Search

by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  On those tablets, fired by scribes who had traced their lineage back to the time of the First Gods, and from whom Jess’s own lineage could be traced forward, the world and the universe were described in terms that contradicted millennia of common wisdom and superstition, yet were confirmed in modern times.

  In the scriptures of the Family, the Earth was said to have been formed by forces unknown and was older than any person could comprehend. It was also described as a sphere, and it moved around the Sun as the Moon moved in turn around the Earth.

  There were no demons or angels or wars in heaven in Les Traditions. Not even a god at the beginning. Not until the First Gods arose from humans, just as life was said to have arisen from the land and sea—not through the intent of some supernatural mind, but because it was the nature of things.

  These scriptures, with statements most other religions would find blas phemous, were the reason why the MacCleirighs had remained hidden, their faith disguised throughout recorded history.

  Over the centuries, as the scattered lines of the Family perfected their strategy of hiding in plain sight, the scholars among them began to assemble the evidence that the truths in their scriptures—so at odds with what other religions maintained—actually did reflect the natural world.

  MacCleirigh money and influence prodded the Enlightenment into being, gave birth to rationalism and an explosion of science. One after another, the truths of the Family scriptures were revealed to be actual truths, measurable by the tools of science.

  Yet, as Jess told David, her teachers emphasized that there were no statements in the scriptures reflecting knowledge that early humans couldn’t have had. There was no mention of atomic theory. No discussion of medical concepts beyond those that wise observers at the time might note; hygiene was critical to maintaining health, the scriptures said, but they made no references to why that might be so, not a word about bacteria.

  Les Traditions de la Famille, then, were exactly what they themselves said they were—the writings of humans who had been present at the birth of the First Gods, and who had been charged by those gods to be their representatives on this world, defending their secrets until their gifts could be shared by all people, everywhere.

  People. Not aliens.

  So the Traditions said.

  “How’s all that stayed secret?”

  Jess shrugged. “By not talking about it. Like I’m doing now.”

  “For seven thousand years?” David struggled unsuccessfully to soften his skepticism. “That’s something like three hundred generations.” The numbers arranged themselves in his mind. “One hundred and forty-four people in each generation means forty-three thousand individuals who knew all this, and not one of them ever tried to betray the Family, or was estranged, or got drunk in a bar and spilled their guts?”

  “Not completely.”

  David took her smile to mean he hadn’t insulted her.

  “Of course,” Jess admitted, “some of the stories from the Traditions, and from the Family’s other writings, have leaked out for all sorts of reasons—that’s human nature. You can find them in other cultures, other legends. Even other religions. Where they came from, though, that’s not open knowledge.

  “The Family’s done studies of generational secrets, particularly of the dynamics of keeping them successfully. Three conditions have proved particularly important.” She ticked them off on her fingers: “One: stability over time. The Family’s certainly had that. Two: strong selection criteria for choosing who to tell the secret to. Very few. You being an exception. Three: nonconfrontational posture. We’ve never tried to impose our beliefs on anyone, so we have nothing to prove. People tend to ignore us because we’re not a threat, and that leads back to our stability.”

  The lamplight illuminated half her hair. Like half a halo, David thought. An angel’s halo.

  “Next question.” Jess’s half-grin told him he’d been caught staring.

  “Okay. What’s the Family actually been doing all these years? And why?”

  Jess’s hands went to the silver cross she wore, the gesture seeming more reflexive than intentional. “The First Gods rose from humans, which means the seeds of godhood are in each of us. They gave humans the gift of civilization, so that we could be freed from fear and labor, and become wise. When we are wise enough, in time we will become gods ourselves at their side.”

  To David, Jess’s words seemed less an answer to his question than a ritualized response derived from unquestioned repetition: childhood training. “You say, ‘in time.’ How much time? Do the Traditions say how long this is going to take?”

  Jess shook her head, and a few strands of her long red hair floated free, gleaming in the light. David had to blink to keep his concentration. “All we know is that everything will change when the First Gods return to us.”

  “They left?”

  She kept her hands on her cross, but David saw her fingers tense. “Nine thousand years ago. Ever since then, each one of us who reads the Traditions has been faced with what we call the Mystery of the Promise. We know what the Promise is—the Traditions make that clear. The First Gods will return to us, and that’s when their Promise that all of us, all of humanity, will become gods at their side will be fulfilled. So the Family protects the knowledge they gave us, and adds to it, preparing for that day. We just don’t know when.”

  The way she spoke said more to David than her words. It was as if she needed to convince herself, not him. As if something else about this ancient mystery were bothering her. Something she wasn’t sharing with him.

  “Why did the First Gods leave?” he asked.

  “We don’t know.”

  “Any idea where they went?”

  “The White Island.”

  “The White Island.” He studied Jess. “You don’t know where that is, either.”

  The way she turned the cross in her hands told him he was right. “There’s a new theory—new questions—every generation. Does the word ‘white’ refer to a color? Is it an industry? A practical facility for making linen shrouds thousands of years ago? Or was it a place of purity? A physical location like Mount Ararat? An actual island? Atlantis? Malta? A place of ice and snow like Greenland or Antarctica? Or, in the end, just a philosophical state of mind?”

  “What do you think?” David asked.

  “If we knew why the First Gods left us, maybe we could figure out where they went.” She seemed about to speak, changed her mind, stood up. “I need to sleep.”

  David stood, too, still reluctant to say good night. “Big day tomorrow.” He glanced at the heavy curtains covering the window, as if he could see through them, through the night, to Tintagel Castle, less than five miles distant.

  He walked to the door with her. She hesitated in the open doorway. “When we get those results back, you’d better be one of my cousins. Otherwise, after everything I’ve told you . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence.

  “Don’t worry,” David said. “Tomorrow, we’ll find a new temple. That’s my promise.”

  So quickly that David knew there was no thought behind her action, Jess lifted the thin silver chain with its silver cross from around her neck and placed it around his.

  “I give you the Twelve Winds of the world,” she said, the rhythm of recitation in her voice again, “because no one knows where one will die.”

  Then, cheeks blazing like her hair, she turned away, and was gone without another word.

  That night, David lay back in bed with her cross in his hand, thinking of the Twelve Winds and where they might take him in his own quest.

  Like Jess, he didn’t know where he might die, either.

  He only knew when.

  Sleep did not come easily.

  THIRTY-THREE

  As far as the public and press knew, the FBI’s 6:00 A.M. raid on the Encounters casino and resort was part of Holden Ironwood’s ongoing legal battles with the Treasury. Special Agent Jack Lyle, Agent Roz Marano, and eleven other speciali
sts from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations—all wearing blue FBI Windbreakers and photo IDs—went unmentioned in the press briefing.

  It took less than an hour to locate the isolated computer installation that Lyle had gambled was hidden in the casino. There, with the exception of the mysteriously missing billionaire himself, Jack Lyle found everything he wanted—but nothing he could use.

  In the walled-off, climate-controlled portion of the Red Room, Captain Trevor Kingsburgh, a computer specialist on loan from U.S. Space Command, wearing civilian clothes and an FBI jacket, delivered the bad news.

  He showed Lyle and Roz one of the data-storage units he’d removed from the block of eight metal shelving racks in the center of the chilly room. “The good news,” the captain said, “is that the installation has eight hundred and fifty one-point-five-terabyte hot-swap drives like this one. If it’s set up with a standard configuration, that works out to about five hundred and seventy drives to hold the entire SARGE database, two hundred to manipulate it, cache, and cross-sort searches, and eighty or so units as redundant spares.”

  Lyle let those figures slip past him, focused on something more important. “Yet you don’t seem happy.”

  “Every drive I’ve examined has been wiped clean. So there’s unlikely to be evidence that SARGE was ever used here.”

  Roz jumped in before he could. “No way you can erase eight hundred and fifty terabytes in an hour.”

  “Not through software,” Kingsburgh agreed, “but look over here.” He carried the drive to a small worktable. “Recognize those?”

  Roz picked up something that to Lyle looked like a large handheld hair dryer completely sealed in red plastic—no air vents. There were five others like it on the table, each with a long electrical cord and standard plug. “It’s an old bulk eraser. Generates a powerful magnetic field. It’s designed to erase videotapes by the box load.”

  Roz wasn’t happy, either. She turned back to Kingsburgh. “Are you going to be able to reconstruct anything that was on them?”

  “We’ll check them all, sector by sector, but . . . hold those erasers within a foot of the drives for a few seconds . . . that’s all it takes.”

  “I didn’t see any bulk erasers in the other room,” Roz said. Her eyes narrowed. She was getting an idea. Lyle began to hope. “So I’d bet the techs didn’t get a chance to use them on their workstations.”

  The junior agent headed purposefully through the cylindrical door to the other side of the Red Room. Lyle and Kingsburgh followed.

  There was an AFOSI technician or an air force specialist at each of the eight workstations at the back of the room. At the conference table, two of Ironwood’s programmers waited, hands bound by plastic restraints.

  One was Keisha Harrill, a young woman about Roz’s age, with dreadlocks, jeans, and a T-shirt showing a large green dinosaur above the words NEVER FORGET. Lyle didn’t get it, but Roz thought it was funny. Naturally.

  The other prisoner was Joost Chatto, a tall, awkward man who had his head down, intent on studying something fascinating on the floor, or maybe it was the knife-sharp crease ironed into his jeans.

  Both Harrill and Chatto had been in the Red Room when the AFOSI technicians had entered. Both had thus far refused to answer any questions. That generally meant they knew something. Their turn would come.

  Lyle waited, patient, as his junior agent zeroed in on one of the AFOSI technicians at a workstation. After a quick conversation, the two consulted the technician’s thick red binder with secret emblazoned on its cover; then Roz stood behind the tech as he typed. Both looked pleased by the text that appeared on the screen, and Roz came back to tell Lyle why.

  “Slam-dunk. We found a subdirectory on the local hard drive that lists files in the SARGE format. That should be enough to establish that the workstation had access to the SARGE database.”

  Captain Kingsburgh still wasn’t happy.

  “Might not be that simple,” he said. “Like I said, two reasons for concern—the fact that all the drives have been wiped, and the fact that this installation isn’t big enough for what it needs to do.”

  “Why not?” Lyle asked.

  “That partial printout you turned in, of the unknown coastline. Its level of resolution is at least six times greater than anything SARGE can produce. Plus, it’s showing a structure at something like ninety meters underground. At best, SARGE can only go two to three meters below the surface—and that’s with favorable soil and moisture conditions, not the kind of rocks we’ve got in that image.”

  Lyle saw no reason to admit defeat. “So what else do we need to find?”

  Kingsburgh looked over to the retrofitted wall that cut the room in half. “For a global database with that level of detail . . . we need to find at least another thirty-five hundred drives to go with the eight hundred and fifty in there. All networked together.” The captain shifted the unit he carried to his other arm. “If I were you, I’d start looking for a few more heavily air-conditioned rooms.”

  “We won’t find them,” Roz said to Lyle.

  “Because?”

  “Because there’s no outside network here. These workstations connect to each other and to the drives in the air-conditioned room, and that’s it. There’s not even an ordinary phone line leading out of this place, so there’s no way they can access any other database or network.”

  “Then we’ve got a problem,” Kingsburgh said. “However that printout was generated, it had to come from something more than just the SARGE database. Because they’re processing a lot more information than what they could’ve stored here.”

  Roz looked around, searching for inspiration, Lyle knew. “Then how about this? Somehow Ironwood’s managed to get access to a second database, similar to SARGE, but . . . better.”

  Kingsburgh glanced around to see if anyone was within earshot. No one was, but he stepped closer anyway and dropped his voice. “The EMPIRE satellite constellation that produced SARGE, the synthetic-aperture radar technology the satellites use . . . we’re the only country with that capability.”

  “Then another possibility,” Lyle said. “If we can keep EMPIRE a secret from other countries, could other countries be keeping their version of the same technology secret from us?”

  Kingsburgh made quick work of that idea. “Why would Ironwood steal the SARGE database to sell to another country if the other country already had a better version?”

  “Unless . . .” Roz said slowly.

  “Don’t stop there,” Lyle prompted her.

  “What if Ironwood’s not interested in selling SARGE? What if he’s the end user?”

  Lyle was impressed. Something new he himself hadn’t considered. “So . . . he obtained a copy of SARGE for himself . . . and also bought or stole a similar database from China or Russia—”

  “Or Switzerland,” Roz said.

  The captain from U.S. Space Command looked confused. “Switzerland? They don’t have spy satellites.”

  Roz looked at Lyle, silently asking permission.

  He nodded. “Go ahead.”

  “When our inside man, Weir, disappeared,” Roz began, “he was being shot at by operators working for a private security firm based out of Zurich. Cross Executive Protection. Then, two weeks ago, we picked up another guy who worked for Cross, who’d been in another gunfight that Weir also was involved in.”

  “Except,” Lyle added, “two weeks ago, the Cross operator was apparently trying to protect Weir. The day Weir disappeared, the Cross operators were trying to stop him.”

  The captain thought that over, then stated the obvious. “Weir made a deal with Cross and then reneged.”

  “He made a deal with someone,” Lyle agreed. “Your line of work, ever hear of the MacCleirigh Foundation?”

  Kingsburgh hadn’t.

  “Neither had we. Turns out, that’s the entity that owns Cross, and it’s the company’s only client.”

  “Private army?” Kingsburgh asked.

 
; “Close enough.”

  “What kind of foundation is it?”

  “Scholarly research and such. Funds archaeological digs, university grants, museums . . . everything seems aboveboard.”

  “Seems?”

  Lyle shrugged. “They have that private army. Or, at least, a private security force. And that force has some kind of connection to Weir.”

  “If you were running Weir as a way to get into Ironwood’s organization, maybe Cross or their employees were doing the same. Weir’s the pawn caught in the middle.”

  “If so,” Lyle said, “here’s the big question. Is the MacCleirigh Foundation trying to get to Ironwood to buy the SARGE database from him, or are they the ones who sold it to him in the first place?”

  “You think a scholarly foundation is involved in international espionage?”

  “There’re so many left turns in this case, I don’t know what to think. The Foundation’s worth billions, tens of billions, so maybe that’s how they make their money: buying and selling state secrets.”

  “Worth looking at,” Kingsburgh suggested.

  “We will.” Lyle waited to see if the captain would say more, but he didn’t. Time to move on. If Kingsburgh didn’t have any secret store of classified knowledge to share . . .

  The captain got the hint. “I’ll check the rest of the drives. See if they missed erasing one.” He headed for the cylindrical door to the sealed half of the room.

  Roz gave Lyle a stern look.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “Some reason you didn’t mention the elephant in the room?”

  “Yes. I’d like to keep my reputation as a rational investigator.”

  “They’re Ironwood’s aliens, not yours. This is about what he believes, not you.”

  “It’s a cover story, Roz. You know—Tony Soprano says he’s going to pick up the cannolis, and he really means the illegal goods, to throw off the Feds.”