Sean glanced down at the ground and found a medium-sized rock, about the size of his palm. He handed it to his friend who took it with a confused look on his face. “When I tell you to, throw that into the water over there. It will get the other cop’s attention and he’ll come back down to check it out. When he does, I’ll be waiting for him over there behind that other tree.” Sean pointed to a similar oak about twenty yards away on the edge of the trail.
“You don’t think I could take him?” Tommy asked, feigning insult.
Sean raised an eyebrow. “Please, be my guest. I’ll throw the rock if you’d prefer.”
Tommy pulled the stone away, shielding it from his friend. “No, it’s cool. Go ahead. I’ll do it next time.”
Sean grinned and passed his friend a suspicious glance. He gave a single nod and took off toward the other tree, staying low as he moved. Tommy watched as Sean worked his way through the shrubs and undergrowth until he reached his destination. Sean stood up behind the tree and held up his hand, motioning for Tommy to wait.
Tommy shrugged, wondering what he needed to wait for, but obeyed nonetheless. A second later, Sean made a throwing motion with his hand, giving the signal for Tommy to do his thing.
He stepped back to toss the rock, but slipped on some loose leaves. The slip caused his balance to shift and the trajectory of the rock to change dramatically. Tommy chucked the stone high through the air and over the water, landing it on the hill above the mouth of the spring.
The noise startled the police officer who’d been searching off to the right of the trail. He swiveled around instantly, shining his flashlight to his left, where the rock had landed among some leaves and sticks. Tommy glanced over at Sean, who was glaring at him with a disapproving and questioning expression.
Up on the hill, the skinny officer had left the trail and was checking around the area where the stone had landed. Tommy was frustrated with himself for screwing up, a feeling that compounded as the policeman noticed his partner lying on the ground in the moonlight.
The cop instantly turned paranoid and started waving his gun around in every direction. He flashed the beam of his light into the woods, desperately trying to find the men who’d attacked his fleshy partner. After a few moments of uncertainty, he made his way down to the other side of the spring and back onto the trail. The officer reached his partner, who was beginning to regain consciousness, signaled by his moaning.
“Giovanni,” Tommy heard the leader say. “What happened?”
All he received was another aching groan.
Tommy looked down and saw another rock at his feet. It was slightly larger than the one he’d just thrown. He eased his way down to one knee and picked up the stone, casting a glance back at Sean as he stood up.
In the shadows, he could see Sean mouth a sentence. “What are you doing?” He received no response.
Tommy ignored him, turned back toward the two Italian policemen, and cocked his arm. He had played baseball most of his life until his parents’ death. He’d even had some major league teams scouting him when he was in high school. Tommy had shown a great deal of promise as a pitcher, but when he’d had rotator cuff surgery it took a few too many miles per hour off his fastball. He tried to rehabilitate the arm and get it back to where it was, but things were never the same. His fastest pitch could only reach into the low eighties, which might not have been a problem for some teams. However, the issue of him being damaged goods at such a young age scared away any of those teams that had an interest in Tommy Schultz.
He spent a few months trying to reinvent himself as an outfielder. His arm was still good enough to play left or right field. One tryout with the Cleveland Indians had gone particularly well, and he made it down to the final cut, only to be told he wasn’t fast enough. Running speed wasn’t an issue with pitchers, which made it a perfect place for Tommy. After the Cleveland tryout, he resigned himself to playing recreationally in town and pretty much gave up his dream.
Now he had a chance to put all those years of hard work to good use. He twisted his body and stepped forward, firing the rock at the Italian policeman who was busy trying to uncuff his partner. The projectile covered the distance in less than a second, striking the skinny cop on the bridge of his nose. The blow sent him toppling over, dropping his flashlight and keys in the process. Blood gushed from his nasal passages and oozed from a cut between his closed eyes. Tommy’s throw was a perfect strike, and knocked the guy out cold.
Tommy rushed out from his hiding place, sprinting across the span in a few seconds. He skidded to a stop, grabbed the lead cop’s cuffs out of their holster, and quickly bound his hands. Sean ran out from his position, unable to hide his surprise at the result of his friend’s plan.
“I guess you still got it,” he said with his hands on his hips.
“They said my fastball didn’t have enough on it.”
“Looks like they were wrong.”
Tommy stared down at the two men piled on top of each other. The fat one continued to moan and he was starting to roll around a little.
“What should we do with them?” Tommy asked.
Sean bent down and took both sets of keys from the men. “Let the park ranger deal with them in the morning.”
Chapter 35
During the few hours’ drive back to Rome, Sean and Tommy did everything they could to stay awake. They’d been up for more hours than they could count, and their energy had been depleted both by travel and by the exertion of their activities. Sean had never been a good night driver, so Tommy had elected to take the wheel, thinking he would be the safer option. At first, they’d tried to find something to listen to on the radio. That had been a fruitless endeavor, however, as they quickly learned that the local taste in music contrasted theirs remarkably. After searching the channels in vain, Tommy elected the silence of the road over the bad music options.
The two tried to keep up conversation to make staying awake a little easier. Sean recounted a number of times where he’d actually fallen asleep at the wheel, but been fortunate enough to snap awake before his car went off the road.
That part of the conversation had been less than comforting for Tommy, who, while a better driver in the late hours, was still battling with heavy eyes. He redirected the conversation back to the stone cylinder. “It’s amazing that you are holding something that was last seen in this world over two thousand years ago, and the last eyes that saw it likely belonged to Julius Caesar.”
“It is pretty remarkable,” Sean agreed, taking a closer examination of the tube. The Latin engraved on the side had suffered almost no erosion, and was just as clear as it must have been two millennia before when it had been created.
Tommy glanced at it out of the corner of his eye and then quickly put his focus back on the road. “I’ve never seen anything like that before. Do you remember finding a cylinder like that on any of your IAA missions?”
Sean shook his head. “No. I didn’t.” He turned the object over, reading the inscription again. He’d read it a dozen times already, trying to figure out what it meant.
Both men could read Latin. Being the foundation of several world languages, knowing Latin was how Tommy and Sean were able to speak multiple languages. The meaning of the words wasn’t the problem. Interpreting them had been easy enough. The problem was the message itself.
The light that brings darkness.
Sean traced the outline of the letters with the tip of his finger. “The light that brings darkness,” he said quietly.
“That’s an odd thing to inscribe on an old piece of rock,” Tommy said, casually. “Still no thoughts on what it means?”