Ascendant- A Mira Raiden Adventure: Dark Trinity, #1

PROLOGUE

Somewhere in the South Pacific, 1944

The grave robber stared out across the sun-dappled water of the lagoon, anxiously scanning the horizon for movement. In a world at war, even in this remote part of the globe, planes and submarines could deliver death without warning, without provocation. Though he was not a soldier, he had seen his share of war and knew that in a combat zone there were no innocent bystanders.

Not that he was innocent.

He had knowingly struck a deal with the devil—the devil always had the shiniest gold and, contrary to what the Good Book said, usually came out on top.

But this time it looked as if the devil was going to lose. The last report the grave robber had heard before leaving civilization confirmed what he had suspected for some time. Germany was fatally wounded, crippled by the economic and human cost of supporting a war on two fronts. While the scientists of the Third Reich were arguably the most brilliant in history, there was simply not enough time for their superior weapons to be perfected and deployed. Their generals and admirals and spymasters were unparalleled in their respective crafts, yet their supreme commander was a madman, whose mercurial temperament had consigned thousands of young men—the cream of Germany’s youth—to death on the frozen threshold of Stalingrad.

The grave robber shook a Camel from a nearly empty pack and lit it with a single wooden match, struck on his thumb and cast into the lapping waters of the lagoon, where it died with a hiss. As he drew in a deep breath of nicotine-laced smoke, his fingers felt the outline of the artifact concealed beneath his shirt and wondered if that simple circle of metal and crystal might change that inevitable outcome.

Guten Tag, Herr Tarrant.

The voice startled him, nearly causing him to drop his cigarette. He whirled, unconsciously recoiling like a frightened animal, and searched for its source. A dark figure, a man wearing an overcoat in spite of the tropical humidity, stepped out from concealment behind a coconut palm directly opposite the lagoon. His sudden appearance almost startled Tarrant a second time.

How in the hell did you get over there? he grumbled, trying to repair his tattered dignity.

The German smiled icily. These are dangerous times. One cannot be too careful.

Tarrant nodded and took a deep breath. Tell me about it.

The German strode out onto the sandy beach, fully exposing himself to the sun’s glare. The grave robber idly wondered if the man would burst into flames, like a vampire in a horror film. He did not, though his pale skin and gaunt features certainly evoked such a comparison. Do you have the item, Herr Tarrant?

You know I do.

Ah. And you wish for some assurance that I have your money?

Tarrant affected a surly shrug. You could put it that way.

The German cocked his head sideways. His smile sliced downward like the blade of a scimitar. I would have thought a man like yourself would expect treachery at every turn. Why, for argument’s sake, would I surrender a fortune in gold to you when I could simply kill you and take the artifact for myself?

Tarrant was used to the Nazi’s mind-games; they had done this before. Because, he answered in a tired voice, you want the next one. There’s always a next one. And you know I’m the only man who can find it.

The Nazi’s smile slipped a notch. You said that there were only two—the Twins, you called them. Our scholars agree.

Tarrant backhanded the cigarette to his lips, dragging deeply as he watched beads of sweat trickling down the other man’s forehead. He blew out a perfect smoke ring, which quickly fragmented in the moist air, before answering. When you touch these things, especially after they’ve gone undisturbed for a while, you see things. Visions of the past. And sometimes of the future.

Yes, you’ve reported that, though our scientists cannot verify your claim.

The grave robber jerked a thumb at his chest. I am the proof. How do you think I found them? The remains of lost cities that you thought were only myths. I saw them in a vision. And this time, I saw something else.

Tell me.

There’s another one of them. Three in all. Individually they’re powerful beyond imagination, but if they’re all brought together in a certain place . . . limitless power.

Power. Something changed in the German’s eyes as he echoed the words, and Tarrant felt an inexplicable rush of fear. He kept talking to hide his trepidation.

The antediluvian world was just as advanced as our own; maybe more so. They spread their civilization over the entire globe, not just Asia. There were at least three separate empires, an Axis of power if you will. Each ruler bore one of these. He lifted the circular relic, still depending from the chain around his neck, to emphasize his point. Trinities are everywhere in ancient religions, the embodiment of ultimate power. That’s the answer to all this. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The ancients ruled the world with it. I believe that is your ambition as well.

Our destiny. For a moment, the Nazi seemed lost in thought, then his expression hardened again. You say that this ancient trinity ruled the world with these talismans of power. But they are not among us today. Do you know why?

Tarrant licked his lips, which in spite of the humidity had become very dry. His heart was racing, as if his body had experienced a premonition that his brain was only beginning to grasp. What are you talking about?

They did not know when to stop. Suddenly, the scimitar returned to the Nazi’s lips. "As with you, Herr Tarrant, you believe there is always one more piece of the puzzle to be found. And you imagine that by finding it you can extract a king’s ransom in gold from the coffers of the Third Reich.

You imagine incorrectly.

Tarrant raised his palms in protest, but before he could say a word, the Nazi raised his hand as well. Clenched in one gloved fist was a Mauser P08 pistol.

Wait. . . .

Tarrant’s protest fell on ears deafened by the roar of the pistol. He felt a sharp hammer blow to his chest and he was knocked backwards. The cigarette flew from his fingers as he splashed onto his back in the shallows where the lagoon met the beach.

Though it was midday, twilight seemed to fall over the island. Tarrant struggled to rise, but no amount of effort yielded the slightest result. He heard the sound of his attacker splashing toward him, felt the gloved fingers tear open his shirt to search his body and discover the relic, but saw only the descending fog of premature night.

Tarrant awoke on the tide. A mouthful of tepid seawater triggered his gag reflex and he rolled onto his side, retching. The sudden, violent movement stirred the embers of pain in his wound, but the unpleasant sensations produced a welcome revelation; he was still alive.

He struggled to his hands and knees, grimacing as the blossom of pain in his torso threatened to render him unconscious a second time. The water stroked his exposed chest and the ragged flesh of the wound as gentle waves brought the tide in. He realized with a start that he had only been unconscious for a short time, perhaps less than an hour.

He rocked back onto his haunches and felt the wound. Blood had begun to trickle afresh since his waking, but he intuited that the nine-millimeter slug had miraculously deflected off one of his ribs. It had burrowed under the skin, but done little more than fracture the bone at the point of impact. It hurt like a son of a bitch, but he would live. He fumbled for a cigarette, but found that the remaining two were sodden from his submergence. Casting the ruined pack into the water, he rose to his feet.

The Nazi had double-crossed him.

His assailant’s final words haunted him. He had indeed played the game once too often. The outcome of dealing with the devil was inevitable, yet he had truly believed that the Nazis would spare no effort to recover every last vestige of the ancient power manifest in the relics. They were desperate for anything to turn the tide of the war. In hindsight it had been a foolish notion; what good was a thrice-powerful talisman if it arrived after the war had been lost?

The pain in his chest was beginning to subside and with that recession, his cognitive abilities began to flow. A line of footprints led away into the sparse forest, marking the path taken by his assailant. With steps uncertain at first, but quickly becoming more determined until he was almost running, Tarrant chased after the Nazi agent.

The footprints disappeared as sand gave way to loamy soil, but the trail remained evident in the trampled underbrush. The Nazi had followed a path that circled back to the beach two miles north of the lagoon. Tarrant slowed his pace as the thicket gave way once more to bare sand, in which the footprints of the Nazi were plainly stamped. The trail led directly into the surf, where wave action had erased the final destination.

A boat, Tarrant surmised. Probably a small motorized launch, which had conveyed the man to a waiting ship. He scanned the horizon, hoping to catch a glimpse of the parent vessel. This close to sea level he realized that his horizon was severely limited, so he dashed back to the forest and scaled a coconut palm. From there, his visual range was extended by several miles.

A black column stood monolithic in the distance. He squinted, minimizing the glare of the sun, and saw more detail. It was a submarine, a German Kriegsmarine Unterseeboot. The grave robber did not know a great deal about naval vessels, but he studied what he could see of the submarine carefully. There were numbers painted along the conning tower, the letter U followed by four digits. Tarrant squinted harder, trying to distinguish them, but the waves slapping against the tower made this a nearly hopeless task.

The U-boat was sinking—No, he corrected. It’s diving. His surveillance took on new urgency as he strained to catch at least catch part of the submarine’s designation. Two—Five— The lapping water touched the base of the painted numbers. The next digit was two or three, but he could not be sure which. A moment later, the black column was gone.

Tarrant closed his eyes and sighed through a sudden flare of pain in his chest. He had aggravated the injury with his sprint through the forest and the scramble up the tree. It bled freely now, a throbbing ache pulsing in time with his rapid heartbeat. With due restraint, he slid down from his perch and sank to his knees in the coarse sand.

He didn’t really know what had motivated him to chase after the Nazi. He had escaped with his life, which was certainly more than the double-crossing German had intended to leave him with. Now the Nazis had two of the relics; they could join them and use that power to . . . Well, what couldn’t they do with it?

Though they did not yet realize it, the Nazis now had the power to boil the seas and shake the earth from its orbit. The relics could even raise an army of the dead to lay low the enemies of whoever wielded it. Even if he one day encountered the man whose treachery had almost killed him, what could he do?

Gazing at the sea, at the very spot where the U-boat had vanished, Tarrant made another deal with the devil. Though the cost would no doubt be higher in an eternal sense than his deal with the Nazis had proved, he swore he would not be so easily taken when his next chance came.

Panama, Present Day

¡Alto!

The laborer froze in mid-swing, the point of his machete aimed at the heavens.

Marquand Atlas rushed forward, exertion and excitement putting a dangerous strain on his already overtaxed heart. The morbidly obese billionaire panted for several seconds, bent over at the waist with his hands on his knees, in order to get enough breath to finally speak. You’ve found it!

Mira Raiden didn’t know what she had found; didn’t know if she had in fact found anything. She only knew, with a certainty that she could not put into words, that something very bad would happen if the laborer blazing their trail through the dense undergrowth allowed his blade to fall. She gestured for the man to back away from his task. Evidently, something in her demeanor conveyed what speech could not, for the man retreated from the thicket as though it were squirming with vipers.

Mira glanced briefly at her benefactor, then behind him to meet the gaze of Curtis Lancet, Atlas’ executive bodyguard and general factotum. Lancet, a former Green Beret and decorated war hero, was everything that Atlas—for all his wealth—could never be: handsome, athletic, charismatic, and a damn good lover.

What is it, Mira? What do you sense? Lancet’s concern was genuine and typical of his good nature. Where his employer saw Mira and her unique abilities merely as one more resource to be exploited and discarded, Lancet had always shown a deep fascination with her as a person as well as with what she could do. Over the course of their journey she had become much more than just a working partner to him.

She shook her head uncertainly, trying to get a handle on the premonition. In some cultures her gift was called ‘second sight,’ but in sensorial terms, it was nothing at all like vision. Having lived with it all her life, she could not explain it any more than she could explain her other five senses, but the closest comparison she could offer was the olfactory sense.

Second smell, she had once told one of her Agency handlers with a chuckle, but that was exactly what it was like. Sometimes, a rosy ‘smell’ hinted that something good was about to happen, while other situations just plain stank. This one, however, was harder to pin down.

It was neither good nor bad. It was just . . . potent.

She directed her words to Lancet. Send them back to camp.

Atlas’ eyes began to dance with anticipation. Yes, send them back. If they catch even a glimpse of what we’ve found, we’ll be fighting off tomb robbers for weeks.

Mira hid a frown. She wasn’t worried about protecting the discovery from the looters that she knew were dogging their steps; her concern was for the safety of the hired workers. She didn’t know what lay beyond that curtain of foliage, but she was certain that it was as dangerous as a loaded gun in the hands of a child.

She held Atlas back with a raised hand until Lancet finished sending the laborers back to their camp a few miles back. Only when their murmured conversations were no longer audible did she advance along the freshly blazed trail, stopping exactly where the workman had been moments before. The indescribable feeling grew with each step forward.

Curt, let me borrow that sword of yours.

Without question or hesitation, Lancet drew a large Pathfinder knife from the sheath on his belt, right behind a holstered SIG Sauer 9mm semi-automatic pistol. He casually flipped the knife and caught the fourteen-inch blade between thumb and forefinger, proffering the hilt to Mira.

Mira was less cavalier about her handling of the knife. She did not hack at the brushy barrier, but rather used the blade to probe the thicket, gently bending vines and branches out of the way. Her surgical precision gradually laid bare the object that the laborer would have discovered with his next cut.

It was a stone stele, standing shoulder high to the petite Mira, adorned with what looked at first glance like Mayan glyphs. Maintaining her calm demeanor, she continued to clear the remaining growth away, fully exposing the carved bas-relief message.

It’s Mayan, all right, Atlas announced. From the moment she had revealed the first glyph, he had commenced scanning the image into his palmtop computer.

What’s it say? Lancet asked in a breathless whisper.

‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,’ Mira muttered, not quite joking.

Atlas chuckled. That’s a pretty close translation actually. It is indeed a warning, from our old friend Storm Jaguar.

Though she was no expert on the Maya, Mira knew more about Storm Jaguar than any classically trained pre-Columbian archaeologist. The truth of the matter was, due to a series of unfortunate circumstances beginning with the actions of an opportunistic Dominican friar and extending forward five centuries, no one in the scholarly world had ever heard of him at all.

Storm Jaguar—the name was a literal translation of the ancient pictographic script—had been the king of an early city-state in western Honduras, well to the south of what most historians believed was the limit of Mayan expansion. His life story had become the basis for the Mesoamerican equivalent of an epic poem, committed to paper—or huun, as the Maya called it—in the fifth century.

A thousand years later, and several centuries after their civilization had mysteriously vanished, most surviving examples of the ancient texts were destroyed by Spanish conquistadores who believed the writings would inhibit conversion of the native population to Christianity. A scant few books, bound and folded into codices, survived the purge, preserved by Spaniards who recognized their worth, but remained hidden and forgotten for hundreds of years thereafter. Experts now knew of four authentic Mayan codices and had used these in combination with the relief carvings in Mayan ruins to develop a fairly comprehensive translation matrix, but none of the known writings mentioned Storm Jaguar. That name was found only in a codex that Atlas had purchased on the black market.

A translation of the document yielded, among other things, the Mayan equivalent of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a tale of how Storm Jaguar left his kingdom and journeyed to Xibalba, the Mayan Underworld. The tale expanded on the creation myths found in the Popul Vuh—a collection of folklore based on oral tradition passed down in the Quiché language—but the provenance of Atlas’ codex had been impossible to establish through conventional means. Which left only unconventional means.

Enter Mira Raiden.

Four months earlier, the closest Mira had ever come to a tropical jungle was the Rain Forest Café at the MGM Grand on the Las Vegas strip. She had been making the circuit of Sin City casinos, winning big, but not too big, and gradually but determinedly feathering her nest. Gambling afforded her no addictive thrill. With her intuition guiding her bets, it was merely working for a living.

One night while playing colors at the roulette table, she had felt the tingle of someone watching her. Surprised that she had been noticed so early in the evening, she had nevertheless taken that as her cue to cash out her winnings and head for the door. The watcher in this case was not the pit boss, however, but rather a sweaty, smiling, little fat man who spoke to her as if they were already old friends.

My dear Mira, he had said, grinning cryptically. You have a gift.

Her gift told her that, where Marquand Atlas was concerned, looks could be deceiving, but she sensed nothing threatening about him. And that, coupled with the fact that he had correctly recognized her abilities and seemed impressed by them, was enough for her to accept his offer of a drink.

They made an unlikely pair in the cocktail lounge. Her elfin physique and features were not exactly glamorous, but she knew that most men found her attractive. Under normal circumstances, she could have had her pick of companions, and at first she had imagined that onlookers would wonder why she had picked the portly Atlas. Only later, when she finally began to get an inkling of his net worth, did she realize that the jealousy she had sensed was actually directed at her.

For his part, Atlas had never tried to impress her with his wealth, much less make any sort of sexual advances. From the outset he had focused solely on her unique attributes, all but interrogating her in an effort to define exactly what she was capable of doing. Later that night he had shown her the codex.

Without even knowing what it was, physical contact with the brittle, discolored pages had filled her with certainty regarding the codex’s authenticity. More than that, it had triggered what she could only describe as a homing instinct, a powerful urge that over the course of several weeks would lead her, with Atlas in tow, to a buried Mayan temple in Honduras more than three hundred miles from the ruins of Copan near the Guatemalan border and from there even farther south to the rugged wilderness of the Darien Gap in search of the legendary Mayan underworld.

But that night in Vegas, as her fingertips brushed the decorative leaves of the codex, she understood for the first time the thrill that made ordinary people gamble away their last dollar on the promise of what the next roll of the dice might bring.

Is it a warning? Lancet asked.

A ‘No Trespassing’ sign, of sorts. It’s a boundary marker. Beyond this point, we are in the realm of Xibalba. Atlas made a dismissive gesture. From the looks of it, the lords of Xibalba have been gone for a long time.

Mira wasn’t convinced. When they had discovered the tomb of Storm Jaguar in the catacombs beneath the temple in Honduras, she had felt only an overwhelming desire to press on, to retrace the steps of the ancient Mayan king. Now, however, on the threshold of that final discovery, her urge to move forward was being countered by a more primal instinct. It wasn’t exactly panic, but something pretty damn close.

Atlas evinced no such inhibition. Drawing his bush knife, he began clumsily breaking trail beyond the stele. Ever loyal to his employer, Lancet reclaimed his own blade from Mira and joined the effort, with considerably more effectiveness. As the two men hacked at the verdant barrier, Mira remained vigilant, sniffing for any hint of imminent peril.

In a matter of minutes, the jungle yielded up another carved stone—not a stele, but rather an entire wall peeking through the growth. The markings on it were definitely not Mayan hieroglyphs.

It’s Atlantean, gasped the billionaire.

The ambient sensations presently inundating Mira’s precognitive abilities could not quite hide the subtle change in Atlas’ aura. The very sight of the strange markings—a language that was far more reminiscent of a phonetic alphabet than any pre-Columbian pictograph—had awakened something deep inside the man, something buried so deep that she had never sensed it before. The only word to describe it was hunger, and the impression was so sudden and overwhelming that the irony was lost on her.

What have I done? she thought. I shouldn’t have brought him here.

Atlas continued chopping away the vines to uncover more of the unique text, and where he did, his fingers brushed at the recessed letters lovingly, his lips moving silently as he read whatever was written there.

Lancet stood paralyzed in disbelief. You can read this?

It is the language of Atlantis. I had long suspected that what Storm Jaguar called Xibalba was really an outpost city built by refugees from that fallen civilization. This—he patted the wall reverently—is the tomb of the king of Atlantis.

That doesn’t explain how you are able to read it, Mira countered.

Tsk, tsk, my dear. Did you think you knew all my secrets?

Actually, I did, she thought.

Atlantis is just a . . . Lancet looked to Mira, perhaps for confirmation that he was not going insane, but stunned by her own inability to detect Atlas’ hidden agenda, she could offer no such assurances.

He’s been looking for this all along. He knew what it was. He knows what it means. Suddenly the potency she had sensed from afar took on a dire implication. Mr. Atlas, I think we should proceed with a little more caution.

Nonsense. We must find a way inside, and quickly, before the looters get wind of this. As if to emphasize his newfound urgency, his next cut exposed the edge of a doorway. Beneath the artistically executed arched lintel, utterly unlike anything she had ever seen. T in her brief experience with Mayan ruins—the passage was choked with rubble, but even this did not slow Atlas down. Sheathing his knife, he reached in with both hands and began pulling out broken blocks of cut stone that were twice as large as his own head.

Lancet tapped him on the shoulder. Take a break, Mr. Atlas. I’ll get this.

The billionaire, red-faced and panting, mopped his brow with a shirtsleeve. Very well, but you must hurry. We’re so close.

We’re too close, Mira murmured, but even in the grip of her newfound anxiety she was not immune to the thrill of discovery. After all, it wasn’t every day that a person found proof that Atlantis really existed.

With half of the blockage cleared away, it became apparent that the passage beyond was wide open. Eager to be inside, the billionaire squirmed his massive body through the narrow gap. A tiny spot of light blossomed in the darkness beyond and immediately began moving deeper into the interior.

Damn him, Lancet growled before scrambling through the aperture in pursuit of his headstrong employer.

Mira’s slight form slipped through without even significantly shutting out the sun’s rays, and in the circle of daylight that illuminated the first few feet of the passage, she caught a glimpse of Lancet, already on the move.

Like the others, she carried a tiny squeeze light clipped to a breakaway chain around her neck. The powerful light emitting diode threw out a brilliant cone of illumination, but as she hastened after her companions, she felt such a sense of familiarity about the place that she probably could have negotiated the buried ruin in total darkness. She was starting to think that Atlas probably could have done so as well. Despite his bulk, he was flat out running ahead of them, drawn inexorably toward the center of temple.

There was no time to examine the halls and rooms through which she now raced. Flashes of light danced on the walls, revealing brightly colored human figures, veristic images, faintly reminiscent of the style found on the walls of Pompeii. The constant motion and vibration at the source of the illumination made it seem like the pictures were coming alive, and then it occurred to her that perhaps the movement glimpsed in her peripheral vision had nothing at all to do with the interplay of shadow and light. She hastened on.

The tunnels wound back and forth through the underground complex like a mystical labyrinth, and while she often lost sight of the flickering lights carried by the two men, she never faltered in choosing her path through the maze. But there was no escaping the grim reality that Atlas would reach the goal—the unknown prize at the heart of the ruin—before she caught up to him.

Then, inexplicably, she skidded to a stop. The goal, she realized, was not merely at the center of the ruin. Storm Jaguar had called this place Xibalba, the underworld, and just like Orpheus and Dante, his journey had taken him far beyond the first level of Hell. The prize Atlas sought lay somewhere below, in the bowels of this ancient subterranean temple. More importantly, there was a shortcut.

Whether Atlas knew about it or not was irrelevant. The most direct route to the temple’s core had not been constructed for the purpose of passage. It was a vertical shaft less than two feet in diameter that stabbed through the center of every layer of the temple, allowing sunlight from the surface to filter down into the deepest catacombs. The ancient architects had not designed this to be a ruin, but rather a living place of worship, and such a place needed light. The roof of the superstructure had long since collapsed, shutting forever the oculus, which had permitted the sun’s rays to enter, but the shaft remained.

At the next junction she turned away from the sound of footsteps and quickly found the opening, a shadowy void in the floor, surrounded by the rubble of the fallen roof. She trained her light into the shaft, verifying with her eyes what her mind already knew; the hole penetrated every descending level of the temple. Motivated though he was there was no way Atlas would ever be able to shove his girth through that orifice. Mira faced no such limitation.

Effortlessly, she lowered herself feet first into the void, gradually but confidently letting her extended arms take the burden of her weight. The floor of the next level was perhaps another four feet below her dangling toes, but she knew better than to simply let go. Directly beneath her, the deep shaft continued, and while she was in a hurry to get to the bottom, she wasn’t in that much of a hurry. Instead, she spread her feet apart, straddling the opening as she landed. With increased confidence, she repeated the process three more times until, above the fifth level, her small light showed something other than a hole in the floor beneath her.

With each successive layer, the intensity of the sensation she had first encountered at the marker stele grew, and now that she was at last face to face with her destination, it was impossible to distinguish anything else. A blanket of psychic white noise emanating from the lowest stage of the temple left her precognitive faculties completely numb. But like a gambler, certain that the cards were about to break her way, the thrill of imminent victory compelled her onward.

From her overhead vantage, it was difficult to say exactly what the object occupying the center of the temple was. She thought it was an altar of some kind, positioned to lie in the beam of sunlight that had once reached into the depths of the temple at midday. If so, the altar was merely a showcase for something else, something that she could not quite make out with her tiny flashlight, but which she knew unequivocally to be the object of Atlas’ mad dash into the ruin.

Jackpot, she whispered, her lips curling in a triumphant grin as she proceeded to lower herself down onto the altar and then onto the supporting dais, where she got her first good look at the tomb of an Atlantean king.

The room was a circle, perhaps fifty feet across, and its single, continuous wall was adorned with a narrative mural executed in the same style as the frescoes she had glimpsed in the tunnels above. She took a moment to circumscribe the room with the beam of her light, and what she saw took her breath away. Protected from the elements, the images were perfectly preserved, the pigments still bright and vivid. Unlike the flat, two-dimensional images that adorned most ancient ruins, the artists who had decorated this tomb understood perspective and had created a remarkable illusion of depth. And while she was no expert on history or folklore, she recognized instantly the subject of the visual sequence. It was the story of the fall of Atlantis.

The tale began and ended with the only break in the circle, a vertical protrusion that stretched from floor to ceiling. At first she thought it was a door, but the carved relief—a perfect rendering of a man in repose—clued her in to its actual purpose: it was a sarcophagus.

Her brief examination of the life-sized sculpture revealed a nude male with exaggerated musculature and