Black Sun

And while the days were often filled with war, it was the nights that held the darkest alleys for him, dreams that twisted and bent back on themselves—mistakes, failings, friends who trusted him suffering and dying.

Neither awake nor asleep could Hawker escape death.

A sliver of light cut across the floor as someone opened the front door. The light widened and then shrank and he heard the footsteps on the crude wooden planks. A match flared and was touched to a candle.

“Are you troubled?” the priest asked him.

“Aren’t we all?” Hawker replied, only half joking.

The priest sat down opposite him. “Of course we are. It is the nature of our existence. But perhaps I can help you.”

Hawker considered the offer. He felt somewhere beyond help. “What happened to you?” he asked, touching his hair in a spot corresponding to the scar on the priest’s head.

“In the early days of Jumbuto, a man who worked for him attacked me with a machete.”

Hawker’s jaw clenched for a moment as he imagined the crime. “Well, perhaps he’s gone now.”

“Oh, no,” the priest said. “He’s quite well, thank God.”

Confused, Hawker narrowed his gaze.

“The man who attacked me was Devera,” the priest explained. “He was young and wanted the kind of life he saw the warlords having. But it was not in him, or, if it was, God took it from him. One day, months afterward, Devera came to me for forgiveness. His eyes were red with tears, his face stricken, his arms covered in blood where he’d gashed them over and over in some form of self-inflicted penance.”

The priest shook his head sadly. “Even after I forgave him, it was a long time before he chose to forgive himself. But he worked day and night to help this village and the people here. Eventually he was one of us again. Part of something more. Part of us, part of life instead of death. And then finally the darkness left him.”

Hawker stared at the priest.

“If he had not attacked me,” the priest said, “he would have killed others, perhaps many. He might not have found his way back to the narrow gate.”

“You could have died,” Hawker noted.

“God works in mysterious ways,” the priest replied. “Change is often arrived at only through enough pain.”

For the second time since meeting this man, Hawker was struck silent. He looked down at the floor and then away.

“I did not mean to disturb you,” the priest said, “but there is someone here to see you.

“To see me?”

“A white man. He says he flew into Dwananga and then drove up.”

“When did he get here?”

“An hour ago,” the priest said. “He insisted that he needed to see you right away, but I made him wait outside. This place is a sanctuary. Here one should not be disturbed.”

An hour. Had he really been in the church for that long?

“Did he give you his name?”

“He did not,” the priest replied. “He said that you would not speak with him if you knew who he was.”

It seemed like a strange admission from someone who’d come to see him.

Hawker stood. “Thank you, Father.”

He walked to the door and pushed through, leaving the darkened quiet of the church for the brightness of the outside world. Squinting across the courtyard, he saw a gray-haired white man wearing slacks and a dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves. The man stood with his back to Hawker, talking with Devera beside the water pump.

As Hawker walked up, Devera looked his way.

The white man turned with him. “By the pricking in my thumbs …,” he said, loud enough for Hawker to hear.

The man was Arnold Moore, director of the NRI.

CHAPTER 6

The words came screaming from the darkness. “What are you looking for?”

Danielle strained to see their source. She felt her body shaking, extreme cold and hot all at the same time, as if poison were coursing through her veins.

A blinding flash of light scalded her eyes.

“What are you looking for?” the voice demanded again.

It felt like a nightmare, like a disjointed dream of terror. Her head was swimming, as if she had vertigo and was falling. She reached for something to hold on to, feeling behind her, but there was no back to the chair, nothing to lean against, only edges like on a countertop or table.

The blinding light vanished and a more subdued light came on. A face moved close. It was Asian in complexion and features, slight and fine-boned. He came so close that all she could see was his eyes. His hands grabbed her. They were cold and shaking. He gazed into her eyes, as if he were searching her soul.

“Don’t worry,” he said, smiling. “We know what you’re looking for. More artifacts, like the one you found in Brazil.” He pulled away, laughing a sickly laugh.

He began to laugh harder and it terrified her. She forced herself to move, scurrying backward and then falling. The jarring impact with the floor sharpened her senses for a minute. She looked back toward her oppressor. He sat in a motorized wheelchair, his body twisted and withered, shaking slightly from some internal tremor.

As strange as it seemed, a feeling of pity came over Danielle. And when the man seemed to recognize it, his face contorted in fury.

“Take her,” he shouted.

Two large men grabbed her, picked her up, and slammed her back onto the examination table. A third man approached with a dripping hypodermic needle.

“No!” she screamed, struggling to break free.

The men held her down. The blinding light flashed again and then the needle pierced her flesh and everything vanished.

She woke, curled up in the fetal position, her heart pounding in her chest. It was more than a dream, but how much more she couldn’t know. As the images faded, she struggled to parse them into coherence, to separate reality from what must only be nightmarish imagination. Try as she did, she could not be sure where the boundary lay.

She sat up slowly. White walls and beige furniture surrounded her, including an art-deco-like desk and several chairs that occupied the far side of the room. There were no windows in the room. No clocks, radios, or televisions; no computer sat on the desk. It was as if she’d fallen asleep in some downtown office building and woken up in the Twilight Zone version of it.

If only that were the case.

She was a prisoner. One who had been treated roughly for some period of time, a few days or even weeks perhaps. She had no concept of how long it had been, of where she was, or what she might have told them.

Her last clear thought was of Professor McCarter lying dead on the side of the hill, wrapped around a tree, like a car that had gone off a cliff.

A wave of depression swept over her.

She felt great responsibility for McCarter. To begin with, he’d only been exposed to the NRI after she’d talked him into joining the Brazilian expedition two years before. He was a civilian and at the time not even cleared to know the truth behind the mission. Yet together they discovered a precursor of the Mayan religion, one that predated the rest of the culture by at least a thousand years.

And then they’d been attacked, first by a group of mercenaries, later by a tribe of xenophobic natives, and finally by a relentless pack of mutated animals that seemed to spring from the Mayan underworld itself.

They’d never found what they were looking for—elements that NRI scientists believed could lead to a working cold-fusion device—but just prior to departing, they’d recovered something else: a large, glasslike stone, which seemed to radiate energy in a ma

The NRI hid the stone in a vault beneath its Virginia headquarters and began to study it. McCarter went back to New York to begin teaching again and Danielle watched the machinery of government move on, unconcerned with those who had suffered for what they’d found.