He sighed and rose to his feet. Mohammed sprang up and asked tensely, “What are your commands for me, O Scion?”
Daniel regarded him wearily. “Why don’t you go wait by the truck? I need to be alone for a while to think.”
Mohammed gave a little bow of deference. “As you wish. I will wait with the infidel.”
“Brother Mohammed, please don’t call him that to his face,” Daniel corrected mildly. “It will annoy him. When Mr. Hunt gets annoyed, he tends to shoot people.”
The Nephilim convert nodded sullenly and walked back to the vehicle. He slumped down on the shady side. Hunt had already crawled back into the truck after opening both doors to catch a cross breeze. He’d slid down in the seat and tipped his hat over his eyes feigning sleep. Daniel guessed that he had adopted the pose to avoid conversing with Mohammed.
The scion walked slowly around what he guessed to be the perimeter of the calendar circle. It looked nothing like the pictures he had pored over in Abu Simbel the night before. He tried to reconstruct the site from memory. Thankfully, a few of the center stones were still intact. At least that gave him his bearings. But where was the lily symbol? It appeared that many of the megaliths were missing. Carried off, perhaps?
He stopped his inner monologue abruptly when something on the ground caught his attention. There were several sets of fresh footprints in and around the circle. Vandals? No, not vandals because there was no sign anything had been dragged out of place recently. Simply footprints concentrated in the center of the circle as if their owners were looking for something.
Daniel bent down to study the tracks more closely. He could detect three distinct sets. The smallest and lightest probably belonged to a woman. The other two were larger and heavier though one set of prints seemed unusually long—most likely a tall man. So, the most recent visitors to the site had been a woman, a tall man, and a man of average height.
Straightening up to ponder his findings, the scion turned pale in spite of the desert heat as the implication struck him. The three relic thieves had been here! He’d never forgotten his prophetic dream about them. He knew beyond question that they were still alive. Of course, he’d never confided his vision to Hunt or anyone else. Whether it was true or not, his battered conscience needed him to believe it. He clung to that conviction like a drowning man clings to a sliver of driftwood in a monsoon.
But how had they gotten here ahead of him? He paused to consider for several seconds before realizing how easy it would have been. They must have been monitoring his movements and followed him to the library. Once they discovered that Chris was his confidante, they might have wired the Rare Book Room in the library and overheard everything that was said. Daniel was no expert in surveillance, but he was quite sure that such a thing was possible. Assuming the relic thieves were monitoring his conversations, they would have known about Nabta Playa even before Daniel made his travel arrangements. They would also have known the contents of the riddle and the physical description of the lapis dove.
Daniel swallowed hard, forcing down a wave of panic. These relic thieves weren’t lagging behind, waiting for him to find something. They were probably three steps ahead of him by now. What would his father say if he knew? Daniel almost laughed out loud at the thought of the diviner’s impotent rage. The scion was sorely tempted to let the trio have the relic—to hang back long enough to be sure they would find it first. He could be free of this wretched quest once and for all. His elation at the thought of freedom died instantly when he considered his father’s retaliation for the loss of the artifact. If the diviner believed that relic thieves had stolen his prize, he would track them down and kill them.
The scion grimaced at the irony. He was actually concerned about protecting his competitors. In the final analysis, the only way to defend the trio was to get to the relic before they did. His conscience had been released from the burden of their deaths on Crete. He wasn’t eager to have a second opportunity to blame himself for their destruction.
So, the relic thieves had gotten to Nabta Playa before him. What had they found? He studied the remains of the calendar circle carefully. There was no indication that anything had been dug up. Surely, if an artifact had been recovered, there would be a hole in the ground somewhere, but the sand appeared undisturbed. No, the relic thieves had left empty-handed, but they’d also unwittingly left him a clue.
For the first time, Daniel noticed a distinct trail of footprints leading from a flat stone at one end of the vandalized circle to another flat stone on the opposite side. He narrowed his focus. These stones didn’t appear to be part of the original circle. Too small. They must have been taken from debris strewn around the area.
Daniel walked back to the center of the circle. He alternated his attention from one of the flat stones to the other. What did their positions mean? Why had the relic thieves placed them thus? An image of the lapis dove flashed briefly through his mind. He could clearly see the diamond circle with two rubies fixed opposite one another.
“Good heavens!” he murmured. The trio had tried to reconstruct the clue using those two stones. He paused, remembering that one of the rubies was larger than the other. A
