OCTOBER 21. 1300 HOURS.
“Echo One, this is Tango Zulu. Arrival in approximately ten minutes, over,” the helicopter pilot called on his radio, waking Micah where he’d been dozing beside Anna.
“Affirmative, Buckner,” the radio operator replied, and it relieved Micah that communications seemed to be up and running—at least for the military. “You are instructed to set down on the upper plaza and await further orders.”
Micah straightened in his harness and yawned, wondering where they were. Through the cockpit windows, he could see vast ocean and sky, but no land.
“Roger that, base. Tango Zulu out.”
The copilot said something Micah couldn’t hear and shook his head. The pilot responded with a shrug of what looked like confusion. Gallia noticed, too. The sergeant unhooked his harness, and quietly walked forward to speak with Buckner. In the sunlight streaming into the cockpit, his khakis had an amber hue. At some point, the windows had suffered an impact. The one visible to Gallia’s right was spiderwebbed with tiny cracks that glittered. The pilot reached down to the instrument panel and flicked a switch. Green lights twinkled in response.
Across the chopper, the marines had their shaved heads together, discussing something. They kept glancing at Micah and Anna.
Micah gave them a friendly nod, but he felt like he’d somehow entered a state of suspended animation. What alarmed him was how sluggishly his brain was processing the data. He’d seen the debris clouds and massive bombing campaign, yet he felt no fear or sense of urgency, just a distant awareness that the world was dying, and he could do nothing to stop it. He wondered if the Hiroshima survivors had felt this same numb sense of utter despair.
Sergeant Gallia peered out the window behind him. In his early twenties, he was stocky and overly muscular. He must pump iron all day. After a minute of looking out the small window, he said, “There it is.”
The other marines turned to look. A tall African American said, “Finally,” in a relieved voice, and a hushed conversation broke out.
Obviously, they would arrive soon. Micah just had no idea what that meant. As far as he could tell, the helicopter was jostling its way across a vast expanse of empty Mediterranean Sea.
He sat up to see if he could spot anything through the cockpit windows, and woke Anna, who’d been sleeping, slumped in her harness next to him. She’d had a tough few hours, constantly jerking and moaning in her sleep, repeating Yacob and James, as though locked in horrific nightmares.
At last, she straightened and rubbed one eye with the back of her bound hands as though surprised to find herself in the belly of a helicopter. Auburn hair curled around her face.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
As the chopper descended, an island came into view. Or rather, three islands strung together, the largest to the south, the smallest in the middle. A city gleamed on the east side of the larger island.
After a few seconds of blinking herself awake, Anna stared as though in awe. “Malta. I don’t believe it.” Her eyes were narrowed and stony, but a slight tremor shook her voice. “The city you see is Valletta.”
Micah tilted his head curiously. “You’ve been here?”
“Yes.” As though they hurt, she shifted her bound hands to a different position, and Micah noticed the rings of dried blood where the plastic ties had cut into her wrists.
“Why would a cryptographer come to Malta?”
“The first time? Mystical geometry. Four years ago, I came here with Hakari. We were trying to understand the secrets of the prehistoric and historic sites. Hakari was convinced the Knights of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, who built the fort, understood the Divine Word, and he—”
The helicopter banked right and swung around. Bucking air currents, it flopped up and down like a wounded seagull. When the harbor came into view, filled with maybe fifty sunlit U.S. warships and several submarines, Micah found himself frantically searching for sailors. Someone should be on deck doing maintenance, repair, or just cleaning.
“Do you see anyone?” Anna said.
“No. Nothing’s moving down there.”
Buildings covered every square inch of the southern island, and hundreds of abandoned civilian and military vehicles crowded the streets. When the fuel had run dry, people must have just climbed out and walked away. Trash clung to the tires, as though the cars and trucks had been sitting there for weeks.
Anna leaned her shoulder against his in a comforting gesture, but then he realized she had pressed against him to better see out the windows, scanning the ancient fort that had appeared. Shaped like a five-pointed star, it was a formidable fortification.
“What is that?”
For a long moment he had the impression that she wavered on the brink of saying something monumentally important, of stepping out of her self-imposed silence and actually trusting him. But then she exhaled hard, and said only, “The Hospitaller Fortress Malta, built in 1552 by the Knights of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem. Today, it’s called Fort Saint Elmo. See the star-like shape?”
Micah scrutinized the structure
“It’s a pentagram.”
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
Anna sank back against the metal hull. He could see the sweat gleaming on her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Her breathing had gone shallow.
“Anna, calm down. Why are you so afraid? I view this as a rescue.”
She ignored the question, and as if rushing to get information out, she said, “Listen to me. You may need to understand. Pentagrams are the symbol of the secret society of Pythagoras.”
“Like the Pythagorean theorem?”
“Precisely.”
He thought about it. “Were the Knights followers of Pythagoras?”
She continued her exposition as though he hadn’t spoken: “The pentagram is a very powerful magical symbol. For example, if you draw lines to connect the corners inside the U.S. Pentagon, you will see that the heart of the structure is a pentagram, and the ratio of the side to the diagonal is an irrational number. Guess which one?”
Micah thought about it. “The Golden Ratio?”
“Correct. Just as the irrational number pi is connected inseparably with the circle, the irrational number phi is connected inseparably with the regular pentagon. Geometry was considered to be a secret and sacred language to people like Plato and Pythagoras; it revealed the mind of God.”
Micah gave her a sidelong look. From her tone of voice, he knew this wasn’t idle conversation. “Circles and pentagons. Shapes in the maze. I get it. So?”
A commotion broke out among the marines, as they shifted to gaze out the windows. They looked relieved to be home.
“You know, Anna,” he continued, “it seems to me that all of these ‘secret’ formulas, rather than revealing something, are designed to confuse and conceal.”
“They are. You see, in the ancient world practicing magic was a punishable offense, usually by death. To protect themselves, Pythagoreans, alchemists, and other magi used deliberately misleading language to hide their secrets from the uninitiated. Hakari was a master at that.”
Her eyes slid to his and slowly, as though to impress upon him the significance, said, “The word ‘vitriol,’ for example. Do you recall Martin mentioning it in his story about Rabbi Meir and the scribe? ‘My son, be careful of your work … if you omit a single letter, or write a letter too many, you will destroy the whole world’?”
“Yes.”
“Well, references to ‘vitriol’ are scattered throughout medieval mystical texts. The word was meaningless to nonalchemists, but members of the secret societies understood it as the Latin phrase: Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificandoque Invenies Occultum Lapidem. Hakari created the maze for the same reason. To hide the truth from the uninitiated.”
“My Latin’s rusty. Translate, please?”
“It’s an instruction to ‘Visit the interior of the earth, and by rectifying, you will discover the hidden stone.’”
She looked like she was waiting for him to ask the question, so he said, “What’s the hidden stone?”
“The legendary Philosopher’s Stone.”
Micah had read about the stone in a few novels, but wasn’t sure he knew what it was. “That was some kind of rock or gem that could turn base metals into gold, right?”
“It could also heal illness and grant eternal youth.”
The chopper bumped sideways, and he felt weightless for a second, then the craft shook as it righted itself. “So, it’s a mythical cure. Just another version of the Marham-i-Isa? Was Hakari looking for the Philosopher’s Stone in Malta?”
She hesitated, before softly replying, “In a manner of speaking … yes. Finding the cure required fully documenting the evolution of God’s wrath. That’s why we excavated one of the megalithic tombs, the Hypogeum. He needed ancient DNA from the skeletal remains to finish charting the course of God’s wrath. In essence, we were ‘visiting the interior and trying to rectify.’”
“Meaning that he believed the stone, the cure, could heal God’s wrath?”
“He did.”
“You said you were here the first time with Hakari. Was there a second time?”
A shiver went through her before she tightened every muscle in her body to stop it. “This used to be a Russian base. The lower levels were used to house prisoners. My God, I thought that nightmare was over. Now I’m back.”
The Sikorsky nosed downward and flew closer to the fort.
Anna twisted her hands against the plastic ties and craned her neck to look through the window again. “There it is.”
What looked like thousands of stacked logs hugged the massive battlements and ramparts around the fort, creating a dark band.
“What is that?”
“Bodies. I think,” Anna said. “Ten or twelve high and just as many deep.”
Micah swallowed hard. Oh, God. “Plague victims?”
“Must be,” she answered without looking at him. She appeared to be examining the fenced enclosure that covered the rocky promontory to the north of the fort where people lay in rows on the ground. Guards walked the perimeter with rifles cradled in their arms.
“Hospital?” Micah whispered.
Anna subtly shook her head. “It’s heavily guarded. If this was a war zone, I’d call it a prison camp.”
“Maybe it’s a quarantine zone for plague victims.”
“But why wouldn’t they be using one of the ships? It would be a lot warmer for the sick, and more secure.”
“This may be the place they put you when there’s no longer any need to waste precious resources on you.”
When the chopper flew right over the top of the enclosure, Micah leaned to the right as far as his harness allowed and peered out the window. He guessed maybe two hundred people lay beneath army-green blankets, but only one man walked amid the doomed, if that’s what they were. The man knelt repeatedly, then moved on. A brave priest giving last rites?
The chopper banked, made a wide curve, and settled down inside the walls of the fort on the elevated apex of the pentagram. Guards immediately ran up and surrounded them with their rifles ready.
Anna squeezed her eyes closed as though preparing herself for the worst. By tightening every muscle in her body, she was trying hard to hide the fact that she was shaking badly.
“Stop it, Anna. You will be treated fairly. Why would—”
“You don’t understand.” When she turned, her gaze went through him like a lance. “Right now, to them, I am the Philosopher’s Stone. The magical key to healing the illness.”
“Yeah, but if you don’t know the cure, why would they—”
“Asher and Hazor?” Gallia called from where he stood behind the pilot. “You’re getting out here.”
As the rotors whumped to stillness, Micah heard someone outside calling orders, and saw Gallia draw his pistol. When the door was flung open, he pointed it at Micah’s chest. “Move.”
Micah rose with his hands over his head and walked for the door. Behind him, he heard Gallia order: “Private, cut the ties around Captain Asher’s ankles and remove her harness. Leave her hands bound.”
“Yes, sir.”
Micah jumped down and walked out into the broad plaza flanked by two marines. The view of the city from up here was gorgeous. Most of the buildings had been constructed of the same pale limestone as the fort and reflected the afternoon gleam like thousands of mirrors, producing an almost unbearably bright glitter.
Gallia escorted Anna from the helicopter. When he stood beside Micah, the sergeant said, “Captain Hazor. Do you see that tower? Walk toward it.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
Before he’d taken three steps, however, the chopper carrying Nadai set down next to the Sikorsky. The ferocious backwash of air almost sucked Micah off his feet. He threw up an arm in defense. When he lowered it, he noticed that Anna had clenched her jaw. For an instant, her gaze clung to the helicopter, as though she desperately needed to talk with Nadai, then she dragged her gaze away and stared at the tower.
Quietly, for Micah’s ears alone, she said, “Cozeba’s here. Be careful of him. I don’t know whose side he’s on.”
She didn’t wait for him to respond. She squared her shoulders and strode for the tower.