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by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  “To kidnappers?” Lyle asked. “Nice work if you can get it.”

  Roz frowned at him, tapped her keyboard. “Investment consultant. That’s interesting . . .”

  “Not these days.”

  “The kind of consulting he does. Art, rare books, antiques.”

  “Possible connection to Gilden?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. We’re dealing with a gang of rogue book dealers.”

  “Address, Roz?”

  More tapping. “He’s in Mays Landing. Just outside Atlantic City.” She gave him a hopeful look. “We could be knocking on the guy’s door in half an hour. Find out where he was tonight.”

  It had been almost ninety minutes since Weir had disappeared. BOLOs—be-on-the-lookout alerts—were in effect for the black Bentley and Vince Gilden’s maroon Crown Victoria, but both vehicles seemed to have vanished with the kidnap victim. Given those circumstances, Lyle doubted Mr. Rodrigues would be at home.

  “Have the locals stake out his house.”

  “You don’t want to talk to him?”

  “The cars that were involved in this disappeared too quickly. They’ve got to be someplace close.”

  “Why don’t we take it straight to Ironwood? He’s at his casino. We could go shake him up.”

  Lyle understood the satisfaction that would come from such a move, but it wasn’t feasible. “Ironwood’s many companies give him more than three hundred domestic locations where he could be hiding the stolen database. Until we find out where it is, we’re not knocking on any doors.”

  At least in that regard, Ironwood’s theft of computer data from the air force was more of an old-fashioned crime than one of the cyber persuasion. Computer files with the plans for a new jet engine or directed-energy weapon could be e-mailed anywhere in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. Once stolen, they were impossible to retrieve.

  The SARGE database, though, was literally massive. The computer terminology for its size—850 terabytes—held no particular meaning for Lyle. Its physical specifications did: Original or copy, with off-the-shelf commercial components it would take a fourteen-foot truck to move the storage units that could hold that much digital information, along with the necessary cables, power supplies, shelves, and cooling system. In fact, the database was so valuable, whoever stole it would make more duplicates. So they were talking several trucks.

  Region 7 had tasked a team of specialists to monitor all the computer communications in Ironwood’s corporate empire for any sign that the air force database, or selected parts of it, were being transferred to potential buyers. Lyle’s goal was to find the actual, real-world location where all the truckloads of physical equipment were being maintained. “Shaking up” the prime suspect wasn’t the best way to go about accomplishing that mission, no matter how much fun his junior agent thought that might be.

  “We should go back to the kid’s private lab,” he said. “See if he left anything that points to a meeting tonight, or where he was planning to go.”

  Roz closed her laptop, disappointed. “Weir never leaves anything.”

  “Always a first time.”

  Lyle’s phone buzzed. He read the ID, answered. “Yeah, Del?”

  “He’s back.”

  Lyle connected the dots. “Weir’s at his lab?”

  “Yes, sir. And he’s not alone.”

  Jess was used to remote jungle huts, desert tents, and corroding ruins, so the half-finished state of David Weir’s workroom didn’t concern her. But the smell did. Acrid. Something like fermenting vinegar.

  “There’s the computer system I put together.” Weir pointed under a plywood-and-sawhorse table at three silver-gray boxes with Apple logos on their sides. They seemed to be in a bed of tangled cables. “Not as fast as a purpose-built sequencer, but good enough for what I need it to do.”

  Jess took one of the metal chairs and positioned it to face the table with the computer screens as Dom circled the room, checking its high windows, being certain the front and back exits were securely locked.

  She turned her attention to Weir. He was studying a screen with bands of color. Ever since she’d told him she knew there were nine more clusters to find, there’d been no more need to threaten him with a gun or confinement. He’d brought her and Dom here without protest. She still hadn’t decided if she’d send him back to Zurich for further questioning by the Family, and she wouldn’t make that decision until she had learned more about his work for Ironwood. Fortunately, Dom hadn’t yet realized she was acting on her own.

  “So why’d your computer call you?”

  “Well, it appears I share a gene sequence with a pig. Hold on.” He leaned down and typed on a keyboard. The screen changed. “Has to do with hemoglobin. No surprise. The program was supposed to filter out gene matches that are already known.”

  Jess didn’t care about any of that. “Show me how you find geographic clusters.”

  Weir seemed hesitant. “It might not be that simple. What do you know about genetics? The human genome?”

  “Assume ‘nothing.’ ”

  “Okay. So . . . human beings have forty-six chromosomes. That’s twenty-three pairs, in the nucleus of all of our cells. Well, almost all of our cells. Then there’s mitochondria that—you really need to hear all this?”

  Jess nodded. “I do.”

  Weir pulled up a folding chair and sat down next to his computer table. “Okay, well, all chromosomes, human and mitochondrial, are made of bundled DNA. That’s deoxyribonucleic acid—amino acids, nucleotides. There’re four different types: adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine.” He paused, but Jess said nothing.

  Weir moved on. “We call those four types A, C, G, and T. You can think of them as chemical letters. They can go together in different sequences, making different words, you might say, and according to the way they’re put together, like computer programming code, they tell the cell how to build certain proteins.

  “Anyway, human beings have about three point two billion of these nucleotides—letters—making up our genetic information. The complete set is called our genome. But it turns out only about one percent of those three point two billion letters make up our actual genes. We’ve got about thirty to forty thousand of them setting our hair color, eye color, how tall we can grow, almost all of our physical characteristics, maybe even a lot of our mental abilities, probably our behavioral tendencies as well . . . So . . . by looking for specific differences in a person’s DNA, especially in the DNA contained in their mitochondria, which are—”

  “You’re right,” Jess said. “Maybe I don’t need to hear everything.”

  “Bottom line—specific DNA differences can tell us where that person’s ancestors came from.”

  This was what she had come for.

  “You can map that?”

  “I can’t, but there’s a research program—the Genographic Project—that’s doing the work. They’ve created a map, and a timetable. A well-established one—of mutations. They’re called polymorphisms, and they’re in the human genome. And we can find that timetable on the Y chromosome of men and in the mitochondrial DNA of men and women.”

  Weir sat back, the fingers of one hand pushing back an unruly strand of black hair. He suddenly looked deeply tired.

  “Knowing when and in which geographical regions those mutations arose is how we can track three major migrations of humans out of Africa in the past hundred thousand years. And that tells us whose ancestors originally went north into Europe, and whose went east into Asia, and whose settled India, Australia, and whose crossed into North America, and like that . . . all with reasonably specific dates.”

  “Do any of these markers prove what you say Ironwood believes, that humans interbred with aliens?”

  Weir’s dark, unusual eyes considered her. “There’s absolutely nothing in mainstream genetic research to support his beliefs. Best I can figure is he’s reacting to information he’s getting from some other sources. What he calls ‘archaeological and cultural ano
malies.’ ”

  Jess could guess what those anomalies might be. The Family hadn’t been able to completely cover up all the physical evidence of its existence and influence through history. Though no legitimate researcher had ever managed to find a pattern in the few clues that remained in the open.

  Weir glanced back at his three computer screens, which flashed with rapidly changing bar charts. “Look, Ironwood’s not completely off base. The program these machines are running—the one I got the call about—it’s comparing genes within the human genome to genes in other animals. I mean, we do share genes with all sorts of other species, and that points to all life on the planet arising from a common ancestor. But there’s no compelling evidence that at any time in the history of life on Earth an extraterrestrial source of DNA was inserted into the process. No matter how much Ironwood hopes it was.”

  “No compelling evidence,” Jess said. “Which means there is some kind of evidence, even if it’s not that convincing.”

  Weir turned suddenly and looked toward Dom, and Jess followed suit. Her bodyguard was holding a finger to his earpiece.

  “The car?” she asked. They had driven here in an armored Suburban. Rather than sound an audible alert, the SUV’s alarm, if triggered, signaled Dom’s phone.

  Dom nodded.

  “Go,” Jess said. The Suburban was a tempting vehicle in a deserted neighborhood.

  Dom pulled his Glock automatic from his shoulder holster, pausing only for Jess to draw her own pistol to cover Weir while he was gone. Then he sprinted for the room’s back door.

  “Uh, there’s an alarm on that door,” Weir said. “If he opens it, it’ll—”

  Click. The metal door was open and Dom was through it. No alarm.

  Jess turned back to Weir. “The evidence,” she prompted him. “That’s not too compelling.”

  Weir was staring at the back door, now swinging shut, as if trying to work out how Dom had bypassed the alarm.

  “David.” She said his name sharply, as if trying to get a child’s attention.

  He gave her an odd look. “What’s your name?”

  Caught off guard, she surprised herself by breaking another of Emil’s interrogation rules. “Jess. Jess MacClary.”

  “Well, Jess, in my experience, if you sort through a large enough random selection of genetic profiles, there’re always a few individuals with markers that don’t match any known human genome.”

  “How few?”

  “Maybe one in a hundred thousand. But the markers are extremely rare. The Genographic Project? It’s got about four hundred thousand genetic profiles. That means, at best, there may be four people in that database with unidentified mutations. Anything that insignificant is usually dismissed as an error, assuming they’re even looking for it.”

  “So how did you find out about them?” Following his reasoning, with the world’s population closing in on seven billion, Jess calculated there’d be at least seventy thousand people alive right now with unidentifiable DNA.

  “I used to work at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Lab—”

  “In Maryland. I know.”

  “Then you also know I had access to a database almost eight times bigger than the Genographic Project’s. When I was doing quality assurance there, I happened to turn up a profile with nonhuman genes. I thought it was an error. I ran a check, and I found another individual with the same markers, and then another . . . and that’s it.”

  “How’d you end up here?”

  “I dug into the literature to see if anyone else had come across what I did. I figured somebody must have, and I wanted to see what theories they might have developed to explain them. A lot of the research in this particular area is . . . let’s say, on the fringe of science. Someone on one of the Web sites I was searching—I thought it was the people who ran the site—sent me e-mail, inviting me to meet—”

  “Ironwood?”

  “Not till later. I ended up selling some data to a guy called Merrit who worked for him.”

  “And that data was your geographic clusters. And he’s hired you to find more for him.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jess knew she was lucky Dom had stepped out to check the SUV. Su-Lin’s instructions, which her bodyguard knew as well as she did, had been unequivocal: If Ironwood’s technician had any connection to Florian’s death, she was to ship him to Zurich without delay—and David had that connection.

  Even so, Jess wasn’t ready to reveal that to Dom or anyone else just yet. Not if she had a chance to advance Family knowledge of Ironwood’s ability to find their temples—Florian had died because of it. This technician might have important information, and Jess knew that once Emil had David Weir in Zurich, she’d never talk to him again.

  She spoke rapidly, summarizing what he’d told her, to be sure. “You sold Merrit your data for three regions—India first, then Peru, and then the South Pacific.” Data that Ironwood had used to find and loot three of the Family’s sacred temple sites.

  David shook his head. “Two,” he said, “and not in that order. The first datasets he bought were for Peru and French Polynesia. For the last one—India—Merrit was still in the field, in the South Pacific. A different guy took me to Ironwood. That’s when he hired me directly. After I gave him my files on India.”

  Jess stared at him, making a connection that he couldn’t. David’s third cluster had only confirmed what Ironwood had already found. It hadn’t led him to it.

  Three years ago, the Family’s longtime rival for ancient treasures had uncovered a lost temple of the First Gods in the Ghaggar-Hakra dry river valley of India—something the Family had searched for, for generations, and had finally decided was the stuff of myth. The Family’s investigation of Ironwood’s success where they had failed led them to conclude he was simply lucky. There were hundreds of significant ruins in that region, most still unexplored, and one of his teams had just by chance been the first to excavate at that location. The MacCleirigh Foundation had promptly pressured the local government to exclude Ironwood’s dig team from the site and give the Foundation sole access.

  Now, in just the past four months, Ironwood had located two more temples. After he’d bought David’s data.

  “Your turn, Jess. Tell me what you know about ‘the other nine.’ ”

  Jess considered her next move—one she knew Su-Lin assuredly would not approve. But centuries of library scholarship had led the Family nowhere. And now it seemed there was a chance to change all that. She, like all children of the Family, had been told that one generation of them would be called to change the future. What if this was the beginning of that call?

  What if the key to discovering the Family’s lost purpose was to locate all twelve of the lost temples of the First Gods and reclaim their mysterious artifacts?

  What if, with this outsider’s help, the Family could find the nine remaining temples the Traditions described?

  And what if one of those was the first temple—where the Promise was made? Surely the Family would forgive her what she was about to do. She turned to David, prepared to make her offer.

  The first burst of machine-gun fire tore through the warehouse door.

  EIGHTEEN

  “Shots fired! Shots fired!”

  Roz Marano pumped the brakes, and the Intrepid slid into the curb a long block from the converted warehouse.

  Lyle pressed his earpiece tight. “Who’s shooting?”

  The deserted street, glistening with rain, betrayed no sign of any activity.

  Del Chang was reporting from the cable van positioned opposite the warehouse. He’d been describing the black Suburban and the man and woman who’d accompanied Weir into his unit—apparently at gunpoint. Then a green shape had moved on the night-vision screen.

  “Shooter’s on the roof.”

  Lyle and Roz were both out of the Intrepid now, running toward the warehouse, SIGs drawn, fingers off the triggers. Lyle heard a distinctive popping sound and echoes from the empty street—
a submachine gun.

  “There’s someone returning fire from the ground!”

  Lyle hissed at Roz to stop advancing. The junior agent flattened against the wall of a darkened building beside him.

  Now more automatic weapons fire. Roz looked at him, eyes bright, cheeks flushed. “Is this when we wait for backup?”

  “Wish it was.” Lyle’s earpiece squealed as Chang gave more details.

  “Three shooters now. Two on the roof. They’re concentrating on Weir’s unit.”

  “Where’s the third?”

  “On the ground. Came around from the back. I think there was another shooter on the roof, but the guy on the ground popped him.”

  Lyle couldn’t figure it out. Someone had kidnapped the kid. Someone brought him back at gunpoint. Now someone was trying to kill him.

  Roz summed it up with her usual eloquence. “What’s up with this guy?”

  Priority one was still to preserve Weir as an asset to use against Ironwood. Lyle figured he’d work the rest out later. “Del—give us an approach. We’re going to take out the shooters on the roof.”

  Gunfire came in near constant bursts now.

  “You should be clear coming up the side. They’re directly opposite Weir’s, shooting across the parking—whoa!”

  “Say again!”

  “The guy on the ground picked off another roof shooter. Someone else is returning fire from the unit, too.”

  The gunfire stopped.

  “Last shooter might be withdrawing. Can’t spot him.”

  “Let’s go,” Lyle said. “Close to the wall.”

  He and Roz ran forward.

  “There he is! Far end of the building—two now. Confirm two shooters still on the roof. Still . . . what’s that?”

  Lyle’s bad knee raged with pain with every footfall on the pavement. He cupped his hand over his earpiece. “Say again? Del?”

  “They’ve got something big up there.” A fusillade of sharp gunfire sounded. “Big exchange from roof to ground. Sir, I think they’ve got a shoulder-fired—”

  That’s when Lyle heard a short whistle and saw the lightning-quick streak of light that stitched across the street.