PROLOGUE
Jerusalem, Temple Mount — Friday, 3:33 a.m.
The man walked barefoot across the freezing stone slabs, as if the cold could not touch
him. He wore a white tunic down to his ankles and a red cord tied around his waist. In
his right hand he held a black obsidian knife that gleamed under the full moon.
No one saw him enter. At exactly 3:13, all the Waqf security cameras shut down
simultaneously. The guards slept a sleep far too deep to be natural.
The man knelt exactly where the Holy of Holies had once stood. From his pocket, he
took out a small baked-clay seal—ancient—bearing the first symbol John saw in
heaven: a white horse and its rider holding a bow.
He pressed it firmly against his own bare chest. He raised the knife.
And drove it into his heart without letting out a single scream.
When the sun came up, the first tourists screamed in horror.
On the corpse, burned into the skin, shone the mark of the first Seal of the Apocalypse.
In his right hand he still clutched a parchment written in his own blood:
"Six remain."
CHAPTER 1
Madrid, Chamberí District — Sunday, 48 hours laterRebeca Neuman woke up with a start, her heart pounding in her throat. The same
nightmare again: Damascus, the explosion, the blinding light, and the One who spoke
her name in perfect Hebrew before everything went black.
The digital clock read 3:33. Always 3:33.
Her phone vibrated on the nightstand. Blocked number. One single file: a photograph.
She opened it.
A dead man on the Temple Mount. Chest split open. A burned mark she recognized
instantly—because she had seen it in her dreams for five years.
The first seal.
Below the image, a short message:
You are the seventh. Run.