“They are already splintering. I have collected the candidates, conducted my own experiments. But I don’t have the expertise. I need you. I need your research. We can transform them.”
Kate crumbled. She felt herself falling under his spell. It was the same as before—her before, in San Francisco. She tried to rationalize, tried to think of a deal, but her mind drifted to her experiences in Gibraltar and then in Antarctica when he had cornered her. It was history repeating itself. The same players, playing out a different game, with the same end, on a different stage. Except this was long before, in another life, in another era.
“If I help you,” she said, “I want to know that no harm will come to my team.”
“You have my word. I will join your expedition—as a security adviser. There are additional steps you all need to take to cloak our presence here. And you will program your resurrection tubes to my radiation signature—just in case something… unfortunate were to happen to me.”
Dorian leaned his head against the helicopter’s back rest and closed his eyes. It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t a memory. He was there, in the past.
And Kate had been there, opposing him, then helping him. He had taken her research, used it, and betrayed her when he was done with her.
Across the ages, they were playing out the same scenario, fighting to transform the human race: her advocating for them, him trying to create an army to face a superior enemy.
Who was right?
He sensed something more: Kate was remembering these events at the same time he was, like they were connected to the same network, each receiving signals, memories from the past, driving them on to some destination. She would receive the code this way. That’s what Ares had planned. Had he programmed the case for this?
Seeing Kate had energized Dorian. Her fear, her vulnerability. It was the same as before. He’d had the power then, and he would have it again. She had the research and information he needed. And soon he would have it. She just had to remember.
But it wasn’t only what had happened. It was some piece of information—a code that she would remember. Ares had known that. Dorian was close to Kate and she was close to remembering the rest, remembering the code he needed. He had timed it perfectly. Soon, he would take her, and take the last secret, the thing she held most dear, and her defeat would be complete.
CHAPTER 80
Somewhere near Malta
Mediterranean Sea
On the horizon, David saw the two larger islands of Malta come into view.
In the last six hundred years, this tiny group of islands, which covered just one hundred twenty-two square miles of land, had been the most fought-over place on the entire planet.
During the Second World War, no place on Earth saw as much bombing per square foot as Malta. The German and Italian air forces had leveled it, but the British had held strong.
In some cities, like Rabat, the residents had retreated underground, living in stone rooms connected by miles of tunnels. The catacombs there were legendary. They had been used in Roman times to bury the dead, but they had kept countless Maltese residents alive during the carnage of the Second World War.
Almost four hundred years before the Luftwaffe had unleashed hell on Malta, a different devil had appeared on their doorstep: the armada of the Ottoman Empire. In 1563, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent had brought his fleet of almost two hundred ships, carrying nearly fifty thousand troops—the largest fighting force in the world at the time.
The months that followed became known as the Great Siege of Malta, and it had changed the history of the world. The siege was a clash of unimaginable brutality, one of the bloodiest battles ever fought. An estimated one hundred thirty thousand cannonballs were fired at or from the island. One in every three inhabitants of Malta was left dead. The Knights Hospitaller, along with a ragtag group of around two thousand soldiers drawn from Spain, Italy, Greece, and Sicily, held the island for four months, until the Ottoman fleet, counting their dead in the tens of thousands, turned and sailed home.
Had the Ottomans taken Malta in 1565, many historians agree that their forces could have easily taken mainland Europe, disrupting the Renaissance to come and forever changing the fate of the world.
The residents of Malta had fought to the death. Were they defending something besides their lives?
David glanced at the paper. Missing Alpha Leads to Treasure of Atlantis.
What was there on Malta? Some ancient treasure? What could it have to do with the plague ravaging the world?
David was a historian. He believed in facts: the truth culled from multiple sources, verified by eyewitnesses, ideally with differing backgrounds and motivations.
Treasure was the lure of fools. As were mythical objects. The Ark of the Covenant. The Holy Grail. He didn’t believe in either of them. Military history was always more reliable. Generals counted their dead. Somewhere between the sums on each side lay the truth.