artistically woven according to the workmanship of the ephod you shall make it: of gold, blue, purple, and scarlet thread, and fine woven linen, you shall make it. It shall be doubled into a square: a span shall be its length, and a span shall be its width. And you shall put settings of stones in it, four rows of stones: The first row shall be a sardius, a topaz, and an Emerald; this shall be the first row; the second row shall be a Turquoise, a sapphire, and a diamond; the third row, a jacinth, an agate, and an amethyst; and the fourth row, a beryl, an onyx, and a jasper. They shall be set in gold settings…”
• Exodus 28:30
DAY 1
CHAPTER 1
Navajo Reservation, Arizona
Christa Devlin slammed on the jeep’s brakes. He appeared out of the darkness like an apparition. With his wizened face, salt and pepper braid and colorful striped blanket wrapped around his shoulders, he had to be Joseph, the Navajo shaman whom her father had sent her to meet. And she was going to run him down, in the middle of a moonless night about as far from civilization as possible in the lower forty-eight. He stood still as she careened towards him, the tires slewing through the desert sand. He held up his hand. She rammed hers on the horn. The jeep stopped with a jolt, as if the old shaman had stared it down.
This was the man who was going to help her save the world, according to her father. Joseph knew the secret of the Turquoise. The sacred Turquoise. The one stolen from an artifact that had sent armies to war and men to the executioner, the most powerful artifact ever lost to humankind. The ancient ones had squirreled away the Turquoise stone in this canyon five hundred years ago. Hardly bigger than an acorn, she had to find it. In less than twenty-four hours. Before the others who would kill to possess it. She was glad Joseph was on her side.
She drew in a deep breath and shut off the engine. The silence was unnerving. She turned off the headlights. The darkness was complete until her eyes adjusted. Then she could make out objects a good ten feet into the pitch dark. Great. She opened the jeep door and climbed down, her hiking boots landing softly in the sand. A river babbled nearby. Insects chirped. The hoot of a lone owl underscored the stillness. She almost longed for the familiar annoyances of a barking dog or fighting lovers, until she looked up. The night sky was alive with stars that most people could only take on faith, framed by the black silhouettes of the canyon walls.
Joseph nodded to her. “It’s cold tonight,” he said. “Come to the fire.” He turned and walked towards a cottonwood grove. He had to be one of Dad’s friends, all right, cloaked in mystery with a hint of danger.
She reached to the passenger seat and grabbed her new lucky pack, picked up at the local trading post. When she had dragged her old lucky pack out of the closet for this trip, it stank of mildew. A bad omen. She stretched the elastic band of her new headlamp over her forehead and flicked it on.
Joseph’s campfire was in a small clearing beyond the patch of cottonwood trees. He crouched and stirred a log deeper into the coals. Sparks spiraled up into the wisps of pungent smoke. He sat down, tugging his blanket in tighter.
She sat opposite him. “My father sounded desperate last night,” Christa said, “when he called from Morocco.” More than desperate, he had sounded scared. Dad didn’t get scared.
“You’ve had a long journey,” Joseph said. “You should rest. We face a difficult climb in the morning, and we must rise with the sun.”
A long journey didn’t begin to describe what brought her to this remote corner of the desert on this dark December night. She had all but abandoned her cluttered office back at Princeton, the stacks of final essays to grade for her first History of Exploration class as an assistant professor, and probably any hope of a career at the university. Just like she had abandoned Dad. Not this time. “If that turquoise is out there,” she said, “I’m damn well going to find it.”
“The future depends on it,” he said.
“You believe in the power of the Breastplate.”
“Not believe,” he squinted into the darkness beyond her, “I know.”
The Breastplate of Aaron. It was a golden shield emblazoned with twelve sacred gemstones, including the Turquoise. God designed the Breastplate, commanding man to create it, as written in the Book of Exodus, if you believed in that sort of thing.
Aaron, brother of Moses, was the first of the high priests to wear it. He wore it in the Inner Sanctum, the Holy of Holies, as he stood alone in front of the Breastplate’s companion piece, the Ark of the Covenant. The Breastplate’s gems would flash with brilliance and open a portal to Heaven. The one who wore it could speak directly with God. He could actually hear God’s voice. Dad was obsessed with finding it and the seven gemstones which were stolen from it in the 16th century and concealed around the world.
A sudden flutter of wings and the alarm call of a quail disturbed the cottonwood grove behind her. She twisted around, but couldn’t see further than the firelight’s dance on the tangle of tumbleweed. Nobody could be out there. Without Joseph’s local knowledge, they couldn’t possibly have honed in on this stretch of valley so fast. “But both the Breastplate and the Ark of the Covenant haven’t been seen since 586 years before Christ was born,” she said, still trying to see into the shadows, “when the Babylonians sacked the Temple of Solomon. How could the Turquoise stone from the Breastplate have ended up here in Arizona?”
This could be another of Dad’s crazy ideas spawned from his fixation on finding the Breastplate. Those bastards who are racing after the stones will kill others, Dad had said last night before the phone line went dead, just like they killed Mom. It will kill me, Christa, if we let them win. The Breastplate will prove that life exists beyond death. Don’t you want to reach Mom? Don’t you want to know that her love for us didn’t just end?
Joseph flung away his blanket and stood, his eyes wide, peering into the cottonwoods. Christa grabbed the nearest weapon, the burning log.
An old man stumbled into the clearing. His chest was shiny with blood. His hand clenched a knife. He collapsed face first towards the red Sonoran dust, near the glowing coals of the campfire. Joseph caught him and eased him to the ground. “Samuel,” Joseph said.
Joseph reached for his bedroll, then eased up the man’s head, and rested it on the makeshift pillow. Samuel looked and smelled like he’d been wandering the desert for decades, and neither he, nor his
matted white beard, had seen civilization, never mind running water, for weeks. He might have appropriated his baggy, threadbare Levis from the skeleton of an unlucky forty-niner. He had tied a prospector’s gold pan to his belt. The stink of his sweat and blood made her gag. She stepped back and jammed the log back into the fire. Flames flared up from the coals.
Joseph loosened Samuel’s grimy neckerchief and unbuttoned the ragged plaid shirt. The wound in the chest was bad, near the heart. It was circular, as if drilled with a bullet, not stabbed with a knife.
Samuel’s eyes snapped open. The knife rolled from his hand. The blade wasn’t metal. It was black, obsidian, its jagged edge a telltale sign of being sharpened with flint. Its handle was carved into a crouching jaguar and decorated with turquoise mosaic. She had researched knives like this. It looked pre-Columbian. Most likely Mayan. Possibly sacrificial. What the hell was it doing on a Navajo Reservation?
Samuel grabbed Joseph’s shoulder, snatching the flannel like a drowning man clutches a lifeline. “I found it!” he said. He shuddered and coughed. He closed his free hand into a fist, fighting for a breath. “I found the path to the lost cliff dwelling.”
Christa drew in closer. The lost cliff dwelling. So the cliff dwelling, at least, could be real. Her father had told her that, five hundred years ago, a sandstorm had buried the remote village inhabited by a mysterious cult of Anasazi Indians. Two days ago, a second once-in-a-millennium windstorm exposed it.
“Samuel, who did this to you?” Joseph asked. Samuel grasped at something tucked into his hip pocket. Joseph eased it out. A dented, stainless steel flask. Joseph unscrewed the top and helped his friend take a sip. She switched on her headlamp and directed it at the cottonwood grove. Nothing.
Samuel swallowed, wheezed and sputtered out a cough that intensified into an incapacitating spasm. He stabbed the darkness from where he came, towards the babble of the river. “All these years, I must of walked beneath it a thousand times. Right above me. I knew it was there, even if I couldn’t see it. I knew it.” He coughed violently. Blood gurgled onto his beard. “Damn double-crosser. He hired me to guide him, then figured he was going to kill old Samuel, in my desert.” Samuel narrowed his eyes at his chest and grimaced. “Reckon he did kill me.” He waved a finger at Joseph. “But not before old Samuel done unto him what he done unto me. Stabbed him with this here knife the ancient ones left behind. I watched him drop right over the edge of that cliff dwelling plateau. Heard him snap when he hit dirt.”
“We’ve got a jeep here, Samuel,” Christa said. Whoever did this to him could still be out there, no matter what Samuel believed he’d done. Years travelling with her father had taught her that bad guys were tenacious. “We’ll get you to the hospital.”
Samuel yanked Joseph closer with surprising strength. “Like hell you will. The bastards are after it, Joseph. They’re as close as I am to kingdom come, maybe closer.” He sucked in a rattle of a breath. “You’re the only one who can beat them. When you get to the body of that scum who killed me, start climbing.” He released his grip on Joseph’s shirt. “It’s an old toe and hand path up the cliff face. It ain’t easy, but it’s there.” His burst of strength played out, Samuel sank back down.
Joseph closed up Samuel’s shirt and crossed his hands over his chest. “Goodbye, old friend,” he said. He stood and looked towards the river. “We have little time.”
She pointed at Samuel. “He has even less, if we don’t help him.”
“We can only help him by doing what he asks.”
Blood oozed rhythmically from Samuel’s chest wound. With a rattling cough, he battled every few seconds for a breath. “Joseph, I want to get to that cliff dwelling more than you do,” she said, “but I am not leaving him here. Help me get him into the jeep.”
“He won’t make it,” Joseph said. “It takes forty-five minutes to reach the nearest paved road. Two hours from there to the hospital.”
“No damn hospital!” Samuel groaned. He raised his hand, as if grasping at the stars. “I am gonna die here, in my desert. And I don’t want my spirit to hang around here and haunt you, so you better not let them that killed me win. Now leave an old man alone.”
Joseph turned and headed into the cottonwood grove, out of the feeble circle of light cast by the dying campfire.
“Joseph, wait.” Damn it. It went against every fiber in her being to leave a man to die. What if it was Dad, lying hurt, with nobody to help him? She grabbed her lucky pack. She swooped up the Mayan knife, the blood on it repulsive and sticky. “Hang on, Samuel,” she said. “I swear to you, I won’t let them win.” Samuel’s lips, oddly youthful beneath the white wilds of his beard, cracked into a smile.
CHAPTER 2
One hundred nautical miles
off the coast of Morocco
Ahmed Battar did not sweat, until today. He bore the blood of generations of Arab desert tribesmen, which flowed cool in the heat of the sun and true to the values of loyalty. And yet again he had to wipe the perspiration from his brow. He stood on the upper deck of the Aquila, anchored one hundred miles west of his homeland and a world away from his beloved wife and daughter. Beneath the surface, a school of silvery pilot fish gathered in the shadow cast by the hull of the Aquila. Ahmed watched as their instinct, or a divine plan, guided them to the deception of shelter, just as it coaxed them to school together, in a mass, the weak with the strong. A tiger shark swam into view, its eyes glassy, without emotion. The shark’s jaws snapped up one, two, and then three fish as the school circled. As a single mass, the fish darted into the sunlit waters. Only escape, not a shadow of a shelter, could save them. The school survived. The shark, satisfied, slid back into the deep.
On the surface, men toiled in the heat, lashing crates and coiling lines. No breeze stirred the heat, as if Allah had lowered a bell jar over them, to watch and wait. Today, the men were happy. The Aquila was a treasure hunter, and they had found their treasure.
Ahmed slipped his hand through the slit in his djellaba, the traditional tunic of his people, and toyed with the tiny device in the pocket of his khakis. He didn’t press the button, not yet.
With his other hand, he fingered the photo of his wife, Leila, and their daughter, Ambar. The photo, snapped when Ambar proudly walked her first steps, was creased and faded from the salt air, heat and touch. She was six years old now, could write her own name in flowing if hesitant Arabic, and insisted on the best of manners and sweets at her frequent tea parties. But the photo was still his favorite. He saw in it her innocence, her future, and, most importantly, hope. They had not destroyed her innocence, had not stolen her life, not yet. He had to press the button, but he couldn’t.
He eyed the men on the foredeck below him, the men whose lives he would soon put in grave danger. They were securing the last crates under the disciplined but kind direction of Captain Bertoni. Ahmed noticed that the captain’s trademark white cotton shirt with red epaulets was damp with sweat. At this morning’s briefing, it had been, as always, pristine and starched. The captain doffed his navy cap, looked up to Ahmed and saluted him.
“The captain likes you, kid.” The voice startled Ahmed. It was Stubb, the elder statesmen of their crew, with the mind and know-how of an historian and the physique of a longshoreman. He had been with Bertoni for years.
“I admire the captain,” said Ahmed, “the way he keeps his ship and crew on an even keel, in calm, or stormy, times.”
“It’s because he chooses his crew wisely,” said Stubb. He pulled out his trademark pipe from his pocket. He no longer smoked it, just chewed on its black nib. “Like when he hired you as translator six months ago. I thought you were a bit too eager to get the job. He said that you reminded him of himself, when he was your age.”
The words, meant as a compliment, stung Ahmed like the bitterest insult. He had thought himself clever to secure a position that would allow him to fulfill his vow to Thaddeus Devlin. Now the manipulations needed to retain this job shamed him, but he had no choi
ce. “I knew Captain Bertoni would succeed,” he said.
“He had to,” said Stubb. “This treasure will buy back his father.”
Ahmed couldn’t hide his surprise. “The captain has never spoken of this.” He thought of his wife, his child. Had the pirates also threatened Bertoni’s father?
Stubb clenched his pipe. “His father disowned him,” he said. “Dear old Papa got tired of ticking off the years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Told the captain that a delusional fool could be no son of Antonio Bertoni.”
“Then the captain is hunting for more than treasure,” Ahmed said, his voice soft.
Stubb pointed his pipe at him. “He is seeking redemption.”
“The most elusive quarry,” said Ahmed.
“Spoken like someone who seeks it.”
Stubb was fishing. Ahmed couldn’t take the bait.
“Captain Bertoni almost gave up hope,” said Stubb. “I’d watch him, in the wee hours of the morning, his long, vacant stares across the open sea. I thought he might step over the side. Be one with his treasure like Ahab with his whale. He thinks he has found what he was seeking, but I don’t believe he has.”
The Seventh Stone Page 1