Chapter 1.
MONDAY 2:12 a.m.
Wiltshire, England

“Hold on, girl.” David Hyden steadied his chocolate lab, Darwin, and made a hard left onto A344. His tires hydroplaned over the wet pavement until rubber gripped road and the Jeep propelled forward. One foot floored the gas pedal and the other hovered over the brake. Thick, vertical sheets of rain pelted the windshield. The Jeep’s high beams cut through the downpour with a blurry astigmatism, barely lighting the road. Water bounced off the cement, forming a thousand tiny rivers that rushed along the pavement and filled the ditches parallel to the highway.

David had traveled this route hundreds of times. He could do it in his sleep. Half the mileage accrued by his beloved 4×4 was just from zipping up and down the Salisbury Plains. His hardtop was a beast capable of conquering Mother Nature. Even this storm, a violent baptism not unlike the times of Noah, couldn’t stop such a vehicle. The biblical tempest was fitting. Too fitting.

Darwin pressed her nose against the passenger window and whined.

“You ever seen rain like this before?” David asked as if she could answer him.

They reached another hilltop summit and caught a glimpse of the next rise. Ahead, emergency vehicles, police cars, ambulances, all with flashing lights, were parked along the road. David gritted his teeth. Half of London’s Patrol had made the 40-kilometer trek. Inspector Lang always managed to blow things out of proportion. Everything was an emergency, everything the end of the world.

Three-quarters up the hill, he pulled off the highway between an ambulance and the field fence separating the pastureland from the road. A small army of officers in reflective rain slickers buzzed around police cars holding emergency flares and flashlights as they made their way up and down the muddy slope.

“Stay here, Darwin,” David said as he opened the door. His boots sunk into oversaturated grass and within seconds, his leather jacket and cargo pants were soaked. Pulling a Red Sox ball cap low over his eyes, he glanced at a man sitting in an ambulance cab nearby.

The EMT stopped sipping coffee and rolled down his window. “Oi!” he yelled to David, looking up anxiously at the storm as if savoring his last few minutes of dryness. “You the bloke who’s come to identify the body?”

David flipped his jacket collar up over his neck. “Yeah.”

The EMT smiled and wiped his nose with his coat sleeve. “American, eh? Take your time, mate. Maybe the storm’ll let up.” He nodded toward the top of the crest. “Up there. In the rocks.”

David slipped through an opening in the field fence and followed a narrow, one-lane road further up the hill. Ropes lined the edges of the cement walkway—an attempt at keeping tourists off the grass, which was now a sodden, trampled mess of carved tire grooves and boot prints. He stepped off the crowded path and forged through the mud to the hilltop, squeezing through a throng of rain slickers and passing beneath towering stone arches. Each monstrous boulder measured over sixteen feet high. Speckled with black and green lichen, the standing stones loomed over the earth like macabre tombstones for the gods.

Floodlights pierced the mist, illuminating the base of the inner stones whose towering tops disappeared into sleet. David stopped, his breath momentarily frozen in his chest. At the center of Stonehenge, a white tarp covered the remains of a body strewn across the mud.

“Sorry to make you come all the way out here,” Chief Detective Inspector Lang said, stepping out from behind one of the stones. Lang’s face was an open book: a glowering brow, frustrated, slitted eyes, the corners of his mouth turned down—all evidence of his disappointment at everything that was David. Rain toppled over the brim of his police hat and caught the tip of his prominent nose, a nose that had prodded its way into the Hyden family’s private life for decades. He brushed by David and squatted beside the tarp. “I figured since you were still in Lond—”

“Let’s get this over with,” David interrupted.

Lang grabbed the corner of the plastic tarp and paused. His expression changed from dismay to concern with the upturn of his brow.

Good grief. David wiped rain from his face and focused on the figure beneath the tarp. What was Lang waiting for? Tears? Anguish? Well, he sure as hell wasn’t going to get it.

Finally Lang lifted the tarp, keeping the plastic above the corpse to shelter it from the rain. “Caucasian male. Mid-60s…” he provided, looking at David expectantly.

David kept his eyes on the body. The victim’s face was barely recognizable: a bloody, pulpy mess, the cheek bones and skull slightly imploded, the mouth locked in a silent scream and oozing a peculiar reddish mud foreign to the sediment of their surroundings. The man’s eyeballs were wide and peppered with crimson sand. It looked as if the earth had chewed him up, only to spit him out in the center of Stonehenge. A dress shirt hung in tatters around a bullet wound at the center of his chest. Stained fabric vaguely resembling pants was belted loosely around his waist, shredded top to bottom along the legs and covered with the same red sand.

“The groundskeeper spotted him three hours ago,” Lang said.

“He’s still bleeding…” David pointed to where blood was seeping from cuts circling both of the corpse’s wrists, wounds so deep they exposed bone.

“That’s rain water,” Lang explained. “It creates the illusion of fresh blood on the ligature marks. I’d estimate by the disintegration of his clothing and the degree of rigor in the joints, he’s been dead two or three days.”

“It looks like he was bound, buried, dug up from the ground, and then placed here,” David said.

Lang took in a deep breath. “Do we have a positive match, then? I don’t want Ian to have to see this.”

David nodded. “That’s definitely Brenton.”

“Whoever did this went through a hell of a lot of trouble to place the body here.” Lang handed off the tarp to another officer and clicked on his flashlight, brightening the bottom edges of the massive, rectangular boulders looming over the scene. Gilded centuries past and erected into archways, Stonehenge possessed an ancient mystique that was amplified by the corpse at its center. “The park is patrolled 24-7,” Lang continued. “There are no tracks in the mud other than our own. No footprints. No tire marks. Nothing.” He turned the corpse’s right palm toward David. “Look at this.”

The flesh was covered with blisters forming an inward spiral that started at the center of the man’s palm and circled outwards to the base of his fingers.

“Oi! Cut the power!” Lang switched off his flashlight as his order echoed across the ruins.

The floodlights went dark. Before David’s eyes could adjust, the spiral mark on the corpse’s hand began to glow brilliant white. “What the hell is that?” David asked.

“I was hoping you might know,” Lang said.

David shook his head. “I don’t know…I mean, it’s a neolithic symbol. One that is repeated in prehistoric ruins throughout the world. But I’ve never seen anything like this…”

“Chief Inspector!” An officer waved to Lang from the highway near the ruins. A black Mercedes limo sat idle on the roadside, its exhaust pouring into the mist. The limo’s rear window rolled down, and a man leaned into the light.

“What the hell is Javan doing here?” David asked, his blood five degrees hotter despite the night chill.

“Dammit,” Lang cursed, equally dismayed. He brushed water from his mustache.

Javan gave David a pleasant wave. The collar of his pinstriped Joseph Abboud suit was turned up over his neck, a failed attempt to hide an ugly, purple scar running from the base of his neck up alongside his head, the left ear entirely missing. Someone sat in the backseat beside him, a man cloaked in shadow, whose hunched unintelligible form was just short of invisible in the dim light.

David scowled. Even from a distance Javan reeked of corruption. All he could think about was leaving. “Am I done?” he asked.

“Yes—of course,” Lang said, distracted. He held up a hand to stall the officer beside the limo and turned back to David. “Look, I’m sorry—”

David was already past the ruin’s edge. Glaring at Javan, he hurried down the hill, making his condemnation obvious as he climbed into his Jeep and slammed the door. Soaked to the bone, he shivered and started the ignition. Rain cascaded down the windshield, blurring his view of the limo. The EMT pulled a gurney from the back of the nearby ambulance, further obscuring his view.

David lowered his head against the steering wheel.

What a mess.

Thunder rippled across the sky. Darwin watched him from the passenger’s seat. He could sense her, hear her nervous panting. She knew something was wrong. He scratched behind her ears, a lousy, half-hearted attempt to comfort her and console himself.

There was a solid knock against the driver’s side window.

David sat upright to find the EMT peering at him through the glass.

“You all right, mate?” the man asked.

David waved him away, nodding and embarrassed. As the EMT started up the path with the gurney, David noticed a body bag folded on top of the stretcher. Where they were taking Brenton’s body, he had no idea. He didn’t care. Maybe he should give a damn, but the fact of the matter was he didn’t. It was as simple as that.

He twisted on his headlights. The beams lit the back of Javan’s limo further up the hill along the shoulder of the road. Chancellor Javan had been the lifelong financier of Brenton’s excavations. A necessary evil whose money had made Brenton the most controversial biblical archeologist in the world. David almost laughed. He couldn’t help but wonder if the infamous archeologist had finally gotten his wish—firsthand evidence of the eternities.

The shadow of the other passenger in Javan’s limo suddenly caught his attention. The man appeared shorter than Javan, and he sat very still, the dark silhouette of his head barely cresting the headrest of the back seat. From afar, he seemed tucked into the corner, crouched against the door as if hiding or afraid.

Curious, David flipped on his high beams. Light reflected off the limo’s back window, making his intention obvious and the other man inside even more impossible to see.

To hell with it.

Revving the engine, David pulled forward along the grass and onto the highway. As he passed the limo, he turned and allowed himself one last look at the man beside Javan. To his surprise, a pair of luminescent green eyes stared back at him through the window, following him with exact precision. Like a coiled snake, the man seemed to wait for David to look his way. Piercing eyes bored into David’s mind. Suddenly parasitic, they thrust deep into his soul, searching for someplace dark and finding it. Eyes so overwhelming, his pale visage of gray skin, the rotted teeth dotting his perverse grin, and the tattered, fifthly tangles of his white hair seemed nothing more than an afterthought. A contorted smile formed across the man’s lips, ugly and haunted, strangely familiar. Although David could not place the old man’s face, he was certain he had seen him before.

A chill rippled down David’s spine.

With a blink, the old man severed their connection.

David reached for the temperature controls and twisted the dial. Heat poured through the vents, but failed to assuage the chill. Flooring the gas pedal, he disappeared into the mist, glad to leave his father’s corpse behind.