“No!” Jake reached out, his fingertips brushing hers as Morgan fell, disappearing into the billowing smoke.
A crash from below. A crack of burning timbers.
The floor beneath him crumbled in its turn, and Jake plummeted down after her.
He had learned to fall at an early age and relaxed his body, bending his limbs and tucking chin to chest as he plunged down into the fiery church.
The impact was hard and sharp against his ribs. Jake fell on his side onto an old wooden pew and rolled off into the embers of the burning floor, breath knocked from his lungs. Thick smoke rose up around him. He coughed, desperately trying to draw breath.
Jake couldn’t see Morgan, couldn’t hear anything but the roar of the voracious blaze as it devoured the ancient wooden church. He rolled to one side and gathered his strength, trying to push himself up as pain flared in his side.
An enormous man strode out of the smoke.
A figure of nightmare, his neck burned into layers of scars and puckered skin, his features twisted with hate. He wore a heavy leather jacket and fireproof gloves, clearly prepared for the blaze. Embers whirled around him as he took two quick steps forward and kicked Jake hard in his damaged ribs with a steel-toe-capped boot.
Jake saw it coming and tensed his stomach muscles, curling into the kick to absorb the blow. But it wasn’t enough. It knocked the remaining breath from his aching lungs and left him gasping as pain ricocheted through his body.
He tried to get up.
Another kick, harder his time. Jake couldn’t help but moan with the pain.
“Stay down, Timber.”
The man knew his name. How was that possible?
The scarred man reached down and pulled Jake’s jacket open, tugging the fragment from his pocket. Flames roared around them, but the man showed no sense of urgency. He folded it carefully inside a metal tin and placed it inside his jacket. Then he picked up a piece of burning pew, a heavy chunk of wood, its end a glowing crimson.
Jake struggled to pull himself away, still gasping for breath.
The man stepped astride him, gaze fixed on his prey, the flaming wood held in one hand. He grinned and dropped his weight down onto Jake’s chest, his knees pinning either arm.
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
Jake shook his head, barely able to breathe with the weight on his chest, and the intense smoke.
The man brought the burning wood close to Jake’s exposed throat. He leaned down, his voice barely audible over the crackle of flames. His eyes were the hard grey of flint, the color of stone mined from the deep earth.
A flash of memory and Jake suddenly recognized him. Frik Versfeld. A man he thought long dead after a mining accident in South Africa.
Frik smiled as recognition dawned in Jake’s eyes. “You’ll pay for what you did to me and my men that day, although your burning flesh won’t smell as sweet as that pretty girl in Lisbon. You’re responsible for her death, too.”
Jake writhed and bucked his hips, trying to throw Frik off, but the man was huge, his weight immovable.
Frik grabbed a handful of Jake’s hair and tugged his head back to expose his throat. He thrust the burning wood close to Jake’s neck in the place where his own scars ravaged the skin.
Jake could feel the heat of it, smell Frik’s sweat and the burning church, and hear blood pounding in his head as the brand came closer. The burning end touched his skin, almost a caress, then the pain intensified, scorching, blistering —
A heavy bronze candlestick swung out of the billowing smoke behind Frik, smashing against the side of his head, knocking him sideways.
As his weight shifted, Jake bucked his hips again, throwing his attacker off. Morgan stepped out of the conflagration, swinging the candlestick in her hands. Frik collapsed on the ground under a burning pew, ash and embers rising up as smoke swirled around his prone body.
Morgan leaned down to help Jake up as the sound of sirens came from outside. “Let’s get out of here.”
Jake scrambled to his feet, every movement sending a shard of pain through his body. “We need… to… deal with him.”
He turned to point to Frik, but the body was gone. The man had dragged himself away in the fiery church — along with the map fragment.
Morgan and Jake stumbled outside. The fire brigade unrolled their hoses and soaked the church, evacuating the area and holding people back from the flames. Paramedics ran to the emerging survivors and helped them to an ambulance. As Jake sucked in oxygen and a medic tended to his burns, he drifted off into memory.
It was the summer after his parents and sister had been murdered.
The only way Jake could deal with their deaths was to join the military, but he had a few months before the next intake, so he took a job at one of the remote coal mines in South Africa as a security guard. The punishing heat, long hours and dangerous work meant that he fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep every night, thoughts of his family’s butchered bodies kept at bay by extreme fatigue.
The camaraderie amongst the men helped too, a tough masculinity that allowed for no emotional breakdown, no sense of vulnerability, no chink of weakness. Jake was in peak physical condition that year, eating only to fuel his muscles, and in the hours he was off duty, he worked out at the gym on the edge of the veld, punishing his body into submission.
Other men joined him during those sessions, their grunts and heavy exhalation punctuating the sounds of the mine site. Frik Versfeld was one of them. He had been at the mine for a year already when Jake arrived, and initially he had been friendly enough. But when Jake was promoted to run the team, Frik undermined him. In subtle ways at first, waiting a beat too long before following an order, then spreading rumors about Jake’s inability to make decisions.
But when someone sabotaged the workout equipment and a heavy weight almost crushed Jake’s foot, he knew he had to have it out with Frik.
The confrontation was loud and almost came to blows, but Jake clenched his fists and let the other man vent, before he ordered Frik to take his security team to the deepest part of the mine for an inspection.
It was routine; it had to be done, but not on that day.
It could have been left until the weather was cooler, when tempers were not so frayed. But truth be told, Jake wanted Frik and his men out of the way.
They went to the bottom of the mine; they did their job, but while they were down there, a coal seam ignited.
The fire spread quickly. The alarm rang out and the mine site activated emergency protocols. They fought back the flames and reached Frik’s team, pulling them back to the surface — but of the four who went down, only two were alive when they reached the hospital, both badly burned, both expected to die. One of those was Frik.
Jake was cleared of responsibility but he still resigned his position, throwing himself into the military, salving his conscience with dangerous missions until he met Elias Marietti that fateful night in the Sudan and joined ARKANE.
Since then, Jake had taken lives and seen many others die. He had also saved thousands of people and possibly altered the fate of humanity for the better with the recovery of powerful artifacts that could have been used for destruction. He had not thought of Frik or the mine in years — but now, a personal agenda threatened the mission.
Jake thought of Ines. Was he responsible for her fate or would Frik have taken her life, regardless? And if he sought the other fragments, who did he work for? Frik Versfeld was not a man of deep faith or deep pockets. He had to be hired muscle for someone else. Jake also had no doubt that Frik was behind the fire at Ets Haim, which meant that now, whoever they were, they had two pieces of the map.
Morgan put a hand on Jake’s arm and pulled off her oxygen mask with the other. “Are you OK? You look more than just dazed. Should the paramedics check you for concussion?”
Ash smeared her features and highlighted the angles of her face. Dark curls hung loose from her ponytail, the ends singed, her clothes were disheveled and smelled of smoke. But despite her own condition, Morgan’s blue eyes were alive with concern, the slash of violet in the right one even more vivid against the dark smudges on her skin.
Jake wanted to reach out and brush the ash gently from her cheek, but instead, he took a deep breath. While the oxygen refreshed his mind, the expansion of his lungs pushed against his damaged rib cage.
He assessed the level of pain against years of experience with injury. “I think the bastard might have fractured my rib, but hopefully it’s just bruised.” He took another deep breath of the oxygen. “I know that man. He worked for me in a mine in South Africa. There was an accident…”
His words trailed off. The fire had been an accident and he could never have controlled its path, but he had sent Frik and the other men down there for no good reason that day. Jake’s anger and frustration and inability to manage the situation had caused the death of two men and the brutalizing of another, who had now become a dangerous foe.
He breathed in once more and slowly exhaled, relishing the pain in his ribs. He deserved it, and he welcomed it. Pain meant that he was still alive, and whatever their past entanglement, he would not let Frik derail this mission. In fact, the man may have helped them by revealing himself.
He pulled up his mask. “Tell Martin to look into Frik Versfeld.” He spelled it out for Morgan as she tapped into her phone, sending the message back to Martin Klein, the head archivist back at ARKANE headquarters.
Martin’s nickname was Spooky because of his uncanny ability to discover obscure secrets within the interlinked databases he had constructed from accessing the world’s knowledge — sometimes with permission and other times, through his alter ego as a white hat hacker. Now they knew who had stolen the fragments, Martin could trace Frik’s path and discover who he worked for.
Jake was more determined than ever to find the pieces of the map and reach the Garden of Eden first.