Endgame: The Calling (42 page)

Chiyoko stops short of the hill and takes a knee. Maccabee and Baitsakhan disappear around the hill and don’t come back.

A doorway?

She counts to 60.

Breathes.

She watches the stars imperceptibly twirl across the sky.

Breathes.

Counts to 60 again.

None of the others reappear.

Yes. A doorway.

She consults the tracker. Sarah and Jago have an ETA of 22 minutes. Maccabee and Baitsakhan are under the mound, going down, down, down. Presumably, Kala and Christopher are down there ahead of them.

She checks her weapons. The poisoned wakizashi inside its sheath. Her shuriken. Her darts. The metal-tipped hojo. Three smoke bombs. A pepper bomb. No gun. Too much noise, those things, and not elegant enough. She stands, clicks her watch: the timer rolls from zero; the digits of the tenths and hundredths fly. She wants to know when Sarah and Jago are close.

Follow and watch, Chiyoko. Just follow and watch. Only confront if completely necessary. Only kill if easy.

She moves toward the hill, as quiet as a ghost.

Alt
n Odas
, 25 m Underground, Turkey

Kala has a hard time keeping her heart rate down. It’s at 88, 90, 93. She hasn’t let it get above 70 in six years.

She and Christopher are standing in a massive chamber as big as an airplane hangar. The walls are rounded and easily 50 feet tall. The ceiling is angled like the inside of a pyramid. Large markings similar to those on Kala’s twisted ring are carved on every inch of the walls, telling some ancient story. A golden statue of a creature with the head of a man and the body of an eagle stands guard before an altar at one end of the room. The altar is surrounded by clay burial urns of varying sizes. And everywhere, piled to the ceiling in some places, are massive, glimmering stacks of gold blocks.

“Holy shit,” whispers Christopher.

Kala puts her pistol in the back of her pants, trains the flashlight on an ancient torch, and removes it from the wall. She pulls a lighter from her pocket, flips it; the torch erupts. Light bounces off the gold and the walls and rises toward the roof. They’re bathed in dense yellow light.

Christopher feels faint and sits on the floor. “Wh-what is this place?”

Kala turns a tight circle. “There are underground cities strewn across Turkey. They were dug by Hittites, Luwians, a smattering of Armenians. The most famous is called Derinkuyu. But none I’ve heard of are as old as this. This is something else. This . . .”

“Sky People,” Christopher guesses, still stunned. “Sarah was right. It’s for real.”

“Yes,” Kala says, filling with pride. The people of Gobekli Tepe, the people who once worked the floor of this amazing room, are directly related to her. The ancestors of her ancestors. The original members of her line. “The Annunaki used gold for energy. And they used men to mine it for them. We were their slaves, and they were our gods.”

“So this is some sort of power plant?”

“More like a fueling station. One that hasn’t been seen in at least fifteen thousand years.”

They are silent. Christopher can’t fathom the value of the gold that surrounds them. Kala raises the torch as high as she can and peers into the recesses of the ceiling.

Christopher follows the light. “Are those . . . letters?”

Kala frowns. She sticks the torch back on the wall and gets out her smartphone. She makes sure the flash is on, holds it over her head, takes a picture. A blinding white light fills the room. She lowers the screen and looks at the photograph.

“By the gods,” she says breathlessly.

“What is it?”

She holds out the phone. Christopher takes it. He can’t understand what he’s looking at. Dashes and periods and numbers and letters. A jumbled mass of them. He pinches to zoom in. Uses his finger to move around the field. Squints. A massive array of Roman letters and Arabic numerals, as if printed by a huge computer. The signs of modern humans, buried here for 15,000 years. He doesn’t understand how it’s possible.

But Kala does. She knows that it’s a sign.

Earth Key is here. It has to be,
she thinks.

“We need to get the key and leave. The boy, Baitsakhan, is up there looking for us,” she says, pointing straight up.

Kala grabs the torch and runs toward the altar.

“What about Sarah? Isn’t she meeting us up there too?” Christopher calls after her.

Kala ignores him. He watches her go and stays on the ground. He’s still recovering from what surrounds them. He breathes. The air is stale and thin. He looks again at the photo of the grid on the ceiling. He stares, stares, stares at the phone, like so many other people in the world are doing at the same moment, playing games, checking email, texting.

None of them are looking at anything like this.

Christopher lets the phone fall into his lap. His face is lit from below by the pale light of the screen. He hears Kala moving at the other end of the room. The phone’s screen shuts off, going to sleep.

Darkness.

Christopher’s mind reels.

He thinks of what he learned in world history, in math, in an advanced history of philosophy class he took in the fall. If this room has been untouched for 15,000 years, then those letters and numbers and signs were put there before writing was even invented. Before
any
kind of writing was invented. Before cuneiform and pictograms and hieroglyphs, to say nothing of Roman letters or Arabic numerals. They were there before Euclidean geometry, before math as we know it, before the concept of knowledge.

Kala’s words ring in his mind.
There is so much you don’t know.

Christopher is completely silent. It
is
real. Endgame, the Sky People, the Players.
This picture is proof,
he thinks. Proof of some unknown human history. Proof of extraterrestrial life.

Proof.

Chiyoko passes through the door and starts to descend the stairs. She hears Baitsakhan and Maccabee shuffling below her, trying to remain quiet, unseen. They are rank amateurs compared to her.

Her footfalls on the cut stone are nonexistent. Her breath is a whisper. Her clothing does not rustle. She carries no light, as each of the fools below her does.

The staircase is a tight spiral not wide enough for two people to pass. The wall is smooth to the touch. There are no markings, just depth and more depth.

The sounds below her change. Baitsakhan and Maccabee have reached the bottom. She quickens her pace. She must see what’s there, decide how to proceed.

She must see what these boys will do.

Because she knows it will happen soon.

It will happen soon.

Blood will flow.

Baitsakhan and Maccabee stop just short of the vast storeroom. Maccabee has his hand over his flashlight. His flesh is red and he can see the blurred outlines of phalanges and metacarpals.

The Donghu holds up a fist, jabs himself in the chest. He mouths,
Surprise
and
Neither lives.

Maccabee nods.
I will guard the exit,
he mouths with a wide grin. Death is coming, and he likes it.

He turns off the flashlight. They move through the darkness like wraiths, step over the threshold of the underground chamber. There is a lit torch at the far end, near what appears to be some kind of altar. For a brief moment, Baitsakhan and Maccabee are struck by the size of the room they have entered. The far-off flame doesn’t do it justice, but they can’t risk any light.

Not until it is done.

Baitsakhan walks in. Maccabee waits in the doorway, his knife drawn, his other hand resting on the butt of the pistol stuffed down the front of his pants.
Let the little monster have his revenge,
he thinks.

Baitsakhan hugs the blocks of metallic stone as he moves toward the torchlight. He knows this place is ancient and untouched.

Sacred.

Something snaps underneath Baitsakhan’s foot. He stops, waits to see if Kala notices. She doesn’t. He kneels, runs his fingers over what broke underfoot, and discovers a frail leg bone.

A good omen for death
, he thinks.

Christopher still sits on the floor when the ghostly form of a small boy passes right in front of him, not more than 10 feet away. This has to be the boy Kala warned him of. Christopher holds his breath and tries to stay calm.

A snapping noise. The figure crouches, stands again. Christopher catches the glint of a wavy blade. The figure moves on, and Christopher’s lungs start to burn. He doesn’t dare breathe. His hands shake. He grips the smartphone with all his strength, hoping that it doesn’t fall to the ground or ring, though there is probably no signal at this depth, in this remote corner of the world. The boy heads for Kala. This is the opportunity he’s been waiting for.
I won’t warn her.
He has her phone, and a picture of the thing on the celling. That should be enough.

Once they start to fight, I will leave.

Kala opens urn after urn around the man-headed eagle.

All empty.

Yet she knows Earth Key is near.

She feels it.

Here and here and here.

But where?

She walks around the statue. She opens a small stone coffin, sized for a dog or a cat. Nothing inside but dust and tattered cloth.

She stops. She is behind the bird statue. Is the key the eagle? If it is, that’s a problem, because it’s too big to carry. She holds up the torch again. Turns on her flashlight and sweeps it over the outstretched wings, the elongated neck, the braided hair of the man’s head. She keeps the light trained there and moves around to the front. The man’s face is flat with deep-set eyes and a broad nose and huge nostrils. His eyes are perfect circles. His forehead is squat. The whole thing is made of gold.

She shines the light up and down the figure.

Nothing.

But then something catches her eye.

Chiyoko walks to within five feet of Maccabee and throws a pebble into the room. The Nabataean’s eyes, struggling against the dark, follow the noise, and she walks right past him, unnoticed. She stays close to the wall and works her way behind several large, cube-shaped stones. The night vision in her monocle does not suggest they are precious in any way. They just look big and gray.