DEDICATION
To Dad
Who gave us the wings . . . and all the sky to fly high
EPIGRAPH
The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Notes from the Historical Record
Notes from the Scientific Record
Prologue
First: Crash & Burn
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Second: Saints & Sinners
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Third: Hide & Seek
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Fourth: Fire & Ice
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Tails
Author’s Note to Readers: Truth of Fiction
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by James Rollins
Praise for James Rollins and the Sigma Force Novels
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
NOTES FROM THE HISTORICAL RECORD
WHAT IS THE TRUTH? When it comes to the past, that’s a difficult question to answer. Winston Churchill once stated that History is written by the victors. If he’s right, then what historical document can truly be trusted? What has been written down only goes back some six thousand years, tracking only the briefest steps of humans on this planet. And even that record is full of gaps turning history into a frayed and moth-eaten tapestry. Most remarkable of all, down those ragged holes many of history’s greatest mysteries have been lost, waiting to be rediscovered—including events that mark pivotal shifts in history, those rare moments that change civilizations.
One such moment occurred in AD 452, when the ravaging forces of Attila the Hun swept through northern Italy, destroying all in their wake. Ahead of his barbarian horde, Rome was all but defenseless, sure to fall. Pope Leo I rode out of Rome and met Attila along the banks of Lake Garda. They spoke in private, in secret, with no written record of what transpired. After that meeting, Attila turned away from certain victory, from the very sacking of Rome by his barbarians, and promptly left Italy.
Why? What had transpired at that conclave to turn Attila away from certain victory? History holds no answer.
Turn this page to discover how close we came to destroying ourselves, a lost moment in time when Western civilization itself came close to shattering upon the point of a sword—a blade known as the Sword of God.
NOTES FROM THE SCIENTIFIC RECORD
WHAT IS REALITY? It’s both the simplest question to answer—and the hardest. Over the ages, it has baffled both philosophers and physicists. In The Republic, Plato described the true world as nothing more than a flickering shadow on a cave wall. Oddly enough, millennia later, scientists have come full circle to a similar conclusion.
The very page this is written upon (or the e-reader in hand) is made mostly of nothing. Stare more deeply at what appears solid, and you discover a reality made up of masses of atoms. Tease apart those atoms, and you find a tiny hard nucleus of protons and neutrons, encircled by empty shells that hold a few orbiting electrons. But even those fundamental particles can be split tinier: into quarks, neutrinos, bosons, and so on. Venture deeper yet, and you enter a bizarre world occupied only by vibrating strings of energy, which perhaps may be the true source of the fire that casts Plato’s shivering shadows.
The same strangeness occurs if you stare outward, into the night sky, into a vastness beyond comprehension, a boundless void dotted by billions of galaxies. And even that enormity may just be one universe among many, expanding ever outward into a multiverse. And what of our own universe? The newest conjecture is that all that we experience—from the tiniest vibrating string of energy to that massive galaxy spinning around a maelstrom of reality-ripping black holes—may be nothing more than a hologram, a three-dimensional illusion that, in fact, we may all be living in a created simulation.
Could that be possible? Could Plato have been right all along: that we are blind to the true reality around us, that all we know is nothing more than the flickering shadow on a cave wall?
Turn this page (if it is a page) and discover the frightening truth.
PROLOGUE
Summer, AD 453
Central Hungary
The king died too slowly atop his wedding bed.
The assassin knelt over him. The daughter of a Burgundy prince, she was the king’s seventh wife, newly wed the night prior, bound to this barbarian lord by force of marriage and intrigue. Her name, Ildiko, meant fierce warrior in her native tongue. But she did not feel fierce as she quailed beside the dying man, a bloody tyrant who had earned the name Flagellum Dei, the Scourge of God, a living legend who was said to wield the very sword borne by the Scythian god of war.
His name alone—Attila—could open city gates and break sieges, so mightily was he feared. But now, naked and dying, he seemed no more fearsome than any other man. He stood little taller than her, though he was weighted down with thick muscle and the heavy bones of his nomadic people. His eyes—wide parted and deep set—reminded her of a pig’s, especially as he had stared blearily upon her, rutting into her during the night, his eyes stitched red from the many cups of wine he had consumed at their wedding feast.
Now it was her turn to stare down upon him, measuring each gurgling gasp, trying to judge how long until death claimed him. She knew now she had been too sparing with the poison given to her by the bishop of Valence, passed through him by the archbishop of Vienne, all with the approval of King Gondioc de Burgondie. Fearing the tyrant might taste the bitterness of the poison in his bridal cup, she had been too timid.
She clutched the glass vial, half empty now, sensing other hands, higher even than King Gondioc, in this plot. She cursed that such a burden should come to rest in her small palms. How could the very fate of the world—both now and in the future—fall to her, a woman of only fourteen summers?
Still, she had been told of the necessity for this dark action by a cloaked figure who had appeared at her father’s door a half-moon ago. She had already been pledged to the barbarian king, but that night, she was brought before this stranger. She caught the glimpse of a cardinal’s gold ring on his left hand before it was hidden away. He had told her the story then—only a year past—of Attila’s barbarian horde routing the northern Italian cities of Padua and Milan, slaughtering all in their path. Men, women, children. Only those who fled into the mountains or coastal swamps survived to tell the tale of his brutality.
“Rome was doomed to fall under his ungodly sword,” the cardinal had explained to her beside her family’s cold hearth. “Knowing this sure fate as the barbarians approached, His Holiness Pope Leo rode out from his earthly throne to meet the tyrant on the banks o
f Lake Garda. And upon the strength of his ecclesiastical might, the pontiff drove the merciless Hun away.”
But Ildiko knew it wasn’t ecclesiastical might alone that had turned the barbarians aside—but also the superstitious terror of their king.
Full of fear herself now, she glanced over to the box resting atop a dais at the foot of the bed. The small chest was both a gift and a threat from the pontiff that day. It stretched no longer than her forearm and no higher, but she knew it held the fate of the world inside. She feared touching it, opening it—but she would, once her new husband was truly dead.
She could handle only one terror at a time.
Fearful, her gaze flickered over to the closed door to the royal wedding chamber. Through a window, the skies to the east paled with the promise of a new day. With dawn, his men would soon arrive at the bedchamber. Their king must be dead before then.
She watched the blood bubbling out of his nostrils with each labored breath. She listened to the harsh gurgle in his chest as he lay on his back. A weak cough brought more blood to his lips, where it flowed through his forked beard and pooled into the hollow of his throat. The beating of his heart could be seen there, shimmering that dark pool with each fading thud.
She prayed for him to die—and quickly.
Burn in the flames of hell where you belong . . .
As if heaven heard her plea, one last rough breath escaped the man’s flooded throat, pushing more blood to his lips—then his rib cage sagged a final time and rose no more.
Ildiko cried softly in relief, tears springing to her eyes. The deed was done. The Scourge of God was at last gone, unable to wreak more ruin upon the world. And not a moment too soon.
Back at her father’s house, the cardinal had related Attila’s plan to turn his forces once again toward Italy. She had heard similar rumblings at the wedding feast, raucous claims of the coming sack of Rome, of their plans to raze the city to the ground and slaughter all. The bright beacon of civilization risked going forever dark under the barbarians’ swords.
But with her one bloody act, the present was saved.
Still, she was not done.
The future remained at risk.
She shimmied on her bare knees off the bed and moved to its foot. She approached the small chest with more fear than she had when she slipped the poison into her husband’s drink.
The outer box was made of black iron, flat on all sides with a hinged top. It was unadorned, except for an inscribed pair of symbols on its surface. The writing was unknown to her, but the cardinal had told her what to expect. It was said to be the language of Attila’s distant ancestors, those nomadic tribes far to the east.
She touched one of the inscriptions, made of simple straight lines.
“Tree,” she whispered to herself, trying to gain strength. The symbol even looked somewhat like a tree. She touched its matching neighbor—a second tree—with great reverence.
Only then did she find the strength to bring her fingers to the chest’s lid and swing it open. Inside, she discovered a second box, this one of the brightest silver. The inscription on top was similarly crude, but clearly done with great purpose.
The simple strokes meant command or instruction.
Sensing the press of time, she steadied her shaking fingers and lifted the silver box’s lid to reveal a third coffer inside, this one of gold. Its surface shimmered, appearing fluid in the torchlight. The symbol carved here looked like a union of the earlier characters found inscribed in iron and silver, one stacked atop the other, forming a new word.
The cardinal had warned her of the meaning of this last mark.
“Forbidden,” she repeated breathlessly.
With great care, she opened the innermost box. She knew what she would find, but the sight still shivered the small hairs along her arms.
From the heart of the gold box, the yellowed bone of a skull glowed out at her. It was missing its lower jaw, its empty eye staring blindly upward, as if to heaven. But like the boxes themselves, the bone was also adorned with script. Lines of writing descended down from the crown of the skull in a tight spiral. The language was not the same as atop the triple boxes, but instead it was the ancient script of the Jews—or so the cardinal had told her. Likewise, he had instructed her on the purpose of such a relic.
The skull was an ancient object of Jewish incantation, an invocation to God for mercy and salvation.
Pope Leo had offered up this treasure to Attila with a plea for Rome’s salvation. Additionally, the pontiff had warned Attila that this potent talisman was but one of many that were secured in Rome and protected by God’s wrath, that any who dared breach its walls were doomed to die. To press his point, the pope offered up the story of the leader of the Visigoths, King Alaric I, who had sacked Rome forty years prior and died upon leaving the city.
Leery of this curse, Attila took heed and fled out of Italy with this precious treasure. But as in all things, it seemed time had finally tempered those fears, stoking the Hun’s desire to once again lay siege to Rome, to test his legend against God’s wrath.
Ildiko stared across his prostrate body.
It appeared he had already failed that trial.
Ultimately, even the mighty could not escape death.
Knowing what she had to do, she reached for the skull. Still, her eyes fell upon the scratches at the center of the spiral. The skull’s invocation was a plea for salvation against what was written there.
It marked the date of the end of the world.
The key to that fate lay beneath the skull—hidden by iron, silver, gold, and bone. Its significance only came to light a moon ago, following the arrival of a Nestorian priest from Persia to the gates of Rome. He had heard of the gift given to Attila from the treasure vaults of the Church, a gift once passed to Rome by Nestorius himself, the patriarch of Constantinople. The priest told Pope Leo the truth behind the nest of boxes and bone, how it had come from much farther east than Constantinople, sent forward to the Eternal City for safekeeping.
In the end, he had informed the pope of the box’s true treasure—along with sharing the name of the man who had once borne this skull in life.
Ildiko’s fingers touched that relic now and trembled anew. The empty eyes seemed to stare into her, judging her worth, the same eyes that, if the Nestorian spoke truthfully, had once looked upon her Lord in life, upon Jesus Christ.
She hesitated at moving the holy relic—only to be punished for her reluctance with a knock on the chamber door. A guttural call followed. She did not understand the tongue of the Huns, but she knew that Attila’s men, failing to gain a response from their king, would soon be inside.
She had delayed too long.
Spurred now, she lifted the skull to reveal what lay below—but found nothing. The bottom of the box held only a golden imprint, in the shape of what had once rested here, an ancient cross—a relic said to have fallen from the very heavens.
But it was gone, stolen away.
Ildiko stared over at her dead husband, a man known as much for his keen strategies as for his brutalities. It was also said he had ears under every table. Had the king of the Huns learned of the mysteries shared by the Nestorian priest in Rome? Had he taken the celestial cross for his own and hidden it away? Was that the true source of his sudden renewed confidence in sacking Rome?
The shouting grew louder outside, the pounding more urgent.
Despairing, Ildiko returned the skull to its cradle and closed the boxes. Only then did she sink to her knees and cover her face. Sobs shook through her as the planks of the doors shattered behind her.
Tears choked her throat as thoroughly as blood had her husband’s.
Men shoved into the room. Their cries grew sharper upon seeing their king upon his deathbed. Wailing soon followed.
But none dared touch her, the grieving new wife, as she rocked on her knees beside the bed. They believed her tears were for her fallen husband, for her dead king, but they were wrong.
&n
bsp; She wept for the world.
A world now doomed to burn.
Present Day
November 17, 4:33 P.M. CET
Rome, Italy
It seemed even the stars were aligned against him.
Bundled against the winter’s bite, Monsignor Vigor Verona crossed through the shadows of Piazza della Pilotta. Despite his heavy woolen sweater and coat, he shivered—not from the cold but from a growing sense of dread as he stared across the city.
A blazing comet shone in the twilight sky, hovering above the dome of St. Peter’s, the highest point in all of Rome. The celestial visitor—the brightest in centuries—outshone the newly risen moon, casting a long, scintillating tail across the stars. Such sights were often historically viewed as harbingers of misfortune.
He prayed that wasn’t the case here.
Vigor clutched the package more tightly in his arms. He had rewrapped it clumsily in its original parcel paper, but his destination was not far. The towering façade of the Pontifical Gregorian University rose before him, flanked by wings and outbuildings. Though Vigor was still a member of the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology, he only taught the occasional class as a guest lecturer. He now served the Holy See as the prefect of the Archivio Segretto Vaticano, the Vatican’s secret archives. But the burden he carried now came to him not in his role as professor or prefect, but as friend.
A gift from a dead colleague.
He reached the main door to the university and marched across the white marble atrium. He still kept an office at the school, as was his right. In fact, he often came here to catalog and cross-reference the university’s vast book depository. Rivaling even the city’s National Library, it held over a million volumes, housed in the adjacent six-story tower, including a large reserve of ancient texts and rare editions.
But nothing here or at the Vatican’s Archives compared to the volume Vigor carried now—nor what had accompanied it in the parcel. It was why he had sought the counsel of the only person he truly trusted in Rome.
As Vigor maneuvered stairs and narrow halls, his knees began to complain. In his midsixties, he was still fit from decades of archaeological fieldwork, but over the past few years, he had been too long buried in the archives, imprisoned behind desks and stacks of books, shackled by papal responsibility.
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