Changeling

SEVEN

As Jade stared at the queue of black TX4 Hackney cabs lined up outside the arrivals gate at London’s Heathrow Airport — all facing the wrong direction, or so it seemed to her — she could not help but think back to her last visit to the city and her first meeting with Gerald Roche. Although that trip had been a net success, it had not gone smoothly and she had left believing that she had made an enemy in Roche. Now, Roche was dead and she was back in London, hoping to solve the mystery behind his murder and possibly fulfill his last request.

“Truth is the only protection,” Roche had said just before his death. “But knowing the truth is not the same as proving it.”

Proving Roche’s pet theory was not her objective. The only truth that she cared about right now was the truth about why Roche had been killed, and why Rafi, without any apparent provocation, had pulled the trigger and subsequently immolated himself. She did not know if there was a connection to Phantom Time, or one of Roche’s other wild conspiracy theories — her instincts told her there was — but it was a starting point.

Professor selected the third taxi in the line and waved for Jade to join him. She shouldered her backpack, the only piece of luggage she had brought along and crossed to the waiting cab where he was holding the door open for her. It was early afternoon but the gray sky seemed unusually dark and depressing after the sunny equatorial clime of Peru. Nevertheless, despite the fact that she was exhausted from the trip — long flights and even longer layovers — Jade was eager to get started, and couldn’t resist tapping her foot and shifting in her seat throughout the forty-five minute ride from the airport to Bedford Square in the Borough of Camden, where Chameleon Press International’s offices were located.

The idyllic setting, nestled amid garden squares and elegant historical buildings that dated back as early as the 17th century, seemed wholly inappropriate for a publisher who dealt primarily with sensational speculative topics, but like its namesake, Chameleon seemed to blend right in, occupying a small corner of the Bloomsbury district, a place synonymous with London’s historic literary culture.

The office was little more than a room with two cluttered desks and a handful of chairs, occupied solely by a handsome if a bit harried-looking man, about her age, with light brown hair and blue eyes that peered out through tortoiseshell framed spectacles.

As Professor opened the door and stepped aside to allow Jade to enter, the man at the desk looked up from his computer screen, then jumped to his feet and rushed over the greet his visitors. “Hello. You must be Dr. Ihara.”

Though she had never seen him before, Jade recognized the friendly voice and understated accent from their earlier phone conversation. She put on her most winning smile and extended her hand. “And you must be Mr. Kellogg.”

“Please, it’s just Jordan.” After introducing himself to Professor, he gestured toward the chairs positioned in front of his desk. “I am sorry that I wasn’t more help over the telephone. Things have been a bit chaotic of late. Recent events…” He shrugged. “I’m the…well, I used to be the assistant editor and vice-president, but that’s not as impressive as it must sound. There was only ever just Mr. Parrott and myself, and since his disappearance, it’s essentially a one-man show, and I’m the one man.”

Jade heard no trace of lingering grief in Kellogg’s tone at the mention of Parrott’s fate. Maybe three weeks had taken the edge off the tragedy. She decided to probe a little deeper. “How will Roche’s death affect the business?”

“Well this may sound a bit ghoulish, but business has never been better. As soon as word of his death hit the news, the booksellers started calling. I’ve emptied the warehouse and I’m going to have to order print runs of several backlisted titles. Tricky business, that. It’s impossible to predict how long we’ll be able to capitalize on public interest. If the buzz fades away too quickly, I’ll be stuck with a warehouse full of unsold books.”

“Must be tough,” Professor muttered, and Jade had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. Kellogg however seemed immune to sarcasm.

“You have no idea. Thank goodness for e-books. That’s where most of our money is made anyway. Instant gratification.” He tapped the side of his nose in a gesture that meant absolutely nothing to Jade.

“Roche told me that he was working on a new book,” she said. “Will you be able to release that?”

“Sadly, no. I know that’s what you’ve come here for, but Mr. Roche shared the manuscript with Mr. Parrott in electronic format and I haven’t been able to locate the file just yet. As I said, things have been chaotic.”

“Even so,” Professor said, “I would think you’d want to strike while the iron was hot, so to speak.”

Kellogg spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “As soon as it turns up, I’ll publish it.”

Jade decided to push a little harder. “Roche believed that Parrott was murdered to keep the book from being published. What do you think about that?” The man’s eyes widened in dismay, but Jade pressed ahead. “And now Roche is dead too. Do you think he was right?”

Kellogg spent several seconds shaping his answer. “I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, but…Mr. Roche was right bloody-minded about these theories”

“So you don’t believe any of it?” Professor said. “It’s all just grist for the mill, right?”

The other man answered with a guilty shrug.

“Could the manuscript be at Roche’s home?” Jade asked.

Kellogg raised an eyebrow as if he found the possibility intriguing. “Why, I don’t know. I would have to get permission to search the premises.”

“Mr. Roche gave me permission,” Jade said quickly. “Not in so many words of course, but he told me about the book and wanted me to look for more supporting evidence. I think finding the manuscript is the obvious first step, don’t you? Here’s an idea. Why don’t you come with us to Roche’s place? Once we’ve had a look at the manuscript, you can take it and do with it what Roche intended.”

She almost said “cash in,” but decided not to push that particular button too hard.

“Can’t argue with that,” Professor added quickly before the other man could reply.

Kellogg frowned as if the logic of the statement troubled him. “How would we get in?”

“Don’t worry about that,” Professor said. “We have a key.”

An avaricious gleam appeared in Kellogg’s eyes. “Well, what are we waiting for?”

Professor’s “key” was a set of lock-picking tools which, in his expert hands, would be able to defeat the lock securing the door of Roche’s Mortlake townhouse almost as quickly as if he possessed an actual key. Breaking into Roche’s home had been their plan all along, but enlisting Kellogg’s assistance was necessary to give their illicit intrusion a veneer of authenticity. A pair of foreigners lurking about the dead man’s front door might arouse the suspicion of locals. This way, if the police did come to investigate, Kellogg would be able to explain that they were there on official business.

It was a fragile illusion, and as it turned out, an unnecessary one. When they arrived at Roche’s residence on the south bank of the River Thames, they found the door standing slightly ajar.

Jade’s breath caught in her throat. We’re too late. Someone beat us to the punch.

Someone wants that book.

It was an enormous leap of logic, but Jade knew it was true. And when taken with what had happened in Paracas, and the disappearance of Ian Parrott, the conclusion was inescapable.

Roche had been right about everything.

Professor raised a hand, warning them to freeze, and then touched a finger to his lips. Jade dragged Kellogg a few steps back, while Professor crept forward and pushed the door open a little more.

“What’s going on?” Kellogg whispered the question, but it sounded as loud as a shout to Jade, who immediately shushed him. She tensed, half-expecting the intruder to burst through the doorway like a homicidal jack-in-the-box, but nothing happened. Professor moved inside and then, after a full two minutes, came out and signaled for them to join him. She could tell by the look on his face that her earlier assumption was spot-on, and as soon as she stepped inside, she got final confirmation.

The tastefully decorated sitting room — where just eight months earlier, Jade had sipped tea with Roche, blissfully unaware of the trap he had laid for her — was a shambles. Every stick of furniture had been overturned, every seat cushion slashed with a razor. The content of drawers and cabinets lay strewn haphazardly on the floor amid piles of furniture stuffing. The intruder had even knocked holes in the wall plaster in an evidently futile search for a wall safe or some other secret compartment.

“The whole place is trashed,” Professor said, breaking the ominous silence. “But if it’s any consolation, I don’t think they found what they were looking for.”

“How can you know that?” asked an aghast Kellogg.

Professor waved his hand in an expansive gesture. “Look at this place. This kind of overkill is the result of frustration.”

Jade did not find this the least bit consoling. “Roche kept his collection of Dee memorabilia in a basement room. Maybe there’s something down there. Something the burglar missed.”

“I saw the room you’re talking about. It’s been completely ransacked, but I guess since we’re here, we might as well take another look.”

Kellogg found his voice again. “I say, shouldn’t we call the police before tramping around and destroying the evidence?”

Jade ignored him and headed for the stairs, descending the familiar route to the basement. She had last trod these steps eight month earlier, racing up them with a gun-wielding Roche chasing after her. The memory haunted her until she reached the bottom step, whereupon the scope of the damage wrought to the collection of unique artifacts and books snapped her back to the present.

The room was unrecognizable. All of the bookshelves that had once lined the walls had been toppled, and now lay atop their scattered contents. The glass display cases which had held remarkable clockwork devices from the Elizabethan era, as well as exotic occult items of dubious provenance, were smashed apart, their contents scattered. Jade stared in disbelief at the ruined collection, feeling both angry and helpless. “Looks like we’re back to square one.”

“This was always a long shot, Jade,” Professor said from behind her. “It’s the 21st century. The manuscript, if it even exists, is probably a computer file stored on a secure Cloud server.”

Jade knew he was right but that didn’t make the pill any easier to swallow.

“There’s a line from an old James Bond novel,” Professor went on. “‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time, it’s enemy action.’”

Jade tore her gaze from the wreckage and stared at him. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Rafi didn’t do this. And I doubt very much that he was involved in the disappearance of Flight 815. I could almost believe that Roche’s death and Parrott’s disappearance on that plane were coincidences, but this…” He waved to the room. “Strike three. Enemy action.”

“But who? Who’s the enemy?”

“That’s what I intend to find out.” He took out his phone and began tapping the screen, scrolling through his contacts list. “The disappearance of the plane is the piece that doesn’t fit. Roche’s murder and this break-in both could be the work of disorganized Muslim extremists, but making a plane vanish completely requires planning and sophistication on a different order of magnitude.”

He held the phone to his ear and was silent for a moment until the connection was established. “Tam, it’s me.”

Jade returned her attention to the wreckage while Professor updated Tamara Broderick on what had happened and what he intended to do about it. Broderick was the director of a special CIA cell — code-named “Myrmidons”—primarily tasked with battling the Dominion. She was, technically speaking, Professor’s boss, though the arrangement was a little more complicated than employee-employer. Professor had a great deal of latitude when it came to operations, as long as he kept Jade safe and occasionally saved the world. Jade had briefly worked with the Myrmidons as a contractor, which was how she and Professor had initially became acquainted, though at the time, he had been working directly for her as a researcher, and international intrigue had been the last thing on either of their minds.

She knelt over a pile of books, scanning the titles. Some were leather-bound gilt-edged tomes — collectible books, not meant to be read, but one overturned shelf had contained a number of perfect-bound trade paperbacks, ranging in subject from geography and history to political science to UFO encounters. Most of the titles on the more speculative end of the spectrum sported amateurish and often lurid cover art. She opened one and idly thumbed through it, noting pages that had been marked with sticky notes and entire paragraphs highlighted in fluorescent yellow.

She realized that she was looking at Roche’s research library, the garden where he had gathered the raw ingredients to brew up his outrageous conspiracy concoctions. It was an apt metaphor. The pieces to Roche’s Phantom Time theory were lying scattered before her, but the exact recipe — the specific ingredients and proportions — had died with the man.

“I really don’t think you should be touching anything,” Kellogg said from the relative shelter of the stairwell. “This is a crime scene. We should step away and summon the police.”

Professor threw him a withering glance, and cupped a hand over his phone and continued speaking in a subdued voice.

Jade set the book aside and turned to face Kellogg. “What exactly do you think the police will do?”

“Well…”

“The police will write this off as a simple break-in,” She continued. “Vandalism. Nothing more. But they will probably seal this place off so that we can’t conduct our own investigation. Is that what you want? Is that what you think Mr. Roche would want?”

“I see your point.” Kellogg’s eyebrows drew together in a frown, then he brightened. “Do you think there’s something here that will help us crack the case?”

Crack the case? Jade thought. This guy has read too many Sherlock Holmes stories. “I doubt the people who did this will have left any evidence behind, but that’s not what we’re looking for.”

“What then?”

“Just before he died, Roche told me he wanted me to find something. Proof that this latest theory was right. I don’t really know exactly how to do that, but maybe if I can retrace his steps, so to speak, I can figure out what sort of proof he wanted me to find.”

“You want to rewrite his missing book, is that it?”

“Well, I wouldn’t have put it that way, but yeah. And the first thing we have to do is put this place back together.”

Judging by his expression, Kellogg found that prospect about as exciting as root canal surgery, but before he could reply, Professor ended his call and rejoined the conversation.

“I have to go to Sydney,” he said with the abruptness of pulling off a Band-Aid. “Tam has given me the green light to join the search for Flight 815.”

“Join the search? How is that going to help?”

“There are a lot of wild rumors about what happened, but I’m guessing the authorities have kept a lot of information about the disappearance out of the news. Maybe if I can get inside, I can get someone to open up and tell me what they really think is going on, and that will give us an idea of who’s behind it.”

The full import of his words finally hit home. “You’re leaving?” Jade was surprised by her reaction to the prospect.

“Just for a few days.” He cocked his head sideways, brows furrowed in consternation. “I figured you’d be happy for the breathing room. You’re always telling me that you don’t need a babysitter. I think you’ll be safe here, but you’re welcome to come with me.”

Jade tried to affect a mask of indifference. “Tagging along really isn’t my style. Besides, I’ve got my own leads to run down.”

“You sure?”

Jade was anything but sure. Although she would never tell him to his face, Jade liked having Professor around for a lot of reasons, and she was dismayed at the prospect of being separated from him for an indefinite length of time. But “tagging along” was exactly what she would be doing. She had nothing whatsoever to contribute to the search effort. The idea of sifting through the disaster zone that was Roche’s library was not particularly appealing, but it was something she could do, and truth be told, she wanted to know the secret that had evidently cost Roche his life.

She looked away, hoping that he would not see the hesitancy in her eyes, afraid that if he asked again, she might not be able to refuse. As she did, she glimpsed another book title. Like the others, it was a slapdash production; the cover featured a sepia-tinted black and white photograph, emblazoned with bold red letters in a Comic Sans typeface. It was the letters that had caught her eye, or rather the words they formed:

She picked the book up and murmured the title, or at least a phonetic approximation of it. “Foh-goo.”

She flipped it over and glanced at the back matter. Fogou, she learned, was a term for ancient Iron Age subterranean vaults scattered throughout Cornwall and Scotland. The brief description of the dugout chambers reminded her of the kivas used by Native Americans in the southwestern United States, but that was not what had initially aroused her interest. Rather it was that word.

Fogou.

It was what Gerald Roche had said with his dying breath.

She raised her eyes to Professor and managed a smile. “I’m sure. Be sure to send me a postcard from Down Under.”

EIGHT

The gray drizzle permeating London intensified to an almost constant downpour the further north Jade traveled, but as she left the urban and suburban environs of the metropolitan area behind, Jade’s mood steadily improved.

Part of the reason for this change was the almost magical contrast between the stormy sky and the green pastures and fields of rural Great Britain and the Scottish Lowlands. Although it was a lot colder and darker than she ordinarily preferred, she could understand how people could easily romanticize the moorlands and heath.

Mostly however, the reason for her elevated spirits lay with the fact that every mile brought her closer to a tangible objective.

She arrived in Kilmaurs, a picturesque settlement in East Ayrshire, Scotland, on the afternoon of her third day in the United Kingdom. It had taken her that long to make sense of the clue she had discovered in Roche’s library, though in truth, it was not much of a clue.

She had not shared her discovery with Professor, who probably would have told her that she had misheard Roche, nor had she discussed it with Kellogg, who probably wouldn’t have known what to make of it. Because it was such a slim lead, she decided the best course of action was to continue with the plan to conduct a methodical search of Roche’s home. After seeing Professor off, she and Kellogg returned to Mortlake and started sifting through the mess. The clean-up was not that much different than what she did everyday on a dig site.

That first evening, after several ultimately fruitless hours of reconstructing Roche’s research library and sweeping up shards of broken glass, Jade yielded to her nagging curiosity and read the book about fogous. It was a short read, long on folklore and quick to jump to the kind of sensational conclusions that would have thrilled fans of the Alien Explorers television series.

She learned that there were only fifteen confirmed fogous in the United Kingdom, but similar structures — called erdstall tunnels — could be found all over western Europe. Although there was no uniformity in structure, both fogous and erdstalls were dry stone chambers, about six feet deep and five feet wide, usually found near the center of ancient settlements. There was no clear consensus on their function. Food storage and shelter were obvious explanations, but the discovery of what appeared to be religious artifacts had led some scholars to believe that the fogous served a ritualistic purpose. The author of the book had gone a step further, proposing that the fogous were doorways between the human world and the world inhabited by faerie creatures, which reminded Jade of Roche’s comments about Changelings having their roots in faerie lore. What was not so apparent however was why Roche had chosen to expend his last breath to point her in this direction. There was nothing in the book that leapt out at her.

The next morning, she and Kellogg went back to work at Roche’s home, and while she found nothing more in the dead man’s personal effects to help make sense of the clue, she was able to make a few casual inquiries of Kellogg, and learned that Roche owned a hunting lodge near Kilmaurs, west of Glasgow. Kilmaurs, which took its name from the Gaelic Cil Mor Ais, which meant “Great Cairn”, was the site of a fogou that had yielded several artifacts including a knobby orb of carved stone, the purpose of which, like the chamber in which it had been discovered, remained a mystery. It was, as Professor might say, pretty thin soup, and she had no idea what it was she was supposed to be looking for, but Jade felt certain that Roche had been trying to direct her to the fogou at Kilmaurs. If she was wrong, there were still fourteen other possibilities.

As she left the motorway behind and began navigating the narrow backroads through farm country, her excitement began to wane a little. There would be no concealing the fact that she was an outsider and there was no telling how the local residents would react to her presence. Without their help there would be little chance of finding Roche’s hunting lodge, to say nothing of the fogou site. Dealing with the natives, whether it was a primitive tribe in Central America or a rancher in middle America, was one of the most challenging aspects of archaeology, but through trial and error, Jade had developed a knack for charming even the most suspicious locals.

After booking a room for the night at a roadside inn, Jade asked the clerk about the fogou, and after some confusion stemming from her pronunciation—“D’ya mean the fuggy hole at Jocksthorn Farm?”—she was given a hand-drawn map that would, if the clerk was not having a bit of fun at her expense, take her right to the “fuggy hole.” Jade thanked the clerk and then asked for a dinner recommendation.

“You’ll want to visit the Weston Tavern,” the clerk told her. “Try the haggis, neeps and tatties, if only to say you did.”

“I’ll do that,” Jade lied. For the first time since his departure, Jade was actually glad for Professor’s absence, as he would have almost certainly double-dog dared her to eat the traditional Scottish meal of sheep’s stomach stuffed with organ meats and oatmeal, and served with turnips and mashed potatoes. As it was, she had no intention of stopping for dinner, not with the goal finally within reach.

Armed only with a flashlight, she braved the chilly rain and set out on foot from the hotel for the two mile walk to Jocksthorn Farm, a forested parcel of land that jutted up out of the rolling fields like an island in a sea of green. After a quick look around to make sure that no one was around to observe her, Jade, hopped over the low stone guardrail and ventured into the woods.

The map was of little use since there were no landmarks to speak of, but twenty minutes of methodical searching finally brought her to a fenced area surrounding a hole in the ground that, if the hotel clerk was to be believed, was the entrance to the fogou. Jade climbed the fence, switched on her light and dropped into the opening.

The ground at the bottom of the hole was covered with loose soil and moss, but just a few steps into the covered passage brought Jade to a tunnel with gently sloping walls of carefully fitted stones — a technique called “battering”—reinforced every few feet with buttresses and corbels, and roofed with large stone slabs that easily held the weight of the earth above. The floor was damp but mostly clean and free of debris. Jade proceeded slowly down the passage, playing the beam of her light on every crack and crevice, looking for anything that might reveal the reason for Roche’s interest, but aside from the obvious craftsmanship required to construct the subterranean vault, there was nothing remarkable about the tunnel leading into fogou. After about twenty-five feet however, the passage opened into the central chamber and Jade was obligated to revise that opinion.

The heart of the fogou was a broad circular chamber. The battered stone walls sloped outward gently up to a point higher than Jade’s waist, then reversed, with each successive layer of rock overhanging the layer beneath it to create an inward slope that continued all the way up to form a domed ceiling. It took Jade a moment to realize that she was standing in a roughly spherical room, remarkably similar to the cavern she and Rafi had fallen into in Peru.

Jade glimpsed something out of the corner of her eye, a man standing beside her, lurking in the gloom. She spun toward the shape, aiming the light where she thought his eyes would be, but the flashlight beam revealed nothing but stacked rock.

She took a deep breath, trying to calm her racing heart. Her eyes had tricked her. The similarity to the Paracas chamber had triggered a subconscious memory of the strange “ghost” hallucinations, and her imagination had taken care of the rest. That was the most plausible explanation, but she could not shake the feeling that she was missing something.

She took another breath. She had not thought about the ghosts since leaving Peru. That particular mystery had taken a back seat, yet she recalled now that Roche had asked about her discovery. Almost as if he knew, she thought. As if he had seen something like it.

Jade shone the light around, searching for more ghosts, but instead of the elusive and ephemeral shapes, her beam picked out something almost as fleeting. A shadow, sliver thin, cast by a rock protruding ever so slightly from the thousands just like it, stacked up to form the curving walls of the fogou. She took out her pocket knife, a Victorinox Swiss Army Tinker model. Professor had laughingly called her “MacGyver” when she’d purchased the slim red folding knife, but it was a lot easier to keep in a pocket than the bulky Leatherman multi-tool he favored. She opened one of the smaller blades and worked it into the crack between the stones. The protruding rock shifted enough for her to grab one end with thumb and forefinger, allowing her to wriggle it loose, revealing a small cavity the width of her thumb.

Her light glinted off a polished surface inside the hollow and a probing finger teased out a rectangle of plastic that she immediately recognized as a USB compatible thumb drive. Jade closed her fist around in and allowed herself a smile off satisfaction. Without a computer, it was impossible to say what the external storage device contained, but her instincts told her that she had found Roche’s missing manuscript.

She turned to leave but then froze as her light revealed something else, a human shape standing in the mouth of the tunnel, and this time, it was no ghost.

NINE

If there was one thing Professor had learned during his time in uniform, it was that, no matter the location, branch of service or flag they flew, military bases were all pretty much the same. It wasn’t a physical similarity, though block construction and grim utilitarian uniformity were a constant, but rather something less tangible. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was, but Royal Australian Air Force Base Richmond on the outskirts of Sydney was no exception.

Even before getting past the main gate, as he waited beside his rental car for his bona fides to be checked and his visitor’s pass to be issued, Professor felt like he had been transported back in time twenty years to when he was a freshly scrubbed swabbie arriving at Coronado to begin Basic Underwater Demolitions/SEAL training. He found himself automatically checking the rank of every Aussie airmen that passed by, separating officers from enlisted like he used to do in the old days, just in case a salute was required. He had to fight the urge to stand at parade rest.

The airmen manning the gate handed him a clip-on pass and supplied instructions on how to find the ad hoc command center where the ongoing search for Flight 815 was being coordinated. Although the Australian Transportation Safety Bureau was the lead agency, there were more than a dozen different organizations — military, civilian, and private — and hundreds of aircraft looking for the plane, which made the RAAF base the ideal hub from which to oversee the effort.

Professor was posing as an FBI counter-terrorism consultant, on loan to the Australian government. The cover was vaguely defined, just official enough to allow him to hang out at the fringes of the search, ask a lot of questions, and get a feel for what had really happened. He did not expect to do any actual consulting, but if there was information being withheld from the public, something that provided a more concrete link to Roche’s murder, he had to find it. He had opted for casual attire — chinos and a navy blue polo shirt — but thought his Explorer fedora might set the wrong tone. It stayed in the rental car.

He decided to begin his search by introducing himself to ATSB operations manager Steven Sousa, the man in charge, notionally at least, but despite the fact that he had both emailed ahead to make an appointment and called to confirm, Sousa was nowhere to be found. The ATSB office was all but deserted. The lone agent manning the phones answered Professor’s inquiries about Sousa’s whereabouts with a shrug, which left him little choice but to park himself in a chair outside the office and wait.

Sousa arrived two hours later, a stout balding man with a haggard expression but a determined carriage. He brushed past Professor and went straight into the office where he immediately began making a phone call. Professor slipped in behind him and took a seat in front of the desk. Sousa acknowledged his presence with an irritated frown, but continued with his phone call — which mostly consisted of “No, sir. Not yet, sir” delivered with an almost stereotypically thick Aussie accent — as if Professor were not even there.

Finally, after a promise of “right away, sir,” Sousa hung up and leaned across his desk. “Let’s hear it.”

Professor offered a cordial smile and proffered his bogus credential pack. “I’m Chapman. FBI counter-terrorism.”

“Great. Another seppo.”

It did not sound like a question so Professor let it go. “I’ve got some questions I need answered and then I’ll be out of your ha… errr, your way.”

Sousa let out a noncommittal grunt. “Fine. Ask your questions. Hope you don’t mind if I keep working.” He reached for a stack of papers and began leafing through them.

The man’s recalcitrant attitude was the main reason Professor had not simply conducted this interview by phone. Getting anything useful out Sousa was going to be like pulling teeth. He decided to push back a little. “We’re on the same team, Sousa. I’m not here to piss on your hubcaps. As soon as I get what I came for, I’m gone. How long that will take is up to you.”

Sousa glared at him for a moment then tossed the papers down and folded his arms across his chest. “Go on.”

Professor took out a notepad and pen. “For starters, why don’t you tell me exactly what happened. I’ve heard what the news media are saying, and just about every crazy conspiracy theory imaginable. Now I want to hear it from you. What really happened to that plane?”

“What happened is that the plane bloody vanished.”

Professor’s pen remained poised above the page, but he said nothing.

Sousa sighed. “The aircraft took off from SYD at 0958. It’s a daily flight, originating here, not a turnaround, so the plane received a thorough maintenance evaluation before departure. Not so much as a loose nut anywhere on that bird. The flight left on time, and everything was fine until it wasn’t.”

Professor had just started writing, but stopped at the cryptic comment. “What does that mean?”

Sousa gave him a hard look. “You know anything about how airplanes work?”

“I understand principles of lift and aerodynamics, if that’s what you mean.”

“It’s not.” Another sigh. “I’m talking about the air traffic control system. People watch movies and they get this idea that ATC is like some kind of computer game, with a great big screen and little lights that show the exact location of every aircraft in the sky.”

“It’s not?”

“At any given moment, there are close to seven thousand commercial flights in the sky worldwide. There are more than a thousand different air carriers, and a lot of them are flying old birds that haven’t been fully upgraded with the latest bells and whistles. Air traffic control has to manage all of them, and the only way to do that is with radar and radio navigation. Both of those rely on line of sight, which isn’t terribly useful a thousand miles out over the Pacific Ocean. There are a lot of gaps in radar coverage. Planes aren’t tracked in real time. Sometimes, we don’t know there’s a problem until a plane fails to show up, or misses a scheduled check-in. What we know about this plane is that they reported in right on schedule for the first three hours or so, and then…nothing.”

“So the crew did not report any problems.”

“Not a peep. The odds are that this was a mechanical failure, not a deliberate act, but we won’t know what happened on that aircraft until we find it. So while I understand that you have a job to do, Agent Chapman, you’re just pissing into the wind.”

Professor didn’t back down. “And why haven’t you found it?”

“Didn’t you hear what I said? We don’t track these planes in real time so we don’t know where it went down.”

“But that particular plane was equipped with both a radio transponder and a GPS locator, right? I heard those systems were shut down by someone on the plane.”

Sousa sighed again as if weary of answering these particular questions. “If the aircraft experienced a major failure, like a fire in the electrical bay, those systems would have been disabled along with the radio. That doesn’t mean someone aboard intentionally shut them off.”

“Okay what about the black box? That’s supposed to be indestructible, right?”

“The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder are designed to survive a crash, and yes, they do broadcast a 37.5 kilohertz locator ping, at least until the batteries die. Right now, search vessels are deployed in the projected crash area listening for that signal, but in case you haven’t looked at a map lately, it’s a big bloody ocean.”

“If the plane’s disappearance was a deliberate act,” Professor said, “say, an act of terrorism, it might have deviated from its course. A difference of even a few degrees would put it thousands of miles from where you’re looking. That would explain why you haven’t found it, right? I’d say that’s a pretty compelling reason to at least investigate the possibility that this was an act of terrorism.”

Sousa rolled his eyes. “I thought you wanted to know what really happened.”

“What makes you so sure this wasn’t a deliberate act?”

“Occam’s Razor. Look, if the aircraft broke up suddenly in mid-flight, whether because of a bomb or a system failure, we probably would have found the wreckage by now. That means that the plane continued to fly after the communications system went down. Here’s my theory. A fire in the E and E bay — that’s Electronics and Equipment — takes out the radios and the cockpit fills with smoke. Captain Norris is unable to send a distress call, so he immediately changes course, looking for the nearest place to set down, but the flight crew, and probably everyone else aboard, is overcome by the smoke and the plane keeps flying with no one at the stick until it runs out of fuel and crashes into the ocean. It’s happened before.”

Sousa’s expertise was eroding the foundation of the assumption that had brought Professor to the opposite side of the world, but there was something he knew that Sousa did not. “What if I told you there was credible intelligence indicating that one or more of the passengers on that plane had been specifically targeted for assassination?”

Sousa remained unmoved. “You aren’t hearing me, Agent Chapman. The plane was not destroyed along its flight path, which means that someone manually changed course. Only the flight crew could have done that.”

“The 9-11 hijackers took flying lessons.”

“If anyone had attempted to take over that plane, the captain would have immediately sent a distress call. The same goes for a passenger trying to sabotage the plane.”

“What about the crew? Maybe one of them was the perpetrator. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“We’ve already looked into that. Captain Norris and First Officer Carrera had impeccable records and no ties whatsoever to extremist groups. We’ve even done voice stress analysis of the recorded radio transmissions. There’s nothing at all to indicate that either one of them was suicidal or under coercion. No, I’m sorry. The simplest solution is almost certainly the correct one. All the evidence points to this being an accident. A tragedy to be sure, but not a crime.”

Professor’s certitude began to crack apart like thin ice. He had made the same mistake as Roche and Jeremiah Stillman and all the other kooks who saw conspiracies in every coincidence. Maybe Sousa was right.

“Can I ask you a question, Agent Chapman?”

It took Professor a moment to process Sousa’s request. He met the other man’s gaze and nodded.

“Who?”

Professor blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“You said you had credible intelligence.” An odd gleam, more than mere curiosity, had entered Sousa’s dark eyes. Professor thought he looked like a cat contemplating a goldfish in a bowl. “I’ve become intimately familiar with ever name on the manifest of that aircraft. There were no red flags. Who was being targeted?”

“It’s not something I can talk about just yet,” Professor said with a tight smile. “Besides, you’re probably right. It’s most likely a dead end.”

Sousa regarded him a moment longer, then laid his palms flat on his desk. “You got what you need here?”

A low buzzing in Professor’s pocket signaled an incoming text message. He resisted the urge to check it immediately. “I’d like to talk to a few more people. Get a broader perspective. Like I said, I don’t want to be in the way. I just want my report to reflect that I did my job. Can you point me in the right direction?”

“I’ll make a list,” Sousa said. His tone was indifferent but the glimmer had not faded from his eyes. “You know, if you really want to understand what’s going on here, you should get your hands dirty.”

“Meaning what exactly?”

“There’s an Orion leaving in about an hour. A search plane.”

Professor knew what an Orion was. The venerable Lockheed P-3 Orion was a four-engine turboprop anti-submarine/surveillance aircraft, developed in 1959 but still in service throughout the world.

“You should ride along,” Sousa continued. “Talk to the men who are actually out there looking. Besides, I can’t think of a better way to get a broader perspective than looking down from a search aircraft over a hundred thousand square miles of open water.”

Before Professor could respond, his phone buzzed again, another message or perhaps a reminder for the first. He dug it out and glanced at the notification, a single message from Tam Broderick: “Did you see this???” followed by a truncated Internet URL.

It was not Tam Broderick’s style to forward funny cat videos.

He rose from his chair. “I’ll get back to you on that, Mr. Sousa. Right now, I need to take this.”

Sousa rose as well and moved toward the door while Professor tapped his screen to see what Tam had sent him. The URL directed him to a familiar website, the Crescent Defense League’s “Enemies of Islam” page. The page had been updated since his last visit. There was a new name on the CDL hit list.

Frigid adrenaline surged through Professor’s veins.

Jade.

The picture of her was a recent one, taken in Peru, probably a production still from the Alien Explorers website. Underneath, a short article outlined the reason Jade Ihara was considered an enemy to the faith, which mostly boiled down to her alleged collusion with Gerald Roche, in the pursuit of spurious evidence to support the “lie” that the Prophet Muhammad never existed.

While the article did not explicitly call for violence against Jade, the implicit message was hard to miss. Enemies of Islam like Roche and Jade needed to be silenced.

It was the last sentence that made Professor’s blood run cold.

He jumped to his feet but before he could turn toward the door, he felt a sharp stinging at the back of his neck. He jerked away reflexively, spinning on his heel even as the sting transformed into a spike of cold, like an enormous icicle stabbing through his upper torso. He whirled around to face his assailant, but whatever Sousa had injected was already robbing him of motor control. Professor’s legs collapsed under his weight and he crashed into the wall.

He clung desperately to consciousness but knew that it was a losing battle. The last thing he heard before the fog closed over him was the distant sound of someone speaking. It was Sousa’s voice, but without any trace of an Australian accent.

“I need a replacement… No. Take him to the facility. We’ll get what we need from him there.”

TEN

As her flashlight beam illuminated the face of the man standing in the passage, Jade managed to stifle her shriek of alarm. The noise that issued from her sounded more like a burp of displeasure.

“Kellogg! Damn it! What are you doing here?” She paused a beat, though not nearly long enough to allow him to respond. “Wait, did you…follow me here? You did, didn’t you?”

A guilty look flickered over his face, but it was replaced almost immediately by an expression of triumph. He pointed a finger at the object peeking from Jade’s clenched fist. “You found it. Roche’s book. I knew you would.”

She jammed the thumb drive into a pocket and took a step toward him, hands on her hips. “You followed me,” she repeated. “What the hell?”

“I didn’t follow you. But when you kept asking about Mr. Roche’s hunting lodge, it wasn’t hard to figure out that you would come here. And I realized that it was the obvious place to look for his manuscript.” His eyes narrowed in suspicion. “I do hope you weren’t trying to cut me out of the picture.”

“I didn’t keep asking and I never told you about the fogous, so how did you find me here?”

“The innkeeper said I’d find you here or at the tavern. You weren’t at the tavern.”

“He just told you where I was?” Jade stopped herself, realizing there was nothing to be gained by hammering at the issue. “Never mind. I wasn’t trying to cut you out of anything, Kellogg. Roche wanted me to find this. That’s what I’m doing. As soon as I figure it out, the book is yours.”

Kellogg spread his hands as if genuflecting. “That’s all I wanted. That, and for you to start calling me Jordan.”

“Quit while you’re ahead.” She shone the light up the length of the tunnel. “Come on let’s get out of—”

She broke off abruptly as she spied movement directly ahead. Something — an animal perhaps, or possibly a person — had drawn back into the shadows at the first touch of light, like a sea anemone shrinking from contact. She turned to Kellogg. “You saw that, yeah?”

“I didn’t…I wasn’t really looking.”

Jade frowned. Another ghost? She didn’t think so. Whatever she had spotted had seemed more substantial. More real. “You bring a date, Kellogg?”

Kellogg’s only answer was a bewildered stare.

Jade was pretty sure no one had seen her enter the fogou, but she doubted Kellogg had been as discreet. Maybe a local farmer or shepherd had spotted him tramping through the woods and followed. She waggled the light back and forth, creating a stroboscopic effect. “Hey you,” she called. “Don’t be shy. Come and say hi!”

Several seconds ticked by. After half a minute, Jade was starting to believe that she had imagined it but then a man stepped fully into view. At least, she assumed it was a man. The build looked decidedly masculine, average height and weight, not overly muscular, but definitely not dainty. The facial features would probably have resolved any remaining doubt about the gender of the new arrival, but those remained mostly hidden behind a black ski mask. That, and the two-foot length of steel pipe in the man’s hand, told her this was no mere curious passerby.

Jade kept her light pointed at the man’s face. The flashlight was an older, low intensity affair, bright enough to irritate but not blind the would-be attacker, but in its glare, Jade could see the man’s eyes, and read the fear written there. This man was no killer, had probably never even been in a serious fight.

Why’d you pick today to start something? Jade thought.

Another figure, similarly attired and equipped, stepped into view behind the first. The second man’s eyes were harder than his companions but only a little. Of the pair, the second man was clearly the instigator, pushing his timid friend forward to ensure that he would not run away.

Jade took a deep breath. “Okay, boys. I’m not sure what this is about…”

She trailed off when she realized that the first man was muttering something. She could just make out the outline of his lips moving under the fabric of his mask, but the words were nonsense. “La-la-la…”

The man abruptly lurched forward, raising his cudgel even though he was still a good ten steps away. Jade took an instinctive step back and bumped into Kellogg who was also retreating. She didn’t need to look behind her to know that there was nowhere to go.

Okay. Fight, then, but with what? It wasn’t like she could just pull a weapon out of thin air.

She straightened her back and widened her stance, trying to remember all the self-defense courses she had taken, all the martial arts instruction Professor and her ex-boyfriend Dane Maddock had tried to impart to her.

Maddock’s new girl was some kind of professional cage fighter.

She’d know what to do, Jade thought mordantly.

The man seemed to be moving in slow motion, as if every step, every action, was being stretched out deliberately to accentuate the dread Jade now felt. She saw his muscles tensing like a clockwork spring being wound tight, and then the subtle shift in his balance as he reversed direction and swung the cudgel at her.

Jade easily side-stepped the attack and thrust outward with both hands, planting the heels of her palms in the man’s chest. A hard shove sent the man stumbling back, his cudgel swiping empty air, yet even as he went reeling, the second man moved in, aiming his pipe at Jade’s head. She tried to duck away, but inertia conspired against her. She had invested too much momentum in repelling the first attacker to change course now. The bludgeoning instrument swung toward her cranium with the precise angle and timing required to deliver a crushing blow, and there was nothing she could do to avoid it.

Something clamped onto Jade’s wrist, pulling her arm taut with such ferocity that Jade thought her shoulder would be dislocated. The violence of the unexpected seizure caused her head to snap sideways. The sound of cracking vertebrae was so loud, she didn’t ever hear the length of pipe whooshing through the space where her head had been only a moment before.

It took her a moment longer to realize what had just happened. Kellogg had yanked her out of the way of the crushing blow. Unfortunately, in so doing, he had also whipped her around and sent her careening into the wall of the fogou.

The impact shuddered through her, rattling her teeth, but it wasn’t as bad as hitting solid stone. The battered rocks shifted like a pile of gravel, and then something broke under her and she spilled forward into a cavity that had been concealed behind the wall. Kellogg, his hand still locked around her wrist, was pulled along with her into the newly opened hole. The flashlight tumbled from her grasp and hit the ground with sufficient force to snuff out the light, plunging the cave and all its newly revealed secrets into darkness.

The darkness offered only a brief respite. A light, probably from a smart phone, flared to life in the circular main chamber, revealing the irregular break in the wall through which Jade and Kellogg had crashed. The light shifted, filling the opening with blinding radiance, forcing Jade to look away, but as she did, Jade realized that the space beyond the wall kept going.

“A tunnel,” Jade gasped. She hoped it was a tunnel at least, and not just a dead end passage. “Come on!”

Jade thought about digging her own phone out for light, but doing so would have served only to give the club-wielding men something to focus on. As long as she and Kellogg could avoid being illuminated, they would be safe.

She started forward, one hand stretched out before her in order avoid colliding with another wall, the other gripping Kellogg’s hand and pulling him along. After a dozen steps, her groping hand encountered something. A wall, but not the dead end she feared. Instead, it was merely the oblique angle of a bend in the tunnel. She shifted direction and continued forward, following the turn. For a few seconds, the darkness was absolute, but then a faint glow from behind signaled that the two attackers were still in pursuit.

The retreat, fumbling along one cautious step at a time, gave Jade time to process what was happening. If the third time was enemy action, then this could only be construed as a declaration of war, yet something about that explanation didn’t ring true. She did not doubt that the disparate events were somehow connected, but each successive link in the chain seemed weaker, as if the enemy was intentionally deescalating the conflict.

The enemy.

Who the hell was the enemy? Islamic extremists? Changelings? Neither felt plausible, but regardless, it was hard to believe that all of the incidents were being carried out by the same group. After disappearing an entire jet full of people, a couple of thugs with crude clubs was almost embarrassingly unsophisticated.

Jade came to an abrupt stop.

“What is it?” Kellogg hissed.

“This doesn’t make any sense.”

“What?”

Jade turned, pushed past him and started back up the tunnel, toward the diffuse glow of her attackers’ light. “Hey! Who the hell are you, huh? What do you want?”

She knew she was shouting but could barely hear herself over the sound of blood rushing in her ears. Every step forward brought her closer to what might very well be a fatal encounter, but instead of fear, she felt only anger. She had faced life or death situations plenty of times before. She could handle the threat, but she absolutely hated not knowing why.

“What do you want?” she repeated.

The light bobbed uncertainly, shifted away as if the man holding it was thinking about turning to flee.

“Answer me, damn it.”

She thought she heard him say something, not words, but the same nonsense chant she had heard before. “La-la-la-la…” Then the light shifted toward her again and she knew that the man was about to make a move. Jade threw an arm up to ward off the expected blow and charged toward the light.

The impact wasn’t as bad as she expected. Her shoulder caught a glancing blow to something relatively soft — probably the guy’s gut — and then she rebounded away like a pinball, striking the second man solidly.

The darkness concealed most of what happened, but the grunts of pain and sounds of bodies hitting the ground painted a vivid enough picture. There was a loud clank as one of the men dropped his pipe, and then a scuffling noise. The light bobbed and then went dim as the man holding it turned away and shone it back up the tunnel. Jade scrambled back to her feet, fists raised, but the light was moving away.

The men were fleeing.

Jade stared at the receding glow, too astounded at the unlikely victory to even think about what would happen next.

Another light flashed behind her. She whirled, fists still up but it was only Kellogg holding up his own mobile phone. “You…” He swallowed. “That was incredible.”

“Uh, thanks.”

Kellogg brought the phone close to his face. “No signal. We need to get out of here.”

“Right,” Jade’s answer was automatic but then she realized what Kellogg was trying to do. “Are you calling someone?”

“I should say so. I’m calling the police.”

She extended her hand, palm out. “No. No police.”

“In case you weren’t paying attention, we were just assaulted.”

“Yes, and in case you weren’t paying attention, I sent them packing. But until we know who’s behind it, we don’t trust anyone. Got it?”

Kellogg snorted. “Oh, it’s obvious who’s behind it.”

The only obvious thing about the attack, as far as Jade could tell, was that the perpetrators would eventually figure out that they had left the job unfinished. “No police,” she repeated. “Now come on. Let’s get out of here before they realize they just got their asses kicked by a girl.”

As she started forward, her toe struck the discarded metal pipe and sent it rolling down the tunnel. She scooped it up and hefted it in her right hand. “That’s more like it.” She half-expected Kellogg to lecture her about destroying fingerprint evidence but he thankfully remained silent.

With the cudgel held in both hands like a baseball bat, Jade moved back up the passage to the break in the wall of the fogou. There was no sign of the two men. She turned back to Kellogg. “Turn off your phone,” she whispered. “No light, and not a sound. But stay close.”

He nodded and then vanished along with the rest of the fogou when the screen went dark. Jade picked her way slowly through the breach, and then began walking stealthily, rolling her feet forward heel-to-toe with exaggerated slowness so as not to betray their presence. She strained her ears, listening for any noise that might indicate the two attackers were returning or lying in wait at the entrance to the chamber, but all she could hear was the sound of falling rain, growing louder with each step forward.

When she could just distinguish the outline of the tunnel mouth, the stormy night sky a faintly lighter shade of darkness than the subterranean depths, she stopped and listened for a full thirty seconds. It was the perfect place for an ambush. She leaned back until she felt Kellogg’s chest against her head. “Stay here,” she whispered.

Before he could reply, she leaped into motion, sprinting to the far end of the stone-lined trench and scrambling up the slick stone surface. If the men were waiting to attack, her best chance at surviving was a dynamic exit. She heaved herself onto the damp earth above ground, and rolled forward in a somersault twist that brought her up in a crouch facing back toward the fogou, the pipe held up and ready to parry any attack.

None came. The two men were long gone.

Jade took a few calming breaths before calling out to Kellogg. “All clear. Come on up.”

Kellogg emerged tentatively, then clambered out of the hole to join her. “Now will you let me call the police?”

“What did you mean when you said you knew who they were?”

Kellogg’s face was unreadable in the gloom. “Are you serious? Didn’t you hear what they were saying?”

“I was kind of preoccupied.”

“‘La ilaha illa’lla.’ It’s Arabic. ‘There is no god but God.’”

As he said it, Jade’s memory of the muttered words became crystal clear, and she knew he was correct. Their attackers had been reciting the shahadah, a statement of faith considered one of the pillars of Islam. Not only was the shahadah part of the five-times daily Muslim prayer ritual, but it was also reputedly the last words spoken by suicide bombers as a way of ensuring that their self-inflicted death would be counted as an act of martyrdom and not suicide, which was a damnable sin according to the Quran.

“Those men were Arabs,” Kellogg continued. “Just like the man that killed Mr. Roche. So, may I please call the police now?”

Jade felt an inexplicable confusion, as if knowing the truth about the motive behind the attack was somehow worse than ignorance or uncertainty. She had not wanted to believe the official version of Roche’s death because accepting it would mean admitting that she had badly misjudged Rafi’s character. Obviously, she had done exactly that.

“They’re going to ask what we were doing here,” she finally said. “They might even take the thumb drive with Roche’s book.”

She thought she saw him sag visibly in defeat, but in the darkness it was impossible to say. “I suppose you’re right.”

For some reason, postponing a conversation with the local constabulary elevated Jade’s mood by a few degrees. “I say we go somewhere safe, change clothes and get something to eat. I hear the haggis and titties at the Weston Tavern are simply to die for.”

Kellogg made a futile attempt to stifle his laughter.

“Then we’ll find a computer and plug this thing in,” Jade said, “and see if we can figure out what Roche discovered that’s worth killing over.”

ELEVEN

Professor drifted on the edge of consciousness, sometimes rising to the surface just long enough to wonder where he was and what had happened, before sliding back down into the darkness. He caught disjointed bits of conversation, but none of it made any sense. He was not sure that the words being spoken were in English, though he had a vague sense of comprehending what was being said even as it slipped out of his memory. Each time it happened, he knew that it would not last. Brief moments of lucidity were a common occurrence when under the influence of anesthesia. When he was able to keep his eyes open for more than a few seconds, he knew he was finally coming up for good. The drug, whatever it was, had worn off.

Sousa dosed me. Why the hell did he do that?

The obvious answer, namely that there was a conspiracy to hide the truth about Flight 815’s fate and that Sousa was part of it would have made perfect sense if not for the fact that, up until the moment he felt the needle prick his skin, Professor had been prepared to accept the ATSB investigator’s explanation for the disappearance of Flight 815.

“What the hell…?” He sat up, winced as a wave of nausea rolled over him, and then looked around for something to help orient himself. There was nothing familiar at all about his surroundings.

He was in a windowless cube that might have been either a low-rent no-tell motel room or a jail cell — odds favored the latter. His head cleared after a few seconds and he took a chance on standing up. He steadied himself with one hand outstretched to the wall, and when he was sure that his legs would hold him up, he began walking toward the door. He expected the door to be locked, but to his surprise, the doorknob turned and the door swung open without any resistance. He winced as bright sunlight flooded into the dim room, stinging his eyes for a moment. The world was a blur of green, which eventually resolved into a stand of evergreen trees.

Pine trees, but despite his comprehensive knowledge of minutia which included being able to recognize most plants on site, he couldn’t place the exact species. The air, which was cool and dry, offered no clue whatsoever as to where on earth he might be. He took a step through the door and turned a slow circle.

He was standing in front of a small plywood structure that reminded him of the backyard shed where his father had kept his tools. The structure appeared to have been built on the ground, without any sort of foundation. The cabin was not especially remarkable. What was remarkable however, was the fact that it was not the only one of its kind. In every direction, stretching all the way to the trees, lined up like soldiers in a formation, were dozens more just like it.

“Toto, I don’t think we’re in Oz anymore,” he muttered.

“Good morning, neighbor.”

Professor whirled in the direction of the voice, which brought on another attack of vertigo that sent him reeling. He leaned against the plywood wall of the cabin, closing his eyes to keep the world from spinning.

“Hey, take it easy.” It was the same voice, a woman’s, speaking English with a faint Australian accent, but closer than before.

He opened his eyes and saw her approaching from the cabin to his right. She was tall and slim, with an olive complexion and straight black hair pulled back in a pragmatic pony tail. But for her accent, Professor would have guessed that she was Hispanic. She wore dark blue trousers and a white shirt with black epaulets crossed by three gold lines.

“That stuff they give you packs a fair wallop,” the woman said as she reached him. She allowed her hand to rest lightly on his shoulder. “I chundered for an hour straight when I woke up.”

“Woke up?” He gave her another look. “They drugged you, too?”

Her eyebrow shot up. “You’re a yank?’

“That’s right.” He stared back at her for a moment. “Who are you? And where am I?”

She returned the searching look for several long seconds, as if trying to decide whether to trust him with those answers. “Where, as near as I can reckon, is forty degrees north, and somewhere between one-twenty and one-thirty degrees east. It’s a lot harder to judge longitude without instruments.”

Professor blinked at her, too surprised by the fact that the woman had answered him with navigational coordinates to even think about the location those coordinates represented. Things stared clicking together. The uniform…navigation by dead-reckoning… mention of instruments….

“You’re a pilot.” Another click. “You’re from Flight 815. First officer…” He searched his memory. “Carrera? Oh my God. You’re alive.”

Despite everything else that had happened, Professor felt emotion welling up into his throat. He looked past the woman and saw that a small knot of people had gathered to watch the exchange.

“What happened to you?” He straightened, pushing off the wall, ignoring the resulting head rush. “You said you were drugged. Did someone hijack your plane?”

Click.

“Forty north… A hundred and twenty…” His breath caught in his throat. He glanced up at the midday sun but without any other way to orient himself, it was impossible to immediately confirm what she had just said. “North Korea?”

“Take it down a peg, friend.” The woman threw a nervous glance in the direction of the growing crowd, “That lot doesn’t know the map as well as you. I haven’t told them where we are… or where I think we are, anyway.”

“But you are First Officer Carrera? And those are the passengers?”

Carrera nodded. “Some of them. There’s forty-seven of us here. I don’t know about the rest.”

“What happened? Were you forced to fly here?” Professor’s mind was whirring like a computer hard drive. There was no way the plane could have made it all the way to North Korea without someone picking it up on radar or catching a transponder ping. That was why the conspiracy needed a highly placed asset like Sousa, to hide or falsify any data that might reveal what had really happened. He wondered how many others were involved in the cover-up.

Carrera shook her head. “No. I was drugged. Just like you. Woke up here. I don’t know where the plane is.”

“And you’ve been here the whole time? Three weeks?”

She let out a heavy sigh. “Three bloody weeks. I take it everyone thinks we’re dead?”

Her despondent tone finally dampened Professor’s excitement over the discovery. Not only had he learned the fate of the aircraft, but it seemed he would share it. “Who’s behind all this?” he asked in a more subdued tone. “Is it the North Koreans?”

Carrera pursed her lips for a moment. “Don’t think I caught your name, friend.”

“Pete. But everyone calls me ‘Professor.’”

“Seriously?” She shook her head, then pointed to the cabin adjoining the one he had awakened in. “Let’s talk in there. These people are still my responsibility and I’d rather not start a panic.”

The exterior of Carrera’s cabin was almost identical to his own, but in the short time she had occupied it, the flight officer had managed to personalize her space with cardboard boxes serving as makeshift tables, and soft drink cans repurposed as flower vases and drinking cups.

“Sorry,” she said as she caught him checking out the décor. “Haven’t figured out how to make furniture yet. Robinson Crusoe I’m not.” She motioned to an open box beside the bed which contained several parcels wrapped in brown plastic that Professor immediately recognized as military rations — MREs — though not the same brand used by the United States military. “Hungry?”

He picked up one of the prepackaged meals just long enough to verify that the label was printed in English. “Maybe later. This is what they’re feeding you?”

“Whatever else they’ve got planned for us, they aren’t going to let us starve.” She folded her arms across her chest. “So what’s your story, Pete? Why are you here?”

“I could ask you the same thing.” He realized that a confrontational tone was not going to win him any points, so he quickly added. “I came down here…to Sydney, I mean… to help with the search.”

He had no difficulty at all recounting the conversation with Sousa. It seemed like it had happened only a few minutes before, but as he replayed it in his head, he struggled to find some precursor to Sousa’s attack. Even with the benefit of hindsight, he could see no hint of treachery.

Carrera stared back appraisingly. “That’s it? You must have said something to make him suspicious.”

Professor shook his head. “I don’t think so. He had me convinced it was just a mechanical failure.”

“Maybe he thought you would keep looking. Ask the wrong person the right question and blow the whole thing wide open.” She blinked. “You weren’t part of the original search, then? What made you decide to look into it?”

“We got some intel indicating that your plane’s disappearance might have been aimed at a specific passenger. It was shaky, but I had to follow up on it.”

Carrera was incredulous. “You’re saying someone took my aircraft and everyone on it, just to get one guy? Who?”

“A Brit named Parrott. Ian Parrott.”

“Name doesn’t ring any bells. He’s not part of the group here. What’s so special about him?”

“He’s the publisher for a guy named Gerald Roche.” Carrera’s blank look indicated that she had not heard of him either. “Honestly, I can’t say for certain that Parrott is the reason for all this, but the coincidences are piling up.” Professor paused a beat. “Your turn. What happened up there? And who’s behind it?”

“I don’t know. We were flying, no problems, and then Seth put a needle in my neck.”

“Seth? That would be Seth Norris, the pilot?”

“The captain,” she corrected. “Only…”

Professor waited several seconds for her to elaborate, and when she did not, he prompted. “Only what?”

“Well, it’s going to sound crazy but… He was different.”

“Like he was being coerced?”

“No, not at all. He was cool as ice. But he just didn’t seem like the Seth Norris I know.”

Professor turned this revelation over in his head but could not immediately see how it fit with everything else. “What happened then?”

“Woke up right here. Been here ever since.”

“No one told you why?”

“No one told us anything. Haven’t seen the buggers. One guy talks to us on the public address. We call him ‘Boss.’ Don’t recognize the voice, but he doesn’t sound Korean if you know what I mean.”

“Talks to you? What does he say?”

“Mostly just reminds us not to make trouble. This morning he told us all to go inside and stay put. That’s what happens when they bring in a food delivery, but we weren’t due. When I came out, I saw you.”

Professor mulled this over as well. “Is there a perimeter? A fence or wall around this place?”

“Don’t know. I haven’t gone looking. That would be the kind of trouble Boss told us not to make.” She squinted at him. “I hope you’re not thinking about making any trouble.”

“I’m not going to sit here and do nothing.”

“The safety of the people here is my responsibility. I won’t let you put them in danger.”

“They’re already in danger. They aren’t holding you as hostages. The world thinks you’re all dead, and they’re obviously content to leave it that way. If the North Koreans or some other government is behind this, then they’re damn sure not going to want anyone outside to know.”

Carrera’s nostrils flared angrily. “You’ll get us all killed.”

“I don’t think so. They want something from you all. That’s the only reason you’re still alive, but as soon as they get it, they won’t have any further use for you. Ergo, we need to make our move sooner rather than later.”

“Make our move? And go where? We can’t escape from North Korea.”

“Actually, we can. I’ve done it before.”

“You?” Carrera gaped at him. “You’re serious, aren’t you? What, you James Bond or something?”

“Something.” He turned for the door.

“Hey.” She grabbed his arm. “I’m serious. Why should I believe that you can do this? Who are you?”

Professor pursed his lips. Like most former operators, he did not like to parade his military service in front of others, but it wasn’t like he was trying to pick Carrera up at a bar. “I was in the SEALs,” he said. “US Naval Special Warfare Group. That’s really all I can tell you.”

“Let me guess,” she said, arching an eyebrow. “If you told me anything more, you’d have to kill me.”

“No,” he answered with a chuckle. “But it’s need to know, and all you need to know is that I can get us out.”

“You were really in the SEALs?”

He raised three fingers. “Scouts honor.”

Carrera pursed her lips. “There’s forty-seven of us. I don’t care how Rambo you are, there’s no way we’ll all make it out. But you might be able to make it out on your own. Let the world know we’re here. It’s the best chance any of us have.”

As reluctant as he was to accept half-measures, he could not argue with her logic. Even with his knowledge of escape and evasion tactics, the odds of such a large group successfully running the gauntlet of North Korean security forces were slim to none. If he escaped on his own, there was a very good chance that his mysterious captors would punish those he left behind, but what he had told Carrera was the absolute truth. They were all living on borrowed time.

“I won’t be able to do anything until nightfall. Let’s take a look around. You can give me the nickel tour.”

Her expression remained apprehensive but she nodded and gestured to the door. Even before he was outside, Professor started running through possible escape scenarios, compiling checklists of items he would need to acquire, like water, food, weapons, and things he would need to watch for like hostile observation posts, surveillance cameras, minefields, and most importantly, places where he might be able to take refuge. He took note of the layout of the camp, the spacing of the cabins and the distance to the tree line. The location of the sun….

He stopped abruptly and stared at the sky in disbelief. “Damn it,” he muttered.

“What’s the matter?” Carrera asked.

Her voice snapped him back to the moment. He raised his wrist in an almost reflexive action to check the time, though he already knew that he would find only bare skin where his Omega Seamaster chronograph ought to have been. “They took my watch.”

Carrera shrugged. “Mine, too.”

“What time is it?”

“I’m not really even sure what time zone we’re in, but my best guess is a little after noon.”

“Guess I’ll have to make do,” he said with a rueful smile. “I really liked that watch.”

His dismay was sincere but it had nothing to do with his missing timepiece. He was mad at himself, and not just for almost letting his poker face to slip. He was mad because he had made a rookie mistake by trusting someone he didn’t know.

He surreptitiously glanced up at the sky again, confirming what he already knew. It was indeed midday, but from the angle of the shadows and the subtle change in their position, he was able to orient himself, and while it would have taken him at least half an hour of careful observation to make a precise determination, it was patently obvious that the sun was in the northern sky. The location of the secret prison camp was more likely at forty degrees south latitude, rather than north.

Which meant that woman claiming to be Jeanne Carrera was lying about being a professional aviator, or intentionally deceiving him about their location. Either way, he had already told her far too much.

TWELVE

Gabrielle Greene swept into Shah’s office with all the subtlety of a thunderstorm. “Have you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“Two of your jihadists attacked Jade Ihara in Scotland.”

Shah sat bolt upright in alarm. “Gabrielle! It’s not safe to talk here.”

She waved a dismissive hand. “That’s the least of our problems right now.”

“What do you mean? Is Ihara….?” He left the question unfinished. Gabrielle might be unconcerned about electronic surveillance, but watching what he said to avoid self-incrimination had become a deeply ingrained habit for Shah, one he could not easily break.

“Oh, she’s fine. She sent them packing.”

“Oh. Well, then I don’t understand why you’re so upset.”

Gabrielle leaned over his desk. “She’s fine, Atash. They didn’t kill her. That’s the problem. It was a ham-fisted amateurish attempt, and they completely blew it.”

Shah stood up and took Gabrielle’s elbow. “Not here,” he repeated, steering her toward the door.

If there was still active surveillance, then she had probably said too much already, but Shah needed a moment to think, and his office, where he labored day in and day out to conduct a strictly legal defense of the Islamic faith and its adherents, was not a place where he felt comfortable talking about orchestrating a murder attempt. Thankfully, Gabrielle waited until they were out of the office and in the elevator to resume the conversation.

“Things are spinning out of control, Atash.”

Shah glanced nervously up at the security camera mounted in the corner, wondering if the FBI had tapped into it. “I don’t understand why you’re so upset,” he said through clenched teeth. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Put her on the list and let the faithful take care of the rest. Nothing to directly implicate us. That was the plan, wasn’t it?”

“The plan failed. Ihara found something in Scotland. And now she knows that we’re coming after her. We can’t afford any more screw-ups.”

“What did she find? Roche’s book?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter? She needs to be silenced.”

Shah felt overwhelmed by the intensity of Gabrielle’s demand, but he could not disagree with the last point. Thankfully, the elevator doors opened on the lobby, giving him another brief respite in which to process the rush of information. Gabrielle had been absolutely right about one thing: the situation was spiraling into chaos.

She had come to him only the night before with a reliable tip that Jade Ihara, the archaeologist Gerald Roche had visited just before his death, was in the United Kingdom, trying to pick up the pieces of Roche’s investigation. The last report was that she was on her way to Scotland so, at Gabrielle’s urging, he had put the word out on the CDL website. He had also circulated more explicit information anonymously on a number of Internet bulletin boards frequented by disenfranchised Muslims living abroad, mostly young men, who fulminated endlessly over the persecution of the faithful by Zionist puppets and were desperate to strike a blow in the ongoing Holy War.

Evidently, someone had heeded his call, but subsequently failed to deliver, and now Jade Ihara was one step closer to making a discovery that would shatter everything Shah and billions of faithful Muslims across the ages had fought to build.

Gabrielle was right about that, too. Jade Ihara had to be stopped.

He strode purposefully through the lobby, with Gabrielle matching him step for step, and emerged onto a chilly but nevertheless bustling Manhattan sidewalk. Out here, despite being surrounded by hundreds of people, they could speak with greater freedom.

“Where is Ihara now?”

“Still in Scotland,” Gabrielle said, her earlier zeal only somewhat diminished. Shah did not need to ask how she came by her information. In the twenty-first century, tracking someone in real-time was the easiest thing in the world.

Shah glanced at his watch. “It’s late evening there, but if we hurry, we should be able to arrange something.”

Gabrielle grabbed his elbow. “You need to take charge of this personally, Atash.”

“What do you think I’ve been doing?”

“Personally,” she repeated. “We can’t entrust this to a bunch of hopped-up students who will turn and run at the first sign of trouble.”

He blinked at her. “You mean… Me?”

“I’m not saying you need to pull the trigger. In fact, we don’t have to kill anyone.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We take Ihara alive. At least until we know what proof she has. Then we can let someone else…” She paused as if searching for an appropriately benign euphemism. “Finish. But you need to take charge in person to ensure that there are no more screw-ups.”

Her grip on his arm tightened. “This is important, Atash. They’re looking for a leader. A real leader, not just some religious demagogue who will tell them to go blow themselves up. Someone who sees their real potential. Show them that you can be that leader.”

“You want me to drop everything here and fly to Scotland?” It seemed like an impossible request, but Shah knew he would not be able to refuse.

“It has to be done, Atash.”

He stared at her, marveling at the power she had over him. “Will you come with me?”

She smiled and the last of his resistance evaporated. “Of course. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

THIRTEEN

Despite her playful suggestion that they sample some traditional Scottish fare, Jade had no intention of remaining in Kilmaurs. Their attackers were still at large, and aside from Kellogg’s assertion that the men were Arabs, they had no idea who the men were or what they looked like. Even the assumption that they were Middle Eastern was a guess. Arabic was the language of the Quran, but that did not mean all Muslims were Arabs. Over the centuries, Islam had spread far and wide, from Eastern Europe to Africa to Indonesia, and their descendants had brought their faith to enclaves in nearly every corner of the globe. It was not inconceivable that the two men might be locals. The safest course was to keep moving.

Jade called the car rental agency to arrange the recovery of her rental, then she and Kellogg struck out for London in his car. While he drove, she plugged the flash drive into his laptop and began scrolling through the directory. Her eye was immediately drawn to the label on one of the file icons.

“‘The Three Hundred Year Lie.’”

“That’s it,” Kellogg said. “That’s the name of Mr. Roche’s book.”

Jade clicked on the icon and opened a list of document files, several of which were marked with chapter numbers. She clicked on the first and began reading silently.

Her initial impression, after reading the first few chapters, was that Roche had somehow contrived a way to stretch the essence of their conversation at the Paracas museum into a forty thousand word screed. He relied on cherry-picked and often irrelevant data, logical fallacies, ad hominem attacks against the men allegedly responsible for the deception, and constant repetition of his core premise. There was nothing particularly persuasive in his argument, and if not for the fact that someone had killed Roche, evidently to keep the information from being released, she would have dismissed it as foolishness.

She turned to Kellogg. “You know what this book’s about, right?”

“I read a synopsis. It all sounded a bit daft to me.”

“Yeah, I was thinking that, too. So what about this has Muslims so upset?”

“You really don’t know?” Kellogg gave her a sidelong glance then returned his focus to the road ahead. “If the Phantom Time hypothesis is correct, then everything the history books say happened between 700 and 1000 AD is a complete fraud. That would include the life of the Prophet Muhammad and the accepted history of the rise of Islam. If Roche is right, then none of it really happened.”

“So what? I mean, he probably isn’t right, but what difference does it make? A lot of people don’t think Jesus was real. Or Moses. That doesn’t seem to bother the people who do believe.”

He shrugged. “You and I both know that, but Muslims take perceived insults to their faith very seriously. Do you recall what happened with The Satanic Verses?”

“Vaguely. I was a kid.”

“In 1988, Salman Rushdie released a novel which included a fictional account of the revelation to the Prophet Muhammad, and Muslims everywhere were outraged. The Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, calling for Rushdie to be killed. Rushdie spent ten years in hiding, and several of his translators were attacked. Some of them were killed. That same year, Martin Scorsese released his movie The Last Temptation of Christ, which included a fictional account of the crucifixion. There was controversy, and outraged Christians picketed theaters showing the film, but that was it. No one died.”

“That was almost thirty years ago,” Jade said.

Kellogg arched an eyebrow. “You think the Islamic world is more tolerant now than they were then?”

“Okay, point taken. But this Phantom Time stuff is…” She smiled as she recalled Professor’s opinion on the topic. “Thin soup. Getting all spun up about it…killing Roche for God’s sake, just legitimizes it.”

“I never said it would make sense. But you did ask.” Kellogg paused a beat. “Anti-Muslim sentiment is also on the rise, thanks to 9/11 and 7/7. There are politicians in your country and mine who wouldn’t hesitate to seize on the possibility that Islam is all a sham, just to score political points.”

Jade pondered this for a moment. Was it possible that Rafi and the two men who had attacked them at the fogou had seen Roche and his book as an existential threat to their way of life? “He’s wrong though, isn’t he? Roche, I mean.”

Kellogg shrugged. “I haven’t read the book yet, but it probably doesn’t matter. People believe what they want to believe. Mr. Roche was always preaching to the converted. This won’t change anything.”

“You just sell books, right?” Jade shook her head. “You shouldn’t publish this.”

Kellogg’s head snapped toward her. “Why on earth not?”

“It’s irresponsible. You would be pouring gasoline on a fire that’s already out of control.”

“People have a right to make an informed decision.”

“Informed decision?” Jade replied. “Seriously? This is a crank theory, and you know it. And people are getting killed because of it.”

“That’s exactly why it must be published. Once it’s out in the open, they’ll have no reason to come after you.”

The argument took the wind out of Jade’s sails. Kellogg was right about that. “Damn Roche,” she muttered. “If he wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him myself.”

Kellogg chuckled mirthlessly. “So it’s settled then. I’ll take the file and set the book up. You can wash your hands of it.”

“I hope it’s as easy as that,” Jade replied. She glanced down at the computer screen again. “Why did he come to me? That’s the part that doesn’t make any sense.”

“I should say many of the things Mr. Roche did made little sense.”

“He thought I could prove something for him,” Jade said, more to herself than Kellogg. She reread the words on the screen, the last few lines of the fourth chapter of Roche’s book.

Jade sat up a little straighter. “Archimedes Vault?”

She scrolled back up to see if she had missed something, but there were no previous mentions of Archimedes or any other vaults. The reference was a complete non sequitur. She clicked on the next file, curious to see where Roche would go with it.

The next chapter began with an exhaustive biography of the legendary mathematician and inventor, Archimedes of Syracuse. Some of the information was familiar to Jade, but much of it seemed sensationalized, like the claim that Archimedes had created a solar-powered death ray and an elaborate crane device to destroy the ships of Roman invaders in Syracuse harbor. Jade found herself wishing that Professor was around to fact-check the information, or at the very least, give her an abbreviated version.

“Do you know about this Archimedes Vault?”

Kellogg gave her another sidelong glance. “No. I don’t recall that from the synopsis. Do tell.”

“Here’s what it says. ‘Although some of his inventions were weaponized for use in the defense of his home, Archimedes held back many of his discoveries, fearing that the men of his time were not sufficiently evolved to use such technology wisely. Like the Robert Oppenheimer of his day, Archimedes recognized that, once this knowledge was revealed, there would be no going back. To preserve these discoveries for future generations, Archimedes constructed a secret impenetrable vault, secured with a lock that would only open once every thousand years.’”

“Is that true?” Kellogg asked.

Jade shook her head. “It’s not really my field, but I’ve never heard of anything like that. You would think if something like that really existed, we’d have heard about it.”

“A lock that can’t be opened for a thousand years? Is that even possible? I’m sure it would be easy enough to accomplish today, but two thousand years ago?”

Jade shrugged. “The way Roche tells it, if anyone could pull it off, Archimedes would be that guy.”

She kept reading, curious to see if there was any evidence to support the statement. According to Roche, the plans for a fantastic timelock mechanism had been found on a palimpsest — a parchment skin which had been erased and written over by medieval scholars. Jade knew this was a common practice. Parchment was expensive and rare, and recycling it was a common practice. While it was possible, in some cases, to restore the original document, historians were faced with the dilemma of choosing which document to preserve. Advances in imagery techniques and electron microscopy however, had made it possible to produce digital versions of documents long thought unrecoverable. Several treatises by Archimedes had been recovered in this fashion, including, or so Roche posited, the ingenious plans for the vault and timelock, which had been leaked — briefly — to the Internet. Unfortunately, or so Roche claimed, that particular palimpsest was not regarded as authentic, and all digital copies of it had subsequently disappeared — if they had in fact existed at all. According to the conspiracy theorist, this was evidence of a Changeling plot to suppress the discovery. Even the original erasure played into this narrative.

Jade stopped reading. “I think I know why Roche came to me,” she said. “He wanted me to find the Archimedes Vault.”

Kellogg looked at her again, longer than was perhaps safe given the road conditions. “You think it really exists?”

“Roche certainly did.”

There was a long pause before Kellogg finally said, “You’re going to do it, aren’t you?”

Jade smiled in spite of herself. “Professor was right. I am predictable. Speaking of which…” She dug out her phone and started composing a text message. “I should probably let him know where I’m headed.” She hit the “send” button.

“Where exactly is that?”

“Syracuse. That’s in Italy, I think. It’s the logical place to start looking.”

“Sicily,” Kellogg murmured.

“Yeah?” The phone buzzed in her hand, signaling Professor’s reply to her text. That was quick, she thought.

“Huh. That’s weird. I thought he’d freak out.” The brevity of his reply was surprising, but there was probably a good reason for it. Maybe he was driving. She wanted to inquire about the results of his investigation, but decided to let that wait until they were face-to-face again. The fact that he was wrapping up meant that he had either found something conclusive, or more likely, nothing at all.

“You do realize,” Kellogg said, “if the vault is real, it would be pretty compelling proof that Mr. Roche was right. About Phantom Time and everything else.”

She looked up from her phone. “Your point?”

“You were the one who thought we should just let it go. Remember? Don’t pour petrol on the fire?”

“The existence of the Archimedes Vault — if it exists — wouldn’t prove Phantom Time any more than the existence of the pyramids or the Nazca lines proves that UFOs are real.”

“And if there is some kind of thousand year timelock?”

“Look, the whole thing is probably a wild goose chase, but I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t at least look for it.”

Kellogg pondered this for a moment. “Mind if I come along?”

“Really? I figured you would be busy trying to get Roche’s book out.”

Kellogg smiled. “Unless I’m very much mistaken, the book’s not finished. There’s still one more chapter left to write.”

FOURTEEN

“‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep.’” Professor muttered.

“What’s that?”

Professor turned away from the edge of the all but impenetrable tree line and offered Carrera a smile. “You haven’t gone past this point?”

“No. Boss made it very clear that there would be consequences if anyone did that.”

There was no obvious sign of a security presence, which only confirmed Professor’s earlier suspicion. If this had been a North Korean prison camp, the perimeter would have been well defined, with guard towers, dogs, guns, land mines… The DPRK did not believe in subtlety. This was something else.

While he and Carrera — or rather the woman claiming to be the First Officer of Flight 815—roamed the camp and strolled along the tree line, Professor surreptitiously worked out a rough estimate of the latitude — forty-five degrees, south. Most of the earth’s landmass was in the Northern Hemisphere. The Southern Hemisphere was mostly ocean, and below forty-five degrees, there was a dearth of real estate. There were really only two places they could be: South America — Chile or Argentina — or New Zealand. The latter made the most sense. If the stubble on his chin was any indication, he had only been unconscious for a few hours, certainly not long enough to make the trans-oceanic flight to South America. What made absolutely no sense at all was why Carrera had lied about their location.

She’s testing me, he decided. But is she working with the people who abducted me, or does she suspect I’m one of them?

“Can you arrange some kind of diversion back at the camp?”

Carrera stared back at him. “I can’t put the passengers in any danger.”

“Just make some noise. Bang some stuff around. All I need is a few minutes to get from my cabin to the trees.”

Carrera’s expression remained uncertain. An act? If so, she was an Academy Award caliber actor. He just hoped his own performance was as convincing.

“Let’s get back,” he said, not waiting for a reply. “I should eat something and grab some shut-eye. I’ll make my move two hours after sunset.”

“Not midnight?”

“Everyone goes at midnight. It’s cliché.” He said nothing more on the subject as they made their way back to the cabins. He asked a few more perfunctory questions, paying more attention to how she answered than to what she actually said. The woman had no tells that he could discern, which he decided almost certainly meant that she was willingly working with his captors.

Her story about the takeover of the airplane was probably the truth, only she had probably been the one drugging Norris, instead of the other way around. That part was easy enough to figure out, but it brought him no closer to solving the real mystery.

Why?

Why take an aircraft full of people just to eliminate one man? Why go to the trouble of constructing this elaborate ruse — Carrera, the bogus North Korean prison camp, the other survivors, if in fact that was what they were? And why had they brought him here?

The scenario reminded him a little of a British television series from the 1960s, about a secret agent who had been abducted and taken to a bizarre village where no one was what they seemed. The villain of the story, the mysterious “Number Two,” played by a different actor in every episode, never revealed exactly what it was he wanted from the hero, just “information.” The program had been heavy with symbolism — a metaphorical struggle of the individual against society’s demand for conformity and homogeneity — and psychedelic to the point of self-parody, but the tactics employed by the nameless antagonist were right out of the Cold War spy handbook. Gaslighting 101. Professor had a sneaking suspicion his captors had either read that book or watched the show. Probably both.

On the return trip, Carrera took him to one of several cabins that served as supply depot and restroom facilities. He collected a box of MREs and a flat of bottled water, and carried them back to his own cabin, where he bade Carrera good-bye. He picked a meal at random and ate, though he barely tasted the unappetizing fare, and then settled onto the mattress for a nap. He had not been lying to Carrera about his intention to eat and sleep before making his escape attempt, but he had misled her about the timing of his attempt. He would not be waiting until two hours after sundown.

Forty-five minutes later, and — judging by its position in the sky — a good hour before nightfall, Professor rose and left his cabin. He walked at a languid pace, casual but purposeful, strolling through the camp in the direction of the restroom cabin. As he went, he nodded to the handful of people he saw, all of them ostensibly passengers from Flight 815. Some waved back, others regarded him uncertainly, but no one spoke to him or made any move to stop him. When he got within sight of his destination however, he shifted course, moving away at the same pace, toward the tree line.

He thought he saw, out of the corner of his eye, some of the passengers taking note, perhaps even following him, but he did not look back. He kept his eyes forward, his pace quickening ever so slightly, as if he had somewhere important to be. When he got within fifty yards of the woods, he broke into a run.

At the edge of the woods, he risked a quick glance over his shoulder. No one was giving chase, which was not necessarily a good sign. He wondered if he had misjudged the allegiances of the people purporting to be his fellow prisoners. His strategy was predicated on the belief that some or all of them were actually working with his captors, and that security beyond the camp would be minimal. If he was wrong….

I’m not wrong, he told himself, returning his focus to what lay ahead. Not completely, anyway.

He scanned the woods in front of him, looking for tripwires or areas of disturbed ground that might hide pitfalls or even mines, checked the branches of trees for surveillance cameras. The most important thing was to establish short-range waypoints in order to stay oriented. Beneath the forest canopy, with so many trees clustered together forcing him to weave back and forth, and no direct view of the sun, he could easily wind up running in circles. Keeping a true course while maintaining a running pace required intense concentration. He did not dare look back again.

He counted his steps, and was able to estimate both the distance he had traveled and the time that had elapsed since fleeing the camp. Five minutes out — give or take a minute — he figured he had gone about a quarter of a mile, with no sign of human activity and no indication that the woods would ever end.

A quarter of a mile. Probably a lot less given the zig-zagging course he was obliged to take.

Miles to go before I sleep.

He strained to catch some noise of pursuit — shouts, alarms, the barking of bloodhounds — but the only sounds he heard were the crunch of his footsteps on the litter of conifer needles and dry seed cones covering the ground and the occasional snap of a low hanging branch breaking against his shoulder.

Two or three minutes more passed by and then, without warning, the woods ahead grew brighter. Professor froze in mid-stride and remained that way while his heart hammered out a hundred beats. The light seemed to be natural, probably the result of a clearing that was allowing more sunlight to penetrate the canopy overhead, but it might also signal the end of the wooded area or worse, a secured perimeter. He crept forward, staying behind tree boughs until his field of view cleared.

It was a clearing, of sorts, but not a naturally occurring one. A swath of bare dirt, at least two hundred feet wide, cut through the midst of the forest. The ground was uniformly flat, obviously packed down and graded with road building equipment, but Professor saw immediately that it wasn’t a road.

It was a runway.

A Boeing 777 sat idle more than a hundred yards away. Radar-scattering camouflage nets hung on poles all around the aircraft formed a shroud that would effectively hide the plane from satellites and search aircraft. The markings and registration number on the tail confirmed what was already plainly obvious. He had found Flight 815.

He studied the aircraft for a full minute but saw no sign of activity, no guards posted, no workmen disassembling or modifying the evidently derelict plane. He fleetingly contemplated trying to fly the aircraft out — how hard could it be after all? — but shelved the idea. Even if he was able to figure out the controls, getting the plane moving would take time, time which he doubted his captors would allow.

Still, there were other ways the aircraft could be useful to what he had planned.

He moved laterally down the length of the runway, keeping to the woods and pausing often to check for signs of pursuit. The fact that there had been none was disconcerting. He felt conspicuously like a mouse being toyed with by a stealthy cat who felt secure enough in its ability to pounce long before the prey escaped.

Tom and Jerry, the dueling cartoon characters, ran through his head, and the thought brought a smile to his face. Jerry always outsmarted Tom.

He stopped a stone’s throw from the plane. The front hatch, where passengers normally boarded and debarked, was open and a makeshift staircase had been erected to facilitate access from the ground. The doorway was dark, the window blinds open to reveal no lights inside. It was almost certainly a trap, but Professor knew something that his captors did not. He was not trying to escape.

He stepped from the trees and crossed to the steps, ascended and cautiously entered the plane. Although some light was getting in through the portholes, it did little to illuminate the interior. The atmosphere was surreal, like being inside the corpse of some immense cyclopean beast. Professor turned toward the front of the plane and found the door to the cockpit. It was open, revealing empty seats and a dark instrument panel.

He sat down in the left hand seat and stared out the front windshield. The nose of the plane was facing west, giving him a view of the darkening sky. There were more trees at the end of the runway, another hundred yards or so distant, but beyond that, only sky.

He folded his hands in his lap and waited. He did not think he would have to wait very long.

FIFTEEN

On the map, the island of Sicily looked like an enormous triangular rock poised on the end of the toe of the boot that was Italy, but Sicily was no footnote. The largest island in the Mediterranean, sloping away from the flanks of the majestic 11,000-foot high Mount Etna, the largest volcano in Europe and one of the most active volcanoes in the world, had been inhabited by humans for more than 12,000 years. Greek culture had taken hold in 750 BCE, and for 500 years thereafter, the island had been part of Magna Graecia—Greater Greece — until, in the time of Archimedes, it had been claimed by Rome. Its fertile soil had fed the Roman legions, fueling the rise of the Roman Empire and conquest of the entire region. In more recent times, the campaign to capture Sicily, spearheaded by the flamboyant American general George Patton, had been pivotal to breaking the Axis powers in World War II.

Though her specialty was pre-Columbian America, Jade was not unfamiliar with the Classical period, and like any archaeologist worth her salt, could not help but be awed by standing in the presence of so much history. She only wished Professor could have been there to share the experience, but his last text message had indicated he was still in Australia and that it might be another day or two before he could get a flight out. Jade did not dare to hope that she would find the Archimedes Vault in that short a time, but she was not about to postpone the search to wait for him.

Shortly after returning to London, Jade and Kellogg had caught an early train to Paris, and then transferred to a Eurostar train bound for Rom, followed by a third train ride and a trip on a ferry. The total journey lasted about thirty-six hours, including short layovers at the transfer points, putting them in Syracuse, Sicily shortly before midnight of the second day since the escape from the Kilmaurs fogou. Flying would have reduced the actual travel time, but trains offered a sort of anonymity that, given the ongoing threat from Islamic extremists — or whomever it was targeting her — seemed the most prudent method of getting to their destination.

The late arrival necessitated finding lodgings for the night. Citing security concerns, Jade insisted on a five star hotel. It would have been too easy for an assassin to slip into a hostel or budget hotel and dispatch her in the dead of night — but after days on the road and weeks of camp life in Peru, a long soak in a hot tub and eight hours—okay, maybe more like nine and half—sleeping on 400 thread count sateen weave Egyptian cotton sheets were just what the doctor ordered. Kellogg grumbled at the rate, but Jade suggested he write it off as business expense. She awoke feeling refreshed and ready to dive into the search. It didn’t hurt one bit that Sicily was warm and sunny, and not nearly as humid as her native Oahu.

From his research notes, it was clear that Roche believed the vault would be found somewhere on the island of Sicily, but he had little evidence to back this supposition up. Ever the conspiracy theorist, he claimed that there had been a systematic effort, either by the Changelings, or by the acolytes of the Society of Syracuse — or perhaps both, though for very different reasons — to erase any mention of the vault’s location from the historical record. Jade would be starting her search from square one, but she was counting on her lack of preconceived notions to give her a fresh perspective. Maybe Roche, in looking too hard for what he expected to find, had overlooked some important clue.

She began looking, as she almost always did, at a museum — specifically the Paolo Orsi Regional Archaeological Museum. Given the rich history of Sicily, and specifically Syracuse, it was not surprising that the city hosted one of the premiere archaeological institutions in Europe. The museum complex — situated on the edge of the historic Villa Londolina, where ongoing excavations continued to provide new insights into the Greek and Roman period — was unusual and a bit anachronistic. A top down view revealed a geometric design of conjoined hexagonal cells, a decidedly modern design for a repository of history. Archimedes would probably have approved, but despite his status as Syracuse’s favorite son, there was very little information about him in the Orsi. After two hours of touring the facility, Jade headed to the next museum on the list, which in hindsight, should have been at the top: the Arkimedeion.

The reason the Arkimedeion had not been her first stop was that it was not a history museum, but rather a science museum, showcasing the mathematical discoveries and inventions of Archimedes. According to a tourist guide website, the Arkimedeion had only been open a few years and the reviews described an ambitious tourist attraction that fell short of its promise. Jade’s hopes were not high as she and Kellogg made the trip by taxi to Ortigia, the small island district where the Arkimedeion was located. The museum occupied an elegant stone building on the edge of a cobblestone piazza, at the center of which was a marvelous fountain with a sculpted mermaid — possibly meant to represent the Roman goddess Diana — and a child riding on the back of a large fish. The setting would have been more impressive if not for the fact that stone buildings were ubiquitous in the Old World, and you couldn’t throw a Frisbee in Italy without it splashing down in a fountain. With appropriately low expectations, Jade headed toward the front entrance while Kellogg paid their taxi driver.

A smiling middle-aged man at the ticket counter greeted her in Italian. He was handsome enough, but like elegant buildings and fountains, that was nothing remarkable. Jade peered at his named badge and then addressed him in English. “Sorry, Paolo. I don’t speak Italian.”

“Ah, scusi. Fortunately, I speak your language well enough. And you are also fortunate that the museo is having free entry to beautiful ladies today.”

“How lucky for me.”

“Si.” He extended a hand like a game show host. Jade noticed a glint of gold on his pinky finger, a signet ring with an emblem she couldn’t quite make out. “And we are very slow today, so it will my pleasure to give you a tour.”

The door opened and Kellogg strolled in. Jade turned to him. “Good news, honey. Free admission today. And a guided tour.”

Paolo’s smile fell but he nodded gamely and gestured to the entrance. “Please, this way.”

Atash Shah watched Jade and Kellogg make their way into the museum from the shelter of a black Volkswagen van, parked on the far side of the fountain. Despite the dark tinted window, which ably concealed the six men in the passenger seats behind him from outside scrutiny, Shah felt exposed. Conspicuous. But if their quarry had noticed the vehicle tailing them through the city, they gave no outward sign.

“We can take them here,” Gabrielle said.

“In broad daylight?” Shah shook his head. “It’s too public.”

“Look around. There’s no one in there. We won’t get a better chance.” Her eyes flitted ever so slightly, looking over her shoulder at the men seated behind them, the implicit message: Send them in.

He understood why she wanted him to give the order. The men behind them, young Muslim immigrants who had answered Shah’s call to arms, needed to hear it from him, their leader, not from a woman and an infidel at that.

He had issued his summons in one of the Internet chatrooms where would-be jihadists flirted endlessly with the prospect of joining al Quaeda or ISIL. Most were poseurs, unwilling to make good on their boasts. Some were probably undercover policeman — FBI or Interpol — though they were pretty easy to unmask. But there were always a few who were willing, eager even, to embrace martyrdom. The trick was in separating the wheat from the chaff.

These six had come from Paris, carrying their own illegally obtained weapons, ready to do whatever he asked of them.

And Shah had to be the one to ask it of them.

He drove the van around the fountain and pulled up in front of the entrance, close enough that no one looking out from the surrounding buildings would see them bring their hostages out the front. Then, he turned to face his holy warriors. “Cover all the exits so they can’t slip away. And remember. We need them alive.”

Shah wondered if they heard the fear in his voice. Would they see through him? See how weak he was? Did they know that the real reason he wanted them to take hostages was that he was afraid to give the order to kill?

If they doubted him, they did not show. One by one, they filed out of the van and headed toward the entrance to the Arkimedeion.

Gabrielle’s hand close over his in a reassuring squeeze, and Shah felt some of the fear slip away.

“How about this one,” Jade said, gesturing to an exhibit that, if the poster was to be believed, was a reconstruction of Archimedes’ “heat ray.” One of his more famous — and probably apocryphal — inventions, the heat ray was an array of parabolic mirrors that the inventor had supposedly used to set enemy ships on fire in Syracuse harbor.

“So sorry,” Paolo said. “Is not working right now.”

“What a surprise,” Jade muttered, sharing a knowing glance with Kellogg. It was not the first time their guide had said those words.

The heat ray simulations, like several other displays and dioramas in the supposedly interactive museum, was currently closed for repairs. Jade now understood the reason for the negative reviews on the travel guide website. It wasn’t that the museum was run down. In fact, the space was bright and welcoming, with vibrant colors utterly unlike the subdued earth tones of the Archaeology Museum. It wasn’t really even that so many exhibits were out-of-order. Rather, the most disappointing thing about the Arkimedeion was how it failed to live up to its potential. An entire museum dedicated to one of the greatest minds in scientific history, and nothing worked. It was hard to believe in the legend of Archimedes when the reproductions of his most famous inventions were non-functional.

“No matter,” Paolo said, waving a dismissive hand at the broken exhibit. “You will like the stomachion.”

“With a name like that, I’m sure I’ll love it.”

Paolo led them up the stairs to another bright room with more vivid primary colors, and not much else. He gestured to the table in the center, which displayed a rectangular mosaic composed of differently colored triangles.

“That’s the… um…stomachatron?”

“Stomachion,” Paolo repeated. He went to the table and began picking up the individual triangles and rearranging them. “Is an ancient Greek game. You create different shapes. Animals. Houses. Anything the mind imagines.”

Jade now saw that the almost psychedelic wallpaper in the room was actually made up of hundreds of different variations on the arrangement of the geometric tiles. “It’s like a tangram puzzle.”

“Si, si. Archimedes, he uses it to test complex mathematical ideas. He wrote book, all about how he uses stomachion, but…” He shrugged. “We have only part. The rest is lost.”

“Speaking of lost books, can you tell us anything about the Vault of Archimedes?”

Jade thought she saw surprise flicker across the museum guide’s face. “Vault?”

“With a timelock that only opens once every thousand years.”

Paolo’s smile returned. “Ah, a new story. I have never heard this one before.”

“I think we can take that as a ‘no,’ then,” Kellogg said.

Paolo opened his mouth to reply, but then looked away suddenly. “Ah, more guests. Please, enjoy the stomachion. Perhaps, you can tell me more about this Vault before you go.”

“Actually,” Jade said, “I think we’ve seen enough.”

She followed Paolo out onto the balcony overlooking the guest lobby, but stopped short when she caught a glimpse of the two men who were just starting up the stairs. Her instincts screamed an alarm.

It was not merely that the two men with dark complexions and full beards seemed to fit perfectly the stereotype of what she imagined their attackers in Scotland must have looked like under their ski mask. Looks could certainly be deceiving. Rather, it was the none-too subtle aura of menace that radiated from them. They both looked ready to explode into violence.

Paolo called out to them in his typically friendly manner but before he could finish his greeting, they reached him and brushed past him like he wasn’t even there.

Jade shrank back into the stomachion room. “Company’s here. We need to find a back door.”

Kellogg stared back, dumbfounded, so Jade grabbed his arm and dragged him toward the exit. His reflex to resist slowed her down just enough to allow the two bearded men to reach the landing at almost the same instant she and Kellogg stepped out. The reaction was instantaneous. The gazes of the two men fixed on Jade like a missile-lock.

“Run!” she shouted, and then without waiting to see if Kellogg would follow suit, she spun on her heel and sprinted away, heading deeper into the exhibits. After a few seconds of searching on the run, she spied a red exit sign on the ceiling. Unlike several of the other signs she had passed, this one did not point to the stairs behind them, but to a destination somewhere further inside the museum. Fire stairs, or perhaps an exterior fire escape in the rear of the building. Jade swerved toward the sign and then glanced over her shoulder to see how close the pursuit was.

Too close.

Although Jade was a good ten yards ahead of the closest assailant, Kellogg’s earlier hesitation had put him within their reach. In the instant she looked back, Jade saw the lead pursuer reaching out to snag hold of Kellogg’s collar.

Without stopping, Jade snatched up a gold-colored sphere — about the size and weight of a bowling ball — and spun it around, heaving it like an over-sized Olympic shot put. As she released it, she shouted, “Duck!”

The warning was not only unnecessary but overly optimistic. The sphere arced through the air with agonizing slowness, and then, as gravity overcame what little inertia Jade had been able to give it, dropped suddenly, almost straight down, to strike the ground a few feet to Kellogg’s left with a resounding thump. After releasing the sphere, Jade’s own momentum carried her completely around, and for a moment, it was all she could do to stay on her feet and not go careening into the rest of the geometric display.

Nevertheless, the attempt was not entirely futile. The two men hesitated, prepared to take evasive action if needed, giving Kellogg a few precious seconds’ lead. Jade got back on an even keel, and with Kellogg now beside her, sprinted in the direction indicated by the exit sign. They rounded a corner and Jade saw, about fifty feet away, a metal door marked with the words “Fire Exit” in both English and Italian.

Jade’s flickering glimmer of hope was extinguished as the door suddenly swung open to reveal two more bearded men.

Great, Jade thought. Reinforcements.

The surprise of the two men at discovering the fleeing figures charging headlong toward them barely gave Jade enough time to avoid a collision. She veered to the right, and then using the wall like a swimmer making the turn at the end of a lap, rebounded back the way they had come, snaring Kellogg’s arm in the process and whipping him around.

The abrupt reversal caught the two pursuing men completely off guard. One of them made a half-hearted attempt to tackle Jade as she shot by, but Jade just lowered her head and plowed through like a football player charging the scrimmage line. She made glancing contact and felt a sharp pain in her scalp as the man’s hands snagged a few strands of her hair, and then she was past them both, running at full speed back toward the distant landing. Kellogg likewise made it past the two men, slipping between them with unexpected gracefulness.

Jade’s dismay at realizing that the odds against them had doubled since the confrontation in Scotland was at least partially offset by the fact that, unlike the cramped tunnels in the fogou, their assailants were behind them and there was plenty of room to maneuver. But as she reached the landing, the balance tilted against her once more. Two more men stood in the reception lobby, temporarily waylaid by an extremely agitated Paolo. One of them looked up, spotted her, and cried out in alarm.

Jade looked around frantically for some other avenue of escape. Kellogg skidded to a stop beside her, likewise searching for an alternate exit but there was nowhere else to go. Then Jade spotted the golden sphere she had thrown earlier, rolling aimlessly toward them.

“I hope second time’s the charm,” she muttered as she reached down and gave it a shove toward the stairwell. The orb cracked loudly on the first step, bounced slightly, cracked again on the next tread, picking up speed and energy as it descended one step at a time. “Go!”

The rolling orb did not appear especially menacing but the two men coming up the stairs balked like it was the rolling boulder from an Indiana Jones movie. Paolo still shouting angrily at the intrusion as he gave chase, broke into a smile at the strange sight. He raised his fist in the air and shook it. “Si! Archimedes would be proud.”

The cascading sphere was just enough of a distraction to allow Jade and Kellogg to close with the men on the stairs at the midpoint. Jade worked all the angles and didn’t care for her chances of bulldozing past the two, so instead, she planted a hand on the rail and vaulted over the side of the stairs. It was an impulsive decision, and as she arced up and over the bannister, and realized just how much space there was between her and the first floor, she instantly regretted it, but there was no turning back. The floor rushed up at her, and then before she was completely ready, she landed.

The impact sent jolts of pain up her legs, but she managed to stay loose, letting her bent knees absorb some of the shock. A vague memory of someone — probably Maddock — explaining parachute jumping techniques prompted her to lean sideways and curl into a ball. It must have been the right thing to do because the landing was not nearly as bad as she thought it would be, and a moment later, she was back on her feet and staring up at the astounded men on the stairs, which included Kellogg.

“You staying?”

Her shout snapped Kellogg out of his amazed stupor and he plowed forward, slamming into his closest assailant and sending him tumbling backward in a flail of arms and legs. Jade whirled around looking for the exit. Between her and it stood Paolo and an array of strange-looking devices — scale models of Archimedes’ siege engines and other inventions.

The sharp report of a pistol startled Jade. She ducked reflexively behind one of the contraptions and looked up, trying to see which of the men had taken the shot. It was impossible to tell since all of them, except for the one Kellogg had knocked down, were now on the stairs and brandishing guns.

It might have been just a warning shot, but it was a message Jade couldn’t ignore. She could outrun the men, but reaching the exit would require her to outrun bullets. A lot of them. Kellogg was even closer to the shooters. If they unleashed a fusillade, he would be cut down instantly.

A memory of what had happened in the fogou returned to her. When retreat had not worked, she had gone on the offensive. Attacked and won.

But those men hadn’t been carrying guns.

A nearby replica — a full-scale model of a scorpion ballista, a giant crossbow artillery piece on wooden wheels, which the ancient Greeks and Romans had used to hurl three foot long iron bolts across long distances — gave her an idea. It was a crazy idea, but maybe just crazy enough to work.

She wheeled the scorpion around so that the business end was facing the foot of the stairs, and raised a hand above the release lever. She knew the men were watching her, hoped they realized what she was attempting. Her insane plan depended on that.

Kellogg reached the foot of the stairs and headed her way. She waited a moment longer for the gunmen to get there.

“Down!” Even as she shouted the warning, her hand striking the release trigger, Jade spun around, ready to dash past Paolo and sprint for the exit.

There was a loud crack, like a giant mousetrap snapping shut, and Jade felt the air shudder as the scorpion’s torsion springs released their pent up energy and propelled the payload across the exhibit hall. An instant later, there was another sharp cracking noise as the bolt penetrated the wall plaster.

The discharge shocked Jade into momentary paralysis. Her intent had been to bluff the gunmen with the ancient weapon, get them to dive for cover in order to buy Kellogg and her the precious seconds they needed to reach the door. She was counting on their instinct for self-preservation to override the obvious knowledge that there was no way on earth a museum replica would be fully functional.

It was impossible to know if the bluff would have worked, but the actual scorpion bolt striking the wall was considerably more persuasive. The gunmen all vanished, ducking behind the balustrade.

She turned to Paolo. “That works?”

He gave a guilty shrug then waved urgently. “Come. This way. Follow me.”

Shah jolted at the loud report. The heavy stone walls of the Arkimedeion building muffled the sound, but there was no doubt in his mind about what he had just heard.

“That was a shot,” Gabrielle said, dismayed. Her reaction was further confirmation that something had gone wrong inside the museum. “They wasn’t supposed to be any shooting. We need her alive.”

Before Shah could respond, Gabrielle threw open her door and charged up the front steps of the museum.

“Gabrielle, wait!” Shah fumbled with the door lever, finally succeeded in getting it open, and raced around the front end of the van in pursuit. Some part of him knew this was a mistake. He was not one of them, not a man of violence, not a warrior ready to kill for his faith. Would they heed his exhortation against killing, especially when he had been the one to declare Jade Ihara an enemy?

He reached the entrance before the doors closed behind Gabrielle and wormed his way through just in time to see her leave the reception lobby to enter the exhibit area. Past her, he could see some of his men shouting and brandishing their guns, but there was no sign of Jade. Gabrielle was crossing in front of the gunmen, waving her hands and shouting for them to put the guns away, but if their wild-eyed looks were any indication, they were having none of it. For the first time, it occurred to Shah that perhaps Jade had been the one doing the shooting.

He continued forward, still not completely certain what he would do to regain control of the situation, and glimpsed movement, someone disappearing behind a partition. “There!”

Gabrielle’s eyes followed his pointing finger and then she was moving again, charging through the entrance to the exhibit. Shah saw the rest of the six jihadists moving to follow her, and raced on, rounding the partition just a few steps ahead of them and right behind Gabrielle.

The temporary walls enclosing the exhibit blocked nearly all outside light, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. He saw Gabrielle, momentarily stalled by the darkness, searching the room for some sign of their elusive prey. The room seemed bigger than it was due to the enormous mirrored wall that ran along one side. On the other side, behind a low wall, stood a mock-up of a Roman war galley, replete with armored soldiers posed as if ready for battle. In the low light, the life-sized diorama offered countless places to hide in plain sight, a fact which evidently had not escaped Gabrielle’s notice. She hopped over the low parapet that separated the model from the viewing area and began shoving each of the mannequins in turn, knocking them to the floor and sending helmets and weapons flying. None of them offered the least bit of resistance.

“Not here,” she growled. “There must be another way out of here.”

Shah nodded dully and turned around to search the mirrored wall. His eyes had adjusted enough to realize that it was not a single flat mirror, but rather several smaller mirrors, each tilted slightly to form an gently concave surface, curved inward like the inside of a spoon.

At that instant, a voice resonated through the little room like the voice of the angel speaking to the Prophet, though the speaker did not sound particularly angelic and the words were not Arabic, but rather a familiar Latin phrase.

“Fiat lux!”

And then Shah’s world became nothing but light and fire.

SIXTEEN

Jade looked away, shutting her eyes tight, but she could not blink faster than the speed of light. The flash as the high-powered spotlight, designed to simulate the sun’s rays, shone from the ceiling of the heat ray exhibit, to be subsequently reflected and focused by the parabolic mirror array, was so bright that, in the instant of the flash, Jade thought she had seen the skeletons of the men pursuing them, visible through their skin. Even the smoked glass window of the observation booth, situated above the mock-up of the Roman war galley, was not dark enough to keep the light, indirect though it was, from being painfully bright.

“My God,” Kellogg gasped. “You just incinerated them.”

“No, no,” Paolo said, his expression equally horrified at the prospect. “Is simulation.”

“I thought you said this thing wasn’t working,” Jade said. Green blobs floated in front of her eyes. “Looks like it worked pretty well to me.”

Paolo shook his head. “Blinding guests, no good for business.”

“Good for us though.”

“Si.” Paolo rose and moved to the door. “But their eyes will recover and they still have guns. We must go. I take you somewhere safe.”

Jade was having trouble reading the Italian’s face through the retinal fireworks caused by the flash, but his willingness to help set alarm bells ringing in her head.

“Maybe we should call the police,” Kellogg suggested. Although it had become something of a signature comment for him, in this instance Jade was inclined to agree.

Paolo seemed to be scrutinizing them. “And will you tell the carabinieri about the Vault of Archimedes?”

Jade’s internal alarm bells got even louder, but before she could figure out an appropriate response, Paolo waved urgently. “I have the answers you seek, but right now we must go. Quickly.”

The promise of answers was enough to help Jade overcome her wariness. Paolo was clearly more than just a humble museum guide, but the mere fact that he had a secret life did not automatically make him an enemy. She nodded and followed.

Paolo led them back down a short flight of stairs and past the hidden door behind the galley model, to a long access corridor. He stopped at the door leading to the fire stairs, opened it a sliver and peeked through. After a moment, he threw it wide open. “Come.”

He crossed to a door on the opposite side of the stairwell and again checked that the coast was clear before venturing outside. The fire exit let out into a narrow alley between the museum and a neighboring building. Paolo hurried them to the far end, away from the piazza, to a back street crowded with parked cars. He stopped in front of one, a boxy red two-door Fiat hatchback. Jade wasn’t much of a car person, but Jade guessed it was probably as old as she. As Paolo slotted his key into the lock, she realized that this was their escape vehicle.

“Shotgun!” Both Paolo and Kellogg began looking around in alarm, so she clarified. “Dibs on the front seat.”

“Si, of course,” Paolo said, opening his door and working the lever to tilt the seat forward. He turned gestured for Kellogg to get in.

Kellogg turned to Jade. “Maybe we should talk about this first?”

“What’s there to talk about? Paolo here just saved our bacon. And he can tell us about the vault.” She opened the passenger door and glanced at their new benefactor. “You can tell us about the vault, right Paolo?”

“Si. But not here. Not where they can find us.”

She turned back to Kellogg. “See? Let’s go.”

Her cavalier attitude was a put-on. The age-old wisdom of countless generations of parents — don’t get in cars with strangers — was echoing in her head. Her gut told her that Paolo was harmless, yet there was clearly more to him than met the eye, and that unknown quantity concerned her. But if he did know something about the vault, then it was worth the risk.

He navigated the back streets with easy familiarity, eventually merging into the chaos of the main thoroughfares. Jade knew she ought to be paying attention to where they were, but her gaze kept drifting to the faces of the people around them, pedestrians at sidewalk cafes, the drivers of the vehicles they passed. Every attack she had survived had come seemingly from out of the blue. Whether they were Muslim extremists or something else, the enemy stalking her seemed to have the ability to blend into the woodwork. Were they, even now, watching her every move? Tracking her somehow?

The thought sent an electric shock through her. They were tracking her. She would have to do a head-to-toe search for tracking chips…Kellogg, too, but the most obvious way for them to keep tabs on her was by pinging the GPS in her smart phone. She dug the device from her pocket and stared at it as she might a ticking time bomb.

The phone was her lifeline, her only means of staying in contact with Professor. She could write down his number, but if she threw her phone away, he would have no way of reaching her.

And what if I’m wrong?

If she was wrong, then it wouldn’t matter what she did. They would find her again.

She tapped out a quick text message to Professor, letting him know that she was about to go dark then shut the phone off. “I need a paper clip. Or a safety pin.”

Paolo glanced over at her, then pointed to the glove compartment.

“Why?” Kellogg asked, leaning over the seat.

“I’m going to pull the SIM card on my phone.” The glove box contained a sheaf of paper held together by a paper clip. She removed it and unbent a section, which she then used to depress the release on the side of her phone. Removing the SIM card would make it impossible for anyone to track the phone remotely but still give her the option of using it again if the need arose. “They might be tracking me that way.”

Kellogg’s eyes went wide. “Should I do that too?”

“Might be a good idea.” She handed him the paper clip, and then shoved both her phone and the SIM card into a pocket. She saw Paolo nod in approval. “That should keep them off our backs for a while,” she said, meeting the Italian’s stare. “Now, how about those answers?”

“I will tell you what I know, but first, tell me please, how did you learn of the vault?”

Jade cocked her head sideways. “Answering a question with a question. That’s not a great way to start a conversation. Do you actually know something, or are you just stringing us along?”

“Ah, pardon me. I meant no offense. I am wondering because, you see, I thought that all knowledge of the vault had been lost forever.”

“Obviously not. You know something about it.”

“Si, si. But is a very closely guarded secret. Those who know would never share it with…” He smiled. “The uninitiated.”

Jade stared at him for a moment. “Uninitiated? Oh, wonderful. You’re part of a secret society, aren’t you? I really hate secret societies.”

Paolo just laughed.

“Let me guess,” Jade went on. “You are modern descendants of the Society of Syracuse, entrusted with preserving Archimedes’ secrets. I guess it makes sense that you would be the one running the Arkimedeion. Though frankly, I would have expected it to be in a little better shape.”

“Better shape?” The Italian seemed amused by her assessment. He waved a hand. “Everything in the Arkimedeion works exactly as it was meant to. Some people, they see a broken thing and want to throw it away. Others see the same thing, and want to fix it.”

“Oh, so it’s a test. To see who’s worthy to join your little club.”

“A test. A game. It is not so hard to join.” He turned the Fiat off the road and drove down a side street until he found a parking spot.

“Really? You guys have a website or something? Society of Syracuse dot com?”

“I do not know this Society of Syracuse you speak of.”

He gestured through the windshield toward their destination, a modest office building with dark windows and no signage, save for a small brass plaque affixed to the front. The words on the sign were in Italian, but a translation was unnecessary. The symbol at the center of the plaque — a drafting compass and a carpenter’s square, arranged to form what looked almost like six-pointed star — was known universally. It was the same symbol, Jade now realized, that appeared on Paolo’s signet ring.

“But to join the brotherhood,” Paolo continued, “a man has only to ask.”

Because he was not standing at the focal point, where the rays of the spotlight were focused by the mirrors into a searing pin-point, Shah’s blindness was only temporary. At first he saw the world as if through a red fog. His companions were indistinct silhouettes. He couldn’t even tell them apart. The loss of vision however was not the worst of it. Shah’s eyes felt like someone had driven shards of broken glass into them.

Some of the jihadists, who had not been looking directly at the mirror array, recovered even more quickly, though not quickly enough to prevent Jade Ihara from escaping. The blind followed the partly-blind back to the van, and one of the latter drove away from the piazza just as the police sirens became audible in the distance.

The red fog in Shah’s vision continued to diminish, though the relentless pain in his eyes made him want to claw them out with his fingertips. Gritting his teeth through the agony, he found the dark shape that he thought was Gabrielle. “Are you all right?”

“I can’t see,” she replied, her voice strangely calm.

“It will pass,” he said. “My vision is returning. Slowly.”

“Mine isn’t.”

“What?” He peered at the place where he knew her face was, as if by sheer willpower he might accelerate the restoration of his sight.

“I was looking right at it. I’m not sure this is going to go away.”

Shah turned to the driver. “We need to find a hospital.”

“No!” Gabrielle said. “No hospital. They may be looking for us now.”

“If this isn’t treated, you might lose your sight permanently.”

She shook her head. “That doesn’t matter now. All that matters is stopping Jade Ihara before she finds the vault.”

“I don’t know how to do that. You were the one who told us where to find her.”

Gabrielle contemplated this problem silently for several seconds. “It doesn’t matter. I know where she will go next.”

“How do you know, Gabrielle? Don’t keep secrets from me. How do you know that?”

Gabrielle reached out a hand and groped for him. “You must believe me when I say that we want the same thing. I cannot tell you more. You will have to trust me.”

“Look where trusting you has brought us.” A volcano of rage built in Shah’s chest. His arms trembled with the effort of holding back the eruption. Though his vision was still dim, he saw everything clearly now. He had willingly permitted Gabrielle to enslave him with her seductive wiles and her empty promises of love, and she had in turn perverted his faith and twisted his mission to safeguard Islam into some agenda that, even now, she refused to share with him.

“Keep your secrets then. I no longer care. I will find Jade Ihara and I will kill her. And then, I never want to see you again.”

As angry as he was, some part of him hoped that she would beg his forgiveness and, at long last, confess her love for him and share her secret, but she did not. Instead, she merely nodded, and then told him their next destination.

“Freemasons,” Kellogg muttered as they followed Paolo into the Lodge. Jade shushed him, but he paid no heed. “It makes perfect sense when you think about it. They’re the puppet-masters orchestrating everything from behind the scenes.”

“Right,” Jade said. “And those little cars they drive around at parades are frigging terrifying.”

Jade’s antipathy toward secret fraternities did not extend to organizations like the Masons. She was merely indifferent toward them. While she did not doubt that the friendships and alliances forged in Masonic Lodges over the centuries had been pivotal in shaping the political landscape — particularly in the United State where, if certain popular authors were to be believed, many of the founding fathers of the country had been senior Masons — Jade suspected this was more a matter of ambitious men also being Masons, and not the other way around. Their reputation for secrecy, more than anything else, had made them a target for persecution by the Church and harassment by conspiracy nuts like Roche, but the truth of the matter was that, despite their reputation as the diabolical architects of the Illuminati’s New World Order, in the modern era, Masons were about as secretive as the Boy Scouts. The members of actual secret societies did not, as a rule, advertise their membership with signet rings and bumper stickers.

“Mock if you want. Mr. Roche warned about this. The Freemasons are the public face of the Changeling conspiracy.”

Jade jerked a thumb in Paolo’s direction. “He can hear us, you know. And do I need to remind you that he just saved our lives from the people who were actually trying to kill us?”

Kellogg gave a dismissive snort.

“Besides, I didn’t think you actually believed all that stuff Roche wrote.”

“Not in a literal sense. But he wasn’t wrong about the world being ruled by an invisible power elite.”

Jade shook her head and followed Paolo through the door and into a lobby that was about as sinister as a doctor’s waiting room. “Please. Make yourselves comfortable. You will be safe here.” He flashed a wry smile at Kellogg. “Our secret plan to rule the world does not include harming the two of you.”

Kellogg glowered.

“Did I hear correctly? You are associates of Signore Roche?”

“Not really,” Jade said, at almost the same instant that Kellogg said: “I’m his publisher.” Jade had to fight the urge to stomp on Kellogg’s toes.

“His publisher?” Paolo’s smile darkened a little. “Well, signore, I am not a hot-tempered man, though we Sicilians have a reputation for it, eh? But you are publishing lies.” He hissed the last word and Kellogg flinched.

Jade moved between the men. “Let’s just all take a step back, okay? I’m not fan of Roche either, but someone killed him a few days ago.”

The news seemed to genuinely surprise Paolo. “Killed?”

“The same people who attacked us at the museum. Not the Freemasons.” She threw a quick look over her shoulder to Kellogg before going on. “They’re trying to stop us from finding the Archimedes Vault. You said you could help us find it, right?”

“I said no such thing,” Paolo replied. “But I did promise you answers, and I will tell you what I can, but please, I must know. How did you learn of it?”

Jade saw no further reason to withhold that information. “Roche wrote about it an unpublished manuscript. He said that it was mentioned in the Archimedes Palimpsest.”

“Ah, yes. I know of the codex, but it is a book on mathematical philosophy. There is nothing in it about the vault.”

“But the vault is real?” Jade pressed.

“Real?” Paolo spread his hands. “Who can say? I know only stories that are passed down in our tradition. Stories that are to be kept secret. That is why I was surprised to hear you speak of it. Is there a real Vault? I do not know. But I can tell you this. If it is real, Archimedes did not build it.”

Jade raised an eyebrow. “Then who?”

“Do you know the story of Hiram Abiff, the widow’s son?” Paolo did not wait for an answer. “It is a very important part of our tradition. Hiram Abiff was the chief architect of King Solomon. He possessed all the secrets of the building craft, and was the grandmaster of the craftsmen’s guild of his day.

“One night, three hooligans attack him and threaten to kill him if he does not reveal to them the secret passwords of the guild. With these passwords, they can demand more money from the guild. Hiram refuses and the men stab him to death.”

Emotion glistened in Paolo’s eyes and he paused momentarily. “It is a story we tell to remember the importance of keeping faith, even unto death. Death comes to all men of course and the brave man does not fear it, but when we come face to face with death, even the bravest man may try to explain to God why it should not be his time. Hiram Abiff was the keeper of the secrets of stone craft. Some say he was not merely a craftsman, but the king of Egypt, and keeper of the secret knowledge of the builders of the pyramids. Who can say if this is true? If he died, much knowledge would be lost forever. He could have said, ‘I am too important to die,’ but he did not. He kept faith, and was struck down. The traditions of our fraternity honor the sacrifice of Hiram Abiff, and cherish his secrets.”

Jade wondered if Professor would have been able to make sense of the story. She certainly could not. “Paolo, I don’t understand. Even if that story is true, it would have taken place hundreds of years before Archimedes lived. What does this have to do with the vault?”

“I told you. Archimedes did not build the vault.”

“You’re saying this Hiram built it? Centuries before Archimedes?”

Paolo’s cryptic smile told Jade that he was not about to give her a straight answer. “Archimedes was a genius, si, but even a genius must learn from a master. Sir Isaac Newton, another of our great heroes, he say, ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ Archimedes traveled to Alexandria to study mathematics and philosophy from the giants of the ancient world. Alexandria,” he repeated. “In Egypt.”

“And Hiram was the king of Egypt.”

Paolo nodded. “Si. Just so.”

Jade turned this over in her head, trying to find the connection. “Are you saying that…” No, he couldn’t be saying that. “Archimedes was a Freemason?”

She expected Paolo to shake his head, but instead he seemed almost gleeful. “The Masonic lodges as we know them today were created only three hundred years ago, but the Masonic tradition goes back much further. We trace our ancestry back thousands of years. The Knights of Malta and the Templars. The Library of Alexandria. Archimedes.”

“Hiram and Solomon’s Temple.”

“Si, but even Hiram was not the first.”

Jade stared at him for a moment. “The pyramids?”

“And before that, the Tower.”

“The Tower…you mean the Tower of Babel?”

“These are just stories. Allegories. Most do not believe them, even among the brotherhood.” He paused then leaned forward and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Everything that I have told you is known outside the brotherhood. There are many things I cannot tell you. I have sworn an oath. But, you already know more than most, and if you keep looking, you will find what you seek.”

Jade let out a growl of frustration. “Damn it, Paolo. You said you had answers.”

“And I have told you much. The rest, you will find for yourself.” He rose from his chair. “I can hire a car to take you to Pozzallo. You can catch a ferry there to Malta.”

“Malta? Why should we go there?”

Paolo smiled. “If you keep looking, you will find what you seek.”

SEVENTEEN

Even before making landfall on the tiny windswept island, a mere half-hour ferry ride from the Sicilian port city of Pozzallo, Jade grasped that Paolo’s hint was not nearly as obtuse as it had first seemed. She needed only to see the place as Archimedes might have seen it 2,200 years before. Or if Roche was correct, 1,900 years.

Malta, despite its size, had a remarkable history that stretched back well beyond the time of the Greeks or Romans. The megalithic Ggjantija temple — the word literally translated to “Giant’s Tower”—which dated back to 3,600 BCE, was just one of several scattered all over Malta and the neighboring island, Gozo. The Stone Age temples, built to honor an unnamed Mother goddess, were some of the oldest man-made structures on earth, older even than the pyramids of Egypt, a fact which had not escaped Jade’s notice. Only the ruins of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey were believed to pre-date the temples of Malta, and those had been buried and lost to history thousands of years before the emergence of the Neolithic culture that had settled Malta. The temples to the Mother goddess on the other hand, had still been extant in the time of Archimedes. One of these, Jade felt certain, concealed the entrance of the vault. By the time they debarked, she had a list of sites to visit, but one site in particular stood apart from the others.

“This place,” she told Kellogg, showing him the entry in the local tourist guidebook. “The Hypogeum of Hal Saflieni.”

“What makes it so special?”

“For starters, it’s underground. Exactly where you would expect to find a hidden Vault. It was discovered in 1902 by workmen digging cisterns for a housing development. An entire temple complex carved into the limestone at least five thousand years ago. Three levels have been discovered, though there could be more. They haven’t explored all the rooms on the third level yet. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

“The complex was used as a burial chamber later on, but it was originally a temple to the Mother goddess — Astarte, or the local variation on that. The upper levels are decorated with the usual symbols of fertility you would expect, but there are also dozens of strange spirals and other geometric shapes.”

“Just the sort of thing that Archimedes would have noticed.”

“Yup. And there’s a room on the second level called the Oracle Room, which has unique and not completely understood acoustic properties. Supposedly, if you stand in it, you can feel an unusual vibration. People report feeling energized, more creative. Some claim to have visions, which might explain the name.”

She paused, thinking about her experience in the spherical chamber in Peru. Was it possible that a similar effect had been at work there? She made a mental note to look into that.

“And some people,” she went on, “believe the Hypogeum is a doorway to another dimension.”

“Just like the fogous,” Kellogg said.

“Maybe. But maybe that ‘other dimension’ is the vault. Maybe if you go to the Oracle Room on the right day, when the timelock expires, the vault opens and you can go in.”

Kellogg frowned. “That doesn’t help us much.”

“Archimedes figured out a way to get in,” was Jade’s confident reply. “We will, too.”

“Maybe he timed his visit better. No matter how you do the math, we’re at least several decades away from the next chance to get inside. Maybe several centuries.”

“There are other ways into a locked room.”

Jade was less confident about that statement however, but there was no actual proof that Roche was actually correct about the existence of a timelock. He had wrongly attributed the vault’s creation to Archimedes; maybe he was wrong about the thousand year waiting limit, too. She did not share this information with Kellogg. That conversation could wait until after they found the vault door.

As interesting as the Oracle Room was, there were other features of the Hypogeum that made it, if not a likely candidate for concealing the entrance to the vault, then at least worth further exploration.

The remains of more than 7,000 individuals had been discovered in the Hypogeum, which was not in itself that unusual. Many religions, even in modern times, placed great importance on inhuming the dead on sacred ground. What was unusual about the skeletons found in the Hypogeum was that many of them showed evidence of artificial cranial deformation, just like the Paracas skulls.

Whether or not Roche’s theory about skull binding being a defense against the Changelings was true, there was some kind of connective tissue, stretching around the world to cultures separated by time and distance. Maybe there was a reason for subterranean vaults and skull deformation that no one had ever considered. Not even Roche.

This too, she kept to herself.

“There is a wrinkle though,” she said. “Another locked door that might be an even bigger problem. The Hypogeum is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and access is limited to no more than ten people per hour — sixty visitors per day — and you have to purchase your tickets months in advance.”

“You want to break in?” Kellogg’s tone was apprehensive but not surprised.

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Maybe there’s another way. Let me try to get us permission. Money talks, and whether or not you put any stock in what he wrote, Roche’s books made a lot of it. Maybe we can unlock that door without doing anything that might get us arrested.”

Jade weighed the offer. Breaking and entering, while risky, would keep their interest in the Hypogeum a secret. If Kellogg tried and failed to bribe their way in, it would alert the authorities to their intention, making it that much harder to sneak in. Even if he was successful, they would be on the radar of a corruptible public official. Still, Jade was no cat burglar. “Okay, give it your best shot, but be discreet.”

“Fear not. Negotiations are what I do.”

While Kellogg conducted his “negotiations,” Jade took the opportunity to visit an Internet café in Valletta — evidently the advent of smart phones had not completely eliminated the need for such establishments — and dug deeper into the mysteries of the Hypogeum.

There was, as she had expected, a great deal of misinformation, ranging from unsubstantiated stories to wild speculation to outright fabrication — the kind of stuff Roche had built his fortune on — but there was a surprising amount of reliable science as well.

One article detailed the most recent research into the acoustics of the Oracle Room, which was shaped like a bell, amplifying sound so that the voice of a priest speaking from the center of the room would be magnified to thunderous and no doubt terrifying proportions, and vibrating not only the air in the room, but the very bones and tissue of the people in it.

Sound in the Oracle Room resonated at 110 Hertz, a design feature found in many other ancient chambers and temples in the world, and a frequency believed to induce altered states of consciousness. That this technology was understood and exploited by a Neolithic culture centuries before the pyramids, and millennia before Archimedes, was nothing short of astounding, but as she delved deeper into the physical effects of acoustic resonance waves, Jade discovered something even more amazing.

Because acoustic waves could partially cancel each other out, it was possible to combine two or more moderately high frequency waves to produce a low frequency wave — called infrasound — in underground spaces like the Hypogeum and, Jade now realized, the chamber in Paracas.

There were many ways to produce such sounds. Musical instruments and chanting. The movement of wind and wave action, both of which were abundant in Malta. The rotation of the earth and friction with the atmosphere produced a resonance frequency of approximately 7.83 Hertz, well below the audible range for humans, but even an inaudible sound could have a profound effect on the human body and brain. Frequencies of about 10 Hz could induce a state of awe or fear. A 17 Hz waveform could produce extreme anxiety, revulsion, and even tightness in the chest and chills down the spine. At 19 Hz, visual hallucinations were reported. Researchers were increasingly convinced that infrasound might be the cause of ghost sightings and other supernatural encounters. It was believed that the frequency disturbed regions in the brain or perhaps in the ocular fluid of the eyeball, producing indistinct figures glimpsed in the peripheral vision, exactly like the ghosts she had seen in Paracas.

“One mystery solved,” Jade mused, “And I didn’t even need Professor to explain it to me.”

The thought made her feel his absence all the more acutely, but assigning a rational explanation to her experiences in Peru not only greatly improved her disposition, it also provided the basis for a hypothesis that might explain how the Hypogeum had become conflated with the Archimedes Vault.

Kellogg returned a few moments later with good news. “We’re in.” he declared. “I’ve arranged special permission from Mr. Eco, a local official of some sort, for us to visit the site this evening. Now it’s up to you to figure out how to open the vault door. If it’s really there, that is.”

“On that subject, I think I may have this figured out.” She recounted her findings about the Oracle Room and infrasound. “So picture this. You’re Archimedes, on your way back from Alexandria, head full of information. You stop off at Malta, visit this crazy temple, and suddenly your head is bursting with new ideas and connections.”

“So the ‘Vault’…” Kellogg made air quotes with his fingers, “is the place where Archimedes was inspired to become a genius, and not some a repository of secret knowledge.”

“That’s what I think.”

“If that’s all it is, then what about Phantom Time?”

“It’s not real,” Jade said. “Never was. Roche was trying to connect dots that just don’t exist.”

“It was real enough to the people that killed him. And who are, I might add, trying to kill us.”

She shrugged. “I can’t help what they believe. But if we can prove there’s no Vault, it should get them off our backs.”

Kellogg did not appear completely convinced. “People have been visiting the Hypogeum for almost a century. Why have there been no similar reports of such…divine inspiration.”

“The natural state of the Hypogeum has changed from what it once was. It’s covered over, surrounded by concrete walls. Maybe those block the production of natural infrasound. If we could get down there and experiment with different frequencies, maybe we could produce a similar effect.”

“You can prove this with a visit to the Hypogeum?”

“I think so. The real question is, are you willing to publish our findings?” She held his stare. “Even if it means debunking Roche’s pet theory?”

“Ah, I see your point.” He managed a tight smile. “Well, let’s see what we find first, shall we?”

The entrance to the legendary Hypogeum of Hal Saflieni was a depressingly prosaic yellow cinder block building occupying almost half a city block in the middle of a neighborhood in the small southeastern town of Paola. There were no windows on the wind1scoured exterior, no ornamentation to speak of. Raised metal letters reading simply “HYPOGEUM” marked the recessed entrance. Because of the limited numbers of visitors allowed into the site, there was little need for additional publicity. The door was closed, blocked by a sandwich board displaying the message “SOLD OUT” in English which was, Jade had learned, one of the two official languages of the former British Commonwealth state. Kellogg stepped to the intercom mounted beside the entrance and pushed the button to announce their arrival. A few minutes later, an older man wearing a rumpled, sweat-stained linen suit appeared to greet them.

“Ah, Dr. Ihara, the renowned archaeologist. Welcome, welcome. I am Roberto Eco.”

Jade accepted the proffered hand and did not resist when Eco pressed it to his lips. She had no idea that she was “renowned” but if Eco believed it, who was she to disabuse him of the notion? Kellogg had greased the wheels, the last thing she wanted to do was derail things on the doorstep. Almost as an afterthought, she checked to see if he was wearing a Masonic signet ring; he was not. “A pleasure, Mr. Eco. I can’t thank you enough for allowing us to visit the Hypogeum after hours.”

“Certainly. Just leave everything as you found it, and be sure to lock up when you go. We are…how should I put it…bending the rules a bit tonight.”

“You won’t even know we were here,” Jade promised.

Eco brought them inside, revealing an interior that was far more promising than the modest exterior suggested. After passing through a museum gallery featuring artifacts recovered from the Hypogeum and other Neolithic sites across Malta and Gozo, they reached the literal centerpiece, a glass enclosure that looked down on the entrance to the subterranean temple.

Before descending the metal staircase into the first level, Jade and Kellogg donned LED head lamps. The sections of the Hypogeum on the tour route were equipped with electric lights, but Jade preferred to see what she might discover on her own, peering with fresh eyes into the unlit corners of the site.

Weather and the passage of millennia had softened the edges of the Hypogeum’s upper reaches, blurring the handiwork of ancient craftsmen who had carved it. At first glance, it looked more like a naturally occurring cave, and indeed, many of the chambers in the complex had been created from existing hollows in the natural limestone. Below the entrance however, sheltered from the wind, she saw the temple as its creators intended, and perhaps as Archimedes might have seen it two thousand years before, with rectangular niches and doorways, and trilithons — monumental arrangements of laboriously carved stones, two vertical and one laid across the top like a lintel, strikingly reminiscent of the interior ring of Stonehenge in England.

Jade’s light picked out the geometric shapes and spirals etched upon the walls and ceilings and painted with red ochre, which would no doubt have been of great interest to the mathematician Archimedes, but reminded Jade more of petroglyphs she had seen in the American Southwest. Spirals, she knew, were a symbol of fertility, but also harmony with the natural order of the universe.

The first level was both shallow and relatively small, but the second level, nearly twenty feet below the surface, was where the Hypogeum earned its magnificent reputation. After passing through several spacious chambers, they entered a vast hall, decorated with what had been dubbed “the Monumental Facade.” The room, with its decorative entrance to the “Holy of Holies,” had become the public face of the Hypogeum, its image adorning posters and postcards. The half-domed chamber had been hewn out with astonishing precision to produce an effect not unlike the Pantheon in Rome, a feat all the more remarkable considering that its craftsman had used primitive flint tools.

The marked route took them next into a room known as “the Snake Pit” surrounding a six-foot deep well believed to have been used for the keeping of snakes, an ancient totem of fertility in cultures around the globe. Thankfully, it had been many thousands of years since a snake had slithered there.

Their destination, the Oracle Room, lay just beyond the Snake Pit. As she entered, Jade immediately sensed the strange acoustic properties of the chamber. The sound of her own footsteps were muted — the closest analogy she could come up with was the sense of being inside a glass jar — but she could hear Kellogg moving with astonishing clarity. Even the creak of his leather shoes was amplified.

She turned a slow circle, playing the light on the ceiling with its vivid red spirals. They almost seemed to be moving whenever she looked away from them. “Turn off your light,” she said, her voice whisper-quiet in her ears. There was no echo.

“Why?” Kellogg’s voice boomed in the enclosure and Jade could feel it vibrating in her bones.

“Just do it.”

He complied, and a moment later, Jade switched hers off as well, plunging them into funereal darkness. She stood motionless, eyes open, waiting to glimpse an infrasound induced hallucination.

Nothing.

“That’s enough of that,” she said, clicking the light back on. She took out her phone and turned it on. Even without the SIM card, this far underground it was useless for communicating with the outside world, but it was still a functional audio playback device. Jade opened a frequency generator app she had downloaded earlier and set it to 110 Hz, the same frequency as the Oracle Room itself, then pressed the play button.

There was no sound, but that was not completely unexpected. When she had played the tone earlier, even at maximum volume, it was barely audible when she put her ear next to the speaker. Although the theoretical low end of the human auditory range was 20 Hertz, many people could not differentiate the very low tones. It was also possible that the room’s unique acoustic design was cancelling out the frequency waves, creating a dampening effect. She moved the setting down to zero, and then began advancing it slowly, adjusting the frequency about ten Hertz every few seconds. It was a frustratingly tedious process and Jade had to fight the urge to simply crank the tone generator up to produce some kind of audible result.

Finally, at about 120 Hz, she heard something, a low hum like the sound of a refrigerator compressor with a discernible pulsing at each wave peak. The sound quickly grew in intensity until, even with the phone held at arm’s length, it was almost painfully loud. A queasy feeling settled in her gut, the sensation almost identical to what she had felt in Peru.

She looked over at Kellogg, saw the discomfort on his face. She managed a smile and mouthed, “It’s working,” then adjusted the tone generator again.

In the corner of her eye, she saw someone moving into the Oracle Room. Her first thought was that their enemies had tracked them down, but when she whipped her head in that direction, there was no one there.

Despite the nausea churning in her gut, Jade broke into a triumphant grin. She advanced the tone again, and the room began to spin.

She glimpsed movement overhead, not another ghost figure, but something else. The red spirals on the ceiling appeared to be spinning like whirlpools draining out of one reality and into another. Suddenly, she felt lighter, as if the swirling vortices were sucking her out of the Oracle Room. She reached down to change the frequency…or perhaps to stop the tone generator altogether…but her hand refused to move and before she could do anything else, the world around her dissolved into darkness and she was swept away.

EIGHTEEN

As a journalist, Shah was especially appreciative of irony. Gabrielle had cajoled and goaded him relentlessly, appealed to his heritage and his faith, teased him with the promise of her affections — a promise he now realized she never intended to keep — all to transform him into a leader, a new Mahdi to unite the factions of the Islamic world and lead them to greatness. Her scheming had cost her dearly, not just her eyesight but ultimately the respect — the love — Shah had once felt for her. And yet, it had at last borne fruit. Shah was now the leader she had pushed him to become.

A leader of only four perhaps, but great things often arose from small beginnings. Gabrielle was not the only person to suffer lasting, perhaps even permanent damage from the strange light-burst in the Syracuse museum. But four men — five counting him — would suffice. They would put an end to Jade Ihara’s plot to destroy the faith, and when it was finished, these four would tell the rest of the world how he had led them into battle.

The door to the Hypogeum was unlocked, just as Gabrielle had said it would be. He did not know how she knew this, and she refused to explain, just as she refused to explain how she knew that Jade would be there. Her obstinacy had been the final straw.

She had asked to accompany them into the Hypogeum and he had refused — what choice did he have? Her blindness was a liability, but it was her refusal to accede to his leadership — the very thing she had labored to establish — that had really been the deciding factor.

“Atash! Just don’t kill them. Not yet.”

He did not ask her to explain. He knew she would not, and besides, he had no intention of complying. Jade Ihara had to die. Yet, he could not help but wonder why she was so insistent about this matter. In Syracuse, she had argued in favor of keeping Jade alive so that they might interrogate her about her next destination, but clearly, Gabrielle already knew where Jade would go next, which meant Jade had no information that Gabrielle did not already possess.

Perhaps I should be interrogating her, Shah thought, and did not immediately dismiss the idea. She was nothing to him now.

Her refusal to tell him what was really going on was unacceptable. Nor would he tolerate her making demands of him in front of his chosen warriors. He had left her behind, blind and helpless, unable to follow, unable to do anything.

Shah motioned for the others to put their guns away. He could feel the outline of his own pistol, a gift from one of his men, pressing against the small of his back. He had almost refused the offer. He knew nothing about guns aside from what he had seen in movies, most of which was probably wrong. In fact, he despised guns. As far as he was concerned, the obsession with firearms was one of America’s greatest cultural failures, second only to rampant ethnocentrism. But since he could not very well lead men into battle without a weapon of his own, he had accepted the weapon, and after making sure that it would not accidentally discharge, he had tucked it in his belt where he intended to let it remain. The others were better suited to violence, eager for it even. He would merely direct and observe, as was proper for a general.

He pushed through the door and into the dark interior beyond. “Hello? Anyone here?”

He had only Gabrielle’s assurance that Jade was there, in the Hypogeum, and if that information was wrong, the last thing he needed was to be involved in a random shootout that failed to accomplish its sole objective. Better to risk giving up the element of surprise than unnecessary bloodshed.

There no response however. The building appeared to be deserted. He waved the men inside and turned on the flashlight built into his phone, cupping his hand over it so that only a dim glow was visible.

“Spread out,” he whispered. “Search the area but do not shoot unless you absolutely have to.”

Their grunts of acknowledgement were not reassuring, but it was too late to call the attack off now. He only hoped the building was as empty as it looked. With luck, they had arrived ahead of their target and would be able to lie in wait.

If she’s even coming, Shah thought, and wondered again where Gabrielle had gotten her information.

He found the entrance to the subterranean complex and waited there for the men to finish their sweep. One by one, they joined him to confirm that they were alone in the museum. He directed one man to stand watch at the front door, and then led the way into the ancient temple.

Despite his best efforts at stealth, the sound of his footfalls on the metal steps sounded like the ringing of an enormous gong. Gabrielle would have told him he was imagining it. For all his anger, he felt her absence acutely. He needed her.

Why was she being so obstinate? What secret was so important that she refused to trust him, after everything they had been through?

He stopped, turned off his light and searched the darkness for several seconds, then resumed moving. He continued in this fashion until, at the threshold of the second level, he heard something, a strange hum that, when he stood perfectly still, made him feel like he was sliding across the floor. Intuitively, he grasped that Jade was connected to whatever was causing this effect.

Stealth was unnecessary now. The hum was almost painfully loud, an assault on the senses that left him feeling nauseated. The urge to turn away, to run and never look back, was nearly overwhelming.

This is a trap. Gabrielle sent us here to die.

He knew it wasn’t true, but the random thought took root like a dandelion seed.

The bitch. I’ll kill her myself.

“Keep going,” he rasped, not looking back to see if the others were still with him. As he pushed deeper into the Hypogeum, the feeling began to abate, transforming from panic to something more like euphoria, but his resolve remained unchanged.

“I’ll kill her myself,” he whispered gleefully, squeezing the grip of the pistol that had somehow found its way into his hand. He didn’t know if he was referring to Jade Ihara or Gabrielle Greene. Maybe both.

Yes. Definitely both.

He spied light emanating from one of the carved doorways, rushed toward it with his gun arm extended.

He saw two figures standing in the chamber beyond. The light was behind them, revealing only silhouettes, a man and a woman, but he knew that the pair could only be Jade and her companion, the man she had been with at the Arkimedeion. Gabrielle never mentioned him, and only now did he wonder at that omission. Did she know who he was?

It did not matter. Whomever he was, he would be dead in a few seconds.

Just like Jade Ihara.

Shah stretched his gun arm out and stared down the length of the barrel, lined the iron sights up on Jade’s head, and pulled the trigger.

The vortex drew Jade up into the darkness, and then suddenly she was…somewhere else.

Forget ghost hallucinations, she thought. This was a full-on out-of-body experience.

In an instant, she was transported from the Hypogeum and flying through the night sky above Malta, rising…rising…higher and higher into the sky.

It felt like a dream. In fact, she was certain that was exactly what it was. A waking dream. The infrasound frequency had somehow thrown her into REM sleep.

She wondered if Archimedes had experienced something like this. With his genius, the vision had probably been even more fantastic — an Alice in Wonderland-like journey through the landscape of mathematics. Maybe he had seen the true value of pi or the square root of two.

Strangely however, there was nothing familiar about the imagery in this dream. Despite her best efforts to take control, she continued rising skyward, as if strapped to a rocket. Malta was just a dark spot in a darker sea. She could make out the outline of Sicily and the toe of the Italian peninsula. She wondered at how high she was, in both respects. Ten miles up? A hundred?

Am I in outer space?

She tried to look up, into the emptiness of the sky, but even this small measure of control was denied her. This was not so much a dream as a mind movie, but where was it coming from?

All of the Mediterranean was visible to her now, Europe and North Africa, the curvature of the earth falling away in every direction, and then something changed. She was no longer rising, but moving laterally above the globe as it rolled relentlessly beneath her. It was nothing she had not seen before on television or in computer generated images of the earth as seen from orbit, but the detail of the landscape was astonishing. Jade had never really paid close attention, but evidently her subconscious had recorded every minor knob of rock jutting from the sea, every fjord and mountain summit.

The Iberian Peninsula passed beneath her, and then the Strait of Gibraltar. The great gray expanse of the Atlantic crawled beneath her and then something like a great fiery phoenix rose into view above the Western horizon.

She was chasing the sun.

The Atlantic crossing seemed to take forever, though the same journey that she was making in minutes would take hours by jet airplane. She wondered how much time had passed in the Hypogeum, and to what destination Kellogg’s dreams had taken him.

Land masses came into view, nothing recognizable, but she knew enough about geography to assume that she was seeing the islands of the Caribbean. They too passed beneath her as she continued west, toward the blazing orb of the sun. More land now, and no ocean beyond. North America, Mexico perhaps? No, that great brown smudge had to be the Mississippi River pouring into the Gulf.

The landscape began to make a little more sense now. The sea of brown earth flatter even than the Atlantic Ocean had to be Texas. The southern extremity of the Continental Divide and a patch of white gypsum sand, like snow in the middle of the black desert — New Mexico. She knew this country well, had flown over it dozens of times. There was the Mogollon Rim, the great chasm of the Grand Canyon….

Now she was descending, falling from the sky. Falling towards….

Why am I seeing this?

For the first time since the journey began, it occurred to her that she might have been wrong about everything. This was not a dream, not the product of infrasound and her fevered imagination.

The Hypogeum was showing her the route to a destination, just as it had shown Archimedes two thousand years before. A specific place, and there, a door with a fantastic mechanical lock that could only be opened….

Roche had been wrong. Paolo and his Freemason brethren, too. The Hypogeum was not the vault. It was the map that showed the way to the vault.

The very idea was so preposterous that, if she had not been experiencing it for herself, she would have dismissed it out of hand. The Oracle Room had been created in such a way as to stimulate specific regions of the human brain to produce exactly this result. Yet, what was so strange about that? Audio and video recordings were nothing more than specific frequencies of electromagnetic energy, easily rendered into digital patterns, and then reconstituted into light and sound. Couldn’t the same thing be done to the human brain?

It really is a mind movie.

The door to the vault appeared, a circular chamber ringed by circles that turned this way and that, sometimes appearing to be linked like the Olympic rings, but somehow never crossing.

I know where this is, Jade thought.

Suddenly the image before her fractured, as if someone had thrown an enormous rock through the television screen in her mind, and Jade was wrenched out of the sublime vision and into the chaos of reality.

Shah’s bullet missed Jade by a country mile, which was not a completely unexpected outcome given his inexperience. He had thought of it as more a signal for his men to open fire than an actual attack. In the final accounting, it would not matter whose bullet actually killed Jade; only that he had fired first.

But no other shots were fired.

Just as the mirror array in the Archimedes museum had focused the spotlight into a searing ray of heat, the unique shape of the Oracle Room had focused the report of the pistol into a deafening sonic assault that brought everyone in the chamber to their knees. He dropped the pistol, clapped his hands to his head as if he might squeeze the noise out of his skull. He thought his head might actually come apart if he let go.

The effect reached its agonizing climax almost immediately and then died away as quickly as the echoes of the shot itself, but recovering from the staggering decibel levels took considerably longer. As a still-grimacing Shah groped for both his light and his gun, he glimpsed a pair of figures — Jade and the other man — making a mad dash past the gunmen.

“No!” Shah rasped. “Not again.”

His fumbling fingers found the gun. He whirled around, trying to line up another shot, but immediately realized the foolishness of such an action. “Hold your—”

One of his men fired at the moving targets and another freight train of agony slammed through Shah’s head.

“Damn it!”

Yet, somehow, the second episode wasn’t quite as bad as the first. Maybe the damage to his hearing had inoculated him against further pain. He endured the pain with a grimace and kept his eyes open long enough to see Jade go down.

Although the first shot had disrupted the tone from the frequency generator, shattering the infrasound spell and snapping Jade out of the vision, she had not actually heard the report. Her abrupt return — figuratively speaking — had left her disoriented but she was in far better shape than the wriggling figures on the floor at the entrance. Though she could barely see them, she had little doubt that these were the same men who had attacked them at the Arkimedeion. She did not immediately grasp what had caused their debilitation, but the tang of sulfur in the air revealed that someone had fired a pistol. She had not heard it because the same acoustical trick that gave the Oracle Room its power had caused the sound waves to almost perfectly cancel each other out at the center of the room where she had been standing. The shot itself had sounded muffled and distant to her ears.

She was not so sheltered when the second shot rang out.

The bullet creased the air next to her ear, but the amplified report blasted her off her feet and sent her reeling through the doorway to the Oracle Room.

Kellogg, who had been stunned by the noise of the first shot, managed to stay on his feet and dragged her onward, out of the line of fire.

More shots sounded, accompanied by the noise of bullets slamming into the limestone walls. Dust and rock chips filled the air but none of the rounds found their target, and as soon as the pair was out of the bell-shaped chamber, the decibel level dropped like a stone.

Jade stumbled along behind Kellogg, her wits still jumbled, part of her brain still trying to process what she had seen during her out-of-body excursion. Was it just something that had arisen randomly from her unconscious mind? A dream? All she knew for certain was that she had woken up to a nightmare.

How did they find us here? I didn’t tell anyone….

A sliver of doubt wormed into the fractured jigsaw puzzle of her awareness. She had made a critical mistake.

The realization brought her fully back to the moment. Her quest for the vault, whatever it really was, would have to wait until she wasn’t being chased by a gang of killers. She pulled free of Kellogg’s grasp and sprinted out ahead of him, following the metal floor back to the stairs, bounding up them three at a time. A few seconds later, she was threading her way through the museum building, following the dim glow of overhead exit signs.

It was déjà vu all over again. Her enemies had tracked her down — again — trapped her underground — again — and now she was running for her life. Again. The only consolation was that the men trying to kill her seemed incapable of learning from their failures.

The thought had barely formed when a man stepped out of the shadows, directly between her and the doorway. Jade’s eyes were drawn, not to his face, but to the dark and all too familiar shape of the pistol braced in his outstretched hands and aimed right at her.

Because her gaze was fixed on the gun, she did not see a third arm appear above the gunman’s right shoulder and snake around his neck. It was only when his head tilted back sharply and then twisted halfway around with a sickening crack, the unfired gun falling from nerveless fingers, that she realized there was someone else there.

As the gunman crumpled into a heap, the face of her savior was revealed. Though still cloaked in shadow, Jade immediately recognized the person standing there. Her surprise at the appearance of the gunman was nothing to what she now experienced.

“Professor?”

His grim expression transformed into a smile as he briskly advanced, arms thrown wide invitingly. Jade ran forward, not interested in escape as much as she was in being in his arms. The same arms that had just broken a man’s neck enfolded her in a tight embrace which she returned with matching vigor. Then his lips found hers.

The kiss was so unexpected that, for a moment, she didn’t know how to respond. Not until this moment did she realize how long she had been waiting for him to do this, how much she wanted it.

Kellogg’s voice intruded on the moment. “There are more of them behind us. We have to go.”

Professor pulled away, taking Jade’s hand and pulling her, gently but urgently, along behind him. They emerged onto the warm but still breezy streets and Professor headed toward an SUV parked across the street. There were no other cars, but Jade remained wary. There had been at least half-a-dozen attackers at the museum in Syracuse which meant several were unaccounted for.

A tumult arose from behind them as the gunmen from the Oracle Room spilled out of the entrance to the Hypogeum. Their shouts were not a warning to the escaping prey but rather an internal communication between the pursuers. A moment later, the shots started.

Jade ducked involuntarily as the bullets began hammering into the fenders of the vehicle to which they ran. Professor however whirled around, drawing a semi-automatic pistol from his waistband, and squeezed off several shots. His return fire shattered the attack and sent the men — all but one of them who now lay sprawled out on the sidewalk, clutching a bloody chest wound — scrambling back into the museum.

Without putting the gun away, Professor wrenched the SUV’s door open. “Inside. Hurry.”

Jade didn’t need to be told twice. She and Kellogg piled into the vehicle — she took the passenger seat, Kellogg got in back — while Professor slid behind the steering wheel. A few seconds later, they were racing away down the quiet backstreets of Paola.

Jade’s heart rate and breathing gradually returned to normal, but her mind refused to slow down. Part of her was still out in the cosmos, racing above the earth like a guided missile, homing in on the vault, even though she now felt she knew less about it than she had half an hour before. Part of her was still reliving this latest attack, which had come closer than any of the others to ending her search forever.

Part of her could not stop thinking about the kiss. About his lips pressing against hers, firm, assertive but not overly intrusive. It was almost everything she could have hoped for.

Which made it so much harder for her to admit what she knew to be true.

The man that had just saved her… just kissed her… was not Professor.

He looked like Professor, sounded like him…even smelled like him. But something about him was wrong. The kiss and the emotion behind were so out of character that there could be no doubt.

Professor had been replaced by a Changeling.

NINETEEN

As the hours stretched into days, it became increasingly harder for Professor not to second guess his decision to allow himself to be recaptured. His reasons were still valid. His escape had been a carefully orchestrated fiction, a test to see what he would do if given the chance. He was certain of that, just as he was certain that First Officer Carrera, or the woman claiming to be her, was working with his captors.

A true escape under those circumstances was impossible for the simple reason that he had no idea who or what he was escaping from. He did not know who was really behind his abduction, or the hijacking of the airliner. He did not even know for certain where he was. Sitting in the cockpit of the derelict aircraft, he had decided that learning the answers to those questions took higher priority than trying to get away.

The “escape” had been a fiction in more ways than one.

They had come for him in force, a force of eight men… scratch that, eight persons. Their genders had been concealed, along with their faces and any easily identifiable features, behind shapeless gray coveralls and mesh head coverings. They carried Taser X26C stun guns, which was interesting but not particularly illuminating. Their movement through the plane had been orderly but not exactly tactical. His sense was that they were not trained operators, not even soldiers, or if they had received formal training, it was from a playbook of their own devising. Without uttering a single word, they closed on him, tased him senseless, and then tranquilized him with another injection.

When he came to again, he was back in the squalid little cabin, no closer to answers than he had been before making his run into the woods.

He remained there for what felt like several hours, silently daring his captors to send Carrera or someone else in to check on him, but no one came knocking. Finally, he cleared his throat and addressed the ceiling. “I’m sure you guys are watching… listening at least, so why don’t we cut to the chase. If you want something from me, just ask.”

No reply.

He counted his heartbeats, trying to gauge the passage of time. After what felt like about half an hour, he tried again. “If you don’t tell me what you want, I can’t very well give it to you.”

Silence.

It was an answer though.

His thoughts kept drifting back to that old television series. He remembered the intro word for word, could still hear the defiant voice of the captive secret agent.

What do you want?

And the reply, a different voice each week, but always the same words.

Information.

Information about what? Ongoing espionage missions? The names of highly placed NOC agents? Moles in the politburo?

It didn’t matter. Information was just a MacGuffin, a symbol of the man’s defiance in the face of Byzantine plots to break his spirit.

You won’t get it, the secret agent had replied, week after week, and always the reply was the same.

By hook or by crook, we will.

Information.

He swung his legs onto the floor, stood up and went outside. The sun was overhead, which meant he’d been under for a full day. A few minutes later, he spotted Carrera walking toward him. There was something different about her. Her bearing had changed, her posture and gait were more assertive. She was the same person, but no longer playing the same role.

“Okay,” he muttered. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“I thought you were going to wait until after sundown,” she remarked, undisguisedly sardonic.

He shrugged. “That’s what I told you. It was never my plan.”

She got within a few yards of him, stopped and put her hands on her hips. “When did you know?”

“Know what?”

She gazed back at him as if trying to judge his sincerity. “I know you’re not stupid,” she said after a long pause.

“Flattery now?”

“Look, just answer the question. When did you know?”

Interesting, he thought. She repeated the question, but didn’t specify. Didn’t give anything away. She’s fishing. Two can play that game. “I was a Boy Scout. One look at the sun told me that we weren’t in the Northern Hemisphere. So I knew you were lying. Either about where we were, or about being a pilot.”

She nodded slowly. “I didn’t know if I could trust you. I thought it might be some kind of test.”

“A test?”

“You know, to see if I’d go along with you or turn you in. They like to play games like that.”

“Who? Obviously not the North Koreans.”

She shook her head. “Obviously. But I wasn’t lying when I told you that they never show themselves.”

As before, she spoke without any noticeable tells. Either she was the most convincing liar on earth, or she was actually telling the truth. He shook his head, trying to resist the seductive urge to believe her.

She’s trying to play me, trying to get me to reveal something. What?

Information.

There was something his captors wanted and if they wouldn’t tell him what, wouldn’t even ask the question, then it could only mean that they expected to learn it simply by observing him.

He had been wrong about this being a cat and mouse game. There was no cat. Just a maze through which he was being forced to run so that his captors could learn… what?

Information.

The only way to beat them, to figure out who they really were and what they really wanted, was to change the game. Instead of information, he would give them disinformation. He would have to become someone that he was not.

“Well, if you’re satisfied that I’m not a plant, maybe we can put our heads together and come up with a better plan for getting out of here.”

“Seriously? After what happened last night?”

“I’m not going to stay here,” he said, and that wasn’t a lie. “I will get out of here, or die trying.” He took a breath. “I have to get back to Jade.”

“Jade?”

“Jade Ihara. My girlfriend.”

Her response was almost too perfect. “We’ve all got people waiting for us back home.”

“Jade needs me. I need her. I’d go through hell itself to be with her again.” He tried to inject the appropriate amount of emotion into his voice so that they would believe this, the first of many lies he planned to tell. He was a little surprised by his own sincerity.

That had been two days ago, and he felt no closer to understanding what was really going on. He was beginning to question his underlying premise; had he given his enemy too much credit for cleverness?

I should have kept going that first night.

But no, he knew better. He was right about everything. It was all a game, a test. He had confused them at the plane. They had been waiting for him to try something… to reveal the extent of his knowledge and abilities. Would he try to fly the plane out? Call someone on the radio?

But why? That was the question that still nagged at him. Why? What did they want?

Information.

Okay, Professor. You’ve always prided yourself on being the smartest guy in the room. Figure this one out. Start back at the beginning.

The plane. Flight 815. Why had they taken the plane?

It occurred to him only then that he had lost track of that particular thread. He had only gotten mixed up in the investigation because Roche’s publisher had been on the missing plane. And it had only been after he had tipped his hand, in a very roundabout way, that Sousa had hit him with the tranquilizer and then arranged his abduction.

Hypothesis: Roche was close to exposing their operation. His obsession with Changelings had unwittingly uncovered something else. An ongoing intelligence operation. A highly placed mole in a government agency. A changeling of a different sort….

He shot to his feet, ran outside the little cabin, but stopped after only a few steps, looking around at the other huts, the handful of people roaming between the rows, idling away the days of their captivity.

Carrera’s voice reached out to him. “Pete? Everything okay?”

He stared at her for a moment, but then he started forward again without answering.

“Pete!” He heard her footsteps pounding the earth as she raced to catch up, then quieting as she fell in beside him. “Pete… Sorry, Professor, what’s up?” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Oh, my God, you’re going for it aren’t you?”

He continued to ignore her, striding purposefully past the huts, passing into the woods without hesitation. Carrera did not repeat the question, but maintained a curious silence as she kept pace with him.

He reached the runway a few minutes later but instead of following it to the idle plane as he had before, he crossed to the other side and kept going, pushing deep into the crowded evergreens. Though he tried not to show it, he was wary now. He was being unpredictable — that was his intent at least — and the response to his actions would be equally hard to anticipate. They might continue watching as they had before, or they might send out the goon squad and zap him into submission again. His gut told him they were more interested in seeing what he would do, but he was going to be ready if and when the guys with tasers showed up again.

Halfway down the far side of a wooded hill, the forest opened up to reveal more signs of human habitation — not an ad hoc containment area like the camp where he had been held, but an actual neighborhood with houses and paved streets that branched and looped, and sometimes dead-ended in cul de sacs. It looked exactly like a suburban housing development, with at least two hundred separate homes, perhaps more. There were small parks, a few large buildings that might have been auditoriums or churches, though strangely, there were no cars on the streets, and no roads leading away from the community. Like the camp of huts, the neighborhood was an island in the middle of a sea of trees.

He risked a glance over at Carrera and found her staring, not at the suburb, but at him. He pointed down the hill. “You don’t look very surprised to see that?”

She said nothing.

“Should I keep going?” he asked.

She spread her hands in a noncommittal gesture. “You seem to have it all figured out.”

“Vinnytsia.”

Her brow furrowed in confusion.

“Early in the Cold War, the Soviets built a mock American town in Vinnytsia, Ukraine to train deep cover agents in how to behave like Americans. They spoke only English — American dialect. Drove American cars, ate American food, listened to American music and read American magazines. All so that their sleeper agents would be able to blend in seamlessly with the American population.”

“You think the Soviets are behind all this?”

“Why don’t you tell me who’s behind it? You took that plane. God only knows how many other people you’ve taken over the years. Brought them here to populate this little farce so that your agents would be able to insert themselves into the real world. Who will I find down there? The real Jeanne Carrera? Maybe the people who were really on that plane?”

“You think I’m—”

“Don’t bother denying it. We’re way past that. Gerald Roche got too close with his Changeling conspiracy. If enough people believed him, started questioning whether their elected leaders had been replaced by doubles, there was a chance — remote, but there all the same — that something would come out, and then the dominoes would start to fall.

“I’ll admit. I’m still not clear on why you took that plane. If all you wanted was to shut Roche up, it seems like there were easier ways to accomplish that with less risk and a lot less collateral damage. Did you just need live bodies? Shanghaied extras to make the training scenario more believable? Or is there something else you needed? Someone else on that plane? Something you needed Parrott to tell you?”

He took her silence for a tacit admission of guilt. “So, let’s see if I’ve got this right. You’ve been doubling people, probably for a while now. You start with someone who’s a close physical match, do the rest with stage make-up. Mission Impossible stuff. Maybe even cosmetic surgery if there’s time for it. But looks aren’t everything. Your imposter wouldn’t last ten seconds in a conversation with someone the subject actually know — close friends, relatives, lovers. You could learn a lot about someone from discreet surveillance, but what you really need is an immersive environment. A place to both train your agents and observe your subjects. Your own little Vinnytsia.

“You kidnap them, bring them here and then watch what they do. Learn everything about them. Mannerisms. Tastes. Am I in the ballpark? You doubled me, right? When I showed up asking the wrong questions, you were worried that it might all start to unravel, so you brought me here to pump me for information, while you got my double ready to head back to the real world and make sure the investigation goes nowhere. Is that about right?” He turned and scanned the woods at their back. “Is he out there? The guy you got to double me? Hey. Come on out. Let’s talk.”

“You are a remarkable man, Professor Chapman,” Carrera said, without a trace of sarcasm. “Mimicking your intellect may be the most challenging part of replacing you.”

She smiled and Professor was shocked to see that she no longer looked like the First Officer of Flight 815. It was as if voicing his revelation had triggered a sympathetic physical reaction in her, stripping away the veil of illusion. She still bore a passing resemblance to Carrera, but there were discernible differences. She reached up with her left hand and peeled back her right eyelid. A finger sweep removed an opaque contact lens, revealing her natural, jet black iris.

“I’m afraid you’ve already missed your replacement. He left twelve hours ago to rejoin your girlfriend, Jade Ihara.” She removed the lens from the other eye, and flicked it away like a nuisance insect. “You see, we knew who you really were before you came looking for Flight 815.”

Professor snapped his fingers. “Rafi. You doubled him, used him to kill Roche so that it would look like Muslim extremists. You had the real Rafi in that car. The double triggered that explosion to cover his tracks and make it look like Rafi killed himself.”

“An opportune scapegoat. The replacement was a hasty affair, but then it was never meant to stand up to close scrutiny.”

He narrowed his gaze at her. “So who are you really working for? The Russians? Chinese? No, this is something else.” He snapped his fingers. “Some kind of international crime syndicate, right? That’s why you wanted to pin this on Muslims. You get rid of that nuisance Roche, and stir up a little profitable international unrest in the bargain. Win-win.”

“Unfortunately, you and Dr. Ihara refused to just let it alone.”

It was the second time Carrera had mentioned Jade by name. A chill ran down Professor’s spine. “Jade isn’t going to find anything. Roche was barking up the wrong tree. You know it as well as I do. Leave her alone. She’s no threat to you.”

Carrera smiled again, but there was no humor in her cold black eyes. She waved to someone in the woods. Professor’s doppleganger might not have been lurking there, but several figures wearing mesh head coverings and gray fatigues emerged and began closing in around him.

“You are intelligent,” she said, “but believe me when I say that you have no idea what’s really going on.”

TWENTY

Jade’s first impulse was to deny. It was a crazy idea. There weren’t any Changelings except in Roche’s delusional brain…and he’s dead now, isn’t he… so Professor couldn’t possibly be one. That this perfectly rational argument, which she so desperately wanted to believe, was an even less convincing possibility, went way beyond unsettling. It terrified her.

If that’s not really Professor, then where is he? Is he… No, I won’t even think that.

But her refusal to frame the thought did not keep her dread at bay. This impostor was wearing Professor’s clothes, his watch, even his ridiculous fedora.

He’s a hostage. That’s what happened. He figured out what they were up to, but they caught him, and sent this guy in his place.

They who? The Changelings? She glanced over at the startlingly familiar visage. Who else?

“Find anything down there?” she asked. Her voice caught in her throat, so the words came out like a coughing fit.

“You okay, babe?”

“Yeah,” she croaked. She didn’t need any more proof than that. Professor — the real Professor — would never, ever call her ‘babe.’ “You know how I get around dust.”

He threw her a sidelong glance as if trying to decide if she was testing him, then returned his attention to the road in front of them. “It was a dead-end. Looks like you’ve been busy though.”

Jade barely heard him. She could barely hear herself think, a condition that had nothing to do with the jet engine loud blast of sound she’d experienced in the Oracle Room.

Changelings are real. The Vault is real. Professor is…not here.

What the hell am I supposed to do?

Kellogg, perhaps sensing the awkward silence, jumped in. “Good thing you showed up when you did. Those Arabs nearly had our guts for garters.”

“Not Arabs,” Professor—

Not Professor!

— corrected. “At least not all of them. The guy leading them is Atash Shah, co-founder of the Crescent Defense League. He’s actually Iranian.” His eyes found Jade again. “That’s the group Rafi was working with.”

She blinked at him, fighting the urge to ask how he had known to go to the Hypogeum. She had pulled her SIM card in Syracuse, before Paolo ever mentioned Malta, and had not tried to contact him since. As if sensing her anxiety over this discrepancy, Not-Professor added, “That’s how I found you actually. I followed him and he went right to you.”

“Makes sense,” she murmured. Except it did not explain how Shah had tracked her in the first place. Paolo? No, that couldn’t be right.

Kellogg?

She bit her lip to keep from letting out a gasp of dismay. Kellogg was working with Shah… or he was a Changeling, too. Were the two factions working together?

She pressed her fingertips to the bridge of her nose, as if to squeeze the paranoia out of her brain. There was a conspiracy at work, but if she let her imagination run wild, she would be virtually paralyzed, unable to defend herself or stop them.

“From what I can gather,” Not-Professor went on, “he thinks that Roche put you on the trail of some historical evidence to prove that the Prophet Muhammad was fictional.”

Kellogg leaned through the space between the car seats and gave her a playful slug in the arm. “What did I tell you? Mr. Roche was right about Phantom Time.”

“Well, I don’t know if I’d go that far,” the impostor said. Then after a pause, he added, “Unless you found something you haven’t told me about. Did you?”

Kellogg drew back suddenly as if realizing he had spoken out of turn. “I’ll…aah, let Jade tell you. I’m not actually quite sure what to make of it.”

The Changelings are using Shah as a stalking horse. That has to be it. They sicced him on Roche…

Suddenly she understood where it had begun. Rafi, the real Rafi, had been replaced by a Changeling, in order to pin the blame for Roche’s murder on the Crescent Defense League, and by extension, the Islamic religion. No doubt, a similar fate had been planned for her.

But Kellogg has been helping me. Do the Changelings want me to find the vault for them? Or am I wrong about him?

“Me either,” Jade said. “I’ll tell you when we get wherever it is we’re going. Where are we going?”

“That’s up to you, babe.”

“Ummm, how ‘bout we find a hotel, yeah?”

Not-Professor threw her a lascivious grin. “Exactly what I was thinking.”

She managed a half-hearted nod. “Yeah. I need a shower. And a drink.”

Kellogg piped up again. “Should we be worried about those Arabs…or Iranians or whatever?”

“I doubt we’ll see them again. This is a small island, and they’ve got nowhere to hide. The shooting will bring out the police.”

The police, Jade thought. Maybe it was time to finally take Kellogg’s suggestion seriously and seek help from law enforcement. And tell them what, exactly? That there are Changelings running around?

Okay, not the police. But who else could she ask for help? “Good,” she said finally, doing her level best to sound confident and calm. “It’s settled then. Let’s find a hotel and worry about all this in the morning.”

“Got a preference? Or should we just see what comes up on Google?”

An idea started to take shape in Jade’s head. “Give me your phone for a sec. We got rid of ours, remember?”

Not-Professor did not challenge the request or question the conspicuously guilty-sounding elaboration, but simply handed his phone—Professor’s phone, Jade thought — over to her.

Her fingers were jittery on the touch-screen controls as she scrolled through the icons and finally tapped the Settings button. Her heart was hammering in her chest. Did he suspect what she was doing?

Privacy…Location Services…System Services….

There it was. An inconspicuous item in the menu marked “Frequently Visited Locations.” She tapped it and a list of locations appeared — every city he had visited on the journey through Malta, a stop in Rome. Sydney. Some place called Rosebery TAS. Sydney, again.

Rosebery. Where on earth is that, and why the hell did he go there?

She exited out and hastily typed the words “hotels Paola Malta” into the search bar. There were no lodging results, but one of the hits for “Things to Do in Malta” gave her another idea. She clicked on it, read the short paragraph, then went back to the search and refined it to “hotels close to Paola Malta.”

She glanced over and caught Not-Professor staring back. He smiled, and she tried to smile back. Crap. I’m taking too long. He knows.

No. He doesn’t. Stay cool.

“Looks like we’ll have to go to Valletta,” she said.

He shrugged. “Great thing about islands. They’re small. I guess I don’t have to tell you that.”

“Right. How does the Hotel Phoenicia Malta sound?”

“It sounds expensive,” the imposter said with a grin. “Who’s picking up the tab?”

Jade tried again to smile but it felt more like a grimace. She glanced back at Kellogg who made a show of rolling his eyes. “I’m not a bottomless pit of money, you know.”

“Yeah, but that next book is going to be a best-seller.”

“You’re not wrong about that.”

Not-Professor chuckled. “Tell me where to turn.”

Jade relayed the driving directions — the hotel was only a few minutes away — while she surreptitiously studied the road map. Getting away from Professor and Kellogg would be relatively easy, provided she had not already aroused their suspicions, but getting away from Malta might be a lot trickier, especially since anyone she encountered might be working with the Changelings.

For the first time since the nightmare began, she understood how Roche had become so paranoid. There was only one person she could trust. Just as Roche had turned to her for assistance, she would have to go to her sworn enemy.

She spent the rest of the drive in silence, speaking only when it was necessary to convey the directions to the hotel. The Phoenicia-Malta was a sprawling palatial resort — a blend of Old World colonial and 1930’s art deco, with just a hint of Moorish influence — situated just outside the City Gate of old Valletta, with a spectacular view of the harbor. Jade felt a slight pang knowing that she would not have the opportunity to indulge in the available creature comforts. She did not know where, much less if, she would sleep tonight, but it would not be here.

In the elegant hotel lobby, Jade stood by patiently while Not-Professor booked their rooms. She kept her reaction completely neutral when he asked for a double room for them to share, but her mental gears were spinning. From the moment he’d appeared, this impostor had acted as if a romantic involvement between them was well-established — the kiss, the pet names, and now the assumption that they would be sharing a bed. Where had the Changeling gotten such a ludicrous idea?

Is it ludicrous? Doesn’t part of you wish that it was true?

She shook her head to banish the idle thoughts. It didn’t matter that the Changelings had tapped into that particular fantasy; they had gotten reality completely wrong, which meant maybe they weren’t omniscient after all.

Or maybe Not-Professor had a different reason for wanting to share a room with her. What better way to keep an eye on her.

Go! Now! You won’t get a better chance.

“Hey, hon,” she said, trying to sound light and airy, and hearing instead a faint quaver. “I’m gonna find the ladies room.”

“I’m almost done here. We’ll be in the room in five minutes.”

She pressed her thighs together and danced from foot to foot. “When you gotta go…”

He nodded and turned back to the reception desk. Jade made a show of searching for the restroom as she wandered through the lobby and then angled toward the hotel lounge, where presumably there would not only be restroom facilities, but also an exit from the building. As she was about to pass out of view of the lobby however, she hesitated.

What if I’m wrong? She glanced back at them — Kellogg, fidgeting a few steps behind…Professor? Not-Professor? — and wondered again if her imagination had run away from her. Maybe the infrasound had messed with her mind. Maybe this was some kind of neurotransmitter-overload-induced delusion?

As much as she wanted to, Jade couldn’t make herself believe it.

If I’m wrong, he’ll forgive me.

She found a door that opened onto the pool deck, where she broke into a jog, darting past rows of chaise lounges and scantily clad tourists, toward the low wrought iron fence that separated the pool from the landscaped garden beyond. She vaulted the fence and kept going, heading toward the noise of traffic.

Her destination was less than three miles away, walking distance, but she needed to get there before her protracted absence was noticed. She figured she had only a few minutes — five, tops — before Not-Professor got suspicious. Time enough for a taxi to get her across Valletta and back to Paola. When she told the driver where she wanted to go, he looked askance at her, but then shrugged and started the meter.

She saw her destination from several blocks away, a tall illuminated spire — like a king’s scepter — jutting up out of the surrounding cityscape. Beside it, and only slightly less obtrusive, was an enormous dome. The surrounding area, several acres, was undeveloped, a rare thing in one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, and formed a wooded buffer zone for the campus of buildings surrounding the tower. The occupants of the religious compound evidently valued their privacy.

She handed the driver a stack of Euro notes, then leaned in close. “Listen, there’s this guy. My ex-boyfriend. He doesn’t agree with…” She nodded at the building. “Some of the decisions I’ve made. It’s probably nothing to worry about, but I’d appreciate if you could forget you ever saw me.”

“I don’t think I could ever forget you, miss,” the man said with a wink. “But fear not. Chivalry is not dead in Malta. Good luck.”

Jade breathed a sigh of relief as the cab drove away, but her sense of satisfaction at having made it this far was dulled by the realization that her next task was going to be far more challenging. Not to mention dangerous. She took a deep breath to muster her courage, and then marched up to the arched gate. She stood there for a few moments until a young man wearing what she assumed to be clerical garments came out to investigate.

His bearded visage was pinched, as if he was mildly constipated, though it was more likely that his discomfort arose from having to deal with this after-hours visitor. “Are you lost, ma’am?”

He spoke with a British accent, which sounded strange coming from someone dressed as he was, standing where he was.

“Is this the Mariam al-Batool Mosque?”

“It is.”

“Then I’m exactly where I want to be.”

“I don’t think—”

She interrupted before he could finish the brush-off. “I don’t need you to think. I need you to go get Atash Shah. I know he’s in there somewhere. He’ll want to talk to me. Tell him it’s Jade Ihara.”

Jade did not actually know for a certainty that Shah would retreat to Malta’s only mosque, but she figured the odds were good that, following the deadly encounter at the Hypogeum, he would seek the protection of fellow Muslims. Even if he wasn’t actually there, she figured someone inside would know where he was hiding out.

She was not wrong however.

The young man’s constipated frown deepened, but he reluctantly opened the gate and allowed her to step inside. “It is not appropriate for you to be here without your husband,” he said.

The scolding was half-hearted, as if he realized that her business with Shah was more important than this violation of protocol. “I say this for your own protection,” he added. “As well as to safeguard others from temptation.”

She bit back a scathing rejoinder, and simply said. “Thanks for your concern. I’m sorry, I don’t have a…scarf or anything to cover my head.”

“I will see that you are provided with one. Please wait here and do not speak to anyone.”

“Where else would I go?”

Shah’s first impulse was to run to the gate, gun in hand, and take revenge for the blood that had been spilled.

Two of the men that had accompanied him into the Hypogeum were dead. Another had been seriously wounded, and without adequate medical attention, would probably not survive the night. Whether he could get that at the Islamic Cultural Centre’s clinic facilities was anyone’s guess, but Shah dared not take the man to a hospital.

But killing Jade on the front steps of the mosque was not an option, and once his initial rage cooled a bit, his curiosity got the better of him. He could not decide if she was bold or arrogant or something else. Desperate, perhaps? Was she here to plead for her life?

Doubtful, but he was curious despite himself. He set aside his anger, along with his weapon, and headed out to meet her at the entrance. Although her hijab, provided for her by the gate attendant, framed her face and completely covered her hair, it was the first time Shah had been able to get a good look at her. He stopped and met her stare.

She did not appear to be desperate.

“I thought you’d look…” She paused, searching for the right word. “More radical.”

“That’s a hell of an icebreaker.”

She shrugged. “I meant it as a compliment.”

Shah turned to the attendant. “Give us some space.”

The young man gave a perturbed frown but moved away. Shah looked back at Jade. “Why are you here?”

“The truth? I need your help.”

Shah tried to conceal his surprise. “Help? Why would I help you?”

She folded her arms. “Why wouldn’t you? Do you even know why you’ve been trying to kill me?”

Her directness was disconcerting. “I…ah—”

“That’s what I thought. Someone handed you a BS story about how I was trying to destroy Islam, and you swallowed it whole. Did you even stop and think, just for a second?”

A red flush bloomed on Shah’s cheeks, not anger, but embarrassment. Jade had cut to the heart of it. He had let Gabrielle push him into a course of action that was so far beyond anything he had ever contemplated. He did not even recognize what he had become, what Gabrielle had turned him into.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this. No one was supposed to get hurt.” The response sounded so pathetic that he couldn’t help but be defensive. “But you kept pushing. You brought this down on yourself.”

“Do you even hear what you’re saying? You have a hit list on your website. A hit list! What did you think was going to happen?” Before he could reply, she shook her head. “Look, I’m not here to fight this out. The truth is, you’ve been played. Roche wasn’t killed by one of your followers. You were set up.”

The statement left Shah stunned and speechless.

“My intern, Rafi…They killed him and then made it look like he killed Roche. Not only to distract everyone from what they were really doing, but to get leverage over you. Manipulate you into doing their dirty work for them. And you bought it. You chased me across half of Europe, and never even stopped to ask why.” Jade stared at him, narrowing her gaze to laser-like intensity. “You know I’m right, don’t you?”

Shah ground his teeth together. “Who? Who is doing this?”

Jade offered a tight smile. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

Shah listened without comment as Jade related everything she knew or thought she knew about the conspiracy that had claimed Roche’s life and given Shah’s jihad the nudge it needed to become an actual terror campaign. She had expected incredulity, but Shah regarded her with a journalist’s inscrutability even as she fumbled for the right words to express something that was still hard for her to grasp. It was only when she started talking about Professor’s replacement that his demeanor changed.

His eyebrows came together in a frown. “How can you be sure it’s not really him?”

It was a valid question, and something Jade had not considered, but what struck her most about it was Shah’s tone. Some part of him had already recognized that she was telling him the truth.

“I…” She hesitated. Despite the fact that she had come to him for help, Shah was still the man who had effectively put a bounty on her. She needed his trust, but that did not mean she was ready to share intimate details of her life with him. “I just knew. There was something off about his behavior…I can’t really explain it. I just knew that it wasn’t the same man.”

“Could your friend have been brainwashed? Reprogrammed somehow?”

She shook her head. “It isn’t him.”

He let out a long sigh. “I think that…my partner…might be working with your Changelings. Maybe she’s even…even one of them.”

Jade could not help but notice his halting manner and the way he said the word “partner,” but she said nothing, silently prompting him to continue.

“Now that you’ve told me, it’s like the scales have fallen from my eyes. She kept pushing me to do more, to be more of an activist. I guess now I know why.”

“Is she here?”

He shook his head. “I sent her away already. I knew she was working with someone else, but she wouldn’t tell me who.”

Jade sensed that a chance to move things forward had arrived. “Well, we know who, sort of, but I don’t think we know why.”

Shah blinked at her. “It seems pretty clear to me. They’re trying to set the stage for a new religious crusade. Islam versus the rest of the world. Everyone loves a good war, and Muslims are such an easy target. Ratchet up the fear factor and give people an enemy, and they’ll trip over each other in the rush to give up their civil liberties. Meanwhile, the military industrial complex cashes in, the Israelis get more political capital to support their apartheid regime in Palestine, and the one percent takes another slice off the pathetic crumbs the rest of us are squabbling over.”

Jade cleared her throat to end the rant. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, but if that’s all this is about, then they’re going to way too much trouble. I think there’s something else going on here. It all comes back to Roche.”

“Two birds with one stone. His conspiracy theories got too close to the truth.”

“Right, but what truth? He been talking about his Changeling conspiracy for years. Why did they wait until…” She trailed off, searching her memories for the answer to her own question. “His new book.”

Shah stiffened a little. “The one where he claims that the Prophet never existed?”

Jade put her hands on her hips. “Really? You can’t see past that? He barely even mentioned that. Besides, the Phantom Time hypothesis wasn’t even Roche’s idea. No, it’s something to do with the vault.”

“At the Hypogeum.”

She looked back at him. “I forgot you were there. Did you…see anything strange?”

“Like what?”

“I guess not. The Hypogeum isn’t the vault. The Vault is…” She stopped herself. No sense in showing all her cards. “It’s somewhere else. The Hypogeum showed me where, sort of like a primitive magical Google Maps.”

Shah accepted this without question. “You think these…Changelings want to get to the vault first?”

Jade felt a little like she had finished the border on a 1,500 piece jigsaw puzzle. Good so far, but there was still a great big hole in the middle. “If the Changelings wanted the vault for themselves, it would have been smarter to let me find it for them.” She shook her head. “I think they already know where it is. They just don’t want us finding it. They knew I would keep looking, so they arranged for you to come after me.”

“After Scotland…” Shah started. “That wasn’t me. I mean, I put you on the Enemies list, but those men were acting on their own. After that, Gab…my partner kept insisting that we take you alive, so we could get you to reveal how much you knew.”

“Maybe she was also trying to protect Kellogg. I think he’s one too, too. He’s been keeping tabs on me since London. Probably waiting to see how far I would take this. Maybe the left hand didn’t know what the right was doing. Once your partner figured out that Kellogg was tagging along with me, she had to do something to keep your people from killing him.”

“My people?”

“You know what I mean. She couldn’t just come out and tell you though. And she couldn’t very well just call it all off. Not when she had worked so hard to make you the fall guy.” Shah’s expression darkened and Jade sensed that she might be losing him. “Hey, the good news is, you didn’t actually hurt anyone. Other than a little property damage, you haven’t done anything wrong.”

Shah blinked at her. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“It should.” She allowed that to sink in for a moment. “So, will you help me?”

“What exactly is it that you want me to do?”

“Help me get Professor back. And help me stop them.”

Shah frowned. “Stop them? If even half the stuff you’ve just told me is true, then these Changelings are everywhere. They’ve already won.”

Jade shook her head defiantly. “If that were true, they wouldn’t be trying to stop me from finding the vault. We can beat them.”

“If we find the vault?”

“I already know where it is.” She did not add that, that there was a very good chance that it would be impossible to get into the vault, at least for a few more decades. Or centuries. “That’s the easy part. Getting Professor back is the real challenge.”

“About that,” Shah began. “What do you…”

“I have a lead on where they might he keeping him. I managed to get a look at the location history on his phone. He spent the better part of two days in a place called Rosebery.”

“Doesn’t ring any bells. Where is it?”

“Australia. I think so anyway. My guess is that they captured him in Sydney and took him there. The impostor took his stuff after watching him for a while. I’m sure he’s still there. It would be too risky to move him.” She said the last part quickly, hoping Shah would take her word for it. “We go there. We find him. We rescue him.”

“Simple as that,” Shah retorted, sarcastically.

“You managed to track me down. You’ve got international resources. And an army at your disposal.”

Shah did not challenge this. “Why should I help you?”

“Well, for starters, it would be your way of saying: ‘I’m sorry I tried to kill you.’ Then there’s a little thing called payback. I thought you might be interested in that.”

“I’ll help you. I think this is a long shot, but I will do what I can. However, if we somehow get through this alive, I want you to take me with you to this Vault.”

“Done.”

“I’m not finished. If we find anything in that Vault that might be…let’s say confusing regarding the life of the Prophet or the origins of Islam, I want you to promise me that we’ll destroy it.”

Jade stared at him, incredulous. “Whatever happened to journalistic integrity?”

“You don’t yell fire in a crowded room, even if the curtains are smoking. There are a billion and a half Muslims in the world. It’s a very crowded room.”

Jade blew out her breath. Agreeing to Shah’s request was easy enough under the current circumstances. Her interest in the vault had nothing to do with proving or disproving the origins of the Islamic belief system.

But what if the proof is there? Do I just ignore it? Go along with the lie?

If it meant saving Professor, absolutely.

“Deal.”

TWENTY-ONE

The noise roused Professor from his drug-induced slumber. He opened his eyes but resisted the urge to rise and investigate. His brain was still mired in the soporific chemical, and he had no doubt that his body would be even more sluggish. He lay still for several minutes, listening to increasingly strident noise which his addled brain finally recognized as the howl of jet engines some distance away.

They’re moving the plane, he thought.

His last clear memory was of the masked guards closing in on him. He had raised his hands to indicate that he would offer no resistance, but they had knocked him out anyway. Judging by his physical condition, that had been only a short time ago, perhaps just a few hours, but evidently something had happened in that brief period of time to prompt his captors to alter the status quo.

He lay motionless, breathing deeply to oxygenate his blood and hopefully purge some of the drug from his system, while he mulled over the significance of this development.

Why are they moving the plane? Has this location been compromised? Or is this some new phase of the plan?

Carrera — or the woman impersonating her — had not confirmed his speculations about the camp or the motive for capturing the plane, but her response made him think he hit pretty close to the mark.

He had been captured by Changelings. Not aliens or supernatural creatures out of mythology, but ordinary humans with an extraordinary talent for impersonating real people. They were method actors, immersing themselves in their roles, not merely imitating their targets, but becoming them to such an extent that even close friends and family members would not notice the substitution.

The town he’d spied from the hillside was a prison where the passengers would live out their days, unaware of the fact that they were being used to train Changeling infiltrators. It was a rehearsal stage, where the Changeling pretenders could hone their abilities, learn real world skills and practice the art of deception and manipulation.

The noise of the jet engines continued building to a climax but was suddenly punctuated by a much more immediate sound, his door bursting open. He rolled his head sideways in the direction of the disturbance and saw a pair of barely visible silhouettes framed in the doorway.

“It wasn’t locked,” he mumbled, wondering why his captors had felt the need to make such a dynamic entrance.

One of the figures stepped forward and then the room was filled with light. Professor winced, squeezing his eyes shut against the brightness, but in the afterimage, he saw a face that he had despaired of ever seeing again.

Jade?

“It’s him!”

It’s her. But how…?

He felt her arms enfolding him, smelled her hair, oddly counterpointed by sulfur tang of recently burnt gunpowder, heard her voice, trembling with emotion as she whispered in his ear. “Oh, God, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

“Jade? How?”

Another voice, low and insistent sounded from behind her. “We gotta go! This place is about to get hot.”

“I’ll explain everything,” Jade said, speaking quickly. “But we have to get to that plane. Can you walk?”

Walk? “I don’t know. How did you find me?”

She insinuated an arm under his shoulder and eased him to a sitting position. “I think they drugged him,” she said, looking back to the other commando. “Have we got any antidote?”

His eyes were getting used to the harsh light, which he now saw came from the small tactical flashlights mounted to the rails of the H&K MP5S pistols that Jade and her companion carried. The gunpowder residue he had smelled issued from the sound suppressor fitted to the machine pistol. They were both dressed in woodland camouflage fatigues — faces painted to match — with black watch caps covering their hair and tactical vests brimming with spare magazines and grenades. The man reached into a pouch and took out an atropine auto-injector device — standard US military issue to counteract the effects of nerve agents. The atropine would probably counter the effects of the drug in his bloodstream too, but the side-effects would be a lot worse.

American military. The guy’s an operator. The thought was a far more powerful stimulant.

“No,” Professor mumbled, gripping Jade’s arm. “I’ll be okay. Just help me up.”

She gave his arm a reassuring squeeze and then turned him on the bed until his feet touched the floor. He was back in his cabin, right where his captors had left him.

He stiffened, pulling free of her grip. “How did you find me?”

“We don’t have time for this,” the other man said, but Jade held up a hand.

“We’ll make time. I told you what these people can do. He deserves an explanation.” She knelt in front of him and stared up into his eyes. “They sent someone to impersonate you, but I wasn’t fooled for a second.”

He laughed. Of course she wasn’t. He had spent two days behaving erratically, spinning falsehoods about his life so that his captors wouldn’t know which buttons to push to get him to cooperate. Later, when he’d realized the true reason for their scrutiny, he had taken every opportunity to sell the notion of a fictional romance with Jade. He had purposely fed them bad data, with predictable results. Garbage in, garbage out. Jade had seen right through the pretense.

“I realized they must have taken you hostage,” she continued, “so I called some of your old SEAL buddies.”

He raised his head and scrutinized the camouflaged face. The man didn’t look familiar, but that didn’t mean anything. Almost everyone he had served with was either retired or had been promoted out of the Teams, but those people still had the connections to launch a rescue operation.

“But how did you know where I was? I don’t even know where I am.”

“The impostor. He was…” She raised a knowing eyebrow. “Very cooperative.”

Something about that explanation nagged at him. One cabin out of dozens, he thought. A needle in a haystack, but they found me.

“We have to go,” the commando insisted again. “That bird is taking off in five minutes, with or without us.”

Jade glanced at him for a moment then returned her gaze to Professor. “You heard the man. I’ll tell you the rest on the plane.”

The plane… “The passengers. We have to get them, too.”

“That’s being taken care of. We’ll get as many as we can.”

“You don’t understand. Some of them are… Might be…” The word caught in his throat. Changelings.

Jade nodded in understanding. “We’ll keep them quarantined until we can sort out who’s who.”

But how will you know for sure? He thought it, but didn’t say it out loud. How would he know for sure? His head was still addled from the drugs. His instincts were screaming for him to slow things down but the urgency of the situation was pushing him to make a snap decision.

He struggled to stand, leaning heavily on Jade, but as soon as he was up, he turned to her, pulled her close and kissed her, unleashing months of pent-up longing, all of the passion and desire that he had never dared reveal to her.

He felt her body instantly go taut, defensive, and for a moment, he thought he had made a grave misjudgment, but then she was returning the kiss with equal fervor.

It lasted less than two seconds before she pulled away. “Okay, lover boy. I’m happy to see you too, but we’ll have to save the rest of it for when we get back home.”

He nodded but did not let go. “You know I love you, right?”

She grinned. “Pete, please. We’ve got an audience.”

“Yes, we do.” He dropped one of his hands to her machine pistol, which dangled from the sling over her shoulder. In the same motion, he spun her around, grabbed a handful of her collar, and leveled the gun over her shoulder. “Drop it or she dies!”

The commando jerked involuntarily and then went for his weapon. Professor had expected something like this, and despite the chemicals clogging up his central nervous system, he was reacting even as the man started moving. He flicked the fire selector toggle to full automatic and pulled the trigger. The compact weapon shuddered faintly in his grasp, the suppressor and the distant jet engine roar masking the sound of the multiple discharges, but the commando went down twitching. Professor released the trigger and thrust the pistol against the woman’s neck. There was a faint sizzle as the hot metal branded her flesh.

“Who are you? Your real name. It’s not Carrera and it sure as hell isn’t Jade.”

The woman started to struggle in his grasp, and given his physical condition, he doubted he would be able to restrain her much longer, so he screwed the suppressor in tighter. “That was me asking nicely,” he growled. “Who are you?”

She grunted and lifted her hands in a show of surrender. “You win.”

“Name.”

She was silent for a moment, then finally said: “Eve.”

“Sure it is. That’s two strikes. You don’t want a third.”

“We don’t use names, okay?” Her tone, both frantic and exasperated, made him think she might be telling the truth. A name — any name — would have helped him establish her nationality, and perhaps reveal the true origins of the Changeling conspiracy, but he had more important questions. “Fine. Eve it is. But you’ve still got two strikes. Do not—” He jammed the MP5S against her again for emphasis. “—lie to me again.”

She nodded.

“That’s more like it,” he said. “First question. Why this charade? What’s changed?”

“Just like I told you. We sent your replacement. Your woman didn’t buy it. She ran. We lost track of her. We need to know what she’s going to do next.”

“How does this phony rescue help you with that?”

“You know her better than anyone.”

Professor laughed despite himself. Evidently his performance had been very convincing, but even he couldn’t predict what Jade might do in such a situation. “You thought she might pull off a stunt like this. Organize a rescue mission.”

A slight nod. “It was a possibility we couldn’t ignore.”

“And my double? Did she really capture him?”

Eve shook her head. “She gave him the slip.”

“Then how would she know where to look for me?”

Eve shrugged. “She’s resourceful. We can’t take any chances.”

The noise of the jet engines seemed to reach a climax, and then settled into a low rumble. “You really are bugging out, aren’t you?”

“Like I said. We can’t take any chances.”

“You’re going to ditch the plane.”

Eve said nothing.

“That was always the plan. Ditch the plane somewhere in the middle of the ocean, where nobody’s looking. Then in a few months, or a few years, some debris will wash up on a beach somewhere and everyone will say ‘mystery solved.’” He shook her. “And the passengers? Are they aboard?”

No answer.

He pulled her head close, shouted in her ear. “You’re going to murder them all?”

The distant aircraft engines abruptly grew louder again. The noise built to a fever pitch and then the tone changed, dopplering away to nothing. The aircraft had just taken off.

“Looks like you missed your flight,” Eve remarked.

Professor gave her a tooth-rattling shake and pushed the machine pistol into her neck so hard that her knees buckled. “Call them back.”

“Can’t. Couldn’t even if I wanted to. Radios are disabled.”

“Find a way,” he shouted. “Call them back or I swear to God, I will execute you.”

For a moment, Eve was silent. Then she said, “You think he’ll really do it?”

“Who are you—?”

The dead commando abruptly sat up. “I actually think he might.”

Professor’s reaction was immediate, outpacing the part of his brain that struggled to process this unexpected twist. He pulled the trigger.

The pistol clicked and shuddered just as it had before. There was even a whiff of burnt gunpowder in the air, but he knew that Eve was uninjured. The weapon was loaded with blanks. The suppressor, which was already designed to absorb most of the gas and energy from a gunpowder explosion, had been further modified to ensure that even a close-range discharge would produce no harmful effects.

Another deception.

Even as he processed this, he felt the woman twisting out of his grip. He swiped the machine pistol at the place where her head had been, but she ducked away, and then lashed out with her fist, striking him in the solar plexus. Professor dropped to his knees, his breath gone, his grasp on consciousness slipping.

“No!”

The denial was like a war cry. He threw himself at her, flailing, and somehow succeeded in knocking her off her feet. The ferocity of his attack took not only Eve by surprise but the ersatz commando as well. The man brought his machine pistol up, either an act of desperation or yet another attempt to bluff Professor into submission, but Professor paid it no heed. He hurled himself across the room, swinging his captured MP5 like an axe, driving it straight down at the man’s head. There was a sickening crunch as the gun’s solid metal frame made contact. The gun was torn from Professor’s hands by the severity of the impact, but he made no effort to retrieve it. Instead, he pushed away from the unmoving man and rushed the still disoriented Eve a second time.

She was on hands and knees, crawling away from him, but there was nowhere for her to go. He caught up to her and grabbed hold of her collar again, heaving her to her feet. She fought, but he was ready this time. He lashed out with one foot, jamming it into the side of her knee. Cartilage and tendons popped and her leg buckled, leaving her without the leverage to resist. She howled in agony, and this time it was no act. He slammed her to the floor and planted one knee in her back, silencing her cries.

“Enough!” he shouted.

In the silence that followed, he could hear blood rushing though his veins, pounding in his head. The bottle of primal fury he had uncorked for this burst of energy was spent, a shot of nitrous oxide that had redlined his engine and left him dangerously overheated. If Eve’s confederates were lurking outside, he would be helpless to resist. No one came in though, and as the seconds ticked away and the head rush gradually subsided, he realized that no one would.

He took a deep breath, then another. When he was able to speak in a steady voice, he leaned close to Eve. “I suppose you would rather die than tell me anything, right?”

A low groan was the only reply.

“That’s what I thought. Happy to oblige you.”

“You won’t,” she rasped. “I know you. You’re not a killer.”

Professor did not miss the note of desperation in her tone. “You don’t know anything about me.” He put his hands around her neck.

“Wait—”

The rest of her plea was choked off, but after a couple seconds, he relented. “Something else you wanted to say?”

She managed a hoarse laugh. “See. I knew it. As long as there’s a chance that I can help you save the people on that plane, you won’t do it.”

There was a measure of truth in what she said, but he did not miss the subtext. “They’re already dead though, aren’t they?”

“You can threaten all you want, but it’s too late to save them. If you kill me, it’s cold-blooded—”

He tightened his grip again, held it until she started thrashing. Her arms curled back, fingers clawing at the floor.

“I can live with that,” he whispered in her ear. “It’s not like your face will haunt me. I don’t even know what you really look like.”

Her struggles continued, growing more frantic with each passing second and then she abruptly went limp. Professor waited a moment longer then let go and flipped her onto her side, into the recovery position. He massaged her neck for a moment to stimulate the flow of blood in the arteries and then felt for a pulse. Her heart was still beating out a rabbit-fast rhythm. He shook her until she drew a single gasping breath, then rolled her over, face down again. Before she could even begin to recover her wits, he drew her tactical vest down halfway, pulling her elbows together behind her back, and then cinched the straps to form a makeshift restraint system.

While it had never been his intention to actually kill her, his rationale had nothing to do with pity, weakness or even an antiquated notion of chivalry. He did not doubt that it was already too late for the passengers of Flight 815. Even if they were still alive aboard the plane — something he seriously doubted — he was out of options for calling the aircraft back. The only thing he could hope to accomplish now was to expose the Changelings, find out just how deep their conspiracy went, and maybe prevent a similar catastrophe. To do that, he needed a live prisoner, not a corpse.

He did a quick pat down, searching Eve’s pockets for useful gear or anything she might be able to use as a weapon if she got free. The magazines held only blanks but he removed them from their pouches and tossed them aside, along with the grenades which were almost certainly duds but had enough heft to be dangerous if thrown or used as a bludgeon. There was a capped syringe in one of her pockets, probably containing a dose of the tranquilizer the Changelings were so fond of using. He slipped it into his own pocket and then moved over to check on the commando. The man was truly dead this time; there was no way to fake a crushed skull. Professor did not bother with the phony combat load, but searched the man’s pockets for anything that might shed light on his identity. There was nothing, save for another syringe which Professor added to his inventory.

Eve was semi-conscious, staring at him through heavily lidded eyes, but she neither moved nor spoke as he scooped her into his arms and then heaved her onto one of his shoulders. The effects of the narcotic seemed to be easing, which meant that either it was nearly out of his system or his body was developing a tolerance for it, but he moved cautiously, as wary of a relapse as he was running into more Changelings. As he approached the door however, he was filled with a new sense of urgency. Waves of heat were radiating off the door, and the smell of wood smoke was creeping into the cabin.

Eve’s accomplice had not been speaking figuratively when he had warned her that things were about to heat up. They’re burning it all down.

TWENTY-TWO

Professor pushed the door open, careful to avoid the blast of super-heated air that rushed in, and was met by a wall of fire. The entire north end of the camp was in flames, the orange radiance so bright that he was unsure whether it was day or night. The conflagration had already reached the row of cabins directly in front of him. Nevertheless, he edged out and skirted along the front of his cabin and rounded the corner. There were a few isolated fires to the south, but for the most part the route was clear. He surmised that the Changelings had set the fire as soon as the plane was in the air, or more probably, just before taking off. Eve’s accomplice hadn’t been exaggerating about the need to hurry.

He wondered if they had actually intended to put him on the aircraft at all. That seemed unlikely since it had not waited around, but it also meant that they had arranged some other means of escaping the fires, which had probably been set to erase all traces of the Changeling camp. Judging by the height of the towering flames, the fire was not merely consuming the ramshackle cabins, but also the forest beyond, and maybe even the town on the far side of the hill — a literal scorched earth retreat.

He quickened his step to a steady jog, running down the narrow alley between the cabins and away from the approaching firestorm, until he reached the southern edge of the camp. There, just fifty yards from where he emerged, he saw something that had not been there during his earlier explorations. A parked SUV.

With some distance between himself and the fire, he saw that it was nighttime, and while the orange glow of the flames provided more than enough light by which to see, the cabins cast nearly impenetrable shadows over the vehicle. He observed it for a few seconds to make sure there was no one lurking nearby and then crossed to it. It was unlocked and the key was in the ignition, so he dumped Eve into the passenger seat, checking to make sure that her bonds were still tight, then turned the key.

The headlights revealed a pattern of parallel grooves in the earth, the tire imprints from a small convoy of off-road vehicles, which converged into a trail that led away to the south. The tire tracks were fresh. Trace evidence of a recent evacuation. He followed the tracks, keeping the SUV moving at a crawl through the rough unfamiliar terrain.

He glanced over at Eve and was surprised to find her staring back at him with eyes full of hate. There was something that looked like a flap of skin — still streaked with camouflage paint — hanging from her face, and under it, another layer of smooth unmarked skin. He considered tearing away the latex simulacrum of Jade’s face to reveal Eve’s true countenance, but decided the unmasking could wait until they were in a more secure environment. Besides, the Changeling’s true face was the least of her secrets that he wanted to know.

“Feeling talkative yet?”

She continued glowering.

“That’s okay. I’ve figured some of this out for myself already. You know how you observe your targets, learning all the little details in order to create a perfect duplicate?” He laughed. “Well, maybe not perfect. But it’s a little like being an FBI profiler. Studying behavior, reading the clues, and putting it all together. While you were observing me, I was observing you. Here’s what I came up with.

“You’ve been at this for a while. Decades. Maybe longer.” He noticed a slight eye-twitch. Okay, definitely longer, he thought. I’ll come back to that. “You’re skilled at the art of illusion. Not just masks and imitating people, but creating elaborate scenarios to manipulate us. Like that fake rescue scene. You could have doped me up with truth serum and asked me anything, but instead you tried to con me into giving up the information. Playacting is like a compulsion for you. A pathological need.”

Eve maintained her stony silence. Professor looked away, allowing the accusation to sink in for a few seconds while he negotiated the narrow trail that wound through the trees.

“I guess it only makes sense. If you’ve got a particular talent or ability, naturally you’d see everything as a problem to be solved in those terms. Like that old saying, when you’re a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. That’s how I can tell that you aren’t working for a national intelligence service.”

She looked up suddenly, evincing surprise at the statement, and inadvertently confirming his statement.

Professor grinned. “A trained spy uses the best methods available to complete a mission. A confidence artist only knows how to run a scam. Now, you’re probably wondering why I’m going on about this. Here’s the thing. Spies are also trained in how to resist interrogation methods. And they know that, no matter how tough they are, if captured, they will eventually break. I’m telling you this so that you know what’s in store for you. You’ve probably heard about ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques? Those are fun, though they aren’t much good against trained assets. You on the other hand…” He shook his head gravely.

Eve sneered. “It doesn’t matter. Even if I told you everything, you would not live long enough to share it. We are everywhere. We don’t work for some pitiful government agency. We are the governments. We are everywhere. You think we’ve been doing this for a few years? Try a few millennia. We’re everywhere. We’ve always been everywhere.”

Professor listened carefully to her rant and decided that she was telling the truth, or at least what she believed to be the truth, but he shook his head. “Nice try. I hope you can come up with something better than that when I’m pouring a gallon of water down your throat.”

She gave a disdainful snort and turned her head to avoid his gaze. “You wanted the truth. The truth is that there is not a soul on this earth you can trust.”

“Then indulge me. Answer my questions. Why take the plane? Why kill Roche? If you’re as powerful as all that, what difference does one crazy guy make?” When she did not respond, he asked one more question. “Why go after Jade?”

Even as he uttered the words, he realized that he had been looking at everything wrong. He thought back to the meeting with Roche, moments before his life had been snuffed out. He had asked the conspiracy theorist a similar question.

Why bring this to Jade?

And Jade had said, You think I can find proof that Phantom Time is real?

Roche had died before answering the question.

“You think Jade is going to find something.” He watched for a reaction, but this time, the Changeling woman maintained a steady poker face. “What? Something to do with Phantom Time?”

He thought he saw a faint glimmer of amusement in her eyes. Okay, not Phantom Time. What then? “Well, you’re right to be worried. Jade can be a regular bulldog when she puts her mind to something, but I guess you’re already figuring that out.”

“It’s not for you.”

Eve spoke so softly that it took him a moment to comprehend what she had said.

“What? What’s not for me?”

She did not answer and he had to turn his full attention back to the matter of driving as the trees thinned and the trail dipped down into a drainage ditch before rising back up to a dirt road. He down-shifted and engaged the four-wheel drive low range, then eased down the embankment. The vehicle nosed down so steeply that he had to make a conscious effort not to take his foot off the accelerator and brace himself to keep from falling. The SUV’s front bumper scraped the bottom of the ditch for a moment, then the vehicle tilted up and it was all he could do to keep his foot on the gas pedal.

When the vehicle was finally level again he turned to Eve. “Will you at least tell me which way to go?”

“That depends on where you’re going.”

“How about we go join the rest of your friends? I’m game if you are.”

She looked forward again, refusing to answer.

Professor shook his head and stared out the windshield at the deeply rutted road. From what he could tell, it ran north-south, leaving him with a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right on the first try. He could always backtrack if he hit a dead-end, but such a mistake might cost valuable time, or possibly exhaust his fuel supply, leaving him stranded. The ruddy glow of the distant fire was brightest to the north. Depending on how the road meandered, it might take them right into the heart of the blaze.

“Two roads diverged in a wood,” he muttered. “So I flipped a coin.”

He cranked the wheel to the right, turning the SUV away from the fire, but Eve stopped him. “Go the other way.”

He corrected immediately, veering to the left and, as soon as the wheels were all pointing forward, shifted the four-wheel drive back into high-range. “Why the change of heart?”

“Because I don’t know how far that road goes, but I do know that if you run out of gas out in the middle of nowhere, I’m screwed. Since you dislocated my knee, I won’t be walking out, and I doubt you’ll be able to carry me very far. It’s pretty simple math, really. Oh, and I don’t think that’s how the poem goes.”

“Poem?”

“Robert Frost. The Road Not Taken. ‘Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.’”

“Ah. I didn’t think you were familiar with Frost.”

“You’re thinking of Jeanne Carrera.”

He looked at her again, wondering about the woman under the mask. “Is it worth it?”

“What?”

“Whatever it is you get from playing this game. Wearing a mask all the time. Living other people’s lives instead of your own.”

She turned away and looked straight ahead. “You don’t know anything about me.”

He shrugged and did the same, pushing the SUV as fast as conditions would permit. The headlight beams picked up the smoke in the air, but after about two miles, the road began to veer away from the fire. Not long after that, the road came to a T-junction with a paved highway.

“Left,” Eve said without looking.

He followed this guidance, but remained wary. Her pragmatic explanation for helping him earlier did not carry as much weight now that they had reached a road more traveled. “So where are we anyway? New Zealand?”

She gave a short, humorless laugh. “I figured you would have worked that out already.”

“I’m in the ballpark, right?”

“Tasmania.”

“Ah, of course.” The island of Tasmania, located a hundred and fifty miles off the south-eastern tip of Australia, shared the same latitude as parts of New Zealand, but was about eight hundred miles further west. “Well that’s a little embarrassing.”

Tasmania was fairly large for an island, about the same size as Ireland, but with only one-eighth the population, half of which was concentrated in the capital city of Hobart, with the rest mostly occupying settlements on the coast. Nearly half of the island had been set aside for parks or nature preserves, most of which were not easily accessible by vehicle, making it the perfect place to hide from the rest of the world.

“I take it that wasn’t your permanent headquarters.”

“We don’t have ‘headquarters.’ I told you. We are everywhere.”

“Well, it won’t be too hard to root you out.” He reached over and tugged the dangling flap of latex, revealing a little more of her true face.

She looked away again, staring absently out the side window. “Not everyone wears a mask.”

That thought was chilling. If the Changelings had truly been infiltrating the halls of power for several generations, then there would be no need for them to replace world leaders. They could simply leverage their preferred candidates into the limelight, and let democracy take care of the rest.

“I don’t believe you,” he lied. “But it doesn’t matter. You’re afraid. Afraid that Jade will find something that will utterly destroy you, and that tells me that you’re a lot weaker than you want me to believe.”

She continued giving him the silent treatment, which seemed proof enough that he was right. I have to contact Jade, he thought. Let her know that she’s on the right track. But how?

How indeed, if even the omniscient Changelings could not find her?

A light appeared further down the road, the headlights of an approaching car, the first he had seen. Probably someone coming to investigate the fire, he thought. But what if it’s not? What if it’s more Changelings coming to see why Eve was taking so long?

There was something strange about the lights too, but with them shining directly in his eyes, he couldn’t quite put his finger on what was bothering him. When the lights were only about a hundred yards away, Eve broke her silence, speaking in a calm detached manner. “They drive on the left here.”

Professor hauled the steering wheel to the side, veering into the left lane, even as the sound of the oncoming car’s horn reached his ears. The SUV shuddered as he fought to regain control, and for a moment, he thought it might go tumbling down the highway. Instead, the vehicle spun around sideways, the rear end clipping a white guard post, and then rebounded away, spinning across both lanes, just missing the passing car, and hit another guard post on the right side of the road.

Something exploded in Professor’s face, showering him with a spray of hot vapor and debris, and then his face slammed into the airbag that had deployed from the center of the steering wheel. The collision combined with the unexpected punch from the safety system left him momentarily dazed, but even before his wits returned, he started groping for the door handle. It took him a few seconds to realize that the door was already open, sprung out of its frame by the crash, and that the only thing holding him a prisoner of the wrecked SUV was his seat belt.

As he wrestled with the buckle, a bright red glow from outside the vehicle caught his attention. It was the brake lights of the car he had narrowly missed. The back-up lights came on, and the car began rolling backwards down the road.

He breathed a curse and then looked over to see how Eve had fared. To his dismay, the passenger’s seat was empty. “Damn it!” He squirmed out of the seat belt and pitched forward onto the pavement, feeling acutely every bruise sustained in the crash and in his earlier struggle with Eve. Nevertheless, he got his feet under him and sprinted around to the other side of the vehicle.

There was no sign of Eve.

He searched the woods, certain that he would see her limping or crawling away. With her injured knee, she could not possibly have gotten very far… Unless she wasn’t heading for the woods.

He ducked down behind the end of the SUV and sneaked a look at the car which had come to a full stop about thirty yards away. The doors opened and four figures — all men, judging by their physique — emerged.

“Help me!” The shriek, a woman’s voice liberally accented with the local brogue, was accompanied by a flurry of movement near the crumpled front end of the wrecked vehicle. A woman shambled into the open, waving her arms. “He tried to kill me! Help!”

It was Eve, and yet it was not her, or rather not the woman he had captured in the Changeling camp. Her mask was gone, revealing smooth white skin and a cascade of blonde hair. She had also shed her commando attire, stripping down to her underwear.

“Damn it!” The men in the car evidently weren’t Changelings, just Good Samaritans, but she would turn them against him all the same.

“Help!” she cried again, falling into the arms of the closest man. “Save me!”

While the one man was occupied with comforting the damsel-in-distress, the other three began advancing. Professor pulled back into the shadows. He would never be able to convince the men that she was not the victim she purported to be. He did not think he could outrun them, which left only one option. He would have to fight his way out of this.

He dug the syringes from his pocket. The fast-acting drug might be enough to even the odds, but he would have to let the men get very close in order to inject them. He backed away from the SUV, staying in a low fighting stance, and waited for Eve’s hapless saviors to close to within striking distance. As the first man stepped into view, Professor realized he had made a grievous miscalculation. The men were armed with pistols, all of which were trained on him.

He raised his hands. “Guys, it’s not what you think.”

The plea sounded utterly ridiculous. These men were not going to take his word over that of a beautiful, half-naked blonde with bruises all over her body, and he doubted very much that Eve would implore them to simply take him prisoner until the police arrived.

“You’re American?” one of the men asked, seemingly apropos of nothing. There was something odd about his manner of speech. He did not sound like an Aussie. The man who had raised the question did not wait for an answer, but instead holstered his gun and took out his phone. He held it up as if to take Professor’s picture then turned to the others. “It’s him!”

Professor watched incredulously as the other men put their guns away and rushed forward, repeating the message in a low murmur.

It’s him.

What the hell?

“We were sent to find you,” explained the first man.

“What are you doing?” Eve screamed. “Shoot him!”

The man looked back to where his comrade was still hugging the woman protectively. “Hold her. Do not let her escape.”

Professor ignored Eve’s cries and continued to regard the other man warily. “Sent by whom?”

“Mr. Atash Shah.”

Professor now recognized the odd lilt to the man’s voice. Indian, or more likely, Pakistani. His swarthy features, along with a long but well-groomed beard, suggested the latter.

He also recognized the name. Shah. The founder of the Crescent Defense League. The man who had put Jade on his hit list. Wonderful, he thought, miserably. And I didn’t think things could get worse.

“And Dr. Jade Ihara,” the man continued.

“Jade?” He felt a glimmer of hope, but then just as quickly grew wary again. It’s another trick. Eve’s dire pronouncement still rang in his ears. There is not a soul on this earth you can trust.

Except Shah had no reason to work with the Changelings, much less with Jade. And how would Jade even know to approach Shah, someone who was actively targeting her? If this was another Changeling ploy, it was positively Byzantine.

“Jade sent you?” he repeated. “I want to talk to her.”

The man looked at his phone again. “The reception is a bit spotty out here, but I’ll try.”

A moment later, he brought it to his ear and began speaking in English. “It’s Ahmad. We found him…Yes…Yes… He wants to speak to Dr. Ihara.” His face broke into a broad grin as he held the phone out.

Professor regarded the mobile device cautiously—

Not a soul on this earth you can trust.

— then accepted it and held it to his ear. “Jade?”

“Prof?”

The sound of her voice, the palpable concern and relief in her tone, brought tears to his eyes, yet he could not forget that Eve had perfectly mimicked Jade’s voice. “How do I—?”

“Know it’s really you?” she finished the question before he could get the words out. She thought for a few seconds, then said: “Where did you get that ridiculous hat?”

“I don’t own a ‘ridiculous hat,’” he said quickly. “But I do have a very dashing and stylish fedora that I picked up in Costa Rica last year. My turn.” He searched his memory for some trivial bit of shared information that no Changeling would ever guess at. Finally, he said. “Jade. I love you.”

There was a long silence at the other end. “Knock it off, Professor. And get your ass back here. I need you.”

It’s really her.

“Jade, I…” A short triple-beep signaled the termination of the call. He sighed and finished the sentence. “I don’t know where you are.”