“We know about Cygnus, Orion, and Reticulum, but this is the first we’ve heard anyone refer to the constellation of Taurus,” he said. “We need to know the significance, and I’ve already run out of patience.”
Tess realized that the message she’d sent to Roche was the only reason she was still alive. Had Maddox cracked the code, she probably never would have woken up at all, and her body would likely be under the tarp with the others. She needed to string him along and hope to God he didn’t see through her deception.
“I don’t . . . know,” Tess croaked. She tried to swallow to clear her throat. “I haven’t figured it out.”
“Oh, I think you have.”
Maddox smiled in a predatory manner, one with which he appeared intimately familiar. Nothing about his face had changed, and yet it somehow looked completely different, as though he’d relaxed the muscles he used to make himself blend in with the rest of them and allowed his true monstrous self to emerge. The scars on his face made him look like a scarecrow, as though his face had been poorly stitched back together. His blue eyes hinted at the kinds of horrors he was prepared to inflict upon her. That he was eager to inflict upon her.
“Aldebaran is the bull’s eye,” she said. “Like Saturn in the crop circles, I believe it serves as a target, although I don’t know whether it’s meant to be literal or metaphorical.”
“Taurus is adjacent to Orion in the night sky,” he said. “Aldebaran lies in the same plane as his belt and aligns with his shoulders, as though he’s looking directly at it. If it’s part of the riddle, then we need to know now or we’ll waste what little time we have left searching in the wrong place. We can’t afford to wait another twenty-seven years for this celestial alignment to occur again.”
“I told you—”
His hand moved so quickly she never even saw it. Her head snapped back and her lower lip burst. She toppled backward in the chair. Watched her feet rise toward the ceiling. Landed on her shoulders. The base of her skull ricocheted from the floor. Colors flashed before her eyes.
Maddox stepped over her legs, straddled her chest, and stared straight down at her.
“You need to think long and hard about how you answer my next question,” he said. “Lie to me again and I won’t be so gentle.”
Blood welled in the back of her throat. She struggled to cough it out, to turn her head far enough to the side to let it drain, but failed. The prospect of drowning in her own blood was more than she could bear. She thrashed against the restraints binding her chest, arms, and ankles to the chair.
Maddox watched the panic form in her eyes. Let her struggle until she was on the verge of inhaling one final time before grabbing the chair and rolling it onto its side.
Tess barely staved off hyperventilation as the fluid drained from the corner of her mouth.
He again crouched in front of her. She could see past him into the hallway, where several men in tactical masks strode directly toward them. One broke away from the others and warily approached Maddox. The urban camouflage design stood apart from the white walls but concealed his face.
“The contact lenses and voice modulator subverted the security system in the elevator, but we can’t find a way to circumvent the electromagnetic seal at the bottom of the shaft,” he said.
“Have a little faith,” Maddox said. “Just be ready to move when it opens.”
“What if there’s nothing down there?”
“Trust me, it’s down there.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“Then we’ll turn this entire base into a flaming crater!” Maddox shouted.
The man in the camo mask took an involuntary step backward.
Maddox straightened his jacket and took a moment to compose himself.
“I know Barnett,” he said. “There’s no way he allowed it to be incinerated. It has to be here somewhere, and you and I both know the original blueprints show more than three sublevels.”
“And just how do you propose we reach the fourth?”
“Use your imagination,” Maddox said. He turned to face Tess with that horrible smile on his face and a knife she hadn’t seen him draw in his hand. “After all, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”
35
KELLY
Joint Base Langley-Eustis,
Hampton, Virginia
Kelly’s cell phone rang. She glanced at the caller ID but didn’t recognize the number. She was about to send the call to voicemail when she recognized the area code as one corresponding to Maryland. She removed her headset and answered on the third ring.
“That was fast,” she answered. She had to shout to hear her own voice over the thunder of the helicopter. “Tell me you have good news.”
She nudged Roche, who was still on the direct line with the Secretary of Defense, although he hadn’t done much of the talking since informing him that Unit 51 had been compromised, and mouthed that she had Friden on the line. “Where are you, Yemen?” Friden asked. “It sounds like you’re in the middle of a freaking war zone.”
“Still on the chopper,” she said. “What do you have for me?”
“So the PCR test produces a basic genetic profile, right? It breaks down sections of DNA, amplifies them, and forms a kind of bar-code design unique to every individual. These bar codes are useful in court because they’re not only accurate but cheap to produce in cases where there are a lot of potential baby daddies, if you know what I mean. Assuming the samples weren’t contaminated, all we’d really done is establish that all three men had the same father. That’s our Western morality, for you. We just assumed that meant they had the same mother.”
“I take it they don’t.”
“Not even close. I could tell just by looking at their mitochondrial DNA that they all had different moms. So I ran a more detailed analysis, worked a little magic, and isolated several sequences that I recognized right away. I don’t have an eidetic memory per se, but I do have a pretty fantastic—”
“Max.”
“Remember that genome I showed you earlier? The one with all of the extra genes?”
Kelly’s hand fretted at her side. She knew exactly which genome he was talking about, but the mere mention of it left her reeling.
“You ran their DNA against that of the body from Mosul,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “You kind of jumped the gun on the big reveal.”
“He’s their father?”
“Not even close, but they have enough of the same genes that you can tell they share some amount of blood. With more time, I could probably determine how much and the extent of their relationship, but I figured you’d want to hear this right away.”
“I could kiss you, Max.”
“Can I make a suggestion as to where?”
She terminated the call, put her headset back on, and glanced out the window as the Black Hawk banked out over the Back River, offering her the briefest glimpse of Plum Tree National Wildlife Refuge and Chesapeake Bay before heading back inland toward Joint Base Langley-Eustis. “Yes, sir,” Roche said. “I’ll contact you personally once the Hangar has been retaken.”
He swung the microphone away from his lips and blew out a breath he’d been holding for too long.
“Friden confirmed the samples belong to three distinct individuals with the same father, but different mothers,” Kelly said.
“So they weren’t mishandled or contaminated.”
“Worse. They share genes with the man in the eagle mask.”
Roche flinched but quickly recovered.
“We’ll have to deal with that later,” he said. “Right now, we’ve got more urgent matters that require our attention, namely taking back the Hangar.” The chopper streaked toward a small airfield surrounded by squat industrial buildings. Clayborn had ordered the immediate enactment of a contingency plan designed during the Cold War for the extraction of senior military officials from the fallout shelter and revised after the renovation of the secret base, transferring o
perational control to a central command center capable of coordinating all of the various moving parts involved in the tactical response. She’d overheard something about a training facility but hadn’t expected anything as ordinary as this. There were no other helicopters or airplanes on the tarmac and nothing in the adjacent fields. Four men jogged away from an aluminum structure toward the helipad.
“The drone’s in the air,” a voice Kelly didn’t recognize said through the headset. “Two miles and closing. ETA: five minutes.”
Roche swung the microphone back in front of his mouth.
“Copy, Command.”
The Black Hawk descended so fast that Kelly’s stomach fluttered. She feared it wouldn’t be able to pull up in time, and while a fiery crash would be a fitting end to the day, they had people inside the Hangar and field teams in both Mexico and Turkey who were counting on them. For all the good she was doing. She felt helpless. Her expertise was in geothermal forces and tectonic activity, not . . . whatever this was. The speculative nature of her current inquiries into ancient religions and mythology made her somewhat uncomfortable, but she was grateful for the opportunity to utilize her skills as a researcher to help, even in such a small way.
“We’ve identified the GPS beacons of your men in Mexico, roughly three miles southeast of their destination,” Command said, “but we’re unable to locate your team in Turkey. We do, however, have visual on a cargo plane in a field near their last known location.”
“Damn it,” Roche said. “Can we keep it from taking off?”
“Negative. By the time we negotiate penetration of Turkish airspace, it’ll be long gone.”
“Then track it. And for God’s sake, don’t lose it!”
“What’s going on?” Kelly asked.
“Our team was ambushed,” Roche said. “Presumably by the same group that attacked them six months ago in Teotihuacan and used Maddox to infiltrate Unit 51, which means that if they found the virus—”
“It’s on that plane,” Kelly finished for him.
The rotors screamed as the chopper pulled up and settled to the ground just long enough for the special ops team to throw open the sliding door and climb inside before taking to the sky once more. The soldiers wore black from head to toe, with night vision apparatuses protruding from their foreheads like horns and semiautomatic rifles with laser sights and infrared beams clutched to their chests. Their eyes passed over Kelly and Roche, but no introductions were made.
“Thermal imaging of the site is negative,” Command said. “And there’s no movement whatsoever aboveground.”
“Do you have access to satellite footage from the last three hours?” Roche asked.
“We’re already going back through it in an effort to determine if an incursion team penetrated the base and the size of the force you’re potentially up against.”
The chopper streaked toward the Hangar, staying just above the treetops to avoid detection for as long as possible. Maddox knew everything Roche did, if not more. He had to know they were coming and had undoubtedly already implemented countermeasures. Kelly couldn’t quite imagine what these four men could possibly do to retake a bunker that had been designed to survive a nuclear detonation and upgraded to withstand a siege, but she had to believe they knew what they were doing.
“Why would they risk an assault on the Hangar when it’s in the middle of one of the largest military bases on the planet?” Kelly asked. “They have to understand there’s no way they’re getting out of there.”
“I’ve been asking myself the same question,” Roche said. “The information in our database would be priceless to the right people, but Maddox has had ample opportunity to download everything in our system. He could have walked right out the door with it and no one would have known.”
“What about the technology?”
“While the tech down there has to be worth billions, it would take a team of engineers weeks to disassemble it and even longer to transport it out of there. It would be easier to just download the plans and build copies somewhere else. We have to be missing something.”
“Like another way out?”
“Possibly, or perhaps Barnett keeps more than just information down there.”
Kelly suddenly understood what he was suggesting.
“You mean like the collection of artifacts Hollis Richards brought with him to Antarctica,” she said.
“With as many secrets as Barnett was keeping, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out there was a veritable treasure trove hidden somewhere down there.”
“We’ve practically lived in the Hangar for the last six months. Surely we would have come across it by now, but even if you’re right, what could possibly be valuable enough to justify the risk?”
“That’s what we need to figure out,” Roche said. “I have to believe that if Maddox knew where it was, he would have simply taken it when the opportunity presented itself.”
“Assuming it was small enough.”
“Even size wouldn’t be an impediment if, as I suspect, he managed to get a team into the base. As long as it fit inside the elevator, they could have loaded it into the back of a truck and drove off with it while we were gone.”
“Which brings us back around to them taking an unnecessary risk.”
Roche leaned back and chewed on his lower lip, an affectation Kelly knew meant he was trying to chase a thought that continued to elude him.
“We have imagery of three men entering the decommissioned airfield on foot precisely fifteen minutes after you left,” Command said. “We’re still working backward to determine their point of origin, but I can tell you they walked straight into that hangar like they owned the place.”
“There are countless cameras throughout the complex,” Roche said.
“Disabled fifteen minutes after you left and within seconds of the appearance of the men.”
“I just talked to Max,” Kelly said. “There’s no way he’s in on it.”
“We’ve dispatched a team to Fort Detrick to interview Dr. Friden, but I’m inclined to agree,” Command said. “He would have bolted the moment you took off if he was an active conspirator. It looked like these guys simply seized the opportunity when it presented itself, but they were prepared to make their play regardless.”
Kelly understood the implications. Had she and Roche been inside the Hangar when Maddox put his plan into effect, theirs would be the same fate as the men and women trapped inside, assuming they were still alive.
“The timing has to be the key,” Roche said.
“You mean the lunar eclipse,” Kelly said.
“It can’t be a coincidence. The only other time this faction risked stepping out of the shadows was when our team discovered the maze under the Temple of the Feathered Serpent in Teotihuacan. They already knew what was hidden at the center, which was why they co-opted the site archeologist in the first place.”
“They wanted the body.”
“Exactly.”
“You don’t think . . . ?”
“It’s not like Barnett to allow anything as valuable as the body in Mosul to be destroyed. And he certainly wouldn’t have told us if he’d brought it back to the States instead of having it incinerated.”
“That would certainly explain why Max had access to so many samples, even after the remains had supposedly been destroyed,” Kelly said. “These people must be after it for the regenerative properties of its tissues.”
“If we assume the body they recovered from Mexico has the same abilities, then surely they have access to all of the samples they need,” Roche said. “This has to be about the body from Mosul specifically.”
Kelly glanced down at the images of the gods on the screen, at the analogous beings who formed the foundation of nearly every extinct and modern religion.
“What if they genuinely believe that these are the bodies of ancient gods?” she said.
“I’ve heard of stranger things.”
The men crouching near the sliding
door tensed and readjusted their grips on their weapons. She followed their lines of sight to where the abandoned airfield materialized from the horizon.
“If there’s another way out of there,” Command said, “we can’t find it on the blueprints.”
“What about an additional sublevel?” Roche asked.
“The original blueprints have a fortified bunker another sixty feet down, but I show it was sealed off when the substructure was modified.”
“What if it wasn’t?”
“It was designed to withstand a nuclear detonation directly above it. We’re talking fifty feet of reinforced concrete surrounding it in every direction.”
“Then how were they planning to get out?” Kelly asked.
“I assure you,” one of the men beside her said. “There’s no way they’re getting past us, let alone off this base if by some miracle they do.”
Maddox had to know that, so why had he taken such an extreme gamble? If she was right and he was part of an organization composed of zealots who believed they were recovering the physical bodies of their gods, then the traditional motivations didn’t necessarily apply. Perhaps these men never intended to escape in the first place and they’d willingly undertaken their assignment knowing it was a suicide mission. What if their sole objective was to attempt to resurrect a being they thought of as a god? Kelly thought about the mummified bodies they’d discovered so far and the masks in which they’d been entombed—the eagle in Iraq, the feathered serpent in Mexico, and the stag in Antarctica—and recalled a carving she’d seen during her hurried research. She scrolled back through the various searches until she found what she was looking for: a detailed image from the Seal of Adda, a greenstone cylinder used as a formal signature on a clay tablet, like a stamp in a wax seal, that dated to 2300 BCE. It featured four figures—the bearded god, An, and his children: Enlil, with his symbolic fish; Enki, with his eagle; and Inanna, with points jutting like antlers from her triangular hat—surrounded by symbols of ritualistic importance to each. These four formed the upper echelon of the pantheon that had been passed from the Sumerians to the Assyrians, provided the foundation for the religious beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, and found modern representation in Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and, some would argue, even Judaism and Christianity.
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