by Glen Craney
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Front Quotes
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
About the Authors
Also by Glen Craney
Also by John Jeter
Excerpt from The Virgin of the Wind Rose
Excerpt from Rockin' A Hard Place
About the Cover Art
Copyright
* * *
Finding nucleobase compounds not typically found in Earth’s biochemistry strongly supports an extraterrestrial origin.… This finding reveals that meteorites may have been molecular tool kits, providing the essential building blocks for life on Earth.
— Jim Cleaves, chemist
Carnegie Institute of Washington
We are the stuff of stars.
— Carl Sagan
* * *
CHAPTER ONE
Llano County, Texas
TWELVE-YEAR-OLD JENNIE DELBERT reined up her filly and squinted at the snowy horizon above Kingdom Come Ranch. Wondering if the white glare was playing with her eyes, she glanced over at her father to confirm if he also saw the gray plume rising in the distance. She had been taught that reading steam in winter was an essential skill for a rancher, one that could mean the difference between life and death on three thousand acres of bonescape hardscrabble. Meandering steam trails that quickly vanished promised a comfortable herd; and small, isolated tufts warned that one of the calves had likely become lost. But sharp, snorted puffs—disconnected, like those now visible over the drifts ahead—could mean only one thing.
An animal was in life-threatening distress.
Galen Delbert, the ranch’s foreman, answered his daughter’s silent question by lashing his Appaloosa into a gallop over the nearest ridge.
Falling several lengths behind, Jennie pushed her pony to its limit and followed her father into the ravine. She found him kneeling over a downed heifer that was struggling in pain. “What’s wrong with it, Pa?”
“It’s giving birth too early.” He grunted as he reached into the writhing cow’s birth canal to feel for the calf. “Bring me the rolled canvas on my saddle.”
Jennie delivered the tarp and began collecting driftwood to build a crude shelter against the biting wind. In the corner of her eye, she saw something flash across the auburn sky. She pointed at a star shooting. “Look, Pa! It’s like Bethlehem!”
Working feverishly to get the calf out, her father grimaced bitterly at the irony of the celestial coincidence. “I guess all we need now are three wise men. But those seem to be in pretty short supply around here these days.”
Jennie knelt aside the suffering heifer and ran her hand across its side to soothe it. She knew Mr. Cohanim, the owner of the ranch, would dock her father’s pay if they lost the calf, and it’d be double the penalty if the mother died, too. Extending her caresses to the heifer’s forehead, she gasped. “This is Beccah!”
Her father checked the underside of the mother’s ear. He stared in disbelief at the engraved number on the metal vaccination tag. “It ain't possible.”
Jennie stood and walked around Beccah, trying to make sense of what was happening. The heifer was a freemartin, a rare female twin of the herd’s bull. The only other freemartin born on the ranch had been sold a year ago to a genetic-research laboratory at SMU. Her science teacher at the time had explained to her that doctors prized the rare calves for their stem-cell research because almost all of the freemartin’s blood cells were identical to those of its twin brother. And every kid who showcased in 4-H knew that a freemartin was made sterile in the womb by the hormones from its male twin. She looked pointedly at her father, questioning if Beccah had somehow been miraculously impregnated, like the Virgin Mary.
Her father had no time to ponder the troublesome mystery. He rolled the heifer on its other side and finally managed to pull a female calf out by its hind legs. He wiped mucous from the newborn’s snorting nose and rubbed its throat to start it breathing. Shocked, he lurched to his feet and took a step back. From head to hooves, the calf looked permanently stained with its mother’s blood.
Jennie scooped up some snow and tried to wipe the newborn’s wet hide, but the bright flame coloring wouldn’t come off. “It’s all red … even its eyes.”
The calf took a shuddering breath and staggered to its wobbly legs.
Looking shaken, her father pulled a cell phone from his coat pocket and punched in a number. “Sir, it’s Galen. I’m down at the west end of Cedar Gulch. There’s something here I think you need to see. … I think it may be. … Yes, sir. Right away.” He pressed the “End” button and looked off into the distance, taking a moment to gather his composure. Then, rousing from his unshared thoughts, he ordered his daughter, “Get the horses.”
Jennie whispered a prayer of thanks to God for allowing both heifer and newborn to survive. She petted the disoriented calf, unable to break away from it. “Pa, do you think Mr. Cohanim would sell me this one?”
Her father glared at her. “No!”
“But you promised—”
“Get the damn horses, Jennie! Now!”
Frightened by his outburst, Jennie retrieved his Appaloosa and mounted her pony. Her father climbed to his saddle and lashed off into a gallop. She followed him for a half-mile east until he pulled to a stop.
“I’ve gotta check the fences over at the Bollulos pen,” he told her. “You go on home and tell your momma I’ll be back an hour after dusk.”
She nodded uncertainly, figuring it was best not to ask why she couldn’t come along. After watching her father hurry west, she split off toward home, troubled and confused. She had never seen him so rattled. Moments after he disappeared over the ridge, she heard a distant whirring behind her. She reined up and looked back toward the arroyo.
Mr. Cohanim’s helicopter was gliding in from the ranch compound.
Why was her father’s boss in such a hurry to see another new addition to the herd? Hundreds of calves were born every year, and he never seemed to care much about them. She had been warned never to get attached to the animals, for they’d all eventually go to slaughter. But she felt an overwhelming urge to hold that red calf again and raise it. She glanced west, toward the dissipating wisps of snow left by her father’s horse. If she rode hard, she could make it back to the birthing spot and ask Mr. Cohanim for the newborn, then be home before her father found out.
Rearing her pony around, she retraced her tracks down the ravine and navigated in the dimming dusk light toward the approaching chop of the helicopter’s blades. She dismounted and tied her pony to a scrub brush. Sneaking down the gulch, she took care to remain out of sight while climbing to the edge of the bank. As the whirr be
came louder, she inched her eyes above the ridge.
Mr. Cohanim jumped out of the helicopter and walked anxiously toward the calf and downed heifer. With the rancher was a short, bearded man who wore a flat-brimmed black hat and a black coat whose hem dropped to his shins. Tiny boxes tied to long, spiraling curls of his hair hung below his ears. After bringing his companion to the tarped lean-to, Mr. Cohanim took off his Stetson to shield his eyes against the setting sun’s reflection off the drifts. He bent down and ran his hand over every inch of the red calf, examining it as if searching for defects. Apparently satisfied with his inspection, he smiled and nodded to the man in the black hat.
Jennie was about to climb the bank and go ask her father’s boss for the gift, but the stranger in black began chanting foreign verses that sounded like a hymn. Startled, she ducked back down below the ravine. The only word she could make out was “Levite.”
Where had she heard that name before?
Wait, hadn’t Pastor Mullens told them in Bible class that the Levites were like a big family of Old Testament priests? Maybe the man in black was giving the calf some sort of birth blessing.
The stranger pulled a knife from his coat pocket. He stretched the calf’s neck and cut its throat from ear to ear. The mother heifer bawled as the calf's blood gushed across the snow.
Jennie pressed her gloved hand to her mouth. Blind with grief, she tried to make sense of what she had just witnessed. Did they kill the calf because it was different from the others? She bit harder on her glove to stifle her sobs. Even if the poor thing was sickly, she would have nursed it to health.
When the spasming calf finally gurgled its last death throes, Mr. Cohanim turned and signaled a thumbs-up at the helicopter. The pilot stepped out, pulled an iron barrel from the cargo bay, and set it next to the gutted calf. He retracted four metal legs, so that the barrel sat above the ground, and opened the top half, revealing a grill.
How had these men known to bring this equipment from her father’s cryptic call? Whatever they were doing, it seemed planned and practiced.
While the heifer continued to caterwaul in protest, the black-clad man lifted the dead calf onto the grate as the ranch owner flicked a lighter to ignite a fire under its bleeding carcass. The flames quickly consumed the calf’s dripping flesh and wet hide. When the fire finally eased, Mr. Cohanim pulled a pistol from his holster and shot the distraught heifer point-blank between the eyes.
They killed the mother, too?
Jennie swallowed another sobbing gasp. None of this made any sense. Even if Beccah had, through no fault of her own, given birth to a freakish calf, she could have been spared to try again, or at least been butchered for the meat. Wiping tears, she watched, frightened, as the three men scooped up the burnt ashes of the calf’s innards and poured them into a metal canister. They loaded the container onto the helicopter, hopped in, and flew off, leaving the charred remnant of the calf’s hide and smoking bones in the snow splattered with Beccah’s blood.
* * *
CHAPTER TWO
Mecca, Saudi Arabia
“SALAAM,” THE ARRIVING HOTEL GUEST whispered to himself, practicing for his check-in greeting. “I am Abdul Baith. May the peace of Allah be with you.”
He loved the elegant sound of his new alias. Servant of the Resurrection, it meant in Arabic. Had a nice tribal resonance to it, like the thump of an oil derrick pounding out a small fortune with each thrust of its drill bit.
As he threaded his way through the busy lobby of the plush Abraj Al Bait Towers, he looked around and savored the perks of his profession. Had he known he would be lodged in such lavish decadence, he might have tempered his nonnegotiable fee of twenty million pounds British sterling. But he quickly dismissed that whimsical notion of generosity with a cynical snort. Such an offer would have set a bad precedent—and besides, money seemed no object to the anonymous client who was paying him for this heist.
He stepped outside through the lobby’s doors and strolled across the heliport that sat adjacent to this garish hotel of seventy-six floors. Above him, the iridescent green clock tower—a knock-off of London’s Big Ben—soared into the heavens. It was now four in the morning, yet hordes of Muslim pilgrims, too excited to sleep, were still milling about the balconies and corridors.
This was merely the calm before the storm, he knew. The protocol for the next twenty-four hours would be the same he used on all of his assignments. In the next few minutes, the order to proceed would arrive by text message from his intermediary in Beirut. Then, he would move on his target, finish the extraction operation, and be out of the country before the next sundown.
Poached by the stifling nocturnal heat, he retreated to the vast air-conditioned lobby, sobered by the knowledge that his struggle for breath would be much worse in the morning. He strolled casually past an expansive plate-glass window and glanced down at his target. His client, he now realized, had not chosen this hotel for the high thread count of its bed sheets. From such a high vantage point, he could scout the security pattern in the Masjid al Haram, the largest mosque in the world. And just as he had expected, the police cordon being thrown up in the pilgrimage square looked tighter than a sultan’s garrote.
He wouldn’t have it any other way.
In two hours, that vast open enclosure—the most sacred ground in all of Islam—would be teeming with half-crazed worshippers, including many of these wealthy Arabs around him now. They lodged here in luxury while just a few blocks away, thousands of less fortunate Muslims spent their pitiful savings in preparation for what they hoped would be the most profound spiritual experience of their lives. All across this sprawling city, dozens of cranes raising new construction projects pierced the dazzling nightscape. The sky’s panorama reminded him of a black velvet cloth studded with an array of sparkling peridot gems.
And yes, he had stolen his share of those, too.
He dug his fingers into his straining neck muscles, trying to stay alert. This extraction operation promised to be the most difficult he had ever undertaken. Only once before had such a theft been attempted, and the captured perpetrators of that bloody fiasco had paid with their severed heads. Shuddering from jet lag, he motioned for a waiter to bring him a double espresso. A good night’s sleep would help, but that was time he could not afford. What was it that umpire had told Ted Williams as the Red Sox slugger stepped up to the plate in his last at bat of his career? Oh, yeah. Well, Kid, you gotta be loose to hit four hundred. But Teddy Ballgame’s challenge had been easy compared with what he was now expected to pull off. After all, he would have to bat a thousand—one for one—or suffer a death he’d not wish on his worst enemy.
He blinked repeatedly at the blur of shimmering white thawbs in the lobby, trying to stretch his eyesight, which had deteriorated from the many years of casing jobs. Last month, his pilfering of Van Gogh’s Poppy Flowers from the Mahmud Khalil Modern Art Museum in Cairo had netted him a paltry million and a half dollars, barely enough to maintain his standard of living for a year. To his great amusement, the museum’s board of directors had blamed the missing painting on faulty alarms. In the art world, everybody was trained first and foremost in the art of covering one’s ass.
Still, most of the low-hanging fruit had been picked, and he had promised himself that this job would be his last. By next week, he would be retired and ensconced on the white beaches of the West Indies, launched upon his next mission: to beat the Guinness Book record for the most rum brands consumed. He pulled his passport from his breast pocket and smirked at the doctored photo. Walnut-shaded skin. Long black hair. Trimmed goatee.
Damned if he didn’t actually look like a Hashemite playboy prince.
If all went as planned, he would join the annals of temerity with one of his heroes, Sir Richard Burton, the British adventurer who had infiltrated Mecca in 1883. Maybe he’d pick up a copy of Burton’s Arabian Nights at the airport bookstore and reread it on the plane out, if only for the rich irony. Ah, Burton, you magnificent magician
. How did you manage to slip past those thousands of fanatics to touch the Kaaba? He had burned into memory the Englishman’s description of Islam’s holiest icon: The colour appeared to me black and metallic, and the centre of the stone was sunk about two inches below the metallic circle. Round the sides was a reddish-brown cement, almost level with the metal, and sloping down to the middle of the stone.
He reached into his jacket pocket, checking to confirm that its depth would cover his hand. But then he remembered that he’d be wearing the white garb of the pilgrim. Come on. Focus. He closed his eyes a moment to revive them. Hit the ball out of the park and then give the bastards the bird while trotting back to the dugout. He opened his eyes again and glanced around the lobby with studied insouciance. The Saudi security police, disguised as tourists, were easy to identify. They always gave themselves away with their looks of boredom, having patrolled their surroundings too many times to care.
He checked his watch. Game time.
After circling the lobby one last time to locate the most secure angle, he sauntered over to a bank of computers that was blocked from the view of the reservation desk. At a corner terminal, he typed an address in the browser and pulled up his contact’s anonymous Twitter account. All email in the kingdom was monitored, but the Saudis were still clueless about these tweets coded in a hundred and forty characters. The last entry on his Twitter roll—with the prearranged hashtag #shrimponthebarbie—said: NAPOLEON ESCAPES ELBA. He smothered a preening grin. Half his fee had just been wired to an account in Switzerland. Another quarter would soon be delivered to a safe house in Paris, and the rest would be deposited with a Hong Kong securities house to be laundered into euros.
Satisfied with his aerial surveillance of the mosque, he moved on to the registration desk. After checking in without a hitch, he rode the elevator to his floor. When the gilt doors opened, he walked down the sumptuously carpeted corridor, savoring the cushioning under his Gucci-shod feet. He must remember that feeling; for in a few hours, his ankles and knees would be aching from the punishment of hard pavement. He slipped his room key card through the slot. Cautiously, he entered his suite and checked each room for intruders. Everything looked clear. Chilled by the freon-processed desert air, he retracted a curtain. The inscription on the temperature instructions reminded him that this megalith had been built with the same Saudi Binladen Group construction money that had paid for the destruction of New York City’s Twin Towers.