Mutation

by Michael McBride

  “Have you determined what we’re looking for yet?” Jade asked.

  “I figure we’ll know it when we see it,” Evans said.

  Jade rolled her eyes.

  “Unlike any of the other archeologists who’ve been studying the site for the last quarter-century?”

  Evans glanced over at her in the passenger seat and smirked.

  “We have an advantage that none of them had,” he said.

  “And what, pray tell, is that?”

  “We have the map.”

  “Assuming that’s even what it is.”

  “Have a little faith, Jade,” Anya said.

  “I’d settle for the slightest proof we’re not wasting our time.”

  The SUV pulled off the side of the highway and onto a gravel road that wended up the slope toward the plateau Jade recognized from the pictures they’d studied on the plane. They found a makeshift lot about halfway up and parked near the base of the railroad-tie staircase that led up to the archeological site. While theirs was currently the only one there, it was obvious from the crisscrossing tracks that this place hosted a reasonable number of cars. How were they supposed to find something that so many researchers and tourists had missed?

  They climbed out, stretched, and mounted the uneven stairs. The cool air felt divine against her skin after being cooped up in first the Cessna, and then the Kodiaq, for so many hours straight. A churning mass of gray clouds scudded across the sky toward the ascending sun.

  A figure appeared at the top of the plateau and beckoned them higher with a congenial wave. The man was sitting on the top step when they arrived and extended his hand to Evans, who helped pull him to his feet. He appeared to be in his early sixties, with a bushy white beard and curly hair poking out from beneath his field-wrapped turban. Sweat bloomed from his brow and ran down his plump cheeks. He wore sandals, dirty jeans, and an untucked blue button-down shirt that struggled to contain his girth.

  “Dr. Ahmet Sadik,” he said with an Arabic accent filtered through a formal British education. “Head of the Department of Protohistory and Near Eastern Archeology at Ankara University. And, for today, your humble guide back in time to the oldest temple known to man . . . Göbekli Tepe.”

  He gripped each of their hands between his sandpapery palms while they introduced themselves, clapped with apparent delight, and opened the security fence surrounding the excavation, which had been erected in response to the aggressive destruction of history by the marauding zealots of ISIS.

  “Prepare to be amazed,” Sadik said and guided them toward the edge of a massive crater, at the bottom of which were the temples Jade had seen in photographs, none of which had captured a fraction of their true wonder.

  She felt like she had when she’d first seen the ancient ruins beneath two vertical miles of ice in Antarctica. There was no doubting the authenticity of the ruins, let alone the veracity of the carbon dating, and yet all logic cried out for her to refute what her eyes were seeing. Loosely organized nomadic peoples didn’t just one day decide to build such intricate and elaborate structures without first teaching themselves those skills through countless iterations of lesser structures, like the pithouses and primitive adobe structures that predated the cliff dwellings in the American Southwest. This was the architectural equivalent of man jumping out of the primordial ooze on fully formed legs and starting to run. It was a historical anomaly only now starting to give up its secrets, one of which, she hoped, was the key to stopping Subject Z.

  The individual temples were built on tiers of different height, much the way artists depicted the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, only adorned with crowns of stacked rocks and T-shaped granite posts instead of flowering vines that spilled from one terrace to the next. It was impossible to appreciate the sheer enormity of the megaliths standing in the center of the rings until she descended the rickety wooden framework to the uppermost structure. How any number of people could have carried them up the hill before the advent of the wheel and the domestication of pack animals was beyond her.

  A sloping ramp erected on stilts encircled the active excavation, which was already easily fifty feet down. As she descended in altitude from one tier to the next, she was reminded that the entire mountain had been formed by the act of burying one temple and then building a new one practically right on top of the old, a process that had been repeated for two thousand years.

  They climbed down onto a section of flat ground and crossed a wooden plank to reach the edge of the nearest temple. Even standing level with the top of the outer wall, the twin megaliths still towered over them. They were much deeper than they were wide, with boars carved in high relief on the sides and the anthropomorphic figures on the narrow front sides, their hands cradling their bellies. Their forms were human-like in proportion, but terminated at the T-shaped shoulders.

  “Where are their heads?” Jade asked.

  “You are not the first to ask this question,” Sadik said. “Many archeologists have pondered this very riddle.”

  “If you’re waiting for a drumroll—”

  Evans took her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze.

  “What my colleague means to say,” he interrupted, “is that the answer may be important to our investigation, especially if the heads are deformed in a specific way.”

  “That, unfortunately, is an answer I do not possess,” Sadik said. “No one does. If ever these megaliths had heads, they are long gone. They have even been removed from the otherwise perfectly preserved idols we’ve exhumed.”

  “Why would they do something like that?” Jade asked.

  “Perhaps because they did not want those who came after them to look upon the faces of their gods.”

  13

  KELLY

  The Hangar

  Kelly strode into the command center expecting to find Roche standing on the bridge like the captain of a starship, overseeing the men charged with monitoring the various satellite feeds of the Amazon and the Middle East. The man standing with his back to her, however, was definitely not the one she’d come to find. Maddox sensed her behind him and turned to face her. The horizontal scars on his cheeks always made him appear to be smiling. She couldn’t help but wonder what kind of nightmare he’d endured to get them.

  “Good morning, Dr. Nolan.”

  Kelly smiled. She still wasn’t used to people addressing her as “doctor.” At least she no longer felt the urge to giggle or turn around to see if there was someone else standing behind her.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen Martin, have you?”

  “Not since he briefed me on the mission to Turkey. Why? Is there something field operations should know?”

  He glanced at a monitor displaying a desert location, but his stare didn’t linger.

  “Nothing like that. I just wanted to run something past him.”

  “If you find him, let him know that our team just arrived at its destination. He’ll want to remain apprised.”

  Kelly nodded and headed back into the corridor. She was about to retrace her steps to the elevator when she noticed a faint aura of light coming from the computer lab. It grew incrementally brighter as she approached. The door stood open upon a room that appeared empty until she saw the lone figure seated at the workstation farthest from her, where four monitors had been pushed together.

  She leaned against the doorframe and watched Roche turn from one screen to the next and back again. Every few seconds he lowered his head and raised his right shoulder, as though taking notes. From her vantage point, all of the monitors looked the same, only the background varied subtly in color. The scene reminded her of a different place and time, one she now thought about with as much regret as happiness.

  Roche abruptly stiffened and turned around. He offered a weak smile and rubbed his eyes.

  “Spare a few seconds?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said. “Truth be told, I could use a fresh set of eyes, too. That is, if you don’t mind.
”

  Kelly weaved through the darkened stations, grabbed one of the empty chairs, and rolled it over beside his. At first glance, the images on the three screens to the left appeared to show the same crop circle from slightly different angles, but she quickly noticed the subtle differences between them. The fourth, however, was completely unlike the others.

  “Maddox wanted me to tell you that Evans’s team just reached Göbekli Tepe.”

  “Excellent,” he said. “Did he happen to say if Evans had figured out what they were hoping to find yet?”

  “No, but that’s kind of why I was looking for you. I was wondering if you thought the fork-like symbols attached to the circles in the design might give us a clue.”

  “I definitely think we’re supposed to recognize their significance, like we did the cymatic expressions of the sounds that helped us unlock the pyramid in Antarctica.”

  “So what’s your theory?”

  “See these crop circles?” He gestured at the monitors. “They all appeared within days of each other in July 1990. They were all roughly the same size and were found within miles of each other in Wiltshire County, England, not far from both Stonehenge and the Neolithic monument in Avebury. The three on the left all feature the same circular designs, the only difference being their arrangement. What do you see when you look at them?”

  “I see variations of the map that led us from Mosul to Göbekli Tepe.”

  “True, but take a step back and look at the designs from the most basic perspective and give me your first impression.”

  “Linear alignments of approximately the same number of circular shapes. Some have fork-like appendages. Others don’t.”

  “Right, and the largest circles are in the middle. Why? Are they more important somehow?”

  “You’re the one with training in cryptanalysis,” she said. “You tell me.”

  “That’s just it. I think we’ve been looking too hard for a pattern that’s been staring us in the face the whole time, something so simple even a child could understand.”

  Kelly was about to take exception to his statement when she experienced the revelation toward which he’d been guiding her.

  “They’re planets,” she said. “The one we aligned with Ninevah isn’t a bull’s-eye, it’s Saturn.”

  Roche smiled. It was the first time she’d seen him do so in months.

  “Exactly. The sun’s at the far left, followed by Mercury and Venus. I think the shorter lines between the next two in the series indicate an orbital relationship. The more prominent of the two, the one inside the circle, is Earth, making the other one the moon. After that we have Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.”

  “So what do the longer lines mean?”

  “That they’re in direct alignment.”

  “Like an eclipse?”

  “More like a conjunction.”

  “The Age of Aquarius.”

  He turned and looked at her with an expression of confusion.

  “You know,” she said. “The old song? When the moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars. This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.”

  “If I’m right, these designs portend an event that has nothing to do with peace and love. These aren’t just maps—”

  “They’re dates,” she finished for him.

  Roche nodded.

  “Two dates, actually. See how the moon is on the opposite side of Earth in the second and third crop circles? It’s technically in conjunction with Mars and Jupiter, on the far side of Earth from the sun. The two dates are separated by fourteen days, half of the lunar cycle, the time it takes for the moon to move from one side of Earth to the other. And the forks stemming from the planets? I think they’re like the hour hands on a clock. They mark the time, a different point on the planet’s rotation. The time of day specific to each. So when Earth sits between the sun and the moon, it will create a lunar eclipse visible to the half of the planet experiencing darkness, during which time both Mars and Jupiter will be nearly right on top of each other in the night sky.”

  “But if the two that show the moon on the opposite side of Earth from the sun signify a lunar eclipse, why do they show two different times? It’s not like an eclipse happens at different times on the same day.” She realized as she said it how wrong she was. That was exactly what happened. Her hand fretted like crazy at her side. “The time difference signifies the point on Earth from which the eclipse is viewed.”

  “That’s my thinking.”

  “But the second one places the tuning fork at nearly twelve o’clock, while the third one doesn’t show it at all.”

  “I think whoever created the crop circle deliberately made the tuning fork of the second design a hair to the left of perpendicular to draw attention to the fact that it was shy of twelve o’clock, and omitted the fork entirely on the third to indicate midnight. A single day on the moon lasts 29.5 days on Earth, so a few seconds up there translates to hours down here. The problem is that we don’t know how many seconds we’re dealing with, which means we have to look to the other planets for clues.” He pointed to the monitors as he spoke. “Each of the hour hands on Mars and Jupiter is in a different place, signifying some specific length of time, either earlier or later. A day on Mars is roughly twenty-four hours, while on Jupiter it’s only ten. If we’re looking at approximately a quarter revolution of Mars and a near-complete revolution of Jupiter, the time between them ought to be somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hours.”

  “So we need to find two locations that are roughly eight time zones apart and will both be experiencing nighttime during the lunar eclipse,” Kelly said. “That only narrows it down to half the world. Even if we assume Göbekli Tepe is one of those points, the other could be anywhere from the Americas in the west to China in the east. Where do we even start?”

  “That’s what we need to figure out.” Roche turned from the monitors and looked directly into her eyes. “Mars and Jupiter are in conjunction once every two years for a period that lasts forty-eight days and we’re already nearly halfway into that window.”

  Kelly had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t spend nearly enough time in the world outside the Hangar, but she vaguely remembered seeing something on the news about an impending solar eclipse and making a mental note to find a few free minutes to watch it, although with everything going on she’d forgotten pretty much right away. That felt like weeks ago now.

  “How long ago was the solar eclipse?” she asked.

  “Twelve days.”

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  “So that makes the lunar eclipse . . . ?”

  “Roughly thirty hours from now.”

  They were already nearly out of time.

  Roche placed his hand on top of hers to still its relentless movements. A tingling sensation rippled up her arm. She opened her eyes and found him looking directly into them.

  “What do you think it all means?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, but I have a feeling we’re about to find out.”

  Kelly nodded and broke eye contact. She couldn’t stand being so close to him and yet so far apart. Half of her desperately wanted him to take her in his arms, while the other wanted to lash out at him for creating the seemingly insurmountable distance she felt between them. She sympathized with the pressure he was under, but the way he chose to handle it was tearing her apart.

  “What about the fourth one?” she asked. “It looks nothing like the others.”

  “It might be completely unrelated, but based on the date of its appearance and its physical proximity to the others—” Footsteps echoed from the hallway a heartbeat before Tess burst into the room.

  “There you are!” she said and switched on the lights. “I’ve been looking for you for like twenty minutes.”

  Roche jerked his hand from on top of Kelly’s and stood so quickly that he knocked o
ver his chair.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Tess held up an iPad.

  “You have got to see this.”

  14

  BARNETT

  Colón, Panama

  “Los cuerpos están hacia atrás,” the officer said.

  “He says the bodies are toward the back,” Barnett translated for his teammates.

  He’d personally called the Secretary of Defense the moment he learned of the discovery and requested that he make arrangements with the Panamanian government to let his team be the first to examine the scene. If what awaited them inside was indeed Subject Z’s handiwork and not that of either the Sinaloa or the Gulf Cartel, as the locals seemed to think, then the creature now had access to one of the busiest ports in the entire world, from which it could board a ship bound for any location on the planet, or continue its northward migration onto the North American mainland, which suddenly made things a whole lot more real for Clayborn back in Washington.

  They followed the sergeant from the Panama National Police Force through the front door and into an ancient hangar made of corrugated aluminum, now more rust than metal. The dim interior was illuminated by what little sunlight permeated the dust-covered windows. Their escort wore drab olive fatigues, a black Kevlar vest, and couldn’t have been more than thirty, which made him an old man compared to the unit outside, which guarded the crime scene and enforced a hard cordon at the end of the dirt road leading to the airfield. The place reeked of airplane fuel and pesticides, an old scent from a time when the facilities had serviced crop dusters, not smugglers. The massive fans in the wall vents squeaked as they turned ever so slightly on the gentle breeze.

  Mountains of rubble rose to either side, collections of metal containers, wooden debris, and trash of all kinds. A table and two chairs sat in the center of the lone cleared area, where presumably business was conducted. The concrete was saturated with oil and chemicals, now furry with accumulated dust. An aluminum wall ran the width of the building. Based on the overall size of the structure, the space on the other side was a whole lot larger. The door that once fit the lone threshold jutted from the mound of junk beside it.