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by Judith Reeves-Stevens

“When you spoke to Weir, did he sell you another set of files?”

  “Sure did.”

  “Did those files pinpoint a new site?”

  “Not this time.”

  Shit, Merrit thought. The files were fakes. Exactly what he’d expect if the CID had flipped Weir to help snare Ironwood. There could be army investigators serving warrants on Ironwood’s offices across the country right now. And when Ironwood went down, Merrit knew, he wouldn’t go alone.

  “Weir set you up. We need to get off the train.” Merrit got to his feet. Ironwood had long had a Plan B in case any of his ongoing battles with the government appeared to be leading to prison.

  His employer waved his hand. “Sit down, sit down. I’m way ahead of you. It wasn’t a setup. The new files—the new genetic cluster—it was for Ganganagar. India. Ring a bell?”

  The name was familiar. Merrit sat down. “That’s where we found the first outpost. Three years ago.”

  Ironwood nodded, looking smug.

  Merrit found the expression irritating. “What good is that? We’ve already been there.”

  “But Weir didn’t know that, did he?”

  “So?”

  “So what it does is confirm his technique: Find a concentration of folks with alien DNA, and somewhere nearby there’ll be one of the outposts the aliens built. So my boy Dave is three for three, and now he’s going for four. Not bad.”

  “And he’s not working at the army lab anymore?”

  “No he is not. He’s mine.”

  “Army CID can still nail him for what he did while he was working there, and then turn him against you.”

  “He won’t turn against me.”

  “He’s a crook selling what he steals. He’s a proven liar.”

  “So? Everyone lies. All the time. Especially to me. Always telling me what they think I want to hear so maybe I’ll fart money on them or something.” Ironwood tapped a finger to his ear. “You know what else I hear?”

  Merrit didn’t.

  “That boy doesn’t like what he’s doing,” Ironwood said. “Stealing from Uncle Sam.”

  “Right. He’s afraid of being caught.”

  “Oh, it’s more than that. You see, as much as I want the genetic cluster information Dave can get me, Dave wants that same information even more. Something bad’s driving that boy.” Ironwood fingered the meteorite, which hadn’t left his possession all this time. “Me, now, I’m as safe as a crow in a gutter. If it comes down to a choice between lying to the Army CID or lying to me, that boy’s going to lie his pants off to the army, because I’m the only one who can give him what he wants.”

  Another possibility occurred suddenly to Merrit. “Does Weir believe in . . .”

  “Aliens?” Ironwood drained the last of his diet cola. “Not a chance. He’s one of those Skeptical Inquirer types. Wouldn’t believe in aliens if Predator bit him on the backside.”

  “Then why’s he after the same genetic information you are?”

  “About that, I admit, I do not have clue one. But I’m gonna find out.” Ironwood grinned a big predator grin of his own. “Interesting, isn’t it?”

  Merrit understood what had to happen now.

  Desperate men did desperate things, and if Weir was as driven as Ironwood believed, then Ironwood could not interact with him again.

  The tech was a loaded gun, and Merrit was not about to take that bullet, not even for a billionaire.

  EIGHT

  Three days from the Barrens, in the backseat of a sound-silenced Maybach limousine, Jess MacClary turned her head to watch the streets of Zurich slip past the smoke-tinted window. Between school years in Boston, this ancient city had been where her real studies had taken place: her Family education. Every twist and turn, each transition from cobblestone to smooth pavement, was as familiar to her as the thoroughfares of earlier times had been to her ancestors. The Family’s presence here stretched back before the Romans to the Celts, when little more than muddy paths ran through a thatched-hut village.

  As a child, she’d taken this route every summer, though never, as today, accompanied by helicopter-borne snipers, ready to protect her from any new attack.

  Jess adjusted the Maybach’s reclining seat until its position was almost fully horizontal. She stretched back, weary from the long trip across the Atlantic, the turmoil of conflicting emotions. Here, in the financial capital of Europe, it was midafternoon, and the armored, bombproof limousine moved slowly along Bahnhofstrasse, now approaching Paradeplatz. Elsewhere in the city, shadowed by other helos, Jess had been told, two other armored Maybachs were following different routes to the same destination—decoys.

  To either side of her vehicle, the city’s stone buildings now gave way to steel and glass monoliths, soaring upward to a cool gray sky. Seen through the car’s passenger skylight, those towers appeared to crest like dark waves in a storm-tossed sea, frozen in the instant before they could crash down on her.

  Jess had never liked this part of Zurich. She missed the openness of the tundra. Vanished now, along with her separate life, into the past.

  The past.

  History was what defined the Family—the history it had witnessed, the history it preserved, and the history it would someday make. All children in the Family learned that each generation might be the generation: the one that would change all of history on the day when they’d be rewarded for their service through the ages.

  Now it was her turn to share leadership of her generation. Her grandfather had been Defender of the Line MacClary, and Florian had been his first child. Her father, Florian’s only sibling, was his last. By right and tradition, Florian’s own first child, male or female, should have been next in line, but Florian had been childless when Jess’s parents had died so senselessly. So the aunt had taken in her orphaned niece, age twelve, and at age sixteen Jess had been formally acknowledged as the Line MacClary heir.

  Fresh tears filled her eyes. She touched the control on the center console, to change the limousine’s skylight from clear to opaque. A few more minutes and the car would arrive at one of Zurich’s most modern structures and the home of humanity’s oldest secret. It still seemed unreal to her that within days, if not hours, she, like her aunt and grandfather before her, would be admitted to the highest level of the Family’s faith, and at last learn the Secret that its twelve defenders guarded.

  That was the nature of succession by bloodline. The new advanced only when the old died.

  There was no sign on the dark blue glass tower. Those who had dealings with the MacCleirigh Foundation knew where it was housed. Those who didn’t had no need to know.

  Around the world, though, academics and scholars and even governments knew of the MacCleirigh Foundation and its work: in Italy, the laboriously computed tomography scans and virtual reconstructions of carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum so fragile they could never be unrolled; in Guatemala, the delicate work of stabilizing Mayan frescoes in ruins scattered deep throughout impenetrable rain forests; in South Africa, the Balkans, and New Mexico, programs to record and document ancient languages before the last of their speakers died.

  The Foundation supported historical research and restoration projects on every continent but Antarctica, and had done so for centuries. It was so renowned for its efforts that researchers rarely questioned where the Foundation’s funds came from, or thought about who might have been the original MacCleirigh for whom it was named. To most historians and ethnologists and archaeologists who relied on its grants, the Foundation had always been there, always doing what it did to preserve and protect knowledge of humanity’s past. And they were right.

  Compared to every other human institution on Earth, the MacCleirigh Foundation had always been there.

  Always.

  In a well-protected inner courtyard, Jess remained in the limousine until the armed chauffeur opened the passenger door for her. She got out and looked up to see what she knew would be there: rooftop spotters in position. Another sign of how her
life had changed. She would never truly be alone again.

  She headed directly for the massive glass doors that led into the main lobby. She wasted no thoughts on wondering how the Family would deal with the open attack on her in the Barrens, the deaths, Kurtz’s wounding, the destroyed helicopter, and her abrupt departure from the Haldron project site. She only knew they would.

  The building’s pristine white entrance hall, seldom busy, was empty. Jess heard the main doors lock behind her, saw the security cameras automatically tracking her. She kept walking toward the only opening between the lobby and the bank of elevators: a metal-detector frame.

  A man waited on the lobby’s other, secure side. He was old, frail, the worn collar of his expensively tailored white shirt two sizes too large for his wizened neck, his black-framed glasses thick.

  Jess stepped through the metal detector. The old man bowed his head deferentially. “Jessica.” His accent was full German, and not the soft blend of German and Swiss that arose from the city’s unique Zürichdeutsch dialect. A frondlike wisp of white hair floated above his age-spotted scalp. “I am glad to see you well. Sad that you must be here.”

  “Herr Reims,” Jess said formally, but her smile of greeting was affectionate. The old man had been her personal retainer at the Foundation since she was sixteen. She offered her hand to him. He did not take it.

  Everything was different now.

  Reims bowed his head again and gestured toward the elevators. “That one, please.” Hands clasped together, he nodded to the only car that could reach the top level. Jess spread her fingers against the spotless glass of the biometric scanner.

  The elevator door glided open.

  Jess walked in, and Herr Reims disappeared from view as the door closed. The car ascended smoothly. An eye-level panel displayed the passing floor numbers, then the words PRIVATER FUßBODEN. The car stopped. The door opened.

  Jess stepped into the hallway, and her scuffed hiking boots sank into thick slate-gray wool carpet. The sudden softness underfoot triggered memories of all the times her aunt had brought her here. Her gaze went automatically to the priceless relics displayed against the fabric-covered walls. Each treasure glowed in subdued pools of light cast from tiny spotlights in the hall’s low ceiling.

  On one wall ranged a set of portraits of men and women that spanned hundreds of years and distinct, diverse styles of art and clothing. The other wall bore a faded parchment, a silver-bladed cross, an Egyptian death mask, a small black leather-bound book barely a century old. Only the twelve family lines that made up the MacCleirighs would understand this collection’s unifying principle. Each relic told a story of past defenders and their fabled exploits.

  Jess paused by the leather-bound book—a King James Bible published in San Francisco in 1897. Florian had loved telling her the story that went with this one—how the little Bible had come to have a bullet hole that passed only halfway through.

  Jess wondered to whom she would tell the story.

  Her reverie was broken by a familiar voice.

  “Cousin.”

  “Su-Lin,” Jess said, even before she turned to see her older relative approaching. “Cousin” was the Family’s honorific that merely indicated a member of the Family, not necessarily a close relation.

  Su-Lin Rodrigues y Machado was a short, slight woman of middle years. Her skin was pale coffee in color, her eyes almond-shaped and gray, and her still-lustrous black hair was loosely twisted in a tress that hung down her back, just as she always wore it. Today, however, though Jess had never seen Su-Lin in anything but severe business attire, the older woman was dressed in classic black trousers, an immaculate white blouse, and intricately woven leather flats. Jess herself was still in the same dusty, wrinkled jeans and ExOfficio travel shirt she’d put on three days ago.

  “You’re early,” Su-Lin said—an observation, nothing more.

  “Ten years, at least,” Jess agreed. Then, reflexively, she dropped to one knee and reached out to take Su-Lin’s left hand. “Defender.”

  Su-Lin motioned her to stand. “No, we’re the same now. The Twelve Restored.”

  Jess responded to the phrase as automatically as she had knelt. “The Secret kept.”

  “Until the Promise is fulfilled.”

  The catechism said, Su-Lin reached up to embrace Jess, who bent down, feeling awkward, so much taller. Her cousin was defender of the Rodrigues family, a MacCleirigh line originally based in Lisbon at the height of Portugal’s golden age of exploration. When the British Empire achieved ascendancy, Su-Lin’s branch had relocated to São Paulo, Brazil, to become the inner heart of South America’s financial and political future.

  The moment the older woman released her, Jess impulsively blurted out the question that had tormented her since the Barrens. “How did she die? I need to know.”

  Su-Lin’s gray eyes revealed nothing of her own emotions. “The others are waiting.”

  The penthouse hallway ended in a pair of tall oak doors that shielded the most secure room in the Foundation building, where the Family’s trustees and officers met to set investment and funding strategies for tens of billions of dollars in MacCleirigh assets. The sanctum’s other function, however, had less to do with material concerns.

  Su-Lin gave Jess a frank look of assessment. “Are you ready?”

  Jess was. Su-Lin swung open the heavy doors and led the way into the Chamber of Heaven.

  There were twelve other rooms like it in the world, one in each city in which a line of the Family was based. Like all the other rooms, this one was round, eight meters in diameter. Its ceiling was domed and painted with a midnight blue sky against which gold stars traced the constellations of the zodiac. In the center of the floor was a circular oak table. Its polished tabletop was bare, revealing darker woods inlaid in pale wood, creating a radial pattern of twelve equal segments. Each segment bore the stylized depiction of a flower or a mountain or an eye or another symbol—twelve in all.

  Around the table, positioned one to each segment, were twelve oak chairs with an almost rustic, handmade quality jarring compared to the refined luxury of the rest of the Foundation building.

  A casual observer might guess that the chamber’s round table was inspired, in part, by the legends of King Arthur. In fact, even the Family’s children, brought here in tour groups for their lessons every summer, knew that the Arthurian legends were inspired by the stories of Arturus Uther Brae, a defender who’d lived in the second century of the Common Era.

  Su-Lin drew out one of the chairs and sat at the table. After a moment’s hesitation, Jess took the seat beside her. They were alone in the room.

  “Jessica,” Su-Lin said as she folded her hands on the table, “you know everyone.”

  Without any apparent trigger, the chamber’s curved wall panels moved up and out of sight to reveal ten large video screens. Above each was a separate display that identified a city and a local time, from London to Canberra and all points between.

  Ten familiar faces looked out at Jess.

  Of the Twelve now restored, five were female, she herself the youngest, Su-Lin the next. The other three were in their fifties, their Lines based in Athens, Buenos Aires, and Canberra.

  Of the seven men, Andrew McCleary of New York was senior. His Line had been the first of the Family’s to be successfully established in North America. Andrew was a distinguished figure, nearing eighty yet unbowed by age; tall, whip-thin, with thick white hair brushed back. His suit was Savile Row, marine navy. His clear blue eyes intelligent, measuring. Jess recalled there had been tension between Andrew and her aunt, but Florian had never said why.

  Andrew, as eldest of the Twelve, spoke first, but with no words of condolence. “Jessica, at the moment of Florian’s death, by our traditions, you became Defender of Line MacClary. Is it your choice to continue in that role?”

  Jess looked from screen to screen and found one face not quite as stern as the others—Willem of Macao, closest of them all to Florian, a fel
low archaeologist and Defender of Line Tasman. When she was much younger, Jess had told Willem that he looked like a pirate with his shaved head and warm brown skin, and he’d sent her a photo from Belize in which he had an eye patch and an iridescent green and yellow parrot on his shoulder. Her aunt had been beside him, her bright face caught midlaugh. On the occasion of Jess’s confirmation as her heir, Florian had confided that Willem was why she had never married.

  Defenders had few rules, but the most important was that no defender could marry another. The First Gods had created the Twelve Lines by scattering the Family on the Twelve Winds, and those Lines were kept distinct. The names of the Lines might change over the generations, reflecting marriages and changes in locale and customs, but the Family’s genealogists worked hard to chart the lines of descent, and to ensure that at no time would more than 144 individuals know that their direct family could be traced unbroken to the time of the First Gods. In that way it was easier to ensure the Family’s origins remained unknown to the outside world.

  Now Willem, whose readout indicated he was in Reykjavik, Iceland, and not Macao, seemed to give her a signal, a barely perceptible nod of encouragement, as if telling her there’d be time for the two of them to talk, later.

  “It is my choice,” Jess said.

  “Have you been told how the Defender of Line MacClary died?” Andrew was a lawyer. He spoke crisply, as if he were leading her through a deposition.

  “The messengers who came for me, they didn’t know. No one’s told me anything.”

  “Emil,” Andrew said.

  Jess looked to the screen marked ROME, where Emil Greco’s characteristic hard-eyed expression marked the man whose role it was to think of the worst possible thing that might happen to the Family, and then protect against it. He was solidly built with a thick mustache and goatee. He had trained her personally in small arms and hand-to-hand combat.

  “Florian radioed in just before it happened.” Emil’s voice was deceptively gentle, his lilting Neapolitan accent making his words almost musical. “She was at the site of a new temple, Jessica.”