“Actually, it’s now,” Alexander said, walking toward the breakwater of giant stones.
King followed him up the rise, taking in the view of the pristine Gulf of Tunis. He looked around again in a full circle. Untouched rocks and sand for as far as he could see, in most directions. Far north along the coast he thought he could make out a structure, but it would have to be only a single story building—possibly a rock. But the geography of the coastline was accurate. He tried to wrap his mind around it. He was seeing Tunisia before it was occupied. Then a history lesson caught up with him. “Wasn’t there a Phoenician city here before the Romans?”
Alexander was stalking around the breakwater, looking at rocks, and sometimes squatting down to peer closely at them before standing in a huff and looking elsewhere. He pointed absentmindedly behind him, at the large boulders to the south of the breakwater.
King walked over to the boulders and climbed them to the top.
South of the breakwater, spread out before him, was a small village. Several of the structures were wattle and daub, but a few were comprised of earth-colored stone. At a quick glance, King put the population at fewer than a thousand people. He saw several wooden boats with brilliant white sails tied to a long wooden pier. On the southern fringe of the town were dozens—possibly hundreds—of camels, tied to wooden posts, and in one case, walking aimlessly in a wooden corral.
King walked back down the boulder to where Alexander was still looking at the stones. He was acutely aware of the grenade, still in his pocket. The AK-47 strapped to his back and the Sig Sauer handgun tucked into the waistband of his jeans. Even his garments and his wristwatch. Everything about him marked him as what he was.
A man out of time.
“That’s the mighty kingdom of Carthage?” King asked in disbelief.
Alexander stood upright and smiled. “First, Jack, remember what I said about taking modern history at face value. Second, you’re getting your years mixed up. Carthage, or Karkhēdōn, as the Greeks will come to call it, has existed as a city at this point only for a few years. Carthaginian hegemony doesn’t begin for another hundred and fifty years or so, when they strike out for the island of Ibiza. But trade is going like crazy right now, and it will help us in our mission.”
“And that mission is?” King asked.
“Hmm,” Alexander mumbled as he continued looking at stones.
“What is this mission you’ve shanghaied me for? I think it’s time you told me.”
Alexander looked up at King. “I’m sorry, Jack. You’re right. I’m just getting ahead of myself. We need to get to Rome. We are going to save my wife, Acca Larentia, from her untimely demise at the hands of my Forgotten.”
King was stunned. The man really was motivated by love. “You told me she had stumbled onto one of your labs, when you weren’t there.” King recalled the man’s admission when they had fought side by side under the ruins of Rome’s Lacus Curtius.
“Yes, she did. To my eternal regret. So we have come back in time to prevent that from happening.”
“How?” King asked. “Don’t we risk screwing up all of history if we change something in the past?”
“There are several theories about the issue of paradoxes, Jack. I believe only one of them: that whatever we do here in the past, has always happened this way. Whatever we do will not change history. It already is history.”
“But if we rescue Acca, won’t the younger version of you know? You told me you found her after the Forgotten had attacked her. They drank her blood, you said.”
“Yes. She was curious, and she had found the lab, and the Forgotten were behind bars. They hadn’t eaten in weeks. She held a cup of water out to them…” Alexander drifted off, lost in the memory.
“I’m sorry,” King said. “But how can we save her then without changing the past?”
Alexander’s head snapped up, a cheerful look replacing the distant look of loss. “I always have a plan, Jack.” He glanced down at the stone at his feet. “Ah! Here it is.”
He stepped back off the stone he was standing on, and King could see a very faint, and very rough letter H. This one did not have the typical circle around it. Alexander reached down and picked up the stone, setting it carefully aside. Then he pulled the three surrounding stones aside; each was slightly larger than twice the size of a basketball. He reached into the hole he had created in the top of the breakwater and pulled out a small wooden chest, six inches long by four inches wide and probably three inches deep—maybe less depending on the lid’s thickness. The outside of the box was ornately decorated with thin gold foil, and the hinges were hidden on the inside. Alexander handed the box to King.
It was surprisingly light.
What the hell is in this? King wondered.
He held the box in his hands and turned it over, looking at the ornate gold design, and trying to determine where it opened. Then he wondered if it was some kind of puzzle box, like in the Hellraiser films. “What is it?”
“What you hold in your hands, Jack, is the infamous Chest of Adoon.” Alexander beamed.
“The who of what?”
“Remember what I told you about history being manipulated by some and changed by others. That chest was a simple box of mine. It contains something very valuable. I was drunk one night in Palermo. This must have been around 100 BC, I guess. I was mouthing off, and I said some things about this chest and what it contains. But over the years, the rumors got a little out of hand.” Alexander took the box and depressed a hidden button on its backside. The lid popped open with a hiss as trapped air escaped.
“Airtight?” King asked. “How’d you manage that in this day and age?”
Alexander smiled. “I had my ways.” He opened the lid and showed King the contents of the box. A small handful of rubies and several dried herbs no longer than an inch in length. In a separate compartment inside the wooden box, were more herbs, finely chopped.
“You went to all that trouble to hide your pot?”
Alexander laughed. He pulled out one of the longer herbs and held it up for King. “This plant is a genetic sibling of Silphium. Have you heard of it?”
King shook his head.
“It was widely known for its medicinal properties. Cyrene even printed it on their coinage. The plant is extinct in your time. This one, though, was even more powerful than Silphium. This one, Jack, can grant immortality. This is essentially what led to the Hydra. This herb, will help Acca to live. And the rubies will get us to Rome.”
“So what were the rumors that got out of control?”
Alexander laughed. “It’s funny, you know. The contents of the box grant eternal life, but the rumor that got started was that the chest contained a powerful weapon of destruction and death. There are faint references to it throughout history, but even into your time, the rumors persisted. By the 21st century, the rumor about the Chest of Adoon, as it came to be known, was that it contained something with godlike destructive powers—like the Ark of the Covenant in that Indiana Jones film.” Alexander scooped out the rubies and dropped them in his pants pocket. Then he delicately placed the four long herbs into a plastic sandwich baggie that he pulled out of his shirt pocket. He took out another baggie and held it open, pouring the smaller herbs into it.
“What’s that one?” King asked.
“Green tea from China. You have no idea how hard it is to get in this part of the world, at this time.”
King tried not to smile. He didn’t want to. But it happened anyway. “Hold on, if your theory of time is correct, the irony is off.”
“How so?” Alexander raised an eyebrow.
“In the 21st century, the box won’t contain the herbs anymore, because you will have removed them. It will just contain air.”
“Exactly. I only thought of that when I was dealing with Ridley.”
King became serious. “What are you talking about? Ridley was—”
“My prisoner,” Alexander said. “Held just a few rooms down from
the lounge where we talked.”
“You what?” King shouted, clutching his fists.“If he gets loose, Asya and my parents are still back there.”
“He won’t get loose, don’t worry about that. Your family will be fine. Besides, shortly before we went through the portal, the rest of your team arrived.”
King thought about the situation and knew Chess Team would protect Asya and the Machtchenkos. They would find Ridley, and if he was still a threat, they would simply end him. Still, it pissed him off that Alexander had kept so many dangerous secrets.
“All this time you had Ridley?”
“It took a long time to get what I needed from him. Eventually I had to offer him a trade.”
“Explain.” King was not pleased to hear that Ridley might have gotten something he wanted, which usually led to hundreds of people dying.
“Relax. I needed him to teach me one small phrase of the mother tongue. When I told him what it was, he seemed to think it was harmless enough, but he was a stubborn bastard and didn’t want to part with his secret words. I tortured him for a while, but he was too good at resisting. Eventually I offered him something he wanted. You see, he had heard about the Chest of Adoon too. Had looked for it for years. After becoming immortal and capable of regenerating, after learning the mother tongue, which granted him the power to bestow life, the only thing he still desired was the so-called godlike destructive power contained within the chest. He wanted it badly. So I told him where it was. I figured, the Chest was still in its hiding place in 2013, so he could have it—after all, he was already immortal. The herbs would do nothing to help him. I guess at the time, I was thinking only of taking some of these herbs from the Chest, but I see now it would be too dangerous to leave any of them, even though we only need two for Acca. And I’m not letting Ridley get my tea.” Alexander chuckled at his own joke.
King pointed at the hole under the rocks where the wooden chest had been hidden. “That’s not a very secure location. How do you know it was undisturbed all those years?”
“I come back eventually—the younger me does. I changed, or rather, will change, the location slightly. It’s plenty secure in the 21st century. No one ever finds it.”
“What about you, when you come back to move the chest? Won’t you open it and see everything missing?” King asked, trying to wrap his mind around the intricacies of paradoxes versus determined fate.
“No, I never opened it again. I just moved it. I was in a hurry that day.” Alexander seemed lost in thought again, the many years of his long life washing over his consciousness.
“So if Ridley gets free, he’ll go after the box?”
“Yes. But it will be empty. Actually the true irony is that the box was under his nose all along. Ridley had been searching for the Chest of Adoon for years. He ended up taking over a small place of mine on this spot and building his lab here for an entirely different reason. He had no idea he was practically sitting on top of the box. You should have seen his face when I told him where it was.”
Alexander was about to put the empty box back in the hole.
“Wait. No one ever opens that box again, right?” King asked, moving closer, and taking the box from Alexander.
“No. Why?”
“Let’s leave a little message for Ridley, in case he ever finds it.” King placed his message inside the box and carefully shut the lid. It hissed for a moment, some hidden mechanism once again removing the atmosphere from inside the box. Then he placed the box into the hole in the ground.
Alexander laughed heartily. Then he hefted the boulders back into place, careful to put the one with the H on top, exactly as it had been. “I like your sense of humor, Jack.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Karkhēdōn Port on the Mediterranean, 799 BC
King waited by the docks wearing the itchy robe and sandals Alexander had procured for him. He looked the part, except for the rifle, which he kept wrapped in a swaddling of fabric, strapped across his back. The Sig was tucked under a flap of cloth on his rope waistband. It didn’t feel very secure, and he kept unconsciously adjusting it, hoping the motion wasn’t giving him away, and then realizing he had nothing to worry about—people in the era had never seen a concealed carry, because there weren’t any guns yet, and wouldn’t be for another eighteen centuries.
The dock was crowded with men coming and going. Most wore similar robes and sandals. They carried loads to and from the waiting boats, and they haggled for prices in several different languages. King saw mostly North African faces, but there were enough seafarers from afar, and even white European faces, that he blended in with the crowd. King had even heard what sounded loosely like Latin being spoken.
He tried to stay vigilant, but then reminded himself he had no need to be. To everyone else on the crowded docks, he and Alexander would be just two more travelers or merchants.
“Jack!” Alexander came strolling down the pier, waving. The period clothes—a robe like his own, sandals and a small satchel made from an animal hide—seemed to fit the man perfectly. “I’ve arranged passage for us to Sicily.”
Alexander smiled broadly and pointed to a short shabby man with a scraggly goatee and dark skin. King stepped up to Alexander and the man slipped an arm around his shoulders like they were pals, and led him to meet the little shabby man. Alexander was acting overly casual. For a moment, King wondered if he was just happy to be back in a forgotten time, like visiting a childhood home. But then Alexander spoke quietly. “I’ve told him you don’t speak the language, but he still wanted to meet you. Just nod to him.”
King did as he was told, and the man nodded in return, smiling widely, showing just three blackened stumps of teeth.
“They’re pirates, but they should get us safely to our destination,” Alexander told him.
They followed the short man, who occasionally turned and beckoned them forward with his hand. He led them past most of the boats along the pier, finally arriving at a small, twenty foot long vessel. The square sail was a hundred shades of dirty. The crew looked in worse shape than their captain, with about ten men, all in various stages of scurvy to King’s eyes.
“Climb aboard, Jack. I’m just waiting on…ah! Here he comes.” Alexander looked down the pier to a small boy of about ten years, who was running toward them holding a wooden tray on the top of his head, a rag twisted to look like a turban keeping it balanced.
“What’s this?” King asked, but before Alexander could answer, King figured it out. As the boy got closer, King could see two small orange cups on the tray on the boy’s head, and a huge jug with steam rising out of the top.
The boy arrived and steadied the tray with a hand, then used both hands to pull the tray down and present it to Alexander. The immortal man took the tray, gave the boy a kind word in a language King did not know, and the boy happily scampered away. Alexander took the delivery and climbed aboard the boat, delicately balancing the tray against the swaying of the boat on the harbor’s blue waters.
“Is that what I think it is?” King asked with disgust, climbing over the gunwale from a small wooden plank. He sat next to Alexander on a hard wooden bench attached to the inner wall of the boat.
“Tea. Practically unknown in this part of the world. We must celebrate. And give prayers for a successful journey.” The man picked up the clay urn with one meaty hand and poured the steaming liquid into a cup. The tea was nearly translucent, with just a slight green tinge, but the bottom of the cup was murky, when King peered into it.
“I did mention I’m not a big fan of tea, right?”
“You’ll drink it now, Jack. The water in this time period would kill you if it wasn’t boiled. Your system has no immunity to the bacteria and viruses of these days. And you’ll be hard pressed to find a bottle of Sam Adams for another 2800 years.” Alexander handed King a cup. “Drink it fast. They don’t know how to glaze the clay yet, so if you wait too long, your cup will disintegrate in your hand.”
King looked at the brew s
keptically, but then took a sip. It was better than the tea they had had in the lounge with his parents.
Alexander poured and drank from his own cup, as the last of the crew boarded and took their seats at oars. The sail was luffing as the crewmen, without orders or chants, began rowing the boat away from the pier. The lines were dumped haphazardly on the deck. No one had time for coiling the rope, King guessed.
The sky was patchy with white fluffy clouds, but there was no sign of a storm anywhere. King swallowed more of the tea and found the flavor improving. “This vessel doesn’t look particularly seaworthy. How long of a trip is it to Sicily?”
Alexander finished the rest of his cup of tea in one gulp, then looked at King with a raised eyebrow. “About twenty-five hours. Longer if the wind isn’t with us. Hence the prayers…and the tea. Unless you’d rather drink seawater.”
“I never thought you’d be much for praying—or do you pray to the old Greek pantheon?” King asked.
“Actually, I pray to them all. God, Allah, the Greek Gods, Buddha, Vishnu and whoever. I figure it can’t hurt on a sea voyage. We’ll use the time on the trip for me to fill you in on a few things about the way the world works in this time. Things you should and shouldn’t do.”
“Like burning my favorite Elvis t-shirt?” King asked, still feeling the sting of giving up his modern clothes.
“Exactly. We wouldn’t want some enterprising twentieth century archeologist to stumble across that AK-47. So you’ll need to keep track of it. If it breaks, there’s no way to fix it in this time, so you’ll have to dismantle it, destroy the pieces, and bury them in different places. Dropping the bits in the sea here…” Alexander pointed over the starboard bow, as the man in front of him on a bench continued to grunt as he rowed, “wouldn’t be a bad idea either. The point, as in all things like this, is to be as unnoticed as possible.”
About halfway out of the harbor, the captain spoke to the men in a long rambling speech. The oarsmen grunted and groaned, but stowed the oars and began pulling in the lines for the sails. A few men with red-stained gums produced small packets of something wrapped in large leaves that they sucked. King imagined it was the equivalent of a smoke break for some of the oarsmen. Only three men appeared necessary for manning the sail. The wind snapped the sail taut and the boat sliced neatly through the crystal blue waters, heading out of the harbor. Soon they were in open sea.
Omega: A Jack Sigler Thriller Page 13