by A. G. Riddle
“Answer one more question,” Yuri said, “and you’ll be a member of the Citium. And I’ll help you discover what happened to Conner.”
Desmond knew this wasn’t a negotiation, that Yuri wasn’t making an offer. These were his terms. He sat at the desk. “The library is back in San Francisco.”
“You won’t need it for this question. Just the internet. And your intelligence. The answer to this final riddle is in plain sight, though few see it.”
Desmond took a pen and pad from the desk.
“In July of 1405,” Yuri began, “a Chinese fleet under the command of Zheng He departed from Suzhou for a tour around the Pacific Ocean. The scale of the expedition was massive. Over three hundred ships, almost twenty-eight thousand crewmen, mostly military. They visited much of Southeast Asia, including Brunei, Java, and Thailand. They stopped in India, the Horn of Africa, and Arabia.
“China in 1405 was home to sixty-five million people. England had only two million. China was the largest economy in the world at that time. India was second. And the Chinese fleets were much more advanced than those of any European power. Their largest ship was four hundred feet long and had a four-tiered deck. By comparison, Christopher Columbus’s largest ship, the Santa María, was roughly fifty-eight feet long.
“In 1400, if you were asked to guess which nation would colonize Australia, you probably wouldn’t have looked to Western Europe. Yet it was the Dutch who landed there first—in 1606. And Britain who established the first colony—in 1788. Why? It’s not an isolated incident. Western European nations came to dominate the world—economically, militarily, and culturally. Why? What made the British and Spanish explorers so different?”
Chapter 25
Conner returned to the hidden room in Lin Shaw’s home with a duffel bag and carefully placed the items inside it. His instincts told him that the pictures, and especially the map, could be useful at some point. They might even hold the key to understanding the motive behind Lin’s betrayal.
A voice came over the comm. “Zero. Unit two. We’ve got incoming X1 troops. They’re evacuating the homes along Santa Cruz.”
Conner raced to the living room. Through the bay window, he saw that the wildfire had grown, and was expanding by the minute.
“Status?” he whispered, nearly paralyzed.
“Sir?”
“The fire!” he roared. “You idiots. What is the status of that bloody fire you set?”
A pause. “We did a drone flyover ten minutes—”
“Status!”
“It’s contained south of Sand Hill. They’ve set up a firewall around Stanford.”
“We’re not at Stanford, are we?”
“No, sir. North of Sand Hill, the fire is rolling through the neighborhoods. It’s too big to stop.”
Conner froze. “How long until it reaches us?”
“Twenty minutes. Maybe a little more or less.”
Conner raced back to the garage. Dr. Park was still sitting in the van with the rear doors open. A screen displayed Desmond’s brain wave patterns.
Park had apparently been listening to the radio exchange, and anticipated Conner’s question. He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Doctor.”
“It’ll be close.”
“How close?”
“Minutes. I’d say it’s fifty-fifty we get out before the fire.”
Conner wanted to retreat then and there. But he couldn’t. Wouldn’t. He looked at his brother lying on the hospital bed. He was helpless, at the mercy of the coming fire, just as Conner had been a long time ago.
Desmond had tried to save him that day. He had failed, but he had saved Conner twenty years later. Conner now had to do the same for his older brother—and the memories buried in the Labyrinth were his only hope of that.
He activated his comm. “Units two, three, and four. Fall back to West Atherton. Take up covered positions. Unit one, converge on my position and prepare to leave. And stay out of sight.”
Ten minutes later, the temperature was rising in the home. Conner sat in the garage, sweating, focusing on his breathing, trying not to imagine the inferno marching toward him.
To his surprise, a knock sounded on the front door.
Desmond didn’t wait on Yuri to find Conner. In Australia, he hired the country’s best private detective to research what had happened to his brother after the fire. Then he hired the second best. Again and again, they hit dead ends. They requested money for lawyers to get public records, specialists to advise, but they made little progress. He pressed them harder.
When he wasn’t searching for Conner, he pondered Yuri’s final riddle. At the heart of the question was how the world had come to be the way it was. Specifically, why had Great Britain colonized Australia instead of Russia, or China, Japan, or India? All were substantial powers in 1606 when the Dutch landed in Australia, yet none of the Asian nations had found the island continent. It was also Western Europe who colonized the Americas and the Pacific Islands, spreading their language and culture, and with it their system of laws and economic principles. Why?
Desmond began with an obvious difference: religion. But when he presented his theory, Yuri simply shook his head. “This isn’t about religion.”
Desmond dug deeper. He compared the geography and climate. Then he realized the key to this mystery might be found in the answer to the previous mystery. The human race had bested its competitors—the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and floresiensis—because it thought differently. How had the British, Spanish, and Dutch thought differently?
The answer became clear immediately.
Yuri sat in Desmond’s hotel room with his legs crossed and his hands in his lap. Desmond stood before the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the green expanse of trees and grass and walking trails that made up Victoria Park.
“Capitalism,” Desmond said. “It powered the West—incentivized exploration, exploitation even.”
Yuri nodded. “It’s half of the answer.”
Desmond didn’t have the other half.
When Yuri left, Desmond grabbed the lamp from the desk table, held it up to throw it at the door, but stopped at the last second. He wanted to have a drink.
Instead he went for a walk. He was learning more than the facts Yuri had led him to. He was learning patience. And discipline.
His phone rang. A thrill went through him when he heard the private investigator’s voice. The man’s name was Arlo, and the New Zealander spoke with a thick accent and gruff voice. “Think I got something, Desy.”
They sat in a coffee shop off Grenfell Street, the steamers screeching in the background. Patrons with dogs crowded the small cafe, staring at laptops and paperback novels and, nonchalantly, each other.
The shaggy-haired man laid a manila envelope on the round table and drew out a series of photocopies of handwritten notes on hospital forms. Intake details. Surgeries. Medications. The name on the forms was “Joe Bloggs”—the Australian equivalent of John Doe. Age estimated at twelve months.
“Two days after the fire, a couple rescue workers came round to your old homestead, takin’ a survey an’ all that. Found this little guy under a flipped-over refrigerator of all places. Burned remains of a woman next to it—”
“Please be quiet,” Desmond whispered.
He read the hospital notes, each word a dagger cutting through his heart. The urge to get up and walk away was nearly irresistible, but it was second to his desire to read more and learn the truth.
The ER doctor who had admitted the infant had placed him in the pediatric intensive care unit. Their primary concerns were noted: Severe dehydration. Third-degree burns on forty percent of his body. Two instances of fourth-degree burns: right thigh and right tricep.
Desmond stared at the final words: Prognosis poor.
The care team administered fluids. Removed dead tissue. Dressed the wounds. Tried to get his weight back up.
On the fourth day, the attending’s notes turned more positiv
e. Still critical, but stable. Responsive to treatment.
They moved him to Adelaide Children’s Hospital, where he convalesced for two months. He cried constantly when conscious. They sedated him and did their best to heal the burn marks across his face and body. The charge nurse’s words rang off the page: It’s both a blessing and a curse that he’s so young. At least he won’t remember the horror of his wounds.
Arlo was getting antsy. “Oy,” he called to the barista. “’Bout an Irish coffee?”
She muttered something Desmond couldn’t make out.
Arlo leaned forward. “’E was a fighter, Desy.”
Desmond turned the last page, which noted that the patient had been remanded to an orphanage outside the city.
“Where is he now?”
Arlo sat back. “Don’t know.”
“What else do you have?”
“That’s it.”
“This is it?”
“Well, thought you’d want to know straightaway.”
Desmond did. But the news that his brother had indeed survived the fire only made him even hungrier to know more.
“Find him, Arlo. Or find out what happened.”
The weathered man fixed Desmond with a fake sympathetic grin. Finally, he exhaled theatrically, as if regretting the bad news he was about to deliver. “Look, that there weren’t exactly easy to come by. Had to search half the hospitals in South Australia. This little manhunt of yours is getting right expensive, Desy. I mean, my time and expenses is already going on three large.”
Arlo glanced away, waiting. Desmond knew the routine. The man was testing his client to see how deep his pockets were—and how far he was willing to extend his arms.
“I’ll give you two weeks,” Desmond said. “And ten thousand Australian when you find him or a death certificate.”
Arlo spread out his hands. “Hey, I bill by the hour. I can’t control where the case takes me—”
“I pay for results. If the ten thousand doesn’t work for you, we’ll settle up now.”
Arlo glanced away, as if struggling with the decision. “Aw, all right. At this point I just want to see you reunited with your baby brother.”
Every day that went by was agony for Desmond, knowing his brother was alive, that he had suffered, and was likely still suffering, possibly alone.
He slept little. His mind was a record on repeat, replaying that day twenty years ago, standing in front of his childhood home, the flames licking the walls and climbing the roof while he screamed his brother’s name. He knew the truth now: if he had waited, if he hadn’t rushed into the fire, he could have searched the remains for Conner, possibly gotten him to the hospital sooner. They could have been together. Grown up together. How would it have changed their lives? What had happened to Conner? The questions and guilt haunted him.
He tried to focus on Yuri’s final mystery, but couldn’t concentrate.
So, as he had in San Francisco, he turned to exercise for escape. He ran in the Adelaide Park Lands, pushing himself harder each day, to the point when the endorphins shut down his mind and freed him.
Days went by. Arlo didn’t call.
Desmond ran every morning and again in the afternoon. In the spring rain and in the blazing South Australian sun.
On a clear Sunday morning, at the end of a seven-mile run, realization struck him when he least expected it. He hadn’t even been thinking about Yuri’s question, but the answer came, unbidden. Every piece of Yuri’s puzzle fit together, they were like images in a vast panoramic landscape Desmond had been staring at his whole life, but had only ever seen in parts. Now his eyes were wide open.
He drew out his phone and dialed Yuri.
“Yes?”
“I know what the Western Europeans had, why they colonized America, and Australia, and India, Hong Kong, and Africa five hundred years ago.”
Silence on the line.
“They had you, Yuri.”
Chapter 26
The Gulfstream jet banked hard and dove, throwing Peyton into the central aisle. Lin was up first. She ran to the cockpit where Avery was shouting into the radio. Peyton saw the Royal Air Force jets a second later.
She caught the gist of the conversation in clips and phrases as the plane leveled out and flew away from the Scottish mainland. Apparently the Rubicon program had established relationships with governments around the world. Avery was verified via the RAF ground operator, and the jets soon fell in beside them and acted as an escort.
Through the oval window, Peyton got her first look at civilization in a month. Or what was left of it. In the midday light, she saw only deserted highways littered with burned cars. Military vehicles were massed around schools and stadiums and hospitals, like swarms of bees dotting the green expanse and nearly empty cities. A few cars moved along the smaller roads—people going out for supplies, no doubt. But for the most part, the world below appeared to have ground to a halt. Everyone was hunkered down.
Green fields surrounded the Oxford airport. Like Post-Rogers, it had only a single runway. Two dozen armored troop carriers and canvas-backed trucks were parked at the terminal.
As soon as they landed, twenty troops marched out onto the tarmac to greet them. They were dressed in camo and body armor, with beige berets featuring a black patch. The patch showed a sword between wings, with a phrase below: Who Dares Wins. SAS troops. Whoever Avery had made contact with had requested the very best to accompany them.
Inside the terminal, they made ten copies of the data Nigel had rescued from the Arktika. Lin refused to tell her hosts exactly what the data was, what she intended to do with it, or even whom she was working with. She simply asked them to transport copies to the governments of the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Russia, and to hold five copies at different locations in the UK. She wasn’t taking any chances.
When the data was on its way, Lin and the others—and their SAS escort—loaded into Land Rovers and drove into Oxford. Peyton took in every detail. Despite spending the first six years of her life in London, she had never visited Oxford. It was a quaint town, filled with old stone buildings with Gothic architecture. Ivy grew up the walls, crawling toward the steep-pitched slate roofs. The village was almost medieval, like something out of a fairy tale, an ancient town frozen in time.
As they turned onto Catte Street, it began to rain, a slow drizzle that blotted out the sun like a curtain being drawn. The city seemed to shrink around them as haze filled the streets.
The convoy stopped at the Old Bodleian Library, and Peyton stepped out into the cold December day. A gust of wind carried a chill, though it was nothing compared to the bone-penetrating gales in the Arctic. And despite the cold, there was no snow on the roofs.
There were also no people in sight, only a few abandoned bicycles leaning against the iron fence across the street. Christmas was in a few days, but no wreaths hung in the windows, no garlands, no strings of lights. In this town devoted to tradition, survival had taken priority.
The Bodleian’s Great Gate lay ahead. At five stories tall, it was the largest gate tower in England. It was also called the Tower of the Five Orders of Architecture, owing to its Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and composite decorative elements. Peyton took in the beautiful stone structure as they marched past its heavy wooden double doors. A ticket booth for tours sat deserted, and beyond, the Old Schools Quadrangle was also empty.
Their footsteps echoed in the stone courtyard as they crossed, altering their course only to go around a bronze statue of the Earl of Pembroke, who was the chancellor of the university from 1617 to 1630.
Another set of wooden double doors led to the library’s vast entrance hall. Large circular information desks lay at each end. A tall man who looked to be about sixty introduced himself as the Bodleian’s librarian. Ten younger assistant librarians crowded behind him, taking in the SAS troops and Peyton’s party with expressions of surprise and curiosity.
On the plane, Lin, Peyton, and Avery had discussed how
to find a first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Normally, they would have used SOLO—Search Oxford Libraries Online. But Avery’s Rubicon contact had confirmed that SOLO had gone offline when the internet routers had been compromised. The contact had asked for the title they were looking for, but Lin had been emphatic that they not reveal it. It was Lin’s decision instead that they would select three librarians at random to accompany Peyton, Avery, and herself as they searched for the books. Nigel would remain behind with the SAS troops and Navy SEALs. Lin still didn’t trust him enough to include him in the search.
Lin didn’t introduce herself or say anything about what they were doing here. She scanned the librarians and pointed at three of them: two men and a woman. Together, they made their way out of the entrance hall.
The room they entered was breathtaking. It reminded Peyton of a medieval church. On each side were five wide windows, at least twelve feet across and twenty feet high, with Gothic arches and stained-glass panes. The ceiling was ribbed in stone. Peyton felt like she was walking through the belly of a giant whale, seeing its back and spine from the inside. The ribs met in star formations that flowed toward the floor like stone icicles hanging from the ceiling.
And something about the place was familiar. “What’s this part of the library called?” she asked the librarian walking next to her, a woman about her age with brown hair and glasses that were slightly too large for her face.
“It’s the Divinity School. It was built in the 1400s. It’s the oldest surviving purpose-built university building.”
Peyton nodded.
Another librarian, a young man with black hair said, “It was in Harry Potter. The infirmary.”
That was how Peyton knew it.
The female librarian shook her head, clearly perturbed that pop culture was coming to define this historic place.