Incarnate: Mars Origin I Series Book III Read online

  Incarnate Copyright © 2014 Shondra C. Longino

  All rights reserved.

  This eBook is intended for personal use only, and may not be reproduced, transmitted, or redistributed in any way without the express written consent of the author.

  Incarnate is a work of fiction. Any references or similarities to actual events, organizations, real people - living, or dead, or to real locales are intended to give the novel a sense of reality. All other events and characters portrayed are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  Cover Design by Shondra C. Longino

  Prologue

  Elberton, Georgia

  June, 1979

  His copy of the blueprints for the five Stonehenge-like monoliths were spread across the bed in his hotel room. He had just returned from leaving the originals and a black Samsonite briefcase stacked full with hundred dollar bills with a banker at the Granite City Bank.

  He draped his suit jacket across the back of the desk chair and momentarily clutched the back of it to steady himself.

  This was finally going to happen, he thought. The instructions left by ancient people more than ten thousand years ago in Mesoamerica was going to be unveiled to the world. They were the explicit instruction of a new world order secreted away more than a millennia ago in an underground earthen den. Hidden, a fantastic proclamation, one that was logical, intelligent and reasonable, yet so terrifying that it would undoubtedly ravage the hearts and souls of the world’s people, cause an insufferable fear to spread around the globe, and culminate in unfathomable consequences for millions. And he was set to unleash the shocking edict on the unsuspecting occupants of this world.

  But only a little at a time.

  He walked into the bathroom and looked at his reflection in the mirror. He ran his fingers over his black goatee. The sliver of white that ran through it told his age.

  He put his fist up to his lips and coughed into it. He was a tall thin man, with dark, deep-set eyes and a bird-like chest that heaved hard with every struggling breath he took.

  Yes, one step at a time.

  And he still had enough time. He hoped.

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked down at his watch. Stage one was going into production right at that moment.

  He knew he wouldn’t live as long as his father had. Already the emphysema caused by years of smoking was making him tire much quicker than he had only a few months ago. Everything was in capable hands now. Still he wanted to see it through. He was determined to hang on.

  Plus, he had one more thing to do.

  He relieved himself and washed his hands. After drying them on a towel he went back into the room, found the carton of cigarettes in his suitcase and took out a pack. He grabbed the large brown envelope off the dresser and sat down at the desk. Inside the envelope was a pack of white linen, watermarked paper. He pulled the sheets out of the envelope and laid them on the desk. Looking in the jacket pocket of the suit coat he had just taken off, he retrieved a fountain pen.

  When he had first arrived in the room three days ago, he’d taken the television from atop the dresser and placed it on the floor to clear a space for the scaled wooden model of the stone structure he wanted built.

  Step One: Stone slabs. Check.

  Glancing over at the model, he took a cigarette, tapped the end of it and lit it. Smoke billowed into the room and set him off on a fit of dry coughing.

  Wheezing, he tried to gulp in air to calm his lungs. He took in a long drag on his cigarette and blew it out through his nostrils to quell the cough.

  He had picked a grassy, long abandoned cow pasture on Highway 77 to erect the twenty-foot high granite stones. They would stand upright, topped with a capstone that would be visible to all who drove down the interstate route.

  Step Two: Time Capsule.

  Underneath his monument he would bury a time capsule. Not to be opened for another seventy years. He would place the secrets of what he had learned in it. Resting the cigarette down in the well of an ashtray, he smoothed his hand over the sheets of paper and uncapped the fountain pen. He began to write:

  It was in 1904 that the building of the Panama Canal was taken over by the United States. My father was just seven years old at the time.

  The U.S. formally took control of the canal property on May 4, 1904. It inherited from the French a field operation that was comprised of an exhausted and diminished workforce, and a vast jumble of inferior infrastructure and equipment. So the U.S. hired out geologists, archaeologists, hydrologists, meteorologists, and oceanographers. They employed the help of surveyors, Spanish interpreters and entomologists. And of course they hired engineers. My grandfather being one of them.

  It was the fortuitous situation, as my father often told me, that my grandmother, seven months pregnant, was too sick, with no inclination to travel or look after her rambunctious seven-year old son. It was, he said, because of her “malaise and melancholy” that his future was set as a great archaeologist. Great because, he, that seven-year old rambunctious boy, traveling with his father to Panama would discover the underground tunnels that ran from Panama to Belize.

  His writings filled up the first two pages of watermarked paper. He stopped and laid the pen down.

  He thought about his father, the famed Maya archaeologist, Linton Satterthwaite Jr., who had passed away just a year earlier in late 1978. He wanted to be sure to explain that. To explain how it had taken almost that entire year since to grieve his father’s death and to concoct and construct a plan that would honor his memory. It had come to him when he had come across the first printed edition of his father’s book, The Monuments and Inscriptions of Caracol.

  His father had never revealed in his writings what he discovered in that system of tunnels that dead-ended in Panama City. He had told his son that the world wasn’t ready for what it.

  Well world, get ready.

  He lit up another cigarette and thought back to when his father had first told him about Caracol, Belize. He remembered it like it had happened yesterday.

  Manuscripts and papyri, a repository filled with codices of another lifetime and culture. That’s what he had found.

  And of course, the edict.

  But there was danger in knowing the truth of that proclamation, or so his father had believed. He had only done three “official” excavations at the site and had to abruptly stop. Or “had been stopped” as his father put it.

  At first he thought his father just paranoid. But he soon realized how hard it was to change the beliefs of people – even the men of science. New theories, new discoveries just weren’t easily accepted. Change was troubling to some, others it made unhinged. It had made his father secretive.

  His father had told him that “they” were always one step ahead of him, and he’d always make his return trips to Belize short, intermittent, and unknown to even his closest colleagues. In the end his father was constantly nervous, fearing that his undertakings would be discovered and he’d suffer “dire consequences.”

  Yes, those had been his words.

  He puffed on his cigarette and felt good at what he was about to do for his father. For everyone, including himself. Man’s destiny, unwillingly hidden away by his father for so long, would now be revealed in the information he would seal in the time capsule.

  The curiosity of the four stone slabs, the capstone and its inscriptions would bring onlookers from around the world. And there, the words would serve as
a guide for what needed to be done in order to survive and continue to live on this planet. And his words inside the time capsule would tell the story why.

  This time he was one step ahead of whomever it was his father had feared.

  There would be eight languages that would be on the face of each side of the stone slabs – English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian. And the four ancient languages for the inscription on the capstone - Babylonian, Classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

  And on the side of one of the stones would be inscribed the date to open the time capsule.

  After the plan was set, he had his banker swear an oath that he would never reveal his identity – and that he, the banker, would see the venture to the end. No matter what.

  He had given the banker the name R. C. Christian to use when speaking of him. Christian because he was one, and wanted no one to doubt that. He didn’t offer a reason for the initials. They did have a meaning though, and that would be revealed when the time capsule was opened.

  “R.C.” The first letter of each word of the two-word mantra that his father had said to him often while growing up, and again with his last breath on his death bed.

  Remember Caracol.

  A knock at the door broke him from his reverie.

  “Room service.”

  He stood up from the chair, glanced around the room, and slowly made his way to the door. Breathing hard, he opened the door and was rushed by two mean. One with a leather strap that was wrapped around his neck. He could hardly breathe and the strap didn’t take long to drain his life.

  The other grabbed his model and crushed it.

  They scattered his papers and the contents of his suitcase on the floor. Then they drained gasoline across the body and lit it on fire.

  Chapter One

  Cairo, Egypt

  Present Day

  She had temporarily disappeared from the window where the scope had been trained on her for the last twenty minutes.

  Blinking his eyes tightly, the assassin spread his legs out in front of him, leaned back into the straight-back chair and relaxed his muscles.

  He would take a break until she returned.

  Pulling his finger off the trigger of his modified single-shot bolt action EXACTO sniper rifle, a model that was yet to be released by its U.S. manufacturer, he stretched his hand to release the tension. He felt the bones in his fingers pop. His metal chair scratched across the wood floor as he pushed it back from the tripod where the rifle rested. He stood up, rubbed his hands together, and walked over to the table that sat along the wall.

  Besides the metal, 1950’s-style dinette table that was covered with a white plastic tablecloth, a folding card table and the chair were the only other furniture in the room. On top of the metal table sat an automatic coffee-maker, Styrofoam cups, plastic spoons, paper napkins, a box of day-old donuts, and a bowl of sugar.

  He used the card table as his arsenal.

  There were two handguns – a .45mm Glock and a Beretta 92FS and its silencer - stuffed into an empty paint can. He had unwrapped the ankle strap that housed his black, Columbia River AG Russell boot knife when he came in that morning and threw both alongside a pair of binoculars that set next to a laptop. His scope on the sniper rifle was linked, via a Wi-Fi network, to the computer. It would be used to transfer the view from the kill to not only the person who had hired him, but to the young woman’s father as the bullet pierced her head. “Live-feed” so to speak.

  He poured a cup of coffee from the automatic coffee-maker. Spilling sugar off the spoon as it traveled from the bowl to his cup, he piled in three heaping teaspoons. His stocking feet slid over the plastic paint tarp that covered the flooring near the walls as he went to grab the cream that set next to a bottle of ketchup and leftover Chinese in the otherwise barren refrigerator tucked into a kitchen corner. Stirring the sweet concoction, he walked over to the window and stared across to the woman’s apartment.

  Castor Armeni was short and stocky. A compact man, who blended in well wherever he was. He ran his hand across the smooth, bald skin of his head and down the back of it. Running his fingers across the black stubble of the horseshoe-shaped ring of hair that still clung around the back of the head, he reached his neck and firmly rubbed it. He refused to go completely bald. But he did keep what was left cut low. No comb over, or overt length to what hair was left. Bending his head from side to side he heard his neck crack.

  Castor was practical, methodical, and reliable. He was not one to let the pressures of life get him down. He, of all people, realized how short life could be.

  Sitting back down in the chair, he moved the rifle with one hand and peered through the sniper scope. “There you are.” He spotted her a few windows down from the one his rifle had been focused on. “You’re in the kitchen,” he said, whispering. He glanced down at the opal-colored face of his watch. “One-thirty. I didn’t realize it was so late. You’re hungry aren’t you?” He spoke to her as if she knew he was there. Taking a sip of his coffee, he watched as she moved around her kitchen. “I hope you’re making something you’ll enjoy. This might just be your last meal.”

  Smiling, he lifted the cup to his lips, and blew out of habit on the hot, murky brew before he took another sip.

  Her apartment stretched across the north side of the high end apartment complex, giving her the benefit of natural light in every room. And giving him the ability, sitting in an apartment on the other leg of the U-shaped building, of being able to take her out wherever she roamed in - so she thought - her high security, safe, ultra-modern apartment.

  But the living room had the best view for the kill shot, so he would wait until she returned to it.

  He stood up. Holding his coffee in one hand and wrapping the other across his chest, he began to pace back and forth along the wall of windows and thought about the task before him.

  She was young. Beautiful. Innocent. As he watched her over the past two weeks, he imagined that each day she rose thinking just those things. Her thoughts must be, he envisaged, that her whole life was ahead of her, delicately unfolding, with time on her side. Time to grow. To love. Time to live . . .

  But she thought wrong. She had no time left.

  Every day, from the first day he had arrived, had been a countdown. A countdown to today. The day when she would probably die.

  Castor walked over to the table, he placed the Styrofoam cup down and pickup up the binoculars. He stood in front of the first window in the apartment he had confiscated for this task and took in the view from his perch.

  Her apartment, like the one he occupied, was on the fifth floor. The buildings were separated by a verdant courtyard that ran the length of the two sides. The sun, set high, filled the bright blue, clear sky with an almost white haze as it began heating up the mid-day. A warm, gentle breeze floated through the trees and across the blades of moss-colored grass that covered the grounds. The sounds of the traffic and the smell from open air cafes and bistros eased their way into his open window and wafted in brushing against his mouth and up his nostrils. He could feel the pulse of the streets as it enveloped him.

  Moving the binoculars slowly up the side of her building, Castor saw her. She seemed to float around the kitchen, she was so at ease. Maybe even happy. Watching the woman making herself lunch, Castor felt a rumble in his stomach and rubbed it. “I wonder what you’re cooking up in there.” He spoke to her softly. Lowering the binoculars, he bent down and leaned slightly forward in the window. He pulled air up through his nostrils as if he could smell what she was cooking.

  “You up for an uninvited lunch guest?” He said out loud and then chuckled at the thought. Wouldn’t that be a surprise? Him knocking on her door, inviting himself in. Partaking a meal with the woman he intended to kill. He could, he mused, anytime he wanted, walk out the door of the apartment he occupied and follow the hallway, down and around, to hers. But he knew it was across that 200 meter-wide courtyard, out of his w
indow and through hers on the tail of a .50BMG cartridge that they would finally make contact.

  “Have a good lunch, Sweetheart,” Castor said as he stood upright and walked over to the table. He grabbed a powdered jelly donut from the box and bit into it as he returned to the window.

  Raising up his binoculars, he saw her as she emerged from the kitchen and went into the dining area. Crossing her leg under her, she sat down and placed a plate in front of her onto the table. She ran her fingers through her long, straight, raven-colored hair twisting it she wrapped it into a knot at the top of her head.

  She never ate much he had noted when he first started watching her. And she exercised often. She seemed to take care in living a healthy lifestyle as well as living a simple one. She stayed in much of the time and not much company to speak of visited her. There had been times over the past two weeks that he wanted to urge her to go out. To enjoy living. To try and make the time she had left more memorable.

  She worked from home and spent hours at the large ebony wooden desk that stretched across her living room perpendicular to the wall of windows. The décor in the room was simple and sleek. White walls. White furniture. Black accents thoughtfully placed throughout. The only thing of any color was a framed print of The Scream by Edvard Munch that hung on the far wall opposite the windows.

  He remembered the grin that curled up his face when he first viewed the set-up of her apartment while learning her daily habits. From the first moment he saw her sitting at that desk, her head lined up evenly with the figure in the Munch painting, he had fantasized that his bullet, as it passed through her temple and out the other side, would lodge in the forehead of the man in that painting holding his head finally giving an obvious reason for that scream.

  She got up from her table, grabbed her plate and walked back into the kitchen where she only stayed momentarily. Reappearing into the hallway, he caught glimpses of her through the windows of each room she passed. As she walked she pulled the knot of hair down and shook it so it cascaded down her back. She tugged at the string on her loosely fitted sweatpants, untying and retying it, and headed across the living room to her desk. As she sat she picked up the phone.