Would the stones heal the earth? And from what?

He leaned forward again, studying a glyph that represented men or mankind or the human kind. Another glyph represented nature, the earth in a sense, and a third glyph represented darkness. He had seen glyphs before that signified that nature would destroy man, as when a volcano erupted or an earthquake flattened a village, but here the order was reversed. Could it mean what he thought it meant? So much of the prophecy, especially as it was treated today, seemed to indicate nature destroying man, but this was different: The parchment in front of him suggested that man destroys nature. Was the catastrophe not natural in origin but in fact man-made? Or was it his liberal prejudices coming out? He remembered a debate with a conservative friend who told him he put trees ahead of people. He could not be sure, but the words were there.

His eyes blurred suddenly, watering and burning. His body ached. He wrote his notes and looked to the next set of glyphs. They seemed familiar to him, in fact he was certain he knew them, but he could not divine a meaning. It was an odd sensation, like not being able to recall the name of someone you knew well. He traced the outline of the first one with his finger, hoping it would jog his memory, but nothing came to him. He drew it with his shaky hand but still his mind was blank.

A jolt of anger and frustration hit him. It was almost impossible to do what he was trying to do without a database, or at least his old notebooks or an anthology of known glyphs. But he had nothing to work with, nothing but his failing memory.

He sat back again. Despite the warmth of the wine cellar he now had the chills. He was running a fever and as often happened to the patient whose temperature rises rapidly, he'd begun to feel as if he were freezing.

He held the towel to his face. He felt as if he might throw up.

He put a hand to his leg and touched the outlines of his wound. It was hot, burning with infection once again, swollen and painful to the touch.

What had he done?

In a vain, desperate effort to hear his wife's voice again, he'd stopped taking the medications Danielle had been giving him. The sickness had brought his wife to him once, or so he'd thought: the sickness and the stone, the conduit through time. But as he'd become well, her face had vanished; her voice no longer touched his mind. It was like waking from a dream and wishing only to go back to sleep and find it somehow. And McCarter could not bring himself to let that happen.

In response he'd shunned the antibiotics in hopes of seeing her again. But the only result was a growing fever and a cloudy mind just when they all needed it to be sharp.

CHAPTER 58.

At the celebration, Father Domingo made a great fuss over Hawker and Danielle. The women of the town found it hard to believe Danielle could be happy in her thirties without having a husband. They insisted she dance with a few of the men, and then, realizing she had come with Hawker, they made it a point to get them dancing and drinking as much as possible.

By midnight the celebration had begun to wind down and Hawker and Danielle found themselves alone in an alleyway outside the guesthouse.

They leaned against the building and looked at each other.

Hawker found himself both captivated by her and concerned. The events of recent days flashed through his head and, strangely, Arnold Moore's arrival in Africa settled in his mind.

"A peso for your thoughts," Danielle asked.

He hesitated. "Just thinking about something Moore said to me in Africa," he told her.

"And what might that be?"

"By the pricking in my thumbs," he said, "something wicked this way comes."

"Bradbury?"

He shook his head. "It's from Macbeth Macbeth, actually."

"Shakespeare?" She smiled. "You surprise me."

"I know a thing or two."

"So it would seem," she said. "You feel like Macbeth?"

"The witches said those words to him, after he became a traitor and murdered the king," Hawker said.

"You're not a traitor or a murderer," she said, "and Arnold Moore certainly doesn't think so."

He guessed that she was right. Certainly Moore had hired him to save the thing he valued most in this world, Danielle. "There are those who would disagree," he said to her, "but even that's not what I'm getting at. Macbeth was a loyal soldier, a general who crushes the king's enemies until the witches stir up his ambition and ego by telling him that he would soon become king himself. The question is, would he have done anything had they just kept their damned mouths shut?"

She guessed his line of thought. "You're thinking about the stones and us, and the parchment Father Domingo had. Afraid we're doing the witch's bidding?"

"I don't believe in destiny," he said. "But people can be manipulated into doing things they otherwise wouldn't."

She took a deep breath and looked into his eyes. "Fate and destiny don't have to be an evil thing. Where would I be, if you hadn't come into my life?"

He studied her. So much in his world was darkness, but somehow she was like the light. The flickering glow from the fire bathed her face, laying shadows and mystery across her skin. A strand of dark hair had fallen across her eyes.

Hawker reached out to put it back behind her ear. He didn't pull his hand away, and she didn't ask him to. Instead he ran the tips of his fingers down the side of her face, softly brushing her cheek. She turned toward it, then looked back up at him as he leaned in and kissed her.

She kissed him back, pressing her lips into his. He could taste the wine on her tongue, feel the warmth of her breath in his mouth.

They kissed hard, then parted, looking into each other's eyes for a second. He laced his fingers through her hair, placing his hand behind her neck, and cradled the back of her head. She closed her eyes and moved toward him again.

In a moment they were sitting on a stone bench with no backrest, facing each other, their legs straddling the bench. They were hidden in an alcove in a quiet alleyway. She kissed him again and rubbed her face against his, the soft skin of her cheek moving across his, the smell of her hair and the perfume of the night around them adding to the intoxication.

Holding her mesmerized him. It wasn't as if he'd been waiting for her; there'd been plenty of women in various places. They had been comfort on hard nights, a chance to forget the hell that life sometimes was. But this was different. It felt like breathing again after drowning, a chance to rediscover what made life worth living.

He pulled her close, his fingers tracing the smooth curve of her neck, sliding down to the top of her back, to the top button on her dress. He opened it.

She traced a finger across his chest, leaning in and kissing him again. His hand slid down the side of her neck, across her shoulder, and down the smooth skin of her back. And then he stopped.

He pulled back.

"What's wrong?" she asked, looking at him. Her hair was a mess, her eyes half open.

He moved his hand to her back, just above her bra strap. But the movement was different, clinical, searching.

She seemed amused. "Having some trouble back there, sailor?"

"Have you had surgery recently?" he asked.

"No," she said, slightly aggravated. "Why?"

"Because you have a fresh scar, between your shoulder blade and your spine. And there's something solid underneath the skin."

A minute later they were back in the guest room. Danielle slid the top half of the cotton dress past her shoulders and leaned forward in front of the light. Suddenly she remembered the pain in her back after regaining consciousness in Hong Kong. She remembered the bright room that she'd thought had been an interrogation room.

Could it have been an operating room? Could they have implanted something in her?

"What is it?" she asked.

"I'm guessing it's some kind of tracking device," he said. "Probably short range, but able to be picked up by remote sensors, like LoJack."

Now it made sense. Of course they had given her boots back; of course they'd allowed her to escape. They knew what she was looking for and they realized she would find it more quickly than they would. Kang wanted her loose. He probably wanted Yuri with her, because of what he could do.

"This is how they found us on the water," she said.

"Probably," he said.

"And you thought you heard a plane earlier," she said.

"It could have been anything."

"But you know it's not," she said.

She stood up holding the dress against her chest to prevent it from falling.

She turned, trying to see the scar in the mirror, but it was in a place that was almost impossible to reach or even to see clearly. That had been done on purpose, so she'd never know it was there.

"How deep is it?" she asked, thinking she would have felt a lot more discomfort if they had cut into the underlying muscle.

She felt his fingers pressing for the edges. "It's just under the skin."

"Subcutaneous," she said. That made things easier.

"What do you want me to do?"

She looked dead at him. "I want you to get a knife and cut the damn thing out of me."

"Are you insane?" he asked. "Does this seem like a sterile environment to you?"

"We can account for that," she said, knowing they had strong antibiotics on hand.

"Okay, fine," he said, "but I'm not a surgeon and I've been drinking for three hours."

She fixed her gaze on him. "I'm not asking you to take my gall bladder out. It's nothing more than a big splinter. You just have to cut the skin and pull it out."

Hawker did not look pleased by the thought but he seemed to realize there was no other choice. "Fine," he said. "Lie down."

She took off the borrowed dress and laid a towel on the bed, wrapping another one around her waist. A second later Hawker was back with a bottle of rubbing alcohol and Danielle's first-aid kit.

He pulled out the Zithromax she'd been giving McCarter and handed her two pills, which she gulped down with a large glass of water.

"This is going to hurt," he said.

She almost laughed. "Not as bad as I'm going to hurt you, if you don't hurry up and get it over with."

She watched as he pulled the scalpel from the kit. Using the rubbing alcohol, he sterilized it repeatedly and then put it down without letting the tip of the blade touch anything.

She folded her arms up around the pillow and closed her eyes, trying to focus on anything but the cut that was about to come. She could feel Hawker's hands against her bare skin. They were warm and strong, and they felt heavy against her back. His leg pressed tight against her thigh and the feeling of his body over the top of her was distracting in an intimate way.

A sudden touch of cold brushed her back; an ice cube to numb the skin. She drew in a sharp breath and held it. Several droplets of water ran across her shoulder blade. One trickled to the side, curving over her body and down toward her hips, clinging to her skin until it trailed across her stomach.

The chill brought on goose bumps and she found herself holding her breath. She wanted to tell him to wait. To turn over and pull him close to her and to make love to him before all this would be done. But they'd run out of time to enjoy life.

"I'm ready," she said.

She felt his hand pressing heavy on her shoulder, holding it still, and then the edge of the scalpel cutting a shallow line in her skin. She tensed, fighting the instinct to cry out in pain.

CHAPTER 59.

Back in her own clothes, with her shoulder bandaged but still bleeding, Danielle hiked to the church with Hawker by her side. She carried the pack with the stone in it. Hawker carried the first-aid kit, with McCarter's antibiotics.

As they walked, she tried to bottle up the waves of emotion running through her, pushing aside the feeling of having Hawker hold her and kiss her. She needed her wits about her now; she needed to be a professional again.

The tiny object buried under her skin turned out to be a radioactive pellet, an isotope that with the right equipment could be sensed from a distance. The fact that it wasn't a transmitter made sense. If Kang knew about the stones, he knew that a small microtransmitter would not operate long in their presence. But the pellet was a simple solution. Danielle guessed and hoped it was a low-grade isotope, with a short half-life and capable of little damage, but she didn't know.

She wrapped the pellet in a cloth and slid it into the lead-lined case that contained the stone. Then she and Hawker hustled to find McCarter. The plan was to go now, to lure Kang's forces away from the town and ditch the pellet along the way, hopefully distracting him further.

They entered the church and immediately made their way to the wine cellar.

As they descended the stairs, she called out to McCarter. "Professor?"

She heard a crash and raced down the remaining stairs. She spotted McCarter in the far corner, the table overturned next to him. They ran to him.

"Professor," she said, helping him up.

He was drenched with sweat.

"He's burning up," she told Hawker.

"Are you all right?" she asked him.

"I couldn't ...," he mumbled. "I can't ..."

She pressed her hand against his forehead. His temperature had to be over a hundred. McCarter reached into his pocket and produced five days' worth of antibiotics, which he had been pretending to take.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I wanted to see her again. I thought that the stone could bring her to me. Make it real."

"I've got to get you upstairs," Danielle said, as she and Hawker helped him up.

With Hawker under one arm and Danielle under the other, they began to move. "I tried to figure it out, but I don't know," McCarter said. "I can't think."