Roche stared at the screen. It looked like there were the same number of vertical bands, but so many more horizontal colored lines packed into the same amount of space that they were nearly indistinguishable. “It has the same number of chromosomes,” Kelly said, “but twice as many genes.”
“More than that,” Friden said. “We’re talking forty-seven thousand genes. That’s nearly as many as a grain of rice.”
“Rice?” Roche said.
“You know, the white stuff they serve with Chinese food?”
“I’m familiar with rice, Dr. Friden, but I don’t have the slightest clue what you’re trying to say.”
“All living beings have chromosomes,” Friden said. “Even plants. A species like rice might have fewer chromosomes, but there are variants with upwards of fifty thousand genes, largely because, evolutionarily speaking, rice has been around a heck of a lot longer than we have. It’s been forced to adapt to all kinds of environmental conditions in order to survive. Temperature, climate, sunlight, darkness, different types of soil. You name it, and rice found a way to beat it. Its advantage is that its life cycle is measured in seasons instead of years, giving it the ability to adapt much more quickly. Considering the weather changes dramatically, often from one year to the next, plants have to basically evolve on the fly, which means that a new adaptation is beginning to kick in even as the current one is in full swing and the one before that isn’t even out the door. All of these minuscule changes start to stack up, one on top of another on top of another.”
“But that’s not how we work,” Kelly said. “Our genetic code is more like a hard drive in the sense that it essentially rewrites the new data over the old very slowly over millions of years.”
“Which is precisely why it took millions of years to develop an opposable thumb. Meanwhile, rice just keeps piling on the new genes, because at the end of the day, rice is always going to be rice. It’s not going to magically grow legs or wings or anything like that, but all of those genes, with all of their subtle variations, serve to make it one of the hardiest organisms on the face of the planet, one capable of surviving environmental cataclysms that’d kill off even the cockroaches.”
“So what’s the significance?” Roche asked.
Friden turned to face him and smiled patiently, as though preparing to address a child.
“Look at it this way,” he said. “Despite tens of millions of years of evolution, we’re really not all that much different than the chimpanzee. We share ninety-six percent of our DNA and have the same chromosomes, if not the same number. If this were a simple mathematical equation, you’d be able to round up a chimp and call it a man. Now look at the one on the right and apply everything I’ve been telling you.”
“This sample comes from a hominin species countless millions of years older than ours,” Kelly said.
“Try billions,” Friden said. “This is a species evolved to the umpteenth degree, one capable of surviving any number of extinction-level events that would wipe us all out.”
“You’re suggesting it could even survive death,” Roche said.
“I just showed you how it could do just that. Those fat cells? They weren’t merely desiccated; they were outright dead.”
“And yet you were able to use blood to refill them.”
“It’s doesn’t work like a sponge. You can’t just pour blood on it and expect it to soak it all up. I mean, I guess that’s exactly what you can expect, but it isn’t that simple. We believe it utilizes regenerative capabilities similar to those of a zebrafish.”
“A fish,” Roche said.
“Or a flatworm,” Friden said. “I figured a fish would give you a better visual, but I’m flexible. Heck, a salamander might even work—”
“The zebrafish will be fine,” Kelly said.
“Okay, so Danio rerio is a common aquarium fish you can buy at just about every pet store in the world. It’s incredibly common, and there’s really nothing extraordinary about it, outside of the fact that it can regrow just about anything you cut off of it. You can blind it, deafen it, sever its spinal cord, or lop off its fins. Whatever you want, really, and a process called histone demethylation will occur at the site, essentially causing the cells of the damaged tissue to revert to a stem cell–like state. These cells are undifferentiated, and thus have the potential to be any part of the body, be it retinal cells, the lateral line hairs of the ear, the neurons in the nervous system, or the structural components of the fins. They aggregate into masses called blastemas, which contain the blueprints for every type of cell in the entire body. You’ll find them in the embryonic stage of every animal species before they begin the process of specialization and form the different kinds of structures and tissues.”
He suddenly turned and strode back down the hallway to his lab, disconnecting and attaching air hoses as he went. It was all Roche and Kelly could do to keep up with him. He passed through the door and veered immediately to his left, where a scanning electron microscope was set up at its own station. The sample on the monitor beside it was stained purple and resembled a long-abandoned spiderweb, the pattern broken in spots and stretched in others.
“This is a blastema we collected from the same adipocytes you see on that screen over there. Our working theory is that they circulate throughout the specimen’s body in its blood, most likely attached to the surface of the red blood cells themselves. You have to understand that blood interacts with every cell in the body, whether directly through the cellular membrane or indirectly via the interstitial fluid, so these blastemas are literally everywhere in the body at once. Anyplace you find blood, you’ll find them, too.”
“The tissue sample came from a mummified corpse,” Roche said. “There wasn’t a drop of blood in it.”
“But there was at one time, right?” Friden said. “In a living specimen, that blood flows from the heart throughout the body and then back again, delivering oxygen and removing waste by-products. It’s a closed system, at least until something traumatic happens to open it, like, say, someone slits your throat and severs your carotid artery. The loss of blood is copious and fatal within a matter of minutes, but it’s not like every drop of blood evacuates your body through the hole in your neck. Once your heart stops beating, the residual blood lingering within that formerly closed system stops flowing and begins to settle, the cellular membranes rupture, and the fluid leaks out, leaving behind these blastemas like grains of salt from an evaporated pond.”
“The same would hold true during the process of mummification,” Kelly said.
“I’d go so far as to say the same thing would happen with any form of death. These blastemas are essentially aggregates of hematopoietic and mesenchymal stem cells capable of restarting the entire embryonic process. Producing blood cells, stimulating nerve cells, regenerating dead tissue. All they would need is the right catalyst to come along, one possessing what we theorize to be a protein called IGF-1, an insulin-like growth factor present in human blood, which researchers believe plays a role in triggering cancer cells to begin proliferating. The same thing happens here. The blastemas react to the IGF-1 in the blood and start rapidly differentiating into various tissues and red blood cells. We’re talking complete cellular regeneration.”
“So without the IGF-1 from the donor’s blood, the body could essentially linger in a state of physical death indefinitely,” Kelly said.
“As long as those blastemas remain intact and viable . . . which brings us to the whole reason I called you out here.”
Friden returned to the station at the back of the room, through the window of which Roche could see the glove box containing the regenerated fat cells. He recalled something the microbiologist had said when they first arrived. It’s our job here to develop active countermeasures and figure out the most efficient ways of killing these bastards.
“So how do you kill something that can’t die?” he asked.
“Aye, there’s the rub,” Friden said. “I can’t tell you how long I�
��ve been waiting to use that line.”
“So what’s the answer?”
Friden smirked.
“We’re still working on that, but what I can tell you—thanks to this miraculous specimen here—is how to wipe out the organisms that produce those gray bastards once and for all.”
“Gray?” Kelly asked. “You mean like Subject Zeta?”
“You’re kidding, right? That’s just about the lamest name I’ve ever heard.”
“Focus, Friden,” Roche said. “How do we kill them?”
“A better question would be: How do we kill them without wiping out humanity in the process?”
24
ANYA
Göbekli Tepe
Anya didn’t know what she’d expected the faces of the gods represented in these primitive sculptures to look like, especially considering the lengths those who worshiped them had gone to aboveground to eliminate all traces of them, but she certainly hadn’t expected something so . . . plain. The craniums were somewhat conical, although they tapered more toward the face than the vertex, upon which had been carved what almost looked like a hat. The eyes were long and slanted, the nose and mouth represented as little more than two dots above a horizontal line. The features didn’t even remotely resemble those of Subject Z, as she’d half expected. If anything, they appeared almost reptilian.
“We don’t have time for this,” Evans said. “We have to keep moving.”
She knew he was right. The men with the assault rifles were still coming, and if Sadik had been telling the truth, they’d been down here before, which gave them a distinct advantage. She quickly snapped off several pictures with her cell phone and hurried to catch up with the others, who were already ducking into the passage at the far side of the cavern.
This place was just like the underground cities of Derinkuyu and Kaymakli. It had been built like an anthill, with sloping walkways connecting one spherical hollow to another. Carbon scoring lingered on the walls to mark where torches had once burned. The ceiling was similarly blackened where the smoke had traced the contours of the rock toward small chimneys that served to funnel it all the way up to the surface. It was impossible to imagine human beings living down here in the flickering glow of flames they required as much for their heat as for their light. Raising children among animals, in filthy conditions rife with disease, while outside raged an apocalyptic blizzard they feared might never end. Generation after generation, for 1,200 years, the same length of time, historically speaking, that separated the Viking Age from the Space Age. The sheer terror that defined their daily existence must have been a physical presence stalking the darkness, their only hope the prayers to the very gods who had consigned them to this fate in the first place, to whom they would build temples when they eventually emerged, temples devoted to tracking the star Deneb, from which they believed these gods to have come.
Anya’s breath caught in her chest. It looked like Evans was sprinting straight into a dead end, but he turned at the last possible second. Jade ducked around the corner behind him, and Anya followed her down a set of narrow, uneven stairs into another circular chamber from which arched doorways branched like the spokes of a wagon wheel. There was more blood on the ground in here, smeared where the body of the feathered serpent had been dragged away. She prayed that there weren’t any more of them down here, lying in wait.
“Which way?” Jade asked. A note of panic had crept into her normally level tone. The clapping footsteps of their pursuers were still distant, but they were definitely louder than before. “We can’t afford to guess wrong.”
Anya shined her beam across the ground. Twelve centuries was more than enough time for the tread of the people who lived down here to wear through the limestone, like traffic patterns in carpet.
“That way,” she said and pointed toward an opening ahead of them and to the right. It suddenly struck her that they were descending in a specific pattern. “They built this place in a spiral to keep the chambers from collapsing under the weight of the bedrock.”
“But that doesn’t mean there’s a way out at the bottom,” Evans said.
Anya could only hope that these warrens had been built like the other underground cities and somewhere down there was another tunnel that would lead them back to the surface. Of course, if the men trying to kill them already knew about it, there could be a second team working back toward them from the other end. They couldn’t worry about that now, though, at least not until they escaped the hunters she could positively feel gaining on them with every passing second.
The tunnel wound downward toward a circular cavern that appeared to be a communal living space, with rooms framed by earthen pillars to both sides and a walkway running straight down the middle. The orifice on the far end led to another descending corridor.
They had to be close to a hundred feet down by now. She wished she’d been paying closer attention to this plateau on their way in. For the life of her, she couldn’t seem to remember how tall it had been, but surely they had to be close to the level of the surrounding plains, which meant that if there was a tunnel leading away from here, like the three hundred miles of interconnected passageways beneath the majority of the Stone Age sites in Central Turkey, it couldn’t be much farther ahead.
The tunnel opened onto a narrow ledge enclosed by a partial retaining wall and columns carved from the limestone. They were far more elaborate than those elsewhere in the subterranean mecca. They’d been sculpted into anthropomorphic figures with their backs to the ledge, like gargoyles watching over the chamber below them. They wore loincloths and cradled their bellies with their arms, like the megaliths in Göbekli Tepe, but each was depicted with the head of a different animal. One had the face of a bull, another that of an eagle. She saw a snake, a lion, a deer...
Anya was struck by a sudden realization that brought her momentum to a standstill. This prehistoric site was linked to the pyramids beneath the jungles of Mexico and two vertical miles of ice in Antarctica in ways she would likely never be able to comprehend.
“They’re the same,” she said.
“Come on, Anya!” Jade said.
“Look at their faces. They’re the same as those on the statues we found in the gallery inside the pyramid in Antarctica.”
“You’re right,” Evans said, “but there’s nothing we can do about that now.”
He rushed back to her, grabbed her by the hand, and pulled her around the circular ledge to where a series of irregular ledges descended to the chamber, at the center of which was a stone sarcophagus. It looked just like the one at the heart of the maze in Teotihuacan, only much smaller. So much smaller, in fact, that nothing larger than a newborn could have been buried inside.
“We have to open it,” she said. They all knew that this was what they’d come here to find. Whatever the map tattooed on the body from the tomb in Mosul led to was inside this stone container.
Evans glanced nervously back toward the entryway above them, from which the drumroll of approaching footsteps grew steadily louder. His stare rose to the domed ceiling, where it lingered for several seconds. Anya followed his line of sight and saw the tattered remnants of massive nests, like those of paper wasps, hanging from the ceiling. Several still contained the remains of long-dead animals, their hooves, paws, and horns protruding from the sides. Too bad the men who’d discovered this place had been better prepared for the feathered serpents this time.
“Then we’d better do it quickly,” Evans said and pushed against the lid, but it didn’t budge.
The footsteps became steadily louder. She could have sworn she heard voices.
“Hurry!” Jade said.
Evans put his shoulder into it and shoved the lid several inches. Anya joined him, and together they moved the lid back far enough to see that there was nothing inside. Where she’d expected to find a mummified body, there was only a circular cutout about six inches wide and just as deep. Anya knew exactly what had been inside
Sadik had been t
elling the truth; they’d already collected the artifact.
“They’re coming!” Jade said.
“Keep pushing,” Anya said.
“There’s no time!” Evans snapped.
“I have to know for sure.”
“Know what?”
“Just, please, help me push this off.”
Evans again glanced back toward the sound of approaching footsteps, then leaned into the lid and drove with his legs. Anya groaned with the exertion. Jade moved in beside her and pushed—
The lid slid over the opposite side and clattered to the ground with a thunderous boom that echoed throughout the warrens.
Anya ran around the base and knelt beside the lid. It had cracked down the middle, where an arch had been carved into the underside. She traced its smooth contours with her fingertips. She’d been right about what had been sealed inside for millennia, and now the canister was in the hands of the last people in the world they wanted to have it.
A faint aura of light limned the mouth of the tunnel above them.
They were out of time.
“Go!” Evans whispered and shoved her toward the lone exit branching from the far side of the room.
She sprinted toward the arched doorway and hurtled through the narrow tunnel. The passage constricted until it was barely wider than her shoulders and continued to wind downward into darkness that grew colder by the second. They had to be below the level of the surrounding desert now, and yet still the passage descended. She was on the verge of panicking when she finally saw the end.
Anya burst from the confines into a large cavern unlike all of the others. It was a natural formation hollowed from the limestone by eons of running water. The ceiling was spiked with stalactites, many of which reached the ground, forming columns that looked like they’d been molded from candle wax.
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