Callsign: King - Book I (A Jack Sigler - Chess Team Novella)

by Robinson, Jeremy; Ellis, Sean

  It’s a baby.

  I’ve just killed a baby.

  As it mewls against the wall, each call weaker then the last, the jaw-weapon falls from my hand.

  “No,” I whisper, falling to my knees. What kind of a sick world have I been brought to?

  I want my mother.

  I scream for her. “Mom!” I scream again and again, my voice growing hoarse. My face is wet with tears and snot. My body is wracked by sobs between each shout for my mother. My thoughts turn to my father. How awful he must feel now that I’m gone, knowing I disappeared while angry with him. Not only had he lied to me for thirteen years, but he also believed I was capable of hurting Aimee. He didn’t trust me. Never had. But I trusted him now. Was this what he was protecting me from? This thought strikes me like a fist and I long for my father’s presence. He could protect me. I yell for him next.

  But he doesn’t come. He can’t hear me. He’ll never hear me again. How could he?

  My voice fades to a whisper. Pain stabs my head with every beat of my heart. The pinpricks of light surrounding me are now blurry halos. In the quiet, I can no longer hear the ragged breathing of the young creature. Certain it’s dead, I weep again, mourning not just the death of this deformed thing that tried to eat me, but the death of something much more precious to me: my soul. As my body gives way to exhaustion, I slide down onto the stone floor, surrounded by bones and wonder, maybe that’s the point.

  ###

  Click here to buy!

  —SAMPLE—

  DARK TRINITY: ASCENDANT by Sean Ellis

  Available for $2.99 on Kindle: Click here to buy!

  DESCRIPTION:

  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.

  EXCERPT:

  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.”

  Atlas’ 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.

  “What’s it say?” Lancet asked in a breathless whisper.

  “‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,’” Mira muttered, not quite joking.

  Atlas chuckled. “That’s a pretty close translation actually. It is indeed a warning, from our old friend Storm Jaguar.”

  * * *

  Though she was no expert on the Maya, Mira knew more about Storm Jaguar than any classically trained pre-Columbian archaeologist. The truth of the matter was, due to a series of unfortunate circumstances beginning with the actions of an opportunistic Dominican friar and extending forward five centuries, no one in the scholarly world had ever heard of him at all.

  Storm Jaguar—the name was a literal translation of the ancient pictographic script—had been the king of an early city-state in western Honduras, well to the south of what most historians believed was the limit of Mayan expansion. His life story had become the basis for the Mesoamerican equivalent of an epic poem, committed to paper—or huun, as the Maya called it—in the fifth century.

  A thousand years later, and several centuries after their civilization had mysteriously vanished, most surviving examples of the ancient texts were destroyed by Spanish conquistadores who believed the writings would inhibit conversion of the native population to Christianity. A scant few books, bound and folded into codices, survived the purge, preserved by Spaniards who recognized their worth, but remained hidden and forgotten for hundreds of year
s thereafter. Experts now knew of four authentic Mayan codices and had used these in combination with the relief carvings in Mayan ruins to develop a fairly comprehensive translation matrix, but none of the known writings mentioned Storm Jaguar. That name was found only in a codex that Atlas had purchased on the black market.

  A translation of the document yielded, among other things, the Mayan equivalent of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a tale of how Storm Jaguar left his kingdom and journeyed to Xibalba, the Mayan Underworld. The tale expanded on the creation myths found in the Popul Vuh—a collection of folklore based on oral tradition passed down in the Quiché language—but the provenance of Atlas’ codex had been impossible to establish through conventional means. Which left only unconventional means.

  Enter Mira Raiden.

  Four months earlier, the closest Mira had ever come to a tropical jungle was the Rain Forest Café at the MGM Grand on the Las Vegas strip. She had been making the circuit of Sin City casinos, winning big, but not too big, and gradually but determinedly feathering her nest. Gambling afforded her no addictive thrill. With her intuition guiding her bets, it was merely working for a living.

  One night while playing colors at the roulette table, she had felt the tingle of someone watching her. Surprised that she had been noticed so early in the evening, she had nevertheless taken that as her cue to cash out her winnings and head for the door. The watcher in this case was not the pit boss, however, but rather a sweaty, smiling, little fat man who spoke to her as if they were already old friends.

  “My dear Mira,” he had said, grinning cryptically, “you have a gift.”

  Her “gift” told her that, where Marquand Atlas was concerned, looks could be deceiving, but she sensed nothing threatening about him. And that, coupled with the fact that he had correctly recognized her abilities and seemed impressed by them, was enough for her to accept his offer of a drink.

  They made an unlikely pair in the cocktail lounge. Her elfin physique and features were not exactly glamorous, but she knew that most men found her attractive. Under normal circumstances, she could have had her pick of companions, and at first she had imagined that onlookers would wonder why she had picked the portly Atlas. Only later, when she finally began to get an inkling of his net worth, did she realize that the jealousy she had sensed was actually directed at her.

  For his part, Atlas had never tried to impress her with his wealth, much less make any sort of sexual advances. From the outset he had focused solely on her unique attributes, all but interrogating her in an effort to define exactly what she was capable of doing. Later that night he had shown her the codex.

  Without even knowing what it was, physical contact with the brittle, discolored pages had filled her with certainty regarding the codex’s authenticity. More than that, it had triggered what she could only describe as a homing instinct, a powerful urge that over the course of several weeks would lead her, with Atlas in tow, to a buried Mayan temple in Honduras more than three hundred miles from the ruins of Copan near the Guatemalan border and from there even farther south to the rugged wilderness of the Darien Gap in search of the legendary Mayan underworld.

  But that night in Vegas, as her fingertips brushed the decorative leaves of the codex, she understood for the first time the thrill that made ordinary people gamble away their last dollar on the promise of what the next roll of the dice might bring.

  * * *

  “Is it a warning?” Lancet asked.

  “A no trespassing sign, of sorts. It’s a boundary marker. Beyond this point, we are in the realm of Xibalba.” Atlas made a dismissive gesture. “From the looks of it, the lords of Xibalba have been gone for a long time.”

  Mira wasn’t convinced. When they had discovered the tomb of Storm Jaguar in the catacombs beneath the temple in Honduras, she had felt only an overwhelming desire to press on, to retrace the steps of the ancient Mayan king. Now, however, on the threshold of that final discovery, her urge to move forward was being countered by a more primal instinct. It wasn’t exactly panic, but something pretty damn close.

  Atlas evinced no such inhibition. Drawing his bush knife, he began clumsily breaking trail beyond the stele. Ever loyal to his employer, Lancet reclaimed his own blade from Mira and joined the effort, with considerably more effectiveness. As the two men hacked at the verdant barrier, Mira remained vigilant, sniffing for any hint of imminent peril.

  In a matter of minutes, the jungle yielded up another carved stone—not a stele, but rather an entire wall peeking through the growth. The markings on it were definitely not Mayan hieroglyphs.

  “It’s Atlantean,” gasped the billionaire.

  The ambient sensations presently inundating Mira’s precognitive abilities could not quite hide the subtle change in Atlas’ aura. The very sight of the strange markings—a language that was far more reminiscent of a phonetic alphabet than any pre-Columbian pictograph—had awakened something deep inside the man, something buried so deep that she had never sensed it before. The only word to describe it was “hunger,” and the impression was so sudden and overwhelming that the irony was lost on her.

  What have I done? she thought. I shouldn’t have brought him here.

  Atlas continued chopping away the vines to uncover more of the unique text, and where he did, his fingers brushed at the recessed letters lovingly, his lips moving silently as he read whatever was written there.

  Lancet stood paralyzed in disbelief. “You can read this?”

  “It is the language of Atlantis. I had long suspected that what Storm Jaguar called Xibalba was really an outpost city built by refugees from that fallen civilization. This”—he patted the wall reverently—“is the tomb of the king of Atlantis.”

  “That doesn’t explain how you are able to read it,” Mira countered.

  “Tsk, tsk, my dear. Did you think you knew all my secrets?”

  Actually, I did, she thought.

  “Atlantis is just a . . .” Lancet looked to Mira, perhaps for confirmation that he was not going insane, but stunned by her own inability to detect Atlas’ hidden agenda, she could offer no such assurances.

  He’s been looking for this all along. He knew what it was. He knows what it means. Suddenly the potency she had sensed from afar took on a dire implication. “Mr. Atlas, I think we should proceed with a little more caution.”

  “Nonsense. We must find a way inside, and quickly, before the looters get wind of this.” As if to emphasize his newfound urgency, his next cut exposed the edge of a doorway. Beneath the artistically executed arched lintel, utterly unlike anything she had ever seen in her brief experience with Mayan ruins, the passage was choked with rubble. But even this did not slow Atlas down. Sheathing his knife, he reached in with both hands and began pulling out broken blocks of cut stone that were twice as large as his own head.

  Lancet tapped him on the shoulder. “Take a break, Mr. Atlas. I’ll get this.”

  The billionaire, red-faced and panting, mopped his brow with a shirtsleeve. “Very well, but you must hurry. We’re so close.”

  “We’re too close,” Mira murmured, but even in the grip of her newfound anxiety she was not immune to the thrill of discovery. After all, it wasn’t every day that a person found proof that Atlantis really existed.

  * * *

  With half of the blockage cleared away, it became apparent that the passage beyond was wide open. Eager to be inside, the billionaire squirmed his massive body through the narrow gap. A tiny spot of light blossomed in the darkness beyond and immediately began moving deeper into the interior.

  “Damn him,” Lancet growled before scrambling through the aperture in pursuit of his headstrong employer.

  Mira’s slight form slipped through without even significantly shutting out the sun’s rays, and in the circle of daylight that illuminated the first few feet of the passage, she caught a glimpse of Lancet, already on the move.

  Like the others, she carried a tiny squeeze light clipped to a breakaway chain around her neck. The powerful
light-emitting diode threw out a brilliant cone of illumination, but as she hastened after her companions, she felt such a sense of familiarity about the place that she probably could have negotiated the buried ruin in total darkness. She was starting to think that Atlas probably could have done so as well. Despite his bulk, he was flat out running ahead of them, drawn inexorably toward the center of the temple.

  There was no time to examine the halls and rooms through which she now raced. Flashes of light danced on the walls, revealing brightly colored human figures, veristic images, faintly reminiscent of the style found on the walls of Pompeii. The constant motion and vibration at the source of the illumination made it seem like the pictures were coming alive, and then it occurred to her that perhaps the movement glimpsed in her peripheral vision had nothing at all to do with the interplay of shadow and light. She hastened on.

  The tunnels wound back and forth through the underground complex like a mystical labyrinth, and while she often lost sight of the flickering lights carried by the two men, she never faltered in choosing her path through the maze. But there was no escaping the grim reality that Atlas would reach the goal—the unknown prize at the heart of the ruin—before she caught up to him.

  Then, inexplicably, she skidded to a stop. The goal, she realized, was not merely at the center of the ruin. Storm Jaguar had called this place Xibalba, the underworld, and just like Orpheus and Dante, his journey had taken him far beyond the first level of Hell. The prize Atlas sought lay somewhere below, in the bowels of this ancient subterranean temple. More importantly, there was a shortcut.

  Whether Atlas knew about it or not was irrelevant. The most direct route to the temple’s core had not been constructed for the purpose of passage. It was a vertical shaft less than two feet in diameter that stabbed through the center of every layer of the temple, allowing sunlight from the surface to filter down into the deepest catacombs. The ancient architects had not designed this to be a ruin, but rather a living place of worship, and such a place needed light. The roof of the superstructure had long since collapsed, shutting forever the oculus, which had permitted the sun’s rays to enter, but the shaft remained.