Rachel Lee - Wildcard

“Hi, Tom. Good of you to come.”

It was the voice from his mysterious phone calls, now coming from a woman sitting in an armchair.

“How did you get in here?” Surprise gave way to anger, and Tom felt distinctly vulnerable, with nothing but a towel around his waist and an unknown woman in his hotel room.

She shrugged. “Hotel-room doors are good. But manageable.”

“Then how about you manage it again and get the hell out?”

She laughed; then her eyes hardened. “You don’t really want me to do that, Tom. You want me to tell you why you’re here and what you’ve gotten yourself into. You’ll want to get dressed, however. You’ll find a Glock nine millimeter in your overnight bag. Standard Bureau issue. I knew you hadn’t traveled with one.”

He flipped open the travel bag, and sure enough, a black handgun lay atop his clothes. Hefting it, he popped out the clip and counted off twelve rounds. Although he knew nothing about her, she apparently knew a great deal about him. As a former undercover agent, that was not a situation he found palatable. But she didn’t seem stupid enough to arm a would-be opponent. Which meant she didn’t see him as an opponent….

“So why am I here?”

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Prologue

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

Epilogue

Afterword and Acknowledgments

Akhetaten, Egypt

1329 B.C.E.

Tutu watched the wanton destruction with a heavy heart. His ruler and patron, Akhenaten, was dead, along with the Pharaoh’s beautiful wife, Nefertiti, savagely murdered in a religious coup, their bodies hacked to pieces and fed to desert jackals.

Tutu himself had escaped the bloodletting, thus far, only because he had been out of the city at the time. But when they found him, they would kill him. Of that, Tutu had no doubt. The royal chamberlain could not be allowed to survive. Tutu had studied too much, learned too much, even if he had not been at Akhenaten’s side to make use of that knowledge when it most mattered. He must die, and what he had learned must die with him.

Tutu cared not for his own life. He was an old man, and death would claim him, one way or another, soon enough. But the knowledge must live.

Hiding amidst the rocks above what had once been the workers’ village, Tutu could not help but chuckle at the irony of it all. Had Akhenaten not grown up with a Hebrew, he might well have kept his birth name, Amenhotep the Fourth. Like his father and his grandfather before him, he would have ruled in the city of Thebes. He would have remained in the good graces of the priests of Amun. He might still be alive.

Instead, Tutu and young Amenhotep had grown up and played with a boy whom Tutu’s mother had plucked from a reed basket in the Nile. Tutu and the young prince had hidden in the shadows as his Hebrew friend listened to the wisdom of his people. Afterward, the three would sneak away together to discuss in secret what they had heard that day. Secrets had shaped Akhenaten’s life from childhood, and in the end they had consumed him.

Perhaps it had been all his fault, Tutu thought, not for the first time. Would young Amenhotep and his friend have tumbled onto the hidden codes by themselves? Probably not. Writing and its mysteries were Tutu’s gift—and his curse. As fluent in Hebrew as he was in Egyptian, even as a child, Tutu had transcribed from memory the stories he had heard. The Egyptian stories he wrote in the royal picture script. The Hebrew stories he wrote in their own language. That had been both his triumph and his downfall.

For once Amenhotep had ascended to the throne, Tutu no longer had to conceal his fascination with the Hebrew scrolls he had written down as a child. The scrolls that had begun to reveal coded mysteries beyond Tutu’s wildest imagination. The scrolls that now lay in a leather bag at his feet. Tutu had shared those mysteries with his two boyhood friends, and their fascination had spurred further study and the discovery of more mysteries.

It was those mysteries that had led Amenhotep to abandon the priests of Amun, change his name to Akhenaten and build the city that was even now being laid to ruin.

The mysteries of the Light. Tutu was now their sole surviving guardian. Akhenaten was dead. Their childhood friend had vanished into the desert, a fugitive wanted for murder. If the mysteries were to be preserved, it was up to Tutu.

With a sad sigh, he took a last look at the once beautiful city that had been his home for the past decade. Then he picked up his precious leather bag and the lone waterskin he had been able to scavenge from the home of a long-departed workman, and crept around the northern rim of the city. It would be a long walk down the Nile to the camps of the Hebrews. But they would offer him sanctuary in his last days.

And, perhaps, he would find among them a young man or two whom he could teach. If only the Light would grant him the time.

Guatemala City, Guatemala

Present Day

Miguel Ortiz sat on a bench in the Parque Centro-América and watched the morning traffic build—shopkeepers and businessmen en route to their daily labors, diplomats to their offices, tourists peeking out of their hotels like so many ants looking for honey. The sun was well over the horizon, already warming air still heavy from last night’s tropical rain. A couple sat on a nearby bench, and Miguel nodded to them. Almost time.

It seemed he had spent his entire life preparing for this day, although in truth he had never imagined himself doing such a thing until four years ago. Had it been that long since the day he’d come home from school to find his father hanged from a lamppost outside their house? He had looked up into his father’s face, bulging and purple, tongue distended, and in that moment he had known what his future would be.

His father had been an innocent man, a Quiché farmer eking out an existence from the impoverished earth. The gringos hadn’t cared. Miguel’s uncle had died defending the family secret, but not before he had killed two of the gringos who had tortured him. In Miguel’s country, blood cried out for blood. His uncle had taken gringo blood, and they had taken the blood of Miguel’s father. Today, he would take theirs. It was the way of the world. His world and, probably, his children’s world. If he lived long enough to have them.

That vision of the future had dimmed in the past four years. He had once imagined himself with a wife, working his father’s farm, raising children. He had once been so foolish as to imagine that his father’s optimism was not misplaced, that the peace accord would stand up, that his country would know stability, that he would someday walk into town and not see men in uniform with machine guns hanging from their shoulders. In his youth and naiveté, that had seemed possible.

That vision had been torn apart as he’d stood on a dirt street beside a drying puddle at the base of the lamppost, a testament to the moment of his father’s death. Blood cried out for blood. Nothing more. Nothing less.