On the Fifth Day Read online

  On the Fifth Day

  A. J. Hartley

  New York : Berkley Pub., 2007. (2010)

  Rating: ****

  Tags: Fiction, Thrillers, Fiction - Espionage, Thriller, American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +

  * * *

  EDITORIAL REVIEW:

  The death of a priest is met with suspicion by his brother Thomas, who knows that his sibling died while researching Christian symbols. But Thomas and curator Deborah Miller aren't alone in retracing the priest's final steps. They're followed by fanatics desperate to hide the secret stumbled upon by Thomas's brother-and willing to kill to keep it buried forever.

  On the Fifth Day

  Book Jacket

  Rating:

  Tags: Fiction, Thrillers, Fiction - Espionage, Thriller, American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +

  EDITORIAL REVIEW:

The death of a priest is met with suspicion by his brother Thomas, who knows that his sibling died while researching Christian symbols. But Thomas and curator Deborah Miller aren't alone in retracing the priest's final steps. They're followed by fanatics desperate to hide the secret stumbled upon by Thomas's brother-and willing to kill to keep it buried forever.

  ON THE

  Fifth Day

  A. J. Hartley

  b

  BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK

  P R A I S E F O R

  On the Fifth Day

  "A. J. Hartley is a rare discovery: a writer capable of chal

  lenging a reader as much as he thrills. His latest novel, On the Fifth Day, careens at a breathless pace from dark crypts to exotic sunlit shores. Full of historical mystery, rife with intrigue and suspense, here is a tour de force sure to keep pages turning deep into the night."

  --James Rollins, New York Times

  bestselling author of Black Order

  P R A I S E F O R

  The Mask of Atreus

  "An exhilarating thriller rooted in the dark side of history and myth. Enormously entertaining. Reading The Mask of Atreus is like looking down a very dark and very scary tunnel--you have no idea what's looking back, waiting to pounce. Hartley is one terrific writer."

  --Jeff Long, New York Times

  bestselling author of The Wall

  "This is exactly the kind of archaeological thriller I love--

  from its gripping opening on a battlefield in the waning days of World War II to its roaring finish. The Mask of Atreus is rich and dramatic--a compelling novel that will grip you in its swift, dark currents and sweep you over the falls . . . outstanding."

  --Douglas Preston, author of

  The Codex and Tyrannosaur Canyon c o n t i n u e d . . .

  "Rich with historical and archaeological detail, this wellconstructed debut . . . celebrates the power of legend while delivering an engrossing mystery that skips nimbly between continents and cultures. . . . This intricate and absorbing thriller augurs well for Hartley's career."

  --Publishers Weekly

  "Absolutely spellbinding . . . Compulsively readable . . . the terrible beauty of ancient Greece collides with the mer

  ciless obsessions of the twentieth century."

  -- Eloisa James, New York Times bestselling author

  "The Mask of Atreus is the perfect debut--a high-octane thriller crammed full of long-buried secrets, treacherous betrayals, jaw-dropping twists, and a healthy dash of ro

  mance. Deborah Miller is an engaging, sympathetic hero

  ine, who you can't help but root for. Move over Michael Crichton--A. J. Hartley is right at your heels."

  --J. A. Konrath, author of

  Whiskey Sour and Bloody Mary

  "Reminiscent of the best Dan Brown intrigues."

  --The Charlotte Observer

  "Intriguing. A labyrinth of history and mystery."

  --Steve Berry,

  New York Times bestselling author of The Templar Legacy

  "I find The Mask of Atreus engaging because it's a rare accomplishment: a genuinely thrilling thriller that's also intelligent and brilliantly written. They said it couldn't be done." --Phillip DePoy, author of The Fever Devilin Mysteries

  "Terrific . . . A. J. Hartley provides a fabulous whodunit made fresh by its deep historical and archaeological base and an endearing heroine."

  --Midwest Book Review

  Titles by A. J. Hartley

  on the fifth day

  the mask of atreus

  ON THE

  Fifth Day

  A. J. Hartley

  b

  BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi--110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Unless otherwise noted, all scripture references are taken from the King James Version of the Bible. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  ON THE FIFTH DAY

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author Copyright (c) 2007 by A. J. Hartley.

  Interior text design by Stacy Irwin.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions. For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 1-4362-4773-X

  BERKLEY(r)

  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY(r) is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. The "B" design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc. To Finie,

  ever graceful and unbowed.

  PROLOGUE: THE WRATH OF GOD

  He would have to go back to the village soon. He had been swimming for almost an hour, and though it had been little more than languid floating about, he was getting tired. The moon was up, and while he had gotten used to the darkness of both sky and sea, he couldn't help an occasional shudder that could not be blamed on the warm oil-like water. The sea was extraordinarily calm, the waves unwinding onto the shore so softly that he barely heard them over the sound of his own breathing and the slow, rolling splash of his breaststroke. He would have to go back to the village, and tomorrow he would have to go home. Whatever he had sought in these tropical is

  lands, he hadn't found it.

  Except that that wasn't entirely true. He hadn't found wh
at he had been looking for, but he had, perhaps, found something else in the silent tranquility of the sea these past three nights. He was going to have to abandon his search--his quest, he thought of it, always with mixed emotions--but his time on the island might make that a little easier, might stay the nag

  ging, driving impetus to bring him back here, or drive him somewhere else.

  But where else was there to go? If it wasn't here, maybe it wasn't anywhere.

  It wasn't a thought he had permitted himself to consider before, and he smiled to himself, rolling onto his back and staring up at the stars, clustered in their millions in ways he had never been able to see in the States. Given time, he thought, he could probably count them . . .

  He allowed himself to drift on the current, feeling the wa

  ter chill beneath him as the beach shelved fast away, kicking suddenly, propelling himself out to the thin outcrop of rock that tapered into the sea like the tail of some great volcanic lizard. He remembered the hope--no, the conviction--he had 2

  A. J. Hartley

  felt surging through him when he first saw that jagged spit of stone: surely it would be here.

  But there had been nothing, and his meager resources were long exhausted.

  Normally the bay would be dotted by the lanterns of sim

  ple fishing boats, but tonight he was alone as he had been for the previous two evenings, made king of the sea by the locals'

  blend of commonsense science and a whiff of superstition. He could swim here for another week and have the horizon to himself. But what would be the point . . . ?

  He felt the movement in the water beneath him like a sixth sense. For a second he thought something had touched him, but it hadn't been that. Something had glided past him. Some

  thing big.

  His unease about the dark, the stories of sharks and stranger creatures heard in half-translated snatches from the villagers, all came rushing over him in a second. He righted himself, treading water vigorously, getting his bearings, figuring out which way would get him most quickly to land. He struck out for the rocks.

  He had swum a few yards before the initial panic subsided. He could see nothing in the water around him, no sign of any

  thing moving, no sign that there ever had been. He breathed, stilled himself, and laughed once into the blackness overhead. His imagination--always overactive, as his superiors were fond of pointing out--was playing tricks on him. He swung around and took two gentle strokes toward the beach, wonder

  ing vaguely how far out of his depth he was. He pointed his toes, held his breath, closed his eyes, and thrust himself down as far as he could go, his arms up over his head. He hit something solid about two feet below him, but it wasn't rock, and it wasn't sand. It shifted when he made con

  tact, but only slightly. It was big and hard and almost sus

  pended motionless beneath him in the deep black water. Shark?

  No. Sharks swim. They move constantly. They have to or 3

  O n t h e F i f t h D a y

  they drown. This . . . whatever it was, was just hanging there in the water, as if it were chained to the bottom. All his panic returned and he shot up from the water gasp

  ing for air as if he had been under for minutes. As soon as he broke the surface he started to swim, harder than ever, turning for the beach and the village beyond.

  He struck out as far as he could reach, pushing the water with his hands and pulling back so hard that he lifted chest and shoulders out of the water with each surging stroke. Maybe he should have made for the rocks. The beach was farther and there would be no hurried dragging himself up onto land: This way he would have to swim the whole way, then stagger with agonizing slowness through yards of waistdeep water . . . So he swam, knowing he was already losing energy, that he couldn't possibly sustain this sprint for the shore, that if something was swimming there with him it would be faster than he could ever be. But as each second went by without teeth tearing at him from underneath, he took another breath and kicked forward once more.

  The moon lit the beach a soft blue-white, distant and sur

  real now that the idyllic tropical scene had shifted into this cu

  riously nightmarish register. It seemed impossibly far away, but whatever he had touched did not lunge, did not bite, did not appear to follow, and he kept going, flailing blindly now, all grace gone from his stroke. He had left his composure out there in the open water, and now there was only panic and the desperate will to live . . .

  It felt like minutes but it could have been only seconds be

  fore his foot hit the sandy bottom. He tried to run, but the wa

  ter was chest deep, and with something like despair he returned to swimming, almost crying out with the frustration of it all. Then his knee touched the seafloor and he straightened up, leaping forward with great lumbering strides, each time ex

  pecting something snapping at his heels. Then sand, the night air on his body, and he was out, staggering drunkenly up the 4

  A. J. Hartley

  pale beach, laughing at his escape, finally permitting the idea that there was really nothing out there at all, that he had imag

  ined the whole thing. His brain teemed with possibilities: a fallen palm tree, the sunken hull of a small boat, a crippled marker buoy . . .

  It was only then that he turned. He wasn't sure why but he didn't like the sense of the sea at his back. It was quickly clear why.

  For a second he just stared, unable to believe what he was seeing, and then, with a dull dread mixed with a strange exhil

  aration, he began to run toward the distant thatch of the village. He had been right. All the time. He had been right. He was shouting now, fear and excitement merged as he ran from the beach, calling to the firefly lights of the village. Now he would be able to tell them. All of them. Now they would see and the world would change.

  He was thinking this, still running in his rapturous terror, as he reached the first bamboo hut, and it was still there in his head as that hut, and every other hut in the village was sud

  denly sucked upward in a great white flash that lifted him and every sleeping soul high into the air and then scattered them with an unspeakable violence. The sound came a half second later, a vast cannon shot that shook the very air, turning into a low dragging roar.

  When it finally subsided, when the waves lapping at the shore ceased to boil, when silence once more descended on the blackened beach and the once fertile land above it, the vil

  lage and everyone in it had ceased to exist.

  PART I

  MY BROTHER'S

  KEEPER

  Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord,

  Lord, hear my voice.

  O let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleading. If you, O Lord, should mark our guilt,

  Lord, who would survive? . . .

  Because with the Lord there is mercy and fullness of re

  demption.

  --Psalm 130:1-4,

  The Liturgy of the Hours, Psalter (Grail) version (London: Collins, 1963).

  CHAPTER 1

  Thomas Knight had his desk cleared out in five minutes. He had never kept much that was personal there anyway. He sep

  arated out his own books--a complete Shakespeare, an overly selective sampling of the Romantics, some Austen, Dickens, and the Stephen King and J. K. Rowling with which he lured the kids to reading--and tossed them in a sagging cardboard box which wouldn't close.

  At least there was no one he had to break the news to, he thought. Not now.

  For the same reason that there's now no job?

  Not entirely, he answered himself. That was a totally differ

  ent set of screwups.

  Thomas grinned bleakly, got his arms under the box, and walked the interminable length of corridor that took him past the gym and the faculty lounge, eventually dumping him out in the parking lot and unemployment. He said his farewells to Frank Samuels, the impossibly ancient janitor who was
smok

  ing by the Dumpster, laughing loudly and shaking Samuels's hand with a tad too much vigor in case anyone was watching. Then he walked to his car through the snow, whistling tune

  lessly as if it were just another day, as if he hadn't a care in the world--both of which were true, he reminded himself, if not helpfully so. At least the media had gone.

  On the way home he picked up a liter of cheap scotch in a plastic bottle at Toni's on Old Orchard and wished the clerk good night.

  "Same to you, Mr. Knight," said the clerk, simulating the manner of someone who hadn't seen him for weeks, and might go longer before seeing him again.

  Thomas picked up a pizza for dinner at Carmen's and drove home through the deepening twilight of Evanston's heavily wooded streets, his outrage sliding further into a familiar sense 8

  A. J. Hartley

  of stupidity and failure. He went running to get it all out of his head.

  He ran badly--even when he had been in the best shape of his life--and he hated every step, lumbering along the treach

  erous sidewalks like a sloth on skates. Running bored him and always had, though he usually got the payoff of feeling vaguely virtuous. This time he couldn't shake the day, the memory of which lumbered after him like a lost wolfhound. His firing had been coming for a long time. Peter, the high school principal (Thomas thought of him as a cartoon squir

  rel: Peter the Principal) had given him chance after chance, and he had blown each one like a man carefully dynamiting bridges behind him. Maybe Peter wasn't the only cartoon character in the scenario.

  He wheezed his way home; showered; ate the pizza, which was by far the best part of the last twelve hours; and started on the whiskey. By eight o'clock he had drunk almost a quarter of it, a dangerous amount. He drank from good crystal, two rocks per glass, and he sipped rather than throwing it back, but did so steadily, with barely a pause between mouthfuls or, for that matter, between glasses. The glass had been part of a wedding present, he thought, considering it, like some appraiser on An

  tiques Roadshow speculating about some lost era. At ten o'clock he stumbled into the bathroom, collected every pill he could find, and dumped them all into another whisky tumbler, which he set on the coffee table beside his leather armchair. The mundane--white and brown and red and yellow--were mixed with the exotic--translucent, iridescent caplets of neon blue and green. They were mainly ibuprofen and aspirin, but some were of more obscure purpose which he had long forgotten. Cold medicine? Laxatives?