Pierce looked at his fist with a grin. “It was a good punch.”
King clapped him on the shoulder. “Would have made Jules proud.”
They both fought against laughing. They both knew that Julie had been a strident feminist who believed men and women should be treated equally in every way, including combat. Which is why she worked so hard to defy the system and become a fighter pilot. She really would have been proud.
King led him back to the northwest corner of the temple. To the north and east they could see the security guards closing in on their location—flashlights giving away their positions. King knelt down and motioned to where they’d hid the bodies. “They’re here for them.”
“You’re sure?”
“Well, maybe not exactly them, but they’re probably expecting to find drunk socialites pissing on a column, not…” King held up his weapon, letting it finish the sentence for him. “Let’s go.”
The series of foundation stones remaining within the long rectangular ruins of the Basilica Julia hid the pair as they snuck around the guards. They stopped directly across from the Lacus Curtius and looked to the right. The two guards, walking away from them toward the temple of Castor and Pollux were oblivious to their presence. But the guards approaching from the other side were now facing them, albeit from more than one hundred feet away. King quickly judged the distance and the intensity of the flashlight beams and decided it was too risky.
Then he saw all four flashlights turn toward the temple of Castor and Pollux. He grabbed Pierce’s shirt and pulled him up. “Let’s go!”
They hopped the small black fence and crouch-ran across the footpath. The ruins on the other side, along with a short, low-hanging tree, provided ample cover. Concealed again, they headed for the ancient pit long since covered. King was surprised to find the structure built over the pit to be constructed of metal poles and beams. The thing was solid and held a large flat roof at an angle to divert rainfall. They crawled beneath the low roof and inspected the site.
Aged rectangular blocks of white marble were laid out in grids on either side of a circular, layered pit. Two layers led down, like steps, to a flat, stone base. A stone on the top of the pit’s far side had been moved out of alignment with the rest, ruining the circle.
It was, in every way, unremarkable. Despite its mysterious origins, King could see nothing that made this site worthwhile … or worthy of a rain guard when the rest of the far more extravagant forum was left to brave the elements. “Why is this covered?” he asked.
Pierce scratched his head. “I’ve heard that before it was covered rain would collect there—” He pointed to the small basin. “And would leak through to whatever is beyond. They feared erosion would undermine the stability of the site and possibly the surrounding sites as well, so they covered it up. Why do you ask?”
“Just seems odd. What do you think is down there?”
“Aside from a chasm created by Zeus’s lightning bolt? The entire area surrounding this hill was a swamp before Rome was built. Today it would have been a protected wetland. They drained the swamps and built the city. Best guess is it’s an underground lake. This whole area of the city is probably full of underground rivers, too. Without the swamps, the whole system might be dry now, but really, who knows.”
King sighed. None of this was helpful. He stood to get a better look at the pit and hit his head on the low-hanging ceiling. The metal sheet sounded out like a gong. “Shit,” he whispered, knowing the guards would soon be upon them.
Ignoring the panicked whispers of Pierce and the distant voices of the guards, King focused his attention on the pit. Once again, there were no markers of any kind. Then he looked up at the ceiling. Its plain surface held no clues, either, but the two I-beams supporting the ceiling did. They were separated by five feet, each crossing over the circle of stones. He mentally stripped the ceiling away and pictured the I-beams over the circular pit.
King jumped into the pit, scouring every surface for something more.
“Did you find something?” Pierce asked, joining him at the bottom of the two-foot-deep depression. “The guards will be here any second!”
“The I-beams,” King said. “From above, they cross over the circle.”
Pierce saw the image in his mind. The symbol of the Herculean Society. But not quite. The circle was broken. “Help me move this,” Pierce said, taking hold of the misaligned stone. “Pull it back into the circle!”
The guards’ voices grew louder. Commanding. They’d found the bodies and discovered they hadn’t passed out, but had been knocked out. The squeal of distant sirens—police and medical—converged on the forum, which would soon be an inescapable quagmire of men in uniform.
And the stone wasn’t budging.
“We’re trying to force it,” Pierce said. “Maybe it’s a more complicated lever.” He placed his hands on top of the stone like he was about to do CPR chest compressions. “You pull. I’ll push.”
As the legs and feet of the approaching guards came into view, King nodded.
Pierce put his weight onto the stone and felt it drop a fraction of an inch. King pulled and the stone shifted easily, completing the circle and the Herculean Society’s symbol. They let go and moved back. The stone began shifting back into its previously unaligned position. It clicked into place as a flashlight cast it in yellow light.
The first guard to arrive drew his weapon and pointed it beneath the low ceiling where he thought he’d seen moving shadows. But the pit was empty and looked untouched. He stood and scanned the area, finding no one but his partner. If someone had been there, they were gone now.
TWENTY-NINE
Washington, D.C.
DOMINICK BOUCHER HAD been wrong.
Not only had Marrs not backed down, but he’d responded to the vulture comment like something out of a Tazmanian Devil cartoon, spinning madly from rally to news station to rally again. With a beet-red face, he shouted at the media. At crowds. At the television audience. And despite the flying spittle and shaking jowls, people were listening.
He turned the self-serving vulture comment around on Duncan. “If one senator keeping the president accountable is enough to make him crack, how is he going to lead the nation?” he had said.
When the media picked up on the fact that Marrs was also responding in anger, he spun the story. “I’m responding to a man who has failed this nation several times. A man who’s inaction has led to the deaths of our children. I should be angry. Every good citizen of this nation should be angry. At Duncan for not preventing the attacks and at the people who perpetrated them. But who is our president angry at? Me! The office needs transparency. It needs accountability. If he can’t handle it, well…” With that he threw up his hands.
The man provided enough sound bites and accusations to keep the media and the public focused on Marrs and, as a result, on Duncan. His hands were bound more than ever now. The media requests didn’t stop coming. There were protesters surrounding the White House grounds and more arrived every hour.
Alone in the Oval Office for a few minutes before meeting with a slew of advisors on a range of issues arising because of the current crisis, Duncan looked out the row of windows. The south lawn, trim and neat like a marine’s head, stretched out before him. The trim grass annoyed him. Nothing was that clear cut anymore. In the Rangers there were good guys and bad guys. Black and white. Right and wrong. He had successfully carried on that tradition through the Chess Team. But now … now there were other battles, unnecessary battles that had to be fought. With Marrs. With the media. With public opinion.
And given the sensitivity of the Chess Team’s mission, he couldn’t fight back. He couldn’t say he had teams spread out around the world, infiltrating the territories of sovereign nations in order to kidnap the sole survivors of ancient languages. If that got out it might start a war. And it would certainly ruin his presidency and provide a lifetime of fuel to Marrs’s smear campaign. Hell, it might make Marrs look enoug
h like a hero that he could be the next president.
Let him try, Duncan thought. After learning the truth behind the threats against the country—mythical monsters, gene-splicing madmen, Neanderthal viruses, and stone golems—the man would resign with his tail tucked between his legs.
But right now Marrs had freedom to act. Freedom to say what he wanted to whomever he chose. Freedom to disappear if he chose. And for those reasons, Duncan envied him.
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in.”
He heard the door open, but he didn’t turn around. A woman’s voice said, “They’re ready for you, sir.”
“I’ll just be a minute,” he replied.
After the door shut, Duncan looked down at his right hand. He held his M9 Beretta; the same one he had used as an Army Ranger. The weapon had saved his life a few times, but it couldn’t help now. As much as he might like to have Marrs stare down the barrel of this gun, a different solution had to be found; one that would not only put an end to the recent attacks and catch those responsible, but also free the team up so they could really function as a cohesive unit. Only then would the American people be safer.
Duncan opened a drawer on the Resolute Desk, placed the handgun inside, and locked it. Before heading toward the door, he looked around the Oval Office, and for the first time during his presidency, the space felt cramped.
THIRTY
Rome, Italy
THE LAST THING King saw before descending into total darkness was a shrinking crescent of light above him. He realized that they’d fallen through a triggered hatch that was now quickly, and quietly, closing. All thoughts of the hatch left his mind as his body impacted against a cold stone floor. He landed at an odd angle, which compressed his ribs near to breaking and knocked the wind out of him.
Unable to speak, he listened as Pierce whispered his name. “Jack … Jack, where are you?”
A bright light struck his face a moment later as Pierce switched on his flashlight.
Seeing King squint from the light and in pain, Pierce said, “Sorry,” and moved the light away, revealing a nondescript stone tunnel. After King caught his breath and was helped to his feet, he looked at Pierce, who seemed unfazed by the fall.
Pierce noticed King’s attention and questioning gaze. He smiled. “I landed on my feet.”
King shook his head. The bookworm archaeologist was becoming a catlike Tomb Raider while he, an elite soldier, became a potato sack.
When Pierce’s grin turned cocky, King said, “At least I didn’t hit a girl.”
Pierce had opened his mouth to issue a retort, but stopped short and then deflated. “Hey, what happened to ‘you have to be a bad parent to be a good parent’?”
King shrugged. “I was trying to make you feel better.”
Pierce forced an unsure smile as King used his conscience against him. “B.S. You’ve hit girls.”
“Not like that,” King said. “You coldcocked the kid.”
“Kid!” With a laugh and a raised fist, Pierce said, “Better watch it, or you’re next.”
“Don’t make me tell Queen you hit a girl,” King said as he found his flashlight on the floor, picked it up, and switched it on.
The light cast a now serious George Pierce in bright, white light. “That’s not even funny.”
King gave him a firm pat on the back. “C’mon, let’s find out which layer of hell we’ve dropped ourselves into.”
King led the way, flashlight out, gun at the ready. The tunnel, a simple brown tube tall enough to stand in and just wide enough for the pair to stand side by side, led down at a steady angle.
“We must be under the Lacus Juturnae by now,” Pierce whispered.
But King wasn’t interested in what lay above. He wanted to know what waited below. The color of the tunnel ahead shifted from dark brown to a dirty, mottled white with splashes of color. Pierce’s eyes went wide with recognition and he rushed past King.
The walls of the tunnel were covered in mosaic tiles, many chipped or fallen away, but enough remained so that the pictures could be pieced together. Blocky shapes slightly more detailed than a sixteen-bit Nintendo game formed pictograph story lines. King couldn’t make them out, but Pierce deciphered it aloud.
“Look here, at this swamp,” Pierce said. “This must be the land Rome was founded on.” He counted the hills in the image, whispering the numbers to himself. “The seven hills of Rome. The original settlers had villages on each hill, but they eventually drained the swamp and formed the city.”
He moved on, looking at a large image of a woman, whose beauty was impossible to hide, despite the rough condition of the wall.
“Who is she?” King asked.
Only fragments of the name spelled out in ancient Greek above the woman’s head remained, but it was enough. “Acca Larentia. We found her.”
They moved faster, all but ignoring the images of Rome’s early development and battles. The tunnel ended in an arched doorway that led to a T junction. They passed through and found a second arch to the left, leading into a small chamber, and a second hallway to the right. Not wanting to proceed too quickly, King entered the small room and cast his light side to side, stopping at the room’s only feature—a marble tomb. They approached the tomb and found a relief of a woman on its lid. Acca Larentia.
“She’s been here the whole time,” Pierce said, his voice full of the same kind of wonder that Rook displayed when assembling a new weapon. Pierce reached out to touch the woman’s face, but was stopped by a guttural clicking growl. The sound was organic, but inhuman.
King spun and fell to one knee, aiming both flashlight and handgun toward the entrance.
A cloaked figure in the doorway flinched away from the light and blocked its face with the loose fabric of its black sleeve. Clearly uncomfortable in the light, the creature stepped back but made no move to retreat or advance. It simply stood there, crouched and swaying slowly side to side.
Waiting.
King recognized the creature. The cloak and bits of gray face and arm he could see were exactly what Rook and Queen had described. A wraith. One of Hercules’s mysterious gofers. Despite the wraith having an aura of evil, King knew it meant them no harm. He lowered his weapon and aimed his flashlight to the floor.
Free of the intense white beam, the wraith stood taller and lowered its arm. In the dim light reflected off the room’s brown walls, King could make out the lower half of the creature’s face. There was no nose to speak of, simply a horizontal slit in its skin. And its mouth, well, there wasn’t one—just a patch of wrinkled gray flesh.
For a moment, King felt pity for the wraith. It had clearly once been a human being, but now … it was a monster. Then it turned, motioned for them to follow with its hooded head, and hopped up onto the hallway wall. It crawled away like a four-legged spider. Or, King thought, like a gecko.
Keeping his weapon ready, King and Pierce followed the wraith, which paused when they fell behind. It led them through a confusing maze of tunnels through which neither man could retrace his steps. Some tunnels were plain stone bearing no markings of any kind. Others housed portions of ancient columns, ruined busts, and half-buried arches.
“These are the ancient layers of the city,” Pierce said. “We’ve been so afraid to hurt what was on top we never thought to look beneath. But cities this old are always built on layers. This is the stuff of legend.” He looked at King. “This was the Rome that Hercules would have known. Before the Caesars. Before the Coliseum. Before the vast empire.”
King was about to respond when he heard a voice. A woman. He stopped at a crossroad and listened. The sound distinctly came from the right-side tunnel. He cocked his ear toward it, as did Pierce.
“Sounds like an Italian accent,” Pierce said.
A second voice, also feminine, but higher pitched and American replied. King’s heart pounded. Fiona! He took one step down the hallway when a darkness swept above them and descended before them like a wall of
shadow. King raised his pistol at the wraith’s head and slowly brought his light up toward its face.
As the light grew closer to the skin of its face, the creature let out a low shriek. King could see its slit of a nose vibrating as the call slipped out.
Sensing a violent conclusion to the stand-off, Pierce backed away.
As King continued to bring the light up, the wraith did something unexpected. Instead of shying away from it, it leaned into the light, fully exposing its face and revealing its large, oval eyes with black, quarter-sized pupils. The light caused it immense pain, which could be seen in its deeply furrowed brow, but it refused to back away. Its actions told King that despite being hurt by the light, it would not be intimidated by it. He also noted that it was not at all concerned about the handgun.
Pierce took another step back and was suddenly in the grasp of a pair of large hands. He let out a shout that spun King around. A man he had never seen in person stood behind Pierce, holding him in place. He was tall and burly, but well dressed in a black casual suit. His face was chiseled and hadn’t been shaven in perhaps a week. He had a barrel chest and a confident gleam in his eyes that either came from always being in control of a situation, or from being an expert at pretending to be.
King lowered his weapon. It would do him no good. “Hercules.”
“Please,” the man said. “Call me Alexander.”
THIRTY-ONE
Chaco Province, Argentina
BISHOP WAITED FOR the sound to come again, but the jungle had gone silent—tense—like every living creature knew something bad was about to happen. They sensed it, just as Bishop and the five Delta operators with him sensed it. But what was going to happen, he had no idea.
Closing his eyes, Bishop relaxed in the dark water, focusing all his attention on his hearing.
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