What Time Devours Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART I

  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

  PART II

  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

  PART III

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  CHAPTER 72

  CHAPTER 73

  CHAPTER 74

  CHAPTER 75

  CHAPTER 76

  CHAPTER 77

  CHAPTER 78

  CHAPTER 79

  PART IV

  CHAPTER 80

  CHAPTER 81

  CHAPTER 82

  CHAPTER 83

  CHAPTER 84

  CHAPTER 85

  CHAPTER 86

  CHAPTER 87

  CHAPTER 88

  CHAPTER 89

  CHAPTER 90

  CHAPTER 91

  CHAPTER 92

  CHAPTER 93

  CHAPTER 94

  PART V

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  PRAISE FOR ON THE FIFTH DAY

  “Terrific plotting, first-rate suspense. On the Fifth Day is a ripping good read.”

  —Kathy Reichs, New York Times bestselling author of Cross Bones

  “Not only is Hartley’s novel well paced, with enough twists and turns to keep most thriller fans satisfied, he avoids the missteps of most attempts to cash in on The Da Vinci Code zeitgeist by focusing on the faithful rather than freewheeling conspiracies . . . this slam-bang title is a very fun, surprisingly satisfying read.”—Publishers Weekly

  “Full of historical mystery, rife with intrigue and suspense . . . a tour de force sure to keep pages turning deep into the night . . . A. J. Hartley is a rare discovery: a writer capable of challenging a reader as much as he thrills.”

  —James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of Black Order

  PRAISE FOR THE MASK OF ATREUS

  “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 romance. Deborah Miller is an engaging, sympathetic heroine, 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 Fuzzy Navel

  “Rich with historical and archaeological detail, this well-constructed 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

  “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

  “Absolutely spellbinding . . . Compulsively readable . . . the terrible beauty of ancient Greece collides with the merciless obsessions of the twentieth century.”

  —Eloisa James, New York Times bestselling author

  “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

  THE MASK OF ATREUS

  ON THE fiFTH DAY

  WHAT TIME DEVOURS

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  Published by the Penguin Group

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  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.

  WHAT TIME DEVOURS

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley edition / January 2009

  Copyright © 2009 by A. J. Hartley.

  Al
l 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,

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  eISBN : 978-1-440-66043-6

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  To Bill, Jim, and all the teachers, colleagues, and students

  who have shaped my love of Shakespeare.

  To my wife and son,

  and to the memory of Ira Yarmolenko (1988-2008):

  “I hope that when you are reborn,

  you are born as a snowflake . . .”

  What is love? ’tis not hereafter;

  Present mirth hath present laughter;

  What’s to come is still unsure:

  In delay there lies no plenty;

  Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,

  Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

  —SHAKESPEARE, TWELFTH NIGHT

  PART I

  Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,

  But sad mortality o’er-sways their power,

  How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,

  Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

  O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out

  Against the wreckful siege of battering days,

  When rocks impregnable are not so stout,

  Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?

  O fearful meditation! where, alack,

  Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?

  Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?

  Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

  O, none, unless this miracle have might,

  That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

  —Shakespeare, “Sonnet 65”

  CHAPTER 1

  Thomas Knight froze, one hand on the coffeepot, the other extended to the faucet over the sink. It was still dark outside and the kitchen light should show only a fringe of green from the yew in the yard, but there was something else. Something at the window. He wasn’t sure if he’d gotten a flash of it in the reflection from the percolator, or caught a glimpse with the corner of his eye, but he knew something was there, something strange. Something wrong.

  He stood there motionless for three or four seconds, as if waiting for it to move, but he knew it wouldn’t and that he would have to turn and look directly at it. Right now it was just an impression of colors that shouldn’t be there—a pale oval touched with yellow and red—sharp against the blackness of the yard beyond, but when he looked at it, it would take shape and meaning. He didn’t want to look.

  He turned to it slowly, and even though he wasn’t surprised, the fact of the thing almost made him cry out. A woman’s face was pressed up to the glass.

  Her eyes were wide, like she was staring at him, but Thomas didn’t wave her away, or threaten to call the police. There was something too fixed and vacant about the eyes. They were unaware of him.

  She was standing at the window, he supposed, but there was an awkwardness to her posture and a slight smear of something on the glass: sweat? Makeup? She didn’t move at all, and Thomas took a small, reluctant step toward the window, half hoping the figure would turn out to be some store mannequin, dressed and propped there by one of his more enterprising students as an end-of-term gag.

  But she was real enough. He took two wary steps toward the window.

  The glass reflected black everywhere but where the face was pressed to the window, lit by the kitchen light so it seemed to float like a party balloon. He supposed she was in her late fifties. Her pale skin looked delicate and had the beginnings of translucence. She was expertly made up, her lips a trifle redder than suited her, and her teeth were unnaturally white. But it was the eyes that he couldn’t shake. They were wide, fixed in something that might have been surprise.

  Or terror.

  One was a dull, muddy green, the other an uncanny violet.

  Thomas put down the coffeepot and picked up the wall-mounted phone, his eyes still on the motionless face pressed up against the window, but he didn’t dial. He would go outside first. He needed to know for sure.

  The kitchen had two windows, one facing south—into the backyard—and one facing east, which was where the woman stood. Thomas stepped out into the predawn chill, cinching his bathrobe tighter as he walked barefoot onto the cold path. She wasn’t visible from the front of the house and it was only when he went around the dark yew that grew on the corner and turned down the narrow path between the house and next door’s dense privet hedge that he saw her. She wasn’t standing exactly, which meant that she was rather taller than he had imagined, but was slumped over one of the gold-flecked au-cubas that were planted along the shady foundation. Down here the only light was the startling and flat brilliance of the kitchen window, which had given an unearthly vividness to the woman’s face from inside. Out here the light only brushed a little green and gold over the edges of the aucuba. The woman herself was no more than the silhouette of her head, her body lost in shadow.

  Thomas approached her slowly, watching for movement, anything that would shift the nature of the morning’s strangeness into something more mundane. She could still be just some disturbed old woman who had fixated on his house for reasons known only to herself, and who might yet bustle off muttering incomprehensibly.

  “Excuse me,” he said, and when she didn’t respond, didn’t move at all, he put his hand on her shoulder.

  Then he knew. He felt the cool slickness of fluid on her shaded shoulder and he recoiled.

  Too late. His touch made her shift. She rolled as she fell away from him, and the kitchen light showed the terrible concave shape of the back of her head and the blood that soaked her back like a cloak.

  CHAPTER 2

  Thomas was already two hours late for work but the police were still there. He had recounted every detail of the morning’s grisly discovery but hadn’t had much to offer. No, he had never seen her before, and no, the spot where she was lying was not where he’d found her. She’d fallen when he touched her, and he was sorry for disturbing the crime scene, but he hadn’t been sure she was dead . . .

  He told the story twice, once to a uniformed officer who treated him like some half-wit who had willfully compromised his investigation, and once to a female plainclothes detective called Polinski who was merely efficient. He gathered they didn’t know who the dead woman was.

  “No purse, no credit cards, no ID,” she said. “Mode of attack suggests a mugging.”

  “The mode of attack?” said Thomas, unnerved by his own curiosity, but also trying to suggest he had nothing to do with it. Thomas was a big man, six foot three and broad across the shoulders. People who didn’t know him expected him to be rough, physical. He had noticed a couple of the policemen sizing him up, though he suspected some of them already knew who he was.

  “Looks like she was hit from behind with a half brick. We found it under the hedge. The lab has it now.”

  Chastened, Thomas said nothing.

  They kept him sitting around for another forty-five minutes and then said he could go. When he went back inside to get his things together, he found that his hand was shaking. He checked his face in the mirror. He was pale, dead looking. Suddenly he felt nauseated and ran to the bathroom, but when he got there, nothing happened. He sat for five minutes on the ed
ge of the tub, then drank a long glass of ice water and felt better.

  Thomas dressed for work, feeling the silence of the house now that everyone had left and the strangeness of putting on his tie in the middle of the morning. He wanted to call his wife, Kumi, in Japan, just to listen to the sound of her voice until the world felt closer to normal. It wouldn’t matter what she said. It was enough that they were talking again.

  The wheezy grandfather clock in the hall chimed eleven. He brushed his teeth again, ran his hand over his stubbly chin, and decided to shave. He wasn’t sure why, but it seemed important to go to school looking composed and professional, looking different from the way he felt.

  Perhaps if everyone else assumes it’s an ordinary day, he thought, it will be.

  But it wasn’t an ordinary day and not because of the corpse at his window. In the morning’s chaos, he had forgotten that his early classes had been canceled, and the school had been closed for the Williams memorial. Thomas remembered as soon as he pulled into the empty parking lot behind Evanston Township High School.

  He cursed, turned the car around and drove over to Hemingway Methodist on Chicago where Ben Williams had volunteered in the soup kitchen. The service was already over and people were drifting out, clustered together, so Thomas sat in the car by the curb, radio off. He recognized a lot of the kids, including a number who had graduated five or six years ago, most of them black. Was it that long since Williams had been here? It didn’t seem so, but then it never did, these days. Thomas was thirty-eight and had been teaching high school for a decade. Ben Williams had been twenty-three; a smart, thoughtful, popular kid and a wide receiver for the Evanston Wildkits. He had only joined the National Guard because it helped pay for college. After his tour he had planned to be a teacher, like Thomas. A week ago he had been killed in Iraq. Thomas didn’t know the details.