by Sean Ellis
ASCENDANT
Book One of Dark Trinity
by Sean Ellis
Ascendant
Book One of Dark Trinity
Finding Atlantis is just the beginning... Psychic ex-spy Mira Raiden's discovery of the tomb of an Atlantean king, is just the first piece in a puzzle that will launch her on a journey to find the Trinity--an ancient device with the power to remake the world.
But Mira is not alone in her search for the Trinity. Arrayed against her is an unholy alliance of evil: a team of brutish mercenaries; the beautiful but deadly daughter of Mira's former mentor; a manipulative grave robber, risen from the dead; and the heirs of the greatest evil the world has ever known.
To find the Trinity and prevent the awakening of a horror beyond comprehension, Mira will travel to the ends of the earth, and into the darkest corners of a world that existed before history.
Join Mira in a breathtaking adventure reminiscent of Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider, and Rogue Angel!
“Sean Ellis delivers again with a globetrotting adventure replete with ancient mysteries, deadly enemies, and creatures out of legend. Ascendant is a thrill ride you’ll never forget!” David Wood, author of Atlantis
Ascendant, Copyright 2014 by Sean Ellis.
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PROLOGUE
Somewhere in the South Pacific, 1944
The grave robber stared out across the sun-dappled water of the lagoon, anxiously scanning the horizon for movement. In a world at war, even in this remote part of the globe, planes and submarines could deliver death without warning, without provocation. Though he was not a soldier, he had seen his share of war and knew that in a combat zone there were no innocent bystanders.
Not that he was innocent.
He had knowingly struck a deal with the devil—the devil always had the shiniest gold and, contrary to what the Good Book said, usually came out on top.
But this time it looked as if the devil was going to lose. The last report the grave robber had heard before leaving civilization confirmed what he had suspected for some time. Germany was fatally wounded, crippled by the economic and human cost of supporting a war on two fronts. While the scientists of the Third Reich were arguably the most brilliant in history, there was simply not enough time for their superior weapons to be perfected and deployed. Their generals and admirals and spymasters were unparalleled in their respective crafts, yet their supreme commander was a madman, whose mercurial temperament had consigned thousands of young men—the cream of Germany’s youth—to death on the frozen threshold of Stalingrad.
The grave robber shook a Camel from a nearly empty pack and lit it with a single wooden match, struck on his thumb and cast into the lapping waters of the lagoon, where it died with a hiss. As he drew in a deep breath of nicotine-laced smoke, his fingers felt the outline of the artifact concealed beneath his shirt and wondered if that simple circle of metal and crystal might change that inevitable outcome.
“Guten Tag, Herr Tarrant.”
The voice startled him, nearly causing him to drop his cigarette. He whirled, unconsciously recoiling like a frightened animal, and searched for its source. A dark figure, a man wearing an overcoat in spite of the tropical humidity, stepped out from concealment behind a coconut palm directly opposite the lagoon. His sudden appearance almost startled Tarrant a second time.
“How in the hell did you get over there?” he grumbled, trying to repair his tattered dignity.
The German smiled icily. “These are dangerous times. One cannot be too careful.”
Tarrant nodded and took a deep breath. “Tell me about it.”
The German strode out onto the sandy beach, fully exposing himself to the sun’s glare. The grave robber idly wondered if the man would burst into flames, like a vampire in a horror film. He did not, though his pale skin and gaunt features certainly evoked such a comparison. “Do you have the item, Herr Tarrant?”
“You know I do.”
“Ah. And you wish for some assurance that I have your money?”
Tarrant affected a surly shrug. “You could put it that way.”
The German cocked his head sideways. His smile sliced downward like the blade of a scimitar. “I would have thought a man like yourself would expect treachery at every turn. Why, for argument’s sake, would I surrender a fortune in gold to you when I could simply kill you and take the artifact for myself?”
Tarrant was used to the Nazi’s mind-games; they had done this before. “Because,” he answered in a tired voice, “you want the next one. There’s always a next one. And you know I’m the only man who can find it.”
The Nazi’s smile slipped a notch. “You said that there were only two—the Twins, you called them. Our scholars agree.”
Tarrant backhanded the cigarette to his lips, dragging deeply as he watched beads of sweat trickling down the other man’s forehead. He blew out a perfect smoke ring, which quickly fragmented in the moist air, before answering. “When you touch these things, especially after they’ve gone undisturbed for a while, you see things. Visions of the past. And sometimes of the future.”
“Yes, you’ve reported that, though our scientists cannot verify your claim.”
The grave robber jerked a thumb at his chest. “I am the proof. How do you think I found them? The remains of lost cities that you thought were only myths. I saw them in a vision. And this time, I saw something else.”
“Tell me.”
“There’s another one of them. Three in all. Individually they’re powerful beyond imagination, but if they’re all brought together in a certain place . . . limitless power.”
“Power.” Something changed in the German’s eyes as he echoed the words, and Tarrant felt an inexplicable rush of fear. He kept talking to hide his trepidation.
“The antediluvian world was just as advanced as our own; maybe more so. They spread their civilization over the entire globe, not just Asia. There were at least three separate empires, an Axis of power if you will. Each ruler bore one of these.” He lifted the circular relic, still depending from the chain around his neck, to emphasize his point. “Trinities are everywhere in ancient religions, the embodiment of ultimate power. That’s the answer to all this. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The ancients ruled the world with it. I believe that is your ambition as well.”
“Our destiny.” For a moment, the Nazi seemed lost in thought, then his expression hardened again. “You say that this ancient trinity ruled the world with these talismans of power. But they are not among us today. Do you know why?”
Tarrant licked his lips, which in spite of the humidity had become very dry. His heart was racing, as if his body had experienced a premonition that his brain was only beginning to grasp. “What are you talking about?”
<
br /> “They did not know when to stop.” Suddenly, the scimitar returned to the Nazi’s lips. “As with you, Herr Tarrant, you believe there is always one more piece of the puzzle to be found. And you imagine that by finding it you can extract a king’s ransom in gold from the coffers of the Third Reich.
“You imagine incorrectly.”
Tarrant raised his palms in protest, but before he could say a word, the Nazi raised his hand as well. Clenched in one gloved fist was a Mauser P08 pistol.
“Wait. . . .”
Tarrant’s protest fell on ears deafened by the roar of the pistol. He felt a sharp hammer blow to his chest and he was knocked backwards. The cigarette flew from his fingers as he splashed onto his back in the shallows where the lagoon met the beach.
Though it was midday, twilight seemed to fall over the island. Tarrant struggled to rise, but no amount of effort yielded the slightest result. He heard the sound of his attacker splashing toward him, felt the gloved fingers tear open his shirt to search his body and discover the relic, but saw only the descending fog of premature night.
Tarrant awoke on the tide. A mouthful of tepid seawater triggered his gag reflex and he rolled onto his side, retching. The sudden, violent movement stirred the embers of pain in his wound, but the unpleasant sensations produced a welcome revelation; he was still alive.
He struggled to his hands and knees, grimacing as the blossom of pain in his torso threatened to render him unconscious a second time. The water stroked his exposed chest and the ragged flesh of the wound as gentle waves brought the tide in. He realized with a start that he had only been unconscious for a short time, perhaps less than an hour.
He rocked back onto his haunches and felt the wound. Blood had begun to trickle afresh since his waking, but he intuited that the nine-millimeter slug had miraculously deflected off one of his ribs. It had burrowed under the skin, but done little more than fracture the bone at the point of impact. It hurt like a son of a bitch, but he would live. He fumbled for a cigarette, but found that the remaining two were sodden from his submergence. Casting the ruined pack into the water, he rose to his feet.
The Nazi had double-crossed him.
His assailant’s final words haunted him. He had indeed played the game once too often. The outcome of dealing with the devil was inevitable, yet he had truly believed that the Nazis would spare no effort to recover every last vestige of the ancient power manifest in the relics. They were desperate for anything to turn the tide of the war. In hindsight it had been a foolish notion; what good was a thrice-powerful talisman if it arrived after the war had been lost?
The pain in his chest was beginning to subside and with that recession, his cognitive abilities began to flow. A line of footprints led away into the sparse forest, marking the path taken by his assailant. With steps uncertain at first, but quickly becoming more determined until he was almost running, Tarrant chased after the Nazi agent.
The footprints disappeared as sand gave way to loamy soil, but the trail remained evident in the trampled underbrush. The Nazi had followed a path that circled back to the beach two miles north of the lagoon. Tarrant slowed his pace as the thicket gave way once more to bare sand, in which the footprints of the Nazi were plainly stamped. The trail led directly into the surf, where wave action had erased the final destination.
A boat, Tarrant surmised. Probably a small motorized launch, which had conveyed the man to a waiting ship. He scanned the horizon, hoping to catch a glimpse of the parent vessel. This close to sea level he realized that his horizon was severely limited, so he dashed back to the forest and scaled a coconut palm. From there, his visual range was extended by several miles.
A black column stood monolithic in the distance. He squinted, minimizing the glare of the sun, and saw more detail. It was a submarine, a German Kriegsmarine Unterseeboot. The grave robber did not know a great deal about naval vessels, but he studied what he could see of the submarine carefully. There were numbers painted along the conning tower, the letter “U” followed by four digits. Tarrant squinted harder, trying to distinguish them, but the waves slapping against the tower made this a nearly hopeless task.
The U-boat was sinking—No, he corrected. It’s diving. His surveillance took on new urgency as he strained to catch at least catch part of the submarine’s designation. “Two—Five—” The lapping water touched the base of the painted numbers. The next digit was two or three, but he could not be sure which. A moment later, the black column was gone.
Tarrant closed his eyes and sighed through a sudden flare of pain in his chest. He had aggravated the injury with his sprint through the forest and the scramble up the tree. It bled freely now, a throbbing ache pulsing in time with his rapid heartbeat. With due restraint, he slid down from his perch and sank to his knees in the coarse sand.
He didn’t really know what had motivated him to chase after the Nazi. He had escaped with his life, which was certainly more than the double-crossing German had intended to leave him with. Now the Nazis had two of the relics; they could join them and use that power to . . . Well, what couldn’t they do with it?
Though they did not yet realize it, the Nazis now had the power to boil the seas and shake the earth from its orbit. The relics could even raise an army of the dead to lay low the enemies of whoever wielded it. Even if he one day encountered the man whose treachery had almost killed him, what could he do?
Gazing at the sea, at the very spot where the U-boat had vanished, Tarrant made another deal with the devil. Though the cost would no doubt be higher in an eternal sense than his deal with the Nazis had proved, he swore he would not be so easily taken when his next chance came.
Panama, Present Day
“¡Alto!”
The laborer froze in mid-swing, the point of his machete aimed at the heavens.
Marquand Atlas rushed forward, exertion and excitement putting a dangerous strain on his already overtaxed heart. The morbidly obese billionaire panted for several seconds, bent over at the waist with his hands on his knees, in order to get enough breath to finally speak. “You’ve found it!”
Mira Raiden didn’t know what she had found; didn’t know if she had in fact found anything. She only knew, with a certainty that she could not put into words, that something very bad would happen if the laborer blazing their trail through the dense undergrowth allowed his blade to fall. She gestured for the man to back away from his task. Evidently, something in her demeanor conveyed what speech could not, for the man retreated from the thicket as though it were squirming with vipers.
Mira glanced briefly at her benefactor, then behind him to meet the gaze of Curtis Lancet, Atlas’ executive bodyguard and general factotum. Lancet, a former Green Beret and decorated war hero, was everything that Atlas—for all his wealth—could never be: handsome, athletic, charismatic, and a damn good lover.
“What is it, Mira? What do you sense?” Lancet’s concern was genuine and typical of his good nature. Where his employer saw Mira and her unique abilities merely as one more resource to be exploited and discarded, Lancet had always shown a deep fascination with her as a person as well as with what she could do. Over the course of their journey she had become much more than just a working partner to him.
She shook her head uncertainly, trying to get a handle on the premonition. In some cultures her gift was called ‘second sight,’ but in sensorial terms, it was nothing at all like vision. Having lived with it all her life, she could not explain it any more than she could explain her other five senses, but the closest comparison she could offer was the olfactory sense.
Second smell, she had once told one of her Agency handlers with a chuckle, but that was exactly what it was like. Sometimes, a rosy ‘smell’ hinted that something good was about to happen, while other situations just plain stank. This one, however, was harder to pin down.
It was neither good nor bad. It was just . . . potent.
She directed her words to Lancet. “Send them back to camp.”
A
tlas’ eyes began to dance with anticipation. “Yes, send them back. If they catch even a glimpse of what we’ve found, we’ll be fighting off tomb robbers for weeks.”
Mira hid a frown. She wasn’t worried about protecting the discovery from the looters that she knew were dogging their steps; her concern was for the safety of the hired workers. She didn’t know what lay beyond that curtain of foliage, but she was certain that it was as dangerous as a loaded gun in the hands of a child.
She held Atlas back with a raised hand until Lancet finished sending the laborers back to their camp a few miles back. Only when their murmured conversations were no longer audible did she advance along the freshly blazed trail, stopping exactly where the workman had been moments before. The indescribable feeling grew with each step forward.
“Curt, let me borrow that sword of yours.”
Without question or hesitation, Lancet drew a large Pathfinder knife from the sheath on his belt, right behind a holstered SIG Sauer 9mm semi-automatic pistol. He casually flipped the knife and caught the fourteen-inch blade between thumb and forefinger, proffering the hilt to Mira.
Mira was less cavalier about her handling of the knife. She did not hack at the brushy barrier, but rather used the blade to probe the thicket, gently bending vines and branches out of the way. Her surgical precision gradually laid bare the object that the laborer would have discovered with his next cut.
It was a stone stele, standing shoulder high to the petite Mira, adorned with what looked at first glance like Mayan glyphs. Maintaining her calm demeanor, she continued to clear the remaining growth away, fully exposing the carved bas-relief message.
“It’s Mayan, all right,” Atlas announced. From the moment she had revealed the first glyph, he had commenced scanning the image into his palmtop computer.