Mutation

by Michael McBride

  The dead man was tethered to a harness, which was hardly able to contain his ravaged torso. A sniper rifle lay at Barnett’s feet amid a scattering of brass casings. He crouched beside it and identified fresh footprints in the soft loam.

  “Zeta definitely came through here.”

  “I’ve got their trail,” Morgan said. “Heading north-northwest of the clearing. Maybe a quarter-mile in.”

  Barnett struck off in that direction, shoving through vines and lianas and swatting aside saplings and thorny branches.

  “This is Dr. Clarke,” Tess said from the sat phone.

  “Director Barnett,” he said. “Tell me you’re in your office.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Good. I need two things from you, Dr. Clarke, and I need them right now.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “I need you to get into Dr. Nolan’s computer and send me a screen-grab of the lines of magnetic variance along the Gulf of Mexico. Everything from Tamaulipas to Tabasco.”

  “That shouldn’t be too hard.”

  “And I need you to crack the code of the third crop circle design and tell me where it leads.”

  “That might be a little more problematic. I’ve been trying to align it with the others, but I can’t seem to match it to any of the ancient Mesopotamian maps.”

  Barnett stopped in his tracks. They were less than five hundred miles from Teotihuacan, where the mummified remains of the man with the feathered serpent mask had been discovered at the heart of the subterranean maze. Was it possible Subject Zeta and UNSUB X were heading back there, or were they—?

  Suddenly, everything fell into place.

  If the tomb in Mosul served to lead to whatever awaited them at the end of the map, then did the tomb beneath Teotihuacan serve a similar function? Was the body Enigma stole right out from under them similarly tattooed? And if so, was it also a map, and where did it lead? He needed to know what the hell he and his team were about to walk into.

  “Try using ancient Mesoamerican maps instead. Aztec, Maya, Inca, Toltec. Whatever you can find. I’ll lay odds that Teotihuacan aligns with one of those planets and wherever Zeta’s heading is at the other end.”

  “I’m on it.”

  Barnett caught up with Morgan, who knelt on the muddy detritus, tracing the edges of the clearly defined footprints with his fingertips. They were evenly spaced and measured. Full heel contact. Their prey wasn’t in a hurry, but rather settling into a comfortable pace.

  “That destination is within a day’s walk from where I’m standing right now,” he said. “We’re talking no more than thirty miles. Maybe as little as twenty in this jungle. Coordinate with Maddox. Figure out what’s waiting for us and work your magic with the satellite footage. Use whatever remote sensing tools you can access. I need to know everything possible about this place before we stumble blindly into an ambush. Let me know the moment you have something useful.”

  He terminated the call and looked at his men. The four of them had been fighting their way through one hostile environment after another for the past six months, always several steps behind their quarry, but this was the endgame now. He could positively feel it. Everything had been building up to a final confrontation beneath the lunar eclipse, and it was only a matter of time before Dr. Clarke deciphered the location of the battlefield.

  By tomorrow night, their ordeal would finally be over and the bullet-riddled carcasses of Subject Z and UNSUB X would be in boxes on their way to USAMRIID for dissection.

  “Come on, men,” he said. “This is the home stretch.”

  “If you’re right,” Morgan said, “they’re going to be ready for a fight.”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  22

  JADE

  Göbekli Tepe

  Jade stared down the barrel of Sadik’s pistol. While she was by no means an expert on firearms, she recognized it as a semiautomatic, which meant he could fire as fast as he could pull the trigger. Assuming it was loaded, anyway. Based on Sadik’s posture and the way his hand shook, she was confident it was loaded, but questioned his marksmanship. At ten feet, however, they’d be hard to miss.

  “Why are you doing this?” Anya asked.

  Sadik wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his free hand.

  “You would not understand,” he said.

  A rooster tail of dust rose over the adjacent plateau. Sadik followed her gaze and noticeably relaxed, which could mean only one thing.

  Reinforcements had arrived.

  They needed to extricate themselves from this situation before whoever was in that car arrived, because, unlike Sadik, they likely weren’t the kind to hesitate when it came to pulling the trigger, which was the very weakness they needed to exploit right now. It didn’t take a tremendous amount of courage to draw a weapon, but actually using it? That was another thing entirely.

  She glanced back at Evans. He appeared to have recovered from his initial surprise. She could almost see the wheels turning in his head as he tried to formulate a plan.

  “Turn around!” Sadik snapped.

  The rumble of the engine grew closer. The parking lot was maybe half a mile away. At the most. They needed to get out of here in a hurry, which meant she was just going to have to handle matters herself.

  “Let me guess,” Jade said, her tone one of mockery. “This isn’t about the money. It’s about answers, right? You’re just trying to solve one of the world’s greatest mysteries, but you can’t do so on your own.”

  “You do not know anything about me.”

  “There’s nothing special about you. You’re just answering a higher calling, aren’t you? We’ve heard your story before. And, believe me, it sounded just as trite when the lead archeologist at Teotihuacan told it. Did your friends back there happen to tell you what they did to Dr. Villarreal? That cavalry you’re so anxiously awaiting? They put a bullet through his head. He never saw it coming.”

  The distant grumble of tires on gravel faded and the dust trailing the vehicle diffused into the sunset.

  “You still have a chance to survive this confrontation,” she said, “but you’re running out of time. Once the men back there see that hole and realize they can reach whatever’s buried underneath this plateau, they won’t have any further use for you.”

  Sadik appeared momentarily confused, but the expression slowly gave way to one of amusement.

  “You think you just now found the entrance? The cavalry, as you called it, isn’t here for the artifact. We retrieved it nearly two weeks ago. No, my dear. It’s here for you.”

  The sound of the car doors closing echoed across the valley like the twin blasts of a double-barrel shotgun.

  Sadik instinctively glanced over his shoulder and Jade lowered her hands to shoulder level.

  “They won’t leave any witnesses,” Evans said from behind her. He moved to his left. Slowly. Sadik’s eyes tracked him toward Anya. Away from Jade. “That’s not their style. They used you to lure us out here, and they’ll kill you with us, tying off all of their loose ends at once.”

  “You have no idea what is down there, do you? Our ancestors lived inside the catacombs below us for twelve hundred years. While the world above was frozen, they dwelled in darkness, generation after generation. This is the Vara of Zoroaster, the metaphorical Ark of Noah. Beneath our very feet is more than just a wealth of artifacts; it is a perfectly preserved time capsule predating the dawn of the Stone Age. What is down there changes everything we know about the history of our species.”

  A silhouette crested the adjacent plateau, above the ruins of Göbekli Tepe. Followed by another. And another. “Those men don’t care about history,” Evans said.

  “That is where you are wrong,” Sadik said. “History is the only thing they care about, for it is in the dust of history that the seeds of the future are planted.”

  At least four men were picking their way down the excavated hillside to the ramp that would guide them around the st
one temples. Just over a quarter-mile away. And closing at a rapid pace.

  It was now or never.

  “And just what future is that?” Evans asked.

  Sadik stared him dead in the eyes and smiled.

  “One in which the gods of man once more walk among us.”

  Jade lunged forward and hit Sadik squarely in the shoulder, causing the barrel of the gun to swing past Anya and out over the plains. He lost his footing and fell to his side, absorbing Jade’s weight on top of him with a grunt. He tried to bring his pistol to bear on her, but Anya kicked it out of his hand. She stomped on his arm to keep him from reaching it before Evans could grab it. He pointed it down at Sadik’s face and tightened his finger on the trigger.

  “Do what you must,” Sadik said. “Events have already been set in motion. The prophecy is at hand.”

  Jade brought her elbow down as hard as she could, striking his temple and hammering the opposite side of his head into the exposed bedrock. His eyes rolled up into this skull, and he was out cold before the rebound.

  She glanced up in time to see the men across the valley break into a sprint. They wore tactical masks and black fatigues, just like the team that had ambushed them in Mexico. She caught a flash from the barrel of an automatic rifle as bullets ricocheted all around them.

  “Go!” Evans shouted and fired off a few rounds toward the men.

  He lifted her from on top of Sadik and shoved her toward the hole in the ground. Bullets pounded the upthrust stone and filled the air with limestone shrapnel. She contorted her body and entered feetfirst. Felt nothing underneath her. A vastness confirmed by what little light reached past her into the narrow shaft.

  A bullet screamed past her ear, and she dropped into the pit. She felt a momentary sensation of weightlessness. Her stomach rose into her—

  Impact.

  Her heels struck. Knees buckled. Legs crumpled underneath her.

  She let out an involuntary shout and barely had the presence of mind to roll out of the way before Anya landed where she’d been a heartbeat prior.

  The younger woman whimpered and tried to stand. Jade grabbed her by the back of her shirt and dragged her from the vague aura of light.

  Evans alighted gracefully behind them and stepped away from the wall, a beam of light streaking from his cell phone.

  “Why didn’t you guys use the toe trail?” he asked and shined the built-in flashlight toward the staggered holes chiseled into the wall.

  “You could have said something, you know,” Anya said.

  “Save it,” Jade said. She removed her own phone from her pocket and switched on the beam. “We have to find another way out of here in a hurry.”

  The stone ceiling was coarse and uneven, the walls of pitted limestone scored black by carbon from the torches that had once burned in the recesses. A single arched doorway opened upon darkness deeper than her light could penetrate. She took off at a sprint and nearly flew out over the abrupt ledge. Twisted to the side at the last possible second and stumbled down the uneven stone steps lining the cavern wall. To her right was a pitfall straight down into darkness, on the far side of which was the landing awaiting her at the bottom of the primitive spiral staircase.

  Uneven columns carved from the earth itself partially enclosed the stone platform on both sides. She took the first passage she saw, her light barely outpacing the shadows. A rounded chamber opened to her left, inside of which were countless human skulls, stacked from the floor to the ceiling and encircling the entire room, at the heart of which was a sunken firepit. The bones were the same color as the walls, as though the deceased had become one with the earth through the millennia.

  “My God,” Anya gasped from behind her. “We’ve never encountered such perfectly preserved remains from the Stone Age. This civilization must have practiced some form of ancestor worship. Imagine how much we could learn—”

  “Imagine our skulls joining theirs,” Evans said. “Because that’s what’s going to happen if we don’t pick up the pace.”

  Automatic gunfire crackled from somewhere behind and above them. Their pursuers were firing blindly down the shaft to clear the way.

  They were gaining on them.

  Jade rushed through the narrow corridor, blowing past smaller chambers from which her footsteps echoed back at her. She caught fleeting glimpses of stylized paintings on the walls, of desiccated animal pelts and carcasses decomposed to jumbled piles of bones, of the occasional wall discolored by algal and bacterial growth, where surface water leached through the bedrock.

  The blood, however, was far newer. Maybe a couple of weeks old. High-velocity and arterial spatters, definitely fatal amounts, but no sign of bodies.

  “Careful!” Anya yelled.

  Jade looked down in time to see a circular hole. Nearly stepped right down into it. The scent of dust and age emanated from it, beneath which she detected a biological smell, almost like—

  “A stable,” Anya said. She shined her light downward at an angle that revealed individual stone partitions filled with dust. “They kept livestock down there.”

  “Which means there has to be a way to get animals in and out of there,” Evans said. “And they’re definitely not herding anything up those stairs.”

  A thumping sound echoed from behind them. The first of the masked men had descended into the warrens.

  “We need to distance ourselves from them,” Evans said.

  He lowered his legs through the hole, drew his arms to his chest, and slid over the edge. The floor was maybe ten feet down, half the initial drop from the surface, but being able to see the bottom somehow made it worse.

  Jade helped Anya work her legs through the hole and brace her elbows on the rim. “I’ve got you,” Evans said and gave her a reassuring squeeze on the ankles.

  Anya released a high-pitched shriek when Jade let go. She glanced back in the direction from which they’d come. She heard the distant thrum of footsteps, but as of yet couldn’t see any sign of movement or approaching lights.

  “Come on,” Evans said.

  Jade sat down, scooted over the hole, and dropped through the ground into the room below. Evans caught her around the waist and drew her tightly to him, his face buried between her breasts.

  “You can put me down now,” she said.

  He released her, and she landed off-balance, toppled backward, and alighted unceremoniously on her rear end. He offered his hand and pulled her to her feet.

  “Sorry about that, but you did say to put you down.”

  Jade jabbed her index finger in his face and prepared to let him have it, but Anya cut her off.

  “Over here,” she said. “You guys have to see this.”

  A ramp led downward from the stable to a level metered by rough-hewn limestone columns. The ground was rocky and uneven around the circumference of the circular cavern, the center of which was several feet lower. It was almost as though the outer ring had been designed to function as a gallery that offered a better view of the cleared section. There were more blood spatters on the wall, and brass casings and long feathers hardened into the congealed mess underneath them.

  Something had definitely been alive down here when Enigma arrived, quite possibly the same extant species of dinosaur that had been left to guard the maze underneath Teotihuacan.

  Jade strode out into the open and joined Anya beneath the domed ceiling. What had looked like pillars were actually freestanding megaliths resembling those from the temples being excavated from the hillside. These, too, were anthropomorphized, only they had something that none of the others aboveground had.

  Their heads.

  23

  ROCHE

  U.S. Army Medical Research Institute

  of Infectious Diseases,

  Fort Detrick, Maryland

  Friden led them down the sterile corridor toward the genetics lab. Roche watched the researchers through the windows of the doors on either side. None of them so much as looked up from their work as the pr
ocession passed. He saw a glove box swarming with mosquitoes in one room and another overflowing with cages full of venomous snakes and screaming primates.

  “What in the name of God do you do down here?” he asked.

  Friden opened the door at the end of the hallway and admitted them into a lab containing equipment the likes of which Roche had never seen before. He looked at Kelly, who appeared every bit as overwhelmed as he felt. Her gloved hand was squirming at her side, the material too stiff to allow her fingertips to tap the pad of her thumb with their customary rhythm.

  “Funny you should mention God, because if you were to find a way to sequence his DNA, I’d imagine it would look a lot like that of the sample you guys sent me.” Friden stopped in front of a series of three computer monitors displaying vertical bands of colors reminiscent of the badges worn on military dress uniforms. “What you’re looking at here is the visual expression of the genomes of three distinct species. On the left you have a common chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes. In the center, Homo sapiens sapiens. That’s us. And on the right, a hominin species the likes of which I’ve never seen before.”

  “The sample from the man entombed in Mosul,” Kelly said.

  “There’s nothing manlike about him. Check out the human genome. Each of these bands represents a single chromosome, forty-six in total, between which there are more than twenty thousand genes. This is humanity boiled down to its most basic ingredients, the fundamental building blocks from which each and every one of us is constructed.”

  “Each of those colored lines represents a gene?” Roche said.

  “Do try to keep up,” Friden said and gestured to the screen on the left. “Compare the human genome with that of the chimpanzee. They look pretty much identical, don’t they? The chimp actually has forty-eight chromosomes—two of which combined down the evolutionary road to help create us—but express roughly the same number of genes. Now check out the one on the right. The one you sent me.”