“You okay?”
Davidson looked down at his shirt. “Oh, yes. It’s marinara.”
Alexander glanced at the large number of room service trays. “I see you’ve been taking advantage of my hospitality.”
“I, well, yes.” Davidson looked to the floor. “But I was up all night and have some new thoughts on the golem.”
Alexander sat down in the room’s lounge chair and opened his arms as though to say, “Let’s hear it.”
King sat down on the bed beside the trays. He eyed a plate of french fries. He hadn’t eaten anything substantial in days. Not that french fries would provide much in the way of nourishment, but they would fill his belly.
Davidson noted his attention. “They’re only an hour old.”
Alexander cleared his throat as King dug into the food.
“Sorry. Ahh. What’s important to realize about a golem is that they are not actually living. I suppose you could say they were quasi-living, but they don’t possess true life. Now, somehow, which I have yet to fully understand, inanimate objects are being animated in a way that mimics life, but these golems lack intelligence. I suspect they have a very primitive knowledge imbued into the atomic structure by their creator—the ability to walk, the desire to kill a certain target—but they can’t communicate. They can’t reproduce. They don’t consume or digest. Based on the files Alexander faxed over—”
“What files?” King asked. He had no idea Alexander had been in touch with the professor. He shot Alexander an annoyed glance as Davidson handed him a folder. He opened it and found several newspaper clippings about the attacks on Fort Bragg, a handwritten detailed account about their experience at Stonehenge. But what really held King’s attention were the several classified documents from the U.S. military, including surveillance-camera still shots from Bragg. He wanted to ask Alexander where he got the documents, but already knew the answer. The Herculean Society was in every nation and in every government.
That’s what Alexander had done in twenty-five hundred years. He might very well control the whole world without a single person knowing. And his direct involvement now might only be because Ridley threatened to upset the balance.
The thought filled King with anger and he wondered if Alexander was so deeply entrenched that he could feed missions to the Chess Team? Just how far did the man’s influence reach? Questions for later, he decided. “Go on,” he said, placing the files on the bed beside him.
“Based on the reports in those files, the golems seem to contain enough energy for a short duration. In every case, the golems simply return to their inanimate state after about fifteen minutes. Without a continued utterance from its creator a golem cannot continue living, err, existing.”
“Like someone chanting?” King asked.
“No, more like a recharge. Something that keeps it energized and on task. It could be as simple as repeating the phrase that animated it in the first place. I’m not really sure. But this is an apparent weakness, time. And brains, or lack thereof. I would compare them to ancient missiles. Their force can be spurred into action and directed, but they cannot be sustained indefinitely and then can be outsmarted.”
King had to admit the professor’s assessment seemed accurate, and useful to a point. But he had hoped for more. Given the anxious glances Davidson shot Alexander, he had, too.
“You mentioned a sample,” Davidson said to Alexander.
Alexander reached into his suit coat and pulled out a small chunk of bluestone. King’s distrust of Alexander continued to grow as his role in the mission became secondary to Alexander’s whims. And that threatened King’s personal goal of finding Fiona. If Alexander’s objective shifted, King might be left high and dry. He would continue, of course, but with time short for Fiona, the delay could be deadly.
Davidson took the stone and looked it over. “This is actually a piece of a golem animated from the stones of Stonehenge?”
“It is,” Alexander said.
Holding it up close to his eyes, Davidson stared at the stone as the bright sunlight glimmered off the blue specks. “We need a lab.”
Alexander stood. “I have one waiting.” He stood, leading the way out of the room.
Davidson eagerly followed.
King hesitated for a moment. Could he trust Alexander? If he turned bad, could he be stopped? Deciding the answer to both questions was an unquestionable “no,” King took a handful of fries and followed after them.
* * *
THE LAB WAS both impressive and sketchy. The equipment looked new, or at least rarely used, and the small warehouse that held it was in a seedy part of town. In fact, everything looked like it had been brought in and rigged to be used specifically for this occasion and would likely disappear when they were done.
King didn’t like that everything he had done since heading to Rome was outside the reach of U.S. resources, but he couldn’t deny the results. Though those results were slow in coming this afternoon. The hot Mediterranean sun beat down on the metal building, heating its insides like an oven. Even the mighty Hercules had shed his suit coat and unbuttoned the first few buttons on his shirt.
“It’s too bad your people didn’t think to bring in an air conditioner,” King said.
“I’ll be sure to have them take care of it next time,” Alexander replied.
As King wondered whether or not Alexander was joking he realized that the man had just confirmed his suspicions. This was a temporary lab.
Tension had King’s body in a tight grip. Unless they found some kind of lead soon, their investigation will have run dry. King checked the date and time on his watch. Day four was well under way and Fiona was now out of insulin. He gripped the edge of the lab table he was leaning on, feeling his anger rise.
“I’ve got something,” Davidson said, backing away from a microscope he’d been standing over for the past ten minutes.
King stood straight and headed for Davidson, eager for news.
“At first glance, the sample looks like any other stone, and to the human eye acts the way we all expect a stone to act—like nothing at all. But at the microscopic level, well, take a look.” Davidson switched out the slides. “This is a normal stone.”
King arrived before Alexander and took a look. He saw a patchwork of stone crystals mashed together.
“Stones are composed of varying sizes of mineral grains. Differing amounts of minerals give us limestone, granite, basalt, et cetera. In this case we have Preseli spotted dolerite containing chunks of plagioclase feldspar, which adds to its bluish tint, especially when wet. The point is, the minerals contained in stone are compressed in a random formation that does not shift unless the stone is broken.” Davidson switched out the slide when King stood back. “This is a sample of the bluestone.”
King looked again. The stone crystals were now an orderly formation of overlapping minerals. Their placement throughout was still random, but it was as though they had been snapped into an organized grid. “It looks like chain mail,” he said.
“Exactly, which would give the stone flexibility, and the ability to merge, at least temporarily with similarly affected stones. Like Velcro. Or a zipper.”
Alexander quickly looked at both slides. “Anything else?”
“It has no traces of DNA, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Davidson said. “As I mentioned before, they’re not living. Simply animated by some kind of energy.”
The statement struck a chord in King’s memory. His family had taken a southwestern summer trip in an RV. The strange site had been one of their stops, at the insistence of his father. “This isn’t totally unheard of in the natural world. The sailing stones in Death Valley move on their own. Some are as heavy as eighty pounds but travel across the flat desert appearing to move under their own power. They leave grooves in the ground hundreds of feet long, make ninety-degree turns, and sometimes travel in pairs before breaking off in different directions.”