Phobos: Mayan Fear by Steve Alten Page B

splendor—the Zohar. Knowing the world was not ready for its knowledge, the Rabbi and his disciples hid the sacred text.
    The Zohar would not surface again until the thirteenth century.
    Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai passed away on the thirty-third day of Omer.

    The three Americans hike up the steep mountain trail in single file. The imposing black man takes the lead, followed by the older Caucasian, who arrived in Peki’in two days earlier with a suitcase filled with cash. Both men carry backpacks.
    The third man is far younger—a white man in his early thirties, his dark hair long and ponytailed, his eyes hidden behind tinted sunglasses. Unlike his two older companions, he climbs with an athlete’s grace.
    Mitchell Kurtz feels his sixty-two years as he limps up the path after Ryan Beck. The former CIA assassin’s black beard and mustache have grayed over the last decade, matching his short-cropped hair. At five feet, eight inches and 160 pounds, Kurtz looks anything but dangerous, yet what he lacks in physical stature he more than makes up for in advanced gadgetry and a ruthlessness in using it. Concealed beneath the man’s right sleeve, strapped to his forearm and powered by a waist-worn battery pack, is a pain cannon. Designed for riot control, the weapon fires pulses of millimeter-waves at its target, heating the victim’s flesh as if the subject had just touched a hot lightbulb. The device can scatter every living being within a half-mile radius or deliver a death blow to a specific target a mile away. Kurtz stays in practice by “cooking alley rats.”
    Kurtz’s partner in crime is Ryan Beck, a former star football player whose six-foot, six-inch frame still carries 280 pounds. Though the cleanshaven Beck has lost his edge due to bad knees and his advancing age, his size and martial arts training still render him a formidable opponent.
    Affectionately known as Salt and Pepper, the duo have spent the last fourteen years guarding one client, not for money but out of loyalty, love, and a devout understanding that the younger man they have known since his birth thirty-four years ago may represent their species’s last shot at salvation.

    It is dark by the time they reach the cave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. The mountain air is a chilly fifty-two degrees, the wind howling through the jagged stone opening. Kurtz ducks his head and enters, using the night vision setting in his smart glasses to verify the cave is empty. Beck scans the summit and surrounding hillside with a thermal imager.
    Both men concur they are alone.
    The younger man with the chiseled physique kneels in the coarse sand and closes his azure-blue eyes. Moving into a transcendental state of meditation, he slows his heart and alters the rhythm of his brain, dropping from the faster Beta waves at forty cycles per second into the lower thirteen-hertz Alpha frequency. Descending farther still, he slides into a Theta trance, the electrical signals transmitting between his nerve cells aligning with the electromagnetic waves present in Earth’s atmosphere, which pulsate at a steady 7.8 hertz.
    Registering the electrostatic deviations around the cave, he opens his eyes and points to a “hot spot” located just outside the cavern entrance. “There.”
    The two bodyguards remove telescopic shovels from their backpacks and set to work, digging through the hard-packed sand.
    The younger man peels off his clothing.

    Immanuel Gabriel was born into a maelstrom of chaos. His father, Michael, who “disappeared” days after his conception, had been branded everything from a Mayan messiah to a paranoid schizophrenic. His mother, Dominique Vazquez, became the Mesoamerican Eve to Mick Gabriel’s Adam, her soul mate’s departure leaving her alone to raise Manny and his white-haired, turquoise-eyed twin, Jacob.
    Jacob and Immanuel: the Mayan hero twins.
    One boy fair-haired and empowered with an active post-human gene that rendered him Superman—further convincing