Pandora's grave

The Alborz Mountains of Iran

He had felt the evil of the place from the moment they had arrived. Something palpable, something he could sense in the very air.

And now it had manifested itself in the dead body of the young man at his feet. Young man? Little more than a boy, really. One of the college students that had followed him to this godforsaken land, chasing the opportunity of a lifetime. Opportunity…

The Israeli straightened, rising to his feet, looking around at the few that were left. “He’s dead,” he announced flatly, stating the obvious.

“What-I mean, what happened?”

He looked up into the light green eyes of the young woman in front of him, eyes now filled with tears. She was on the verge of breaking. As were they all. Somehow he had to keep them together. Somehow…

“I have no idea, Rachel,” he replied, his voice little more than a whisper. “How about you, Grant?”

The fifty-eight-year-old history professor from Princeton shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” He paused. “Where are the others, Dr. Tal?”

Moshe Tal didn’t answer for a moment, his mind absorbed with what had led to this point. The years of toil in Israel, working on other projects-Hazor, Masada, Baalbek. Mere footnotes along his life, along the path that led here. Nothing compared to this.

Rhodaspes. Its very name lured him like a siren song-a Persian trade city poised on the trade route between the blue waters of the Caspian and the snow-capped peaks of the Elbrus.

Rhodaspes, the queen of the east-a city that had controlled vast wealth from her mountain fastnesses, a Persian Petra.

Rhodaspes, the unconquerable, though besieged briefly by no less than Alexander the Great on his way to India.

Rhodaspes, a city that had been abandoned in the middle of the fourteenth-century, suddenly, mysteriously as though God himself had scattered its inhabitants to the winds. The native Farsi still spoke of the place as accursed. Now he knew why. It was…

“I said, Dr. Tal, where are the others?”

Grant Peterson’s voice brought him back to reality. The present darkness.

Moshe pointed wordlessly, down the mountain path to the mass grave, the place that had started it all. One could see a few bodies sprawled stiffly by its edge. The bodies of the remaining archaeologists.

He should have known the moment they had unearthed the grave. Should have taken it as an omen of the evil to come.

For the inhabitants of Rhodaspes had never buried their dead. They were Zoroastrians, and the practice was an abomination to them. Never mind a mass grave.

He shivered. His team would join them soon. Unless he did something about it. He turned to the young man by his side, the last of the college students left alive. “Get on the radio, Joel. We need to contact Tehran.”

Joel Mullins swallowed nervously. “Right,” he acknowledged, seeming glad for something to do. “Right away.”

Moshe went back into his tent. He had no other choice. And now he had to move quickly, before he too was stricken, before the Iranians could arrive and discover the truth…

September 14th

Cancun, Mexico

It was five minutes past midnight when Angelo Calderon stepped from the entrance of the Cancun nightclub he had just visited. The weather was just as forecast, light winds sweeping off the ocean, cooling the night to a warm seventy-six degrees. He had three minutes left to live.

Perfect, the watcher thought, standing in the shadows near the parking lot. The drug lord was flanked by two bodyguards, both of whom carried semiautomatic pistols holstered on their hips. Undoubtedly, Calderon himself was armed. He folded the compact night-vision scope into an inner pocket of his jacket and followed, a hunter stalking his prey.

Calderon took another deep breath of the fresh ocean breeze, letting it soak into him. Another forty-eight hours and the deal would be complete. Nothing could stop him now. Five years before, his eldest son had been killed by US Border Patrol agents working in coordination with the federale s. Now the time for his revenge had come.

Young people flitted about him as his bodyguards elbowed their way through the crowd, many of them in beach costume. Tourism had increased over the last week in preparation for the El Grito Independence Day celebrations on the sixteenth. It seemed fitting that this deal would be consummated on such a day. History would remember him as well. Perhaps not in the same company as Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the priest who had sparked the 1810 revolt against Spanish oppression, but he would never be forgotten.

A couple of rather pretty American girls caught his eye and he smiled at them as they passed. At the age of forty-nine, Calderon was still strikingly handsome and he knew it.

He never saw the dark-haired man moving through the crowd toward him and his bodyguards, nor the suppressed semiautomatic pistol that suddenly materialized in that man’s hand.