The Mortality Principle Read online

  When legend becomes deadly reality…

  In Prague researching the legend of the Golem, a fantastical “living” creature made of clay, archaeologist Annja Creed is faced with an even bigger mystery on her hands when someone begins murdering the homeless. And every day there’s a fresh corpse.

  As the suspicion that Golem is behind the deaths circulates quietly on the streets of the city, Annja cannot resist unraveling the thread that binds science to superstition. According to Czech history, these aren’t new attacks. They’re part of a greater pattern of murders that have gone unacknowledged over centuries. And now Annja is the next target. Unless she can find the real monster behind the myth…before it finds her.

  Annja held out her sword in one hand.

  Holding her phone in the other hand, as if its glow were a shield, she stared at that strange, incomplete face as he raised his hands to shield his eyes from the bright glare. At least, she thought it was a he….

  There was so much of the thing in front of her that she couldn’t see around it, but she knew it was there by the blast of its foul breath, a waft of stale sweat.

  Then it staggered forward, striking out at Annja, its great clubbing fists slashing at the light, the creature seemingly ignorant of the threat her sword presented. She pushed the blade as hard as she could, feeling it slide through its heavy coat and into the flesh beneath.

  A vibration ran the length of her blade all the way into her fingertips.

  There was no pain in its childlike sketch of a face, no change in the thing’s expression despite her sword plunging through its body.

  Annja pulled the hilt to free the sword, but as she did the thing swung a fist at her. The impact of the blow sent her sprawling.

  Before she hit the ground the world faded to black.

  Titles in this series:

  Destiny

  Solomon’s Jar

  The Spider Stone

  The Chosen

  Forbidden City

  The Lost Scrolls

  God of Thunder

  Secret of the Slaves

  Warrior Spirit

  Serpent’s Kiss

  Provenance

  The Soul Stealer

  Gabriel’s Horn

  The Golden Elephant

  Swordsman’s Legacy

  Polar Quest

  Eternal Journey

  Sacrifice

  Seeker’s Curse

  Footprints

  Paradox

  The Spirit Banner

  Sacred Ground

  The Bone Conjurer

  Tribal Ways

  The Dragon’s Mark

  Phantom Prospect

  Restless Soul

  False Horizon

  The Other Crowd

  Tear of the Gods

  The Oracle’s Message

  Cradle of Solitude

  Labyrinth

  Fury’s Goddess

  Magic Lantern

  Library of Gold

  The Matador’s Crown

  City of Swords

  The Third Caliph

  Staff of Judea

  The Vanishing Tribe

  Clockwork Doomsday

  Blood Cursed

  Sunken Pyramid

  Treasure of Lima

  River of Nightmares

  Grendel’s Curse

  The Devil’s Chord

  Celtic Fire

  The Pretender’s Gambit

  Death Mask

  Bathed in Blood

  Day of Atonement

  Beneath Still Waters

  The Mortality Principle

  The Mortality Principle

  THE

  LEGEND

  ...THE ENGLISH COMMANDER TOOK.

  JOAN’S SWORD AND RAISED IT HIGH.

  The broadsword, plain and unadorned,

  gleamed in the firelight. He put the tip against

  the ground and his foot at the center of the blade.

  The broadsword shattered, fragments falling

  into the mud. The crowd surged forward,

  peasant and soldier, and snatched the shards

  from the trampled mud. The commander tossed

  the hilt deep into the crowd.

  Smoke almost obscured Joan, but she continued

  praying till the end, until finally the flames climbed

  her body and she sagged against the restraints.

  Joan of Arc died that fateful day in France,

  but her legend and sword are reborn...

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Epilogue

  1

  The peace was broken by the clatter of a trash can being overturned, which was followed by a burst of laughter.

  Annja Creed glanced out of the window into the road below. Illuminated by the streetlights, a gaggle of young men jostled one another. She couldn’t tell if the shoving was playful or if there was a simmering undercurrent of real violence to it. One thing was for sure, the young men were more than a little the worse for wear from the night’s drinking. Her first thought was that it was the same in cities and towns the world over, but that wasn’t true. This kind of rowdiness, playful or not, wouldn’t happen in a Muslim state, or in places where poverty placed survival above pleasure.

  She wasn’t even sure it would have happened here in Prague thirty years ago. The world had changed just like the regime, and after the first flush of greedy capitalism, Prague settled down to become one of those cities. It promised excitement and just enough culture to satisfy the tourists, whether they came to cast off some imagined loss of freedom that marriage was about to bring, or simply to soak up another way of living.

  For Annja it was simply a case of another city and another hotel room. They all began to bleed together in her mind these days. She couldn’t remember the last time she had slept in her own bed. No, that was a lie; she could remember the last time she’d crawled into it, but she hadn’t actually slept. It had been the night of the big network meeting. Doug Morrell had called her into the office with an ominous message of “Big changes are on the horizon. We need you here, pronto.”

  She’d crossed town to the office, carded her way through security and ridden the express elevator up to the boardroom on the top floor of the skyscraper, every step of the way imagining a worst-case scenario that was just a little bit worse than the last one she’d just imagined.

  She opened the boardroom door to see the army of assembled faces looking up at her, Doug
halfway down the line. He looked like someone had stolen his toys from his stroller. “Miss Creed, good of you to join us. First, let me just say what a huge admirer I am,” one of the nameless suits said, indicating the only empty chair at the table. Annja took her seat, waiting for someone to explain what was going on. “We were just in the middle of discussing corporate restructuring,” the suit went on. “We’ve got some exciting plans for the network.”

  Annja’s mind raced, trying to play catch-up. She really didn’t understand what was happening. Restructuring? Exciting plans?

  “Obviously Chasing History’s Monsters is a bit of a niche program,” another suit spoke up. His thick-knuckled hand was wrapped around a network mug, warming himself. “It’s got a loyal audience, but over the past eighteen months it’s struggled to bring in new viewers, which means it’s struggled to bring in more advertising revenue and basically isn’t paying its way.”

  “In short,” the first suit picked up, “we’re not here to educate the world, we’re here to entertain it, and if we’re not entertaining it, we’re not doing our job properly.”

  The man stared daggers at Doug when he delivered this last line. Annja sensed a serious undercurrent of dislike between the two. It wasn’t simmering so much as threatening to boil over. Somehow Doug managed to keep his mouth shut while the suits took potshots at the program he produced and, by inference, at him.

  “We’ve got a duty to the shareholders,” another voice chimed in. This one was female. Annja turned to look at the woman, realizing that with the exception of Doug, Annja didn’t have a single ally in the room.

  The first suit took that as his cue to drive home the obvious. “Meaning we can’t keep on throwing good money after bad. Chasing History’s Monsters is expensive for what it is. We could just as easily screen episodes we’ve got in the can in the same time slot, given there are almost one hundred now, or alternate them with stuff we can buy in from other networks that come with an established audience.”

  “Are you canceling the show?” Annja asked, sensing where this was going.

  “Not yet,” the suit said, dangling the threat of cancellation like the Sword of Damocles over her head. “But I guess you could say we’re putting you on notice. Things have to change.”

  “Okay, so why am I here? What do you expect me to do?”

  “We want you to justify the money the network is investing in you, Miss Creed,” the fourth and final suit said, speaking up for the first time.

  He was the youngest of the four, Annja observed, no doubt fresh out of some Ivy League school with a point to prove—that point being to tear down everything that had been created and rebuild it from scratch, reinventing the proverbial wheel.

  “We want you to prove to us you’re worth the long-term investment,” he went on, “meaning we want you to go out there and interact, hit the social networks, build up followers on Twitter, post compelling little Vine video hints about what’s coming up to lure people in, use hashtags to get people involved in your investigations, turn the viewers into your army of citizen archaeologists. Make them feel like they are part of the show.”

  “How’s that supposed to work?”

  “Well, one idea we’ve had is live broadcasts,” the woman said, leaning forward. “So they can tweet you with what they want to see happen when it comes to the hunt. Say you’re going after the Amber Room and there are three possible sites you’ve identified. They can vote which one you check out. Or maybe they can Tweet questions at you during live interviews, that kind of thing.”

  “Do you have any idea just how bad an idea that is?” Annja said, shaking her head. She couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing.

  “It doesn’t really matter what you think, Miss Creed. You either find a way to make this work, or you don’t. But if you don’t we’ll be forced to look at the alternatives. Tonight’s meeting was merely a courtesy. We wanted you to understand the orders weren’t coming from Mr. Morrell. He’s fought your corner passionately, but some things are bigger than a mere producer. They come down from on high. In this case, all the way from the top. From the owners themselves. As I said, I’m a huge admirer of yours, Miss Creed. For your sake, I can only hope you’ve got a truly gripping segment lined up.”

  That had been a week ago. Now she was in Prague, unable to sleep, trying to work out how on earth she was going to make these changes work. Part of her wanted to ignore them and just turn in a segment like the hundred other segments she’d turned in, but she knew something like that would just rebound on Doug. It would have been different if it had only been her job on the line, but she wasn’t about to put his in jeopardy, not after hearing how he’d gone to bat for her against the suits. For all that they argued, she knew he was on her side deep down. It was just that sometimes those subterranean depths were somewhere near the earth’s core. She needed to map out a few prerecorded minutes, little minisegments to set up a bigger mystery that could go out live.

  And that thought terrified her: a live feed going out to the world, warts and all, with so many variables she couldn’t possibly hope to control. It wasn’t just about veering off script, either. The suits wanted to set the lunatics loose to run the asylum. Somehow she needed to engineer it so they wound up making the choices she needed them to make, a bit like a magician onstage. It was all about direction and misdirection. Make the masses think you were giving them what they wanted, when really you were giving them what you wanted. Her head ached just thinking about it.

  Annja’s laptop stood on the desk that doubled as a dressing table. The cursor flashed on a blank screen, taunting her. She’d read all the research she had brought with her a dozen times in the past week, and she’d spent days just wandering around the city, getting a feel for the place. The amount of information on the internet about the city was overwhelming. Even when she tried to narrow the search parameters, the amount of data she had to wade through was daunting. She kept finding references to the city being Hitler’s favorite, and how he’d preserved a lot of the Old Town because he wanted to keep it for himself. Every time she saw the same statement it was prefaced with the words little known fact despite that putting the words Hitler and Prague in Google returned several thousand identical little-known facts. For Annja, though, it was all about one thing, one story that had endured so much so it was part of the fabric of the city itself: the golem.

  She’d sketched out brief notes covering myth behind the creation of the creature made of clay and given life by Rabbi Loew, but most of them were nineteenth century legends that claimed the Maharal—Loew—created the golem to defend Prague from anti-Semitic attacks back in the sixteenth century. Of course, now it was virtually impossible to tell how much truth was hidden within those sensationalized tales. As with most European legends, it didn’t take long to isolate the common elements. There were enough of them for her to be sure that they originated from the same source, no matter how fantastical they eventually became.

  Of course, Annja was reasonably sure that what she was chasing this time was nothing more than a feat of deception that had fooled enough people when they needed to be fooled. Illusion was the simplest way to give birth to a legend. It wasn’t so different from the Hans Christian Andersen story of the emperor’s new clothes. You had this miraculous defender of the city only seen by some precious few, but then more and more accounts of sightings started to emerge, not because people had seen the golem but because no one wanted to be the odd one out.

  However, given the additional pressure from on high, the piece on the golem was feeling like fluff, just a filler bit for the show, not an entire segment, and most certainly not enough to make it the focus of a live show. And being live, they wouldn’t be able to pad it with lots of shots of the city. Even if they could have, that would have made the episode about the city not the golem—hardly something that would satisfy the ad-revenue-hungry network executives.

  Eventually she gave up staring at the screen and crawled into the uncomfortable
bed, knowing she needed to grab some sleep if she was going to be good for anything in the morning. Coping with jet lag wasn’t the biggest problem, but even days after the event, being cooped up in a plane always left her feeling restless.

  Her running shoes were still in the bottom of her case.

  She was tempted to get up, get ready and go out for a run. She never felt more alive than when she was running, and these were new streets to pound. The problem was she wouldn’t be able to sleep after that. But maybe that was better than lying in the bed, restless?

  Another noise from the street drew her attention.

  It wasn’t the sound of the group of young men this time, nor was it a single drunk trying to find his way back home.

  She recognized the sounds of violence for what they were. She heard a body fall and was at the window looking out into the near-darkness, unable to make out any sign of movement below. Annja threw the window open. There was nothing to hear but the distance rumble of traffic. No, she realized, under it she could barely make out the slap of a single pair of heavy footsteps moving away.

  Whatever the argument had been, it was over quickly.

  The question was how serious was it on a scale of licking wounds to bleeding out in a gutter?

  In the week she’d been in Prague, she hadn’t had a reason to think of it as a violent city. Sure, its past was rooted firmly in revolution, but she didn’t think of any European city as being any worse than parts of New York or Chicago. That didn’t mean that violence didn’t exist here, just that tourists were kept away from it. Maybe it was the lack of gunfire, which seemed to provide a huge part of the New York night chorus, or the endless cycle of sirens that painted a sensory image of what a violent city ought to be like.

  She waited at the window, listening, but heard neither so assumed the scrap had been fists not firearms.

  The bedside clock flashed a few minutes shy of 3:00 a.m. Sleep still seemed a long way off. Annja turned on the radio, keeping the volume so low the half-whispered voice of the late-night DJ was so quiet it was impossible to tell what language he was speaking between the ripple of easy listening.

  It was enough to lull her to sleep.

  Annja woke to the sound of movement in the corridor outside her room.