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Not anymore.
    The dirt was packed tightly, but once he dug the firstfew handfuls out the rest was easier to break through. The wall, which was only four or five inches thick, three-and-a-half-feet tall and three feet wide, broke apart in chunks, revealing what appeared to be the opening of a tunnel. A piece of rock ripped the skin on his left palm, but he couldn’t stop, he was almost there.
    A gush of cool, stale air rushed toward him.
    Ancient air.
    Sixteen-hundred-year-old molecules and particles filled his lungs, along with the scents of jasmine and sandalwood. He climbed in, despite the claustrophobia that reached out and grabbed hold of him and the out-of-control panic that threatened his progress. Sweating suddenly, now gasping for breath, he desperately wanted to turn around, but the pull of the tunnel was more powerful than the paranoia.
    The space only accommodated him on all fours. So, on his hands and knees, he crawled forward, immediately engulfed in darkness, and sadness crushed him as if the air itself was weighted down with it. He struggled on slowly, going five yards in, ten yards in, then twenty and then twenty-five. The professor continued calling out for Josh to stop, but he couldn’t: there was an end point somewhere up ahead and he needed to reach it.
    He navigated a turn, gulping for air, and froze, incapable of moving. It would be easier to die now than to go forward. Picturing the dirt that surrounded him, he saw it coming loose, breaking free, raining down on him. So real was the manifestation of his fear, he could taste the grit in his mouth, feel it in his nostrils, closing up his throat.
    But something important waited for him up ahead. More important than anything else in the world.
    â€œStop, stop!” Rudolfo yelled, his voice coming from a far distance, distorted and echoing.
    Oh, how he wanted to, but he managed another five yards.
    The professor’s voice reached him, but more faintly now. “What if there is a drop and you can’t see it? What if you fall? I can’t get to you.”
    No, and that was one of the fears that plagued him now. A sudden break, a hollow cave beneath this one, a descent into subterranean darkness.
    He sensed the energy in the tunnel and let it pull him forward. Almost alive, it begged him to come, to come deeper into its shadows, to explore what was waiting, what had been waiting for so damn long.
    â€œCome back at least and get a flashlight…. What you are doing is dangerous….”
    Of course, the professor was right. Josh had no idea what lay ahead, but he was too close now to turn back, not sure that if he did he would find the nerve to start over.
    He moved forward another foot and then he felt it. Something long and hard under his fingers. Trying to identify it through touch, he examined its contours and its circumference.
    A long stick? Some kind of weapon?
    The surface was slightly pitted. It wasn’t wood. Or metal.
    No. He knew through logic and through a primordial instinct.
    It was bone.
    Human bone.

Chapter 5
    New York City—Tuesday, 2:00 a.m.
    F our months after her aunt’s unexpected death from a heart attack, Rachel Palmer learned that a woman who lived in her building was assaulted on the stoop as she fished in her bag for her keys. Much to her chagrin, Rachel couldn’t shake how uncomfortable she felt in the brownstone after that: always looking over her shoulder when she opened the front door, rushing up the stairs, quickly throwing the bolt behind her and never sleeping through the night. When she mentioned that she was going to start looking for another place, her uncle Alex suggested she temporarily move into his palatial duplex at Sixty-Fifth and Lexington.
    Even though he never said it or showed it, she knew he was lonely—Alex and her aunt Nancy had been inseparable the way certain childless couples can be—and even though he was only sixty-two-years old, Rachel sensed it was going