The Seventh Stone

THE

SEVENTH

STONE

A Thriller

PAMELA HEGARTY

Sky Castle Publishing

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost;

that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

- Henry David Thoreau

This book is a work of fiction. The author doesn’t actually know any maniacal pharmaceutical titans set on creating a new religion even if it means purging millions of lives. Although unsung heroes are no doubt saving the real world as you read this, the characters in this book are imaginary. Much of the history, including the Biblical references to the Breastplate of Aaron, is real.

THE SEVENTH STONE, Copyright © 2011 by Pamela Hegarty. All rights reserved. Produced in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews. Contact Sky Castle Publishing at
[email protected]
. For more information, go to skycastlepublishing.com and pamelahegarty.com.

ISBN 978-0-9630791-0-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011917818

Cover Image: Cat’s eye emerald superimposed on photo of the Helix “Eye of God” Nebula. Helix nebula image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA.

DAY
1

CHAPTER
1

Navajo Reservation, Arizona

Christa Devlin slammed on the jeep’s brakes. He appeared out of the darkness like an apparition. With his wizened face, salt and pepper braid and colorful striped blanket wrapped around his shoulders, he had to be Joseph, the Navajo shaman whom her father had sent her to meet. And she was going to run him down, in the middle of a moonless night about as far from civilization as possible in the lower forty-eight. He stood still as she careened towards him, the tires slewing through the desert sand. He held up his hand. She rammed hers on the horn. The jeep stopped with a jolt, as if the old shaman had stared it down.

This was the man who was going to help her save the world, according to her father. Joseph knew the secret of the Turquoise. The sacred Turquoise. The one stolen from an artifact that had sent armies to war and men to the executioner, the most powerful artifact ever lost to humankind. The ancient ones had squirreled away the Turquoise stone in this canyon five hundred years ago. Hardly bigger than an acorn, she had to find it. In less than twenty-four hours. Before the others who would kill to possess it. She was glad Joseph was on her side.

She drew in a deep breath and shut off the engine. The silence was unnerving. She turned off the headlights. The darkness was complete until her eyes adjusted. Then she could make out objects a good ten feet into the pitch dark. Great. She opened the jeep door and climbed down, her hiking boots landing softly in the sand. A river babbled nearby. Insects chirped. The hoot of a lone owl underscored the stillness. She almost longed for the familiar annoyances of a barking dog or fighting lovers, until she looked up. The night sky was alive with stars that most people could only take on faith, framed by the black silhouettes of the canyon walls.

Joseph nodded to her. “It’s cold tonight,” he said. “Come to the fire.” He turned and walked towards a cottonwood grove. He had to be one of Dad’s friends, all right, cloaked in mystery with a hint of danger.

She reached to the passenger seat and grabbed her new lucky pack, picked up at the local trading post. When she had dragged her old lucky pack out of the closet for this trip, it stank of mildew. A bad omen. She stretched the elastic band of her new headlamp over her forehead and flicked it on.

Joseph’s campfire was in a small clearing beyond the patch of cottonwood trees. He crouched and stirred a log deeper into the coals. Sparks spiraled up into the wisps of pungent smoke. He sat down, tugging his blanket in tighter.

She sat opposite him. “My father sounded desperate last night,” Christa said, “when he called from Morocco.” More than desperate, he had sounded scared. Dad didn’t get scared.

“
You’ve had a long journey,” Joseph said. “You should rest. We face a difficult climb in the morning, and we must rise with the sun.”

A long journey didn’t begin to describe what brought her to this remote corner of the desert on this dark December night. She had all but abandoned her cluttered office back at Princeton, the stacks of final essays to grade for her first History of Exploration class as an assistant professor, and probably any hope of a career at the university. Just like she had abandoned Dad. Not this time. “If that turquoise is out there,” she said, “I’m damn well going to find it.”

“
The future depends on it,” he said.

“
You believe in the power of the Breastplate.”

“
Not believe,” he squinted into the darkness beyond her, “I know.”

The Breastplate of Aaron. It was a golden shield emblazoned with twelve sacred gemstones, including the Turquoise. God designed the Breastplate, commanding man to create it, as written in the Book of Exodus, if you believed in that sort of thing.

Aaron, brother of Moses, was the first of the high priests to wear it. He wore it in the Inner Sanctum, the Holy of Holies, as he stood alone in front of the Breastplate’s companion piece, the Ark of the Covenant. The Breastplate’s gems would flash with brilliance and open a portal to Heaven. The one who wore it could speak directly with God. He could actually hear God’s voice. Dad was obsessed with finding it and the seven gemstones which were stolen from it in the 16
^th
century and concealed around the world.

A sudden flutter of wings and the alarm call of a quail disturbed the cottonwood grove behind her. She twisted around, but couldn’t see further than the firelight’s dance on the tangle of tumbleweed. Nobody could be out there. Without Joseph’s local knowledge, they couldn’t possibly have honed in on this stretch of valley so fast. “But both the Breastplate and the Ark of the Covenant haven’t been seen since 586 years before Christ was born,” she said, still trying to see into the shadows, “when the Babylonians sacked the Temple of Solomon. How could the Turquoise stone from the Breastplate have ended up here in Arizona?”

This could be another of Dad’s crazy ideas spawned from his fixation on finding the Breastplate.
Those bastards who are racing after the stones will kill others,
Dad had said last night before the phone line went dead,
just like they killed Mom. It will kill me, Christa, if we let them win. The Breastplate will prove that life exists beyond death. Don’t you want to reach Mom? Don’t you want to know that her love for us didn’t just end?

Joseph flung away his blanket and stood, his eyes wide, peering into the cottonwoods. Christa grabbed the nearest weapon, the burning log.

An old man stumbled into the clearing. His chest was shiny with blood. His hand clenched a knife. He collapsed face first towards the red Sonoran dust, near the glowing coals of the campfire. Joseph caught him and eased him to the ground. “Samuel,” Joseph said.

Joseph reached for his bedroll, then eased up the man’s head, and rested it on the makeshift pillow. Samuel looked and smelled like he’d been wandering the desert for decades, and neither he, nor his matted white beard, had seen civilization, never mind running water, for weeks. He might have appropriated his baggy, threadbare Levis from the skeleton of an unlucky forty-niner. He had tied a prospector’s gold pan to his belt. The stink of his sweat and blood made her gag. She stepped back and jammed the log back into the fire. Flames flared up from the coals.

Joseph loosened Samuel’s grimy neckerchief and unbuttoned the ragged plaid shirt. The wound in the chest was bad, near the heart. It was circular, as if drilled with a bullet, not stabbed with a knife.

Samuel’s eyes snapped open. The knife rolled from his hand. The blade wasn’t metal. It was black, obsidian, its jagged edge a telltale sign of being sharpened with flint. Its handle was carved into a crouching jaguar and decorated with turquoise mosaic. She had researched knives like this. It looked pre-Columbian. Most likely Mayan. Possibly sacrificial. What the hell was it doing on a Navajo Reservation?

Samuel grabbed Joseph’s shoulder, snatching the flannel like a drowning man clutches a lifeline. “I found it!” he said. He shuddered and coughed. He closed his free hand into a fist, fighting for a breath. “I found the path to the lost cliff dwelling.”

Christa drew in closer. The lost cliff dwelling. So the cliff dwelling, at least, could be real. Her father had told her that, five hundred years ago, a sandstorm had buried the remote village inhabited by a mysterious cult of Anasazi Indians. Two days ago, a second once-in-a-millennium windstorm exposed it.

“
Samuel, who did this to you?” Joseph asked. Samuel grasped at something tucked into his hip pocket. Joseph eased it out. A dented, stainless steel flask. Joseph unscrewed the top and helped his friend take a sip. She switched on her headlamp and directed it at the cottonwood grove. Nothing.

Samuel swallowed, wheezed and sputtered out a cough that intensified into an incapacitating spasm. He stabbed the darkness from where he came, towards the babble of the river. “All these years, I must of walked beneath it a thousand times. Right above me. I knew it was there, even if I couldn’t see it. I knew it.” He coughed violently. Blood gurgled onto his beard. “Damn double-crosser. He hired me to guide him, then figured he was going to kill old Samuel, in my desert.” Samuel narrowed his eyes at his chest and grimaced. “Reckon he did kill me.” He waved a finger at Joseph. “But not before old Samuel done unto him what he done unto me. Stabbed him with this here knife the ancient ones left behind. I watched him drop right over the edge of that cliff dwelling plateau. Heard him snap when he hit dirt.”

“
We’ve got a jeep here, Samuel,” Christa said. Whoever did this to him could still be out there, no matter what Samuel believed he’d done. Years travelling with her father had taught her that bad guys were tenacious. “We’ll get you to the hospital.”