Kane and Grant were already moving, racing down the walkway between the huge glass cabinets. Brigid was sprinting toward the far wall, where the icelike shelves had formed the makeshift steps for their entry into Abraham Flag’s buried laboratory of wonder. Kane and Grant weaved between the cabinets that held the carved throne and the single bullet, making their way swiftly toward the far wall to join their red-haired companion.
Though knocked off his feet, the millennialist guard who had grabbed Brigid was not dead. He reached for his Calico M-960 as he lay on the floor beside a glass cabinet holding a single clay tablet. Kane’s bullet had indeed hit him; it had slammed into the goggles that he wore, impacting against the hard plastic of the right eyepiece, leaving a scar across its surface like a spiderweb. Beneath the goggles, the guard’s cheek ached, and he would have a black eye inside of an hour. But, other than disorienting him for five seconds, the bullet hadn’t created any lasting damage. Now he turned his subgun in the direction of the fleeing figures and pumped the trigger. A stream of flat-nosed 9 mm bullets spit from the muzzle of the Calico, spraying out over the trophy room. Automatically, Kane, Grant and Brigid dived for cover as the bullets raced toward them.
As his team ducked behind the tall glass cabinets of the room, the string of flat-nosed, wadcutter bullets smashed through the cabinet at Kane’s back, shattering the panes of glass and embedding themselves into the eerie, carved throne that waited silently within.
Guatemala, May 19, 1926
IT TOOK A FEW MOMENTS for his eyes to adjust when the sack-cloth bag was removed from Abraham Flag’s head. Warily, he looked around at his new surroundings. He was in a small, windowless room that appeared to be barely eight feet square. Lit by a single, flaming torch, the room held the distinct smells of dust and decrepitude.
When Flag tried to move, he found that his wrists were held in place. He looked down and saw the large wooden clips that had been placed over them like some tribal woman’s bracelet, clamping them to the arms of the solid wooden throne that he now sat upon. As hard as amethysts, his purple gaze played over the chair itself, examining the strange markings he saw there. The chair was covered in carvings, pictograms that Flag immediately recognized as the ancient written language of that dead race called the Aztecs.
Flag’s lightning-quick mind worked overtime, swiftly translating the words that he could see, ascertaining their meaning as swiftly as he was able. The meaning of those symbols was clear: it was a throne of execution.
Suddenly, Flag became aware of movements behind him, and then a sinister voice came from close to his shoulder. “I see you are awake, Professor Flag,” a man’s voice stated. The man spoke in heavily accented English, and Flag recognized almost immediately that the speaker was from the Latino region of Central America.
“You have me at a disadvantage, friend,” Flag replied. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”
“‘A disadvantage’ would be a more than fair analysis, Professor,” the man said, stepping from the shadows. Flag saw that he was a short man, carrying a little extra weight and dressed entirely in white. A vicious-looking scar ran down the right-hand side of his face, ending several inches into the man’s hairline. The man’s hair was hidden by a magnificent headdress of feathers, each of them dyed a vivid, bloodred. “You may call me Mr. Hidalgo. I am the man who will kill you before this day is out.”
Abraham Flag had heard that same threat in numerous forms over the length of his career, and he felt no trepidation at facing death once again. Instead, he merely smiled at the irony of the man’s name, for hidalgo meant noble in Spanish, the strangely garbed man’s native tongue. This hidden threat had been close by ever since Flag had journeyed down to Guatemala to help with Michael Brand’s construction project and encountered that first hideous corpse. Only now had that threat finally been given a face. The terrible, twisted and scarred visage owned by Mr. Hidalgo, the revived priest of the blood-thirsty Aztecs.
“The chair that you now sit in,” Hidalgo explained, “has lain beneath this pyramid since its construction over three thousand years ago. It is a throne for the dead, and all who sit in it must surely die.”
As Hidalgo spoke, Flag could feel a cold shiver wrenching at his spine. There was something about this chair, some uncanny ability that could affect a man in ways almost beyond comprehension. The ideographs were more than simple representations of its purpose—they acted in some way to channel a person’s will, forcing them to die, their heart to cease beating.
“You feel it already, Professor Flag,” Hidalgo said, wide teeth showing in a sickening smile. “You feel the dreaded march of death’s approach.”
This strange throne was the primitive equivalent of an electric chair, Flag realized, but one that was powered solely through the will of the executioner himself. Flag’s only means of survival was to outthink Hidalgo before the dreams of death overcame him.
Flag narrowed his eyes and concentrated, his muscles tensing as his arms wrenched at the bonds that held them in place.
“You are a fool, Professor,” Hidalgo mocked as he saw Flag struggling at his restraints. “You cannot break those shackles—no man can. And, in a few moments, you shall be dead.”
Flag ignored the man’s ranting, concentrating on his inner strength, the nobility of purpose that had served him through the most dire of situations. He could feel Hidalgo’s thoughts in his mind now, sifting through them as a man’s hands will sift through sand. Suddenly, that terrible, invisible hand clawed within Flag’s skull, and the great man of science let loose a desperate gasp.
Hidalgo, that resurrected priest of a blood-soaked civilization of the ancient past, laughed as he tightened his mental grip on his victim, feeding all of his terrible hate through the strange and mystical chair through his thoughts alone. Trapped in that seat of doom, Abraham Flag fixed his fierce stare on the man in the abominable headdress, feeling the pressure bearing down upon his mind. His skull felt as though it might explode like some rotted fruit, but still Flag clung to life, recalling the miraculous things that he had discovered, thinking of all the sights he still had to see. And in that moment, something else flashed through his exceptional brain.
u x d + (c x s) - (t x b)
It was the incredible equation he had been developing at his hidden Laboratory of the Incredible in the Antarctic, the equation that proposed to hold the key to life itself. He concentrated all of his thoughts on the equation, on life itself.
Up x Down + (Charm x Strange) - (Top x Bottom)
As the equation raced through Flag’s thoughts, the ideographs on the chair began to glow and, incredibly, to alter their shape. The parable of death that had been written there just moments before changed, the millennia-old carvings shifting their lines subtly as their meaning altered forever at Flag’s command.
At first the priest, Hidalgo, failed to notice the extraordinary change that was occurring before his eyes. He stood in that tiny death chamber, grinning at Flag’s plight as he focused his thoughts to power that incredible, ancient machine. And then, like an old sheet finally wearing through, something in Hidalgo’s mind seemed to tear, ripping apart. The whites of his eyes took on an aspect of crimson as all of the capillaries burst, and blood trickled from his nose before he fell to the flagstone floor.
With a final strain of superhuman effort, Abraham Flag snapped the two shackles that held his wrists to the chair, their wood shattering into a thousand splinters as he leaped from that terrible throne of death….
KANE HELD HIS HAND over his face to protect his eyes as glass crashed
