Solstice Shadows by Avanti Centrae

Author:Avanti Centrae
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thunder Creek Press
Published: 2020-07-29T09:06:07+00:00

Chapter 46

Istanbul, Turkey

December 23, 10:55 a.m. Eastern European Time

Pyotr looked around the cheap hotel room, his head still hurting from where Lex had knocked him out near that camp in Mexico. Why had the man stolen his phone and not killed him? Professional courtesy? Perhaps. But now he owed the guy, and he hated owing anyone. At least he’d been able to keep the concussion hidden from the baron.

He was sitting in an overstuffed armchair near a pane of glass that let in the gray light of a Turkish morning. It was a cold, cloudy day and the window was dirty, but the small sliver of lorandite still gleamed red in his hand.

On the desk stood his new phone with the GPS monitoring app that he’d used to follow Anu Kumar here to Istanbul. Thanks to the SVR’s interception of the Marshall woman’s text conversation with her ex-boyfriend, he’d been able to beat them to Chichén Itzá. Realizing it would be near impossible to isolate and kidnap Marshall, he’d chosen the archeoastronomer as a way to follow the group. The GPS gadget was from the team back in Russia, who had stocked him with a detection-proof implant—new tech that supposedly noticed if a sweeper wand was nearby and turned itself off.

At the moment, the monitoring map showed that they were several blocks down the street, probably in a CIA safe house.

He turned back to the lorandite spike in his palm. He loved technology, but also loved ancient mysteries, like this tiny piece of mysterious material. The crimson shard, about fifteen centimeters long and half a centimeter wide, was sharp at both ends. He felt the points. Quite sharp.

From his helicopter all those months ago, he’d seen the balls of lightning the baron had told him were caused by this material. Perhaps the stuff was even the source of his father’s death. Pyotr knew that what they hunted was a much larger mass of it, maybe a meteorite that had fallen to earth millennia ago.

But what made it remarkable was that when he closed his fingers around it, he could feel it pulse.

Not a rapid movement. Instead it felt like holding the slow, steady rhythm of his own heartbeat in his hand. Fascinating. For years, he had trained with the ultra-dark forces of the Soviet military machine, his life given away at a young age. His father had used him as a pawn in his quest to gain standing with the military, to earn trust, and that had meant endless exercises. Esoteric yogic rituals to stay warm while immersed in ice. Attempts at remote killing while having an out-of-body experience. The last had never worked for anyone, top secret CIA Stargate program included, but he was good at most of the other dark arts. How, then, did one create ball lightning with this lorandite?

Soviet scientists who had studied the material didn’t understand much about ball lightning, and even questioned its very existence. Pyotr had seen it, though, and knew it was real.

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