Oracle

FOURTEEN

Jade stared up at the decorative pediment above the entrance to the British Museum, and for the first time since arriving in London, felt her mood start to lighten. The triangular relief, which featured sculpted figures and sat atop a row of Ionic columns, looked as it might once have decorated a Greek temple. What Jade found most interesting about the piece was the central figure, which stood tallest of all; a woman who Jade thought might be the goddess Athena. In her outstretched left hand, she held a golden orb.

She pointed it out to Dorion. “I think we’re on the right track.”

The physicist gazed up at the sculpted figure. “She is the embodiment of science. The sculptures tell the story of the progress of civilization. You see primitive man hiding behind a rock there on the left. He receives enlightenment from the angel and then learns art, poetry, drama and music, until he becomes educated man, the master of his world.”

“I was talking about the sphere in her hand. It seems like a good omen.”

Dorion gave a pragmatic shrug.

His ambivalence did not dampen her rising spirits.

Ophelia’s private jet — a Gulfstream V — was in most respects more luxurious than the hotel room Jade had been forced to abandon in San Jose — the only thing missing was a hot bath — but no matter how it was dressed up, Jade always found air travel to be an exhausting experience. Her funk had only increased when they had arrived at Biggin Hill field, a small airport on the southeastern edge of the Greater London area. Just as she and Dorion were about to depart, Professor had asked, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

She felt like screaming. Instead, she had managed a confident smile. “I’ll be fine. You and Ophelia enjoy your Greek holiday.”

He frowned. It was a reaction, but not the one she’d been hoping for. “It’s only going to take a couple hours to check out the museum. Maybe we should just wait for you.”

For such a smart guy, he can really be clueless sometimes. “It might take longer. You guys stick to the plan. Paul and I will catch up as soon as we’re done here.”

And that had been the end of that. Jade and Dorion, accompanied by a four-man security detail, climbed into a big gas-guzzling — and probably armor-plated — SUV and headed north toward London proper. She wasn’t even sure why the thought of Professor running off to Greece with Ophelia, who was about as real as a vintage Barbie doll, bothered her; it wasn’t like she and Prof were an item. She had contemplated telling their driver to skip the museum and take her to a hotel; maybe that long awaited soak and some room service would lift the dark cloud. Now, she was glad she had kept the idea to herself.

The museum was spectacular.

After passing under the auspicious personification of Science, with her golden orb, Jade found herself in what looked at first glance like an open plaza, surrounded by elegant Old World buildings. In fact, the entire space was indoors, enclosed by a glass roof, which spread out like an umbrella from a circular structure in the center. The round building was the Reading Room, all that remained of the old British Library, which had been badly damaged by bomb attacks during World War II. The other “buildings” were in fact just facades, and each one led into a different wing of the museum. The British Museum was the first ever public museum, and boasted what was arguably the finest collection of art and history in the world. With more than eight million pieces in all, Jade almost felt guilty for being so interested in just one.

Almost.

They made their way into the Enlightenment Gallery, a long room on the eastern side of the Great Court. The Enlightenment Gallery was in the original 18th century museum building, and was a tribute to spirit, which had led to the creation of the museum. Its shelves and display cases contained a large and diverse assemblage of items gathered from around the world by famous British explorers and champions of enlightenment like James Cook, Charles Darwin, and Howard Carter. The collection even included a clockwork brass orrery from the 1750s.

Another good omen.

The Shew Stone and other relics once used by Dr. Dee, were located in the Religion and Ritual section of the room. The red painted display case featured a large mirror of polished obsidian, a seal stamped on a sheet of what looked like gold, and three wax tablets, engraved with pentacles, seven-pointed stars and other occult symbols. The small globe of smoky quartz sitting on a plain black tripod, looked disappointingly ordinary by comparison.

Jade placed a palm against the glass cover and closed her eyes. Nothing. She turned to Dorion. “Let’s find a curator and see if they’ll be willing to extend us a little professional courtesy.”

It took an hour for them to finally meet the principal curator of the Enlightenment Gallery, a woman who introduced herself as Dr. Allenby.

Jade extended a hand. “I’m Dr. Ihara,” she said, resisting the impulse to adopt a friendlier, less formal posture. “I’m currently working with the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico at Teotihuacan.”

It wasn’t technically a lie; she had not resigned her position, nor to the best of her knowledge, had she been fired. Presumed dead is not the same as terminated, she told herself.

“This is my colleague Dr. Dorion.”

Dorion extended a hand to Allenby, and when she reached out, he took hers and made a gentlemanly bow as if to kiss it. “A pleasure to meet you, cherie.”

Jade recalled how awkward her own first meeting with Dorion had been, and had to suppress the urge to giggle. “We were hoping you could help us with some research.”

Allenby, still smiling in response to Dorion’s charms, spread her hands. “I make no promises, but I’ll help if I’m able.”

“We’d like to have a look at some of the relics in your Religion and Ritual collection, specifically an obsidian mirror and a crystal globe, both of which are believed to have originated in Mexico.”

“You’re talking about the Dee artifacts? I knew that the mirror was an Aztec piece, though I wasn’t aware that the origin of the crystal had been determined. Its provenance has always been a bit dodgy.”

“That’s actually what we’re hoping to establish,” Jade said. She was winging it, but it seemed to working. The obsidian mirror gave her a plausible connection to the Dee artifacts. “Not formally, you understand,” she added hastily. “Not yet at least. We just want to have a quick look.”

“It shouldn’t be a problem, thought I’d rather prefer it if you could wait until after hours. If word got out that I let you have a look at it, there’d be no end of trouble.”

“Trouble?”

Allenby rolled her eyes. “You wouldn’t believe how many people want to put their hands all over Dr. Dee’s magical crystal ball. It’s an obsession for them. And not just the kids. I’ve had businessmen, actors, MPs even, offer me thousands of pounds if I’d just let them have it for a night.”

Jade cast a surreptitious glance at Dorion. “Is that so?”

“And the really daft bit is that the diabolical Dr. Dee probably never even touched it.”

Coming on the heels of the previous statement, that revelation hit Jade like a physical blow. “He didn’t?”

Allenby quickly backpedaled. “I’m sorry, I really shouldn’t have said that. You must know how it is with acquisitions. These things pass through a lot of hands before they come to us. The Dee artifacts came from the collection of Horace Walpole, who lived more than a century after Dee. Lord Walpole was a collector, so he could have got that crystal anywhere. We actually found it in the gem collection. We put it with the Dee items because of his reputation for using crystal balls, and who knows? Maybe we got it right.”

Jade pondered this for a moment. It had never occurred to her that the crystal ball in the display might not be the same orb Gil Perez had used to read Dee’s manuscript. “Were there other crystal balls?”

“Quite a few of them, I should imagine. But I know of only one other. It’s in the collection at the Science Museum. It’s my understanding that the provenance of that piece is rather better established than this one.”

“We’re going to have to have a look at that one too.”

“I’ll ring the curator at Science,” Allenby volunteered. “Tell him to expect you.”

“Thank you. I appreciate that very much.” Jade turned to Dorion. “It looks like this is going to be more work that I expected. So much for good omens.”

Two hours later, Jade’s dire forecast took an even more discouraging turn.

With the museum closed for the day, Allenby let them have a look at the artifacts in the Enlightenment Gallery. Jade made a show of examining the authentic Aztec obsidian mirror, which Dee had actually used in his divination rituals, and then inspected the ball of smoky quartz. Whether or not the occult scholar had used it, Jade could not say, but she felt nothing — no sense of distorted space-time, not even the strange tingling of the sphere on Isla del Caño. She dutifully took a few pictures and notes, and did her best to hide her disappointment.

“Any chance of getting a look at the crystal in the Science Museum?”

“Ah, that.” Allenby sighed. “I’m afraid I have rather a bit of bad news. The Dee crystal ball has been removed from the permanent display. It’s now in the archives at Blythe House. Inventory number A127915.” She handed Jade a sheet of paper. “Here. I wrote it down for you. You can take this to Blythe house in the morning and request a viewing.

“I should warn you though,” Allenby went on. “About ten years ago, that item was stolen. The thief smashed the display case, grabbed it and ran. The police later apprehended the thief and recovered the item, but…” She sighed. “There’s some question about the authenticity of the item that was returned.

“Just between you and me, there are some who suspect that the theft was engineered to cover the fact that the original had been replaced by a fake years before. Remember what I told you about people wanting to get their hands on those artifacts? It’s possible that an unscrupulous curator switched it with a fake decades ago, and sold it off to a wealthy occult enthusiast. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that has happened.”

Jade felt her disappointment give way to ire. This was turning into a wild goose chase. There has to be a better way to go about this than bouncing from one museum to the next, asking for permission to fondle John Dee’s crystal balls.

She shook Allenby’s hand and put on her most winning smile. “Thanks so much for following up on that for us, and for letting us inspect these artifacts. I’m curious about one thing: If, as you suggest, the crystal ball from the Science Museum was replaced with a fake…who, in your professional opinion, would be the most likely suspect?”

Allenby seemed astonished at the question. “Why, I haven’t the slightest. I make it a habit to avoid the criminal element whenever possible.”

“Of course,” Jade said quickly. “I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. It’s just…” She recalled something Allenby had said earlier. “Well, you know how it is with acquisitions. You know who the collectors are, and who has a reputation for…questionable dealing.”

“I honestly have no idea.” Allenby still seemed a little ruffled by Jade’s inquiry. “Occult enthusiasts are a different breed than most art collectors. They care nothing for the intrinsic or artistic value of a piece; only whether or not it has,” she waggled her fingers dramatically, “strong juju. They are also very secretive.”

“Just point me in the right direction.”

Allenby sighed. “Well, there is this one fellow…”

According to his website, Gerald Roche was the world’s leading authority on the life and career of Dr. John Dee. He had not merely written the book on Dee, he had written several.

To his legions of devotees, Roche was a visionary and a crusader, piercing the manifold veil of deception that had been thrown over the eyes of the world by a diabolical conspiracy intent on enslaving the masses. His supporters claimed he had accurately predicted the international banking crisis, the near-collapse of the European Union, and even accurately foreshadowed, nearly a decade in advance, groundbreaking theories about quantum physics and the true nature of the universe. His suggestion, which had seemed at the time ludicrous, was that the universe was a holographic projection, like something from Star Trek, controlled by an omniscient computer that had been misidentified as “God.”

According to most reputable news agencies, he was both deluded and dangerous. Roche preached a strange blend of conspiracy theory and New Age mysticism, which included the evidently sincere belief that world leaders, bank executives, and captains of industry were all renegade computer programs he called ‘changelings’ — so named for the demonic faerie creatures of folklore that were substituted for human children — engaged in an ongoing plot to control humanity.

“Never heard of him,” Jade said, when Dr. Allenby had supplied Roche’s name.

Allenby had mentioned Roche’s enduring fascination with Dee and hinted at the man’s somewhat volatile nature; Jade had learned the rest for herself.

“I can see why this guy tops the list of suspects,” she told Dorion as they researched Roche on the Internet that evening at their hotel. “He’s obsessed with Dee. And he definitely has the money to get whatever he wants.”

Roche did not occupy the same tier of wealth as Ophelia Doerner, but the former Minister of Parliament, turned professional conspiracy theorist, netted a hefty annual income from his publishing empire, syndicated radio show, and personal appearances. Among those who either worshipped or feared him, he was a household name, but as was the way of such things, outside of that niche, few knew of his existence. Those who had merely heard of him dismissed him as a kook.

Even among his supporters, there was some debate about whether his more extraordinary claims were meant to be taken literally. Some averred that the “changeling” plot was merely a metaphor for the fact that rapacious bankers and deceitful politicians had relinquished all trace of their humanity in their quest for wealth and power. Jade thought that explanation probably made a lot more sense; Roche was too successful to be completely “off his nut,” to quote Allenby.

That he was obsessed with Dee was evident, not merely from the numerous books he had written, but also from the fact that Roche was known to be a collector of Dee memorabilia and had for more than a decade lived in Mortlake, not far from the site of Dee’s summer house — the very place where Perez had used the crystal Eye to interpret the manuscript describing the chamber beneath Teotihuacan.

“How do we find out if he has Dee’s crystal?” asked Dorion.

“I thought I might just ask.”

“You’re just going to walk up to him and say ‘Please, may I look at you stolen property?’”

“Something like that,” she smiled, and then stretched. “Well, I don’t know about you, but I am seriously jet lagged. I think I’ll turn it.”

Dorian rose from the table. “I don’t suppose you would care to join me for a nightcap?”

The invitation caught Jade completely off guard, and for a moment, all she could do was gape at him. He seemed to sense her discomfort and quickly backpedaled. “Or if you’re not feeling up to it, I understand. It has been a long journey.”

Jade was still trying to process what she was hearing. Dorion was a nice enough guy, smart and charming, and completely different from…him. She had even gotten past that awkward first impression; given their shared experience with the dark matter-fueled premonitions, they had a lot in common. Yet somehow, he just wasn’t the sort of man she could see herself with.

I haven’t exactly had much luck with the kind of guys I can see myself with.

She couldn’t help wonder what Professor was doing right now. Perhaps sharing a romantic dinner with Ophelia in some Greek café, swooning over her plastic beauty.

Maybe I’m overthinking this.

But dalliances and one night stands weren’t her style. For all her flaws, and she knew she had a few, she didn’t like playing games with other people’s emotions. Maybe Dorion wasn’t interested in something meaningful — he was French after all, though she couldn’t get a read on whether he was the love ‘em and leave ‘em type — but that wasn’t what she wanted.

So what do you want, Jade?

“I’m really beat tonight.” She tried for a disarming smile. “Maybe some other time?”

She wasn’t sure if she really meant it, or if she was just trying to let him down easy. Maybe both.

“Of course. Let me walk you to your room.”

She accepted the chivalrous gesture and when they reached her door, she even gave him a quick peck on the cheek. “Bright and early,” she said, before closing the door on him.

As tired as she was, sleep eluded her for a long time thereafter. Yet, it was not doubt about whether she had made the right decision in turning Dorion away that occupied her thoughts. Instead, it was the image of Professor and Ophelia together that kept her tossing and turning.

FIFTEEN

Hodges felt Gutierrez’s scrutiny cut through him like a laser beam, and yet the handsome billionaire had not spoken a single word of recrimination. Instead, the man had listened patiently to Hodge’s report, asking pertinent questions in an incisive tone, without even once giving voice to his exasperation at the evident failure.

It had not been difficult to establish the identity of the mysterious savior who had appeared to whisk Chapman and the others away at the last second, but that knowledge only complicated matters. Ophelia Doerner wasn’t somebody he could go after with impunity. The only option he felt he had was to return in disgrace to Mexico, make his report to Gutierrez, and accept the consequences.

The billionaire continued to regard him across his desktop, then he abruptly leaned forward and picked up a mobile telephone. He composed a brief text message, then set the phone down again.

“You were right not to pursue this woman,” he said, finally breaking his long silence. “It would have complicated matters, though what she is trying to do is exactly what we are trying to prevent.”

“So what happens now?”

Gutierrez waved the question away, but then elaborated. “Damage control. I think it is safe to say that your cover is blown. You’ll be working directly for me now.”

It wasn’t a job offer; Hodges had just been drafted.

An electronic ringing sound, like a first-generation cordless phone, signaled an incoming Skype message, which Gutierrez answered with a keystroke. Hodges could not see the screen, but he recognized the voice from the other end of the call. “Andres? What’s so important that you pulled me off the back nine?”

“It’s your sister, Lee. She’s interfering with our prosecution of an Alpha event.”

Hodges’ eyes went wide. The person on the other end of the call was Laertes Doerner, Ophelia’s brother. That Gutierrez and Doerner were on a first name basis did not surprise Hodges; that Doerner was evidently part of the Norfolk Group did, though on further reflection it made perfect sense. Despite the family reputation for advocating the kind of polarized political views that often fostered the sort of upheaval that the Norfolk Group was trying to prevent. At the end of the day, Doerner, like any other wealthy man, was mostly interested in self-preservation.

There was a disgusted snort at the other end of the line. “Fi’s a dreamer, Andres. Whatever she’s mixed up in can’t be of any consequence.”

“An Alpha event, Lee. You know as well as I do what that means. You helped draft the protocols.”

“Well, sure I—”

“This call is a courtesy, Lee. I am going to be overseeing this affair personally. If you want Ophelia kept safe, then you need to be completely forthcoming. It’s the only chance she has.”

There was a long silence, in which the only sound from the speakers was a faint crackle like static white noise, and then Doerner gave a defeated sigh. “What do you need from me?”

“She left Costa Rica a few hours ago. I presume she’s on one of your planes. I need to know where she’s going.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

There was a click and the white noise vanished.

Hodges sat very still mentally processing the fact that he had just listened in on a conversation between two of the richest men on earth.

“He’s a pampered fool,” Gutierrez said, without prompting. “He may have inherited the greater share of the family wealth, but his sister got the brains. It will be a pity if we have to kill her.”

Hodges felt like he had to say something. “You’re taking over?”

“That’s right. That’s how I prefer to operate. The only way to ensure a task is done right is to do it yourself.” He cracked a smile. “Relax. I’m not angry about your failure in Costa Rica. Well, not very angry. You had to make a difficult decision. Not killing Ophelia Doerner was probably the right call.”

That had only been one consideration for Hodges. The fact that Ophelia’s men might have shot down the second helicopter before they could get close enough to sink the yacht had been a much more persuasive factor, but Hodges decided it was best not to bring that up.

“This way,” Gutierrez continued, “if a situation like this arises again, you won’t have to make a judgment call. I’ll be there to do it for you.”

“You’ll order her to be killed?”

Gutierrez expression was as hard and cold as ice. “It’s an Alpha event. We aren’t playing games here.”

Another electronic tone sounded and the billionaire glanced at his cell phone. “Ah. Laertes made good on his promise. Ophelia Doerner is on her way to Delphi, Greece. And so are we.”

SIXTEEN

Because he was a seasoned world traveler — as a SEAL, he had some experience with grabbing sleep whenever a chance presented itself — Professor rarely suffered from jet lag. The Gulfstream had arrived in Athens after dusk, and they had continued on to Delphi by car, a journey of more than seventy miles, arriving at nine p.m., which was early by local standards, but too late to accomplish anything useful. So, he had retired to his hotel room and promptly fallen asleep.

He awoke with the sun, hit the tiny bathroom to take care of the obligatory “three S’s,” and dressed in the tastefully expensive attire provided by the hotel concierge. He was just getting ready to head down to the hotel lounge for breakfast when a knock came at the door.

He opened it to find Ophelia, likewise looking refreshed and, he had to admit, rather lovely. She wore a sea green raw silk halter-top sun-dress and less make-up than he would have expected.

“I have a surprise for you,” she said, producing a large gift box tied with a blue ribbon.

“And here I didn’t get you anything,” he said, with mock-guiltiness, accepting the box and giving the ribbon a tug.

“Maybe you’ll find just the right thing at the sanctuary,” she replied with a mischievous grin.

Inside the box, he found a hat — his hat — cleaned, blocked and restored to near-perfect condition. “Wow. Thank you.”

“It’s your lucky talisman,” she said. “Now our success is guaranteed.”

He chuckled. “Well, I don’t know about that. This was a long shot to begin with, and even if we find what we’re looking for, all it’s really going to tell us is that we were right.”

“Oh, don’t be such a pessimist.”

“Sounds like something Jade might say,” he muttered. He felt bad that Jade wasn’t here, but when Jade got an idea in her head, there was no reasoning with her.

If Ophelia heard his comment, she gave no indication. “Now, let’s see about some food. They do a traditional Greek breakfast here. I love the galatopita, but they also make an omelet with graviera and siglino that is spectacular.”

He took the culinary recommendations in stride, but as he headed out the door behind her, the significance of what she had said hit home. “You’ve been here before.”

“Several times.” She looked at him thoughtfully as they descended the stairs to the hotel restaurant. “I thought you knew. I’m very serious about this. I was coming to Delphi long before I ever met Paul. Of all the stories, all the myths and legends, this is the one that has always held the most promise.”

He waited until they were seated, with demitasse cups of sweet Greek coffee set before them, to ask what she meant by that.

“You must know something of the history of Delphi. There is something special about this place.” She took a sip of her coffee. “I’m sure you’ve heard the rational explanations for the prophecies given by the oracle.”

He nodded. “The oracle, a woman who was always called Pythia, supposedly inhaled vapors rising from a crevice under the Temple of Apollo and chewed bay leaves to enter a trance. It was up to the priests of the sanctuary to interpret her ramblings, which they did in a way so vague they could never be wrong, and which usually pleased the supplicant enough to offer a large gift to the temple. One of the most notorious was the prophecy given to Croesus. He was told that if he went to war with the Persians, he would destroy a great empire. He took that as advice to launch a war, which he lost, and when he confronted the oracle, he was told that the great empire he had destroyed was his own.”

She smiled patiently. “Yes, anyone who’s studied the oracle knows that one, but do you know the rest? How Croesus tested the oracle? Or the oracle’s prophecy that his kingdom would last until the Medes put a mule on the throne?”

Professor was not about to let Ophelia show him up. He searched his memory for more information about the Ionian king whose legendary wealth was remembered even into modern times. “Croesus was defeated by Cyrus, half-Mede, half-Persian. Mule could be interpreted to mean ‘half-blood.’”

Ophelia nodded. “The oracle Pythia endured here for more nearly a thousand years, and more than five hundred prophetic pronouncements have been discovered. Some of them are, as you say, open to interpretation, but many of them are quite specific and startlingly accurate, particularly those that involve world events on a grand scale. It’s easy for us to play the skeptic, but do you believe the oracle’s prestige and reputation for infallibility, could have lasted that long if she were just spouting fortune cookie prophecies?”

Professor shrugged. “As a scientist, I have to follow the principle of parsimony. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary explanations. I can’t discount what I’ve seen in the last few days, but I’m not going to let down my guard and start believing everything.”

Ophelia reached out and clasped his hand. “Maybe today, you’ll see something that will change your mind.”

With his “lucky talisman” atop his head, Professor followed Ophelia along a trail that led out of the modern city of Delphi, across the evergreen-dotted slopes of Mount Parnassus, with a spectacular view of the azure waters of Kólpos Itéas and the Gulf of Corinth. Every now and then, he would catch a glimpse of Ophelia’s security detail, but the men seemed to have learned a thing or two since Costa Rica, and for the most part, remained inconspicuous.

The half-mile walk ended with a steep descent that led past the ruins of a theatre and the site of the Sanctuary of Apollo, where the Oracle at Delphi had delivered her prophecies. They passed by the Castalian Spring, where both the devotees and visitors to Delphi would ritually bathe themselves before approaching the oracle, and eventually arrived at the Athenian treasury, built to commemorate the Battle of Marathon. In ancient times, there had been several such storehouses on the site, but most had fallen into ruin. The Athenian treasury, a blocky structure of cut stone that looked a lot like a cross between a bank vault and a Greek temple, was as much a masterpiece of modern restoration techniques as it was ancient architecture.

Ophelia led Professor down the stone walk below the treasury and showed him a stone slab upon which rested a conical rock, about four feet tall, that looked a little like the top half of an egg or the nose cone of a jet.

“The Omphalos,” she said, with a magisterial flourish. “One of them anyway. There’s a better one in the museum.”

“That must be the one I’m thinking of,” Professor replied. “It looks sort of like a giant potato wrapped in a fishnet, right?”

“That’s not what I see when I look at it,” Ophelia replied, raising a playful eyebrow. Then her expression became more serious. “You know the significance of the Omphalos, right?”

He nodded. “The Greeks believed it marked the center of the earth — literally the navel of the Earth goddess Gaia. Of course, the exact location was subject to change. According to the myth, Zeus sent out two eagles from different places, and told them to meet at the center of the world. That turned out to be Delphi, so they marked the spot with an Omphalos stone.”

“That’s one story,” Ophelia replied. “Another is that Apollo slew the dragon Python, who was guarding the navel of Gaia. The vapors that rose from beneath the Temple of Apollo were believed to be the gases of Python’s body decomposing.

“There may actually be some truth to that story,” she went on as they headed back toward the museum. “The site was inhabited in the Bronze Age, by the Mycenaean Greeks, and it is believed that there was a temple to Gaia here, and a Sybil who prophesied the future, as early as the fourteenth century B.C.E. The Mycenaean civilization collapsed of course, and the site was abandoned for many centuries, until the rise of Classical Greek culture. So perhaps Apollo ‘slew’ Python in the sense that the worshippers of Apollo arrived and took over the site for their own religious practices.”

After touring the two thousand year old remains of an ancient civilization, the Archaeological Museum at Delphi was something of a surprise architecturally speaking. Instead of trying to mimic the Classical design, the building was modern looking, with plain geometric lines, and lots of windows to provide natural light. The reason for this became apparent as Professor stepped inside; the museum architects did not want their contribution to Delphi to overshadow the historical riches housed within.

They found the more famous Omphalos stone displayed near the entrance of the museum, an orange-colored, bullet-shaped stone, several feet high. The exterior was carved to resemble an elaborate rope net. The stone was hollow through the center, and had acted as a sort of nozzle, focusing and concentrating the mystical vapors that the oracle would have breathed in the innermost chambers of the Apollo sanctuary. This was the Omphalos that was reproduced on coins and artwork dating back to the Classical Greek era, but it was widely believed that this stone was a copy from early Roman times.

The Romans, Professor learned, had also venerated the site and consulted with the oracle, at least until the fourth century C.E. when Emperor Theodosius I had ordered the temple destroyed and forever silenced the prophetic voice of Pythia.

The museum contained numerous treasures brought from distant lands; spoils of war brought to honor the oracle who had guided kings and heroes on adventures abroad. One of the most spectacular pieces was the Sphinx of Naxos, a seven-foot tall marble structure with outstretched wings, dating back to the year 570 B.C.E. Once, it had stood atop a column and gazed out over the waters of the Gulf below. There were far fewer artifacts from the Mycenaean period, but a helpful English-speaking tour guide filled in some of the gaps in his knowledge.

“There was almost certainly a shrine here during the late Minoan and Mycenaean periods, but very few physical artifacts remain. On the way up to the Sanctuary of Apollo, you will see the Sybil Rock. That is where the ancient oracle, the one before Pythia, delivered her prophecies.”

Professor thanked the guide, but before the man could leave, Ophelia asked him, “What happened to the original Sybil?”

The man shrugged. “We know very little about the Bronze Age history of the site. There are many possible explanations for what happened to the Mycenaeans — war, internal conflicts, earthquakes — the answer is probably a combination of these factors. For many years, it was believed that the Mycenaeans were destroyed by invading Dorians, but it seems more likely that the invasion was more a cultural change than a military campaign.”

“Was there a Sybil or an oracle here during that time?”

The tour guide spread his hands apologetically. “That period is called the Greek Dark Ages for a reason. We just don’t know. The history of Delphi, to the best of our knowledge, begins when Apollo, in the form of a dolphin, brought priests here to establish his sanctuary.”

“I’m sorry, did you just say a ‘dolphin’?”

The guide nodded. “That’s how Delphi got its name. Apollo Delphinos — Apollo the Dolphin.”

As the man left to rejoin his tour group, Professor took Ophelia aside. “The sphere we found in Costa Rica also had a dolphin glyph. Dolphins were sacred to the Phoenicians, which we would expect from a sea faring people.

“During the same period when the Mycenaean civilization was collapsing,” he continued, “the rest of the Mediterranean region was under attack by a group of raiders called the Sea People. Some contemporary accounts mention the Sea People in connection with the destruction of Knossos and other Mycenaean cities.”

“Were the Sea People the Phoenicians?”

“You won’t find a serious historian who believes that, but it’s interesting that the Phoenician cities were left untouched by the Sea People. It’s been suggested that they were more of a loose confederation of pirates, so why not Phoenicians? Or maybe the Sea People plundered the Omphalos sphere, and sold it to a Phoenician trader who was headed east. Maybe the old myth got it backward. Maybe the ‘dolphin’ wasn’t Apollo bringing the priests here; maybe it was the Phoenicians taking the Ompahalos — the original Omphalos away. They sailed east, across the Pacific, and when they spotted the dolphins, they decided that was the place to establish a new temple, a new oracle.”

“Perhaps the theft of the Omphalos is what caused the fall of the Mycenaens,” suggested Ophelia, warming to the subject. “The Sibyl’s guidance is what protected them, and when the source of her visions was taken, they were unable to prepare for the disasters that followed.”

“There’s a problem though. If the original Omphalos was a dark matter sphere — and how it got here in the first place, I have no idea — but if it was, and the Phoenicians took it, then how was it that the Delphic oracle was able to continue making accurate predictions, a thousand years later?”

“Perhaps there is some residual effect, like the way a magnet can temporarily magnetize a piece of metal. Or maybe that sphere was part of a larger source of dark matter. You’ll recall that Paul said it might be possible for an object with a strong dark matter field to seed another. Or the sphere you found was just such a created Omphalos. Possibly, the original is still here.”

“Paul also said this was the first place he looked. If there is a dark matter field here, he would be the person most likely to find it.”

Ophelia spread her hands. “Have you ever lost something important — your keys or maybe your wallet — and you looked everywhere for it, and then you went back and looked again and found it in a place you had already checked two or three times? Maybe our search is like that?”

Professor chuckled. “Yeah, I guess you always find something in the last place you look. So if there is some lingering dark matter here, how do we find it?”

“Simple,” Ophelia said. “We look again.”

They made their way back outside, up the trail to the site where the Temple of Apollo had once stood, the place where the oracle had delivered her pronouncements. The tour guide that had answered their questions in the museum was now delivering his canned speech about the procedures that had been followed when Delphi had been, figuratively at least, the center of the ancient world.

“You might have seen pictures of the oracle, a beautiful young woman, levitating in a cloud of mystical vapors,” he was saying, “but that’s not quite the truth. It’s true that in the early days, a young virgin was chosen — being beautiful was not a requirement — consecrated and given the title Pythia. Or I should say, virgins since there were at times, as many as three Pythias, sharing the duties, which involved breathing poisonous volcanic gasses. Communing with the gods was not good for one’s health and the life expectancy of a woman chosen to be Pythia was not long. You children, listen to your parents when they tell you not to smoke cigarettes.”

There was a ripple of laughter, right on cue.

“The idea that Pythia was a young virgin is also somewhat inaccurate. Sometimes, the women chosen were older, married women. Later on, they were chosen from among the very poor and uneducated. In any case, those seeking the advice of Pythia never actually saw her. She sat behind a wall, breathing the vapors and chewing bay leaves. The questions were written down and given to the priests, who gave them to Pythia and received her answer, which they in turn wrote down in the form of a poem.

“And it wasn’t as simple as writing your question and handing it over. There was an elaborate procedure that had to be followed. A supplicant had to travel to Delphi in person. If you think the drive here from Athens took you a while, just imagine what it was like two thousand years ago. The supplicant would have to provide a gift to the oracle and present their question to be reviewed by the priests. Just as with today’s psychics and mediums, there were some questions the oracle didn’t want to be asked; questions that might have made people question her abilities.”

More chuckles. It was evident that the tour guide wasn’t a believer.

“Pythia also had to go through quite a bit of preparation to get ready for communing with the gods. She would have to undergo a period of fasting, followed by a ritual cleansing at the baths, which I showed you on the way up here, and then make the final ascent to the Temple here. Because the oracle would only speak nine times a year, on the seventh day of each month from spring to fall, a supplicant might have to wait for weeks to have his question answered.”

“Why the seventh day?” asked Professor, raising his hand like student in a classroom.

“Seven was a sacred number for Apollo,” the guide replied, offhandedly as if he had heard the question many times before, and then went right back into his spiel. Professor however had stopped listening.

He leaned close to Ophelia. “I need to talk to Paul. Can you arrange that?”

She nodded. “Why?’

“I think I know why he didn’t find anything here. He wasn’t looking in the wrong place, but he might have been looking at the wrong time.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m not sure I do either. But I think he might.”

SEVENTEEN

A small park, nestled between blocks of flats, occupied the land where Dr. Dee’s summer house had once stood. Jade, who had traded in her normal working attire for a pair of light cotton slacks and a loose fitting silk blouse, waited there gazing out at the peaceful water of the Thames. She watched scullers darting across the river channel like water skippers, thinking about the people that might once have contemplated the same view: Dee, himself, Queen Elizabeth, who visited her favorite astrologer on several occasions, and of course, the man whom she was most interested in, Gil Perez. She was alone, though Dorion and the security detail were in a car parked nearby on Mortlake High Street.

“Miss Ihara?”

She turned to greet the speaker, a fit looking man in his late twenties or early thirties. It was not Roche, she was certain of that; a personal assistant or more likely a bodyguard. She affected her most supercilious demeanor. “Doctor, actually.”

The man blinked as if the distinction meant nothing. “Mr. Roche will see you. Follow me please.”

“I thought I was going to meet him here?”

“No ma’am.”

Evidently, that was all she was going to get from the flunky. No doubt the assignation at the park was merely to give Roche or one of his lackeys a chance to check her out, maybe look for surveillance or perform an electronic sweep to see if she was wearing a hidden microphone.

Paranoid much? “Where are we going?”

“Mr. Roche’s flat is nearby.”

“That wasn’t what we arranged.” She tried to sound irritated to hide just how pleased she was. If Roche did have the crystal, she had a much better chance of getting him to show her in the privacy of his home. She wasn’t too worried about being on his home turf, though considering how whacky some of his ideas were, maybe that was a naïve belief.

The man led her toward the water, and then along the river walk. From here, it was impossible to tell exactly where she was in relation to the street; the buildings eclipsed even her view of the tower at St. Mary’s parish church. About a hundred yards from the park, they turned onto a flight of steps that led up to a patio overlooking the river. There, seated at an outdoor table calmly sipping from a cup of tea, was the notorious Gerald Roche.

He rose and inclined his head in a gentlemanly bow. “Miss Ihara? Or rather I should say, Dr. Ihara. You are much more beautiful that your reputation led me to expect.”

It sounded rehearsed to Jade, but she managed a charmed smile. “I might say the same about you. I mean, you don’t appear to be an ogre after all.”

It was true enough, though she could have judged that from viewing the headshots on his website. Roche was in his late fifties, pleasantly rotund with a beatific smile on his ruddy face, hands in the pockets of his silk smoking jacket. He looked positively jolly, like an off-duty Buddha or department store Santa Claus on holiday. Looks, Jade knew, could be deceiving.

He laughed, then continued. He had a deep, radio friendly baritone voice, colored with a broad Yorkshire accent. “You’re American? When I heard the name, I naturally assumed you were from Japan, but I don’t hear even a trace of an accent.”

“No. I was raised in Hawaii by my mother. If you listen to me long enough, you might hear a little pidgin creeping in.”

“Jolly good. Can I interest you in a spot of tea?”

Jade wasn’t a tea drinker, but decided it would further her cause by accepting. She nodded and Roche passed the nod to the man who had escorted her from the park. He promptly went into the flat and returned a moment later with a tea service. Jade took a cup with milk and sugar.

“Now,” Roche said, clapping his hands together. “At the risk of being rude, I’m eager to hear about this journal you recovered.”

Jade’s plan was simple, and had the benefit of resting on a mostly factual foundation. She was no con artist, not even a very good liar. Instead, she would lead with the truth. Offer the journal for sale as a collectible, and then when a deal was more or less concluded, try to wrangle a peek at the Shew Stone. She would only need just a few seconds with the crystal ball to pull this off.

She launched into her only slightly modified version of what had actually happened. “I was excavating a ruin in Mexico and found the remains of a Spanish tomb robber. In his possession was a journal, which described how he had learned of the tomb from a manuscript stolen from Dr. Dee. I asked around and was told that you were the leading authority on the good doctor.”

“And you were hoping that I might be able to…what, exactly?” While his manner remained cordial, Jade sensed an underlying wariness. “Authenticate the document? Or perhaps direct you to the Dee manuscript that talks about this tomb?”

“Well, I am curious about the latter, but to be perfectly frank, the journal doesn’t much interest me. My field is pre-Columbian archaeology. The Spaniard is most definitely not pre-Columbian, so the journal isn’t really of much value to me.”

“Ah, but you thought it might be of value to me, as a Dee enthusiast?”

Jade inclined her head. This was the critical part of the plan. Would Roche accept that she was an unscrupulous trader in illicit artifacts like himself? Or would his paranoia slam the door shut?

“May I see it?” he asked.

“I don’t have it with me. It’s old parchment and hasn’t been properly restored. It shouldn’t be handled excessively. Of course, I don’t expect you to make a commitment without seeing it first. I merely wanted determine if you were someone I could do business with.”

Roche nodded slowly and sat back in his chair. “Of course, of course. You do understand that I am not merely a general collector, and this business of a Dee manuscript that talks about a lost tomb sounds rather fanciful. Almost like the sort of thing a forger might try to peddle.”

“I can assure you, the journal is real.” It’s a lump of soggy parchment, but it’s real.

“Oh, I’m not suggesting that you are a forger. However, your grave robber might very well have been taken in by a clever fake. There are quite a few occult manuscripts attributed to Dr. Dee in circulation. Perhaps this Spaniard was taken in by one.”

Jade frowned. This was not exactly going according to plan. “Well, I suppose that is something we would have to investigate before proceeding.”

“Just so. Can you tell me more about this alleged manuscript?”

Might as well go all in. “According to the journal, the Spaniard broke into Lee’s Mortlake house, while the doctor was traveling in Europe, and found a manuscript that was penned in a strange language, which I took to be angelic script. He claimed that he was able to read it with the help of a crystal ball.”

“And what did this manuscript say?”

“It described a vision that Dee had received from an angel named Orphaniel, It told of a ruin in a place called the Navel of the Moon, which is the literal meaning of the word Mexico.” Jade added a few more details, while omitting mention of what they had actually found beneath the Pyramid of the Sun.”

“Ah. Yes, that sounds very familiar.”

Jade wondered what he meant by that, but before she could phrase the question, Roche stood. “Would you like to see my collection?”

Jade was momentarily taken aback. “Very much.”

He led her into the flat, which was tastefully modern if a bit austere. Jade thought it looked like a model home, not a place where someone actually lived. Roche led her to an interior staircase which descended two flights, into a windowless room that she could only assume was below ground level. There, she found herself in what might have been a small gallery from the museum she had visited the day before.

There were dozens of display cases containing unusual objects — not merely the sort of thing Jade would expect from a man with Dee’s reputation as a conjurer, but also astrolabes, sextants, and mechanical devices that might have come from the pages of Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbook. There were dozens of bookshelves with leather bound tomes in outward-facing display stands. Nowhere, however, did Jade see the legendary Shew Stone.

Roche stopped at one case which contained something that looked like a toy bird made of wood. “This is a working replica of the dove of Archytas, built by Dee in 1578. It was designed by a Greek inventor who lived in the fourth century before Christ. It runs on steam power, and can actually flap its wings.” He gestured to another case where sat a bronze bust of a man’s head. “That is a Brazen Head, a sort of automaton that speaks. It only says ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but for the sixteenth century, that’s rather remarkable, don’t you think.”

Jade nodded, not insincerely. “Dee made that?”

“Yes. All of the objects you see here were constructed by Dee, based on his own designs, or those he found while traveling abroad. He was a true Renaissance man, a polymath. During his lifetime, his enemies tried to caricaturize him as an evil magician studying witchcraft and communing with the devil. He was, in fact, a devout Christian. In the years since his death, people who imagine themselves students of the occult have only made it worse by embellishing those ludicrous charges, turning him into some kind of necromancer. Here, this one is my favorites.”

He opened a case that contained what looked like a brass dragonfly. After winding a small key, he held it out at arm’s length and released it. It leapt from his hand, wings buzzing furiously, and flew right toward Jade, who started — visions of Shelob flashing through her mind — and jumped out of the way. The clockwork insect continued flying but gradually turned in a wide circle that brought it right back to Roche’s waiting hand where it settled, its energy completely spent. Roche returned the item to its case and his hands to his pockets.

“Marvelous, don’t you think? Dee saw items like these at courts and universities in Geneva, Prague, St. Denis, and reverse engineered them in his own mind. Quite an accomplishment for a charlatan, wouldn’t you say?”

Jade wasn’t sure where any of this was going. “I never said I thought he was a charlatan. Honestly, I don’t know that much about him.”

“Obviously.” Roche smiled, but the humor was gone from his eyes. “Did you know, for example, that he never received visions? Never saw the future in a crystal ball? It’s true. He did make accurate astrological predictions, but he never could get the trick of scrying. The angelic visions were received by spirit mediums, working at his direction, and he would then record and interpret what they saw. That’s how I know this journal you are trying to foist on me is worthless.”

Alarm bells were sounding in Jade’s head. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. “I’m sorry you think that,” she said slowly. “I’m only telling you what was in the journal.”

“Some of the visions were utter rubbish,” Roche continued, as if he hadn’t heard. “Dee was too trusting. Edward Kelley, a changeling, took advantage of Dee, stealing a fortune from him, stealing his wife, discrediting the man, even as he used Dee’s fame to enhance his own reputation as an alchemist.

“But some of the visions were real. I know because I also have received them, using the very tools that Dee made available to his mediums. Tools such as this.”

He removed his left hand from his pocket and held it out to reveal a clear crystal ball, less than two inches in diameter. “This is what you came for isn’t it?”

Jade swallowed nervously. When she had called to set up the meeting, she had not mentioned the Shew Stone.

“I know that you came here to steal it,” Roche continued, his voice taking on a hard edge.

“Steal it?” Jade’s voice sounded strident in her own ears. “Why would you say that?”

“Because it’s true.” He raised his other hand and Jade saw that it held a compact semi-automatic pistol, pointed right at her. “Do you think you’re the first agent the changelings have sent to blind me?”

Jade raised her hands and took an involuntary step back. “You’ve got it all wrong,” she said hastily. “Yes, I did come here hoping to get a look at that. I was told that you might have it. But I don’t want to steal it.”

“You’re lying,” Roche hissed. “I saw you take it.”

Despite the roaring of blood in her ears, the primal urge to flee or if necessary fight, something about the statement pulled Jade back from her panic.

He saw? Is it possible?

“You think I want to steal it?” she said defiantly. “Like you stole it from the Science Museum?”

Something changed in Roche’s expression confirming the truth of her accusation, but also revealing the deeper implications of that fact. Roche could not simply turn her over to the police because doing so would bring his own crimes to light. Jade felt a premonition of her own; not the déjà vu of a dark matter-fueled glimpse into alternate dimensions, but a grim certainty that this paranoid lunatic had no intention of letting her merely slink away empty handed. Roche was going to kill her.

Dorion gazed out the window of the SUV, desperately hoping to see Jade strolling toward them, but there was no sign of her. This was taking too long. He never should have let her go to this meeting alone.

“Maybe we should go look for her,” he prompted one of the security men.

The man gave him a blank look, but before he could answer, his face screwed up in consternation. He reached into a pocket and took out a cell phone. “Hello?” A pause. “I’ll put him on.”

He passed the phone to Dorion. “Yes?”

The voice on the other end belonged to Chapman — Professor, he thought, that’s what Jade calls him. “Paul? How goes the search at your end?”

Dorion wasn’t sure what to say. “Ah, Jade is meeting with someone right now.”

“That’s okay. I was actually hoping to talk to you. It’s about Delphi. Were you aware that the oracle only entered the sanctuary on the seventh day of each month?”

Dorion was having trouble concentrating on the question. “I don’t recall. Why would it matter?”

“The Greeks used a lunar calendar. The first day of each month always corresponded to the appearance of the first crescent moon. The seventh day would always fall on the first quarter moon.”

“So?”

“You said that dark matter is influenced by gravity. The phases of the moon affect the earth’s gravity. New and full moons exert the greatest influence because the earth, moon and sun are all aligned. The tidal effect is most pronounced at those times. When the moon is in its quarter phases, the tidal forces are weakest.”

Dorion finally saw what Professor was driving at. “And the Delphic oracle was active only when the gravitational field was at its weakest.”

“Maybe that’s why you never felt anything at Delphi. Maybe you were there at the wrong time. What I can’t figure though is why the effect would be stronger when the tidal forces are weakest. Wouldn’t it be the other way around?”

“Not necessarily. The effect works because close proximity to the dark matter field causes a relativistic change. You are literally traveling at a different speed, relative to the rest of the universe, when you are near a dark matter field. During the full moon, the gravitation effect is so strong, it probably cancels out the dark matter field.”

“That makes sense.”

“Are you saying there might still be a dark matter field there at Delphi?”

“Well, I don’t know if it’s still there after sixteen hundred years, but it might explain how the oracle was able to continue making accurate prophecies hundreds of years after the Omphalos was stolen.”

“I will tell Jade. We will come there as soon as we can.”

Dorion rang off and handed the phone back to the security man. “Where is she?” he said, more to himself than to the other man. “We need to get to Delphi as soon as possible. This search for Dr. Dee’s crystal ball is clearly a dead end.”

Jade calculated the distance between herself and Roche. She kicked herself for having retreated at the first sight of the pistol. “Mr. Roche, I don’t want to steal anything from you. I’ve told you the complete and honest truth.”

“My visions have never led me astray,” Roche said. He twisted the gun slightly in his hand, swiping off the safety catch with his thumb.

“You actually saw me steal that crystal ball in a vision?” she asked, trying to sound incredulous, even as she shifted her weight, priming herself for action. “Did it look something like this?”

She stepped toward, spinning on her outstretched foot so that, at the critical moment, she was turned sideways and no longer in his sights. The pistol banged loudly and she felt the hot eruption of gases from the barrel, but the round sizzled harmlessly past her, shattering the glass on one of the display cases. It had been a reflexive shot and Roche hastily tried to aim the weapon again, but she was already inside his reach. She threw her left arm out in a rising block that knocked the gun hand away, and then followed through with a solid punch to his lower jaw. Dazed, Roche flew back, rebounding off another display case, dropping the pistol and inadvertently flinging the crystal ball away.

Jade kept advancing and snatched the orb out of the air. It was heavier than she expected. As her fingers closed over the smooth quartz globe, she wondered if she would be hit by a vision. Instead of a warning from another dimension however, she heard a shout from the top of the stairs; the bodyguard, asking if there was a problem. Roche’s wild shot might not have hit her, but it had still done some damage.

She bolted for the stairs, the only way out of the basement gallery. As expected, Roche’s bodyguard was on his way down. Jade didn’t slow or try to evade him, but instead drove forward, cutting the man’s legs out from under him and plowing through as he tumbled down the stairs behind her.

Because the house was unfamiliar territory, Jade bypassed the first floor and kept ascending, back to the patio where she had entered. Before she reached the top of the second flight, she heard footsteps on the stairs below. The bodyguard had recovered and was giving chase.

She darted through the house and reached the door to the balcony just as her pursuer reached the top of the stairs. Damn, he’s fast, she thought, glancing back and jamming the crystal ball into an empty pocket.

She didn’t bother with the stairs down to the river walk, but instead vaulted over the patio rail and into the open air. As soon as her feet touched the lawn, she rolled forward into a somersault, trying to redirect some of the energy from the impact. It must have been the right thing to do, because instead of breaking her legs, she somehow wound up in what could almost pass for a sprinter’s crouch.

The bodyguard appeared at the railing above, but instead of attempting to imitate her, he simply aimed his gun.

Jade erupted from her crouch, running headlong toward the river’s edge, knowing even as she did that every step was taking her further from Dorion and Ophelia’s security team. Unfortunately, getting back to Mortlake High Street meant running the gauntlet with Roche’s man.

But if I can reach the river….

She crossed the sandy bank and splashed out into the water until it came up to her knees, and then launched into a headfirst dive. Her hands split the chilly water like the tip of a harpoon, and she plunged into the murky depths, dolphin kicking to propel herself as far from the shore — and the man with the gun — as she could go on a single breath. When she finally broke the surface, she was more than a hundred feet out into the river.

“Are you okay?”

She turned toward the voice and found a young man, sitting astride a sleek torpedo-hulled scull, drifting in her direction. She paddled toward him. “Just out for a swim.” She tried to sound casual, but the cold water made her teeth chatter.

“That’s probably not a very good idea.”

“No kidding. I don’t suppose you could give me a ride back to shore. Preferably, that way.” She pointed to the north bank, which was at least two hundred feet away.

The man opened his mouth to reply, but at that instant, the sound of a gunshot rolled across the water. He jerked in surprise and tumbled out of the boat.

Jade whipped her head around and saw a figure on the patio she had just fled. It was Roche, and although she couldn’t see him very clearly, she could tell that his arms were extended and holding a small black object. There was a flash of fire from the object and a moment later, another report.

If that’s Roche, where’s the bodyguard?

There was no time to find the answer to that question.

The scull’s owner was swimming away frantically. Jade thought he had merely panicked; at this distance, Roche’s accuracy with the pistol was non-existent, and the only way he could have hit anything was if blind luck was on his side. Still, luck was a funny thing, and Jade thought the rower probably had the right idea.

Still, no sense in letting a perfectly good boat go to waste.

She gripped the end of the scull and tried to heave herself up onto the rapier-thin hull, which proved to be about as easy as climbing onto a greased log. The boat threatened to roll over, forcing her to go slow and move in very slight increments. She had never been on a craft like this, but she had practically grown up on the water, surfing and paddle-boarding and this didn’t seem much different. Straddling the narrow hull, distributing her weight to maintain balance, she inched toward the center seat, and then carefully twisted around until she was set.

So far so good.

The process of getting situated had taken at least thirty seconds, during which time she had not heard another shot. Maybe Roche had come to his senses; not only were his chances of hitting her virtually nil, but in England, where gun laws were considerably more strict than in the United States, shooting up a posh neighborhood was bound to attract attention that Roche probably didn’t want. There also the very real possibility that, if he killed or even injured her, the Shew Stone would be lost in the Thames. She did not allow herself to believe however, that Roche was going to just let her go.

She curled her hands around the oar grips and pushed down, raising the long paddles out of the water. Despite the balance of the rig, the oars felt heavy and unwieldy. She pushed them forward keeping the blades flat and parallel to the water, then twisted them, letting the blades dig into the river. Planting her feet, she pulled on the oars with all her might. The seat rolled back beneath her, allowing her to straighten her bent legs and amplifying the energy of her body as she hauled in the oars.

The scull shot backwards like a rocket.

Unprepared for the success of her first attempt, Jade’s follow-through was sloppy. As she tried to get the oars back to forward position, she dragged one tip through the water, which caused the scull to turn sharply and suddenly, nearly capsizing. She froze, waiting for the craft to settle, and that was when she heard the mosquito-buzz sound of a small outboard.

Roche and his bodyguard had found a boat. It was just a little dory, maybe fifteen feet with a little outboard, but it was more than a match for the scull.

Jade breathed a curse and focused on the task at hand. She had only a few seconds before they caught her, but if she could make the scull do what she wanted, there was a chance she could get to the far shore, and from there escape on foot.

“Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,” she muttered to herself, like a mantra. It was something Maddock had often said — damn, she didn’t want to think about him right now — but it was sage advice. She exaggerated every movement, making sure that the blades were exactly where she wanted them before trying to move the oars.

Push forward. Dip. Pull back.

After just a couple cycles, she got the hang of it. The only problem was that she was arrowing through the water at an oblique angle; she needed to turn, aim for the shore, or Roche would catch her.

On her next cycle, she held back a little on her right side, and the scull gradually swung in that direction.

Close enough.

She dug in again and again, repeating the mantra like a military cadence. “Slow is—” Lift the oars. “Smooth, and—” Roll forward and recover. “Smooth is—” Drop the oars and pull. “Fast!”

Not fast enough. The dory shot toward her, then veered away, cutting a wide circle around her. She thought she might still be able to reach the shore, but then the boat’s wake hit her and nearly rolled her over. When she finally got the scull on an even keel, the dory was between her and the shore. She felt the scull shudder as someone — Roche’s bodyguard, leaning over the side of the idling motorboat — grabbed hold of it. Roche stood next to him, wearing an exultant grin. He held the pistol in his right hand; his left was extended, palm up.

“Give it back, and I’ll let you walk away.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Maybe I’m not being clear,” Roche continued. “This is a one-time offer. Give me the crystal ball or I will kill you.”

He’s bluffing. But what if he isn’t?

She let go of the oars, raised her hands as if in a show of surrender, and then brought them to rest on her thighs. She could feel the outline of the contents of her pockets through the fabric of her slacks. Slowly, more to avoid further upsetting the boat, she wormed her hand into her left pocket, curling her fingers around something smooth and round. She drew it out and held it out over the water.

“You shoot me and I might drop it,” she retorted.

The gun twitched in Roche’s hand but he did not lower it. “I don’t want that to happen, but if you leave me no choice, I will take that chance. The crystal will be recovered, but you will be dead. Is that what you want?”

Jade looked down into the murky water. “You think you can find it down there? Be my guest.”

She opened her hand and let the orb fall. It hit the water with a loud plop, and vanished.

Roche’s reaction was almost primal. He leaped from the boat, reaching out as if he might somehow be able to catch the transparent globe before the water claimed it. The dory began bobbing violently from the abrupt shift in its mass, and the effect was magnified when Roche hit the water, throwing up a spume of water.

The bodyguard threw up his hands in a reflexive grab for a handhold, releasing the scull, but not before Jade got a hand on the dory. She rolled over the side, dropping into the motor boat, and before the bodyguard could recover his wits, she brought her joined fists down in hammer blow that caught him in the back of the head. The strike didn’t knock him out, but it was enough to daze him. He barely resisted at all as Jade got her arms under his torso and heaved him up and over the side.

Jade scrambled back to the outboard and twisted the throttle to ‘full.’ The boat lurched forward, throwing out a rooster-tail of white water. She glanced back and saw the bodyguard thrashing in the wake but there was no sign of Roche, who had evidently made a deep dive to retrieve the sunken orb.

She turned the boat toward the south shore and ran it up onto a sandbank not far from where she had gone in. She was a little worried that someone might have called the police, so despite her eagerness to be away, she ran back up toward Roche’s flat and skirted along the apartment buildings until she found a narrow alley leading back to the main street. Then with as much nonchalance as possible given her sodden appearance, she stepped onto the sidewalk and began strolling toward the waiting car.

“Jade?” Dorion leaped out of the car. “Where did you go?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Your friend Professor called. They’ve made an amazing discovery in Delphi. We have to hurry if we’re going to catch our flight.” He stopped, looked at her. “Why are you all wet?”

“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you after I dry off.”

“Were you able to make the switch? Did everything go as you planned?”

Jade dropped a hand to her pocket and brought out her prize. She thought about Roche groping in the mud at the bottom of the river, rooting around like a catfish. How would he react when he finally found what he was looking for, only to discover that the orb she had dropped into the Thames was not Dr. Dee’s Shew Stone, but a cheap reconstituted quartz crystal ball she’d picked up at an occult bookstore a few blocks from the British Museum?

The thought brought a smile to her face. “Almost exactly as planned.”

EIGHTEEN

Professor gazed up into the darkening eastern sky, and found the moon, a misshapen white disk that looked more like an over-inflated football than a sphere. The technical name for the current phase was ‘waxing gibbous’ but in a few more days it would be completely full. If Dorion was right about tidal forces cancelling out the dark matter field, then they might have already missed their opportunity.

After his conversation with the physicist, it had occurred to Professor that there might be another explanation for the oracle choosing to speak only on the seventh day of the lunar month; the timing of moonrise and lunar zenith. The first quarter moon would be in the sky during midday, when the oracle was active. As the month progressed, moonrise would come later and later, until in the latter half of the month, the moon would only be overhead in the middle of the night. Perhaps it wasn’t the alignment of sun and moon that mattered, but simply having the moon overhead. That too was something they could test, which was why he and Ophelia had been cooling their heels at the hotel until after dusk.

He turned to Ophelia. “Ready to play oracle?”

She returned a playful smile. “You know, according to tradition, we should ritually bathe first.”

“We also should have spent the last few days fasting,” he replied, evenly. “Let’s hope it doesn’t make a difference.”

She laughed and seemed content with his answer. Professor waited until she had turned away to roll his eyes in frustration. At first, he had thought perhaps he was misreading her, but after a while, it had been impossible to miss the signals; the sly glances, the comments thick with innuendo, and perhaps most significant of all, the fact that she was trying her damnedest to impress him with how intelligent she was. He had been flattered, and then he had grown suspicious. He wasn’t arrogant enough to believe that every woman swooned in his presence, and since Ophelia was both beautiful and wealthy, it seemed unlikely that she was desperate for suitors, especially someone so far outside what he assumed was her normal social circle. So why was she trying so hard to get his attention?

He decided that, despite her seemingly confident manner, Ophelia was either a narcissist, in which case what she really wanted was for every person in her life to worship her; or deeply insecure, which essentially meant the same thing. Either way, nothing good could come of indulging her. He had decided it was better to feign being oblivious to her advances; this was a partnership of convenience, nothing more, and it would be over soon enough.

“Okay, but if this doesn’t work, it’s your fault.”

“Fair enough.” He donned his hat and headed for the door. He wasn’t, in truth, prepared to accept any kind of blame in that regard. As far as he was concerned, the visit to Delphi had already borne fruit. If he or Ophelia actually experienced some kind of precognitive vision at the ruins of the sanctuary of Apollo, well that would just be icing on the cake.

Flanked by Ophelia’s security detail, they headed out through the bustling streets, toward the archaeological site. The site was technically closed for the day, but years of generous donations from the Doerner Charitable Trust had earned her “special access.”

They made their way along the trail by moonlight, and came to the ancient temple. Professor had seen pictures and models of what the temple might have looked like during the heyday of Delphi; now, all that remained was a foundation of cut stone blocks and five upright columns, only one of which was still mostly intact. As they approached, Ophelia stepped ahead of him, practically racing to the edge of the temple site.

“Watch your step,” he warned. His advice was probably unnecessary. Ophelia had been here so many times, she probably could have negotiated the irregular maze of footings and excavated trenches blindfolded.

She looked spectral in the silvery moonlight, more a wraith than a prophetess. The vision — no, don’t call it that — left him ill at ease, but he kept his anxiety to himself.

Despite his scientific skepticism, he had grudgingly come to believe that both Jade and Paul Dorian had glimpsed some kind of alternate reality, and that Dorian’s dark matter hypothesis was accurate. It furthermore seemed very probable that a solid sphere could act as a dark matter collector, and that one sphere could seed another, drawing in WIMPs like iron filings to magnet; maybe Costa Rica had been some kind of ancient Omphalos farm.

Ophelia roamed back and forth across the ruin, moving more slowly but not, Professor suspected, because she was unsure of her footing. She walked with her arms slightly apart, palms facing down, as if she might somehow feel the energy of the ancient oracle rising up from the below. Professor just watched, hanging back to observe the outcome of the experiment.

After ten minutes, in which Ophelia never stopped moving for more than few seconds, he finally called out to her. “Anything?”

She stopped. “No. Maybe we’re doing something wrong.”

“There are too many variables. Maybe we’re not close enough to the dark matter field. The oracle always received visions in the lower level of the sanctuary. Maybe there’s too much earth in between.” He took a breath, and then told her what he was really thinking. “Or maybe the field has dissipated over the centuries. I spent the afternoon looking for anecdotal evidence of any kind of paranormal activity at Delphi, and came up empty. There are dozens of so-called ‘power spots’ all over the world — Stonehenge; the Pyramids; Sedona, Arizona; even Teotihuacan — where people report all kinds of weird stuff. I couldn’t find so much as a whisper of strange activity at Delphi. Maybe there was a residual dark matter field after the Phoenician raiders stole the original Omphalos…maybe that’s how the oracle was able to prophesy…but it’s gone now.”

Ophelia seemed to deflate. She picked her way across the ruin to join him. “Let’s go,” she said, dejectedly.

Professor thought about reaching out to her, giving her a hug or holding her hand as they made their way back up the trail, but resisted the impulse. Now was definitely not the time to send her mixed signals.

As they started toward the theatre, he spied lights moving down the trail toward them. Immediately wary, he extended a hand to block Ophelia. “I don’t like the look of this.”

“It might be the night watchman.”

Professor watched the lights bobbing as they moved along. “I don’t think so. There’s more than one. Let’s find another way out of here.”

Before he could turn however, one of the security men called out. “It’s okay. They’re friendlies.”

“Friendlies? What does that mean?” He leaned close to Ophelia. “I don’t care what he says. Be ready to move.”

There were four vehicles in the convoy, each one carrying four men; sixteen men in all. Hodges wondered if it would be enough. All of them, with the exception of Gutierrez, had been with Hodges on Isla del Caño, and all were hungry for payback, but there had been even more of them when they had gone after Chapman and his friends on that island. Gutierrez was confident of success and his own ability to lead the men in combat — evidently, he had attended some kind of elite commando school run by former Delta Force guys. In his mind, he was the next best thing to Rambo — but Hodges wasn’t sure exactly how Gutierrez’s plan of action was much different than the one they had used on Isla del Caño, other than the fact that they wouldn’t have any air support. There were other parts of the plan that concerned him as well.

“Isla del Caño was remote,” he had told Gutierrez, “and Costa Rica doesn’t have a military, so we knew we wouldn’t have to worry about local intervention. That’s not going to be the case at Delphi.”

“It’s been taken care of,” was all Gutierrez would say on the subject. “Don’t worry. It’s not your responsibility anymore.”

Hodges’ dislike for Gutierrez was growing; the billionaire was going to get them arrested. Or killed.

The convoy stopped on the roadside near the museum and the men began piling out. Gutierrez gathered them together for a final check of equipment and a review of the objectives. When directed to, Hodges lowered his night vision device over his eye and turned it on. The world was immediately rendered in pale green, with bright blobs from streetlights and the lights of the nearby city at the edge of his vision. He could clearly see the rest of the assault team; with their NV goggles in place, each man looked like some kind of cyborg from a science fiction movie. The effect was even more pronounced when pencil-thin laser beams began crisscrossing the darkness as each man checked the aiming devices attached to their suppressed nine-millimeter machine pistols. Hodges touched the trigger of his own weapon and saw a beam lance out from the end of the barrel.

“Weapons hot. All units move out.” Gutierrez’s voice sounded from Hodges’ earbuds. This guy watches too many movies, Hodges thought.

The shooters spread out and began creeping up the hill, fanning out around the museum building. The latest report they gotten from their contact at the hotel was that Chapman and Ophelia Doerner had headed out for an after-hours visit to the archaeological site. That would make what they were about to do a little easier, even if Ophelia was surrounded by her bodyguards. There was no word on the whereabouts of Jade or Dorion, but as Gutierrez had said, one thing at a time.

He followed Gutierrez up the path behind the museum. They were both walking slowly, careful not to betray their presence with the crunch of a boot on gravel or the rustle of grass. The laser beams and infrared light marked the location of the rest of the team.

Despite Gutierrez’s ersatz expertise, Hodges felt his pessimism begin to lift. In Costa Rica, they had sacrificed the element of surprise, giving Chapman time to mount a defense. This time, they would strike quickly with no warning, and their superior technology would give them the edge over the unsuspecting targets.

As if to echo his rising confidence, a voice sounded in his ear. “I see them. They’re at some kind of old temple ruin with five pillars.”

Hodges searched the hillside to find the indicated spot. From behind a cluster of evergreen trees, a laser beam was pointing into the sky, waving back and forth as a beacon to mark the location.

“I see you,” Gutierrez said over the radio. “Converge on that location. Quietly,” he emphasized. “And wait for my signal.”

“What about Ophelia?” asked Hodges.

Gutierrez turned to him. “She’s a dangerous fanatic,” he snorted. “Her brother will thank me for getting rid of her.”

The lights continued getting closer, resolving into four distinct sources; handheld flashlights illuminating the path down which the approaching party moved. One of the beams came up and briefly flitted across the waiting forms of Professor and Ophelia.

“There you are,” called out a familiar voice.

“Jade?”

The group closed the distance quickly and in the ambient light, Professor quickly picked out Jade and Dorion, as well as the team of bodyguards that had left with them in England.

“Did you start without us?” Jade asked.

“Started and finished,” he replied. “Nothing happened.”

Dorion looked even more disappointed than Ophelia. “Well, I suppose it was too much to hope for.”

“I think whatever power was here, whatever lingered after the Phoenicians took the Omphalos across the ocean, has long since dissipated.”

“It’s a dead end,” sighed Ophelia.

Jade looked at her, then at Professor. “Hey, cheer up kids. The day wasn’t a complete wash out.” She held up a small transparent orb, about the size of a racquetball, for inspection.

“You got it?” Professor was astounded. “John Dee’s Shew Stone?”

Jade shrugged a little. “Well, that’s what its former owner seemed to think.”

“Former…Jade, did you steal this?”

Jade put on an expression of mock umbrage. “Steal? I retrieved it.” She quickly recounted the outcome of the stopover in London. “And once we’re done with it, I’ll make sure it gets returned to the Science Museum.”

“And did it, you know, show you anything?”

Jade’s jaw slid sideways in irritation. “No. Not really. I didn’t get a chance to look at any of the Dee manuscripts in Roche’s collection. There are probably some others at museums and libraries in London, but it’s probably not a good idea to go back there, at least for a little while.”

“We’ve made real progress here,” Ophelia said, regaining some of her earlier passion. “We can’t stop looking now.”

“Maybe we should just take a step back,” Professor suggested. “Who knows what we’ll see after a good night’s sleep?”

Ophelia ignored him. “What if we tried using the Shew Stone here?” She stuck out a hand. “Let me try?”

Jade shrugged and proffered the orb. Ophelia clutched at it greedily and then started back along the path to the sanctuary. Dorion quickly followed after her.

“Think it’ll work?” Jade asked.

“Not really.”

“So what do we do next? I mean after you and,” she nodded suggestively in the direction the others had gone, “sleep on it?”

“Really, Jade?”

She laughed and took his arm. “Come on. Let’s go watch the show.”

They found Dorion and Ophelia huddled together on the ruins of Apollo’s temple, caressing the Shew Stone.

“Reminds me of the Graeae,” Jade remarked. “Those Greek witches, squabbling over who would get to use their Eye next.”

“We seem to be short one witch. Maybe you should join them.”

Jade made a face at him. After a few minutes, she leaned close and spoke in a sotto voice. “How long are we going to let them go at this?”

“They’ve got to get tired eventually.”

Suddenly one of the bodyguards on the far side of the ruin crumpled to the ground. Professor was instantly alert, poised for action, but before he could make a move, another man was down. He leaped forward into the ruins and grabbed Dorion and Ophelia, dragging them back to where Jade stood, still uncomprehending.

“Up the hill!” He shouted. “Run!”

NINETEEN

Jade knew better than to ask questions. She ran.

The air was suddenly alive with faint zipping noises and the sound of men shouting and dying. A single pistol report sounded; one of Ophelia’s men returning fire, but it was the only shot she heard. The attackers — it had to be Hodges — were using suppressed weapons.

Professor was pounding up the trail beside her, urging Dorion and Ophelia to run faster. “Turn off your lights,” he said. “They’ll use them to track us.”

Jade complied and for the next few seconds, the world was plunged into total darkness. She tried to orient herself on the noise of footfalls and labored breathing. For a little while, that was all she could hear. There was a subtle change in the feeling of the ground underfoot but before she could make sense of this, her shins struck something hard and unyielding.

“Climb the steps,” Professor urged. His voice was urgent but he sounded strangely calm. He wasn’t even out of breath.

We’re in the theatre, Jade realized. She groped forward until she found the obstruction she had barked her shins on, and then hoisted herself onto it. She slid forward until she found the next seating tier and repeated the process. As her night vision gradually improved, she could see the others, just silhouettes in the moonlight. She was out in front; Dorion and Ophelia were lagging, and Professor was urging them on.

“What if we’re running into an ambush?” Jade managed to ask between labored breaths.

“Then we’re dead,” he replied, matter-of-factly. “I think they’re all behind us. If they wanted to ambush us, they would have waited and caught us on the trail.”

Something cracked on the stone nearby and Jade felt chips of stone brush against her face.

“We’re exposed here,” she called out. “Run to the left. We can get back to the trail.”

Professor did not argue. Jade took that as tacit agreement and heeded her own advice, sprinting along the terrace toward the western edge of the scallop-shaped theatre, even as more bullets started striking all around her.

She was starting to recall the layout of the site, where the ruins were situated in relation to the trail she and Dorion had followed from the modern city of Delphi. She knew that the curved shape of the theatre would turn her south, away from her goal and ultimately bring her right to the unseen hunters stalking them. She started counting her steps, and when she reached a hundred, she turned and started climbing again, ascending several more tiers until the sound of bullets striking stone warned her that it was time to change direction again.

She barely stopped herself before running headlong into a wall at the edge of the ruin. She risked a glance back and saw that the others were still alive and moving, and not far behind. She could also see, far below, several dark shapes, like ants, moving along the dais and the lower tiers. One of them stopped and pointed up in her general direction. A moment later she heard the resonant crack of a bullet striking the rock nearby.

Jade scrambled up several more steps until she spied a break in the theatre perimeter. “This way!”

She crawled through the gap then turned to help pull Ophelia and Dorion through. As Professor clambered up, she risked another look back down at the small army pursuing them.

“Keep going,” Professor shouted. “Climb the hill.”

Jade almost balked. The lights of Delphi were visible above the treetops to the west, and that seemed like a better option than running up Mount Parnassus and hoping that the bad guys would give up and go home.

He knows what he’s doing, she told herself. Trust him and don’t be such a control freak.

Easier said than done, especially when every fiber of her body told her to run toward the light.

The one good thing — maybe the only good thing — about running uphill was that it was almost impossible to wander off course. Her quadriceps burned, and while she wasn’t out of breath, she was definitely breathing faster than normal. Dorion and Ophelia were having even more difficulty than she was, barely moving faster than a walking pace. Without the persistent threat behind them, they probably would have already dropped in their tracks.

Jade dropped back to where Professor was trying to cajole them to move faster. “We can’t keep this up,” she managed to say. “We’re not SEALs.”

She thought she heard him mutter a curse under his breath, then in the same even tone of someone who had barely exerted himself, he said, “Those guys trying to kill us know that. They also know that the only chance we’ve got is running back into town. They’ll be waiting for us.”

“If they don’t kill us, the mountain will.” She looked back into the darkness behind them. There was no sign of pursuit, but she knew it would only be a matter of seconds before their foes began emerging from the theatre. “What’s that old saying about the best defense?”

“Jade, I think these guys are using military hardware, maybe night scopes. We’re unarmed. We don’t even have a rock to roll down on them.”

“We have to do something.” She knew how useless that sounded, so she added. “This is Greece, right? Where the underdogs always win. Like in ‘300’.”

“The Spartans got completely wiped out at Thermopylae.” He glanced at the slope ahead, scanning back and forth. “But maybe you’re right. The Spartans were able to hold off the Persian army as long as they did because they chose their battlefield.” He pointed off to the left. “That way,” he said, loud enough for Dorion and Ophelia to hear, and with an intensity that would have shocked a drill instructor he added, “Move your ass!”

An invisible light show was playing on the slopes Mount Parnassus. Hodges marveled at the dancing laser beams that crisscrossed the mountain side and shot up into the heavens, beams which only he and the others wearing night vision goggles could see. Yet, despite the almost magical spectacle, Hodges felt uneasy. Although the initial phase of the attack had gone off almost perfectly — the bodyguards eliminated in a bloody pre-emptive strike — the primary targets had slipped away. It had been easy enough to track them, but the team had gotten too spread out. Despite Gutierrez’s best efforts to deploy the mercenaries strategically, like pieces on a game board, they had all struck out on their own, driven by bloodlust or machismo or just plain stubbornness. The billionaire, for all his imagined leadership skills, had learned that most basic lesson of warfare: no battle plan survives first contact.

Not that things were going too badly. They had not suffered a single casualty and from what Hodges could tell, Chapman and the others were running scared, heading up the mountain and away from any possible refuge. If Gutierrez did manage to corral his human hunting dogs, organize them into a picket line and march them up the slope, they would eventually run their prey down.

There was a faint hiss as someone broke squelch over the radio net. “I’ve got them. Signaling now.”

Hodges scanned the sky until he saw a laser waving back and forth off to his left. He consulted his mental map of the site. “That’s near the stadium,” he told Gutierrez.

“So?” grunted the billionaire.

Hodges wondered if the man, in his eagerness to play commando, had bothered to do any map reconnaissance. The stadium, where athlete-warriors from all over Greece had competed in the Pythian Games, was a five hundred foot long open limestone trough, surrounded by a terraced seating area and beyond that, a ring of evergreens. “There are a lot of places for them to hide there. If we charge in, they might be able to slip out the other end. But if we can surround them, cut off their escape, we’ll have them.

Gutierrez keyed his mic. “All units, converge on that location.”

Jade counted to twenty and then darted out from behind the stone structure and ran to the next one in line. As soon as she was behind cover, she pressed herself flat against the rough surface and held her breath. She listened, but heard nothing except the insistent throb of her own heartbeat. She counted, and when she got to twenty, she moved again.

Listen. Count.

There was a loud snap from somewhere behind her, not a bullet striking stone, but something more like a twig snapping or a piece of glass crunching underfoot.

Here they come.

There were more sounds from just around the corner, a clicking noise, a scuffle, grunts and a strange animal cry. Then silence. She tried to assemble the pieces of the auditory puzzle, but her apprehension — her raw primal fear — told her something very bad was coming.

She tensed, gripping the flashlight, preparing to shine it at the first hint of movement. If Professor was correct and the men hunting them were wearing night vision goggles, then the brilliant LED light would blind anyone coming around the corner, giving her a chance to strike back. If he was wrong, or if her timing was off even by a second, she would give her position away, and they would be all over her.

“Jade,” hissed Professor. “Coming your way.”

She let her breath out in a low sigh. The plan had worked; she had been the bait, and Professor — the trap — had caught something.

A few seconds later, a silhouette appeared from around the corner. In the moonlight, she could see something half covering a silvery-white face and almost panicked.

“It’s me,” Professor whispered, as if tuning into her sudden alarm. He passed something to her; a small plastic object that looked like a camera, with straps hanging from it. She knew it had to be some kind of night vision device. “Quick. Put it on.”

Jade slipped it over her head, fitting a small rubber cup. “I don’t see anything.”

“These things have a tilt-switch that shuts them off automatically. There’s a little button on top. Turn it off and then back on again. Hurry.”

She did as instructed and winced as a flash of green light hit her fully dilated pupil. The effect was startling. She now saw Professor as clearly as if they were both standing in broad daylight. He had a similar device covering one of his eyes, but that was not his only new acquisition; hanging from a sling over one shoulder was a gun — the kind she always associated with SWAT teams — and there was another one in his hands.

She looked past him and saw clearly for the first time, the stadium where they had decided to make their final stand. Beyond the mountainside was alive with strange dancing lights. They were beautiful and a little frightening.

“What are those lights?”

“PAQ4 aiming lasers. They’re invisible to the naked eye, but with NV, all you have to do is point and shoot.”

“How did they miss us then?”

“Lasers always point in a straight line. Bullets aren’t quite as predictable, especially with short-barreled weapons. They probably also didn’t take the time to zero them; just grabbed their new toys out of the box and went hunting.”

He handed one of the machine pistols to her. “Get the others. We’re going.”

“Going? I thought we were going to fight here.”

“We don’t have to. Those lasers show us where they are. All we have to do is avoid them.” He held up his hand and showed her a ring of keys. “If we can make it to the bottom of the hill, we’re home free.”

Home free sounded overly optimistic, but Jade didn’t argue. Gripping the unfamiliar weapon, she ran along the terrace to the seating area that overlooked the stadium floor. She had told Ophelia and Dorian to hide in the trees above the stadium. What had seemed like a good plan in total darkness was now revealed to be sadly deficient; she spotted them almost effortlessly, crouching down behind tree trunks that weren’t broad enough to conceal them.

Professor was right behind her. “Keep your finger off the trigger unless you’re ready to shoot,” he whispered. “The laser will give your position away. Hurry. They’re almost here.”

She grabbed hold of Dorion and lifted him erect. “Stay close. We’re going to make a run for it.”

“I can’t run anymore,” Ophelia protested, still half-panting from the ordeal of climbing the hill.

“Then I’ll drag you,” Jade threatened.

“It’s all downhill from here,” Professor added, as if deciding to play good cop to Jade’s bad. “Just a little further.”

Despite his assurance, they were soon climbing again. The assault force was converging on the stadium and the only avenue of escape was, once again, up. Fortunately, as the killers funneled into the stadium, the route back down the hill was left wide open. Jade took the lead, easily picking out a trail that cut east across the slope, while Professor brought up the rear, keeping a constant watch on their foe.

“Pick up the pace,” he advised when they had been running for just a few minutes. “I think they found the guys I took out. They just shut off their lasers. So much for our early warning system.”

Jade did not tell him that they were already moving as fast as she dared go. The night vision monocular was playing havoc with her depth perception, making her think the ground was closer than it really was, but Dorion and Ophelia were quite literally stumbling in the dark. Fortunately, the path was mostly flat and free of obstructions.

As they skirted along the top of the theatre, Jade could see all the way down to the museum building, and to the ribbon of asphalt that cut across the slope, right above the Gulf of Corinth. She could also see four cars, probably from a rental agency, lined up on the roadside.

Almost there.

Something flashed beside her, as bright as a lightning strike, followed immediately by the sound of tree branches breaking. She looked back and saw one of the aiming lasers stabbing down at them. The shooter was at least five hundred feet away, the distance probably the only thing that had saved them, but Jade’s sense of imminent victory had taken a direct hit. The killers had found them again.

Survival meant a sprint to the finish.

“Use your flashlights,” Jade shouted, tearing off her night vision monocular.

“Jade, they’ll see us!” warned Professor.

“They already know we’re here.” She turned on her light and shone it down the path. The cone of illumination was paltry compared to the world revealed in the monochrome display of the NV device, but this was a light that Dorion and Ophelia could follow as well. She started running, charging down the hill like the hounds of Hell were nipping at her heels.

She could no longer see the road, but after about a minute of running, the museum building appeared out of the gloom.

“Jade!”

She glanced back. Dorion and Ophelia were still with her, but Professor had stopped. He made an underhanded throw and something sailed through the air toward her. She caught it reflexively and felt the familiar shape of keys in her hand.

“Get the car started. I’ll try to buy you a few seconds.”

Jade swallowed as the implication of his words hit home, but she nodded and resumed running.

They skirted around the perimeter of the museum and scrambled down a dirt embankment at the roadside. Jade let her machine pistol hang from its sling, and fumbled with the keys, pushing random buttons on the alarm remote. The headlights of the second vehicle in the line flashed, and then to Jade’s amazement, it started up.

Nice, she thought, and then shouted, “Get in!”

The others were already angling for the passenger side. She almost grinned when she heard Dorion call out, “Shotgun.”

It was a newer Mercedes GLK 350 compact sport utility vehicle. She slid behind the wheel and quickly oriented herself to the essential controls. The previous driver was evidently a lot taller than she was, but there was no time to fiddle with the adjustment buttons. She scooted forward until her right foot could reach the pedal, and then shifted into gear.

She cranked the wheel hard to the right and jammed the accelerator to the floor. The Mercedes leaped forward, but then it shuddered to a stop as the front corner met the rear bumper of the vehicle parked ahead of it. A strident wailing noise rose up as the lead vehicle’s anti-theft alarm went off. Jade muttered a curse, but refused to back off, keeping steady pressure on the pedal until, with a tortured groan, the SUV burst free of the snag and shot out across the asphalt.

There was movement directly ahead, and in the split-second it took for Jade to decide whether to slam on the brakes or keep going, she heard Dorion say, “Look out!”

Brakes it is.

The there was a screech of friction and the vehicle came to a complete stop, just a few feet from the man who had emerged from the roadside. It was Professor.

He clambered into the backseat and shouted, “Go!”

She went.

“Wasn’t sure you were coming,” she remarked as the SUV picked up speed.

He made a noise that might have been a strained chuckle. “What, you didn’t actually think I was going to make some kind of noble sacrifice did you?”

Actually, I did, Jade thought, but didn’t say it aloud.

“I was trying to rig up the laser as a decoy,” he explained. “Then you had to go and set off the alarm.”

“Oops.” Her sense of relief slipped away, replaced by embarrassment.

“Where are you going? Delphi is back the other way?”

“If I had gone that way, you’d still be walking,” she growled, embarrassment quickly turning to irritation. The truth of the matter was that she had not given much thought to what would happen after reaching the relative safety of the vehicle. The cars had been parked facing east and it had not occurred to her to turn around and head for town.

“Too late now. Here they come.”

Jade checked the side mirror and saw headlights flaring to life behind them. “We’ll just outrun them. This road has to go somewhere.”

She turned her attention forward again and for the first time since getting into the vehicle, realized that it was equipped with real time GPS. The screen showed their location on the highway; it also showed that they were approaching an almost ninety-degree bend in the road. Jade hit the brakes slowing to a crawl to get through the turn, and then accelerated forward once more.

The GPS showed that the highway was mostly straight for the next few miles — make that kilometers, Jade thought, mentally dividing the numbers in half. There were a couple of wicked looking switchbacks but beyond lay a small city called Arachova; a total distance of ten kilometers — about six miles — and according to the GPS, it would take about eight minutes at safe legal speed.

I wonder if we can do it in five. The trailing headlights reappeared in the rearview as the pursuing cars made the turn, and she realized that she would have to push the car — and herself — to the limit to keep them alive that long.

Jade didn’t need to look at the speedometer to know that they were going a lot faster than the safe, legal speed. She could tell by the vibrations rising up from the road and her own insistent inner voice cautioning her to slow down.

“Everybody down,” Professor shouted suddenly. A moment later, a series of loud cracks sounded against the exterior of the vehicle and the rear window became a glazed translucent mosaic of tiny glass particles.

Jade had to fight against every instinct of self-preservation to keep steady pressure on the accelerator. She wasn’t sure how Professor had known the shots were coming; maybe he had seen the lasers with his NV device, or maybe he’d had a premonition of his own.

“Jade. Give me your gun!”

She had forgotten about the machine pistol, unused and still hanging from its nylon sling. She uncurled one hand from the steering wheel just long enough to pull the strap over her head and deposit the weapon in Dorion’s lap; if felt like the most terrifying two seconds of her life.

Dorion handed the weapon back to Professor, and a few seconds later, Jade heard a mechanical clicking noise, the sound of the pistol’s internal mechanism ratcheting bullets into the firing chamber and ejecting spent casings. The smell of burnt gunpowder filler the air but the report was barely audible. In the mirror, she saw a set of headlights abruptly veer left and go out.

“Got one!” Professor crowed, but his triumph was short-lived. “Oh, you can’t be serious.”

“What?”

“More helicopters.”

Suddenly, Jade’s entire world was suffused with light. The illumination was as bright as sunlight and filled the interior of the car. She flinched away, reflexes overriding every other imperative.

The SUV started to shudder violently as one wheel left the paved surface. Jade let off the gas pedal and tried to guide the vehicle back but it was already too late. She felt an invisible hand lift her out of her seat as the Mercedes careened down the hillside.

The blinding light vanished, plunging the interior once more into darkness, but Jade was barely away of this change. It was all she could do to hold onto the steering wheel as the vehicle crashed through small trees and lurched over boulders. Then something struck her full in the face and everything went completely black.

TWENTY

Professor did not lose consciousness, but for several seconds — it might have been even longer — he had no sense of where he was. Everything was dark and his nostrils were filled with a strange mélange of smells, some he recognized — gunpowder, pine trees, gasoline, dust — and others he did not. It was the latter, a hot, metallic odor, like electrical wiring about to catch fire, that prompted him to start moving.

Something was pressing against his face; it took him a moment to realize that it was the side-impact airbag. He recalled being walloped in the head with it, like a mean-spirited blow in a pillow fight. He also felt something soft in his arms.

Ophelia. He had hugged her close just as the SUV had gone off the road. He felt a measure of relief when she began to stir.

He raised his head and saw that the interior of the Mercedes was filled with dust or smoke — or more probably some combination of the two — and illuminated once more by the helicopter searchlight that had transfixed them earlier, ultimately causing Jade to run off the road. He could hear it beating the air overhead.

“Jade? Paul?”

There were murmurs from the front seat. Everyone seemed to be alive.

“We have to get moving,” he urged. His hand found the lever, but he had to slam his shoulder against the door to get it open. It finally yielded to his efforts and it was only when he spilled out onto the ground that he realized why he had been so disoriented; the SUV had smashed into a tree and stopped facing down the steep slope at an angle.

The front door popped open and Jade tumbled out. She glanced up at the two helicopters hovering overhead, shining spotlights down on them and kicking up a small dust storm, then turned to Ophelia who was struggling to emerge from the SUV. “I don’t suppose you brought one of those RPG launchers along.”

Ophelia shook her head as if the question had been serious.

An electronically amplified voice sounded from the sky. The words were incomprehensible, but after a moment the voice spoke again, this time in English. “This is the police. Stay where you are.”

One helicopter — the word “POLICE” was plainly visible in big white letters on its blue exterior — circled slowly, as if looking for a good landing spot. The other one hovered in place, its searchlight beam still illuminating the wrecked Mercedes.

Jade looked at him. “What do you think?”

He was about to remind her that the Mexican Army had evidently been working with Hodges and the Norfolk Group at Teotihuacan, but before she could say it, the sound of a bullet striking the SUV’s fender made the point far more eloquently. Barely visible in the darkness beyond the cone of illumination, the killers were moving down the hill toward them.

Professor pulled Ophelia down the slope, seeking cover behind the tree trunk that had stopped the Mercedes. Jade reached back into the vehicle’s interior, hauled Dorion out and dragged him along after her.

Professor spotted Hodges’ face amid the crowd of attackers. There had never really been any doubt in his mind that the attack was the work of the Norfolk Group, but here was the proof. “Time to go,” he said, even though he knew they had nowhere left to run.

“Wait!”

Professor was almost as stunned by the calm, confident way Ophelia said it, as he was by her actual words.

“We can’t stay here.”

She shook her head insistently. “It will be all right.”

As if on cue, the loud crack of a high-powered rifle echoed off the hillside. Professor knew that sound well; it was a burst from a Kalashnikov rifle, and it had come from the hovering helicopter. He couldn’t tell where the rounds struck, but the advance of the shooters on the hillside stalled.

Professor felt Jade’s eyes on him, and the implicit question: What do we do?

He didn’t have an answer for her. His instincts told him to run, but Hodges and the killers were so close, there didn’t seem to be any point.

The circling helicopter spiraled closer to the slope, close enough that Professor could see that the men inside were wearing dark tactical gear, similar to what he had worn as a SEAL. The pilot brought the aircraft down until the rotor-disk was almost kissing the slope, at which point the uniformed men began pouring forth, rushing toward the wrecked SUV with weapons at the ready.

Time to see if I made the right choice. Professor raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.

The helicopter lifted off again as soon as the last man was out, and rose high enough to allow the swirling dust cloud to subside. Five men — Professor figured they had to be EKAM operators, the special anti-terrorism unit of the Hellenic Police — surrounded the Mercedes, but their weapons were aimed up the hill at the Norfolk Group gunmen. The air bristled with tension and harsh shouts, but one by one, the killers, despite having superior numbers, began lowering their guns. Hodges was one of the last to surrender his. The man beside him, however, remained defiant. “This doesn’t concern you,” he yelled. Despite his fair complexion and dishwater blond hair, there was a hint of a Mexican accent to his speech. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”

One of the policemen took a step forward, thrusting his weapon forward meaningfully. “Drop your weapon or I will kill you.”

The man took a step forward. “Do you know who I am?” His tone implied that it was a rhetorical question and that the policeman most certainly did know.

“He knows, Andres.” Shouted back a different voice — clear, unaccented American English. “And if you don’t put your gun down he will shoot.”

The gunman — Andres — gaped in disbelief. “You! You betrayed us.” He took another defiant step.

A shot rang out, and then several more, the reports blurring together in a tumultuous peal of thunder. Andres upper body seemed to dissolve in a red cloud as scores of 7.62-millimeter rounds ripped through him.

He remained upright for a moment, but the light had gone out of his eyes. As the last echoes of gunfire died away, Andres dropped to his knees and then pitched forward, sliding down the slope, leaving a long crimson stain in the dirt.

Hodges showed not the slightest inclination to follow the other man’s example. He raised his hands in the air and dropped to his knees. The other men with him quickly followed suit.

As the police operators moved cautiously forward to begin securing their prisoners, Ophelia abruptly rose to her feet and stepped out into the open.

Professor hissed a warning, but was too late to stop her. She advanced and began speaking to the man who had moments before answered Andres. “I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so happy to see you.”

“Well somebody has to keep you out of trouble.” The man’s voice seemed to fluctuate between irritation and amusement.

Ophelia turned and waved invitingly. “It’s all right. You can come out. We’re safe now.”

Professor felt Jade’s eyes on him. He could only offer an uncertain shrug, then he too stood up. His first good look at the man Ophelia was speaking to revealed two things immediately. First, the man was not an EKAM operator and did not appear to belong to any law enforcement agency; although he wore a helmet and body armor, he carried no gun and displayed no official credentials. The second thing Professor noted was his appearance. The man was tall and slender, with pale blonde hair and a handsome yet familiar face that looked almost too perfect,

Professor was not the least bit surprised when Ophelia said, “I’d like you all to meet my brother.”

TWENTY-ONE

“You are not under arrest,” the policeman told Jade as he escorted her into a small windowless cell and then started to close the door.

“Wait,” she protested “Are you just going to leave me here?”

“Someone will be with you shortly,” he said, and then the door clicked shut.

The guy’s English was pretty broken; maybe she had misunderstood. Maybe he had actually said that she was under arrest.

“Don’t I get a phone call,” she shouted. Maybe the phone call rule was only true in the States. Or maybe it was just something that only happened in movies.

Jade sagged resignedly onto the cot that occupied the far wall of the cell. No matter how you sliced it, arrested was better than dead. And she was fairly certain that, once the facts came out, they would all be released. Surely, even in Greece, self-defense was a valid legal defense. Yes, she had stolen — and wrecked — a car, but aside from that, what crime had she actually committed?

Oh, there was the small matter of the Shew Stone, which was probably, technically speaking, the property of the London Science Museum, but it wasn’t like she had stolen it from the museum herself.

It rankled that she had only been in Greece a few hours, barely in Delphi for ten minutes, and someone had already tried to kill her. The worst part though was that it felt like it had all been for nothing. The Delphi oracle remained quiescent and the Shew Stone had failed to unlock the mysteries of the universe… or the multiverse.

Whatever.

She sat and brooded for what seemed like a long time, but probably was only about half an hour, until the door finally swung open. She jumped up, ready to demand her phone call.

Ophelia stood at the threshold. She looked completely refreshed — new clothes, immaculate make-up, not a scrape or bruise from the wreck anywhere to be seen. She clearly had not been sequestered in a jail cell. “Jade. I’m so sorry they’ve kept you cooped up in here. You how know bureaucracy works, but the good news is, we’re all free to go.”

It was good news, but Jade was immediately suspicious. “Just like that?”

Ophelia laughed. “Well, I’m probably oversimplifying it, but yes. My brother and I have…ah, influence with the Greek government.”

“Speaking of your brother…”

“Oh, come along, Jade. You don’t want to spend all night in here, do you?”

Jade had to admit that she did not, but she was still bothered by the almost too-fortuitous appearance of Laertes Doerner. She kept replaying the exchange between Andres, the man who was evidently leading the Norfolk Group band of killers, and Doerner.

You! You betrayed us!

She followed Ophelia through the police station to a waiting car. Ophelia slid behind the wheel and that struck Jade as odd.

Where are the bodyguards? Then she remembered.

A few minutes later, they arrived at the hotel. Ophelia led Jade straight to an upstairs room where she found Dorion and Professor already waiting.

She threw a withering glance at Ophelia. “Chapman, Dorion, Ihara. I guess you played the ‘get out of jail free’ cards in alphabetical order.”

“Actually,” Professor replied, using his best paternal tone, “Laertes just dropped Paul and me off.”

“Ah, yes. Where is the mysterious Mr. Doerner? I’d love to know more about how he just happened to show up in the nick of time to save the day.” She turned on Ophelia. “That seems to be a family gift. Maybe you’ve already got the ability to see into the future.”

“Jade has a point,” Professor said before Ophelia could respond. “There was a perfectly good reason for you to be in the right place at the right time to save our butts in Costa Rica, but Laertes showing up when he did, with the local gendarmes in tow, is just a bit too convenient.”

“They don’t call them gendarmes anymore,” came a smooth voice from the doorway. Jade whirled and saw Ophelia’s brother, leaning against the lintel with a self-satisfied smirk plastered to his face. He too had taken the time to clean up after his helicopter ride. “I would think you, of all people Dr. Chapman, would know that.”

“I was speaking in a general sense.”

“Ah.” Doerner took a step forward and closed the door firmly behind him. “Please, sit down Dr. Ihara. Make yourself comfortable. I’ve got a lot of fires to put out right now, so I’ll have to be brief, but I think you are all owed an explanation. And an apology.”

Jade could not help but notice Doerner’s smooth but folksy manner. He was a born politician, charismatic and oozing with what most people would call charm. Jade sat as directed and braced herself for what she expected to be a veritable downpour of dissembling and double-talk.

“To begin with,” he said, “as you may have surmised, I am a charter member of an organization informally known as the Norfolk Group. I guess you’ve heard a little about us, so I won’t deny that our goal is to prevent religious extremist groups from upsetting the delicate balance of our global economy. Myself and several other very influential men met several weeks ago to talk about exactly how we were going to do that, and we established a series of protocols; concrete steps that we would take to ensure that something like what happened at Norfolk would never be repeated.”

Professor spoke up quickly. “You also recruited a network of spies to infiltrate legitimate organizations — law enforcement, the military. That’s not exactly legal, you realize.”

“Dr. Chapman, the law exists to protect people. The Norfolk Group came together because your so-called legitimate organizations failed to enforce the law and protect our investments.” Doerner stopped abruptly and took a breath as if trying to get back on track. “The point is that even our very well thought out protocols did not anticipate a situation like this arising. Clearly, your work did not represent the kind of threat our group came together to fight. Andres Gutierrez lost sight of that. He was a loose cannon and he nearly caused an international incident.”

“You’re saying it’s over?” Jade said.

“Gutierrez is dead. His accomplices will be dealt with…discreetly. By tomorrow, you should all be free to return home to the States.” He glanced at Dorion. “Or wherever home is.”

The physicist nodded wearily, but then Ophelia spoke up, in her familiar confident tone. “Now we will be able to resume our investigation without having to worry about looking over our shoulder.”

Doerner’s forehead creased in a frown of irritation. “You intend to continue with this fool’s errand?”

“Of course,” Ophelia said as if the question annoyed her. “Especially now. Paul’s discovery at Teotihuacan proves that there’s something to all of this.”

Paul’s discovery? Jade almost said something in reply to that, but Doerner’s intent stare told her that there was a much more immediate problem. “Actually,” she quickly interjected, “we’ve got a lot to talk about, and I don’t think anything has been decided.”

Ophelia looked ready to protest, but Jade shot her a look that said, ‘Shut up!’

Professor seemed to be on Jade’s wavelength. “That’s right. This was supposed to be a scientific endeavor, and so far we haven’t exactly gone about this very scientifically.”

Doerner glanced at each person in turn, and then broke into a big fake smile. “Well, I’m glad we’re all in agreement. Now, as I said, I’ve got some fires to put out, and a few ruffled feathers that need smoothing. Fi, meet me for breakfast at, say nine-thirty?”

Jade realized she had no idea what time it was. Her body had just started getting adjusted to Greenwich Mean Time; Greece was two hours ahead of that. She shot a look at her watch and was dismayed to discover that the crystal had been cracked nearly in two. Must have happened during the wreck. Damn, I loved this watch. Maddock gave me…

She had a mental image of Christmas in Germany, but instead of kissing her while snow fell all around them, Maddock was kissing Angel Bonebrake.

Come to think of it, no great loss.

She slipped it off and shoved it into a pocket.

Doerner didn’t wait for an answer, but turned on his heel and strode confidently from the room. When he was gone, Ophelia rounded on them, focusing most of her ire on Jade. “What the hell was that about? Don’t ever contradict me, especially not in front of my brother.”

Professor stood, raising his hands in a placating gesture. “Ophelia, please take a breath. Jade was right to say something. Your brother just admitted to being part of the organization that tried to kill us, and you as much as said that you’re going to keep stirring that hornets’ nest.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You heard what your brother said,” Jade said. “The Norfolk Group wants to keep the status quo nice and…quo.” She wrinkled her forehead. “That sounded better in my head.”

“Exactly,” Professor said, nodding. “We only have Laertes’ word for it that Gutierrez was a loose cannon. How do we know that your brother isn’t the one who’s gone off the reservation? These guys have enough money and influence to do whatever they want, and right now what they want is to make sure that discoveries like ours vanish into the abyss.”

“So we just give up?” Ophelia shook her head, determined. “I can’t do that. Not now.”

“We aren’t giving up,” Jade said. “But you can’t rub your brother’s nose in it.”

“Maybe giving up is exactly what we need to do,” said Professor. “We’ve hit a dead end. I’m not sure what we’re even trying to find at this point.”

“The Moon stone, of course,” Jade said quickly.

“Why?”

She didn’t have an answer for that. Why do anything? Because it’s there. Because it’s an unsolved mystery. Because doing this is a hell of a lot more fun than lecturing and advising graduate students on their theses. None of those were very good reasons.

Ophelia supplied an answer of her own. “My motives are the same today as they were when I met you all. I want to see into the future. Don’t correct me, Paul. I understand your theories and what they mean, but the distinction is meaningless. If Delphi doesn’t have what I want, then we’ll look elsewhere. If the Moon stone is what I think it is, then just tell me where we need to go.”

Professor sighed, as if recognizing that his appeal to rational thinking had backfired. “Well, that’s the problem isn’t it? We don’t know where to look.”

Jade considered this. “There still might be something in the Dee manuscripts. Some clue that only the Shew Stone can reveal. We still have it, right?” She shot a hopeful look at Dorion who in turn looked at Ophelia. The latter, almost reluctantly, took the crystal globe from her clutch purse and placed it on the tabletop.

“If Dee really did have a vision of the Moon stone,” Jade said, “maybe he also saw where it would eventually end up. The only problem is finding the right manuscript.”

“I suppose we could do some research online,” Professor said. “That might help us narrow it down. Then, of course, there’s the obvious. We try to find out what happened to Alvaro. Didn’t Perez’s journal mention that he saw himself presenting the Moon stone to King Philip? For all we know, the thing is gathering dust in a Spanish museum.”

Ophelia clapped her hands together. “We can start looking right now!”

She rose from her chair, went to the nightstand and returned with an iPad. She held it out to Professor. “Will this work?”

Jade felt his eyes on her, as if silently asking: Are you sure you want me to do this?

She wasn’t sure at all, but what choice did she have? She was drawn to unsolved mysteries like a moth to a flame, unable to turn away despite the threat of getting burned.

Professor took the tablet from Ophelia and set it on the table facing up. “Okay, what should we start with?”

The next hour was excruciating. Jade, Dorion and Ophelia crowded together behind Professor, looking over his shoulder as he navigated a seemingly endless maze of Google results. “John Dee Manuscripts” directed them to Dee’s diary and several other works that had been laboriously transcribed into plain text and also recommended several books for purchase by a certain Gerald Roche.

“Scans of John Dee Manuscripts” was even less helpful.

“It may not matter,” Professor told them. “If the manuscript Perez saw was written using some kind of special ink that’s visible only when viewed through a polarized crystal, it wouldn’t show up in a scan.”

“So we would have to actually have the original parchment in hand,” said Jade. “Well, I know that Roche had a bunch. Those won’t do us much good.”

“You could break in and steal them.”

“Don’t tempt me. Where else can we find Dee originals?”

Professor typed in “Where can I find original John Dee manuscripts?”

“The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at Oxford,” Jade said, reading the first result that didn’t mention Roche. “Wouldn’t mind going there.”

“I’m not sure we’re going to find much more of use online. And if this is all we’ve got, then I don’t think we should get our hopes up.”

“Try searching for Alvaro.”

Professor dutifully typed in: “Alvaro Diego Menendez Castillo.”

“I’m glad you remembered that,” Jade said. “I didn’t.”

“That’s why you keep me around.” He scanned the results. “Nothing.”

He tried different variations, but there was not a single result that linked back to the sixteenth century.

“That’s not so unusual,” Professor said. “It could just mean that no one has digitized the historical account in which he appears.”

He tried other searches relating to Spanish history, ships that sailed from Mexico in 1593, ships that might have sunk along the way. Finally, he tried Gil Perez.

“Uh, Jade…”

She looked at the list. “No way.”

Jade had gotten used to results that had nothing at all to do with what had been entered into the search engine. Common names yielded personal websites and Facebook pages, and no shortage of advertisements for White Pages and other paid people-finding services. She was completely unprepared for what the search for Gil Perez returned.

“‘The mysterious teleporting man’?”

Professor clicked on the page and Jade began reading silently.

The story showed up, more or less word for word, on more than a dozen different web sites. One page indicated that the story had first appeared in print about a century afterward. Another site offered a skeptical examination of the details and explained why the story was nothing more than an urban myth.

“This can’t be the same guy,” Professor said. “Even if the story is true…and I’m not saying it is…there wasn’t anything in that journal about being a palace guard in the Philippines.”

“But the date,” Jade persisted. “It’s exactly the same.” She reread the account again. “In the journal, Perez said something about seeing the life he might have lived as if looking through a window. And he talked about opening the window and stepping through. What if he succeeded?”

“We found his body. I’d call that a ‘fail.’”

Jade turned to Dorion. “Paul, is there a possibility that a dark matter field could transport people between alternate dimensions?”

Dorion seemed excited by the prospect. “When it comes to quantum mechanics, almost anything is possible. It may be that Perez — our Perez, the man we found under the pyramid — tried to bridge the universes, to open a door instead of just looking through the window. In so doing, he might have created instability in space-time, causing several universes to overlap.”

“Maybe that’s what he meant by the life he might have lived; he saw the outcome of a different choice in life — the choice to be a lowly palace guard — and tried to switch places with his double. There was a hiccup and one Perez wound up dead in Teo, and the other got teleported to Mexico City.”

“A hiccup?” said Professor. “Is that the scientific term for it? Can I point out a big flaw in this idea? The Perez in the story had no clue about any of this, and the sailors who arrived from Manila confirmed that Perez had gone missing. That means that the guy we found in the cavern might be the one from another universe.”

“So?”

“So, maybe the whole business with Alvaro taking the Moon stone happened in another reality.”

Jade shook her head. “If that was true, we would have found the Moon stone in the cavern. Maybe things got mashed up, but the Moon stone was taken, and that means it’s got to be in our universe…somewhere.”

“Then, as bizarre as this story is, it doesn’t really tell us anything.”

Jade clung to the story of Gil Perez like a lifeline. “No, this has to be important somehow. We’re talking about someone teleporting! What if,” she glanced at the iPad screen again. “What if we look for other stories like this? Unexplained disappearances. Maybe we can find the Moon stone’s footprint.”

Professor’s expression was dubious. “Well, if you want mysterious disappearances, you don’t have to look very far. The route for Spanish galleons heading back to Europe went right through the Bermuda Triangle.”

Jade’s eyes went wide and Professor hastily added, “But the Bermuda Triangle is just a myth, created by a writer in the 1960s. Most of the so-called disappearances have been completely blown out of proportion and have a perfectly rational explanation.”

“Most? What about the ones that don’t? This makes perfect sense. Alvaro’s ship must have gone down. The Moon stone is sitting there at the bottom of the ocean. It’s probably the cause of those disappearances.”

Dorion weighed in. “If we accept the premise that the dark matter field can cause people to shift between different universes, then this is not implausible.”

Professor made a low grumbling noise.

Ophelia, who had been following the discussion without comment, now spoke up. “If this Moon stone is there, at the bottom of the ocean, how would we find it?”

“I’ve read all the scientific explanations for why the stories about the Bermuda Triangle are probably exaggerated,” Jade said. “But there are cases that still defy a logical explanation. Those planes that left Florida and vanished without a trace—”

“Flight 19,” supplied Professor grudgingly. “Five Avenger torpedo bombers went on a training flight in 1945. The flight leader radioed that he was off course and lost, and all attempts to talk them in or figure out where they were failed. The Navy searched for days in the area where they thought the planes had gone down, but found no trace. One of the search planes disappeared as well. The story of Flight 19 was what started people talking about the Bermuda Triangle. After that, every time a ship or plane went missing in the area, it added to the myth.

“But sometimes planes and ships just disappear, even today. Flight 370, that Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 went off course and vanished in the Indian Ocean. Everyone wants to believe that there’s some mysterious force at work because we think our technology is foolproof, but it’s not. More than two-thirds of the planet is covered in deep ocean. It’s a great big haystack to lose a needle in. It’s just that simple. Unless you think there are other dark matter fields out there.”

Jade raised an eyebrow. “Maybe there are.”

“You’re worse than Bones,” Professor sighed.

Jade rolled her eyes at the thought of the six-foot-five Cherokee Indian, Uriah “Bones” Bonebrake, Dane Maddock’s partner-in-crime, and like Professor, a former member of the same SEAL team. She and Bones had gotten off on a bad foot, and Maddock’s new relationship with Angel didn’t help, but Jade and Bones had actually gotten along pretty well when they’d last worked together. Jade recalled Bones’ fascination with unexplained phenomena. “We could probably use him on this. Anyway, my point is that we can take those stories — the ones that are still completely unsolved — and triangulate to find the center of the effect. At the very least, it can narrow our search area.”

“The average depth of the Atlantic is nearly two miles down.”

“If you can put us in the ballpark,” Ophelia said, “I can provide a search vessel with submersibles.”

“There may be another way to narrow the search,” said Dorion. “In order to have that kind of effect at a distance, the field would have to be massive, much larger than what we observed in Teotihuacan.”

“Could the Moon stone still be collecting WIMPs?” Jade asked.

“Possibly. But that’s not what I’m getting at. There’s never been a way to detect dark matter, but if the Moon stone is exerting a significant effect on space-time — significant enough to make planes vanish from the sky — there will be measurable relativistic effects.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that time will distorted…we’re talking differences of perhaps only a few nanoseconds, but it’s a fairly simple thing to measure those differences with an atomic clock. We have one clock with us, synchronized to the FOCS-1 clock in Switzerland. As we move closer to a disruption of space-time, the clocks will desynchronize. Put simply, we can build a dark matter detector.”

“Speaking of clocks,” Ophelia said, “it’s late. We should all get some rest. I’ve got a breakfast date with my brother in a few hours. I’m not looking forward to that.”

Jade felt a twinge of apprehension. Despite his intervention on their behalf, Laertes Doerner remained a member of the very group that had repeatedly tried to kill them. “Maybe we should keep this just between us?”

“I won’t be able to hide an ocean-going expedition. But you let me worry about Laertes.”

Professor sighed in defeat. “I suppose none of you will be happy until we’ve had a look. But you do realize that, if there’s any truth to this crazy idea, the Bermuda Triangle will be a very dangerous place, and we’ll be sailing right into the heart of it.”

Jade grinned. “Never stopped us before.”

Brian Hodges closed his eyes and tried to imagine that he was somewhere else. With his hands and ankles zip-tied to a chair, there wasn’t much else he could do to deal with his imprisonment. He had no idea how much time had passed; hours, certainly. He knew that he had dozed off once or twice, but the uncomfortable chair to which he was bound made real sleep impossible. His captors had not fed him or even allowed him to go to the bathroom. His stomach had been grumbling for a while now and he had a splitting headache, though strangely, he didn’t feel the need to urinate. That meant he was probably dehydrated.

“Can I get a drink of water?” he croaked. “You can’t treat me like this. I have rights.”

There was no answer. He had seen no sign of anyone since being tied up and left here in this cell. Had they forgotten about him?

There was a click at the door and it swung open to reveal an irritated-looking man with pale blond hair. He recognized the visitor immediately; Laertes Doerner, the man who had betrayed them to the Greek police.

Hodges felt a surge of defiance from the depths of his misery. “What a surprise. You know they’re going to come after you.”

Doerner cocked his head sideways. “The Group? Oh, I doubt that very much. You and Andres really screwed things up. The Group will be pleased that I managed to clean this mess up with only minimal blowback.”

“Why did you turn us in?”

Doerner chuckled. “Isn’t it obvious? Andres went after my sister. I couldn’t very well just stand by and let that happen.”

“No victory without sacrifice,” Hodges muttered. “I lost my family. A lot of people lost sisters and daughters. What makes you so special?”

“You mean apart from a net worth that runs to eleven figures?”

“You’re a hypocrite. When the Group learns about this—”

Doerner waved his hand as if brushing away a bothersome fly. “Don’t presume to know what the Group thinks. You’re not in our class. In any case, the Group won’t be learning of it. Not from you, at least. You see, somebody has to pay for your little incursion on Greek soil. Those gunslingers Andres hired are already on their way to the deepest darkest prison in Greece. You’ve got reservations there as well, unless…”

Here it comes, thought Hodges. Carrot or stick? He’s going to make me beg for it. “Unless?”

“I know that your motives are ideological. Or maybe a better word would be personal. I suspect you would gladly endure imprisonment or any other fate because you think your cause is just. Whether you believe it or not, I feel the same.” He stared past Hodges, a wistful expression alighting on his arrogant face. “Though I will admit to having a weakness where my sister is concerned.”

He brought his eyes back to Hodges. “Ophelia is a crazy dreamer, chasing after fairy tales. Unfortunately, she’s just told me that she’s not going to give up the search, and there’s a very real possibility that she’ll find what she’s looking for. That presents a problem for us all. I love her, but she’s out of control, and yes, if it comes down to it, I’m willing to do what has be done. I’d prefer it not come to that, but there it is.”

“Unless?” Hodges repeated, the word grating from his throat.

“Do what you were sent to do. Make this problem go away. It’s as simple as that.”

“As simple as that?”

Doerner took something from his pants pocket. He held up his fist and with a snick, a two-inch long blade appeared.

Switchblade, thought Hodges. This guy is a real piece of work.

Doerner leaned over him and sawed apart the zip ties. “We both know Andres was to blame for what happened here. I’ll see to it that the local authorities forget your name. It goes without saying that the Group will take care of you.” He took a step back. “Do we have a deal?”

“What about your sister?”

“I would prefer that she come to no harm, but as you say, no victory without sacrifice.” Doerner’s eyes glinted like the steel of his blade. “But if it should come to that, do yourself a favor and kill yourself, because I won’t be that merciful.”