“You’ve had the vaccine. This vaccine?” Anna held her hand out to the computer.
“Well, I—I don’t know. I didn’t understand that was a picture of a vaccine. Ben Adam didn’t explain that to me.”
“This was Ben Adam’s computer?”
“Yes.”
Glancing back at the dazzling display of sacred geometry rotating on the screen, she stayed silent for a long time. Hakari had been dressed in a monk’s robe. He’d called himself Ben Adam?
Bending forward, she propped her elbows on her knees to let the stunned sensation pass through her while she contemplated the ramifications.
Ben Adam.
In Hebrew, it meant Son of Man. Throughout the Book of John the term was associated with the Last Judgment and with Jesus’s humanity and death.
As though the world had shifted to slow motion, her chest gradually constricted, and her gaze moved from the screen to the elegant double helix spiraling around the floor. It struck her like a fist. “They’re different.”
“What?”
“The formula on the screen is different from the one on the floor. What’s the image on the floor? Did he tell you?”
“No, I … I mean maybe he did, and I didn’t understand, but there’s another one like this in his cell at the monastery. He drew it on the walls. Shall I show it to you?”
Hakari must have been afraid the formula would be accidentally erased or even deliberately destroyed. That’s the only reason he would have drawn it in two different places. To protect it. What is it?
Turning, she closed the precious laptop, clutched it against her chest, and rose to her feet. “Right now, I need to get this computer to my friend Yacob in the lab aboard the Mead. Perhaps I could meet you at the monastery later tonight?”
CHAPTER 65
OCTOBER 30. MIDNIGHT. MONASTERY OF SAINT JOHN OF JERUSALEM.
Anna and Yacob stood in the cold room, facing the peculiar formula written on the walls. Drawn with the same blue chalk as the DNA formula in the bomb shelter, the geometric symbols seemed to float in the candlelight like odd, hovering ghosts. Brother Stephen, who sat on the cot in the rear, had not said a word since he’d brought them here.
Outside, the storm beat against the walls and snowflakes whipped by the window.
Yacob shifted to brace his feet. It had practically taken an act of God to get Cozeba to allow him to come here.
“Anna, you read his theoretical paper. Is this the ancestral form of HERV-K? The oldest form of the virus? That’s what it looks like to me.”
As she walked closer to the wall, she noticed the spots of old blood on the floor and carefully veered around them. This had been James’s cell. It made sense that it was his blood. The thought reawakened the grief that had tormented her since his death. Taking a deep breath, she bent down to examine the formula’s complex structure, the way the hexagons were connected to the pentagons, and slowly, methodically, began moving along the walls, following out each line as it spiraled around and around. Twenty minutes later, an almost overwhelming elation filled her.
“My God.”
“Yeah,” Yacob said. “It’s brilliant. It’s beautiful. But what is it? Is this the source of hundreds of diseases?”
The simple cell was dark and freezing, and the strange symbols reminded her of runes drawn on thousand-year-old Norse tombstones, intricate and mysterious, incomprehensible unless you knew the arcane language. In this case, the language of DNA.
Turning to the young monk on the cot, she asked, “Brother Stephen, did Ben Adam tell you anything about this formula?”
At first, he shrugged, then he seemed to think about it. “He said it was the Word of God. And the Mark of the Beast.”
“The Mark of the Beast?”
“From Revelation.”
Yacob shook his head, as though that made no sense whatsoever. It took a while for his eyes to go wide. “Oh. I see it. It’s right there.”
“What do you see?” Anna strode to his side and tried to follow his gaze, to see exactly what he was looking at.
He lifted a hand to point. “Hexagons have six sides. The sequence starts and ends with three hexagons: 666. The number of the Beast in the Book of Revelation. In a way, 666 is the alpha and omega of the ancestral virus. If that’s what this is.”
Feeling lost, Anna studied the sequence again. She needed rest. Once she’d slept, maybe she could …
A jolt of adrenaline suddenly flooded her veins. She stood there breathing hard while sheer wonder spread through her. “That’s what he was trying to tell me. He said I’d find it and defeat the Beast.”
“You mean the reference to—”
“Yacob, look at it! It looks like the ancestral HERV-K virus, because it’s based upon it. The ancestral virus is the Beast, but this is not.”
Yacob grimaced at the blue chalked images. Seconds later, she heard his sharp intake of breath. Hoarsely, he said, “I’m looking right at it, and I don’t believe it. It’s the HERV-K vaccine, the cure for LucentB and dozens of cancers, mental illnesses, neurological and autoimmune diseases…” His voice trailed off as the ramifications sank in.
Awestruck, she said, “James spent his whole life searching for this, and it cost him everything—his job, his mind, his freedom.”
“Even the love of his life.”
When Yacob looked back at Anna, she could tell he was remembering the brilliant man they’d both loved.
“Do you realize what this means?” she asked.
“Yes, it means the LucentB vaccine taken by the Russians is now irrelevant, insignificant in comparison to the miracle formula flickering in the candlelight in front of us.”
A particularly strong gust shook the floor beneath her feet, and Anna’s gaze moved around the room. When it reached the window, she stared out at the snow falling across the dead city of Valletta, and the dark ocean in the distance. “With this vaccine, America controls the future.”
“Which means the world is going to live.”
As she calculated the probabilities, vivid, sometimes terrifying, images of the future flashed behind her eyes. Patiently, she traced out the logical pathways, watching the dominoes fall, for how long she did not know, but when she finally turned back, she found both men watching her with moist eyes.
“Yacob, we have to get this formula copied and start producing it. This is clearly the vaccine we must get to America.”
“I know.”
As though all of his energy had fled, Yacob’s knees went weak. He slowly walked to the cot and sank down atop the simple wool blanket beside Brother Stephen.
They remained there for a long time, the light golden and the air soft, the small sounds of the monastery punctuated by the wind battering the ancient stone walls.
Finally, Brother Stephen asked, “Everything will be all right now, won’t it? The Word of God will heal everyone?”
Yacob looked at him, then he leaned forward and put his head in his hands. Anna heard a rasping, a sound that was probably laughter, as irreverent as anything she had ever heard, but it ended as something far more difficult to listen to.
She walked across the room and sat down on the other side of Brother Stephen.
Softly, she answered, “Yes. Yes, it will…”
ALSO BY
KATHLEEN O’NEAL GEAR
People of the Wolf
People of the Fire
People of the Earth
People of the River
People of the Sea
People of the Lakes
People of the Lightning
People of the Silence
People of the Mist
People of the Masks
People of the Owl
People of the Raven
People of the Moon
People of the Nightland
People of the Weeping Eye
People of the Thunder
People of the Longhouse
The Dawn Country
The Broken Land
People of the Black Sun
People of the Morning Star
People of the Songtrail
An Abyss of Light
Treasure of Light
Redemption of Light
It Sleeps in Me
It Wakes in Me
It Dreams in Me
The Visitant
The Summoning God
Bone Walker
Sand in the Wind
This Widowed Land
Thin Moon and Cold Mist
Dark Inheritance
Raising Abel
The Betrayal: The Lost Life of Jesus
Children of the Dawnland
Copper Falcon
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KATHLEEN O’NEAL GEAR is a nationally award-winning archaeologist who has been honored by the United States Congress. She began writing full-time in 1986 and has over one hundred nonfiction publications in the fields of archaeology, history, writing, and buffalo conservation. She has authored several novels under her own name and coauthored more than thirty international bestsellers with her husband, W. Michael Gear. Their books have been translated into twenty-nine languages. She and her husband live in northern Wyoming. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Also by Kathleen O’Neal Gear
About the Author
Copyright
Cover design by James Perales and David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photographs: maze © Exogenesiso/Shutterstock.com; DNA © Nanovector/Shutterstock.com
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
MAZE MASTER. Copyright © 2018 by Kathleen O’Neal Gear. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-12199-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-12200-1 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250122001
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First Edition: July 2018
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