“How did that get there?” he asked, surprised.
“I put it there when I kissed you.” She smiled at him. “So it wouldn’t get wet. I knew you’d never jump.”
A wrinkle of hurt pride blemished his perfect forehead.
Standing in the doorway, she checked her phone. It was a text message, an important one from the name of the sender. She went cold all over, beyond anything a shiver could warm through or a heated touch could soothe.
“Who is Argentum?” Farid asked, reading over her shoulder.
It was why she traveled under so many false names, like the one she used to book this room.
“It appears I have some pressing business to attend,” she said, stepping through the doorway and turning. “I must bid you good-bye here.”
A dark disappointment showed in his face, a flicker of anger.
He abruptly shoved her deeper into the room, following close. He grabbed her roughly and shoved her against the wall, kicking the door shut.
“I’ll say when we’re finished,” he said huskily.
She lifted an eyebrow. So there
Smiling up at him, she tossed her phone to the bed, pulled him even closer, their lips almost touching. She swung him around so he was now the one with his back to the wall. She reached to his pants, which widened his dark smile. But he mistook what she searched for—she removed his hidden knife instead.
She opened it one-handed, and with a quick thrust, she buried it in his eye socket, punching it up and back. She kept hold of his body, pressed against the wall, feeling his body’s heat through her thin clothes, knowing that warmth would quickly expire, snuffed out with his life. She savored that waning heat, held him tightly as the death tremors shook through him.
As they ended, she finally let go.
His body sagged to the ground, his life spent.
She left him there, stepped to the bed, and sat down, crossing a long leg. She retrieved her phone and opened the attached image file that had been sent to her.
On the screen, a single photo appeared, of a piece of paper covered with a strange script. The handwriting stemmed from another time, better suited to being scratched on parchment with a sliver of bone. More code than language, it was written in an archaic form of Hebrew.
As part of her training, she had studied ancient languages at Oxford and now read ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew as easily as her native Hungarian. She deciphered the message carefully, ensuring she made no mistake. Her breath quickened as she worked.
,
She brought a hand to her white throat, fingertips brushing the mark that blackened her skin, thinking of the night she received it and became forever tainted. Her blood burned still.
She read on.
She stared at the phrase in Herodian Aramaic. The Belial had waited long for this message.
Her lips shaped impossible words, not daring to speak them aloud.
A surge of unfamiliar fear pulsed through her fingertips.
He whom she served had long suspected the Jewish mountain stronghold might hide the precious book. Along with a handful of other sites. It was one of the reasons she had been sequestered here, deep within the Holy Land. A few hours’ distance from dozens of possible ancient landmarks.
But was he correct? Did Masada mark the true resting place for the Book of Blood? Once she and her team revealed their presence, they could not be hidden again. Was this enough of a sign to warrant that risk?
She knew the answer to only the last question.
Yes.
If the book were truly unearthed, it offered a singular opportunity—a chance to end the world and forge a new one in His name. Although she had been trained from a young age, she had never truly expected this day to arrive.
Preparations must be made.
She pressed the second number on her speed dial and pictured the large muscular man who would answer on the first ring.
Her second in command, Tarek.
“Your wish?” His deep voice still bore traces of a Tunisian accent, although he had not spoken with a countryman for a lifetime.
“Wake the others,” she ordered. “At long last, the hunt begins.”
5
Erin longed to be on the ground, away from the heat and noise and dust, and from the priest. She was too hot herself, and the priest must have it worse in his long cassock and hood. She tried to remember when Catholic priests stopped wearing hoods. Before she was born. Between his hood and his sunglasses, she saw only his chin, square with a cleft in the middle.
A movie-star chin, but he made her uneasy. As far as she could tell, he had not moved in more than half an hour. The helicopter dropped a few feet, but her stomach stayed up in the air. She swallowed. She wished that she had thought to bring water. The soldiers didn’t seem to have any, but they didn’t seem to care. The priest didn’t either.
Monotonous arid landscape slipped by below. Since the helicopter left the hospital, it had been flying east and north, toward the Sea of Galilee. Every minute of flight changed their possible destination, but Erin had lost interest in trying to guess where she might land.
They closed in on a familiar flat-topped mountain that climbed steeply out of the desert. She made out the white finger of the ramp that the Romans had built to finally breach its walls.
Masada.
It hadn’t even been on her list of possible sites. Masada had been thoroughly excavated in the sixties. Nothing new had come out of the site in decades. Tourists had been tramping all over it.
Perhaps the earthquake had uncovered something nearby. A Roman camp? Or the remains of the nine hundred Jewish rebels? Only thirty or so bodies had ever been recovered. They had been reburied with full military honors in 1969.
She craned her neck to get a better view. Unbroken sand stretched in all directions. No sign of activity around the base, but she spotted a large helicopter on the summit. That must be where she was headed. She sat straighter, eager to discover what required her immediate attention.
The priest moved almost imperceptibly, a slight shift of his handsome chin. So he still lived. She had forgotten
