 Kelly's teammate, Sloane, attempts to kill Kelly to be the sole person who can claim the find, not suspecting what Kelly has learned about the fungal infection, and neither parties realizing until very late that they are being tracked by contemporary practitioners of the cult, who have enhanced their ability to stalk and fight with traditional hallucinogens such as psilocybin, mescaline, and datura.The character of Nora Kelly is modeled on the amateur archaeologist and writer Nora Benjamin Kubie, grandmother of Lincoln Child.Bill Smithback, the journalist hired to chronicle the expedition, previously appeared in Preston and Child's Aloysius Pendergast series, and is revealed to have achieved some level of fame based on his novelization of the events depicted in "Relic" and "Reliquary".