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  In a few seconds, the small dolphin was in deep enough water to swim. It shot away from Chelsea, who gave a triumphant bark, then galloped back to Dane.

  “Good girl,” Dane said, as he turned back toward Foreman, but then he picked up something from Chelsea. Together, they looked out to sea. A row of dolphins, at least a dozen, were coming toward them, fins cutting the surface. Then they all stopped about twenty meters away and rose up on their tails, half out of the water, dark eyes staring at Dane and Chelsea.

  One of them, a magnificent specimen almost fifteen feet long, moved slightly forward. Chelsea barked. Dane knew that the dolphin was communicating in some way with his dog, but he couldn’t pick up anything directly. Then he saw it, relayed from Chelsea: a darkness in the ocean, danger.

  Just as quickly as they had come, the dolphins turned and disappeared beneath the waves. Dane was startled as the sound of helicopter blades slicing through air cut into his conscious mind. A Japanese military chopper came in low over the water, circled, and set down. The side door slid open, and a crew member waved for them to get on board.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Foreman demanded as Dane helped Chelsea on board.

  “We’re not in this alone,” Dane said.

  * * *

  Ariana Michelet got out of the Lincoln Town Car on Central Park West and stared up at the large sphere enclosed in a glass cube: the Frederick Phineas & Sandra Priest Rose Center for the Earth and Space. The glass cube was ninety-five feet on each side, and the sphere inside housed the Hayden Planetarium. Lit by colored searchlights, the sphere, inside the glass, was a magnificent sight.

  She stood still for a few moments looking at it. The sphere, the interior upper half of which was the most sophisticated virtual reality machine in the world, had always seemed large to her. It was eighty-seven feet in diameter and weighed over two thousand tons. Impressive it was, but she knew that it was dwarfed by the sphere that had come out of the gate.

  Shrugging off the disturbing image, she turned and headed for the front steps of the American Museum of Natural History. Since her father was one of the largest contributors to the building of the new planetarium, her phone call to the museum’s curator asking for assistance had been greeted with quick acquiescence.

  The person waiting at the top of the stairs, Jaka Van Liten, had agreed to meet Ariana here because of the nature of the subject matter of the meeting: crystal skulls. As Ariana got closer, she could see that Van Liten was a small, wizened old woman, clutching a leather briefcase in her gnarled hands. Ariana had found the woman’s name on the Internet, constantly mentioned as the number one expert in the world on crystal skulls and purported to own quite a few in her personal collection. Ariana’s invitation to join her at the museum to see its crystal skull had been greeted with enthusiasm by Van Liten, who lived in Manhattan and was only a short cab ride from the museum.

  “Good evening, Ms. Van Liten,” Ariana greeted her as she arrived at the top of the stairs. “I’m Ariana Michelet. Thank you for coming on such short notice.”

  “Michelet,” Van Liten said. “I knew your father many years ago.”

  Ariana had not known that. “Where did you meet him?”

  “My family is like yours. The same circles. I’ve been a recluse for the past ten years, but before that, I was quite… how shall we say… a party girl.”

  Ariana smiled at the thought of this little old lady with his father. The smiled disappeared though when Van Liten asked a question.

  “Are the skulls connected to these gates that are causing so much trouble?”

  “We’re checking into that,” Ariana hedged. She noted that a guard was waiting for them, holding a door to the now-closed museum open for them. “Shall we go inside?”

  She escorted the old woman through the door. The click of their heels echoed in the massive Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall. A middle-aged man in a white coat and sporting a most serious manner was waiting for them in the center of the hall.

  “Good evening,” Ariana said as they approached.

  “I’m Dr. Fleidman,” he said, emphasizing his title.

  Ariana introduced herself and Van Liten, picking up the doctor’s disdain for both her and the old woman. Ariana held back telling him of her own two PhD’s having run into this type of person before.

  “This way,” Fleidman said and began walking away, causing them to hurry to keep up. As they passed through the hall, Ariana Michelet remembered her first visit to the museum as a child and her predominant memories were of the model of the huge squid that hung in one hallway and the squid fighting a large blue whale in another. She had found that place wondrous and returned many times over the years. The museum was located right across from Central Park, where Central Park West and West Seventy-ninth Street intersected, taking up an entire city block.

  They exited the Roosevelt entrance hall and turned left, going into the Hall of Biodiversity, where the arms of the squid cast strange shadows on the walls. As they passed under the squid, Fleidman caught Ariana looking up at it.

  “It’s the oldest model on display in the museum,” he said. “Purchased in 1895. Made of papier-mâché and forty-two feet long. We actually have a real giant squid body, twenty-five feet long, that was brought here in 1998.”

  Ariana nodded. They’d recovered videos from the Glomar of the attack by the strange, squid like creatures — krakens, Dane had called them — with tentacles that ended in mouths. She knew there would be no model of that bizarre creature, because it wasn’t part of this world’s natural history.

  They reached the Hall of Gems and Minerals, Fleidman’s domain. He stopped at a box just outside the entrance and punched in a code. “The hall is very secure. Laser detectors, pressure sensors, and constant live video feed.” He waved up at an unseen camera. “There is, of course, ample need for such security. We have over one hundred fourteen thousand specimens. Ninety thousand minerals, twenty thousand rocks and four thousand gems. Of note, we have the Star of India, which is the world’s largest blue star sapphire.” He pointed to his right as they passed a glass case, and Ariana could see the sapphire, highlighted by a single light above it.

  “And how many crystal skulls?” Ariana asked.

  Fleidman pulled a ring of keys out of one of his deep pockets and unlocked a metal door that had No Admittance to Public prominently stenciled on it. He ushered her and Van Liten through, into a long, dimly lit room, the center of which was filled with rows of tables holding crates and boxes.

  “One,” Fleidman said as he hit the overhead lights. The skull rested in the center of one of the tables. It was human-sized and pure, the eye sockets empty.

  Ariana walked over and peered at it. It was quite beautiful, the surface translucent. She reached, then paused. “May I touch it?”

  Fleidman nodded. Ariana ran her fingers lightly over it. The surface was perfectly smooth and cool. She felt a tingle of power, so subtle she wasn’t sure if it was real or not. Fleidman walked around to the other side of the table.

  “Quartz is mostly composed of silicon dioxide and is found in almost every rock. It can also form huge crystals that can weigh up to several tons. However, it is extremely rare to find pure quartz like this, which is colorless. Even the slightest influence of other material can greatly tinge quartz. Onyx and agate are two types of quartz that are streaked with bands of color from mother elements. Amethyst is violet quartz.

  “Quartz is also very difficult to work with,” Fleidman continued. “If you work against the grain of the stone, the crystal will shatter. There are three common denominations to crystal skulls. Those considered ancient, those called old, and those manufactured now.”

  “Why would someone manufacture one now?” Ariana asked.

  Fleidman glanced at Van Liten, then answered. “There are those who believe such forms hold tremendous power. Nothing proven, of course. It’s like those who believe pyramids focus power, which has also never been proven.”

&nbs
p; “What about the ancient ones?” Ariana asked.

  “The numbers vary, as most are held in private collections”—again the hard look at Van Liten—“but some say there are as many as forty-nine.”

  “No,” Van Liten spoke for the first time. “Many of those are copies. There are only nine ancient skulls of the pure form that have been found that I know of.”

  “Pure form?” Ariana asked.

  “Many that people claim to be ancient are made of the wrong material. They come in amethyst, sapphire, smoky quartz, topaz, moonstone, etcetera. The pure form are those that are composed of perfect, unflawed, quartz crystal. As Dr. Fleidman noted, quartz is very easily corrupted. Also, they are human-sized. There are others made of pure quartz, but they are smaller.

  “This one”—Fleidman seemed bothered that Ariana was asking questions of Van Liten in his museum—“was found in an ancient Mayan Pyramid in Central America.”

  Ariana stared at it, sensing something, the empty eye sockets looking back at her. “Why isn’t it on display?” she asked.

  “Well…” Fleidman seemed at a loss, and Van Liten answered.

  “Because they can’t explain it. Correct, young man?”

  “It’s simply an artifact,” Fleidman said.

  “It is not simply an artifact,” Van Liten said. “Can’t you sense the power in it?”

  “There are some strange aspects to this,” Fleidman allowed. “We’ve analyzed it, and the carving is perfect, which is difficult to explain, given the dating of the pyramid it was found in. You see, to carve quartz, which has a hardness of seven on a scale of ten, with diamond being a ten, you need something harder than seven. No ancient society we know of had such tools. Also, the carving, what little we can tell of it, seems to go against the natural axis, although that is very difficult to determine. As I mentioned, if you carve against the grain, the quartz should shatter. Obviously, in this case, it didn’t.”

  “That’s because there is no carving.” Van Liten said.

  “They don’t occur naturally, growing on trees,” Fleidman snapped. “Where do you think they come from?”

  “That I am not sure of,” Van Liten said. “At least I am willing to admit my ignorance.”

  “Quartz has interesting properties,” Fleidman said, trying to get back to an area where he was an expert. As he went on, Ariana had to almost bite her tongue to keep from speaking.

  “Quartz is the second most common of all minerals,” Fleidman said. “It is composed of silicon dioxide. It is the primary constituent of sand. It crystallizes in the rhombohedra system. It exhibits interesting properties, one of which is the piezoelectric effect, which means it produces electric voltage when subjected to pressure along certain lines of axis. Therefore it has important applications in the electronics industry for controlling the frequency of radio waves.” He reached out and turned the skull on its stand under the light. “In addition, it has the optical property of rotating the plane of polarized light.”

  “It also goes through structural transformation when heated,” Ariana said. “Low quartz, when heated to one thousand sixty-three point four degrees Fahrenheit becomes high quartz, which has a different crystal structure and physical properties. When cooled, high quartz reverts back to low quartz.” She pointed at the skull. “It would be interesting to see what properties these skulls have as high quartz.”

  Fleidman seemed disconcerted by her detailed knowledge of geology. Ariana had spent most of her adult life working for her father, searching the world for valuable minerals. She had been drawn into the entire gate phenomenon because of a search for a diamond field in northwest Cambodia, where her plane had been downed inside the Angkor gate.

  “How many skulls do you have?” Ariana asked Van Liten, deciding now was not the time to tell what Dane had seen happen to Sin Fen.

  Van Liten reached into her leather briefcase and drew out five photographs, which she spread across the table in front of the skull. “Five pure ancients.”

  “From where?” Ariana pressed as she checked the pictures. All five were almost exactly the same, with some slight differences in size. All were very realistic, exact approximations of the human skull.

  “One from Central America. One from Russia. One from Mongolia. One from Canada. And one from under the Atlantic.”

  “All found near pyramids?”

  “The origin of some I have no idea about other than general vicinity,” Van Liten said. “I bought two on the black market, where naturally, the sellers were loath to say where they obtained them. I own Shui Ting Er, which was found in Mongolia inside a large burial mound. I also own what is called the Jesuit Skull, which purportedly has an association with the Jesuits and Saint Francis of Assisi; and a skull found in a burial mound in Russia that contained artifacts from the Scythalians.

  “You have to understand, though, that just as I have purchased these skulls, I believe they have traveled far from their original sites. A crystal skull is rumored to give great power to whoever possesses it, so it is impossible to determine where each one originated or how many people have possessed each one over the course of the ages.”

  Ariana turned back to Fleidman. “Anything else you’ve discovered about the skulls?”

  “I’ve told you all that we’ve learned.”

  Ariana was frustrated. She knew that Dane had sent her here instead of accompanying him to Japan to get her out of the way. Why does it matter about the skulls now? She wondered. They are an end product, worthless. She checked that thought. As they were now, they were worthless, but that didn’t rule out other possibilities.

  “Have you ever checked the skull for muon emissions?” she asked Fleidman.

  “Muon emissions? No.”

  Ariana doubted he even knew what muons were. She turned to Van Liten. “What else do you know about the skulls?”

  “There are several theories,” Van Liten said. She glanced at Fleidman. “Most are considered rubbish by the scientific community, but there are events occurring now around the world that scientists are having a very difficult time explaining, are there not?”

  Ariana nodded. “Go ahead.”

  “There are those who believe the skulls are a form of — for lack of a better word — a computer, or a critical part of a larger computer, perhaps a hard drive, so to speak. These people believe that the skulls record everything that occurs around them and perhaps, even draw in the memories of those who touch them, thus making them a recorder of history.”

  Fleidman snorted, but Van Liten ignored him as she continued.

  “Other people claim the skulls were brought to our planet by extraterrestrials. Others suggest that they were made by people who live inside the Earth. They propose that there are twelve pure skulls, each representing one of the twelve tribes of people who dwell there.”

  Ariana fought to keep her reaction to herself, while Fleidman had no such compunction.

  “A hollow Earth theory?”

  “I’m just relating various theories,” Van Liten said, “not saying whether they are valid or not.”

  Ariana considered that. It wasn’t as far-fetched as she would have thought a month ago. It would definitely seem to ancient people that the gates were doorways into the Earth itself.

  Van Liten continued, “In many of the theories, though, the numbers twelve and thirteen do crop up. There seems to be some acceptance, even among radically different theories, that there are twelve pure ancients, along with a thirteenth master skull, and that if they are brought together, something momentous will happen.”

  “Are there any—” Ariana began, but then she paused.

  “Yes?” Van Liten pressed her.

  “Are there any rumors that these skulls are someone’s real skull transformed in some matter?”

  This time Fleidman’s snort of disgust was loud. Ariana spun toward him. “Doctor, we have a very reliable eyewitness who saw this transformation.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  �
�You’ve seen what happened in Iceland, right?” Ariana didn’t wait for an answer. “These skulls are related to the gates, so I am most definitely not joking.”

  “Most interesting.” Van Liten seemed to get taller as she straightened. “Yes, there have been similar stories. When did this occur?”

  “During the last outbreak of the Bermuda Triangle gate,” said Ariana. She quickly related what Dane had seen happen to Sin Fen on top of the sunken pyramid. When she was done, Van Liten turned to the skull on the table. She reached out with her wrinkled hands and ran her fingers lightly over the cheeks. “So this was indeed a person. A priestess. Who died to stop the Shadow.”

  “It appears so,” Ariana confirmed.

  “Amazing,” was Van Liten’s summary.

  “You said there was a spear with the figure of a seven headed snake on the end,” Fleidman said. “How come none of those have turned up?”

  “I don’t know,” Ariana said.

  “And the master skull — if there is one—” Van Liten said, “What about that?”

  “Maybe,” Ariana said, “that’s still in someone’s head and hasn’t been transformed yet. I do think, though, that we need to start gathering up the pure ancient skulls. Just in case.”

  “You can have mine,” Van Liten immediately offered.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE PAST

  25 AUGUST 79 A.D.

  The blast of war trumpets echoed down the stone tunnel to the ears of the waiting gladiators, indicating that the next contest was about to begin. Falco lay on a bench, the fancy armor he’d worn during the pompa, or procession into the arena, to one side, his battered fighting gear on the other. A slave carefully oiled his body, paying particular attention to the numerous scars, kneading them to loosen the knotted muscle beneath the skin. It was the last day of the games. He was underneath the arena floor, the place dimly lit by smoky torches. The bellow of animals deliberately starved so they would perform — if eating poorly armed or even unarmed people were performing — adding to the din of the crowd above. The entire place stank of fear and death.