Mutation

by Michael McBride

  “Quien lo encontró?” Barnett asked.

  “No sabemos. Fue llamado de forma anónima.”

  Barnett nodded. If he’d been the one to find what he believed awaited them on the other side of that wall, he would have gotten the hell out of there and reported it anonymously, too.

  The sergeant stopped a dozen feet from the doorway.

  “Estás solo desde aquí,” he said and gestured for them to proceed. This was as far as he would go. “Avisame cuando termines.”

  Barnett left him behind and led his men through the doorway into the hangar proper. The smell hit him immediately, followed in short measure by the drone of flies.

  “That can’t be good,” Sheppard said.

  To the left was what remained of an office, its window shattered and desk overturned. Beside it were rows of shelves overflowing with rusted containers, water-damaged crates, and ripped bags of grain. To the right was a small plane that had been cannibalized for parts and its fuselage used for target practice. Several vehicles had been pulled into the space between them: an older model pickup stained red by dust, a Suburban with rusted wheel wells, a brand-new F-150 glistening with chrome, and a nondescript panel truck, its driver’s side door standing open. The hangar doors remained closed behind them, all but the one on the far end anyway, which stood open just wide enough for a man to pass through.

  Barnett weaved through the maze of parked vehicles until he reached the one he’d come to find. He rounded the open door and inadvertently kicked a brass casing underneath it. The tinkling sound echoed in the confines. Even more empty rounds glittered from the ground beside the cargo hold, behind which was pretty much exactly what he’d expected to find. Ruptured burlap sacks had disgorged a carpet of coffee beans down the ramp and onto the concrete, where the bodies of three men were sprawled in dried black puddles of their own making. The deep lacerations on their chests, necks, and faces were identical to those of the men back at the drug camp in Colombia.

  His footsteps clanged from the ramp as he ascended into the cargo hold, the walls and ceiling of which were decorated with arterial spatters. Crates had toppled and broken open. Burlap sacks had been shoved aside and ripped with sharp implements. There was a conspicuous gap near the back where the cocaine had been stored and a mess of coffee beans had been trampled beneath the feet of the men unloading it. The dead man in the corner had been dispatched in a quick and efficient manner, yet with enough savagery to nearly separate his head from his shoulders. There was no mistaking Subject Z’s footprints in the man’s blood, nor those of its traveling companion, whose bare foot was human in shape and proportion, if not size.

  Barnett recognized exactly what had happened.

  “They buried themselves under the cargo to either side and waited patiently for the men to unload the truck before revealing themselves,” he said.

  “Poor bastards never saw it coming,” Sheppard said from behind him.

  Barnett beckoned his man closer.

  “Document these tracks.”

  Sheppard removed a camera from his pack, stepped around Barnett, and placed his own foot beside the human footprint for scale. His size 11½ boots were almost exactly a foot long, but still four inches shorter than the unknown track.

  “Whatever it is has to be close to seven feet tall,” he said.

  Barnett nodded. They’d been reluctant to draw a solid connection between Subject Z’s counterpart and the body it had removed from the sarcophagus in Antarctica, but they were running out of excuses. The most glaring problem was that to do so they needed to accept the reality that the long-dead remains had been somehow reanimated after the creature drenched them with blood. Worse, they had to face the prospect that whatever this second being was, there was another one out there right now, in the hands of the masked forces of Enigma, who had retrieved the body from the tomb at the center of the maze beneath Teotihuacan.

  “The skin’s cool to the touch and rigor mortis has already set in,” Brinkley said from where he crouched beside one of the bodies on the hangar floor. “I’d wager he’s been dead for at least four hours, probably closer to five or six.”

  “We’re losing ground.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Morgan said.

  Barnett turned to see his second-in-command standing beside the column of light entering through the outer door. He looked up from the ground and met the director’s stare.

  Everything fell into place.

  “Damn it,” Barnett said and lowered his eyes to the bed of the truck.

  Amid the scattered beans and squashed bananas were more footprints. They were nowhere near as distinct and looked almost like rust on the metal ramp. He descended and followed them into the mess of blood and bullet casings, from which they emerged on the opposite side, only farther apart, as though moving at great speed. The blood had transferred completely from their feet by the time he reached Morgan, who stared out across the dirt tarmac toward a runway overgrown with weeds.

  The footprints were every bit as evident in the dirt as the tread of the tires driving into the building.

  And those of the plane that was no longer there.

  15

  ANYA

  Göbekli Tepe

  “Each of these pillars stands two stories tall and weighs ten tons,” Sadik said. They’d worked their way down to the floor level of the temple he called Enclosure C and stood before the twin megaliths, their heads barely reaching the stylized belts of the anthropomorphic figures. “They are colloquially known as the Celestial Ancestors, although they are called by many other names in as many different cultures. You will find idols crafted in the exact same proportions and style—what we call the ‘birthing posture,’ with their hands clasping their bellies in such a way as to frame the navel—all around the world. This specific symbolic gesture has appeared on statues from Mexico and Colombia to Tahiti and Easter Island, not to mention countless European and Asiatic sites, and provides what many believe to be proof that civilizations separated by seemingly insurmountable distances and geographic barriers must have come into physical contact with one another.”

  Anya walked a circle around the giant stone sculptures, which appeared fairly generic in design. Where else would someone carve hands in such a way as to be seen from the front of a narrow anthropomorphic construct? Of course, she couldn’t deny the uncanny resemblance to carvings she’d seen firsthand in both Mexico and Russia. “What’s the significance of the name?” Evans asked.

  “They’re called the Celestial Ancestors because all of the societies where these appear share a common belief that their gods descended from the sky. These are the beings responsible for their creation, hence the birthing posture. It was their way of saying ‘This is where we come from.’ ”

  “Surely there’s a more logical explanation,” Jade said. “One that requires fewer speculative leaps to get there.”

  Sadik smiled patiently.

  “The people of Göbekli Tepe did not have the benefit of thousands of years of knowledge and accumulated history to draw upon, like we do,” he said. “Where they saw the intervention of mystical beings beyond their understanding, we see the opportunity to impose science upon chaos. The two forms of religion are not necessarily so different. I find the truth generally lies somewhere in between.”

  Anya completed her circuit of the temple and returned to the others. If she stood on her tiptoes, she could see down into the adjacent temple complex. Something about their placement in relationship to one another nagged at her. The pattern in which they’d been built recalled another prehistoric site, but she couldn’t seem to make the connection.

  “And what is that truth?” Jade asked.

  “The twelfth century BCE saw the arrival of a mini ice age known as the Younger Dryas, which reversed the gradual climatic warming that had occurred since the Last Glacial Maximum and heralded the sudden onset of twelve hundred years of winter. While there are those who theorize that what we affectionately refer t
o as the Big Chill was caused by a comet striking the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the prevailing theory is that an ice dam containing a body of water trapped beneath that sheet—one the size of the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Ontario combined—simply broke as a consequence of the warming, releasing all of that frigid water into the Atlantic Ocean, altering the circulation cycle by which warm water is gradually cooled on its way from the equator to the north pole, and causing flooding all across the globe. The influx of cold water pouring into the Arctic stimulated a cooling cycle that triggered the rapid expansion of ice across the northern hemisphere.”

  “Which wiped out the Clovis civilization and North American megafauna,” Anya said.

  “On your side of the globe,” Sadik said. “On mine, it was the flooding that did the majority of the damage. Those who survived were afflicted with what modern psychologists have termed ‘catastrophobia,’ an extreme fear caused by abrupt physical upheaval and climatic chaos, both of which were common motifs in the artwork of otherwise disparate cultures. They saw the ending of the ice age as a form of rebirth, an archetype reflected in statues anthropomorphized with the universal symbol of birth. The flood motif is memorialized to this day in nearly every modern religion, the majority of which were conceived where we stand at this very moment, in the watershed of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.”

  The mention of flooding caused the tumblers to fall into place for Anya. That was what her mind had been crying out for her to recognize.

  “The staggered construction of the buried temples reminds me of Derinkuyu and Kaymakli, neither of which is very far from here,” she said. “We’re talking massive underground cities carved into the soft volcanic rock, like human anthills. Both of them reach several hundred feet in depth and contain hundreds of miles of interconnected tunnels capable of comfortably housing tens of thousands of people. It was in places like these where we believe mankind rode out the Younger Dryas event in relative comfort.”

  “And not just the people,” Sadik said, “but their animals, as well. In the ancient Iranian religion of Zoroastrianism, it is believed that the god Ahura Mazda descended from the sky with a dire warning. He foretold a coming cataclysm that would involve flooding and a winter such as had never been known. He instructed his people to build a Vara, an underground enclosure two miles long and two miles wide, and populate it with the fittest men and women and two of every type of animal.”

  “Like the Christian myth of Noah’s Ark,” Jade said.

  “Which is theorized to be on Mount Ararat, just to the northeast of here. What you call myth others call fact, but is not all mythology rooted in fact? Is it so hard to believe that a Vara could be interpreted as an ark or that the two monotheistic religions share a common flood myth? Look around you. Do you not see the animals memorialized on all of these structures? They are an integral part of this metaphorical rebirth. All of them were there when man emerged from his underground warrens after countless generations and struck off to build his civilization anew, only this time under the sun. And it was on this very ground where he put to use the skills he had honed inside the earth to build upon it, where he erected the first monuments to the gods who saved them from the brutal winter and birthed them once more into a Garden of Eden.”

  “So they lived underground with their animals to ride out the ice age,” Jade said. “It’s a logical decision to make, one that any nomadic people would make under the same circumstances. It sounds like a nightmare of sanitation and disease, though. They’re lucky they survived at all.”

  “But they did,” Anya said, “and they tried to re-create the experience here. These temples exhibit the same physical configuration as the caverns underneath Derinkuyu, where the interior spaces were staggered to keep the honeycombed rock from collapsing upon itself.”

  “It was all they had known for more than a thousand years,” Sadik said. “It makes sense for them to build a similar structure aboveground.”

  Evans walked around to the far side of the megaliths and stared up at the sky from between them.

  “But what’s the significance of aligning these giant idols with the star Deneb?” he asked.

  “Everything!” Sadik said. It appeared they’d finally reached the part of the story he was itching to tell. “Where do you think Ahura Mazda came from?”

  “Give me a break,” Jade said.

  “Whether you believe it or not is irrelevant. These people did. In fact, they believed it so deeply that they spent the next two millennia tracking it across the sky, even when the angle of the planet’s precession changed and they were forced to start all over again. People traveled countless miles to stand right where you are now and look upon their god.”

  “Whose face they apparently didn’t like.”

  “She’s right,” Evans said. “Without the faces, there’s no way of validating your theory. I’ve studied dozens of temples, but none of them feature desecration of this nature. To mutilate the face of a god would be the ultimate sacrilege.”

  “As I said, this soil has given birth to many religions, some of which are outright hostile toward those whose gods they consider false, as you can see happening in this region even today. We had to erect the security fence around this dig for that very reason. There have been many days where we stood on this spot, watching the smoke rising against the horizon, feeling the ground shudder from explosions, wondering if that would be the day a caravan of Toyotas sped across the desert and destroyed this link to the origins of mankind.”

  “Where was Ahura Mazda when you needed him?” Jade said.

  Anya discreetly elbowed her, but Sadik only smiled.

  “Come with me,” he said and led them down a wooden plank metered with horizontal boards that served as stairs. He gestured to a T-shaped stone only partially exhumed from the ground. It was covered with seemingly random designs and animals carved in high relief. “He was right here all along.”

  Anya recognized a vulture and a pair of ibises, a lizard and a scorpion. And at the very top, where the entire upper half had been broken off, were three canisters with arched handles. The central one clearly showed the hand holding it. She’d seen that exact same object before.

  She looked at Evans, whose expression revealed that he’d made the same connection.

  “Allow me to present Ahura Mazda,” Sadik said.

  He turned his cell phone around and held up the picture so they could all see. The screen displayed a petroglyph in the Assyrian style featuring a bearded man with a conical hat standing in profile. He had wings on his back and what looked like a watch on his wrist. In one hand he held a pinecone, while in the other he carried a container by the handle.

  The design was nearly identical to the one they’d seen on the wall of the tomb where they found the remains of the tall man whose tattoo had led them here in the first place.

  16

  ROCHE

  The Hangar

  Roche ran into the command center. Maddox strode to meet him with a remote headset and the news Roche had been both expecting and dreading.

  “Director Barnett confirmed that Subject Zeta managed to board a small aircraft and we have reason to believe it’s already left the continent.”

  “Damn it,” Roche said.

  Now wasn’t the time to remind everyone that he’d told them this would happen. They needed to figure out where that plane was going and have a team in place to intercept it.

  He donned his headset and assumed his position on the bridge. The images on the screen scrolled frenetically as the communications specialists chased every possible lead around the world.

  “What do we know?” he asked.

  Kelly and Tess finally caught up with him and hovered at the back of the room. He could feel them behind him, but didn’t turn to look. He was grateful for their presence; he was going to need all the help he could get.

  “Our field team tracked the panel truck from Colombia to Colón, Panama,” Maddox said. “They found it in the hangar o
f an abandoned airfield. The men inside the building had been slaughtered, but the cocaine was conspicuously absent. Our working assumption is that Subject Zeta and UNSUB X hid beneath the unrelated cargo in the truck, emerged once the cocaine had been loaded onto the plane, and mowed through the resistance to board the aircraft before it took off.”

  “No evidence of attempted consumption or conversion into drones?”

  “Negative. The victims had been overwhelmed and dispatched in the same manner as those at the drug encampment.”

  “Have we established a time frame?”

  “The condition of the victims’ remains suggests between four and six hours.”

  “Jesus,” Roche said. “They could be anywhere by now.”

  “True, but we’re confident we have at least a general idea of where that plane’s going,” Maddox said. “The Sinaloan and Gulf cartels are the primary distributors of Colombian cocaine in the United States. The former controls most of the northwest region of Mexico, including the area bordering Arizona and California, while the latter controls the eastern side of the country, along the Gulf of Mexico, including the state of Tamaulipas, which borders Texas.”

  “That’s nearly the entire country.”

  “According to the DEA, the Sinaloans dominate the trade, and based on their geographic location, receive the majority of their shipments directly from Colombia, either by plane or by boat. The Gulf Cartel has to be more creative to circumvent both the authorities and the Sinaloans, which means a truck bound for the northernmost city on the Panama Canal better fits its mold. A smaller twin-engine airplane could make it as far as Tabasco, the southernmost extent of their territory, without having to refuel. That would also be the perfect place to offload the product if their intention was to continue on to Neuva Loredo, the cartel’s base of operations.”