Mutation

by Michael McBride

  Kelly allowed her gaze to linger on the dandelions growing from the tarmac before entering a hangar that looked like it would be leveled by a stiff breeze, assuming the rust didn’t finish the job first. A maze of water-damaged wooden crates led to an interior wall that looked like any other, with the exception of the retina scanner concealed inside the rusted breaker box.

  She allowed the laser to do its thing and stepped back. The false wall receded and slid to the side, revealing a stainless-steel elevator. There were no buttons, only a microphone that received voice commands and translated them into a digital sound wave on the embedded screen. Not only did the security system analyze the voiceprint as a secondary form of authentication, but there were also sensors in the ceiling that measured body heat and scanned for infectious biological agents. She didn’t know exactly what would happen if someone were to trigger the fail-safes, but the aerial dispersion nozzles weren’t so well hidden that she couldn’t make an educated guess.

  The door closed behind her. She turned to face the mirror-like surface and spoke to her reflection.“Level One.”

  She still wasn’t used to the silver-lavender hair or the brick-red eye shadow, but those weren’t the only reasons she felt like she was confronting a stranger. It was almost a relief when the door opened upon the brightly lit, sterile corridor. She could hear Roche snoring from behind the closed door of the conference room, but headed for her office instead.

  Tess was sitting on the wrong side of her desk with her back to the door when Kelly entered. For as much time as both of them spent down here, they were rarely in the office at the same time. Or maybe they were so lost in their own work that they didn’t even notice when the other was in the room.

  Kelly noticed the picture on the screen in front of Tess and couldn’t help but smile.

  “He got to you, too,” she said.

  “Who did?” Tess asked. Her eyes were bloodshot when she turned around.

  “Martin.”

  “What do you mean ‘got to me’?”

  Kelly gestured to the monitor.

  “Duh . . . the crop circle.”

  “That’s not what this is. It’s the tattoo from the body Anya found in the tomb in Mosul.”

  “I don’t know about that, but I can tell you with complete certainty that what you’re looking at there, that design? It’s a crop circle from Alton Barnes, Wiltshire. Martin had pictures of all of them hanging on the walls of his workshop in England.”

  “You’re sure it’s the same design,” Tess said.

  “I guess I couldn’t swear to it in a court of law, but I know someone who could.”

  Tess was already on her feet when Kelly turned and headed down the hallway toward the conference room outside of Director Barnett’s office, which apparently moonlighted as Roche’s new home. He didn’t even stir when she opened the door. He was curled up on his side with his face to the cushions and his left arm pinning a pillow over his head. She felt awful about waking him since she knew how little sleep he was getting, but he was going to want to see this.

  She placed her hand on his shoulder and gently shook him.

  “Martin?”

  Another shake and he rested his hand on top of hers. Softly. He mumbled something and rolled onto his back. A contented smile formed on his face, only the bottom half of which was visible beneath the pillow.

  “There you are,” he whispered and drew her hand to his chest.

  “Martin?”

  His expression suddenly changed, and he bolted from the couch so quickly he nearly knocked her over.

  “What’s wrong? Did they find Zeta?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Kelly said. “There’s something we need to show you.”

  Roche nodded and followed them back down the hallway, rubbing his eyes the whole way. He recognized the design the moment they entered Kelly’s office.

  “Alton Barnes, Wiltshire. July 11, 1990.”

  “Was I right or what?” Kelly said.

  “But what does it mean?” Tess asked. “That was thousands of years after the body was tattooed.”

  “What body?” Roche asked.

  Kelly called down to the VR lab while Tess explained how she had isolated the tattoo from the raw data used to build the virtual re-creation of the tomb in Iraq and how Anya and Jade believed the design had been deliberately inflicted upon the remains as a warning to whoever discovered them. By the time she was done, Anya and Jade had arrived, with Evans in tow.

  “We can only guess at its true meaning,” Roche said. “It doesn’t match the physical representation of a sound frequency, like the crop circles that helped open the temple in Antarctica, nor does it appear to be the key to solving a maze. Researchers have theorized everything from a form of communication similar to Morse code to a chemical formula of some kind.”

  Tess furrowed her brow for a moment, then rushed around her desk and printed out a copy of the tattoo. “What about a map?” She stood beside the monitor that showed the design Subject Z had carved into the walls of the cavern that served as its cage and held up the paper beside it, but there wasn’t a match. “I thought maybe . . .”

  She set the printout aside, returned to the monitor, and leaned on the backs of the chairs between Roche and Jade.

  “What are your thoughts, Anya?” Roche asked.

  “I’ve been looking into every style of writing from that time frame, but all of them are of a linear style derived from cuneiform. I can’t find a single one that uses anything resembling circles, let alone different variations of them.”

  “Jade?”

  “I’m convinced the design was tattooed within days—at most—of the man’s death. The wounds appear to have been inflicted more recently than those on his hands and wrists.”

  “So you’re convinced it’s a message,” Roche said.

  “Stands to reason,” Evans said. “What we don’t know, however, is whether or not those remains were interred before or after the creatures were sealed inside with whatever virus killed them.”

  Kelly picked up the paper and stared at the design. Her left hand fretted faster and faster at her side, as though a physical manifestation of her thought processes. Previous crop circles had helped them decode special sound frequencies and guided them to a sarcophagus containing a potentially alien life-form nearly identical to the one in Iraq, and just like the one Subject Z had liberated from Antarctica upon its escape. The idea that this design might be a map wasn’t so far-fetched, but she feared they lacked the skills to interpret it.

  She tuned out the others and went to her workstation. The monitors still displayed detailed images of South America beside a map of various major and minor fault lines and areas of tectonic activity. She used the mouse to expand the map, highlighted an area over the Middle East, and zoomed in until she was able to see the city of Mosul. The screen was just bright enough to show through the paper when she pressed it against the monitor. She placed the largest circle over the city, but all of the other circles aligned with locations in the middle of nowhere. The slope of the horizontal line—straight in the middle and curved downward at either end—roughly approximated the course of the Zagros Mountains, which ran through northern Iraq and into southern Turkey. The same was true of the Bitlis Suture of the Arabian Tectonic Plate that had helped to form them. If she aligned the dots and the line connecting them with the fault line—

  And then she saw it.

  If she placed the smaller dot offset to the right—the one that looked like a bull’s-eye—on top of Mosul, the remainder followed the fault line. One of the circles almost aligned with the city of Nusaybin, another with Gaziantep, but the remainder fell upon nothing. She’d been so sure . . .

  “Can you bring up another map?” Evans asked from behind her.

  Kelly glanced back and saw the excitement on his face.

  “Of course. Anywhere on Earth.”

  “How about any time?”

  She stared at him curiously for a moment b
efore she realized what he was thinking and bent over her keyboard.

  “How far back?” she asked.

  “Jade?” Evans said.

  “Three, maybe four thousand years,” Jade said.

  Evans turned back to Kelly, who was already typing. A search returned maps from ancient Sumer, Akkadia, Assyria, and Babylon. She clicked on the one closest to the time frame of interest and transferred it to the big screen. The matches were apparent for all to see. She held up the printout, which, after shrinking the map just a touch, aligned perfectly.

  The bull’s-eye didn’t correspond with Mosul, but rather the ancient city of Nineveh. The small dot beside it was Kalah. The larger circles represented Gozan, Haran, and Karkemish. The trailing dots at the far left aligned with Arpad, Ebla, and Charqar. Only the central circle inside the ring didn’t match a city on the archaic map, which didn’t seem to bother Evans at all. If anything, his smile had grown even wider.

  “What?” Kelly asked.

  “Anyone else up for a trip to Turkey?”

  7

  ARELLANO

  22 miles south of Calamar,

  Colombia

  What passed for a road was actually a dry riverbed that became impassible by vehicle during the wet season. It was barely wider than the panel truck’s tires, which bounced unevenly over the smooth stones. The suspension screamed and the overhanging branches scratched the sides of the cargo hold with a constant screeching sound. Precious little moonlight penetrated the dense canopy, barely enough to limn the damp rocks and the broad leaves of the rubber and palm trees with an almost ethereal glow. He’d driven this route enough times to know it by rote, not that it was really such an amazing accomplishment. Once the tires were slotted between the banks, there was nowhere to get back out until he reached the camp.

  The men waiting for him were the reason Emilio Arellano had lost his faith in humanity. He was a minor criminal by comparison, an opportunist, little more than a scavenger picking at the carcass of their excess. These men, on the other hand, were a different breed of monster that had risen from the vacuum of power created by the fall of the Medellín Cartel and the wars between the Colombian military and various guerilla factions. Bloque Meta had learned savagery from the Mexican cartels and greed from the privatized corporations that controlled the main shipping ports, a fact that necessitated a measure of creativity when it came to the distribution of its product, which was where Arellano came in.

  There was really no such thing as interstate trucking in this part of the world. Prohibitive taxes, geography, and border hassles made it more trouble than it was worth, except for the few Panamanian companies that imported the American agricultural products that accounted for nearly three-quarters of Colombia’s imports. While the majority entered by sea, a growing portion arrived via the Panama Canal thanks to recent construction that increased its size to accommodate neo-Panamax bulk container carriers that could haul more than twice as much cargo, which allowed for the consolidation of shipping lanes between the American East Coast and Asia. The massive ships barely paused long enough to unload a fraction of their tonnage onto docks bristling with cranes, where Arellano waited patiently with his refrigerated truck.

  He loaded the tripe into the back, drove to Colón, where he boarded one of the RORO—roll-on/roll-off—barges to bypass the Darién Gap, and delivered it to a wholesale warehouse in Barranquilla. The men who unloaded his truck didn’t even take the time to hose out the bed before packing it full of coffee beans and bananas and sending him on his way back to Cartagena, where he would drive onto another RORO bound once more for Panama. The overwhelming scents of blood and coffee beans confounded the dogs in the port and the guards had dealt with him so many times that they were on a first-name basis. There was no reason for them to open up the back and dig through the enormous stacks of beans and bananas for the bricks of cocaine hidden at the back, which would be halfway around the world in another seventy-two hours.

  Arellano caught a flicker of light from the corner of his eye, but by the time he turned it was gone. He shouldn’t have been close enough to see their bonfire yet. He was still at least five minutes out. Come to think of it, though, he should have seen the sentries posted beside the dry riverbed by now. Maybe they were getting better at hiding, although he’d always figured that the presence of hardened men with AK-47s was meant more as a show of force than an early warning system.

  Another flash of light from the dense jungle.

  It almost looked like the discharge of an automatic weapon in the distance. He rolled down his window and listened, but couldn’t hear a blasted thing over the sound of the branches raking the sides of his truck. Firing off a few drunken rounds was one thing, but if they were executing someone in that camp, he wanted no part of it. He’d watched them flay his predecessor before dousing him with gasoline, setting him on fire, and kicking him while he crawled through the dirt, bleating like a dying goat. That had been more than enough to convince Arellano not to skim so much as a single gram. Hell, he didn’t even pinch the occasional banana anymore, which was probably why they left him to his business when he arrived. Either that or they didn’t want him getting a good look at any of their faces, which was totally fine by him. The less he knew, the more valuable he was.

  He smelled the smoke from the fire before it materialized from the darkness. The surrounding rubber trees concealed the old guerilla training camp of the AUC—United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia—until he was nearly on top of it. The windows of the wooden buildings were boarded over to conceal the electric lights inside. The chugging of the gas generator sounded labored and issued a plume of black smoke that clung like a mist to the bare ground at the bend. His tires thumped on the wooden ramp, which always made snapping sounds, yet somehow miraculously held the truck’s weight.

  He pulled in beside the firepit, then backed around it until his tailgate faced the door of the nearest structure.

  “¡Hola!” he called out the window. He killed the engine, opened his door, and hopped down into the dirt. “Estoy aqui para recoger mi entrega.”

  He closed his door. The echo sounded almost like a gunshot. He walked around to the rear, unlocked the hatch, and swung open the twin doors. Several bunches of bananas fell to the ground at his feet. He brushed them off on his shirt before returning them to their overturned crates and once more stacking them neatly. He pulled out the ramp, climbed inside, and made a path through his cargo so he could reach the deepest part of the bed, where the leftover blood had already summoned damn near every fly in the jungle.

  “¡Estoy listo!” he shouted.

  Arellano was torn between wanting to make sure they knew he was here and trying to keep from startling someone who might have had a little too much to drink and his finger a little too close to the trigger. Between the women processing the coca leaves, the guards, and the supervisory honchos, there had to be at least a dozen people in the camp at any given time, sometimes even more if he counted the men he occasionally heard crying from the stables, begging for their lives to be spared.

  Not tonight, though. Everything was silent. Only the crackling and popping of the logs in the firepit.

  He didn’t have all night. He needed to have his cargo in Colón in less than sixteen hours if they hoped to get the loads sorted and into the proper containers without arousing suspicion. He’d gotten used to making up the time on the road from Calamar to Cartagena, but this old truck could only go so fast. Probably best to just go ahead and start loading. Surely someone would return at any minute. The last thing he wanted was to go looking for them and stumble blindly upon them while they were immolating some poor bastard.

  The door to the processing room was closed. He knocked and waited for a response. The women inside worked in the nude so they could be trusted not to steal from their employers, who deliberately hired the most unattractive specimens they could find to make sure business and pleasure never conflicted. The arrangement made him uncomfortable, even though
he did his best not to let his gaze wander, which applied equally to everywhere in the camp.

  When no one answered, he entered and immediately turned to his left, where the bricks were wrapped in duct tape, stacked from the floor to the ceiling, and sorted by load. Each had a series of numbers and letters for tracking purposes. He identified his load, grabbed as much as he could carry, and hustled it out to his truck. Thumped up the ramp, traversed the narrow aisle, and started stacking. Went back inside for more. One trip after another until each of the rear corners had a collection of bricks stacked ten wide, ten deep, and ten high. He draped the cargo nets attached to the frame over them and slid the bagged coffee beans up against them to hold them in place.

  Arellano had thought for sure someone would have acknowledged him by the time he was done securing his load. He probably would have been fine just driving away, but he knew he’d spend every waking second between now and his next pickup stressing over the consequences of potentially having violated some unwritten protocol. Better to just track someone down now and hope to God they weren’t in a trigger-happy mood. Surely, he could avoid any confrontation by simply asking one of the women laboring inside to pass along his message. The men would appreciate him not interrupting whatever they were doing. Or so he convinced himself.

  He headed back into the building, only this time he passed the room filled with cocaine, turned right toward the production center—

  And stopped dead in his tracks.

  Crimson spatters stood apart from the scattered cocaine like roses in a snowstorm. The woman sprawled in the mess looked like she’d been attacked by a wild animal. Her back had been opened to expose the crescents of her ribs and the knobs of her spine. The curtains that served as a door to the storage room in the back stood open, revealing arcs of blood draining down the wall above the drums of caustic lime and gasoline.

  He opened his mouth to cry out, but clapped his hands over it before he could do so. Whoever did this to her could still be nearby.