Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two Read Online Free PDF

cabin and locked that door after himself, too, as he did every night. Even though the Thallians were gone and Kavanaugh didn’t have anything to fear from them any longer, he still didn’t want to discount force of habit. He remembered what they’d done to Lim, Kavanaugh’s engineer from the grave robbing team on the Templar tombworld. A locked door wouldn’t have stopped them, but it might have given Lim enough time to arm himself before they came in to cut him apart.
    Kavanaugh turned on the news in order to have some voices for company as he brushed his teeth and tried to amp down from the day. He told the computer to scan programs in Galactic Standard, switching every minute or so. In this media-saturated galaxy, millions of channels broadcast constantly, but at this hour, celebrity gossip dominated the news. Kavanaugh never paid enough attention to know whom they were gossiping about.
    Just as he was going to shut the screen off, footage of sheer black cliffs scoured by gritty winds caught his eye. He sank down onto his bunk, captured. He didn’t feel homesickness so much—who could feel homesick for that ?—but he had spent a couple of months in that nightmare of wind and obsidian sand. Why, he wondered, would anyone be interested in the Templar tombworld now?
    The cameras panned over the bunkers he and his crew had left behind when Sloane broke down the “archaeological dig” and paid the grave robbers off. Kavanaugh had been only too glad to get off that rock.
    The next video showed a grainy surveillance recording of some human men, dressed in black livery that harkened back to the Imperial days, exploring the bunkers. Kavanaugh had never seen Thallian in person, for which he thanked the stars. The commentator identified the soldiers’ commander as Revan Thallian, older brother of the infamous Jonan, the Imperial diplomat who’d been convicted in absentia of disseminating the Templar plague. Apparently no one knew for certain if Revan had also been involved in the creation or spread of the plague, but he seemed implicated in the genocide as he ordered his men to explore the Templar graves. It was assumed he had also overseen the looting of them.
    Kavanaugh knew the truth of that.
    More grainy surveillance footage followed. Directed by a boy who was obviously yet another Thallian, two soldiers attempted to open one of the tombs. The avalanche that followed was almost too quick to comprehend: first there was a mountain. The men were placing charges to shift the slab that sealed its entryway. Then the men, the slab, and the mountain’s face were gone, buried in a rubbish pile of broken stone.
    Kavanaugh fumbled the bottle of xyshin out of his coat pocket and knocked back a hefty swallow. His hands shook. Then he set the footage to play again.
    While working for Sloane, Kavanaugh and his team had opened more than a dozen Templar tombs. Nothing had ever been booby-trapped. Kavanaugh shuddered at the sight of the death that might have been his.
    The third time he watched the avalanche footage—slowed down as much as he could make it—he recognized the dimly colored Templar characters painted above the tomb’s doorway. The voiceover said it labeled this as the Templar Master’s tomb, the grave of the leader of the Templars at the time of their genocide.
    The tomb was empty, the narrator said. More recent—less grainy—footage showed the plundered tomb as it stood now. The fallen stone had been cleared away, piled neatly on either side of the entryway. The camera moved past the silent heaps of rock and entered the tomb itself, empty save for the lone catafalque in its center.
    The video crew had set fire to a collection of pots around the edges of the room, highlighting the massive tomb’s interior dimensions. The cave was much larger than Kavanaugh had suspected. Its ceiling soared upward inside the mountain, easily twice as high as its diameter.
    “What was here?” the narrator wanted to know. He raised