“We have information that that one of the many foreign intelligence services that have been looking for the Sophia Passion are getting close,” said the Patron. “This operation has been going on too long to avoid leaving a trail.”

He paused. Then: “How long will it take to… wind things up here?”

“Not long,” Sergiev replied. “The warehouse is nearly empty. The crating of those fucking fat broad dolls is done, and ready to be shipped to the buyer. The two broads are down there now drooling over some weird stone panel. We can have everything done and shipped out of here by the end of tomorrow. The only piece of loose baggage is…” He nodded toward his feet, to Zoe’s cell down below them.

“Yes,” the man from Moscow said simply. “I understand the girl is quite attractive.” All the men nodded.

“Good, good,” said the man from Moscow. “That’s very good. I want you out of here by noon tomorrow and don’t leave a trace that leads back to any of us. You will telephone the consulate for a truck and then make sure that all of the files from the operation are carried safely down to the truck and the vehicle sealed. You will then dispatch the girl in an untraceable manner. I do not care what you do with her before that. Have whatever fun you wish with her. Consider her your bonus for this month.”

“You are most generous,” the Hulk said with a wide grin.

Thalia and Zoe crawled on their hands and knees, faces just inches from a huge piece of alabaster nearly four feet across, round like a Mayan calendar stone and covered with elegant relief carvings and inscriptions. The frieze sat alone in the middle of the impromptu art studio, its very isolation a reminder of a stage waiting for the final curtain.

Earlier that morning, Zoe had followed her captors into the studio, worried that the previous evening’s epiphany might have changed her in ways that might make them suspicious or raise Thalia’s intuition. But from the first the moment they had uncrated the frieze, Zoe had no thoughts for anything else, no emotions to spare.

“This is the most astounding piece of art I have ever seen in my entire life,” Zoe said, her voice soft with awe.

“That has to be the hundredth time you’ve said that today.”

Zoe did not reply, enraptured as she was by the carvings. They were a sort of history of God chiseled in stone. There at the very center was the sculptor’s concept of the beginning: God was represented as a trinity of forms, androgynous, hermaphroditic, and as a trinity within the trinity, father, mother, child. From this emerged the anthropomorphic avatars that people had used for worship, spiraling out from the center, the Venus figures of the Great Goddess closest to the center and gradually sharing space with male representations that quickly subsumed the graphic narrative.

“I don’t recognize the language these inscriptions are written in.”