“He says it is a warning, Sayin Winchester. He says we should go no farther.”
The workman was talking again, Kamir preparing to translate.
“He says—”
“I know what he said. He wants me to bury this find so no one will ever come upon it again.”
Kamir nodded his acknowledgment, but Winchester had already gone back to work clearing the message chiseled into the stone tablet. The rest of the dig team was hovering behind him, trying to see the results of his labor for themselves. When his work with the whisk broom was completed, Winchester went through the arduous process of laying strips of onionskin parchment over the figures and tracing out the message revealed. He numbered and dated each sheet and stowed them in an environment-proof plastic pack. To supplement these efforts, he snapped off a full two rolls of film with two different cameras to record the markings on the tablet. In archaeology, redundancy was a fact of life.
“Have we found what you are after, Sayin Winchester?” Kamir asked when Winchester was at last finished.
“I won’t know that until we open it.” Winchester stopped and held his foreman’s stare. “Order the men to remove the tablet.”
Kamir, a veteran of dozens of digs, gazed at him incredulously. “Did you say remove it?”
“I did.”
“Please, Sayin, you know better than I that proper procedure dictates—”
“Now.”
It took an additional four hours to fully unearth the stone slab. It was twelve inches thick, an unheard-of bulk, meaning that its total weight was likely in excess of a ton. Whoever had sealed what lay beneath it almost three thousand years before certainly had meant for the contents never to be uncovered again. In the sky the sun had turned red, with the last of the afternoon fleeing like the loser from a dogfight.
“We should wait until morning to proceed,” Kamir cautioned.
“I want it lifted off,” Winchester insisted.
“The light, Sayin …”
“Will do just fine.”
It was another forty minutes before the dig team managed to free the slab, then twenty more before they could budge it. At last the workmen found the proper leverage, and it slid a foot back from its perch.
The smell flooded out in a violent gush of air, a rancid stench worse than death itself. But even Winchester would have conceded it was more than just a smell that escaped. Something seemed to brush him aside, something like talons formed of hot steel slicing him in the chest on their way by. Winchester looked down at his shirt, expecting to see a neat gash with blood streaming from it.
He shook himself alert as the Turkish workmen staggered backward, falling to a position of prayer. Trembling himself, Winchester was conscious of some of the workmen’s pleas and prayers.
“They say it is an entrance,” Kamir translated fearfully, “an entrance to—”
“We go no farther tonight,” Winchester interrupted, composing himself. “We go no farther until Hazelhurst arrives.”
Hazelhurst was at one of the dig sites in Israel. He could be here as early as tomorrow afternoon, depending on when the message reached him.
“Find me a man to take a message into Izmir,” Winchester ordered Kamir.
Then he yanked his notepad from his pocket and began writing as fast as he could:
Professor Hazelhurst:
I’ve found the doorway….
Chapter 3
“Car Fifteen, do you copy?”
Detective Sergeant Joseph Rainwater pulled the headset off his ears and lifted the microphone up to his lips. “Copy, Twelve.”
“How’s it hanging, Injun Joe?”
“Not bad for a fucking stakeout. You got a reason for calling, Hal?”
“Figured I’d cheer you up, pal. ’Sides, me and the boys are ordering out and I wanted to see if you wanted anything. We’re going with your native stuff tonight. You know, that new Indian place? Bearded maître d’ walks around with a turban on his head?”
“You’re a fucking riot, Hal. Hope you get the runs.”
“Love you too, Sarge.”
Joe Rainwater smiled in spite of himself as he returned the microphone to its clasp. The companionship, distant and garbled as it was, was greatly appreciated. He’d been pulling twelve-hour shifts on this stakeout for weeks now. Putting the headset back into place, he let himself wonder if Captain Eberling hadn’t been right when he’d pulled the plug on this part of the machine. Trying to nail Ruben Oliveras, the big fucking cheese of the whole Chicago drug business, had become an obsession for Injun Joe. Too often he’d seen the results of Oliveras’s work, and so he was only too glad to accept the special assignment. Then, when the bugs they’d managed to plant throughout the drug lord’s mansion turned up zilch, Rainwater found he couldn’t let go. It was just him and one other cop pulling shifts now, and before much longer they’d be yanked, too.
Injun Joe changed the channels on his receiver to check out the sounds in the wired rooms of Oliveras’s mansion. In the automatic mode, it would lock on the room with the most auditory activity. Not that they ever could have wired all the rooms, not in the former Japanese consulate building that Oliveras had snatched up as soon as it came on the market. Son of a bitch just couldn’t resist that three-story red-brick mansion on Forest Avenue in Evanston, with Lake Michigan in its backyard. Bought and paid for with drug money.
Injun Joe was parked just over a block away on a circular drive between a small neighborhood park and the beach. Best entertainment on these spring nights was watching the Northwestern kids strolling along. He’d made a game out of trying to guess when the couples were going to kiss, but it didn’t help much. The nights were getting longer, and the black coffee was beginning to chew a hole in his gut. What Injun Joe should do, he should go up to the door and just blow Oliveras’s brains out.
Fat chance, since Oliveras had bodyguards coming out his keister. A dozen guys with Uzis and .44 Magnums around him twenty-four hours a day to protect against attacks from his enemies. Enemies? What a crock. The only attack Oliveras had to worry about was one from his conscience, since he controlled every major dealer in the whole city. A fucking monopoly to rival the old AT&T and no one was taking him to court on it.
Joe Rainwater started flipping through the channels of his receiver like it was a cable TV control. Eight bugs had been placed throughout the mansion and at night all of them would be silent for long periods. It was starting to get to him, every bit of it. Two months ago his wife walked out, and now he’s spending his nights parked in view of one of suburban Chicago’s most glamorous neighborhoods. Check out the houses in it and maybe dream a little when there wasn’t something buzzing in his ear.
It was a far cry from the Comanche reservation where Rainwater had grown up. He had come back from Vietnam the most heavily decorated Indian vet of the war and a hero to his people. He still spent holidays and some weekends in his boyhood home, would probably spend more there now that Sarah had left him. In any case, the council of elders wouldn’t be able to warn him anymore about bringing mixed children into the world. No problem there, since he and Sarah never even tried, never even—
A garbled rasp like feedback filled his ears. A bolt of pain seared his eardrums behind it. He was about to yank the headset off when he heard the first scream, a wail of agony that froze his blood. Suddenly gunshots rang out, and the rat-tat-tat of automatic submachine-gun fire became a constant din over shouts of men that gave way quickly to more anguished shrieks.