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by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  Though it made sense to him, Ironwood didn’t expect his suggestion to go down well with this particular brain trust. He was right.

  “If there were such a thing as mystical ley lines,” Keisha said, “you can be sure geologists and physicists would be happily engaged in rewriting the laws of nature at Sedona and Glastonbury and Rosslyn and who knows where else. And I personally would be checking to see if they ran anywhere close to the outposts.”

  “But there’s no such thing, is what you’re saying,” J.R. interrupted as he entered and joined their conversation. Ironwood smelled the reason for his son’s tardiness and attitude—he’d stopped at a bar or, more probably, lifted someone’s drink order from one of the hostesses’ trays.

  “What I’m saying,” Keisha said pleasantly but firmly, “is, if phenomena like ley lines or Earth energy lines are real, their existence has yet to be demonstrated with appropriate scientific rigor. Bring me the evidence, and I’ll change my mind.”

  Ironwood smiled. That intellectual openness was why he’d chosen Keisha to lead his team. His only point of disagreement with her was on what constituted appropriate evidence.

  His son, however, was a different matter. No choice there.

  “J.R., they’re waiting for you in security. Novak’s going to put you on rotation. Pick up some coffee on the way.”

  Ironwood could see the resentment in his son’s eyes—his usual reaction to parental orders—but J.R. wisely moved toward the door and left without further comment.

  “Hey, boss,” Keisha suddenly added, “if you’ve got the time, we can show you something new we’re trying. No results yet, but you never know.”

  Ironwood brightened. He loved new things. “What’ve you got?”

  Keisha led him to the room’s biggest display, nine feet on the diagonal, turned so it couldn’t be viewed by anyone coming through the main door. She picked up a remote control with a large touch screen and tapped it several times. “Remember I mentioned Glastonbury before?”

  Ironwood nodded, intrigued. Glastonbury was a small English town in the county of Somerset, and of particular interest to him. Among the many legends associated with the place, some maintained it was where Joseph of Arimithea had traveled about thirty years after the death of Jesus, and where he’d built the first church in Great Britain as a secure fortress in which to hide the Holy Grail.

  A series of place names materialized on the giant display.

  Keisha moved her finger across the remote, and a highlight bar flashed down the list until it reached GLASTONBURY/SOMERSET/ENG 51.09N 02.43W. “Here we go.” She tapped again. At once, an aerial image appeared of a small town with a distinctive triangular layout surrounded by multihued farm fields.

  The aerial perspective zoomed in.

  “Glastonbury Abbey,” Keisha said. “World’s oldest Christian church. At least, probably the oldest one originally constructed aboveground. Built around A.D. 60, more or less.”

  The zoom stopped.

  In a green field, the white outline of a building was visible—the ruins of the abbey. Ironwood knew he was looking at stones that had been put into place almost two thousand years ago. Moments like these always filled him with awe. How long humans had lived on this small world—and after all that time, how little they knew.

  “So,” Keisha said, “this is one of those places we thought we’d search on a hunch. See if there had ever been an outpost here.”

  “You already told me you didn’t find one.”

  “No outpost, but under that hill—”

  “It’s called a tor,” Ironwood corrected. “Glastonbury Tor.”

  “Right. Under that tor, then, there’s a structure that’s not in the textbooks. Take a look.”

  Ironwood watched the screen, hooked as always, as his illegal $20 million investment came to the fore.

  Keisha tapped the remote, and all the colors on the screen shifted, becoming wild and garish. “False colors,” she’d explained to him once, arbitrarily assigned shades chosen to heighten the differences between various materials. On the screen, the tree leaves were now white. The grass beneath them, orange. The white stones of the ruins were bright red. The cars parked in the nearby lot were black.

  “Switching to SARGE,” Keisha said. She hit a key, and the parking lot they’d just been looking at suddenly disappeared. Apparently, it hadn’t been built back in 2005, the creation date of the particular version of the SARGE database he’d acquired. “Now we take a one-meter slice to eliminate surface structures . . . following the topo contours . . .”

  The trees disappeared, and the bright red stones of the abbey ruins shifted slightly as only the foundation material remained visible. All the other surface detail disappeared as well. Instead, a spidery set of black and green lines appeared against a multicolored mottled background.

  “Pipes?” Ironwood asked.

  “Drainpipes, for the most part. There’re lots more at two meters. But we’ll go straight to five meters below ground . . .”

  The image shifted again. Now a smaller rectangle of red stones appeared where the abbey ruins had been. Ironwood knew that meant that sixteen feet or so under the abbey, another, older structure had once stood. Likely a Roman temple. It was common practice for early Christian churches to be constructed on the sites of pagan temples.

  “Five meters is where we start to look for the outposts in this kind of soil. Want to try?” Keisha held out the remote.

  Ironwood couldn’t resist playing with his toys. He tapped the control.

  On-screen, a bright blue in-scale floor plan appeared of what he’d taken to calling an alien outpost. A moment later, that floor plan began flickering over the screen, angled one way, then another, back and forth, appearing and disappearing so quickly he could only see it as an afterimage. It was how the computer program was attempting to find any pattern in the high-contrast mottling of the site’s soil and stone matching the layout of an outpost.

  The same technique was used by the military to analyze surveillance photos. While a human eye might be unable to notice the camouflaged silhouette of an enemy tank, a computer could apply that outline to every possible point in a photo, at every possible angle. The pattern search was time-consuming. It was also virtually infallible.

  After half a minute, the flickering stopped and a message appeared: NO MATCH.

  “Now,” Keisha said, “in an actual search, we’d be covering a square kilometer at a time, and we’d go down in half-meter increments. It took us three days to do the full search of that tor.”

  She tapped the control again. “Here, let me take you to the fun stuff right away.”

  Ironwood watched the screen intently, anticipating it would soon reveal the familiar outline of a megalithic burial chamber beneath the abbey. The hills of Great Britain were riddled with them.

  Then the screen refreshed and he blinked, surprised. The structure hidden far below the abbey was five times bigger than any megalithic burial chamber he had ever seen; moreover, its walls were remarkably straight, and all its angles were at ninety degrees.

  “How deep is that?” Unconsciously, he held his breath as he waited for the answer.

  “Twenty meters. Guess what it is yet?”

  Ironwood thought quickly. Twenty meters. It’s got to be thousands of years old. But the construction is so perfect. As if it were built recently and—Then he had it. “It’s a bomb shelter.”

  He regarded the buried structure with real interest, not regret. The data that Keisha had just used to flush it out was the reason why the security in this room was so tight. SARGE. Or, as the U.S. Air Force called it, the Synthetic Aperture Radar Global Environment database.

  SARGE was his newly adopted $20-million child born of unprecedented air force remote-sensing technology, first tested on two space shuttle flights in the 1980s. After those flights, the technology had evolved in two forms—one public and the other very private.

  Publicly, SARGE was being used in global scien
tific efforts to create topographic maps and monitor sea levels and earthquake movements from space. Privately, the massive database was being used by the United States to create a classified satellite surveillance network: EMPIRE, a network of free-flying constellations of multiparameter imaging-radar satellites. Those satellites could not only produce images of the Earth’s surface at night and through cloud cover at unprecedented resolutions but could also look past the surface for buried installations, or anything else that might be hidden a few meters underground—and many more meters beyond that, too, if the right techniques were used to mine the data.

  SARGE was perhaps the greatest trove of intelligence information ever developed.

  A version of it now belonged to him.

  “Most likely from the fifties,” Ironwood said about the shelter, “built to protect local government in the event of atomic war.”

  “Optimists,” Keisha said. “Anyway, here’s the 3-D model we assembled from ten-centimeter slices.”

  Ironwood watched, fascinated, as the outline of the bomb shelter appeared to lift off from the screen and rotate, revealing a three-dimensional reconstruction that showed its curved roof, and even the blurred shapes of the bunks, desks, and room dividers inside.

  It was a deceptively simple demonstration of capability that came with complex significance. Using the massive collection of information in the stolen SARGE database, it would be possible to create similar images of every hidden U.S. Navy sub base, every secret U.S. Air Force missile silo, every secure and undisclosed location built to protect elected officials and preserve the continuity of government in case of war or disaster. All it would take was someone—or some country—who could afford the computer system to go looking for them, and who also had access to the algorithm that allowed unprecedented detail to be extracted from what most analysts would call static or noise.

  Ironwood wasn’t thinking of the legal and moral consequences of his acquisition, though. He knew the air force was aware a copy of the SARGE database had been illegally made, and he didn’t doubt there was a high-level investigation already under way. Nor did he have false hopes of evading that investigation forever.

  He was in a race, and the only way he would avoid a life of exile or imprisonment was to find the proof that he’d need to discredit the government before the government found the proof they needed to arrest him.

  How long that race would last, he didn’t know. For the moment, in the sanctuary of his Red Room with his team, he didn’t care. Instead, once again he dreamed.

  Someday, Ironwood told himself, he’d see to it the whole world could look through the government’s lies to the real truth they were concealing. After all, what was the good of great wealth if it couldn’t leave this world a better place? A world without secrets.

  ELEVEN

  Four days later, Jess MacClary’s hands still hurt.

  The palm of her right hand was shielded by a rubberized strip of bright green bandage. Five sutures. Her left hand was immobilized in thick white dressings from which only her thumb and fingertips emerged. Nine sutures. Even so, Jess’s real pain was spiritual, and she wasn’t sure how to deal with that.

  She’d returned to the highest floor of the MacCleirigh Foundation building, the same secure level where ten defenders had welcomed her via satellite screen links. But there was little sign of such technology in the Foundation’s library.

  As evidence, three computer terminals, concealed behind the rolltops of antique desks in one secluded alcove, provided the Family’s researchers with instant access to the digitized MacCleirigh archives in Australia. That concession to the twenty-first century was unobtrusive, though, as if computers were only a passing fancy.

  For the rest of the library, double-height bookcases and cabinets that could be reached only by wheeled ladder were the order of the day. As were the antique brass lights with green glass shades, somber wall hangings, massive walnut reading tables, and high-back green leather chairs. Over all drifted the thick, musty scent of ancient paper and oiled wood. Without question, a place for scholarship, not relaxation.

  Jess was not in the mood for either pursuit. She sat alone at a long table, a single book before her, as yet unopened.

  As a defender, she now could access all locked shelves reserved only for the Twelve. Yet with centuries of journals and secret writings available to her, including her aunt’s archaeological field journals, the volume she’d taken from the shelves today was one she’d read before, when she was in her teens: The Lost Constellations and Zodiacal Traditions of the Family, Their Lore and Meaning, by Percival Lowell, Director of the Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona; Non-resident Professor of Astronomy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Membre de la Société Astronomique de France; etc., etc.

  Lowell’s efforts were legendary. Not only did the renowned American astronomer further the scholarly goals of the MacCleirighs, he did so while diverting mainstream academics to safer pursuits not in conflict with the Family’s. At the turn of the last century, he’d been third in succession to be defender of his line but had never been called to serve. His scholarship, however, was such that he had been admitted to the 144 who knew the truth of the First Gods and their Promise to return.

  “I see you’ve gone back to the classics.”

  Her cousin stood beside her.

  “May I?” Su-Lin gestured to the chair across the table, sitting only when Jess nodded her assent. “We’re all troubled at first, you know. It’s unsettling to discover the thing we’ve waited all our lives to defend doesn’t exist.”

  “But it does.”

  Su-Lin looked surprised. “Sorry?”

  “The Secret existed once, didn’t it? The First Gods gave it to our ancestors, or at least put our ancestors in charge of defending it.”

  “As it is our tradition.” Su-Lin’s reply was another meaningful phrase to those within the Family.

  “So the only thing that’s happened is . . . we screwed up. Lost the Secret. But it’s still out there. Which means it can be found.”

  Su-Lin regarded Jess like a wise parent who’s heard her offspring spin a foolish, wishful chain of logic. “We looked for thousands of years, Jessica. The Secret’s gone.”

  Jess ran the fingers of her right hand over the worn leather of the Lowell book. It had been privately published, as all Family books and pamphlets were. This one in New York, 1908. A Tuareg cross was embossed upon the cover. “The temples were also lost to us for thousands of years.” She looked up at Su-Lin and caught her cousin in a frown that swiftly disappeared. “And they were found again.”

  “To what end?” Su-Lin asked. “The temples in India and Peru were looted long before Ironwood’s arrival. Now that you’re at the table, I can tell you that Florian recovered a second sun map in the Polynesian temple, the engraving on it identical to the one in the Shrine. But that was all she found. Presumably Ironwood has it now. The one I showed you has been in our possession for as long as we’ve had written records.” Su-Lin’s expression was sympathetic but firm. “Whatever clues those ruins once held, they’re gone now. The Family must move on.”

  “We’ve failed our sacred trust with the First Gods and we should just ‘move on?’ To what?”

  “That’s something you have to decide for yourself. Reread our Traditions.” Su-Lin tapped the old book between them. “This one, too. There’re different ways to view what they say. Some of us believe the Secret the First Gods gave us was not a goal but a process, a way of life. So we honor them by living that life as we were directed—in the pursuit and preservation of knowledge.” Su-Lin sat back, her expression expectant of compliance. “That’s how I’ve moved on.”

  Jess still felt bewildered, even angered, but dutifully she opened Lowell’s book and flipped through to a page she knew well. On it, a simple silhouette, the symbol of her line: the Branch.

  It was one of twelve symbols inlaid or painted on every round table in every modern reconstruction of a Chamber of Hea
ven. Jess had been taught since childhood that it represented a constellation—but after Su-Lin’s revelation in the Shrine of Turus, it seemed the Branch had no connection with the First Gods’ ancient skies. It was merely the outline of an object the gods of her faith had entrusted to the Family. To revere, protect, and defend.

  An object the MacCleirighs had lost.

  The Branch itself was only one of twelve symbols—the twelve constellations in the Family zodiac. Jess at age three could recite them by heart, could draw them blindfolded.

  Three were symbols from the Earth—those things that were inanimate: the Diamond, the River, and the Mountain. Three were symbols from the Green—those things that brought life from the Earth: the Seed, the Blossom, and the Branch. Three were symbols from the Hand—those things that humans made to give them power over the Green and the Earth: the Blade, the Archer’s Bow, and the Chain. The final three were symbols from the Blood—those things that gave movement to the Hand: the Skull, the Eye, and the Heart.

  The lesson-stories of Jess’s childhood had taught her that the gods of her faith themselves had drawn these symbols’ shapes among the stars on their maps. They’d recorded them as constellations so the knowledge they contained would always be there, for all who looked to the sky. She now knew that those stories, the same ones Lowell the astronomer had secretly relayed, which had guided her education as an adult, were incomplete.

  It wasn’t merely knowledge that had been given to her family—it was actual, physical artifacts. Twelve literal gifts from the gods that had fit within the hollows on the carved stone table.

  Jess turned the page, to the symbol she knew as the Archer’s Bow. Its story had once made so much sense. The bow and arrow were a powerful piece of technology, extending the reach of hunters a dozen times. That made food-gathering faster, more efficient. When a small team of hunters could provide food for a village, other members of that village were freed to pursue other specialties. To the Family, the bow and arrow marked the birth of scholarship.