Gallo turned toward the mountain, the likeliest place from which they might be observed. “All clear for now.”
Pierce switched on the unit and knelt down, sweeping it back and forth. The display showed a dense subsurface — solid rock just below the thin layer of compacted sediment. He covered the target area and then started working outward, expanding the search area one square yard at a time. As he did, he felt less like Indiana Jones and more like a desperate treasure hunter with a metal detector and a crazy dream.
He should have known better. Numerology was just an elaborate form of pareidolia, seeing patterns where none truly existed.
Sacred cubits and recurring numbers, my a—
Hold on.
He stopped, then went back and swept the last section again, eyes riveted to the image on the screen.
“There’s a void here!”
THIRTY-SIX
From his concealed position in the back of a minivan parked atop Mount Nebo, Craig Williams stared through the high-powered scope at the three figures. He settled the crosshairs on the kneeling figure — the man, George Pierce — watching him sweep a handheld device back and forth across the arid hardpan. Williams used the tick marks on the crosshairs to estimate the range to target and the time it would take for a bullet to travel that distance.
Three seconds, he thought.
He shifted the scope onto the older woman.
Older maybe, but I’d tap that.
He had not been told her name, but with her long black hair and olive complexion, she looked kind of like the lady in that last James Bond flick, the French actress.
Sophie…no, Monica. Monica… Something.
He decided to call the dark-haired woman ‘the French Chick.’ She was mostly standing still, though every few seconds, her head moved slowly from side-to-side, looking around.
Williams moved to the last person, the younger woman — she looked like a kid. Black hair, dark skin… Mexican maybe? She wasn’t glamorous like the French Chick, but she wasn’t fugly, for damn sure.
He centered the crosshairs on the side of her head, his trigger finger curling almost subconsciously.
No wind. Three seconds to target.
His finger curled.
“Bang,” he whispered.
With a sigh of pent-up frustration, he moved the crosshairs back onto Pierce, the only member of the group who appeared to be doing anything. Exactly what he was doing was a mystery to Williams, but he had been hired to observe, nothing more.
No sniping today.
The scope wasn’t even attached to a rifle. The man who had contracted him and the rest of the Alpha Dog team had fronted them the money to buy black market weapons, ‘just in case,’ but he had made it clear that killing Pierce and the others was not the primary objective.
Williams was a veteran of the Iraq war, where he had been a sniper before being discharged. He took a job with a private military contracting firm called Alpha Dog Solutions, so he could keep doing what he did best: kicking ass and taking names.
Alpha Dog’s leadership had made some bad decisions, lost key personnel in botched field ops, and ultimately gone bust, but their misfortune had been Williams’s opportunity. He had dusted off the name and rebooted the defunct company. The contracts weren’t as exciting as they had been back in the glory days, but the Alpha Dog name still held a certain cachet with potential clients, especially those who didn’t know any better.
Actually, this was their first big A-list gig, and Williams did not want to screw it up. If the man said watch, then watch he would.
Pierce was no longer on his knees. Instead, he was standing, gesturing wildly. Found something, did you?
The French Chick was smiling — she was too cool to get excited — and the Mexican Girl just looked a little worried. Nevertheless, she took a step forward, positioning herself on the exact spot where Pierce had been kneeling a moment before. Her lips began moving, though she didn’t appear to be speaking to anyone.
Then, she took a step forward and vanished.
Williams jerked the scope back and forth, trying to locate her again. He reduced the magnifying power of the scope from 25x to 15x, then to 10x. He could see the other two, standing there, staring at that same spot, but there was no sign of the girl.
Where the hell did she go?
Suddenly, she popped back into view. Part of her, anyway. The girl’s head and shoulders protruded from the desert floor, but everything below the center of her chest was concealed.
What is that, a trap door or something? he thought.
She made a ‘come on’ gesture and then was gone again. After a moment, Pierce and the French Chick stepped forward and also vanished.
Williams scanned the area trying to find the hidden door through which the group had passed but there wasn’t one. The trio had stepped into the ground and disappeared. He set the scope down and turned to look at his employer.
“Mr. Fallon, you are not going to believe this.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Carter’s face was hidden by a netela—the traditional head covering worn by many Ethiopian women, but when she turned her head to look at him, Lazarus saw an uncharacteristic anxiety in her eyes. Felice Carter was one of the strongest women — no, that was wrong — one of the strongest people he had ever known. She had to be, to bear the burden fate had laid upon her. That strength took the shape of exceptional mental discipline. She wasn’t without emotion like Spock from Star Trek, but she knew how to keep emotion and fear from short-circuiting rational thought.
“You okay?” he asked.
She looked at him, smiled, and gestured out the window of their taxi. “It’s just this place. Ethiopia. This is where it happened.”
Lazarus nodded. For all their time together, this was something they had never discussed in detail. He had learned of the event before meeting her for the first time, and there had never been cause to question her further about the particulars of that incident. He knew that Carter had been in Ethiopia as part of an expedition looking for prehistoric genetic material in the Great Rift Valley, where the remains of the oldest primate ancestors of humanity had been discovered. They had spent much of their two years together on the African continent, but their travels had never brought them back to Ethiopia, the place where Carter had been exposed to the paleo-historic retrovirus that had turned her into a living evolutionary kill-switch.
Everyone had their issues, and hers was a doozy. But his was pretty intense, too.
“We’re at least three hundred miles from there,” he said. He meant it to sound reassuring, but they had traveled thousands of miles from Switzerland to Ethiopia. Three hundred miles didn’t seem all that far by comparison.
Axum had been the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Aksum, but now it was a small city of fifty thousand inhabitants, poised on the edge of the ever-encroaching desert. There were as many camels as cars on the main paved road. There was an airport though, about five miles from the center of town. The architecture was simple and traditional, mostly adobe-covered brick buildings. Lazarus saw no evidence of earthquake damage. The inhabitants of the region had been spared that additional hardship.