Maze Master

by Kathleen O'Neal Gear

  Stephen rose beside him with his Breviary in one hand and the candle in the other. “Are you done praying? Shall we go back to the monastery now?”

  “Not yet.”

  Purposefully, he marched to the tunnel that wound around and eventually led to the lowest, darkest level of the labyrinth.

  For another hour, Stephen followed along behind him, and the girl trotted at his side, trying to keep up.

  It’s spelling cat. C-A-T. Around her finger, she slurred, Why is the machine spelling cat?

  He tried not to answer her, or even to look at her.

  She wasn’t really there.

  As he descended, the passageways that defined the labyrinth shot off in every direction. He passed rock-cut pillars and beautifully carved catacombs filled with skeletons, all neatly stacked. In one chamber, about thirty small skeletons lay close together on the ground, as though the children had taken comfort in their friends’ warmth as they’d died.

  “Dear God, does anyone know they’re here?” Stephen asked. “Someone should come get them and give them proper burials.”

  He hesitated, staring in at the skeletons, and the girl grasped his hand and tugged him away.

  Come on, James. I don’t want to look at them.

  She dragged him down another tunnel.

  “Let go of my hand.”

  “Brother, I’m not holding your hand. Is someone else? Someone I can’t see?” Fear strained Stephen’s voice.

  “No, no, I—I’m sorry, Brother.”

  The deeper he went the more stale the air smelled, as though every step he took stirred up the dust of ancient civilizations. When he finally stepped down to last tunnel, he stopped.

  See? The girl pointed with a wet finger.

  Twenty feet ahead, the heavy iron door stood open.

  He swung around. “Did you open my door?”

  Shocked by his tone, Stephen recoiled a step. “Brother? I’ve never been here before.”

  You left it open yourself.

  “Oh, yes, of course. I-I must have. Done it myself.”

  Pale blue flashes, like a lighthouse beacon, escaped from the bomb shelter and rhythmically flared into the tunnel where he stood.

  He walked forward, shoved the heavy door open wider, and entered the large chamber.

  When Stephen entered behind him, he said, “Look at all the food and water in here! This would feed our small monastery for months.”

  Jugs of water, candles, and packets of dried food were stacked floor to ceiling on every wall. None of that interested him. His gaze was riveted on the computer resting on the table in the middle of the room. Batteries, solar panels, and a small satellite relay crammed the space beneath the table. On a counter across the room, test tubes, syringes, needles, a centrifuge, and other lab equipment rested.

  The girl skipped forward, aimed a hand at the computer screen, and said, See? C-A-T.

  “Those are just three of the Word’s letters.”

  Stephen didn’t ask what he meant. Instead, his gaze darted back and forth from the computer screen to the empty air where the girl stood.

  Ben Adam walked forward, dropped into his chair, and studied the genetic sequence. It was so elegant … so utterly beautiful … a symphony of geometry and light. When had this result come in? He shook his head, trying to recall. He thought he’d seen it before, long ago, but maybe not … maybe God had just written this on the screen today. He couldn’t remember, and it broke his heart.

  Why is it talking about cats?

  “It isn’t about cats. It’s about the mystical properties of the blood of Christ.”

  Stephen listened with wide blue eyes. He kept nervously licking his lips. “What is, Brother?”

  Drawing the handheld quantum computer from his pocket, he transferred the information, so he would have it in two places.

  As they always did when he came to this room, the other children started talking in the hall outside. Soon dozens had entered the room and crowded around him to gawk at the screen.

  I told you it was important, the little girl said. Are you going to send it to Anna?

  Swallowing hard, he convinced himself to swivel his chair around to look at the children. Their hazy bodies appeared half transparent in the blue gleam. He could see through their chests to the jugs of water beyond.

  Stephen seemed to be trying to follow his gaze, to see what he saw standing in the room. Reflexively, the young monk crossed himself and whispered, “Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.”

  From beneath the table, Ben Adam pulled out the satellite relay and other things he’d need, rose to his feet, and carried them with him as he headed for the surface.

  Stephen asked no questions. He just quietly followed along behind.

  * * *

  Two hours later, he knelt on the rim of the sea cliff with his heart pounding and set up the relay. After he’d connected it to his handheld computer, he had to wait for it to contact the orbiting satellite. In the meantime, he watched the chaos in the distance. Every road to the docks was filled with honking vehicles and jingling bicycles. People crowded along the shore, waiting their turns to climb into the small boats that would take them out to the ten big ships floating in the harbor. Shouts and cries carried on the wind. Police with truncheons moved through the people, striking anyone who tried to push through to the front of the line. So far, it was mostly an orderly evacuation.

  When a cool wind shoved his hood back, he quickly grabbed it and pulled it back up to hide his face from the eyes that he knew were watching. Eyes everywhere, searching for him. Panic surged in his veins. He had to get out of sight. If they found him, they’d take him back to the locked room, fill him with drugs, and God’s voice would die. Then the world would die.

  Stephen walked up and crouched at his side. “Brother? May I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t know much about computers, but I think that’s a satellite dish. Are you sending out the Word of God? Who are you sending it to?”

  “Anna.”

  He kept his head down and his eyes on the screen. When the green light flared, he typed in:

  Encrypt.

  Waited.

  Hit send.

  “But I thought you said Anna wasn’t real.”

  Somewhere below him, water dripped, and it sounded like the last clock in the world counting down the seconds to oblivion.

  “She must be. She must be.” He recited the words like a prayer.

  CHAPTER 19

  SEPTEMBER 29. A RIDGE NEAR THE NILE RIVER, EGYPT.

  Martin stretched out on his sleeping bag just inside the cave where they’d made camp around midnight. Exhaustion weighted his body. He needed to sleep. Instead, he was gazing through the mouth of the cave at the place thirty yards away where Anna paced back and forth against the gaudy orange glows of distant burning villages.

  Tremors shook the earth. Will the bombing never stop?

  If he had to guess the time, he’d say it was around three in the morning. Anna propped her hand on the butt of her holstered pistol and stared up at the stars. Her sobs had been wrenching for a while, though barely audible. When she’d first awakened him, he’d thought about rising to go comfort her, but had reconsidered. For three days, she’d barely spoken a word to him. Granted, they’d been hiking hard from dawn to dusk, but her silence was more than that. She’d basically withdrawn into a shell and shut him out of her world. If she’d wanted company tonight, she wouldn’t have walked so far out into the darkness. But …

  Martin heaved a tired breath and rose to his feet. As he walked toward her, he called, “Don’t shoot me, okay?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Nope. Time to talk.”

  She braced her feet and removed her hand from her pistol. When he got close to her, he noticed a small electronic device sitting on the sand.

  He pointed. “Hey! What the hell is that? I thought you said no electronics?”<
br />
  “It’s a satellite detector. Tells me when they’re overhead.”

  Martin frowned at it as he passed. It resembled a palm-sized box filled with flashing lights. “Is that how you know when to duck under rock overhangs or hide out in caves? I’ve wondered.”

  Anna didn’t even deign to nod. In the past twenty seconds, she had straightened her spine. The tears were gone. The wrenching cries had vanished. The Iron Woman was back. She just stared at him with half-narrowed eyes as he came closer. It stunned him how quickly she could go from a shattered sobbing wreck to the queen of composure. That had to take practice. He did wonder, though, under what sort of circumstances she had acquired such a skill.

  When Martin stopped in front of her, he said, “Look. Obviously you’re upset. Does this have something to do with the fact that Yacob was not at Bir Bashan? You keep calling his name in your sleep.”

  She let out a breath and bowed her head for a long moment.

  “He was carrying vital information, Martin,” she announced in a low voice, as though afraid of being overheard. “Information we desperately need.”

  “Like what? We found the cave. We found the Marham-i-Isa. What else was Yacob supposed to—”

  “He knows things about the maze that I do not.”

  “What maze, Anna? I don’t see a maze.”

  She glanced at the satellite detector, then tipped her head back to look up at the glittering night sky. The desert breeze toyed with her hair, fluttering it around her face. “Give me a few days. You will.”

  Martin studied her expression the way he might an ancient scroll, searching for secrets written between the lines that etched her forehead and cut faint scratches at the corners of her eyes. She had her jaw clenched, but he couldn’t figure out if she was still struggling against emotion or just angry with him.

  “Anna, tell me something, will you?”

  Only her eyes moved to focus on him. “If I can.”

  “I’m sure that Yacob’s information would have helped you, but I doubt not having it would cause you such despair. You’ve been sobbing for over an hour. What’s really going on?”

  As though berating herself for letting him see her so vulnerable, she turned away. For a time, he stared at her back.

  “Are you in contact with Yacob?”

  She shook her head. “No, no, not now. I was. But…”

  “Why is he important?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you, this is all about the maze.”

  “The maze.” Martin spread his arms in frustration. “How do you even know there is a maze?”

  A strange expression slackened her face. “The last time I saw him, Hakari told me it had appeared to him in his dreams—and the survival of humanity depended upon his ability to decipher it.” She glanced down at the satellite detector lying on the ground. “He said if he died first, it would be up to me, and the maze would be the greatest decryption challenge of my life.”

  “Anna, look, I’m trying to understand, but you know he was a nut, right? I came here to find the legendary Jesus Ointment. We’ve done that, at least I think so. Let’s go home, find a good lab, and get it analyzed. That’s my only goal. Don’t you want to know if it really does cure the sick? There’s a goddamn plague ravishing the world.”

  “It won’t be as easy as a chemical analysis. There is far, far more to the Marham-i-Isa than the chemicals in an ancient jar.”

  Martin folded his arms tightly across his chest. It was an old defense mechanism. He could tell when someone was about to go off the religious deep end. “Anna, come on. You’re a scientist. You’re not about to give me some supernatural mumbo-jumbo about the mystery of God inhabiting the ointment, are you? I mean, I’ll listen to anything you have to say, but—”

  “Of course the mystery of God inhabits it. If Jesus created it…” Anna threw up a hand suddenly. Her gaze had riveted on the satellite detector. “We have to get under cover right now.”

  She scooped the detector up and ran hard for the cave.

  Martin pounded across the sand behind her. They were both breathing hard when they ducked into the darkness.

  Anna walked to the rear, picked up her pack, and tucked the device inside. Then she stood up, and clenched her fists at her sides.

  He couldn’t see her face. His eyes hadn’t adjusted yet. Anna just looked like a faintly lighter spot in the rear of the cave.

  “Martin. Tell me something. If Jesus had returned, what do you think he’d be doing right now?”

  “I don’t know. Probably trying to save the world, but you honestly can’t believe—”

  “Hakari believed it. That’s the point. I’m not going to torture you with any religious ravings. This is a maze. The Marham-i-Isa in that jar is not the true cure, though it may be part of it. The maze is the cure. And everything we need to solve it was in that cave.”

  “Okay, I mean, I don’t understand, but like what? Help me out here.”

  Patiently, she said, “Have you ever created a maze, or tried to walk through one? There are plenty scattered around the world.”

  “Sure, as a kid. We had a corn maze close to home. Why?”

  Anna sat down on her sleeping bag and stared up at him. “There are two fundamental questions you must answer to solve a maze. Where’s the entry, and what kind of maze is it? For now, I’m most interested in the shape of the maze. Then I’ll figure out how to enter it.”

  “Explain.”

  “Well, I mean, is this a multicursal maze that slithers back and forth like a demented serpent and has lots of dead ends? Or a braid maze that has no dead ends? In a braid maze, all the passages are connected to each other, which are designed to run you around in circles forever. It could even be a Hamiltonian path, an ordered pathway that never doubles back on itself. Worst of all, maybe it’s a plainair maze drawn on something like an imaginary cube or a dodecahedron. He did that in class once, as a final exam.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “A dodecahedron is a figure with twelve flat faces. There were three possible entrances to the maze, but the one that worked started in the lower left corner of the first face, then wound around each of the twelve faces, before it exited at the lower right corner of the same face where it began. It had over seven hundred dead ends and lots of closed circuits and blind alleys.”

  He took a deep breath. “I take it everybody flunked?”

  “No.”

  “You passed?”

  “I did.”

  Martin threw up his hands. “Okay, well, I don’t understand any of this.”

  “Me, either. All I can tell you with fair certainty is that the geometry of the maze is molecular.”

  “Molecular?”

  “Yes. That’s how he taught. He designed mazes to teach his students about the intricate chemical structures of molecules. DNA, for example, is filled with dodecahedrons.”

  “So…” He made an airy gesture with his hand. “Hakari is going to walk us through the geometric structure of a molecule? What for?”

  “Maybe he’s going to teach us something about the virus. Maybe it’s the cure. But I guarantee you that we won’t take a single step in the right direction without the inscription we found in the Cave of the Treasure of Light.”

  Martin’s gaze roamed the darkness of the cave, trying to fathom the connection. “What could a two-thousand-year-old inscription have to do with a molecular maze?”

  She went quiet. Just breathing. Finally, she said, “I’m pretty sure the letters are guideposts. They tell us where to turn. I’ll know more when we get to Karnak.”

  CHAPTER 20

  OCTOBER 2. DAWN. NEAR EL KARNAK, EGYPT.

  “Sojur?” a woman’s soft voice called.

  Micah wasn’t certain it was real. It sounded more like whale song lilting behind his closed eyes, rising and falling in a curiously comforting melody. He was home, standing in the kitchen while Mama checked the Thanksgiving turkey. The cinnamon fragrance of apple pie fill
ed the old ramshackle house in south Atlanta, and he could hear his brothers and father laughing out on the front porch.

  In a loving voice, his mother said, “We’re so proud of you, Micah.”

  “Well, I don’t know why. I can’t tell you a single detail of what I do.”

  She gave him that smile that had always filled his heart. “Yes, but I know you. I know my son. You’ve always been too brave, or maybe too bullheaded, to give up on anything you ever tried to do. Which means you must be good at it, whatever it is.”

  The kitchen counter was scattered with cooking tools, potholders, and a notepad filled with scribbled numbers. Mama had always been a fan of numerology, which amused Micah. She was a smart woman. How could she believe in something so silly? “You’re not still messing around with numerology, are you?”

  “I was worried about your next mission. When I did the reading, it came out a twenty-two. That’s the Master’s number. You be careful. You’re going to meet somebody very important over there.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  He watched her as she used potholders to lift the stainless steel lid on the turkey, evaluated something he’d never understand, and slid the lid back in place. “Another fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  Warmth spread through him. My God, it was good to be home. If only he could …

  “Sojur? Sojur, wake now.”

  A cool hand patted Micah’s face. It snapped him out of the dream with a gasp. He jerked his eyes open and stared up at a girl who couldn’t be more than fifteen. She wore a tattered garment that resembled an old flour sack belted at the waist with a rope. Black hair haloed her thin African face. She had the same fine Ethiopian features, narrow nose, and high cheekbones that he had. Despite her exhausted expression, her dark eyes sparkled.

  Barely audible, he croaked, “My men. Where are my men?”

  “Um?” She cocked her head.

  “D-did you find other soldiers … with me?” Pronouncing each word, he repeated, “Where. Are. My. Men?”

  “Don’t know, sojur.” She reached to the side and brought back a chipped clay cup. As she held it out to him, she said, “Drink now. Drink.”