Her breath caught.
“You see it?” Nazri asked.
“It’s a map of Har Madhyh. This island.”
“But?” Nazri prompted.
“Har Madhyh is two islands—and this map shows it as one.”
This island on which the observatory had been built, which one day would be called Malta, had a sister island to the northwest, separated by a narrow strait less than a single stadon across—a quick boat ride or a short swim.
Yet this map, judging from its relief shading, showed the two islands joined as one, with a valley where the strait ran today.
As smoothly as the interwoven strips of wood had moved to unlock the unusual wayfinder’s case, Atlan pictured the known facts falling into position.
“This is how the Navigators saw Har Madhyh.”
“It is,” Nazri agreed.
“But it is not as Har Madhyh is today.”
“It is not.”
Atlan had been trained in logic and deduction. The end result was obvious.
She looked at her fellow masters in the torchlit chamber. They were no longer expressionless. They were grim.
Atlan said the only thing that could be said. “We must do what the Navigators did before us.”
“Even if we do, the White Island won’t survive what’s to come,” Nazri said. “Neither will our outposts. We’ll perish as they did.”
Atlan didn’t share her fellow masters’ pessimism. She looked around the chamber with its wealth of information. But not enough information. “As individuals, yes. That’s a known fact. But as a people, perhaps not.”
Nazri and the other masters regarded their newest colleague with interest as she ran her bandaged hand across the smooth stone surface of the meeting table.
“We need to leave more than maps,” she said. “I have an idea.”
THIRTY-ONE
Andrew McCleary found the whole affair distasteful, especially since it should never have been allowed to begin in the first place.
The interrogator waved something near Willem Tasman’s face, and the man twitched back into consciousness. The only reason he hadn’t fallen from his chair was that he was tied to it.
The Defender of Macao was being questioned in an old residential building in Queens. Not Andrew’s favorite place in the city, but safely removed from the offices of McCleary Adams & Intrator LLP. The sound-proofing built into the deceptively plain and artistically aged walls also added a measure of protection. This room, and others like it, had been useful over the years, whenever the needs of the Family had required certain actions to be taken that were best kept hidden. A sliding panel in the next room led to a corridor that ran to an underground parking area—perfect for discreet removals.
“You can make this stop anytime,” Andrew reminded him.
His captive said nothing.
The interrogator, a bland-looking man in his fifties, but one of Cross’s best, looked to Andrew for further guidance. The session had lasted more than an hour, which explained why the subject kept passing out.
Andrew decided to try another approach. He waved the interrogator aside and stood before Willem’s wooden chair beneath the room’s single harsh light.
“If you tell me what I need to know, I’ll make sure Jessica is safe. There’s nothing I can do for you, but I can protect her.”
Finally Willem spoke. Only a single word, but it was the first he’d said since he arrived from Boston and the hood was taken from his head.
“Why . . .”
“You know the answer. For the Family. Everything I do is for the Family.”
Andrew’s phone vibrated silently in his jacket pocket. He told the interrogator not to resume until he returned, then went into the next room.
“Any progress?” Su-Lin asked.
“None whatsoever. What about you?”
“She’s gone to ground, and it’s obvious Florian taught her all her tricks.”
Andrew knew exactly what that meant. Defenders were supposed to be completely supported by the Foundation. They had no need for private wealth because anything they could ever want would be provided without cost or question. It was a perfect way for whoever held the purse strings to keep control. Which is why, from time to time, more willful defenders, like Florian or Willem, would work outside the system and amass their own resources, beyond Family oversight.
Florian had been particularly adept at diverting Foundation funds to her own use, and had actually reached the point where she had been able to personally underwrite her own expeditions. Now, it seemed, Jessica was following in her aunt’s footsteps.
“Any ideas where she’s gone?”
“There’s no electronic record of her leaving America, so she’s using false passports.”
“Are you certain she’s left?”
“Cross found her and David Weir on security tapes from Terminal 7 at JFK airport. They’re going through them all to see which flight they took—Canada, Japan, Spain, Australia, Britain . . . a great many places they could end up, and Cross can’t cover them all in the time we have.”
“If she’s with Weir, we know where she’s hoping to end up.”
“A new temple.”
“Exactly. But we can’t allow that to happen. We’d lose everything we’ve—”
“Just a minute . . .”
Andrew looked at his phone in disbelief. Su-Lin had put him on hold. What could be more important than saving the Foundation?
His annoyance vanished when she returned to the call with good news. “We have them. They flew British Airways to Heathrow. Cross is checking the passenger lists against passports. We’ll have the names they’re traveling under within the hour. Then we’ll be able to do a full survey of hotels and car rental companies.”
“What if England isn’t their final destination?”
“Then we’ll keep tracking them. In the meantime, we’re sending a demolition team from Zurich to London. If she’s found a temple on British soil, by tomorrow morning we’ll only be a few hours behind them.”
“Then do we need to continue this unpleasantness with our friend from Macao?”
There was a long silence. She was either weighing all the variables or checking the markets.
“We shouldn’t risk having him disappear so close to Florian’s death. When he dies, it will have to be seen as an accident, and we’ll need the body.”
“It might take him a few weeks to heal, so he’s recognizable.”
“A few weeks should be fine.”
Su-Lin’s decisiveness made Andrew feel better than he had for ages. Willem and Jessica might not agree, but their sacrifice would be for the greater good. For the Family.
“Perhaps we could arrange to have Willem and Jessica perish in the same accident.”
“She’s too dangerous,” Su-Lin said. “I don’t want her alive for a few more weeks. I want her dead tomorrow.”
THIRTY-TWO
“How does this work?”
Tucked into the high wingback chair in David’s room, Jess looked and sounded jet-lagged. She’d wrapped herself in a gray flannel bathrobe and slipped her bare feet under her.
It was midnight, local time. David was still in the same jeans and navy pullover he’d been in for hours. He snapped on the pair of thin silicone gloves that had come with the testing kit.
Three days ago, they’d been running for their lives beneath the streets of Boston. Now they were settled in a fussy Victorian bed-and-breakfast in the north of Cornwall, under new names. The Canadian passport that carried David’s photograph identified him as Mark Alexander Askwith.
Three phone calls were all it had taken for Jess to arrange their flight and journey. In addition to what seemed to be unlimited funds, she had access to resources that effectively trumped government regulations. David hadn’t asked for details.
He tore the seal on a slender foil pack and withdrew a small scraper.
“I’m going to collect some skin cells from the inside of your ch
eek—with this.”
The scraper resembled a cocktail swizzle stick—a long white plastic rod with a flattened end that had a few scallops in it, like a worn-down comb.
“I’ll put your sample in the vial with the preservative, and then we send it to your friends at Cambridge for comparison with mine.”
When David had explained the test he’d like to do to confirm that he and Jess were distantly related, she’d asked him which English university could run it. He’d said Cambridge, and she’d made another phone call. The sample-collection kit had been waiting for them at the Goring Hotel in London the night they arrived. It seemed her family had been long-term benefactors of the University of Cambridge. Since it was founded. In 1209 C.E.
“I’m asking them to look specifically at the hAR regions on chromosome 20.”
“Because that’s where you found your anomalies.”
“The most significant ones, yes.” David made sure the small vial of preservative was ready. It was a bullet-sized container of translucent plastic, the tip sharply tapered. “The four clusters I’ve found so far aren’t exactly like each other—there are markers unique to each of them—but all four share the same haplotype around the hAR region.”
“Haplotype?”
He knelt down before her. “Open,” he said. Jess opened her mouth, and he lightly began scraping the inside of her cheek. “Have you heard of the Human Genome Project?”
Jess nodded, the small movement awkward in the circumstances.
David removed the scraper, examined it. At its flattened tip was a small buildup of white mush. “It was the first attempt to list the genetic structure of every human chromosome—some three billion base pairs. Took thirteen years and three billion dollars, and that was just for one person’s genetic code.” He broke the end off the scraper, dropped it into the plastic vial, capped the vial, and shook it.
Then he opened the packet holding a second sterile scraper. “Some parts of chromosomes are so difficult to take apart that, realistically, we know maybe ninety-two percent of the human genome’s DNA sequence in detail. Open.” He scraped at the inside of her other cheek. “This is for the backup, in case anything goes wrong with the first. Anyway, the point is, given the cost and the difficulty and the time required, most researchers have to work with big chunks of DNA from specific sites on specific chromosomes. Done.”
David snapped the end of the second scraper, placed it in the second vial, and capped it.
“Does that work as well?” Jess swung her legs down from the chair, stood up, and stretched.
“Yeah, it does. Because genes tend to get passed from one generation to the next in big chunks called haplotypes.”
David peeled off his gloves, then began attaching ID stickers to the vials containing Jess’s samples.
“It’s the same technique researchers use to figure out when humans migrated out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago. Haplotypes tell them the routes the different groups of people took as they spread out over the rest of the world.”
“I remember you told me that. Three major ones, right?” Jess said.
David nodded. “It’s likely there were lots of migrations, but not all of them were successful. For example, we know there were modern humans living in Israel somewhere between ninety and a hundred and twenty thousand years ago, but around the ninety-thousand-year mark, humans outside of Africa disappear from the fossil record. So none of the genetic lines from those first migrations survived. That means”—he dropped her vials into the slot of the collection box next to the two vials that held his samples—“everyone alive today can be traced back—genetically at least—to one of those three major migrations out of Africa, starting about sixty-five thousand years ago.”
David placed the consent forms he and Jess had signed earlier into the sample box, then sealed it. The signatures matched the false names on their new passports.
“So what about your clusters of nonhuman markers?” Jess asked him. “Which route did those people take?”
David took a moment to answer. The small room’s overwhelming fragrance of lavender potpourri was almost suffocating. “Well, that’s the strange thing. The genetic anomalies I’ve found . . . they’re not unique to any of the migrations. They show up in populations everywhere.”
“If everyone has them, how can they be anomalous?”
“Because everyone doesn’t have them.” Jess still didn’t know the death sentence those markers bestowed on him and a few unlucky others, maybe even her. From her mentions of other members of her extended family, David knew that many of them lived a normal span of years. However, for now there was no way to know if that was because they had a variant of his genes that overcame early death, or because they had nothing genetically in common with him.
Until the tests were run and David knew one way or another if he did have a connection to the MacCleirighs, he saw no point in revealing his secret to Jess. At first, that decision had been to protect his privacy. Now, he realized, it was because he didn’t want to cause her worry.
He sat down on the edge of the room’s white iron-framed bed. He chose his words carefully to tell her just enough and not too much.
“It’s as if nine to ten thousand years ago or so—when humans had spread out across the world—somehow a new set of identical haplotypes just appeared. All at the same time and in at least four different populations.”
“Your four clusters,” Jess said. Her green eyes were bright, clear. Interested in what he had to tell her.
“Exactly. So here’s the problem. Someone might be able to make the case for some kind of trade or connection between the South Pacific and Peru back then, but there’s no way to connect the people in those two sites—at that time—to the clusters in India or in Cornwall.”
“Except my way.”
“The First Gods?” David shook his head. “What I should have said is there’s no way to scientifically connect the sites. Stories just can’t do that.”
Jess looked chagrined. “Stories. David, do you know you could be the first person in years . . . maybe centuries . . . maybe ever, to know about the First Gods outside of the Family? I can’t believe I even told you.”
David found himself wishing he could tell his own story to her. Instead, he tapped the small box beside him. “Might not be a big deal that you did.
If the DNA test shows we’ve got the same anomalies, then you and I are cousins.”
He couldn’t read the strange expression that flashed across her face. It was as if he’d said something with special significance to her.
“But you don’t believe,” she said.
“In God, or First Gods? No, I don’t—can’t. There’s no evidence. At least, none that’s testable, scientific.”
“Like Ironwood’s aliens.” Jess’s eyes met his, unflinching. “I’d get into so much trouble saying this to my teachers, but . . . what if they’re the same?”
“Your gods were aliens?”
“No. No.” Jess waved a dismissive hand at him. “The other way around. The Traditions clearly say that the First Gods rose from the people. They didn’t come to us from the sky or from anywhere else.”
“The Traditions. Your bible.” David felt he had no footing here. Religious beliefs were a matter of faith, and faith didn’t lend itself to rational debate.
“There’s nothing supernatural in the Traditions. That’s one of the ways we know it’s the truth.”
“How can the idea of gods not be considered supernatural?”
“Because of where the First Gods came from.”
It was obvious to David that Jess’s next words were a straight quote from her Traditions.
“ ‘For forty generations man hid in darkness like the beasts, and knew not fire nor grain nor the markings of the heavens and the measure of the sun and moon and stars. Then, in the fortieth and first generation, the people of darkness captured fire, and did sow grain, and by the measure of the sun and moon and stars, did reap it. And
these things and others they took to their children and to their parents so they would not fear the darkness, nor hunger, nor would they fear the confusion of days.’
“How much clearer could it be?” she asked. “It doesn’t say, ‘The people from the sky.’ ‘The people with green antennas.’ It says, ‘People of darkness.’ The same people mentioned in the verse preceding.” She tapped a finger to her chest. “Us. Humans. People of darkness living in caves and grubbing for our food until—until the First Gods rose from us and gave us the tools of civilization so we could rise from that darkness and become gods ourselves. At their side.
“You want to know why our scripture isn’t some collection of fairy tales like any other religious text you’d care to name? Because it reveals truth that’s supported by reason, not unthinking faith.”
However unfounded her beliefs, David accepted they were sincerely held, like Ironwood’s. “Well, it’s different, at least,” he said.
For the first time, David realized he was enjoying the company of someone else as much as his own. He searched for a way to prolong this strange conversation, fearing if he didn’t, Jess would return to her room and their day together would be at an end.
“Tell me more,” he said.
And she did.
In modern times, the scriptures of the Family were called Les Traditions de la Famille, after the classic French translation by René Quinton, guardian of his line at the turn of the last century, and a shining example for children of all twelve lines as to what they should aspire to be. Quinton, a renowned scientist and physician who had saved tens of thousands of lives with his discoveries, had based his translation on earlier works in Latin, Hebrew, and ancient Greek that dated back to between two and three thousand years ago. With multiple copies having been passed down through generations of MacCleirighs, the scriptures were complete, and, even having been copied by hand and translated so many times, there were few discrepancies among the different versions.
The oldest form of the Family scriptures, though, was in cuneiform, dating back to almost five thousand years. One hundred and seventy-eight clay tablets—approximately one-third of the complete work—survived and were now preserved in the repository maintained by the Claridge line in Australia.
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