Read Online Phobos: Mayan Fear by Steve Alten - Free Book Online

him he and his brother were the warriors written about in the Mayan Popol Vuh; the other boy dark-haired and troubled, a hybrid who simply wanted to lead a normal life.
    Jake and Manny: yin and yang.
    Polar opposites, sharing a symbiotic relationship. Jacob was a spiritual being trapped in a physical form, his dedication to his “perceived” life’s mission often voiding out his human emotions. Immanuel was the human condition with all its flaws—emotion driven by ego. A blue-collar athlete, Manny had found dynamite in his developing adolescence—a harbor of tranquility where everything slowed down, a state of existence where fulfillment came in abundance and peak performance was ensured.
    Athletes called it the zone.
    Jacob called it the Nexus.
    The Nexus was a higher dimension, an unveiled channel to the Creator’s light. As his alter ego, Samuel “the Mule” Agler, Manny had used the Nexus to score touchdowns and hit tape-measure home runs seemingly at will. The big man on campus at the University of Miami, he had quickly become the most coveted amateur athlete in modern history and a cult hero who could have anything he desired. Fame and fortune rested at his feet, and his ego basked in its glory—
    —his fall from grace all but guaranteed.
    Like every soul intoxicated by power, the Mule fell hard. In the span of a few weeks leading up to his twentieth birthday, the dark-haired Gabriel twin lost his athletic career, his future, his identity, his family … and his fiancée.
    Lauren Beckmeyer was an innocent bystander. A scholar athlete motivated by altruism, she was a young woman with a bright future who had loved “Sam” since their second year together in junior high school. On the fateful early morning of her fiancé’s twentieth birthday she would discover his true identity. Then, only moments after Immanuel Gabriel refused to join his twin brother aboard the starship Balam , Lauren was felled by a sniper’s bullet intended for him.
    Though the killer had been contracted by Lilith Mabus, Manny blamed Lauren’s death on Jacob.
    Suddenly forced into exile, unable to cope with the loss of the only woman he had ever loved, Manny fell into a deep depression that kept Beck and Kurtz on an around-the-clock suicide watch. While Dave Mohr and his wife, Eve, had become surrogate parents to Jacob, they hardly knew Manny, and neither they nor the two bodyguards felt qualified to deal with the despondent twin’s grief. Desperate, they arranged a clandestine reunion between Manny and his foster father, the man who had raised him since his orchestrated death seven years earlier.
    The fugitive twin spent two weeks hiding out with Gene Agler in a motel room in the Pocono Mountains, vocalizing his hatred and contempt for his missing brother, whose insistence upon following the “hero twin legacy” had left his own life shattered.
    Agler consoled his foster son by comparing the Gabriel boys to another famous set of twins. “Sam, I know you’re not religious, but do you remember the story of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? If you recall, Jacob also had a twin brother, Esau.”
    “Esau was like some hairy hunter who wanted to kill his brother after Jacob tricked their father into giving him his birthright.”
    “Basically, yes. But that’s just the simplistic Bible story. There’s a far deeper meaning hidden in the passage. Jacob was attuned to the light of the Creator. Esau, a man of enormous ego, represented the negative side of existence. Esau’s hatred for his twin grew out of jealousy and anger, his internal fire fanned by a voice in his head that cried out, ‘Why isn’t my life perfect? Why must I suffer? Why don’t I have money or wealth or good health?’ It’s a voice attuned to darkness.”
    “Okay, Dad, what are you saying? That I’m the negative twin? That I’m Esau?”
    “Son, the metaphor of Jacob and Esau applies to everyone. Light and darkness cannot coexist in the physical world; enter a dark