Black Scorpion (30 page)

“Yes.”

“Well, extremely high-power sound waves can disrupt and/or destroy the eardrums of a target and cause severe pain or disorientation. This is usually sufficient to incapacitate a person. Less powerful sound waves can cause humans to experience nausea or discomfort. The use of these frequencies to incapacitate persons has occurred both in counterterrorist and crowd control scenarios—in ships at sea seeking to defend themselves against terrorists, for example. Something called a long-range acoustic device was used by a cruise ship to chase off pirates not too long ago. A similar system called a magnetic acoustic device has been used successfully, especially in Europe, to even break up riots. So the technology's definitely there.”

“But how did it get
here
?” Naomi asked him.

“The first challenge is size. The kind of long-range acoustic devices being deployed on ships at sea is the size of a small tire.”

“Nothing like that was recovered from Edward Devereaux's suite or anywhere else in the Daring Sea.”

“You mean, nothing that anyone noticed. That only means the weapon was likely deployed within something already present inside the suite. But a sonic bomb wouldn't work under the same principles as acoustic weapons do. They deploy ultrasonic waves; a sonic bomb, instead, would utilize something called infrasound.”

“Infrasound?”

Markham nodded, clearly enjoying himself. “The low frequency of infrasonic sound and its corresponding long wavelength makes it much more capable of bending around or penetrating your body, creating an oscillating pressure system. Depending on the frequency, different parts of your body will resonate, which can have very unusual non-auditory effects. Almost any part of your body, based on its volume and makeup, will vibrate at specific frequencies with enough power. Human eyeballs are fluid-filled ovoids, lungs are gas-filled membranes, and the human abdomen contains a variety of liquid, solid, and gas-filled pockets. All of these structures have limits to how much they can stretch when subjected to force, so if you provide enough power behind a vibration, they will stretch and shrink in time with the low-frequency vibrations of the air molecules around them.”

“Would an autopsy reveal evidence of that?”

“It would reveal evidence of something normal forensics would be unable to explain, that is if the great whites hadn't pretty much ravaged the victim's remains. I'm not sure if there's enough left of our victim to come up with anything definitive. So my conclusions are based on the infrasound's effects on the glass. It wasn't the harder portions of the pane that were struck first, it was the softer layers that ruptured from the inside out, like I said before, creating a chain reaction that destroyed the structural integrity of the glass wall. An infrasound weapon that powerful would have killed the victim, even if the wall hadn't ruptured, as an autopsy on whatever's left of him might yet reveal.”

“What about the means of delivery?”

“An infrasound weapon doesn't rely on a focused beam the way an acoustic weapon does. It dispenses waves instead, and the actual device could have been disguised as practically anything.”

“Dispensed
how
, Greg?” Naomi asked him.

“I've been reviewing an inventory of all Daring Sea suites, and I'm guessing through something electronic. If it were me, I'd go with this,” he said, freezing the screen on a high-end Bose clock radio that was among the objects recovered from Devereaux's suite.

“Why?”

“Because it already has a fairly sophisticated sound system built in. Means less of a chore to modify it into a sonic bomb. And the clock radios in the Daring Sea suites also have automatic battery backup power, meaning—”

“They'd work in the event of a blackout,” Naomi interrupted.

Markham nodded. “Unfortunately, the police took the clock radio as evidence, so I can't examine it myself and I can't be absolutely sure until I do. Right now, though, I'm sure enough.” He paused. “And I'm also sure you're dealing with one brilliant, and exceptionally dangerous, mind here.”

“Brilliant enough to cause the blackout, too?”

“Not in my realm of expertise, I'm afraid.”

“Then find me somebody whose realm it is in. How soon can you get him … or her on the job?”

“It's a
him
. Give me until tomorrow. He'll want to be paid in cash, quite a bit I should add. He doesn't work cheap.”

“Not a problem, so long as you're willing to vouch for him,” Naomi said, realizing she sounded like Michael. “My boss isn't the kind of man who takes being betrayed well.”

“I wouldn't recommend someone unless I was sure you could trust him. This guy's the best hacker in the business, wanted by companies and countries alike who have absolutely no idea who he is. You want to find out how somebody staged this blackout, he's your man.”

Naomi's cell phone rang, her private number known only to a select few.

“I have to take this,” she told Markham, turning away to answer.

“Hello, Counselor,” greeted the voice of Del Slocumb.

“How'd you get this number, Agent?”

“We're the FBI. You'd be surprised what we can pull off when we put our minds to it,” he said, sounding almost jovial.

“You're right, I would.”

“Then let me prove it to you another way,” Slocumb said. “I've got some more news about your boss I think you'll want to hear.”

 

SIXTY-EIGHT

S
ICILY

“The truth, Ismael. Now.”

And the truth Saltuk shared with her had taken Raven Khan to Sicily where a private jet arranged via her myriad of trusted contacts landed at Vincenzo Bellini Airport. A rental car was waiting for her at the private terminal.

A cloudless sky and full moon as dawn approached made for an easy ride through countryside she had never once traveled, but somehow seemed familiar. The directions took her along the A19 to a destination located at the near halfway point between Catania and Palermo. Even with those directions, she thought she'd missed her target, finding herself in the middle of a town that seemed lifted from another century.

The light wood and stone buildings were uniformly ancient, most dating back hundreds of years and many remaining frozen in time. Like much of Italy, the town claimed churches as its most cherished landmarks along, in this case, with a castle-like town hall in the piazza municipio that, according to a historic plaque aglow in a ground-mounted spotlight, was registered among official Italian landmarks. Soft rolling hills bracketed the town on either side, layered with more graveyards than she'd ever seen in her life, something that seemed oddly appropriate right now.

Raven slid down the window and smelled the air, refreshingly cool for summer and laced with a pleasant aroma of the flora that suddenly seemed strangely familiar.

Oranges,
she realized,
I can smell oranges.

Just then she came to a sign featuring the name of the town in reflective letters that caught the moonlight:

Caltagirone.

For Raven, though, it smelled oddly like something else entirely.

Home.

 

P
ART
F
IVE

HOME

 

A man's character is his fate.

Heraclitus

 

SIXTY-NINE

T
HE
C
ITATION

“Do you always travel like this?” Scarlett asked Michael in the rear of the cabin.

“No, this is a piece of cake. Usually, it's really challenging,” he tried to joke.

She started to smile. Then, just as fast, her features sunk and tears began streaming down her face.

Michael had moved from the cockpit and settled into the seat next to her, just in time for Scarlett to lurch into his arms when a fresh blast of turbulence shook the Citation.

“I'm not a very good flier,” she said, breaking the embrace but still clinging to him. “Guess I'm a coward at heart.”

“The storm will be behind us soon.”

“Which one?” Scarlett asked him, as turbulence rocked the Citation again and sent her back into Michael's arms.

“On second thought, maybe I'll tell Alexander to circle back. I kind of like this.”

Scarlett managed a smile that slipped quickly from her face, as she began to sob again. “I'm sorry, Michael, I'm so sorry.”

“For what?” he asked, still holding her against him, feeling the Citation leveling off now.

“Making you come all this way, take all this risk.”

“You'd only have something to be sorry for if you
hadn't
called me.”

She eased herself away from him. “I didn't know what else to do. What happened … It was so much worse than anything I could imagine. I thought I'd never experience anything like that again after French Guiana. Guess I was wrong. Remember what I told you when we first met, about uncovering a find that would change how we perceive the world, even history itself?”

“That's when I told you I wanted to fund that effort.”

She looked at him plaintively. “To find the truth behind your relic, whether it really does hold some mysterious power dating back to the ancients.”

“We don't have to do this now, Scarlett.”

She eased away, then was thrown back against him by another blast of turbulence. “Yes, Michael, we do. There's something I never told you about your relic, because I thought the results had to be wrong. Remember when I tried to determine its age?”

“Through carbon dating or something. You told me the results were inconclusive.”

“More like impossible, because the readings and analysis were all over the map. They indicated the relic had
no
age, at least none that could be determined within any degree of reasonable certainty. Almost like it had existed forever, since the dawn of time. I've spent the last five years following its trail, spending as much time in libraries as I have in the field. I thought it was a fool's errand at first, I truly did. A wild goose chase with only dead ends.”

“But that's not what you found in Romania, is it?” Michael asked, thinking of all the cities where he'd managed to meet Scarlett. He remembered the first time he'd shown her the relic, avoiding an explanation of the circumstances of how he'd come to possess it, while wondering out loud if the legends others had associated with it might be true.

If this is what I think it may be …

She'd left things there, never elaborating further on her suspicions. Until now.

“No,” Scarlett said finally. “I believe I've found proof, Michael, proof of what I suspected about the origins of your relic all along.”

“What origins?”

Turbulence rocked the Citation anew, and Scarlett waited for it to subside before resuming.

“The treasure of the Gods.”

 

SEVENTY

T
HE
C
ITATION

“The day before the massacre,” Scarlett continued, “I uncovered an ancient journal, a manuscript written on parchment at the dig site.” She swallowed hard, lips trembling at the memory. “I only got a chance to read a portion of it but the contents were incredible, starting with the author: Josephus.”

“Most famous scribe of that era.”

“And a vast amount of what we know of those times comes from his writings,” Scarlett explained. “In this case, he was chronicling discoveries made by others that somehow ended up with him.”

“You're losing me, Scarlett.”

“Then let's back up a bit to Caesar,” she said, eyes dipping to Michael's chest where his relic was likely held hidden beneath his shirt. “After conquering Gaul, after returning to Rome a hero in the wake of the civil war and becoming dictator, Caesar became obsessed by the power he was convinced the relic had given him, obsessed by its origins. Where had it come from? What if there were more? What about the gold from which it had been forged? Caesar formed an order of loyalists he instructed to find the answers to those questions for him, no matter how long or exhaustive that quest became. Josephus's journal indicates the loyalists started their research in Rome sometime in forty-five or forty-six BC and didn't complete it until more than a decade later.”

“By which time Caesar was long dead.”

“You can imagine the loyalists' dilemma when they had no one to whom to report their findings once they finally returned, not that they had any real desire to do so.”

“Why?”

“Josephus's report was titled ‘The Treasure of the Gods' because the Romans believed in multiple deities back then, a tradition they inherited from the Greeks. But what the loyalists found on this quest that took them far beyond the borders of the Roman Empire contradicted that dogma long before the Romans began worshipping a single God. Judea, for example, where members of Caesar's order of loyalists apparently met with a number of scribes and historians, even rabbis, who filled them in what they believed were the treasure's origins.”

A fresh wave of turbulence shook the Citation and Michael finally belted himself in.

“Those origins,” Scarlett continued, “went back all the way to the original Temple of Solomon that was built specifically to house the greatest treasures of the Jewish faith, including the Ark of the Covenant. Among the rest were three pieces that included a candelabra, a pair of trumpets, and the Table of Divine Presence.”

“Sunday school stuff.”

“Maybe, but what's not was the reason for the creation of those objects in the first place. How well do you know the Old Testament?”

“Why?”

“Because it states that God gave the plans for a great temple to David but refused to let him build it.”