The Book of Bones (Harvey Bennett Thrillers 7) Page 2

  Something much more powerful.

  But after Blas had left for Spain, Jeronimo had read that his beloved brother had been executed in Cadiz. He did not want to believe the letters, but after waiting three years for his return, he began to think his brother may have been bested.

  Then he began to hear rumors. A Jesuit priest had been found walking through the region of the Chachapoyas, one said. Another hinted that a light-skinned group of men and women had appeared in a village and traded a Catholic crucifix for supplies and food.

  Finally, a letter had reached Jeronimo that a man had stumbled into the very same village only a few months later, claiming to be looking for healing from a terrible injury: he was missing a hand, his wrist nothing but a bloody stump.

  Jeronimo had been quietly putting together a plan, and they had set out three months ago on the most perilous journey of his life. Unsure of what they might encounter here, he had opted for a split group of Jesuits and warriors, hoping it might prepare them for anything from indigenous peoples that needed conversion or tribal hunters that wished them harm.

  Now they were here, wherever here was, and he felt all the fear and anxiety come rushing back in. This place may not be friendly, and even if it were, his brother may not be here at all.

  “Jeronimo,” Luis said, calling his attention to the path he’d seen earlier. “What do you make of this?”

  Jeronimo looked over. Luis was pointing at a line of stones that had been set into the side of the path, as if forming a barrier between the path and the forest beyond it. Another line of stones sat on the other side of the path. It was the strangest sort of path Jeronimo had ever seen. The stones were huge, nearly boulders, and it puzzled Jeronimo about how or why they would be necessary here. It would have taken at least two men to lift each one and place it down.

  “Why would they place stones near a path?” He asked. “What purpose can it serve?”

  “It seems a waste,” Luis said. “What people would construct a stone-lined path, especially stones of this size?”

  Jeronimo had no answer, but he noticed that the warriors were in a crouch, watching the surrounding trees. Their arrows were nocked, their eyes steady and their breathing controlled.

  “Are we to be attacked?” He asked.

  “They are simply staying alert,” another Jesuit man whispered. “For this is an unknown construction style to them.”

  “I understand,” Jeronimo said. “But let us continue onward.”

  The men followed behind, and while Jeronimo pressed forward down the path, he wished two of the Inca men would have taken the lead. Still, he knew his warriors were some of the best money could buy, and they would do everything in their power to protect their group.

  The warriors were trained from a young age to hunt, trap, and fight. They could move as swiftly and silently as any jungle beast, and Jeronimo felt confident that should they come across anyone wanting to do them harm, the warriors would be able to fend them off. Furthermore, his Jesuit brothers had been hand-picked for their hardiness. Many of them had grown up in dangerous lands, fought with or against the Spanish, and had earned their edge.

  And yet Jeronimo couldn’t help but feel the weight of the unknown pressing down on him. The forest seemed alive here, watching them. It seemed to have secrets of its own, and the farther they marched into it, the heavier those secrets seemed to become.

  He needed to get out of his own head, but he was trying to prepare himself for meeting his brother once again. Eleven years his elder, Blas had always been a bit of an enigma to Jeronimo. He was a good older brother, but their age difference meant that Blas was more of an estranged uncle, returning from his adventures with hardly more than stories and tall tales.

  Was his brother here? Was his brother one of the secrets kept by the forest?

  After another two hours of walking, Jeronimo noticed that the path had become wider, the ground made up of small crushed pebbles. It was unlike anything he had ever seen, and the sheer audacity of its creation took him by surprise.

  He was so fascinated with the strange path that he almost didn’t notice where it led. He stepped out into a clearing once again, this one far larger than the one from which they had discovered the path in the first place. There were more stone structures, but they too were built in a style that he had never seen. The buildings were utilitarian, plain. There were stele standing tall in a wide open area in front of him, but they too were bare of advanced designs. A wide building sat behind the stele, and long steps stretched across the front of it. If it was a temple, it was the most empty-looking, plain temple he had ever seen.

  Strangest of all, the structures were far larger than the temples and buildings he had seen the Inca create. These buildings seemed to be almost twice the height of normal stone houses, and the doorways leading into them were taller and wider than he would have expected.

  The temple, if it was one, had a rounded front, the sides bending in toward the main open space while the entrance was pushed backward into the forest a bit, giving the impression that the building was a small chunk that had been cut from a huge circle and placed here.

  It, too, was larger than any building needed to be. Where the Inca, and even the Chachapoyas, built massive temples when they intended to elaborate and accentuate them in honor of their gods, this temple was nothing but a semi-circular building that seemed disproportionately large.

  What gods do these people serve? He wondered.

  He stepped forward again, then stopped. He sensed movement to his right, but he hadn’t heard a sound.

  Luis was on his left, and must have sensed something similar, as he grabbed Jeronimo’s left arm and squeezed. Jeronimo slowly turned his head and tried to find the source of the movement.

  But there was nothing. Whatever movement he had sensed had vanished, or it had been a tree playing tricks on their minds.

  “I am looking for a man,” Jeronimo said, first in Quechua, then in a dialect more similar to the Chachapoyas region. “His name is Blas Valera. Is he here?”

  He raised his voice and then repeated the question. He waited a full minute.

  “We are alone, my friend,” Luis said, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “No,” Jeronimo said. “I know someone is here. Someone is listening to us.”

  Luis grabbed Jeronimo’s arm once again. “No, my brother,” he said, his voice still quiet but nearly frantic now. “I meant that we are alone.”

  Jeronimo frowned, then caught his breath when he realized what Luis meant. He turned, slowly, taking in the strange world they had stumbled into.

  As he turned, he tried to understand what he was seeing.

  Nothing. He was seeing nothing. More specifically, Jeronimo was seeing no one.

  His team — the four other Jesuits besides Luis and the five Inca warriors — had vanished.

  They were gone.

  Jeronimo felt his heart race. Where could they have gone? And how did they leave so quietly?

  He kept his eyes steady, focusing on everything and nothing at once, studying the edge of the jungle for any sign of movement. He slowly stepped in a circle until he was turned fully around again, and he began to speak to Luis.

  “We must leave, Luis. We must —”

  Only then did he notice that Luis, too, was missing.

  Jeronimo was standing in a clearing, alone.

  Worst of all, he knew that whatever had taken his team was still here, somewhere.

  And it would take him next.

  1

  Ben

  There wasn’t much light left, and what little there was had been mostly consumed by the thick knots of forest that hung high above his head. Harvey Bennett was running in near pitch-black conditions.

  He hadn’t intended for it to end this way, but he hadn’t had much of a say in it to begin with. His mind raced, trying to calculate, to extrapolate. What do I have in my possession that’s helpful?

  He’d run out of ammunition three
hours ago, and he’d left his pack and survival gear back at camp. He’d only intended to take a minute to relieve himself, but he’d wandered about thirty paces into the thicker forest and found that while he’d been gone someone had snuck into his clearing.

  He heard his feet thudding heavily over the packed-snow trail, feeling the intense bass rhythmic as it pounded throughout his body. Left, right, left… on and on and on until he wouldn’t be able to push on any longer.

  His breath poured out in front of him and swirled around his head, the warmth doing little to warm him. The condensation froze nearly immediately and the heavier drops fell back down, some of them landing on his face and stinging his eyes. Still, he powered through it. Discomfort is a luxury we’re lucky to get used to, his old man used to say. Harvey Bennett’s father, Johnson Bennett, was a Marine, a hard man on the outside, saying little and often letting his featureless expressions speak for him. But on the inside, Johnson had been a loving, caring father, a devoted husband, and the kind of man Harvey wanted to become.

  His father had instilled in Harvey and his younger brother long ago values like that one — that getting used to a bit of discomfort was a great way to prepare for the inevitable discomfort that would eventually visit a man in life. Pain, suffering, sorrow, and loss were synonyms with ‘discomfort,’ and Harvey had tried to live up to his father’s training.

  Harvey stopped, both to assess his surroundings and catch his breath. He was still being chased, but he knew he couldn’t afford to lose track of the trail and miss his destination. The trail had been shrinking over the last few hours, thanks to the massive amount of snow that was falling around them, somehow finding a route through the thick canopy where the light had failed to.

  Cabin’s back that way, he thought, silently analyzing the scenery. Camp is behind me, a few hundred yards due east of here. That means —

  He turned, just as a dark shape lunged at him from behind a tree.

  He grunted as the massive body heaved into his own, and both men went down. The fall would have been stifled by the soft fresh powder covering the trail, but somehow the two men had gotten twisted around and Harvey landed on top of his attacker. He momentarily lost his bearings, but quickly regained his composure and rolled off the man.

  Can’t… lose the…

  He felt at his side, checking to ensure he hadn’t lost the payload. It was still there, strapped to his belt loop through the end of a huge silver carabiner. The container was small, cylindrical, and a dark pewter color. It was heavy, but the weight had been an asset, allowing Harvey to run and move around without needed to constantly check that it was still attached to his pants.

  Harvey “Ben” Bennett was a bear of a man, hardened and thickened through years of service in national parks and later as the leader of the Civilian Special Operations, a team of civilian operators who worked with the US military on projects that had been deemed by the government to be too small, too insignificant, or too politically dangerous.

  Together the team had scaled the ice cliffs of Antarctica, traipsed through the jungles of Brazil, and explored hidden tombs in Egypt. They had lost members, gained more, and become a close-knit group over the course of just over a year. Harvey had become the de facto leader after they had lost their previous commander in Philadelphia, but he liked to think their group was more of a democracy than a dictatorship.

  Still, the others — including his soon-to-be wife, Juliette — looked to him for leadership. They followed him willingly, knowing that he had their best interests in mind. He had a knack for finding the clues that led to the answer to a puzzle or mystery, and he had a very hard time ignoring the unjust. He was quick to rush in and fight, even if it meant risking his own life.

  He pushed the man back down before he could recover, and Ben took off again, this time ignoring the paths, heading in the direction of the checkpoint directly. He needed to get there first, before the rest of the —

  “You’re not going to win, Bennett,” the voice called out from behind him.

  Right behind him. The man had recovered and was chasing him down. Ben would lead him right back to the checkpoint where the others should be waiting. He was hoping someone at the checkpoint could help him, but if no one else had reached it yet…

  2

  Victoria

  Professor Victoria Reyes looked around the small lecture hall, her eyes having trouble adjusting to the brilliant white spotlights shining down on her from the ceiling. She recognized the students in the front row, and most of the second, but beyond that her eyes couldn’t make out anything but shadows.

  Still, the room was full. All 80 seats occupied by members of the graduate-level course she had been teaching for a few years. She’d designed the course and written the curriculum herself, based on her own PhD dissertation, Ancient Orders and Fraternal Development of Modern Religion. It was a tome of work, but it was her life’s work, and she had plans to write follow-ups. This course, Impact of Ancient Orders on Modern Religion, was a testing ground for those later works, and the discussions she had with her students helped push her research forward.

  One of those students, a young Catholic minister who was working toward a PhD in Catholic Literature, raised his hand.

  “Yes, Mr. Edwards?”

  “Mrs. Reyes,” the man began. She didn’t correct him — she had been married, and she’d kept her ex-husband’s name. While she would have preferred Ms., she also liked to keep her personal life separate from her work life. “Since the Regius Poem is the first official mention of the Freemasons, and that was in 1390, how can you say that the birth of the Freemasons predates that of the Catholic Church?”

  Victoria smiled. “A perfect question to lead into my next slide.” She clicked the presentation remote’s button and advanced the slideshow. The image now filling the wall-sized screen behind her was a picture of an ancient text, adorned with red drop caps at the beginning of a large, embossed title. Beneath that the Halliwell Manuscript, or the Regius Poem, continued in black inked lines. “This is the Regius Poem, in its original Middle English text. It was rediscovered and referenced in a paper in the 1800s by a James Halliwell, and from there it become one of the Mason’s ‘Old Charges,’ and the first-ever written account of the Freemasons.

  “But,” she continued, “if you read the text carefully, you realize that it is not a foundational document — it is not a poem written to act as the formation of a new organization, but as a description of one. Take the opening stanza, for example:

  “Hic incipit constituciones artis gemetriae secundum Eucyldem.” She paused. “Anyone?”

  A student near the center of the hall raised her hand and began. “Here begin the constitutions of the art of Geometry according to Euclid.”

  “Precisely,” Victoria said. “The Regius is a poem describing the moral standards of ‘the art of geometry,’ which as we know is another term for ‘masons,’ but the poem assumes the existence of such an art long before Euclid came across it in Egypt.”

  She clicked the remote again, and another slide appeared, this time a picture of a similar document, though the text on the scrolls was nearly illegible.

  Victoria read the translation she had memorized. “Every chronicle, and history, and many other clerks, and the Bible in principle, witnesses of the making of the tower of Babel, and it is written in the Bible, Genesis Chapter… Noah's son begot Nimrod, and he waxed a mighty man upon the earth, and he waxed a strong man, like a giant, and he was a great king. And the beginning of his kingdom was a true kingdom of Babylon, and Arach, and Archad... And this same Nimrod began the tower of Babylon… and he taught to his workmen the craft of measures, and he had with him many masons, more than 40 thousand.

  “Elsewhere in the manuscript, during the history given that aligns with the pre-flood histories we read in the Bible, the Cooke Manuscript says this: …these 3 brethren had knowledge that God would take vengeance for sin, either by fire, or water, and they had greater care how they migh
t do to save the sciences that they had found, and they took their counsel together and, by all their wits, they said there were two stones of such virtue that one would never burn, and that stone is called marble, and that the other stone that will not sink in water and that stone is named latres, and so they devised to write all the sciences that they had found in these two stones, so that if that God would take vengeance, by fire, that the marble should not burn. And if God sent vengeance by water, that the other should not drown, and so they prayed their elder brother that he would make two pillars of these two stones, that is to say of marble and of latres, and that he would write in the two pillars all the science, and crafts, that all they had found, and so he did…”

  A student in the front row spoke up. “The two pillars — like the two pillars that are part of the Masons’ rituals?”

  “One and the same,” Victoria said. “Meant as an homage to Solomons’ temple, whom the Masons believe was built to house the Ark of the Covenant, they feature prominently in Freemason rituals to this day. Further, the history of the Cooke Manuscript and the Regius Poem both describe geometry — the science of the masons — as one of Biblical descent. A science that can trace its lineage to generations before Noah and the flood.

  “So although the written texts we have today describe some of the ritualistic similarities and share some common ancestries, and the formal organization as we know wasn’t founded until the 1700s, I believe that Freemasonry is, in fact, older — much older — than the Catholic Church.”

  She stepped aside and forward to bring herself out of the glare of the light, so she could see the auditorium more clearly. A few students in the back of the room were furiously scribbling notes, but one was staring directly at her. She waited, expecting a question or comment.

  That question came in a few seconds. “Mrs. Reyes,” the young woman said. “If the Catholic Church was founded after the Masons, is there reason to believe that there is a struggle for legitimacy between the two?”