The God Extinction

by Kevin Tumlinson

  “Power, then,” Kotler said.

  “Power. Life eternal. And the answers that you, yourself, seek. Isn’t that right, Dr. Kotler?”

  Kotler studied Nesahor and saw that instead of madness or even religious zeal, there was something else driving him. The man was filled with something more profound than greed or avarice. Something that went beyond merely a quest for power.

  Nesahor truly believed in the gods. And more, he truly believed he had the right to be one of them.

  Kotler shook his head, saying nothing. He and Denzel chatted quietly while watching the two men, ensuring neither of them tried to escape. As they discussed options, it became obvious that they would have to leave this place. And given the situation here, and the revelations they had already uncovered, it was possible the Egyptian government would clamp down on the site until it could be properly explored by a well-vetted team.

  This might be the last time Kotler ever got to see the place.

  He shot video and photos, narrated some of his observations, made notes of everything that occurred to him. He immersed himself in this while Denzel made preparations to take their two prisoners out and back to the surface, where they would be handed off to the Egyptian military.

  After a while Kotler resigned himself to tucking everything away, replacing the camera equipment and pulling his pack over his shoulders. He joined Denzel, who had the two men standing in front of him, facing the stone archway that led back to the antechamber. They would make rapid progress, going out. They wouldn’t stop to investigate anything, as they had on the way in. This was the end of the excursion.

  “You good?” Denzel asked.

  Kotler chuckled. “Just taking it in. This place,” he shook his head and looked around. “There’s so much I could explore here. So many questions I might be able to answer. And it’s just … it’s not going to be my work.”

  Denzel watched him for a moment and nodded. “You might be invited back.”

  “Maybe,” Kotler smiled. But he didn’t believe it. This site, and all of its wonders, would be explored and studied by someone else. Its secrets might not even be revealed to the world for years, even decades. Depending on what was found here, and the sensitivity it inspired in the Egyptian authorities, Kotler might never learn anything of it.

  Someone else would have to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by this place and look into the deepening mystery of what it meant for the shared culture of humanity. Perhaps that person would be Maalyck.

  Kotler hoped that it would.

  They left the forest behind, each of them pushing one of the other men ahead of them. Within the hour they were close enough to the exit to reach the base camp by radio. Shortly after that, they were topside, and following a debriefing, they were escorted to a transport. As Kotler had figured, the site would be sealed until further notice.

  As they rode away from the site in one of the military Jeeps, Kotler looked back, taking it in one last time, remembering the impossible forest beneath the stone of this plateau. He sighed and turned back to face the rough terrain ahead.

  The gods, whoever they had been, might be extinct, but they were not finished revealing their secrets. Not just yet.

  Answers, he decided, would one day come.

  Epilogue

  Central Park, New York

  Ludlum had to admit that the whole scenario felt like something out of a thriller novel. She had followed instructions, had arrived at the park and made her way to the bridge. This part of Central Park was somewhat isolated, though it was also somewhat famous. This area, and the very bridge she was approaching, had been a part of a number of films set in New York. The isolation lent itself to a bit of romance and intrigue.

  And there were many scenes portraying this exact scenario—a clandestine meeting, arranged by an unseen and unknown figure, claiming to know what she was up to. Claiming to have information she would want.

  Ludlum spotted the flower in the man’s lapel. The sign she’d been told to look for. She approached.

  “Dr. Ludlum,” the man said. He was older, perhaps in his seventies or early eighties. His hair was steel grey and swept under the brim of a dark gray fedora. He was even wearing the black pea coat. Every inch a spy, by her estimate. Or someone living out a fantasy, which seemed far more likely.

  “Who are you?” Ludlum asked.

  He smiled and shook his head. “You know, of course, I have no intention of telling you. But I’ve become aware of what you and Agent Brown are doing. Looking into the charter for Historic Crimes.”

  Ludlum felt her heart pounding, but she kept her breathing steady. She’d gotten a text message with instructions to be here, at this time, and to meet this man. It had outlined some of what she'd done so far, in her research into Historic Crimes. She'd been told to come here if she wanted more answers. She’d been told to tell no one.

  But of course, she’d told Dani immediately. Agent Brown wasn’t far away, sitting at a bench within sprinting distance of this spot. She was listening via Ludlum’s phone, which was tucked into the chest pocket of her coat. It was the best they could manage on short notice, without raising suspicion at the FBI, with a surveillance request.

  Ludlum was also armed, her FBI-issued sidearm in a holster inside her coat. She was taking a risk by being here, but she’d be insane to go in unarmed.

  “Are you here to tell me to stop?” Ludlum asked the man.

  Again he smiled and laughed lightly. “No. I’m here to tell you to keep going. But to be more careful.” He reached into his coat and pulled something small out of his pocket. He reached toward her, and she instinctively lifted her hand to receive it.

  The man placed a small object in Ludlum’s palm. A thumb drive. “This will help. But use it on an air-gapped computer.”

  He turned to leave, and Ludlum caught up with him. “Wait,” she said. “I need to know what’s going on. If you won’t tell me who you are, will you at least tell me why you’re helping? How did you know what I was looking into? How do I know you’re not setting me up for something?”

  The man shook his head. “If I were setting you up, would I have continued to talk to you even though you brought Agent Brown along?” He grinned. “Of the two of us, I’m the one showing the most trust, don’t you think?”

  “How did you …”

  “You’re not the only one with friends, Dr. Ludlum.” He glanced around at the trees and stones of the park, and Ludlum followed his gaze.

  They were more or less alone here, but not far from this spot people were milling about, walking and chatting, sitting and observing. Any one of them, Ludlum realized, could be there to watch them.

  “I can tell you that this is about Dr. Kotler,” the man said. “All of it.”

  Ludlum shook her head. “You’re … wait, you’re saying not just this, but … Historic Crimes? The department itself?”

  “All of it,” the man repeated. “Be careful, going forward. Both of you. There are aspects of this that someone doesn’t want discovered. Isn’t that just the way?” He chuckled. “I’m leaving. Don’t follow me. Go back to Agent Brown, and the two of you go find a computer you can use to look those over.” He nodded to her palm, and Ludlum self-consciously slipped the thumb drive into her coat pocket.

  She stood and watched the man walk away, but before he got too far, she asked, “How can I reach you? If we need to ask questions?”

  “I’ll be in touch,” the man said without looking back. Ludlum watched as he walked into the tunnel under the bridge and disappeared after leaving the far end.

  She wandered back to Dani, dropping down beside her on the bench. The agent was frowning. “What the hell is going on?” she asked.

  Ludlum shook her head and sat in silence, thinking.

  She wasn’t sure what they should do next. But she did know one thing for certain. “We can’t tell Dan about this. Or Agent Denzel. Not until we have more.”

  Dani looked at her, shook her head, and sighed. “Ok,
” she agreed. “We say nothing. But that guy was right. We have to be more careful. If someone like that has caught wind of what we’re doing, then someone else has, too.”

  Ludlum nodded, then stood. “Let’s go. I need to buy a laptop.”

  They left the park, taking Dani’s sedan, merging into the New York City traffic.

  Ludlum let her mind wander as Dani drove, thinking over the encounter, over what she’d learned so far. It wasn’t much. She had only just gotten started. With Dani passing her information only as she could retrieve it, progress had been pretty slow. Ludlum had started branching out, using some of her NYPD contacts, even chatting with members of the forensics community.

  It was slow, tedious work, reverse engineering Historic Crimes, searching for its origins. Whoever created their charter hadn’t wanted their name to come up.

  What was it, Ludlum wondered, that had gotten this man’s attention? What part of her search had taken her too close to whatever this mysterious person in the background wanted to keep hidden?

  Careful, Ludlum thought. Be careful.

  She could be a lot more careful, she thought, if she knew which nerves she was hitting.

  For now, she would slow down a little, until she could see and make sense of whatever was on this thumb drive.

  But the answers were coming.

  A Note at the End

  Sugar Land, Texas

  This book is a sequel in more ways than one.

  First—and I sincerely hope this comes through naturally and organically—it's another fully-developed volume in the continuing story of Dan Kotler and Roland Denzel. Like the six full-length novels that came before it, this book is meant to expand on the mythos of a character I’ve come to love writing about. It’s meant to be fun, intriguing, even a little informative.

  But second, and maybe even more important, this book is a sequel to a story that readers have been asking about since I first starting writing thrillers. This story picks up where The Brass Hall left off—albeit twenty years after the events of that tale.

  In case you’ve never read it, The Brass Hall is a novella I wrote at the same time I was writing The Coelho Medallion, the first full novel in this series. In truth, Brass Hall is technically the very first Dan Kotler thriller, released just before the release of the full novel. I wrote it while I was doing edits and revisions on the book, as a way to ease my existing list of sci-fi readers into the idea that I was going to try my hand at a whole new genre.

  At that time, I was releasing a lot of novella-length and short-story-length books, experimenting to see if I would enjoy writing more grounded fiction. I was also testing the waters for short fiction, to see if there was a market for it. I believe there is, but I’ve come to realize it’s a slightly different market than that of my full-length novels.

  At any rate, Brass Hall was always meant as a soft introduction and a prequel to the Dan Kotler series. “Soft,” because though it featured Kotler doing heroic deeds as well as dealing with the “misplaced history” that I wanted at the heart of my books, it lacked some of the elements I knew would eventually become staples for the series. Most notably, Agent Roland Denzel was nowhere to be found in the story, and in fact, the FBI itself never gets a mention.

  Brass Hall was more of an Indiana Jones, pulp-fiction type of tale, where the hero and his sidekick face an ancient mystery and modern dangers, coming out of it all with a MacGuffin—a treasure—and maybe a few scrapes and bruises.

  Martook, the young sidekick in the story, has never been directly mentioned in any of the books since that tale. He was a crucial part of the story, and without him, Kotler would never have found himself in that predicament. But I've never explored that character any further. Until now.

  Over the years (and it seems odd saying it that way, since both Brass Hall and Coelho Medallion were released in 2016, and it’s only now 2019, as I write this), I’ve gotten a lot of reviews and emails and private messages on social media, asking when I’ll get around to turning Brass Hall into a full novel. I’ve had reviews claiming it was too short, that they wanted more, that they’d gladly buy a book that took that story further.

  Those comments and requests nudged me, but I also had questions to consider: Whatever happened to Martook, after his adventure with Kotler? Whatever happened to the Brass Hall? As intriguing as it was to discover a Druidic site hidden in the mountains of Egypt, why has there never been any follow-up? This was potentially earth-shaking news (literally, in the case of Kotler and Martook’s escape from the Brass Hall), but it appeared to have no repercussions in Kotler’s world.

  These questions, and the requests, nagged at me. Not so much that they halted everything for me, but they were always there.

  As I wrote five more books in the Dan Kotler series, there were little whispers, always tickling the back of my neck. There were nudges and side-trails. And there was a desire. I wanted to go back, to pick up where Brass Hall left off, and to tell the rest of the story. I wanted it as much as readers wanted to see it.

  The trouble was, how?

  So here was the challenge I faced, and it’s more about practicality than anything: I had the novella, The Brass Hall, already out in the world, already getting reviews and making sales. If I wanted to expand on the story, what was the best way to handle it?

  If I went back to it and picked up literally where it left off, should I release it as the same book, just putting in a note to say it was “new and expanded?" Or should I publish the expanded book as its own volume, and start over with reviews and sales?

  If I started over, should I take the original novella off the market?

  And what about people who had already read that novella? Could I justify asking them to pony up another five bucks for a book that contained a novella they’d already read? Would they consider that a money-gram or a rip-off? Would I alienate my audience while trying to please them?

  See? There was a lot to consider. Decisions like these are never as easy as they appear.

  Where I landed on this, initially, was that I would go ahead and include the novella as the first few chapters of the new book—Part I of the novel. I’d give this book a whole new title and then skip ahead to twenty years later, where I could pick up the story from a more familiar Dan Kotler, along with his FBI partner and the history we’ve learned about them to date. I’d make it clear, maybe in the book description or somewhere else, that this book contained that other story, that you might consider skipping ahead if you’d already read The Brass Hall. But otherwise, “welcome to the next Dan Kotler book.”

  I had decided that some readers wouldn't be happy with this decision and that I would just have to appease them the best I could. Maybe I could offer a free short story to anyone who didn’t like having a third of the new book turn out to be content they’d already read. Would that be enough?

  I wasn’t really sure. But I figured I’d deal with it when the time came.

  With that in mind, I dropped the novella into the book and got to work on expanding the story from there.

  I got pretty far, too. I wrote in some scenes that I felt would neatly bridge the novella and the modern story. I brought back Martook as Dr. Martook Maalyck, giving him a last name for the first time, and starting to flesh out his backstory to fill in some of the gaps between tales. I decided on the major plot point that would drive all of this, landing on the bronze sword that Kotler and Martook had managed to recover from Credne’s hall. I even came up with a title …

  The title …

  Oh, the horror.

  Titles are a big deal to me. They are, almost without exception, the very first thing I know about a book going in. I come up with a title, and I write a book to match it. That’s been the very best technique for me, over the past decade or so of publishing. I start with the title.

  So it has to be right.

  This time, things were different. I had a title, but it was kind of coming in after the fact. I had the novella wedged into the stor
y, as its opening chapters, and the title was sort of tacked onto that. And … well … it didn’t fit. It felt awkward and unnatural. It felt like what it was, in other words—one story masquerading as another.

  Weirdly, because the title wasn’t “right,” it was throwing me off. I found that despite knowing the general direction I wanted to go, I couldn’t figure a way to get there. It was like trying to use a map of New Zealand to drive from Iowa to Mississippi. You might make it, eventually, but the map had nothing to do with it.

  And that wasn’t the only hang-up. There were bigger problems.

  With The Brass Hall rammed into the book like a whale punched through the hull of a boat, I found I was having a hard time managing the energy and momentum of the thing. It was difficult to impossible to steer.

  Unlike previous books in this series, where I would introduce a plot by using a prologue—falling back on the sort of cold open that TV dramas use deftly—I was opening this book with a complete, self-contained story. Beginning, middle, and end. Which meant that there was already a resolution, by the end of Part I of the book. There was no energy or momentum to carry it further.

  To reintroduce the mystery and intrigue that would keep the reader turning pages, I wedged a sort of pseudo prologue into place. Scenes very similar to those that open this book were jammed in there. They were different from what you’ve read here, far less cohesive, and seemingly random when I looked back and considered them in context.

  The problem was, I was literally cramming a prologue into the opening of Part II of the book, and it showed. The result felt like a bad anthology, with only two stories. And one of those stories had an opening that wouldn’t inspire anyone to turn the page, much less keep reading for 50,000 words.

  It made no sense. As a reader, I looked at it and wondered, “Why should I care about this?” As a writer, I looked at it and wondered, “What kind of awkward, pointless mess have I wrought?”