Aleman saluted in reply.

He climbed into the jet’s rear section, sat down, and strapped in. He tapped the pilot’s head and they began moving back out of the hangar where an empty runway awaited.

As the jet taxied out of the hangar and Aleman walked toward them, Peter looked down at Lynn’s teary face. “All set?”

She nodded and said, “I don’t like this.”

Peter squeezed her arm. “He’ll be fine.”

Aleman arrived and said, “How do you feel about Best Western?”

“As long as they have a continental breakfast, I’m good,” Peter said.

The three exited the hangar together and watched King’s F/A-18 roar into the air, headed east. A loud boom washed over them as the jet broke the sound barrier, becoming a distant speck in the sky.

TWENTY

HE SAT TWO hundred feet beneath the surface of the earth surrounded by darkness, and yet able to see. The large circular space had once served as a kind of sitting room, a bath perhaps, but had, for the past year and a half, been used as a laboratory, though some might call it a torture chamber. His test subjects included insects and animals from the desert above, humans from surrounding villages, and even the earth itself. They were like clay in the hands of an artist, malleable, but his skills needed honing and his manipulations often cost the living their lives while the inanimate found life—at least temporarily.

Those brought to life had vastly different roles. The quickly animated stone subjects were large, strong, and doltish. But they followed orders without pause or moral hindrance. Unfortunately, they didn’t last long. If he didn’t repeat the words that granted life within fifteen minutes, they would return to their prior state. Clay held together best, enduring without need for a repeated imbuement, and with it, his finest creations came to being.

But there was more to accomplish. Much more. He had a firm grasp of manipulating the inanimate, but the animate still eluded him. And that was key. A computer programmer couldn’t rewrite software code if he didn’t know the language in which it was written. But if that language was learned, the code could be hacked and rewritten. The same was true of the human mind, the world’s most sophisticated, organic computer. And he was close to deciphering the original coded language. Once he knew the language, he could rewrite the code of the human mind. Only a few fragments of knowledge still eluded him and they were nearly lost to time.

Sometime, far in the past, the human race spoke one, unifying language. But suddenly, as though erased from the minds of its speakers, the language was lost—though not completely. Fragments of the ancient language remained hidden in the new dialects, passed down orally through generations. Even fewer fragments had been etched into stone by those wise enough to realize the knowledge would die with them. Identifying the lost written fragments had taken time, but the tracks of the ancients were easy to follow once you knew what to look for. With the last stone fragments still being tracked down, there was time to perfect a few more tricks.