City of Screams

JAMES ROLLINS

and

REBECCA CANTRELL

Contents

CITY OF SCREAMS

An Excerpt from The Blood Gospel

Prologue

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

About the Authors

Also by James Rollins

Also by Rebecca Cantrell

Copyright

About the Publisher

CITY OF SCREAMS

October 23, 2:09 P.M.

Kabul, Afghanistan

IT STARTED WITH the screams.

Sergeant Jordan Stone listened again to the snippet of an SOS that had reached the military command in Kabul at 4:32 that morning. He rested his elbows on the battered gray table, his palms pressing the oversize headphones against his ears, trying to draw out every clue the recording might offer.

A lunch of lamb kebabs and local lavash bread sat forgotten, though the smell of curry and cardamom still permeated the air, contributing to the nausea he felt as he listened. He sat alone in a small, windowless room at the Afghan Criminal Techniques Academy, a one-story nondescript building at the edge of Bagram airport outside Kabul.

But his mind was out there, lost in that firefight recorded on tape.

He strained, his eyes closed, listening for the fourteenth time.

First screams, then a spatter of words:

They’re coming again . . . helpushelpushelpus . . . !

The sound faded in and out, but that did nothing to hide the terror and panic of those simple words.

Next came gunfire—frantic, sporadic, uncontrolled, echoing around—interspersed by more chilling screams. But what raised the small hairs on the back of his neck was the silence that followed, dead air as the radio continued to transmit. After a full two minutes, a single phrase rasped forth, distorted, unintelligible, as if the speaker’s lips were pressed close enough to brush the microphone. That intimacy more than anything set his teeth on edge.

Jordan rubbed his eyes, then pulled the headphones from his ears. Plainly the situation out there had ended badly in the wee hours of the morning. Hence the need for Jordan’s team to be summoned. He and his men worked for JEFF, the Joint Expeditionary Forensic Facility, out of Kabul. His team served as crime scene investigators for the military: gathering evidence from insurgent suspects, examining and testing homemade bombs, tearing down mobile phones found at battlefield sites or ambushes.

If there was a mystery, it was their job to solve it.

And they were good at what they did. They’d solve this one, too.

“I’ve got more intel,” Specialist Paul McKay said as he entered and plopped down into a metal chair. It squeaked under his weight. The man stood a head taller and a belly wider than Jordan, and he knew his business, recruited out of an Explosive Ordnance Division. Smart and unflappable. “That recording came from an archaeological team up at Bamiyan Valley. Four men and a woman. All Americans. Command sent a team of Rangers to secure the scene. We’ve got an hour to figure out what we can here, then we’re supposed to follow them out into the field.”

Jordan nodded. He was used to the pressure, liked it even. It kept him running, kept him from thinking too much. “I’m going to work on this message. You and Cooper get a full murder kit together and meet me at the chopper.”

“You got it, Sarge.” McKay tossed him a quick salute and hurried out.

Jordan listened to the mysterious phrase at the end of the message again, then called in translators. That didn’t help. None of them could even tell him what language it might be; not even the local Afghanis recognized it. A few claimed that it wasn’t human at all, but some kind of animal.

Someone quickly tracked down a British historian and archaeologist, Professor Thomas Atherton, who had been working with the team in Bamiyan, and brought him to Jordan. A fit and sturdy scholar in his early sixties, the archaeologist had come to Kabul two days before to have a broken arm set. As the historian listened to the screams, he grew pale. He ran one hand through his well-trimmed gray hair.

“I think that’s my team, but I can’t be certain. I’ve never heard them scream like that.” He shuddered. “What could make them scream like that?”

Jordan handed him a Styrofoam cup of water. “We have a chopper full of Rangers on their way to help them.”

The professor looked like he knew such aid would arrive too late. He adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses on his narrow nose and said nothing. When he lifted the cup, his hand trembled so much that water spilled onto the desk. He set the cup back down, his cast clunking against the table.

Jordan gave him a minute to pull himself together. Listening to his colleagues’ deaths had hit him hard, a natural reaction.

“That last phrase.” Jordan rewound the recording to that final whispery phrase. “Do you know what language it is?”

He played it again for Atherton.

A muscle under the professor’s eye twitched. “It can’t be.”

He gripped the edge of the table with both hands, as if he expected it to fly away. Whatever it was, it unnerved him more than the screams had.

“Can’t be what?” Jordan prompted.

“Bactrian.” The professor whispered the word. His knuckles whitened as he tightened his grip on the table.

“Bactrian?” Jordan had heard of Bactrian camels, but never a Bactrian language. “Professor?”

“Bactrian.” The professor stared at the headphones as if they were lying to him. “A lost language of Northern Afghanistan, one of the least known of the Middle Iranian dialects. It hasn’t been spoken since . . . for centuries.”

Strange.

So someone had attacked a group of archaeologists—then left a message in an ancient language. Or had the message come from a survivor? Regardless, to Jordan, that didn’t sound like a standard insurgent attack. “Can you tell me what it means?”

The professor didn’t lift his eyes from the table when he answered. “The girl. It means the girl is ours.”

Even stranger.

Jordan shifted in his chair, anxious. Were those final words a threat? Did they indicate that one of the archaeology team—a woman—was still alive, maybe being held hostage or tortured? A few years ago he might have wondered who would do such a thing, but now he knew. When it came to dealing with Taliban forces or the isolated tribesmen, nothing surprised Jordan anymore.

And that worried him.

How had a farm boy from Iowa ended up in Afghanistan investigating murders? He knew he still looked the part, with his wheat-blond hair, clear blue eyes, his square-jawed face. No one needed to see the Stars and Stripes sewn onto the shoulder of his fatigues to know he was American. But if you looked closer—at the scars on his body, at what his men called his thousand-yard stare—you’d see another side of him. He wondered how well he would fit in those cornfields of his former home. If he could ever go back.

“How many women were there at the site?” Jordan asked.

The door opened and McKay poked his head in, a finger pointed at his wrist.

Time to go.

Jordan held up one hand, telling him to wait. “Professor Atherton, how many women were at the site?”

The professor stared at him a long second before answering. “Three. Charlotte. I mean, Dr. Bernstein, from the University of Chicago; a local woman who cooked for us; and her daughter. A little girl. Perhaps ten?”

Jordan’s stomach churned, upset at the thought of a little girl caught in what sounded like a massacre. He should have felt outrage, too. He searched for it, but found only disillusionment and resignation.

Am I that hardened?

October 23, 4:31 P.M.

Bamiyan Valley, Afghanistan

JORDAN STARED OUT the chopper’s window at the bowl-shaped valley below. Framed by snow-dusted mountain ranges to the north and south, the entire valley stretched thirty miles long, an oasis of farmlands and sheep ranches nestled between the tall, stony peaks of the Hindu Kush. Though only a short hop by helicopter over the mountains, the city of Kabul seemed a million miles from this isolated valley.

They circled the empty village where the archaeologists had set up their camp. The village was little more than a small cluster of a dozen mud-brick buildings, some with thatched roofs, others topped by rusted metal, a few open to the snowy sky. It didn’t look as if anyone had lived there for a long time before the archaeologists moved in.

Snow fell around them, thick, fluffy flakes that were collecting on the ground and obscuring any evidence. Jordan shifted impatiently in his seat. If they didn’t get there soon, he might not be able to do any good. Plus with the sun to set in the next half hour, they were about to run out of daylight.

They landed, and he and his team, now including Professor Atherton, hiked to the location identified by the Rangers as the murder site. Jordan had brought the professor along in case they needed a Bactrian translator.

Or someone to identify the archaeologists’ bodies.

He hoped the professor was up to the task. The guy had been getting twitchier the closer they got to the site. He’d started picking at the rim of his cast.

Jordan paced carefully around the edges of the gruesome crime scene. Thickening snow and careless feet had already disturbed the details of the crime, but they failed to hide the blood.

There was too much of it: splashed against crumbling stone walls on either side of the hard-packed dirt street, dragged into a rusty-red path out of the village. The wide smear looked like the thumbprint from a bloody god. It seemed that same god had stolen the bodies, too, leaving only evidence of a recent massacre.

But where were the victims taken?

And why?

And how?

He stared at the heavy flakes that fell from a darkening gray sky. They had only scraps of daylight left.

“Treat the entire village as a crime scene,” he instructed his two teammates. “I want it all secured. And I don’t want anyone else setting foot in here until we’re done.”

“Closing the barn door after the horse is out?” McKay stamped his feet against the cold and tugged his cold-weather gear more tightly over his wide shoulders. He pointed to a boot print that marred a pool of blood. “Looks like someone forgot to take their shoes off.”

Jordan recognized the tread mark of a U.S.-military-issue boot. This unfortunate contamination of the crime scene must be the result of the Ranger team who had locked down this valley in the preceding hours, securing the area for the arrival of Jordan’s team.

“Then let’s take a lesson and keep our own steps light from here,” Jordan warned.

“Got it. Light as a feather,” his second teammate acknowledged. Specialist Madison “Mad Dog” Cooper clapped a large black hand atop McKay’s shoulder and patted his friend’s ample stomach with the other. “But that might be a problem for McKay here. Back in Kabul, he’s been spending more time in the chow line than at the gym.”

McKay shoved him away. “It’s not about weight. It’s about technique.”

Cooper snorted. “I’ll take the north side. You cover the south.”

McKay nodded, hiking his pack higher on his shoulder and freeing his digital Nikon camera, ready to begin photographing the site. “First one back with a real clue buys the next round when we hit stateside.”

“Like you need another beer in that gut of yours,” Cooper said, waving him off.

Jordan watched them head off in different directions, following protocol, preparing to canvass the periphery of the town for tire tracks, footprints, abandoned weapons, anything that could identify the perpetrators of the attack. His two men were each trailed by an Afghani police officer—one was named Azar; the other, Farshad—both trainees from the Afghan Criminal Techniques Academy.

Jordan knew the banter of his two teammates masked their uneasiness. He read it in their eyes. They didn’t like this situation any better than he did. A bloody crime scene with no bodies smack in the middle of nowhere.

“Why would anyone live up here?” he mumbled, not expecting an answer but getting one.

“It may be that very isolation that first drew the Buddhist monks to this valley,” Professor Atherton said behind him. Jordan had practically forgotten that he was there.

“What do you mean?” Jordan unpacked his video camera. If the snow kept up, these pictures might be all they had to go on later. He drew a grid in his head and walked to the edge. He took off his gloves so he could work the camera. “Stay behind me, please, and out of the crime scene area.”

Atherton took a long draw of breath through his pinched nose, eyes darting from side to side as if afraid to settle on a single detail. When he spoke, his voice came out in a high-pitched rush. “This entire valley was revered by the Buddhists. They developed a vast monastic complex, digging out meditative caves and tunnels in the cliffs. Some of the world’s first oil paintings still decorate those cave walls.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Jordan switched the camera to low light. He wanted to get every detail he could.

The professor turned from the valley to the cliffs and continued with what sounded like an oft-delivered speech, slipping into a monotone. “Monks sculpted colossal statues of Buddha out of the cliff faces centuries ago. If you squint, you can still see the niches that once housed them.”

Jordan stared at the distant yellow cliffs and could make out the dark pocks marking tunnel and cave openings, along with giant archways, the niches of which the professor spoke.

“The Buddhas the Taliban destroyed back in 2001,” Jordan said, remembering the international outcry.

“Sadly true. They came with tanks and bombs and blew up the famous statues, declaring them an insult to Islam.” The professor kept his eyes fixed to the faraway cliffs, clearly trying not to look at the blood surrounding him. Blood that could have been his. He talked more, his voice never changing from its even pitch. Jordan was starting to find it a little creepy. “All that’s left of the former colossi are those empty niches, holding rubble. It’s as if this valley is cursed.”

Jordan noted the professor’s attention had turned from the cliffs to a tall hill that overlooked the tiny village and shadowed this crime scene. He could make out bits of stone walls, pieces of ancient parapets, and sections of towers. It reminded him of a child’s sand castle that had been kicked over and left to the elements. The surface had been worn down by rain and wind and snow, until the entire edifice had dissolved into a misshapen version of itself, crumbled back to sand and rock, with only hints of its past still showing.

“If this valley is indeed cursed,” Atherton continued, “there’s the source. The Muslims named this set of ruins Mao Balegh, which means Cursed City.”

Curiosity piqued in Jordan at his words, along with a trickle of dread. Something about the place unnerved him—and few things made him uneasy.

“What happened to it?” He kept filming. He might as well get more background information from the professor while he was at it.

“Betrayal and massacre. But, like many such stories, it started with a tragic pair of young lovers.” The professor paused, as if waiting for a response from Jordan.

Jordan didn’t have time to humor him. He tried to move a little faster. The valley was losing light fast, and by tomorrow the snow would have covered everything. He hated the thought of having to finish their investigation in the dark, where they might miss something key.

“This city was once one of the richest in all of Afghanistan.” The professor gestured toward the ruins with his casted arm. “It served not only as a monastic center but also as a major trading post for caravans traveling along the Silk Road from Central Asia to India. To protect that wealth, a Shansabani king named Jalaludin built this citadel. For a full century, it was considered impregnable, growing to house over a hundred thousand people. Stories say it was riddled with secret passageways to help defenders attack their enemies. It even had its own underground spring to make it easier to withstand prolonged sieges.”

“So how did it end up like this?” The ruins had clearly fallen a long way since their glory days. Jordan zoomed in on a blood splash, trying to get a clean shot in the bad light.

“Genghis Khan. A Mongol by descent, he wanted to control this valley. So he sent his favorite grandson to negotiate a peaceful takeover, but the young man was killed instead. Then Khan moved his forces into the valley, swearing to slay every living thing in retribution. But once here, even his vast forces couldn’t find a way to breach the citadel.”

Still filming, Jordan took another careful step forward. “He must have found a way. You mentioned something about a betrayal . . .”

The inflectionless voice continued. “And a love story. The king’s only daughter had fallen in love during the months prior to the siege. But her father had refused her desired suitor, decapitating him when they tried to elope. Heartbroken and angry, she left the citadel and went to Genghis Khan under the cloak of darkness. To avenge her love, she showed the Mongols the secret passages, told Genghis Khan where the king’s forces were hiding at the underground spring.”

Jordan listened to the story with half an ear, concentrating on his work, finishing one side. His efforts weren’t as careful as he would have liked, but conditions were worsening. He crossed to the other side of the street, wiped a melted snowflake off the lens, and filmed his way along.

Atherton stood silent for a breath, then suddenly spoke again, as if he had never stopped. “And once Genghis Khan breached those walls, he did as he had promised. He killed everyone in the city, over a hundred thousand people. But he didn’t stop there. It is said he slaughtered every beast of the field, too. It was those dark acts that earned the city the name it bears today.” The professor shuddered. “Shahr-e-Gholghola. The City of Screams.”

“And what happened to the daughter?” Jordan could tell that the professor was a nervous talker. He needed an ancient story to distract him from the reality of what had happened to his colleagues.

“Genghis put her to the sword, for betraying her father. It is said that her bones, along with the bones of the other dead, both man and beast, are still buried within that hill. To this day, they’ve never been found.” Atherton glanced up the bloody trail to a cleft in the mountain a few hundred yards away, and his eye twitched. His voice dropped to an imploring whisper. “But we were close. We had to get as much work done before this winter as we could. We had to. We had to get any historical artifacts unearthed and secured before they risked succumbing to the same fate as the Buddha statues. We had to work fast to get artifacts out. To save them.”

“Could the team have been attacked because of what they found over the last couple of days while you were gone? Maybe some sort of treasure?”

“Impossible,” the professor said. “If the stories are true about this place, Genghis Khan cleared out anything of value before destroying this city. We’ve never found anything valuable enough to kill for. But superstitious tribesmen did not want us to disturb this mountain-size tomb of their ancestors. Stories abound around here of ghosts, djinns, and curses, and they were afraid that we would awaken something evil. Perhaps we did.”

Jordan let out a soft snort. “I’m less worried about dead enemies than I am about live ones.”

He was glad to have the Rangers at their backs. He didn’t trust the professor or the locals here, not even the Afghani trainees under his care. Out here, loyalties shifted in less than a second. Hell, that Shansabani king had lost his kingdom because he couldn’t even trust his own daughter.

He turned from the ruins and stared at a pair of CH–47 Chinook helicopters that sat a kilometer away, snow collecting on their blades, positioned at the edge of the neighboring town of Bamiyan. They had a team of investigators questioning the townspeople. They were all fighting the night.

He turned off the camera. He’d study the video later, but for now he wanted to think, to feel the scene.

What could he tell by the setting? Someone had attacked the archaeologists with a brutality he’d rarely seen. Blood was everywhere. It looked like a knife fight, not a gunfight, blood arcing out in thin spatters from a flurry of cuts, not single blotches as from a bullet wound. But the sheer amount of blood made it hard to be sure.

Who had done this . . . and why?

Had the Taliban taken some religious affront to the work here? Or maybe opportunists in town grabbed the researchers as a part of a ransom scheme that got out of hand? Or maybe the professor was correct—superstitious tribesmen had killed them because they feared what the researchers might disturb here. He hoped the Rangers were having more success than his team, because he didn’t like any of these answers.

By now, the ice mist had grown thicker, the snowfall heavier, slowly erasing the world around them. Jordan lost sight of the choppers, of the distant town of Bamiyan. Even the neighboring ruins of Shahr-e-Gholghola had almost vanished, offering mere peaks of rubble and ruin.

It was as if the world had shrunk to this small village.

And its bloody secrets.

The professor took off his glove and bent to pick something up.

“Stop!” Jordan called. “This is still a crime scene.”

The professor pointed to a scrap of sea-green fabric frozen in a pool of blood. His voice shook. “That’s Charlotte’s. From her jacket.”

Jordan winced. There were so many senseless, savage ways to die. “I’m sorry, Professor Atherton.”

Jordan looked from the professor’s anguished face down at his own hands. His right hand was twisting his gold wedding band around and around on his ring finger. A nervous habit. He let the ring go.

Heavy footfalls, rushed and determined, sounded from his left. He swung around, freeing his weapon—a compact Heckler & Koch MP7 machine pistol.

The shadowy form of McKay appeared out of the mists, trailed by Azar, his Afghan trainee.

“Sarge, look at this.”

Jordan shouldered his weapon and waved McKay forward.

The corporal closed in and used the bulk of his body to shield his Nikon camera from the blowing snow. “I took pictures of some tracks I found.”

“Footprints?”

“No. Look.”

Jordan stared down at the tiny digital screen. It showed a trail of bloody tracks across a snow-crusted stretch of rock. “Are those paw prints?”

McKay scrolled through a few more shots, showing a close-up of one of the prints. “Definitely an animal of some sort. Maybe a wolf?”

“Not wolf,” Azar interjected in stilted English. “Leopard.”

“Leopard?” McKay asked.

Azar huddled next to them and nodded. “Snow leopards have lived here for thousands of years. Long time ago they were a royal symbol for this place. But now, not so many are left. Maybe a few hundred. They attack farmers’ sheep and goats. Not people.” He scratched his beard. “Not enough rain this year and early winter. Maybe they came down here to look for food.”

That wasn’t even a threat Jordan had considered before now. He felt better thinking that animals had attacked the archaeologists. Animals could be dealt with. Leopards didn’t have weapons, and they weren’t likely to be sheltered by the locals. It also explained the ferocity of the attack, the firefight, and the blood. But could it be that easy?

Jordan straightened with a shake of his head. “We don’t know that the cats killed them. They might have come to scavenge afterward. Maybe that’s why we didn’t find any bodies. They were dragged to wherever this pride of leopards—”

“Leap of leopards,” McKay corrected, ever the stickler for details. “Lions come in prides.”

Atherton hunched in on himself. “If the cats have taken the bodies, they are close.” He pointed his cast toward the ruins. “This place is riddled with hiding places. And also land mines from the many decades of war up here. You have to be careful where you step among those ruins.”

“Great,” McKay grumbled, “like we don’t have enough problems with man-eating leopards. We get land mines, too.”

Jordan had maps of the area with the land mines marked on them, but he didn’t look forward to hunting through that maze to recover the bodies—especially in the dark—but he knew that might become necessary. Any clues to who killed the archaeologists might still lie with those mauled corpses. It couldn’t have been leopards, he realized. Leopards didn’t whisper in ancient languages. So the words must have come either from a survivor or a murderer. They had to go now. The longer they waited, the less likely the survivor would still be alive, or the murderer would be brought to justice.

“How big are these cats?” Jordan asked.

Azar shrugged. “Big. I’ve heard of males as big as eighty kilos.”

Jordan did the math. “That’s about a hundred seventy-five pounds.”

Scary, but not too bad.

McKay chuffed his disagreement. “Then you’d better look at this.”

He flicked to another picture and showed a paw print with a shiny quarter next to it, using the coin to reveal the perspective of its size.

Jordan felt a deep-seated cold fear, a primal reaction to when his ancestors huddled in caves against what hunted the night. The paw print looked to be eight inches wide, the size of a small dinner plate.

“I found another line of tracks, too.” McKay showed them on his camera.

He ended on another paw print, again photographed with a quarter, only this one was smaller—not by much, but clearly different.

“So there are at least two cats hunting here,” Jordan said.

“And both a lot larger than a hundred and seventy-five pounds,” McKay added. “I’d estimate twice that, maybe more. The size of African lions.”

Jordan stared over at the misty ruins, remembering the tale of two African lions, nicknamed The Ghost and The Darkness, who terrorized Kenya for almost a year during the turn of the century. The two lions were said to have killed over a hundred people, often pulling them out of their tents in the middle of the night.

“We’re going to need more firepower,” McKay said, as if reading Jordan’s mind.

Unfortunately, his team had traveled here light, one weapon each. They had expected to come and go before dark. Plus, with the Ranger unit standing nearby, it had seemed like plenty of protection.

That is, until now.

A crackle from the radio caused both Jordan and McKay to wince and grab for their earpieces. It was Cooper.

“I’ve got movement over here,” Cooper radioed in. “Inside the village. Spotted a flicker through one of the windows.”

“Stay put,” Jordan ordered. “We’ll join you. And be on the lookout for leopards. We may not be alone out here.”

“Got it.” Cooper’s voice sounded more annoyed than frightened. But he hadn’t seen the tracks.

After Cooper passed on his location, Jordan led the others to the far side of the village. He found Cooper crouched with Farshad by a jumble of boulders at the edge of the village. The ruins of Shahr-e-Gholghola rose behind their position. Jordan felt uneasy turning his back on that mountainous graveyard to face the village.

“Over there,” Cooper said, and pointed his rifle at a small mud-brick house with a snow-dusted thatched roof. The door was closed, but a window faced them. “Someone’s in there.”

“Or maybe you’re jumping at shadows,” McKay said. “The Rangers cleared every building. They found nothing.”

“Doesn’t mean someone didn’t sneak back here when we weren’t looking.” Cooper turned to Jordan. “I swear I saw a flash of something pale pass by that window. It wasn’t a gust of snow or a trail of mist. Something solid.”

McKay showed Cooper the pictures of the giant paw prints.

Cooper crouched lower and swore. “I didn’t sign up to be a big game hunter. If that’s some big lion in there—”

“Leopard,” McKay corrected.

“I don’t give a flying fart what it is. If it’s got teeth and likes to eat people, I’ll let McKay’s big ass take point.”

“Fine by me,” McKay said. “Especially since we know there are at least two of them and the professor here thinks they’re holed up in that craggy hill behind you.”

Cooper glanced over his shoulder and swore again.

Jordan settled the matter. “Cooper and Farshad, stay here with the professor. I’ll take McKay and Azar and check out that house.”

With his H&K pistol in hand, Jordan led his two men toward the targeted house, feet silent in the newly fallen snow. He was confident his weapon had enough firepower for whatever hid in this house. Still, he kept looking over his shoulder, wishing he had more ammunition.

As Azar kept his weapon fixed on the window, he and McKay approached the door. They slipped to either side and readied themselves. Jordan glanced over and got a silent confirmation from his teammate.

Upon Jordan’s signal, McKay stepped up and kicked the door in.

It burst open with a loud crack of wood.

Jordan ran low inside, weapon at his shoulder. McKay kept post, standing higher, sweeping the room with his own gun.

The home was a single room with a small table, a corner stone oven, and a pair of straw beds, one large and one small. Empty. Just as the Ranger search team reported. Cooper had been wrong, which both surprised and relieved Jordan. He should have known—

“Don’t move, Sarge,” McKay said from the doorway.

He obeyed, hearing the urgency in his teammate’s voice.

“Look slowly up. At your eight o’clock.”

Jordan shifted his eyes in the direction indicated, barely moving his head. He followed the mud-brick wall to where it met the thatched roof. Half hidden by a rafter, a pair of eyes shone back at him, as if lit by an inner fire. A rustling of straw whispered in the quiet room as the hidden watcher slipped deeper into the nest of thatch, a perfect hiding place, using the musty, stale straw to mask any scent.

Smart.

Jordan slung his weapon back and lifted his empty arms.

“It’s okay,” he said softly, gently, as if he were encouraging a skittish colt. “You’re safe. Come on down.”

He didn’t know if his words could be understood, but he hoped his tone and mannerisms made his intent plain.

“Why don’t you—”

The attack came suddenly. The shadowy lurker leaped from the rafters, coming down with a rain of dry thatch. McKay’s weapon twitched up.

“Don’t!” Jordan warned.

He caught the diving shape in his arms, recognizing the simple need in that falling form. He had been raised with a passel of brothers and sisters, and now nieces and nephews. Though he had no children of his own, he knew that plain desire. It went beyond language and country and borders.

A child needing comfort and reassurance.

Small arms clasped around his neck, a soft fiery cheek pressed against his own. Thin legs wrapped around his waist.

“It’s a little girl,” McKay said.

A terrified little girl.

She quaked in his arms, shivering with fear.

“You’re safe,” he assured her, while silently hoping that was true. He turned to McKay. “Bring Cooper and the others inside.”

McKay dashed out, leaving Jordan alone with the child. Jordan guessed the girl was no more than ten. He crossed to the table and sat down. He unzipped his coat and wrapped it around her, cradling her thin form against his chest. Her small body burned against him, feverish through the pajama-like garment she wore. He read raw terror in her every twitch and soft sob as she hovered at the edge of shock.

What had she seen?

He hated to treat this small child as a witness, especially in this state, but she might have the only answers to what really happened here.

The other men crowded into the small room, which only made the girl cling more tightly to him, her eyes huge upon the newcomers. He squeezed as much reassurance as he could. Her small round face, framed by black hair parted down the middle, constantly glanced at him, as if making sure he didn’t vanish.

“Leopard tracks all around the house, Sarge,” Cooper said. “It’s like they had a dance party out there.”

Atherton spoke from the door. “She’s the cook’s daughter. I don’t know her name.”

The girl looked at Atherton as if she recognized him, then shrank back against Jordan.

“Can you ask her questions?” Jordan asked. “Find out what happened?”

Atherton kept his distance from the girl. He rapped out questions as if he wanted to get through them as quickly as possible. His eye twitched madly. She answered in monosyllables, her eyes never leaving Jordan’s face.

Holding the girl gently, Jordan noted the two Afghanis standing by the smaller of the two beds. One man knelt down and picked up a pinch of white powder from the dirt floor and brought it to his lips. It looked like salt and from the squint and spit probably tasted like it, too.

Jordan noted that a whitish ring circled the bed, and a cut rope hung from one bedpost.

The two Afghanis kept their heads bowed together, looking from the circle of salt to the girl. Their eyes shone with suspicion—and not a small amount of fear.

“What’s that about?” McKay whispered to Jordan.

“I don’t know.”

Atherton answered their question. “According to folklore, ghosts or djinn often attack someone as they sleep, and the salt holds them at bay. The mother probably believed she had to protect her child, what with them working within the shadow of Shahr-e-Gholghola. And perhaps she did. Things happen out here in the mountains that you cannot believe when you are safe in the city.”

Jordan kept himself from rolling his eyes. The last thing he needed was for the professor to start spouting nonsense. “What did the girl say happened here?”

“She said the team had a breakthrough yesterday.” He tapped his cast and grimaced. “I missed it. Anyway, the tunnel they had been digging had broken into a cache of bones. Both human and animal. They were to begin removing them in the coming days.”

“And what about last night?” Jordan asked.

“I was just getting to that,” Atherton said with a pique of irritation.

He returned to questioning the girl, but Jordan felt her body stiffen. She shook her head, covered her face, and refused to say more. Her breathing grew more rapid and shallow. The heat of her body now burned through his coat.

“Better leave it for now,” Jordan said, sensing the girl retreating into shock.

Ignoring him, Atherton grasped her arm roughly. Jordan noticed a loop of rope dangling from her slender wrist. Had she been tied to the bed?

Atherton’s words grew harsher, more insistent.

“Professor.” Jordan pulled his hand off her. “She’s a sick and traumatized little girl. Leave her alone.”

McKay drew Atherton away. The professor retreated from the girl until his back was flat against the mud wall and then stared at her as if he, too, were afraid of her. But why? She was just a scared little girl.

The girl glanced up at Jordan, her body burning up in his arms. Even her eyes glowed with that inner fire. She spoke to Jordan, pleadingly, faintly, before slipping away.

How long had it been since she had eaten or drunk anything?

“That’s enough for now,” Jordan said to McKay. “Let’s get her to medical help.”

He took out his water bottle and coaxed her to take a sip.

The girl whispered something so softly that Jordan couldn’t make out the words, if they were words and not just a sigh.

The professor’s face blanched. Atherton glanced to the two Afghanis, as if to verify they had heard her words, too. Azar backed toward the door. Farshad to the bed, stepping within the ring of salt, bending to fix the area where he’d picked up the salt a moment before.

“What?” Jordan asked.

“What the hell’s going on?” McKay echoed.

Atherton spoke. “That last bit the girl just said. It wasn’t Hazara dialect. It was Bactrian. Like from the recording.”

Was it? Jordan wasn’t so sure. He wasn’t sure she’d said anything and, if she had, that the professor would have been able to hear it. He had listened over and over again to that taped SOS. The words at the end certainly hadn’t sounded like what the girl had just said. He remembered those words, deep, guttural, sounding angry: The girl is ours.

The voice had reeked of possessiveness.

Maybe it was her father . . .

“What did she say just then?” Jordan asked. He felt a rising skepticism toward the professor. How could a ten-year-old girl speak a language that had been dead for hundreds of years?

“She said, Don’t let him take me back.”

From beyond the mud-brick walls of the home, a ululating yowl pierced the mists.

A moment later, it was answered by another.

The leopards.

Jordan glanced toward the window, noting that the sun had set during the last half hour, falling away suddenly as it did in the mountains. And with the sun now down, the leopards had come out again to hunt.

Azar darted for the open door, panicked. Farshad called after him, clearly imploring him to come back, but he was ignored. The man vanished into the snowy darkness. A long stretch of silence followed. Jordan heard only the soft hush of falling snow.

Then, after a minute, gunfire burst out, followed by a piercing scream. The cry sounded both distant and as close as the dark doorway. It rang of blood and pain and raw terror. Then silence again.

“McKay, secure the entrance,” Jordan barked out.

McKay hurried forward and shouldered the wooden door closed again.

“Cooper, try to reach that Ranger battalion parked over at Bamiyan. Tell them we need assistance. Pronto.”

As McKay trained his weapon toward the door, Jordan shifted away from the table, to the floor, drawing the girl with him. She clung to his side, breathing hard. He freed his machine pistol and kept his sights on the window, waiting for the cats to come through.

“What now, Sarge?” McKay asked.

“We wait for the cavalry,” he answered. “It shouldn’t take them too long to get those birds in the air.”

Cooper shook his head and lifted their radio unit in his hand. “I’m getting no pickup. Just dead air. Makes no sense, not even with this storm.”

Atherton looked at the little girl as if she had knocked out their radios. Jordan tightened his grip on her.

“Does anyone hear that?” McKay asked, cocking his head slightly.

Jordan strained, then heard it, too. He waved everyone to stay quiet. Out of the darkness, through the fall of snow, a whispering reached them. Again it sounded both close and distant at the same time. No words could be made out, but it set his teeth on edge, like a poorly tuned radio station. He remembered thinking earlier that nothing surprised him anymore. He’d have to revise that. This whole situation had him surprised right out of his comfort zone.

“I think it’s Bactrian, too,” Atherton said, his voice taking a keening, panicked edge. He crouched like a frightened rabbit near the stone oven. “But I can’t make anything out.”

It didn’t sound like a language at all to Jordan. Maybe the shock of the day had caught up to the professor. Or maybe it wasn’t even Bactrian on the tape.

Farshad crouched beside the salt-ringed bed. He stared daggers at the child, as if she were to blame for all of this.

“Remember what I translated from that desperate radio call?” Atherton’s glassy eyes stared past Jordan’s shoulder at nothing. “Those last words. The girl is ours. They clearly want her.”

The professor pointed a trembling finger at the child.

Whispers out in the night grew louder, taking on a gibbering sound, a chorus of madness just beyond the edge of hearing. It felt as if the words ate through his ears, scratching to get inside his skull. But maybe those were just normal leopard noises. Jordan had no idea what a leopard was supposed to sound like.

Atherton clamped his hands over his ears and crouched lower to the floor.

Farshad barked out words in Pashto, his native language, and raised his rifle at Jordan, at the girl. He motioned toward the door with the tip of his weapon. Between the pantomime and the bit of Pashto that Jordan understood, the message was clear.

Send the girl outside.

“Not happening,” Jordan said grimly, staring him down.

Farshad had gone red-faced by now, his dark eyes wild. He shouted again in Pashto. Jordan made out the word djinn and something like petra. He kept repeating the word over and over again, shoving his weapon belligerently toward Jordan each time. Then a round fired and blasted dirt near Jordan’s knee.

That was enough for his men.

Defending him, Cooper and McKay fired their weapons at the same time.

Farshad fell back across the bed, dead before he hit the girl’s straw mattress.

The child cried out and buried her face in Jordan’s chest.

Atherton moaned.

“What was Farshad yelling at the end?” Jordan asked. “That word petra.”

Atherton rocked slightly, never lifting his face. “An old Sanskrit word, used by both Buddhists and local tribes people of this region. It translates as gone forth and departed, but it usually means demonic ghosts, those still craving something, unsettled spirits.”

Jordan wanted to scoff at such a thing, but he couldn’t find the words.

“Farshad believed the girl is possessed by an escaped djinn and that the ghosts of the mists want her back.”

“What I photographed out there,” McKay said, “those looked like leopard prints, not ghost prints.”

“I . . . I don’t know.” Atherton kept rocking. “But perhaps he was right. Maybe we should send the girl out there. Then they’ll leave us alone. Maybe she’s all they want.”

“Who wants?” Jordan spat back. He wasn’t going to send the girl to her death.

As answer, a heavy weight hit the thatched roof overhead, raining down dry straw. Jordan swung his machine pistol up and fired through the roof. His men followed suit, the blasts deafening in the small space.

A screeched yowl—not pained, just angry—met their efforts, followed by a scrambling retreat. It didn’t sound injured—just pissed. Was the creature out there attempting to draw their fire, to lure them into wasting ammunition?

Jordan checked his weapon. He caught the matching frowns as his teammates did the same. Not good. They were going to run out fast.

Another feline scream came from near the door. Cooper and McKay swung around, training their weapons there. Jordan returned his sights to the window, staring out at the mist-shrouded ruins. “If you see them, shoot. But be cautious with your ammo.”

“Got it,” Cooper said. “Wait till you see the white of their eyes.”

“That roof isn’t going to withstand many more attacks like that,” McKay said. “A few more poundings, and those leopards will come crashing on top of us.”

McKay was right. Jordan recognized the futility of staying holed up here. They didn’t have enough weapons to hold off a pair of three-hundred-pound monsters, especially in such cramped quarters. They were as likely to shoot each other as the animals.

Jordan regained his feet, scooping the girl in his arms.

“Do you have a plan?” Cooper asked.

Jordan stared at the door. “But it’s not a good one.”

“What are you going to do?” McKay asked, looking worried.

“I’m going to give them what they want.”

5:18 P.M.

JORDAN RAN THROUGH the snow, through the night, staying low but carrying the burden over one shoulder, limp and silent. The girl’s sleeve brushed his cheek, smelling of sweat and fear. He didn’t know if she was the source of all of this, if the leopards were fixed on her scent. He didn’t know if those whispers in the mists were echoes from far away or something else.

Right now, it didn’t matter.

If they wanted the girl, let them follow his trail, his movements.

He fled away from the distant glow of Bamiyan and toward the ruins of Shahr-e-Gholghola. He followed instructions given to him by Atherton, pointing him to the archaeology team’s excavation site. It was only a fast fifty-yard sprint away.

That graveyard offered the only hope now.

He and his men had just a few weapons and a limited amount of ammunition left. And these beasts had proven themselves to be crafty, experienced hunters, definitely hard to kill, plainly wary of guns. His best hope was to lure the beasts away and trap them.

After he was done with them, he’d deal with whoever was out there whispering in the mists.

Or at least that was his plan.

As he raced, McKay kept to his heels.

He’d left Cooper back at the house, covering their flight from the window. Maybe the cats would get into his sights, and Cooper would bring them down and solve all their problems.

Jordan crossed the last of the way, dodging through a maze of wheelbarrows, mounds of excavated gravel and sand, and stacks of abandoned tools to reach the entrance to the archaeological dig site. Cold wind cut through his shirt. He missed his coat.

As he skidded up to the mouth of the tunnel, he shifted his burden higher on his shoulder, making sure his weapon wasn’t compromised.

McKay panted beside him. The exertion didn’t make him short-winded, nor the elevation here. It was simple fear.

“You know what you have to do,” Jordan said.

“I’ll see what I can dig up—literally.”

Jordan grinned, appreciating his friend’s levity, while still knowing the fear it hid. “If I’m not back in ten minutes—”

“I heard you the first time. Now get going.”

A screaming howl punctuated that order.

McKay slapped Jordan on the shoulder, then disappeared with a map fluttering in his hand. Jordan clicked on the xenon tactical flashlight mounted to his weapon and pointed it down the tunnel that had been excavated into the heart of the ruins.

Now to set the trap . . .

He ducked low to keep the girl’s clothing from ripping on the rough-hewn walls and set off into the tunnel. He needed the cats to follow him, luring them with his bouncing light, his frantic flight, and the scent of the child’s fever-damp clothes. The low ceiling required him to run in a crouch, his shoulders bumping the walls to either side.

As he chased his beam of light down into the depths of the dark ruins, he noted a warmer breeze wafting up from below, as if trying to blow him back outside. It smelled of damp rock along with a chemical sting, like burning oil. He was grateful for the warmth, until his eyes began to water, and his head spun.

He knew some natural caves breathed, exhaling or inhaling depending on surface pressures and temperatures. Was that how the archaeologists knew where to dig, had they noted a section of the Shahr-e-Gholghola sighing out, revealing its inner secrets, and dug toward it?

Within a few more yards, he had his answer. The excavated walls turned to natural stone. He discovered steps carved into the rock underfoot. The archaeologists must have broken into a section of the secret passages that once riddled the ancient citadel.

But what had they found?

A scream of fury chased him, echoed by another.

He pictured the two cats crouched at the entrance, sensing their quarry was trapped. He breathed a sigh of relief for McKay.

They’re still coming after me . . .

Spurred by that thought, Jordan rushed deeper, knowing where he must reach, a place roughly described to him by Atherton, even though the professor had never been there himself.

Within a few steps, the tunnel ended at a large cavern, a dead end. He slid slightly on damp stone, coming to rest at a pile of bones, a deadfall of limbs, skulls, and rib cages. The scatter of bones covered the stone floor of the cavern, forming a macabre beach at the edge of a pool of black water. More bones glowed up through the shallows.

Jordan remembered Atherton’s story of the citadel’s subterranean spring—and the slaughter that took place here centuries ago.

But the deaths here weren’t all ancient.

Resting atop the bones, at the water’s edge, were the bloody bodies of fresh kills. The corpses were torn, gutted, and broken-limbed. Here lay the remains of the archaeology team, and what appeared to be the girl’s mother. From the gnawed state of their bodies, Jordan knew he had found the lair of the leopards. They hadn’t waited long to take over the newly opened cave.

As if sensing his violation, a yowl echoed down to him, sounding much closer than before. Or maybe it was his fear accentuating his senses. His head also continued to spin from the fumes that filled the space. By now, his eyes wept, and his nose burned.

He had to work fast.

He stepped to the edge of the boneyard and tossed his burden far. The girl’s clothes fluttered open, scattering straw that he’d stolen from the mattress and stuffed inside. If the beasts hunted by scent or sight, he’d wanted to do his best to convince the hunters that the girl was with him.

Or maybe it didn’t matter.

Maybe, as with Azar earlier, it merely took his own flight to draw the beasts.

Cats hunted things that ran from them.

And if he had failed to draw them after him, he had left Cooper back at the mud-brick house with the girl and the professor. It was the best plan he could muster to keep them safe with their meager resources.

Jordan unhooked the flashlight from his gun and flipped it to the opposite side of the cavern. The beam flipped end over end, a dizzying effect with his head already spinning. The light landed near the far side of the underground spring, glowing like a beacon.

Jordan fled away from it, to a cluster of boulders at the right of the tunnel entrance. He crouched down, drew his weapon, and waited. It didn’t take long.

He smelled the muskiness of the leopards before the first brute stalked into the cavern. It was a sinewy monster, nine feet long, all fiery furred and marked with black rosettes, a male. It flowed like a tide into the space, silent, purposeful, unstoppable. A second beast followed, smaller, a female.

He caught a glimpse of its dark eyes as it surveyed the room. They burned with an inner fire, much as the girl’s eyes had earlier.

Jordan held his breath.

The world turned watery, his head more muzzy.

Movement became smudging blurs.

The male rushed to the discarded clothing, snuffling deeply, intent on its focus.

The second animal slid past its mate, drawn to the light, stalking low toward it.

A rippling of the water drew his attention to the spring-fed pool. He watched the male cat’s reflection shimmer, wavering. For the briefest flicker, he thought he saw another image hidden beyond the fiery fur, something pallid and sickly, hairless and hunched. Jordan blinked his burning eyes, and it disappeared.

He shook his head and tore his gaze away.

He dared not wait any longer.

He slipped as quietly as possible out of hiding and toward the open tunnel, sneaking back the way he had come. He had to steady himself with one hand on the wall to keep upright.

Then sudden movement made him freeze. The male leopard, its back still to Jordan, lifted its head from the mound of discarded clothes and yowled its frustration at the roof, knowing it had been tricked.

Under its paws, the bones began to shift.

To Jordan’s addled senses, they seemed to stir on their own—scraping against one another, knocking hollowly. He gaped, trying to convince himself the movement was merely the massive beast shifting its weight.

He failed.

Numb with primal terror, he stumbled backward toward the mouth of the tunnel. The shaking of the bones grew worse. He watched one of the archaeologists’ bodies rise, belly up, back broken.

He wanted to look away, but horror transfixed him.

As he stared, the carcass lifted up on limbs twisted the wrong direction. It scuttled across the bone field like a crab. Its head hung askew, mouth open. From that gullet, gibbering whispers flowed. Words in the same archaic language as on the recording.

A second corpse stirred, missing a lower jaw, throat bared open.

It added to the chorus of madness.

Can’t be . . . I’m seeing things.

Grasping at this thin hope, he turned and fled up the tunnel, rebounding off the walls every few feet. The world continued to churn around him, betraying his steps. He fumbled for the penlight in his pocket.

He found it, flicked it on, and lost it as it slipped from his fingertips.

It bounced away behind him.

Still, the glow offered enough light from behind to help illuminate the way up.

He ran—while a howl arose behind him.

As it echoed away, he heard a faint whispering in his ear.

“. . . hurry. All done here . . .”

McKay.

He forced himself upward: buffeted by that foul wind, chased by howls, pursued by things that scratched rock with rotted nails and bone.

Shadows cast up from below danced on the walls around him, ahead of him, capering up from the fires of Hell.

Heavy footfalls rushed up the tunnel behind him.

No more howls now.

Just the silent hunt.

Jordan ran his palms along the wall to keep his legs under him. He tore his skin on the coarse stone, but he didn’t care. The pain meant he had abandoned the smooth natural cavern walls below for the excavated sharp edges of man-made work.

Behind him, a harsh panting echoed.

The penlight’s glow vanished.

Darkness collapsed around him as the beasts closed in.

He ran faster, his lungs burning.

He smelled the creatures now, the stench blown up to him by the foul breath of the cave: stinking of meat and blood and horror.

Then light shone ahead.

The exit.

He fled toward it, diving through it from a yard away to freedom, landing hard, almost forgetting to make that last leap to save his life.

McKay caught him in his arms and rolled him to the side.

A howl burst forth from the tunnel, full of frustration and the promise of bloody vengeance.

As Jordan tumbled away, he caught sight of the male leopard stepping to the mouth of the tunnel—then the world exploded.

Fire.

Smoke.

Pelting rocks and stinging grit.

Jordan shook free of McKay’s embrace but stayed on his knees.

He took in deep gulps of fresh air, trying to clear his head.

He watched for any sign of the leopards through the smoke, but the tunnel had completely collapsed. As he stared, an avalanche of rock continued to flow down from above, further sealing the passageway, reburying those bones along with the two leopards inside.

“How many land mines did you use?” Jordan gasped out, his ears still ringing from the blast.

“Just one. Didn’t have time to dig up more than that. Plus, it was enough.”

Before him, the mass of Shahr-e-Gholghola steamed and shuddered. Jordan pictured the subterranean cavern collapsing into stony ruin below. More explosions ripped through the ruins, blasting smoke and rock.

“The quaking is triggering other land mines to blow,” McKay said. “We’d better haul ass out of the way.”

Jordan didn’t argue, but he kept a wary eye on the ruins.

They retreated to the thatched-roof house. Cooper came stumbling out to meet them. Blood ran down one side of his face.

“What happened?” Jordan asked.

But before Cooper could answer, Jordan hurried past his teammate to find the home empty.

What the hell . . .

Concern for the girl spiked through him.

Cooper explained. “As soon as you went into the cave, the girl dove through the window. I tried to go after her, but that damned professor clubbed me, screaming, ‘Let her go! Let the demons take her.’ That guy was a whack job from the beginning.”

“Where are they now?”

“I don’t know. I just woke back up.”

Jordan sprinted out of the hut. Falling snows filled in their tracks but he could see that the girl’s tiny feet pointed west, the professor’s east. They’d gone in opposite directions.

McKay caught up to him.

A thump-thumping beat echoed in the distance.

A helicopter, ablaze with light, came sweeping toward them from Bamiyan, drawn like moths to a flame. The Rangers had heard the explosions.

“Great,” McKay said. “Now the cavalry comes.”

“What’s next, Sarge?” Cooper asked.

“We let someone else get the professor,” Jordan said, rediscovering his outrage. It flowed through him, warming him, telling him what he must do, centering him again at long last. “We go get that little girl.”

THREE DAYS LATER, I sit in my nice warm office at the Afghan Criminal Techniques Academy. All the paperwork has been filed; the case is closed.

The events surrounding that night were blamed on a single unusual finding at the ruins of Shahr-e-Gholghola: a gas signature emanating from deep underground. The gas was a hydrocarbon compound called ethylene, known to cause hallucinations and trancelike states.

I remember my own confusion, the things I thought I saw, the things I wished I hadn’t. But they weren’t real. They couldn’t have been. It was the gas.

The scientific explanation works for me. Or at least I want it to.

The reports also attribute the leopards’ strange and aggressive behavior to the same hydrocarbon toxification.

Other loose ends are also resolving.

Professor Atherton was found a mile from the ruins of Shahr-e-Gholghola—barefoot, raving, and suffering from hypothermia. He ended up losing most of his toes.

McKay, Cooper, and I had searched through the night for the little girl, and eventually I found her nestled in a shallow cave, unharmed and warm as toast in my coat. I’d been grateful to find her, relieved that I had cared enough to keep searching. Maybe I’d find my way back to those innocent Iowa cornfields someday after all.

The girl had no memory of the events at the ruins, likely a blessing. I’d taken her to a doctor, then turned her over to her relatives in Bamiyan, thinking that was the end of it.

But the cave where I found her, not far from the ruins, revealed itself to be the entrance to a small crypt. Inside rested the remains of a young man, entombed with the weapons and finery of a Mongol noble. Genetic studies are under way to determine if the body might not be that of Genghis Khan’s grandson, the emissary the king of Shahr-e-Gholghola had murdered centuries ago that set in motion the events that would lead to the citadel’s downfall.

But it was the manner of that young man’s death that keeps me sitting at my desk this winter morning staring at the neatly filled out report and wondering.

According to Atherton’s stories, the Shansabani king had slain his daughter’s suitor by decapitating him after he discovered their planned elopement. And the Mongolian body in the tomb had no head.

Could the emissary and the lover have been the same man? Had the king’s daughter fallen in love with the Khan’s grandson? Had that tragic love triggered the massacre that followed? Everyone always said that love led to good things, but it didn’t always. I find myself playing with my wedding ring again and make myself stop.

I don’t know, but as I sit here, stuffing the reports in a folder, I remember more details. How Azar told me that leopards were the royal symbol of the Shansabani kings. How Farshad screamed about the girl being possessed by a djinn and hunted by ghosts.

Was he right after all?

With the opening of the tombs, had something escaped?

Had the wisp of a long-dead princess slipped into the girl, seeking another to help carry her to her lost love?

Had her father, still mired in anger and vengeance, possessed those two leopards, the royal sigils of his family, and tried to drag her back to the horrors hidden under Shahr-e-Gholghola?

And in the end, had the explosions that resealed that tomb reburied his grave along with the bones of the leopards, ending the angry king’s ghostly pursuit of his daughter?

Or were the pair of hunters merely leopards, not possessed by anything more than hunger, their aggression fueled by the toxic gas in their new den?

And those voices. Had it just been the cats? I hadn’t been able to track down another Bactrian scholar, so no one but the professor had translated those eerie sounds into words. Maybe he was unhinged by his colleagues’ deaths or already affected by the gas from his earlier work at the dig site.

I shake my head, trying to decide between the logical explanation and the supernatural one. Usually, I’m a logical guy.

These crazy thoughts must be the aftereffects of all the gas I breathed in the cavern. But when I think back to the professor’s words, I can’t be so sure: Things happen out here in the mountains that you cannot believe when you are safe in the city.

A knock at the door interrupts my train of thought, and I’m grateful for it.

McKay comes in, steps to the desk. He carries a paper in hand. “New orders, Sarge. Looks like we’re shipping out.”

“Where?”

“Masada, Israel. Some strange deaths reported following an earthquake out there.”

I reach to the folder on my desk and close it, ending the matter.

“I bet this assignment will be easier than the last one.”

McKay frowns. “What’s the fun of that?”

Read on for a sneak peek at

The Blood Gospel

an exciting new novel from James Rollins and Rebecca Cantrell, featuring archaeologist Erin Granger, Vatican priest Father Rhun Korza, and Army Ranger Jordan Stone in his next adventure

On sale January 2013

Prologue

Spring, AD 73

Masada, Israel

THE DEAD CONTINUED to sing.

Three hundred feet above Eleazar’s head, the chorus of nine hundred Jewish rebels rang out in defiance of the Roman legion at their gates. The defenders had sworn to take their own lives rather than be captured. Those final prayers, chanted to Heaven on high, echoed down to the tunnels below, carved out of the heart of the mountain of Masada.

Abandoning the doomed men to their bitter sunlight, Eleazar tore his gaze from the roof of the limestone passageway. He wished that he could chant beside them, that he could give up his own life in a final battle. But his destiny lay elsewhere.

Another path.

He gathered the precious block into his arms. The sun-warmed stone stretched from his hand to his elbow, the length of a newborn baby. Cradling the stone block against his chest, he forced himself to enter the rough-hewn passage that sliced into the heart of the mountain. Masons sealed the way behind him. No living man could follow.

The seven soldiers who accompanied him forged ahead with torches. Their thoughts must still be with their brothers, the nine hundred above on the sun-scoured plateau. The stronghold had been under siege for months. Ten thousand Roman soldiers, split into enormous camps, surrounded the mesa, ensuring no one could leave or enter. The rebels had vowed, when their chant was complete, to take the lives of their families and then their own, before the Romans overran their walls. They prayed and readied themselves to kill the innocent.

As must I.

Eleazar’s task weighed upon him as heavily as the stone in his arms. His thoughts turned to what awaited below. The tomb. He had spent hours praying in that subterranean temple, knees pressed against stone blocks fitted so close together that not even an ant might escape. He had studied its smooth walls and high, arched ceiling. He had admired the careful handiwork of the craftsmen who had labored to make the space sacred.

Even then, he had not dared to look upon the sarcophagus in the temple.

That unholy crypt that would hold the most holy word of God.

He hugged the stone tighter to his chest.

Please, God, take this burden from me.

This last prayer, like the thousands before it, remained unanswered. The sacrifices of the rebels above must be honored. Their cursed lifeblood must serve a higher purpose.

When he reached the arched doorway to the temple, he could not step through. Others jostled past to their posts. He rested his forehead against the cold wall, praying for solace.

None came.

His gaze swept inside. Torchlight flickered, dancing shadows across the stone bricks that formed an arched roof overhead. Smoke swirled above, seeking escape, but there would be none.

Not for any of them.

At last, his eyes settled on the small girl, on her knees, held down by soldiers. His heart ached at the piteous sight of her, but he would not forsake the task that had been asked of him. He hoped that she would shut her eyes so that he might not have to look into them at the end.

Eyes of water . . .

That was how his long-dead sister had described those innocent eyes, her daughter’s eyes, her little Azubah.

Eleazar stared now at his niece’s eyes.

A child’s eyes still—but it was not a child who glared back at him. She had seen what a child should never see. And soon would see no more.

Forgive me, Azubah.

With one last murmured prayer, he stepped into the torchlit tomb. Guttering flames reflected off the haunted eyes of the seven soldiers who were waiting for him. They had fought the Romans for days, knowing that the battle would end with their own deaths, but not like this. He nodded to them, and to the robed man in their midst. Nine grown men gathered to sacrifice a child.

The men bowed their heads to Eleazar, as if he were holy. In truth, they did not know how unclean he was. Only he and the one he served knew that.

Every man bore bloody wounds, some inflicted by the Romans, others by the small girl they held captive.

The purple robes she’d been forced to wear were too large, making her appear even smaller. Her dirty hands clutched a tattered doll, sewn from leather, tanned the color of the Judean desert, one button eye missing.

How many years ago had he given it to her? He remembered the delight bursting from that tiny face when he knelt and offered it to her. He recalled thinking how much sunlight could be trapped in such a little body, that it could shine so brilliantly, fuel such simple joy at a gift of leather and cloth.

He searched her face now, looking for that sunshine.

But only darkness stared back at him.

She hissed, showing teeth.

“Azubah,” he pleaded.

Eyes, once as calm and beautiful as a fawn’s, glared at him with feral hatred. She drew in a deep breath and spat hot blood in his face.

He staggered, dazed by the silken feel, the iron smell of the blood. With one shaking hand, he wiped his face. He knelt before her and used a cloth to gently brush blood from her chin, then flung the soiled rag far away.

Then he heard it.

So did she.

Eleazar and Azubah both jerked their heads. In the tomb, they alone heard screams from atop the mountain. They alone knew that the Romans had broken through the stronghold’s defenses.

The slaughter above had begun.

The robed one noted their movement and knew what it meant. “We have no more time.”

Eleazar looked to the older man in the dusty brown robe, their leader, the one who had demanded that this child be baptized amid such horror. Age etched the leader’s bearded face. Solemn, impenetrable eyes closed. His lips moved in silent prayer. His face shone with the surety of a man free of doubt.

Finally, those blessed eyes opened again and found Eleazar’s face, as if searching for his soul. It made him recall another stare from another man, many, many years before.

Eleazar turned away in shame.

The soldiers gathered around the open stone sarcophagus in the center of the tomb. It had been carved out of a single block of limestone, large enough to hold three grown men.

But it would soon imprison only one small girl.

Pyres of myrrh and frankincense smoldered at each corner. Through their fragrance Eleazar smelled darker scents: bitter salts and acrid spices gathered according to an ancient Essene text.

All lay in terrible readiness.

Eleazar bowed his head one final time, praying for another way.

Take me, not her.

But the ritual called for them all to play their roles.

A Girl Corrupted of Innocence.

A Knight of Christ.

A Warrior of Man.

The robed leader spoke. His graveled voice did not waver. “What must be done is God’s will. To protect her soul. And the souls of others. Take her!”

But not all had come here willingly.

Azubah yanked free of her captors’ hands and sprang for the door, swift as a fallow doe.

Eleazar alone possessed the speed to catch her. He grabbed her thin wrist. She struggled against his grip, but he was stronger. Men closed in around them. She pulled the doll to her chest and sank to her knees. She looked so wretchedly small.

Their leader gestured to a nearby soldier. “It must be done.”

The soldier stepped forward and snatched Azubah’s arm, wrenching her doll away and tossing it aside.

“No!” she cried, her first word, forlorn, still sounding so much like a child, coming from her thin throat.

She tore free again and surged forth with furious strength. She leaped upon the offending soldier, locking her legs around his waist. Teeth and nails tore at his face as she knocked him hard to the stone floor.

Two solders rushed to his aid. They pulled the wild girl off and pinned her down.

“Take her to the sepulcher!” the leader commanded.

The two men holding her hesitated, plainly fearing to move. The child thrashed under them.

Eleazar saw that her panic was not directed toward her captors. Her gaze remained fixed on what had been stolen from her.

He retrieved the tattered figure of her doll and held it in front of her bloody face. It had quieted her many times when she was younger. He strove to block out memories of her playing in the clear sunshine with her laughing sisters and this doll. The toy trembled in his hand.

Her gaze softened into a plea. Her struggles calmed. She disentangled one arm from the men’s grasps and reached for the doll.

When her fingers touched it, her body sagged as she succumbed to her fate, accepting that escape was not possible. She sought her only solace, as she had as an innocent child, in the companionship of her doll. She did not want to go into the darkness alone. She lifted the figure to her face and pressed her small nose against its own, her shape a sigil of childlike comfort.

Waving his men away, he lifted the now-quiet girl. He cradled her cold form against his chest, and she nestled against him as she used to. He prayed for the strength to do what was right.

The block of stone gripped in his free hand reminded him of his oath.

To the side, their leader began the prayers binding the sacrifice above to the one below, using ancient incantations, holy words, and tossing pinches of incense into the small pyres. Atop the mountain, the rebels took their lives as the Romans broke their gates.

That tragic payment of blood would settle the debt here.

With the block clutched in his hand, Eleazar carried the girl the few steps to the open sarcophagus. It had already been filled, nearly to the rim, sloshing and shimmering. It was to act as a mikveh—a ritual immersion bath for those to be purified.

But rather than blessed water, wine filled this bath.

Empty clay jugs littered the floor.

Reaching the crypt, Eleazar peered into its dark depths. Torchlight turned wine to blood.

Azubah buried her face in his chest. He swallowed bitter grief.

“Now,” their leader ordered.

He held the girl’s small form against his own one last time and felt her release a single sob. He glanced at the dark doorway. He could still save her body, but only if he damned her soul, and his own. This terrible act was the only way to truly save her.

The highest-ranking soldier lifted the girl from Eleazar’s arms and held her over the open tomb. She clutched her doll to her chest, terror raw in her eyes as he lowered her to the surface of the wine. And stopped. Her eyes sought out Eleazar’s. He stretched a hand toward her, then pulled it back.

“Blessed be the Lord our God who art in Heaven,” the leader intoned.

Above them, all chanting stopped. She tilted her head as if she heard it, too. Eleazar pictured blood soaking the sand, seeping toward the mountain’s core. It must be done now. Those deaths marked the final dark act to seal this tomb.

“Eleazar,” the leader said. “It is time.”

Eleazar held out the precious stone block, its holy secret the only force strong enough to drive him forward. The stone block’s weight was nothing in his arms. It was his heart that held him trapped for a breath.

“It must be done,” the robed one said, softly now.

Eleazar did not trust his voice to answer. He moved toward the girl.

The commander released her into the wine. She writhed in the dark liquid, small fingers grasping the stone sides of her coffin. Red bled over its edges and spilled to the floor. Her eyes beseeched him as he placed the stone block atop her thin chest—and pushed. The stone’s weight and the shuddering strength of his arms forced the child deep into the wine bath.

She no longer fought, just held the doll tight against her chest. She lay as quiet as if she were already dead. Her mute lips moved, forming words that disappeared as her small face sank away.

What were those lost words?

He knew that question would haunt his everlasting days.

“Forgive me,” he choked out. “And forgive her.”

Wine soaked his tunic sleeves, scalding his skin. He held her inert form until the prayers of their leader ceased.

For what seemed an eternity.

Finally, he let go and stood. Azubah remained drowned at the bottom, forever pinned under the weight of the sacred stone, ever its cursed guardian. He prayed that this act would purify her soul, an ageless penance for the corruption inside her.

My little Azubah . . .

He collapsed against the sarcophagus.

“Seal it,” the leader ordered.

A limestone slab, lowered with ropes, ground into place. Men slathered the edges of the lid with a slurry of ash and lime to bind stone to stone.

Eleazar flattened his palms against the side of her prison as if his touch could comfort her. But she was beyond comfort now.

He rested his forehead against the unforgiving stone. It was the only way. It served a higher good. But these truths did not ease his pain. Or hers.

“Come,” their leader beckoned. “What must be done has been done.”

Eleazar drew in a rattling breath of foul air. The soldiers coughed and shuffled to the doorway. He stood alone with her in the dank tomb.

“You cannot stay,” the leader called from the doorway. “You must walk a different path.”

Eleazar stumbled toward the voice, blinded by tears.

Once they left, the tomb would be hidden, the passage sealed. No living being would remember it. Any who dared trespass would be doomed.

He found their leader’s gaze upon him.

“Do you regret your oath?” the man asked. His voice rang with pity, but it also held the hardness of the resolute.

That hardness was the reason why Christ named their leader Petrus, meaning “Rock.” He was the apostle who would be the foundation of the new Church.

Eleazar met that stony gaze. “No, Peter, I do not.”

PART ONE

Who looks on the earth and it trembles,

who touches the mountains and they smoke!

PSALM 104:32

Chapter One

October 26, 10:33 A.M., Israel Standard Time

Caesarea, Israel

DR. ERIN GRANGER stroked her softest brush across the ancient skull. As the dust cleared, she studied it with the eyes of a scientist, noting the tiny seams of bone, the open fontanel. Her gaze evaluated the amount of callusing, judging the skull to be that of a newborn, and from the angle of the pelvic bone, a boy.

Only days old when he died.

As she continued to draw the child out of the dirt and stone, she looked on also as a woman, picturing the infant boy lying on his side, knees drawn up against his chest, tiny hands still curled into fists. Had his parents counted his heartbeats, kissed his impossibly tender skin, watched as that tiny heartbeat stopped?

As she had once done with her baby sister.

She closed her eyes, brush poised.

Stop it.

Opening her eyes, she combed back an errant strand of blond hair that had escaped its efficient ponytail before turning her attention back to the bones. She would find out what happened here all those hundreds of years ago. Because, as with her sister, this child’s death had been deliberate. Only this boy had succumbed to violence, not negligence.

She continued to work, seeing the tender position of the limbs. Someone had labored to restore the body to its proper order before burying it, but the efforts could not disguise the cracked and missing bones, hinting at a past atrocity. Even two thousand years could not erase the crime.

She put down the wooden brush and took yet another photo. Time had colored the bones the same bleached sepia as the unforgiving ground, but her careful excavation had revealed their shape. Still, it would take hours to work the rest of the bones free.

She shifted from one aching knee to the other. At thirty-two, she was hardly old, but right now she felt that way. She had been in the trench for barely an hour, and already her knees complained. As a child, she had knelt in prayer for much longer, poised on the hard dirt floor of the compound’s church. Back then, she could kneel for half a day without complaint, if her father demanded—but after so many years trying to forget her past, perhaps she misremembered it.

Wincing, she stood and stretched, lifting her head clear of the waist-high trench. A cooling sea breeze caressed her hot face, chasing away her memories. To the left, wind ruffled the flaps of the camp’s tents and scattered sand across the excavation site.

Flying grit blinded her until she could blink it away. Sand invaded everything here. Each day her hair changed from blond to the grayish red of the Israeli desert. Her socks ground inside her Converse sneakers like sandpaper, her fingernails filled up with grit, even her mouth tasted of sand.

Still, when she looked across the plastic yellow tape that cordoned off her archaeological dig, she allowed a ghost of a smile to shine, happy to have her sneakers planted in ancient history. Her excavation occupied the center of an ancient hippodrome, a chariot course. It faced the ageless Mediterranean Sea. The water shone indigo, beaten by the sun into a surreal, metallic hue. Behind her, a long stretch of ancient stone seats, sectioned into tiers, stood as a two-thousand-year-old testament to a long-dead king, the architect of the city of Caesarea: the infamous King Herod, that monstrous slayer of innocents.

A horse’s whinny floated across the track, echoing not from the past, but from a makeshift stable that had been thrown together on the far end of the hippodrome. A local group was preparing an invitational race. Soon this hippodrome would be resurrected, coming to life once again, if only for a few days.

She could hardly wait.

But she and her students had a lot of work to finish before then.

With her hands on her hips, she stared down at the skull of the murdered baby. Perhaps later today she could jacket the tiny skeleton with plaster and begin the laborious process of excavating it from the ground. She longed to get it back to a lab, where it could be analyzed. The bones had more to tell her than she would ever discover in the field.

She dropped to her knees next to the infant. Something bothered her about the femur. It had unusual scallop-shaped dents along its length. As she bent close to see, a chill chased back the heat.

Were those teeth marks?

“Professor?” Nate Highsmith’s Texas twang broke the air and her concentration.

She jumped, cracking her elbow against the wooden slats bracing the walls from the relentless sand.

“Sorry.” Her graduate student ducked his head.

She had given strict instructions that she was not to be disturbed this morning, and here he was bothering her already. To keep from snapping at him, she picked up her battered canteen and took a long sip of tepid water. It tasted like stainless steel.

“No harm done,” she said stiffly.

She shielded her eyes with her free hand and squinted up at him. Standing on the edge of the trench, he was silhouetted against the scathing sun. He wore a straw Stetson pulled low, a pair of battered jeans, and a faded plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to expose well-muscled arms. She suspected that he had rolled them up just to impress her. It wouldn’t work, of course. For the past few years, fully focused on her work, she acknowledged that the only guys she found fascinating had been dead for several centuries.

She glanced meaningfully over to an unremarkable patch of sand and rock. The team’s ground-penetrating radar unit sat abandoned, looking more like a sandblasted lawn mower than a high-tech tool for peering under dirt and rock.

“Why aren’t you over there mapping that quadrant?”

“I was, Doc.” His drawl got thicker, as it always did when he got excited. He hiked an eyebrow, too.

He’s found something.

“What?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Nate bounced on the balls of his feet, ready to dash off and show her.

She smiled, because he was right. Whatever it was, she wouldn’t believe it until she saw it herself. That was the mantra she hammered into her students: It’s not real until you can dig it out of the ground and hold it in your hands.

To protect her work site and out of respect for the child’s bones, she gently pulled a tarp over the skeleton. Once she was done, Nate reached down and helped her out of the deep trench. As expected, his hand lingered on hers a second too long.

Trying not to scowl, she retrieved her hand and dusted off the knees of her jeans. Nate took a step back, glancing away, perhaps knowing he had overstepped a line. She didn’t scold him. What would be the use? She wasn’t oblivious to the advances of men, but she rarely encouraged them, and never out in the field. Here she wore dirt like other women wore makeup and avoided romantic involvement. Though of average height, she’d been told that she carried herself as if she were a foot taller. She had to in this profession, especially as a young woman.

Back home, she’d had her share of relationships, but none of them seemed to stick. In the end, most men found her intimidating—which was off-putting to many, but oddly attractive to others.

Like Nate.

Still, he was a good field man with great potential as a geophysicist. He would grow out of his interest in her, and things would uncomplicate themselves on their own.

“Show me.” She turned toward the khaki-colored equipment tent. If nothing else, it would be good to get out of the baking sun.

“Amy’s got the information up on the laptop.” He headed across the site. “It’s a jackpot, Professor. We hit a bona fide bone jackpot.”

She suppressed a grin at his enthusiasm and hurried to keep pace with his long-legged stride. She admired his passion, but, like life, archaeology didn’t hand out jackpots after a single morning’s work. Sometimes not even after decades.

She ducked past the tent flap and held it open for Nate, who took off his hat as he stepped inside. Out of the sun’s glare, the tent’s interior felt several degrees cooler than the site outside.

A humming electric generator serviced a laptop and a dilapidated metal fan. The fan blew straight at Amy, a twenty-three-year-old grad student from Columbia. The dark-haired young woman spent more time inside the tent than out. Drops of water had condensed on a can of Diet Coke on her desk. Slightly overweight and out of shape, Amy hadn’t had the years under the harsh sun to harden her to the rigors of archaeological fieldwork, but she still had a keen technological nose. Amy typed on the keyboard with one hand and waved Erin over with the other.

“Professor Granger, you’re not going to believe this.”

“That’s what I keep hearing.”

Her third student was also in the tent. Apparently everyone had decided to stop working to study Nate’s findings. Heinrich hovered over Amy’s shoulder. A stolid twenty-four-year-old student from the Freie Universität in Berlin, he was normally hard to distract. For him to have stepped away from his own work meant that the find was big.

Amy’s brown eyes did not leave the screen. “The software is still working at enhancing the image, but I thought you’d want to see this right away.”

Erin unsnapped the rag clipped to her belt and wiped grit and sweat off her face. “Amy, before I forget, that child’s skeleton I’ve been excavating . . . I saw some unusual marks that I’d like you to photograph.”

Amy nodded, but Erin suspected she hadn’t heard a word she’d said.

Nate fidgeted with his Stetson.

What had they found?

Erin walked over and stood next to Heinrich. Amy leaned back in her metal folding chair so that Erin had a clear view of the screen.

The laptop displayed time-sliced images of the ground Nate had scanned that morning. Each showed a different layer of quadrant eight, sorted by depth. The pictures resembled square gray mud puddles marred by black lines that formed parabolas, like ripples in the puddle. The black lines represented solid material.

Erin’s heart pounded in her throat. She leaned closer in disbelief.

This mud puddle had far too many waves. In ten years of fieldwork she’d never seen anything like it. No one had.

This can’t be right.

She traced a curve on the smooth screen, ignoring the way Amy tightened her lips. Amy hated it when someone smudged her laptop screen, but Erin had to prove that it was real—to touch it herself.

She spoke through the strain, through the hope. “Nate, how big an area did you scan?”

No hesitation. “Ten square meters.”

She glanced sidelong at his serious face. “Only ten meters? You’re sure?”

“You trained me on the GPR, remember?” He cocked his head to the side. “Painstakingly.”

Amy laughed.

Erin kept going. “And you added gain to these results?”

“Yes, Professor,” he sighed. “It’s fully gained.”

She sensed that she’d bruised his ego by questioning his skills, but she had to be certain. She trusted equipment, but not always the people running it.

“I did everything.” Nate leaned forward. “And, before you ask, the signature is exactly the same as the skeleton you were just excavating.”

Exactly the same? That made this stratum two thousand years old. She looked back at the tantalizing images. If the data were correct, and she would have to check again, but if they were, each parabola marked a human skull.

“I did a rough count.” Nate interrupted her thoughts. “Over five hundred. None larger than four inches in diameter.”

Four inches . . .

Not just skulls—skulls of babies.

Hundreds of babies.

She silently recited the relevant Bible passage: Matthew 2:16. Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.

The Massacre of the Innocents. Allegedly, Herod ordered it done to be certain, absolutely certain, that he had killed the child whom he feared would one day supplant him as the king of the Jews. But he had failed anyway. That baby had escaped to Egypt and grew into the man known as Jesus Christ.

Had her team just discovered tragic proof of Herod’s deed?

Chapter Two

October 26, 1:03 P.M., Israel Standard Time

Masada, Israel

SWEAT STUNG TOMMY’S eyes. Eyebrows would come in handy about now.

Thanks, again, chemo.

He slumped against another camel-colored boulder. All the rocks on the steep trail looked the same, and every one was too hot to sit on. He shifted his windbreaker under his legs to put another layer of protection between his pants and the scorching surface. As usual, he was holding the group up. Also as usual, he was too weak to go on without a break.

He struggled to catch his breath. The burning air tasted thin and dry. Did it even have enough oxygen? The other climbers seemed to be fine breathing it. They practically sprinted up the switchbacks like he was the grandpa and they were the fourteen-year-olds. He couldn’t even hear their voices anymore.

The rocky trail—named the Snake Path—twisted up the sheer cliffs of the infamous mountain of Masada. Its summit was only a handful of yards overhead, sheltering the ruins of the ancient Jewish fortress. From his current perch on the trail, Tommy searched out over the baked, tan earth of the Jordan Valley below.

He wiped sweat from his eyes. Being from Orange County, Tommy thought he’d known heat. But this was like crawling into an oven.

His head drooped forward. He wanted to sleep again. He wanted to feel cool hotel sheets against his cheek and take a long nap in air-conditioning. After that, if he felt better, he would play video games.

He jerked awake. This was no time to daydream. But he was so tired, and the desert so quiet. Unlike humans, animals and bugs were smart enough to take cover during the day. A vast empty silence swallowed him. Would death be like this?

“Are you okay, honey?” his mother asked.

He startled. Why hadn’t he heard her approach? Did he fall asleep again? He wheezed out, “Fine.”

She bit her lip. They all knew he wasn’t fine. He yanked his cuff over the new coffee-brown blotch of melanoma that disfigured his left wrist.

“We can wait as long as you need to.” She plunked down next to him. “I wonder why they call it the Snake’s Path? I haven’t seen a single snake.”

She spoke to his chin. His parents rarely made eye contact with him anymore. When they did, they cried. It had been like that throughout the last two years of surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation—and now through his relapse.

Maybe they’d finally look him in the face when he lay in his coffin.

“Too hot for snakes.” He hated how out of breath he sounded.

“They’d be snake steaks.” She took a long drink from her water bottle. “Sun-broiled and ready to eat. Just like us.”

His father trotted up. “Everything all right?”

“I’m just taking a break,” his mother lied, covering for him. She wet her handkerchief and handed it to Tommy. “I got tired.”

Tommy wanted to correct her, to tell the truth, but he was too exhausted. He wiped the cloth across his face.

His father started talking, like he always did when he was nervous. “We’re close now. Just a few more yards, and we’ll see the fortress. The actual fortress of Masada. Try to picture it.”

Obediently, Tommy closed his eyes. He pictured a swimming pool. Blue and cool and smelling like chlorine.

“Ten thousand Roman soldiers are camped out all around here in tents. Soldiers with swords and shields wait in the sun. They close off any escape route, try to starve out the nine hundred men, women, and children up there on the plateau.” His father talked faster, excited. “But the rebels stand firm until the end. Even after. They never give up.”

Tommy tugged his hat down on his bald head and squinted up at him. “They offed themselves in the end, Dad.”

“No.” His father spoke passionately. “The Jews here decided to die as free men, rather than fall to the mercy of the Romans. They didn’t kill themselves in surrender. They chose their own fate. Choices like that determine the kind of man you are.”

Tommy picked up a hot stone and tossed it down the trail. It bounced, then vanished over the edge. What would his father do if he really chose his own fate? If he offed himself instead of being a slave to the cancer. He didn’t think his father would sound so proud of that.

He studied his father’s face. People had often said they looked alike: same thick black hair, same easy smile. After chemo stole his hair, no one said that anymore. He wondered if he would have grown up to look like him.

“Ready to go again?” His father hitched his pack higher on his shoulder.

His mother gave his father the evil eye. “We can wait.”

“I didn’t say we had to go,” his father said. “I was just asking—”

“You bet.” Tommy stood up to keep his parents from arguing.

Eyes on the trail, he dragged forward. One tan hiking boot in front of the other. Soon he’d be up top, and his parents would get their moment with him at the fort. That was why he had agreed to this trip, to this long climb—because it would give them something to remember. Even if they weren’t ready to admit it, they wouldn’t have many more memories of him. He wanted to make them good ones.

He counted his steps. That was how you got through tough things. You counted. Once you said “one,” then you knew “two” was coming, and “three” right after that. He got to twenty-eight before the path leveled out.

He had reached the summit. Sure, his lungs felt like two flaming paper bags, but he was glad he’d done it.

At the top stood a wooden pavilion—though pavilion was a pretentious word for four skinny tree trunks topped by more skinny tree trunks laid sideways to cast patchy shade. But it beat standing in the sun.

Beyond the cliff’s edge, desert stretched around him. In its dried-out and desolate way, it was beautiful. Bleached brown dunes rolled as far as he could see. Sand slapped against rocks. Millennia of wind erosion had eaten those rocks away, grain by grain.

No people, no animals. Did the defenders see this view before the Romans arrived?

A killing wasteland.

He turned and scanned the plateau up top, where all that bloodshed had happened two thousand years ago. It was a long flat area, about five football fields long, maybe three times as wide, with a half-dozen or so crumbling stone buildings.

This is what I climbed up here for?

His mother looked equally unimpressed. She pushed curly brown hair out of her eyes, her face pink from sunburn or exertion. “It looks more like a prison than a fortress.”

“It was a prison,” his father said. “A death row prison. Nobody got out alive.”

“Nobody ever gets out alive.” Tommy regretted his words as soon as they left his mouth, especially when his mother turned away and slid a finger under her sunglasses, clearly wiping a tear. Still, a part of him was glad that she let herself feel something real instead of lying about it all the time.

Their guide bounced up to them, rescuing them from the moment. She was all bare legs, tight khaki shorts, and long black hair, barely winded by the long climb. “Glad you guys made it!” She even had a sexy Israeli accent.

He smiled at her, grateful to have something else to think about. “Thanks.”

“Like I told everybody else a minute ago, the name Masada comes from the word metzuda, meaning ‘fortress,’ and you can see why.” She waved a long tan arm to encompass the entire plateau. “The casemate walls protecting the fortress are actually two walls, one inside the other. Between them were the main living quarters for Masada’s residents. Ahead of us is the Western Palace, the biggest structure on Masada.”

Tommy tore his eyes away from her lips to look where she pointed. The massive building didn’t look anything like a palace. It was a wreck. The old stone walls were missing large sections and clad with modern scaffolding. It looked like someone was halfway through building a movie set for the next Indiana Jones installment.

There must be a deep history under all that scaffolding, but he didn’t feel it. He wanted to. History mattered to his father, and it should to him, too, but since the cancer, he felt outside of time, outside of history. He didn’t have room in his head for other people’s tragedies, especially not people who had been dead for thousands of years.

“This next building we believe was a private bathhouse,” the guide said, indicating a building on the left. “They found three skeletons inside, skulls separated from the bodies.”

He perked up. Finally something interesting.

“Decapitated?” he asked, moving closer. “So they committed suicide by cutting off their own heads?”

The guide’s lips curved in a smile. “Actually, the soldiers drew lots to see who would be responsible for killing the others. Only the last man had to commit suicide.”

Tommy scowled at the ruins. So they killed their own children when the going got tough. He felt a surprising flicker of envy. Better to die quickly at the hands of someone who loved you than by the slow and pitiless rot of cancer. Ashamed of this thought, he looked at his parents. His mother smiled at him as she fanned herself with the guidebook, and his father took his picture.

No, he could never ask that of them.

Resigned, he turned his attention back to the bathhouse. “Those skeletons . . . are they still in there?” He stepped forward, ready to peek inside through the metal gate.

The guide blocked him with her ample chest. “Sorry, young man. No one is allowed inside.”

He struggled not to stare at her breasts but failed miserably.

Before he could move, his mother spoke. “How’re you doing, Tommy?”

Had she seen him checking out the guide? He blushed. “I’m fine.”

“Are you thirsty? Do you want some water?” She held out her plastic water bottle.

“No, Mom.”

“Let me put some more sunscreen on your face.” His mother reached into her purse. Normally, he would have suffered the indignity, but the guide smiled at him, a stunning smile, and he suddenly didn’t want to be babied.

“I’m fine, Mom!” he spat out, more harshly than he’d intended.

His mother flinched. The guide walked away.

“Sorry,” he said to his mother. “I didn’t mean it.”

“It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll be over there with your father. Take your time here.”

Feeling terrible, he watched her walk away.

He crossed over to the bathhouse, angry at himself. He leaned on the metal gate to see inside—the gate creaked open under his weight. He almost fell through. He stepped back quickly, but before he did so, something in the corner of the room caught his eye.

A soft fluttering, white, like a crumpled piece of paper.

Curiosity piqued inside him. He searched around. No one was looking. Besides, what was the penalty for trespassing? What was the worst that could happen? The cute guide might drag him back out?

He wouldn’t mind that at all.

He poked his head inside, staring at the source of the fluttering.

A small white dove limped across the mosaic floor, its left wing dragging across the tiles, scrawling some mysterious message in the dust with the tip of its feathers.

Poor thing . . .

He had to get it out of there. It would die from dehydration or get eaten by something. The guide probably knew a bird rescue place they could bring it to. His mother had volunteered at a place like that back home in California, before his cancer ate up everyone’s life.

He slipped through the gap in the gate. Inside, the room was smaller than his father’s toolshed, with four plain stone walls and a floor covered by a faded mosaic made of maddeningly tiny tiles. The mosaic showed eight dusty red hearts arranged in a circle like a flower, a row of dark blue-and-white tiles that looked like waves, and a border of terra-cotta, and white triangles that reminded him of teeth. He tried to imagine long-ago craftsmen putting it together like a jigsaw puzzle, but the thought made him tired.

He stepped across the shadowy threshold, grateful to be out of the unforgiving sun. How many people had died in here? A chill raced up his spine as he imagined the scene. He pictured people kneeling—he was certain they would be kneeling. A man in a dirty linen tunic stood above them with his sword raised high. He’d started with the youngest one, and by the time he was done, he barely had the strength to lift his arms, but he did. Finally, he, too, fell to his knees and waited for a quick death from his friend’s blade. And then, it was over. Their blood ran over the tiny tiles, stained the grout, and pooled on the floor.

Tommy shook his head to clear the vision and looked around.

No skeletons.

They were probably taken to a museum or maybe buried someplace.

The bird raised its head, halting its journey across the tiles to stare up at Tommy, first with one eye, then the other, sizing him up. Its eyes were a brilliant shade of green, like malachite. He’d never seen a bird with green eyes before.

He knelt down and whispered, his words barely a breath. “Come here, little one. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

It stared with each eye again—then took a hop toward him.

Encouraged, he reached out and gently scooped up the wounded creature. As he rose with its warm body cradled between his palms, the ground shifted under him. He struggled to keep his balance. Was he dizzy because of the long climb? Between his toes, a tiny black line skittered across the mosaic, like a living thing.

Snake was his first thought.

Fear beat in his heart.

But the dark line widened, revealing it to be something worse. Not a snake, but a crack. A finger of dark orange smoke curled up from one end of the crack, no bigger than if someone had dropped a lit cigarette.

The bird suddenly burst from his palms, spread its wings, and sailed through the smoke as it fled out the door. Apparently it hadn’t been that injured. The smoke wafted Tommy’s way, beat by the passing wings. It smelled surprisingly sweet with a hint of darker spices, almost like incense.

Tommy crinkled his brow and leaned forward. He held his palm over the smoke. It rose up between his fingertips, cold instead of warm, as if it came from some cool place deep within the earth.

He bent to look at it more closely—when the mosaic cracked under his boots like glass. He jumped back. Tiles slipped into the gap. Blues, tans, and reds. The gap devoured the pattern as it grew wider.

He backpedaled toward the door. Gouts of smoke, now a reddish orange, boiled up through the splintering mosaic.

A grinding groan rose from the mountain’s core, and the entire room shook.

Earthquake.

He leaped out the bathhouse door and landed hard on his backside. In front of him, the building gave a final, violent jerk, as if slapped by an angry god—then toppled into the chasm opening beneath it.

The edges crumbled wider, only feet away. He scooted backward. The chasm chased him. He gained his feet to run, but the mountaintop jolted and knocked him back to the ground.

He crawled away on his hands and knees. Stones shredded his palms. Around him, buildings and columns smashed to the ground.

God, please help me!

Dust and smoke hid everything more than a few yards away. As he crawled, he saw a man vanish under a falling section of wall. Two screaming women dropped away as the ground split beneath them.

“TOMMY!”

He crawled toward his mother’s voice, finally clearing the pall of smoke.

“Here!” he coughed.

His father rushed forward and yanked him to his feet. His mother grabbed his elbow. They dragged him toward the Snake’s Path, away from the destruction.

He looked back. The fissure gaped wider, cleaving the summit. Chunks of mountain fell away and rumbled down to the desert. Dark smoke churned into the achingly blue sky, as if to take its horrors to the burning sun.

Together, he and his parents stumbled to the cliff’s edge.

But as quickly as it began, the earthquake ceased.

His parents froze, as if afraid any movement might restart the quakes. His father wrapped his arms around them both. Across the summit, pained cries cut the air.

“Tommy?” His mother’s voice shook. “You’re bleeding.”

“I scraped my hands,” he said. “It’s no big deal.”

His father let them go. He’d lost his hat and cut his cheek. His normally deep voice came out too high. “Terrorists, do you think?”

“I didn’t hear a bomb,” his mother said, stroking Tommy’s hair like he was a little boy.

For once, he didn’t mind.

The cloud of blackish-red smoke charged toward them, as if to drive them off the cliff.

His father took the suggestion and pointed toward the steep trail. “Let’s go. That stuff could be toxic.”

“I breathed it,” Tommy assured them, standing. “It’s okay.”

A woman ran out of the smoke clutching her throat. She ran blind, eyelids blistered and bleeding. Just a few steps, then she pitched forward and didn’t move.

“Go!” his father yelled, and pushed Tommy ahead of him. “Now!”

Together, they ran, but they could not outpace the smoke.

It overtook them. His mother coughed—a wet, tearing, unnatural sound. Tommy reached for her, not knowing what to do.

His parents stopped running, driven to their knees.

It was over.

“Tommy . . .” his father gasped. “Go . . .”

Disobedient, he sank down beside them.

If I’m going to die anyway, let it be on my own terms.

With my family.

A sense of finality calmed him. “It’s okay, Dad.” He squeezed his mom’s hand, then his dad’s. Tears flowed when he thought he had none left. “I love you, so much.”

Both of his parents looked at him—square in the eye. Despite the terrible moment at hand, Tommy felt so warm right then.

He hugged them both tightly and still held them as they went limp in his grasp, refusing to let gravity take them as death had. When his strength gave out, he knelt next to their bodies and waited for his own last breath.

But as minutes passed, that last breath refused to come.

He wiped an arm across his tearstained face and stumbled to his feet, refusing to look at his parents’ crumpled bodies, their blistered eyes, the blood on their faces. If he didn’t look, maybe they weren’t really dead. Maybe it was a dream.

He turned in a slow circle facing away from them. The foul smoke had blown away. Bodies littered the ground. As far as he could see, everything was dead still.

It was no dream.

Why am I the only one still alive? I was supposed to die. Not Mom and Dad.

He looked down again at their bodies. His grief was deeper than weeping. Deeper than all the times he’d mourned his own death.

It was wrong. He was the sick one, the defective one. He had known for a long time that his death was coming. But his parents were supposed to carry on memories of him, frozen at the age of fourteen in a thousand snapshots. The grief was supposed to be theirs.

He fell to his knees with a sob, thrusting his hands toward the sun, his palms upraised, both beseeching and cursing God.

But God wasn’t done with him yet.

As his arms stretched to the sky, one sleeve fell back, baring his wrist, pale and clear.

He lowered his limbs, staring at his skin in disbelief.

His melanoma had vanished.

About the Authors

JAMES ROLLINS is the New York Times bestselling author of thrillers translated into forty languages. His Sigma series has been lauded as one of the “top crowd pleasers” (New York Times) and one of the “hottest summer reads” (People magazine). Acclaimed for his originality, Rollins unveils unseen worlds, scientific breakthroughs, and historical secrets—and he does it all at breakneck speed. Find James Rollins on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, and at www.jamesrollins.com.

REBECCA CANTRELL’s Hannah Vogel mystery novels have won the Bruce Alexander and Macavity awards and been nominated for the Barry and Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice awards. Her critically acclaimed novel iDrakula was nominated for the Appy Award and listed on Booklist’s Top 10 Horror Fiction for Youth. She and her husband and son just left Hawaii’s sunny shores for adventures in Berlin. Find Rebecca Cantrell on Facebook and Twitter, and at www.rebeccacantrell.com.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Also by James Rollins

Bloodline

The Devil Colony

Altar of Eden

The Doomsday Key

The Last Oracle

The Judas Strain

Black Order

Map of Bones

Sandstorm

Ice Hunt

Amazonia

Deep Fathom

Excavation

Subterranean

Also by Rebecca Cantrell

A Trace of Smoke

A Game of Lies

A City of Broken Glass

A Night of Long Knives

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Excerpt from The Blood Gospel copyright © 2013 by James Czajkowski and Rebecca Cantrell.

CITY OF SCREAMS. Copyright © 2012 by James Czajkowski and Rebecca Cantrell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062262561

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