The Cross of the Empress

A hidden Byzantine relic.
A colonial government conspiracy.
A Filipina professor and a German spy.
And a desperate race to prevent a cataclysmic event...

For seven centuries, the dense, igneous heart of Mt. Banahaw, in northern Philippines, has guarded an impossible engine: the Vera Crux. This medieval Byzantine invention of subterranean high-density mineral has secretly dictated the spiritual and geo-political lanes of the Orient long before western ships breached the Pacific.

1929. As the crude electrical current from Manila's new power grid extends towards the fault lines along the mountain's slopes, a merciless ancient cult of assassins emerge from the shadow, bent on commandeering the relic's petrified core and splicing it to modern technology...so that it might forever bind the sovereign longitudes of the young Philippine Commonwealth to the coffers of international trading companies.

Bearing only their dead ancestor's cryptic, arcane navigational charts, anthropology scholar Dr. Kristina Salvador teams up with Reinhard Bauer, a battle-scarred German operative haunted from the trench-war nightmares of WWI. Their adventure plunges them deep into a thrilling techno-archaeological maze of bloody antiquity, coded imperial ciphers and indigenous traps wherein one error in judgment will set off the apocalyptic, volcanic forces.

Blending coded historical cryptography with high-octane adventure, this heart-pumping thriller challenges one terrifying question: Will two ordinary, avant-garde adventurers successfully unravel the ultimate mystery of the ancient world, hidden inside the jungles of the Orient, before the vengeful forces of the enemy unleash their dark vendetta that will reshape history forever?