Two beasts paced the edge of the dirt track, waiting, stalking. They were jet black, with matted fur, like wolves, but larger, with oversize forequarters and glowing, golden eyes. The larger of the two bared its teeth, snarling. They looked even more terrifying in the twilight than in the dark.
The man that had been flung in front of the jeep reached his hand towards the driver of the Land Rover. A beast stood over the downed man, its paws on his chest. The beast’s mouth gaped open hungrily. Drool dripped from the beast’s sharp canine tooth onto the man’s cheek. “Rambitskov,” the man pleaded. “Get me out of here.”
“Torrino,” Rambitskov said in a voice that was preternaturally calm. “Go get Devlin and Fox and bring them to the Land Rover. Professor Devlin,” he added in the same, steady tone. “You’d better bring the stones with you, or I will throw you right back to the beasts.”
Torrino moved cautiously toward them, his eyes not leaving the beasts, his hand on the butt of his gun in his shoulder holster.
Torrino, that was his name. She couldn’t possibly overpower him and Rambitskov. She couldn’t make a run for the Land Rover and leave Braydon behind. And she couldn’t let Rambitskov get the stones. He was keeping them alive for a reason. She had to use that to her advantage. She had only one priority now. Get away from the beasts.
She eased down from the jeep. She and Torrino helped Braydon down beside her. She reached into the jeep and slowly looped her arm through the straps of their packs, easing them over her shoulder. Torrino stretched Braydon’s good arm over his shoulder and half-carried him to the Land Rover.
They reached the far side of the Land Rover. She opened the back door. Torrino slid Braydon in, flopping him across the back seat. Torrino slowly opened the front passenger door. “Get in,” he said, then, in a whisper, “Get behind the wheel.” She didn’t question. She did as she was told, too terrified to hope.
The beast on top of the man on the ground craned his neck upwards towards the rising moon. It howled, that same sickening primeval sound that had pierced the desert night when she was first here with Joseph. The man beneath the beast began weeping, his chest in his black ops uniform shaking up and down with his ragged breaths. “Rambitskov, please,” he cried.
Rambitskov eased his handgun from his holster. He aimed. He fired, once. The man’s face was stricken with wide-eyed shock. A hole appeared in his temple, then a trickle of blood. The beast atop the man clamped his teeth on to the man’s throat and tore at it, shaking his snout violently back and forth, nearly severing the man’s head.
The other two beasts crouched and loped towards Rambitskov. Torrino quickly climbed into the Land Rover and shut the door. “Drive!” he shouted. She threw the gear into reverse. She twisted to look behind her. Trees, everywhere. A crash now would disable their last working vehicle. Rambitskov shouted at them, cursing, shooting at the beasts, then shooting at them. A bullet shattered the window at the rear.
Rambitskov sprinted in a new direction, going for the shelter of the disabled SUV, with the tire Braydon had shot out. Its door was open. Rambitskov dove into it. His foot kicked out at the beast as it lunged after him. The beast stumbled back. Rambitskov slammed shut the door. Christa yanked the wheel around, sending her Land Rover into a spin. She threw it into Drive and pressed the accelerator to the floorboard. The car fishtailed, stuttered and shot forward. As she sped into the darkening desert, Rambitskov’s Land Rover came into view in the rear view mirror. Three beasts flung themselves against the windows to attack the prey inside.
“I wouldn’t wish that death on anyone,” she yelled over the engine noise and the ghastly howls of both beast and man.
Braydon groaned. He pushed himself up to look woozily out the shattered rear window. “Be careful what you wish for.”
DAY 4
CHAPTER 59
Braydon’s shoulder knocked against the padded panel door of the Homeland Security SUV they’d seized in the desert. He awoke from a dream that on any other day would have scared him more than the real world. He was sweating, breathing fast. Remnants of sharp teeth dripping drool bit through his brain. Scariest part was, in the dream, he was the beast, poised to kill Rambitskov.
They had just driven onto the Bay Bridge. He could see that much and not much else. The notorious San Francisco fog cocooned them in white. Steel girders smacked into view and vanished behind them. Ahead, the peaks of the city skyline, punctuated by the distinctive pinnacle of the TransAmerica pyramid, pierced the fog. A time traveler from long ago might think it was a cloud city, a wonder of the future, if not for the intrepid, or foolish, sailor who plied the waters of the Bay close by the docks below.
No more foolish nor intrepid than they were. Torrino, behind the wheel, had to be punch drunk tired. They had driven through the night and most of the day from Arizona. He was driving like a New York cabbie, careening around a Camry piloted by an elderly gentleman who clearly feared plunging off the edge of the bridge in the fog more than the impending apocalypse.
“I’m as curious about life after death as the next guy,” Braydon said, “but I’d rather not find the answer at the bottom of San Francisco Bay.”
Torrino’s eyes darted to see him in the rear view mirror. “Tell that to the guy chasing us,” he said.
He twisted back, couldn’t see more than twenty-five yards. “You know, the first symptom of that poison is delusions.” He faced front to see Christa looking at him. God, she was beautiful. Her brown hair curled from beneath the brim of her funky plaid cap. A hand-painted winged, tattoo-like design blazed across the back of her black sweatshirt. She grabbed the papers on the lap of her sustainably harvested cotton skinny jeans to keep them from being flung to the floor with the momentum of Torrino’s evasive maneuvers. And she was no delusion.
With her free hand, she grabbed onto the handle above the door to steady herself. “Glad to see you’re still among the living.”
“She was worried about you,” he said. “I told her you were harder to keep down than my mother-in-law’s Arrabbiata sauce.”
“Thanks, I think,” he said. In fact, the bullet graze in his shoulder throbbed like Ali was punching him from the inside and he couldn’t shake off the devil pressing hot fingers against his forehead where he’d smashed into the Jeep’s dashboard. “You sure we got a tail?”
“Picked us up at the entrance to the bridge,” Torrino said, craning over the steering column to distinguish vehicles, girders and other deadly obstacles through the almost solid white. “Black Hummer, not exactly inconspicuous.”
“I disabled our GPS tracker,” he said, “which means they were waiting to hunt us down because we’re hunting down the Abraxas stone.”
“Which means,” Torrino said, “the Prophet didn’t get the real deal in that museum theft in this fair city nine months ago.”
“And he knows we don’t have it yet,” Christa said, “since we’re heading into San Francisco. But, if he thinks we have a lead on the Abraxas, why chase us down? Why not follow us without letting us know?”
“Contreras must already have boots on the ground here,” Braydon said. “He’s one step ahead, again. He didn’t send this tail to follow us. He sent them to stop us.”
“I’d bet Stonington is in on this,” Torrino said.
“Who’s Stonington?” Christa asked.
“High-end fence,” Torrino said. “Braydon saw Contreras meet him at his Nob Hill penthouse just after the Abraxas theft.”
“Stonington is way out of his league with this one,” he said. “I’d be worried about him if he wasn’t such a slug.” He checked the bandage on his arm, no blood seepage. After their near escape in the desert, they made a quick detour to the hospital. While he got stitched up, Christa checked in on Joseph and told him they’d found the Turquoise. Joseph gave them his file on everything he knew about the Circle of Seven. “Contreras needs that Abraxas stone as desperately as we do. We’ve got to get it first. Torrino, lose that tail. Christa, fill me in.”
“That chain is only as strong as its weakest link,” he said.
“And it broke,” she said. “The Abraxas guardian pegged his nephew, Adam, to inherit the guardianship, but this was back in the ‘sixties. Adam was drafted to Vietnam.”
“So no time to train him.”
Torrino slammed on the brake and swerved to the outer edge of the bridge. Out of the fog, an exit appeared, Treasure Island, smack in the middle of the Bay. He yanked the SUV onto the exit ramp.
Braydon twisted around. The Hummer swerved across two lanes, sending that old man’s Camry into a squealing stop against the girders. The Hummer thread the needle of the exit ramp. “Didn’t shake them taking the exit,” he said.
“I’ll lose him down below,” Torrino said. “I visited this place when we were here last spring, read about it in a guidebook, San Francisco and Beyond, 101 Affordable Excursions. Pays to be on a budget.”
Christa pressed her hand against the dashboard as they spiraled down to sea level. The narrow road hugged the shore of the sparsely wooded island. “The uncle was ready to train his next choice as guardian if Adam was killed,” she said, “but he didn’t dare pass the secret to another until he was sure it was necessary.” They passed an impressive half-moon shaped building accented with tall, vertical windows and post-art deco details. She pointed at it. “Isn’t that—“
“The setting for the exterior of the Berlin Airport where Indiana Jones took off in the blimp in the Last Crusade flick, without all the swastikas,” Torrino said. “Living the dream, baby.” He floored the accelerator, bulleting through the fog along the shoreline.
“The key word being living,” she said. “I can’t see twenty yards ahead of us.”
“Neither can the guys chasing us,” Torrino said.
She turned back to the notes. “Adam finishes his tour, comes home to San Francisco, but the uncle collapses from a massive coronary. He barely lived long enough to tell Adam about the Abraxas, how important it was. He had no time to educate the kid. Joseph came to San Francisco to fill in the gaps, but Adam disappeared.”
“Don’t tell me,” Braydon said. “Adam was eaten by a vicious, mythical beast that lives in an underground chamber that hides the Abraxas stone.” One thing he had learned about these Seven Stones. They were pried from beneath the Earth and, whether it was divine providence or the laws of inevitability, a powerful force was determined to return them from whence they came.
“Worse,” said Christa. “He started a secret religious cult centered on the stone. It goes back to the Abraxas stone’s origins.”
“It always comes down to that,” Braydon said, “the fight between good and evil.”
“Hang on!” Torrino yanked the steering wheel to the right. The SUV listed to the left, its massive weight shifting onto the outer tires. Then it straightened as it made the curve. Behind them, the Hummer careened forward, brakes screaming. It bolted up as it bucked over the curb, leaned sideways and crashed onto its side, sliding through the fog, until it vanished with a loud splash. “Score one for good,” Torrino said. “I knew that beast wouldn’t make the curve.”
“Don’t get cocky,” Braydon said. “Contreras wouldn’t send just one Hummer after us, unless he had a contingency. And the Abraxas was both good and evil.”
“That’s right,” Christa said. “It’s a mythical creature to the early Gnostics of the second century, a name for the supreme being that encompassed both good and evil.”
“With the head of a lion, the body of a man holding a whip in one hand and a shield in the other and serpents as legs,” Braydon said.
She raised the page to show the drawing in Joseph’s notes.
Torrino glanced over. “It doesn’t look like no supreme being to me.”
Braydon wasn’t about to admit that this “supreme being” had haunted his nightmares, more than once, since researching it after the San Francisco museum theft. “Back then,” he said, “supernatural beings didn’t teach the followers to follow their rules. They terrified them into following their rules.”
“The Abraxas creature was engraved on ancient gemstones,” Christa said, “along with the name Abraxas, to be used as charms. This note from the Jewish encyclopedia points out that some Abraxas stones had Hebrew names carved into them along with Abraxas, showing the influence of Judaism in ancient societies.”
“So the guardian didn’t as much start a religious cult,” Braydon said, “as revive one.”
“We are so close,” she said. “Think about it, Braydon. We’ve got the Urim and Thummim stones in my pack, along with the Tear of the Moon Emerald and Yikaisidahi Turquoise. And now we’re going after the original Abraxas Stone that the Gnostics revered in the second century.”
Torrino followed the road back up into the fog cloud and blended into the Bay Bridge traffic. If they had a second tail, Braydon couldn’t see it. “It’s dangerous,” he said. “The FBI has dealt with religious cults before. It never ends well.”
“You got to admit, Adam was ingenious,” Christa said. “He comes home from the Vietnam War, where everything is a deadly threat and suddenly faces the responsibility of guarding a powerful gemstone, used by Aaron in Biblical times. San Francisco in the late ‘sixties would have been ripe for a cult like this. What better way to protect the stone than build up a cult of fanatics devoted to keeping it secret and safe?”
“Only problem is,” he said, “these cults tend to get out of control, like Charles Manson’s group of crazy murderers who brutally slaughtered the Hollywood star, Sharon Tate, when she was eight months pregnant and wrote the word, Pig, on the door in her blood.”
“Manson,” she said, scanning the page. She stabbed a paragraph with her finger. “Manson referred to himself as Abraxas, both God and the Devil, in a parole letter. You don’t suppose?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t. I rely on facts. Manson has been behind bars for decades. The real Abraxas stone is still out there, or Contreras wouldn’t have hired Stonington to find it.”
“Manson was like a Skinwalker, a guy turned evil, only he didn’t shift shapes,” said Torrino. He took one hand off the steering wheel to finger the simple, silver cross he always wore around his neck.
“But I can see the connection,” she said. “The Abraxas cult learned from the Manson murders in 1969 to keep their cult underground, literally and figuratively.”
“The question is, do they know about the connection to the other seven stones.”
“Not sure,” she said, “but it says here that some believe the seven letters of Abraxas represent the seven classic planets.”
“The sun through Saturn, like in the tunnels that led to the Turquoise,” said Braydon.
“Not this time,” said Christa. “The classic planets are those objects in the sky that were visible from Earth without a telescope. Sun, Moon, Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn, the same heavenly bodies that inspired the names of the seven days of the week. And for you mathematicians out there, the numerical values of the original Greek letters spelling out Abraxas add up to 365.”
“As in 365 days of the year,” offered Torrino.
“Or, if you were a second century Gnostic,” said Christa, “the 365 spheres or heavens.”
“I’m having enough trouble following the rules of getting into one heaven,” said Torrino. He slowed to merge into the exit for the city.
“Did these cult members know that this particular Abraxas stone was pried out of the Breastplate of Aaron?” asked Braydon. “That was supposed to be the Circle’s best kept secret.”
“And it was,” she said. “Better kept than most. Until
the early 1970s, the stone was buried in the hull of a ship beneath the streets of San Francisco.”
“An underground ship?” From the 1500’s?”
“No,” said Christa, “although the original guardian did arrive by ship. He came aboard a British ship exploring what is now the California coast. It was very hush-hush at the time. I studied about this when I worked on my thesis on the conquistadors. Sir Francis Drake had explored the coast, named it New Albion and claimed it for England. He sailed north searching for a Northwest Passage, information so valuable that Drake’s brother was tortured by the Spanish to reveal their discoveries. Queen Elizabeth the First ordered subsequent, secret explorations up the coast. Some say Drake had started a colony right here, on this bay. In any case, according to the oral history Joseph learned from the Abraxas guardian years ago, the original guardian of the Abraxas came north on a British ship, came ashore. He intermarried with the indigenous people. Fast forward almost three centuries to the gold rush. Hundreds of ships were cramming into San Francisco harbor. One of those ships is the Niantic, a whaler out of New England. Its crew deserted, fleeing to find their fortune in the gold country.”
“And how did a ship end up underground?”
“A whole section of San Francisco is built on top of ships abandoned during the gold rush,” she said. “Like most of the 500 or so ships that brought gold seekers to San Francisco, the Niantic’s crew deserted to seek their fortune. Without a crew, the Niantic was floated in and left aground when the tide receded to serve as a hotel and baggage storage. The city kept burning down. The Niantic kept getting rebuilt. Eventually, dirt was filled in around the hull to create land on which to build a new Niantic hotel. The Niantic became the fanciest hostelry in the city, under the direction of the man whom we now know was the guardian of the Abraxas stone. He made a fortune.”
The Seventh Stone Page 37