by Rob Jones
“There are only around two hundred of them in service and as far as I know they’re all with the US military.”
“The Oracle has very high contacts,” Nikolai said.
“But still…”
“I still want to know how he got the location,” Lea said.
Nikolai pulled up the hood on his jacket. “Do not put anything past the Oracle,” he growled. “He is capable of committing any evil to get what he wants.”
“I can back that up,” Zeke said. “Son of a bitch treated me like an animal in that damned dungeon. When I get my hands on him he’s going to be one sorry bastard.”
“We have to get to him first,” Hawke said.
Lea linked her arm through his. “At least Ryan is still alive!”
Hawke nodded and watched as one of the monks dragged Ryan closer to the hole they had blown in the mountainside. “They’re going in, everyone. Let’s get moving – we haven’t got a second to waste.”
CHAPTER FORTY
The Oracle watched as his long life’s mission reached its zenith, with the anticipation rose inside him like a lava flow. “You have done well, Bale,” he said, turning to the hacker from London. “Without your hard work none of this would be happening, and we wouldn’t be about to enter the Citadel.”
Ryan said nothing. He looked like he was going to be sick as he watched the Athanatoi working like a well-oiled machine as they set about excavating the last rocks from the enormous entrance tunnel. Ahead of them, a slope receded into the darkness at the heart of the mountain. The Oracle didn’t care about how the young man felt. He would be dead within the hour and the unimaginable riches of the Citadel would be his at last. After all this time.
“Perhaps if you swear allegiance to the Order, I will let you live.”
“Who’s the traitor?”
The Oracle turned to Ryan, cold dead eyes fixed on the young man’s dirt-smeared, exhausted face. “What?”
“We’re only here because you gave me photos of the other seven rings. There’s only one place you could have got them, and that’s from the ECHO team. Who is the traitor?”
“You presume too much, Bale. What if I told you I was able to get the images from the original owners of the rings?”
“I would say you are a liar. For one thing, there was no record of the Alexander ring until we found it in the King’s Tomb. The images had to come from ECHO, and that means we have a traitor among us.”
“Or someone with a smart head for business. What would you do for ten million dollars?”
Ryan stifled his gasp. So it was true, someone in ECHO had sold out the rest of the team for ten million dollars. Shamefully, his mind instantly thought of Scarlet Sloane and her dream of a private island.
The Oracle was grinning. “I see I’ve put the cat among the pigeons.”
Ryan kept his mouth shut. Could it be Lexi? They all knew she had many dark secrets, and just maybe one of them could only be kept locked away with millions of dollars. After all, what did anyone really know about the mysterious Agent Dragonfly? Or Reaper? Surely not, and as for Lea or Hawke, the very idea was ridiculous. That left Alex in Washington, Zeke and Nikolai. Had anyone else seen the rings?
A sharp nudge in between his shoulders nearly knocked him to the floor. “Move on!”
They walked closer to Ignatius and Absalom who were walking back up the slope, capering after their leader. They spoke with Salazar for a short while, and the senior acolyte turned and made his way over to the Oracle to make his report.
“The men are almost through,” he said. “And it looks like the boy was right.”
The Oracle felt his heart quicken. “How so?”
“Ignatius found some carvings on the stone floor within the first meter of excavation, and they’re just as he described they would be. Eight icons with eight rings above their heads, like halos. This is the Gateway to the Citadel.”
“Good, very good.”
“But there could be a problem.”
The Oracle turned sharply from watching the men down at the rockface and glared at Salazar. “What problem?”
“He also found this.” He handed his leader the stone tablet.
“What is it?”
“We’re not sure, Oracle. We found it set in the inner wall.”
He snatched it from Salazar’s hands and stared at it for a few seconds, his eyes crawling over the strange carvings as he desperately sought a meaning from them. He relented after a few seconds and thrust the tablet at Ryan, who only just caught it before it crashed into his chest. “I can read the first symbols at the top, but I need your help for the rest. Feel free to decipher them instantly, or die.”
He raised a Heckler & Koch P30 and pushed its cold muzzle into Ryan’s forehead. “You could be a hero and refuse, but you’d only be a hero for a few seconds. If you help me, you may live another hour.”
Ryan curled his lip. “Looks like I’m spoilt for choice.”
“I thought you’d see things my way. Now, get translating – my men cannot proceed until we know the meaning of this tablet. It looks like some kind of warning.”
Ryan set the heavy stone slab on the sandy ground and knelt down in front of it. Like the Oracle, he also recognized the main line of symbols at the top. They were a simple set of pictograms he had gotten used to thanks to the golden icons they had found all over the world. They listed the gods’ names and then a warning not to enter the Citadel. Reading the second line of symbols, he was able to extend his life by another few moments.
“It’s a warning, but nothing specific. Loosely translated, it says we will incur the wrath of the gods if we continue on our present course.”
The Oracle nodded and tightened his jaw. He ripped the tablet from Ryan’s hands and smashed it against a boulder. “In that case, Mr Bale, lead the way.”
With a gun in his face, Ryan had little choice but to obey. Dusting himself off he got to his feet and started off down the tunnel.
*
“It’s time to move out,” Hawke said. “Are we all good to go?”
Reaper hefted his submachine gun. “Oui. Mon ami. Let’s get this done.”
Nikolai leapt to his feet and dusted off his hands. “Just try and stop me. I’ve waited a long time to get my revenge, and now that time has come.”
The exhausted team crossed the narrow river and made their way up the final slope, slipping and sliding on loose scree as they slowly approached the entrance.
“Hawke!” Zeke called out.
The Englishman turned to the Texan who was walking a few metres to his right. “What is it?”
The former tank commander hauled a dead mountain goat out onto the path. “Bullet to the head,” he said in his thick Texan twang. “Fresh, too. I’d say they’re less than a half hour ahead of us.”
“Then we need to get a wriggle on,” Lea said. “We can’t let those bastards get their hands on whatever the hell is inside this mountain.”
When they reached the freshly blown hole in the side of the mountain, they cautiously followed Ali up the final stretch of the path and stepped inside the cool, dark interior.
They followed the tunnel in awed silence, noting the footsteps of the Oracle and his men in the dirt at their feet. After another twenty minutes of marching in the damp darkness, Hawke saw something in the sweep of his flashlight beam and called back to the rest of the team. “Up ahead! I see an archway.”
The archway was lighter than they expected due to the Athanatoi lamps and glow sticks scattered and dumped around the chamber. Cobwebs hung from gargoyles and a cold wind rushed through the narrow tunnel.
Hawke took it all in without slowing his pace for a second. Ryan was somewhere up ahead and like the rest of his crew he had no illusions about what the Oracle would do when he had used him to reach the Citadel. His greatest fear was they had already found their way and no longer had any use for him. Every time he turned a corner in the tunnel or one of the vaults, he dreaded finding his friend’s bo
dy lying in the dirt.
“Wait!” Lea said. “I see something.”
She walked over to a chunk of flat stone and crouched lower as she swept her flashlight over its chipped, dusty surface. “I think we have something here, guys.”
“It’s some sort of stone tablet!” Nikolai said. “Without a shred of doubt – just take a look at it!”
He lifted the heavy tablet fragment and handed it to Hawke who took it and brushed some more of the dirt off its flat surface. “It looks like it’s been smashed recently,” he said. “I can just about make out what looks like some of their symbols carved into the rock but the damage is too bad to make any sense of it. There’s only one person who could do it.”
They all knew who he meant.
“But it looks like Ryan already worked his magic,” Hawke said. “I’m guessing the Oracle had him translate this and then they smashed it.”
“Why?” Zeke asked.
“Too heavy to carry,” Scarlet said. “And they didn’t want us to read what it said.”
“That’s the bit that worries me,” Hawke said, staring at the smashed fragments lying in the sandy dirt. “This could have contained number of important messages – directions, some sort of guidance – a warning maybe.”
“Merci, mon ami,” Reaper said, his gruff voice rumbling in the vault. He looked from the fragments up at the ceiling of the vault and then down into the tunnel sloping away from them. “Now you have me really worried, too.”
“If we hurry, I think we can get ahead of them,” Hawke said.
Lea looked doubtful. “Really?”
He nodded. “This place is vast. We must be able to find another way through to the actual Citadel, and avoiding their footsteps would be a good start.”
*
The Athanatoi followed Ryan down the tunnel until they reached a gigantic cavern full of statues and ornaments arranged in front of a deep, black chasm. One statue towered above all else in the cavernous space, and the head of the ancient cult beheld the enormous object as his men’s flashlights swept over its towering contours. In his long, meandering life he had seen nothing like it before. Half-man, half-monster, its dog-nose and snarling teeth took his breath away. “Like the Egyptian deities.”
Ryan was confused. “You mean you don’t know who it is?”
Salazar furrowed his brow. “None of us knows who or what it is. We are merely Athanatoi.”
As the Oracle walked over to make a study of the statue, Ryan turned to Salazar. “Merely Athanatoi?”
“We are a simple priesthood, given the gift of long life by the gods who built this civilization so we were able to serve them across the ages.”
“Like servants?”
He nodded, the folds of his hooded robe obscuring his face from the flashlights dancing over the giant statue. “The ancients chose us to act as priests, a class of enlightened beings to spread their message to the mortals.”
“Wait, you said you were given the gift of long life by the ancients.”
“That’s right.”
“But that’s not immortality.”
Salazar smiled. “We are not immortal, but the years of our lives are counted in the thousands, so it appears that way to mortals like yourself. Even the ancients were not immortal. Their lifespans were counted in the tens of thousands of years. They gave us the gift of long life so we could serve them better.”
“It’s all starting to make sense now.”
“To a person who lives ten thousand years, a life of even one hundred years is nothing. They could not develop a meaningful relationship with a person with that sort of lifespan. This way, our priest class could pass on their knowledge to their offspring and ensure the ancients were served properly. Four or five generations of Athanatoi across the lifespan of one ancient was the best they could do.”
“And that’s what the Oracle wants, a life of ten thousand years?”
“Not at all,” Salazar said quietly.
“Not enough elixir?”
He gently shook his head. “The ancients did not restrict our lifespans, it was ourselves who restricted it, right here.” He tapped his chest.
“I don’t understand.”
“Even with the elixir, our DNA can only withstand a lifespan of two or three thousand years. The Oracle is coming to the end of his long life. He is here to learn the truth about the ancients, not to seek more life for himself.”
As the words sunk in, one question leaped to Ryan’s lips. “So the ancients had different DNA?”
“Of course.”
“Silence!” snapped the Oracle, turning with a ferocious look on his face. “Hold your tongue, Salazar, or I’ll have it torn out and stuffed back down your throat until you choke to death on it.”
Salazar crumbled instantly, bowing his head and begging his master’s forgiveness, but his pleas were soon interrupted by Ignatius.
“The gods are smiling on us, Oracle.”
“What is it?”
The monk raised his hand and pointed out across the chasm. “There, I see the entrance to the Citadel.”
The Oracle almost fell to his knees. “Our destiny is before us, my loyal servants.”
“Wait,” Absalom growled. “There, to the south of the Citadel’s entrance. I see movement.”
Salazar looked on calmly. “It looks like they’re going into the Citadel!”
“Have the seen us?” Absalom asked.
“No, but they have beaten us!” Ignatius said.
The Oracle stared into the gloom with his ancient eyes and when he saw the line of men and women moving toward the chasm. In the vastness of the cavern they looked like tiny toy soldiers. He curled his lip and spat out one word. “ECHO.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“My God,” said Hawke as he swept his flashlight across the chamber and struggled to take in what they were seeing. “This is bloody unbelievable. I’ve never seen so much carved stone in my life.”
“Is this the entrance to the Citadel?” Zeke asked.
“No.” Qasim stepped forward. He had recognized the meaning of the carvings at once. “This is some kind of temple, and without a doubt, the entrance to the Citadel. The symbols are vaguely redolent of the much later cuneiform script of the Sumerian civilization, and like those these are certainly phonograms, and very complex ones.” He shook his head, sweeping the flashlight beam along the length of the smooth rock. “These have been carved with some sort of stylus, possibly bone, and yet their symmetry is almost too perfect.”
Lea leaned in and shone her flashlight on the beautifully carved symbols. “I see what you mean, Dr al-Hashimi.”
“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” he said. “But like the cut of the rocks themselves, they’re just so accurate. It’s as if they were carved yesterday using laser technology. This is incomprehensible, my friends.”
“So is half of what you just said,” Ali said.
Mohamed laughed, but the mirth was cut short when Qasim gasped, drawing the attention of everyone in the chamber.
Hawke broke the stunned silence. “Problem?”
The archaeologist shook his head in disbelief and took a step away from the wall. “I… this is impossible!”
“What is?” Scarlet asked.
“I’m not entirely familiar with the way this civilization is dating their epochs, but there are strong similarities with the way the Sumerians did it, not to mention later civilizations, including even us.”
“You’ll have to elaborate,” Lea said.
Qasim looked like he was starting to panic; sweat beaded his forehead as he licked his lips and muttered to himself. Overwhelmed by the information in front of him, he was struggling to make sense of it all.
“I need you to focus, Qasim,” Hawke said. “Our time is growing thin.”
“I know… I know, but…” he reached a trembling hand out and traced his fingertips along the carved grooves, tears forming in his eyes. “The Babylonian calendar was based on the Sumerian one, and
that one appears to have been based on this. If I am right in my interpretation, the Citadel beyond this temple is… no, it can’t be!”
“What can’t be?” Scarlet asked.
Qasim paled as he turned to face them. “At the time these carvings were made on this rock, the Citadel was already hundreds of thousands of years old. I don’t think we’re even capable of understanding just how old this civilization was, but we’re talking millions of years. An entirely different civilization rising and falling right here in our world.”
“Well, fuck a duck and call it Daisy,” Zeke said. “And I thought Windsor Castle was old.”
Scarlet rolled her eyes. “Coarse, but saved by your charisma… and the accent doesn’t hurt.”
He smiled at her. “You think I’m charismatic?”
“Don’t push it, Tex.”
“So what happened to them?” Lea asked.
Another shake of the head. “Something must have wiped them out.”
“A plague, perhaps?” Reaper asked.
“Or a war,” Lexi said.
Hawke felt his heart quicken. “Or some sort of out of control doomsday weapon.”
“Wait,” Qasim said. “It also speaks of three gates.”
“Three gates?”
He nodded, staring wildly at the carvings. He ran his fingers over them as if his mere touch might help translate them. “Only he who passes the three gates may enter the Citadel.”
Hawke looked around the tiny chamber. “Must be through that door then, because there’s no sign of any gates from where I’m standing.”
“Joe’s right,” Lea said. “There’s nothing here. It’s all dead now,” Lea said, looking at the ruins with a mix of awe and raw contempt. “Nothing left but dust and bones.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that…”
Hawke spun around just in time to see the Oracle’s withered, gaunt face move out of the shadows of the entrance they had used to enter it. Behind him, Ryan’s face also moved into the light of their glowsticks. What must have been a hefty whack to his face had produced a substantial black eye, and an inch-long cut snaked up from his top lip toward his nose.
