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by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  He felt a warning hand on his shoulder and turned to see Jess hold a finger to her lips as she pushed the lightstick back into the pocket of his overalls. Next, still on her stomach, she eased past him, until she was just inside the opening, looking out.

  A moment later, she relaxed and waved him forward.

  It was safe.

  Dropping five feet to the broken shale below, they landed on the shore beneath the bluff.

  Jess grabbed David. The cameras? she mouthed. Do you have them?

  David patted his pockets. Yes, he nodded.

  They ran again.

  THIRTY-SIX

  It was raining. The rocks underfoot were soaked and slippery. And though local time was three thirty-five in the afternoon, Jack Lyle was still on Eastern Daylight Time and starting to think of dinner and bed. He hadn’t slept on the red-eye from Kennedy to Heathrow, but the journey had brought him to the coastline on the printout identified by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Cornwall.

  “Any of this making sense?” Roz asked.

  She held a large black umbrella for both of them. They each wore a bright yellow rain jacket with a checkerboard band of reflective tape, courtesy of the Devon-Cornwall Constabulary. The umbrella kept the rain off, but the wild waves crashing not twenty feet away created mist and spray that went everywhere.

  The local police were inured to these conditions—the rain hadn’t slowed them. They’d done an exemplary job of securing the site of . . . whatever this had been.

  Fifty feet along the stony shoreline, at the base of a near-vertical cliff, yawned the jagged edges of a huge hole created by explosives. It had been cordoned off by traffic-control barricades and yellow tape, as had a second explosive opening in the cliff wall, higher up and another twenty feet farther away. Police and a hired civilian crew were now moving in and out of both openings, digging through the rubble to get some idea of what had happened here and why. They’d already brought out a number of carved stone blocks, and the police had called in local historians, still in transit.

  “You tell me,” Lyle said. “It’s definitely not a secret military installation.”

  “Still, someone used military assets to find the underground structure inside that cliff,” Roz said.

  “Someone?” Lyle mopped beaded moisture from his face. “How about David Weir and the woman he’s with? Or Ironwood’s outfit?”

  “But they all wanted to find whatever’s in there. Real bad. So why would they try to blow it up?”

  “Doesn’t look like they tried, Roz. Looks like they blew it up real good.”

  “Which could mean there’s a third party involved.”

  “I really wish you hadn’t said that.”

  “Because that’s what you’re thinking, too, right?”

  “Right.”

  Roz sniffed, then wiped her own face free from spray. “Which could confirm Ironwood stole the SARGE database for his own use—”

  “As you so helpfully suggested.”

  “—and not to sell it to our nation’s enemies, of which there are so many.”

  “Just because he has his own use for it doesn’t mean he doesn’t plan to sell it. And remember, he’s altered it some way, to add more detail. Could be Ironwood’s so keen to find his . . .” Lyle couldn’t bring himself to say it.

  Roz could. “Alien bases?”

  “Yeah, those. Could be he’s made a deal with the devil. Or a devil, at least.”

  “So what about party number three? Someone’s blowing up those bases. Who might that be?”

  Lyle tried to focus his thoughts as pragmatically as possible. “In the real world, which would be the one I inhabit, it could be whoever it is who wants the database for themselves, and wants to hide the fact that SARGE can be used to find underground complexes.” He looked at his partner, knew what was coming. “And in your world?”

  “Simple. Someone already knows what the alien bases are and doesn’t want Ironwood to find them.”

  Lyle was too tired and too cold to play the game anymore. “Do you honestly believe that’s what’s in there?” He looked down the rocky shore to the first explosive opening. Most of the police were gathered there now. Two were on radios. Something had caught their attention. “Something built by aliens?”

  “Honestly?” Roz asked.

  “Preferably.”

  “If the aliens are smart enough to get from wherever they live to where we live . . . and they really don’t want us to know they were here . . . then they’re smart enough to do a better job at hiding their bases. I don’t have any idea what’s in there, or who built it, but it’s homegrown.”

  Lyle studied her closely. “So that’s not an alien base.”

  She shook her head. Drops of water fell enchantingly from her soaked hair.

  “Yet you still believe in aliens.”

  Roz smiled.

  Lyle sighed. He felt his phone vibrate, fumbled with the police raincoat, pulled out the buzzing device in time, answered.

  “Agent Lyle, it’s Colonel Kowinski.”

  “Yes, Colonel?” Lyle made a point of leaning close to Roz so she could hear the conversation. Roz rolled her eyes, hit a button.

  Kowinski’s voice was now on speakerphone. Who knew?

  “. . . the nonhuman DNA,” Kowinski said, then paused as if expecting a response.

  “Say again, Colonel. You broke up.”

  “I said, my team has been able to identify the source of the nonhuman DNA in the files that David Weir stole.”

  “Okay, I got that. Neanderthal?”

  “Not even close. The source is David Weir. He was sequencing his own DNA.”

  “Colonel, are you telling me . . .” Lyle hesitated, searching for the appropriate words.

  Roz had no such trouble. “Colonel Kowinski, Agent Marano here. Are you saying David Weir isn’t human?”

  The colonel’s reply was characteristically brusque and noncommittal. “I’m staying out of any interpretation of these results. All I’ll go on the record with is to say that Weir’s genetic structure contains sequences that are not typically found in the human genetic code.”

  Lyle waved Roz off, found his voice. “And off the record, Colonel? Can you give us anything more to go on?”

  “Off the record . . .” There was a long pause, enough to make Lyle check the phone’s display to be sure it was still connected. “Off the record, he doesn’t have a human genetic structure—and he’s not the only one.”

  Lyle put it together as quickly as that. “The other files he was selling, they’re for people with the same sort of . . . wonky DNA?”

  “He found thirty—out of three million.”

  This time, Roz held up a hand to seek permission to speak next. Lyle nodded.

  “Colonel, Marano here again. Is there any way to figure out where the anomalous DNA came from? Can you be sure it’s not just some kind of random mutation?”

  “Let me be clear about this, Agent Marano, any mutation that shows up in thirty different families from four different locations isn’t random. I don’t know where it came from. And, second, unless someone can give me clearance to bring in some outside specialists, I can’t even go looking.”

  “I understand,” Lyle said. “Let me get back to you, Colonel. And thank you.”

  “I’ll be here.” The call clicked off.

  Lyle didn’t want to consider the implications of what the colonel had found, but he knew he had to. As crazy as it was, could there be any connection at all in this case to extraterrestrials?

  Roz apparently guessed what he was wrestling with. “Y’know, we don’t have to have an opinion about aliens for this investigation. All we need to know is what Ironwood’s opinion is, and that’s pretty well established.”

  She was right, and Lyle felt embarrassed to admit it. He hadn’t been tasked to solve a bigger mystery here. His job was to find the SARGE database, keep it from falling into enemy hands, and arrest the people responsible for its theft.
After that, Roz and Kowinski could play X-Files to their hearts’ content. For himself, he planned to go fishing.

  He made his decision. “Trail’s gone cold here. We catch the next flight back home and focus on the interrogation of Ironwood’s computer team.”

  “Works for me,” Roz said.

  Lyle handed her his phone. “Make the arrangements.”

  Before Roz could place the call, two paramedics hurried past them, boots crunching on the rocks. They were carrying a folded stretcher toward a knot of workers and police by the cliff opening.

  “Someone hurt?” Lyle asked.

  “Someone in the rubble,” one called out as they rushed by.

  Lyle and Roz exchanged a glance and fell quickly in behind them. Roz struggled to close the big black umbrella, failed, tossed it aside.

  They arrived on the scene just as a dirt-covered body was carefully lowered down the cliff face to the waiting police and paramedics.

  The body twitched, alive.

  Lyle pushed through the police beside the stretcher and flashed his badge. “You know him?” an officer asked.

  Even through the dirt and blood, Lyle did. “Don’t book that flight,” he told Roz. “We’re staying.”

  On the stretcher before him was an asset better than David Weir. Someone even closer to Ironwood and his illegal activities.

  His son.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  “What now?” Jess asked as she moved her chair closer to David’s. Twenty-four hours ago, she and this man had been in yet another race for their lives, this time along the rocky shore of Cornwall, and she still couldn’t say she knew anything about him. Nor why, the night before that, it had seemed so natural to share her secrets with him and give him her cross. The only explanation had to be that he was Family.

  The computer screen in front of David was three feet across, its colors intense. The small workroom was quiet, the air-conditioning cool. The absence of windows added to the almost cocoonlike environment. The room was designed for optimal concentration on the work at hand: usually geological mapping, but now archaeological reconstruction.

  “All the photos are loaded in from the memory cards,” David said. “We’ll sort through them, pick the best ones, then have the software stitch them together to make a seamless image.”

  He began typing on the computer’s elaborate keyboard, and the screen displayed a rich green backdrop on which the corporate logo of Haldron Oil appeared to float. Haldron was one of dozens of energy conglomerates that based their headquarters in Aberdeen, and unquestioned access to their facilities had been easy to arrange. Not because of the Family’s influence, but because of Jess’s own. She’d been on assignment for Haldron in the Barrens.

  On her rushed flight to Zurich, just one month ago, she’d dictated her report on the nature and origin of the buried bodies found by the company’s Arctic pipeline crew. Charlie Ujarak’s wishes notwithstanding, the early North Americans who’d lived in that long-vanished village were not related to the contemporary Inuit population of the region.

  That report had saved Haldron Oil both time and money, on the order of months and millions. It also hadn’t hurt that Haldron’s project manager, Lionel Kurtz, had formally credited Jess with saving his life. She didn’t care about being thanked. She was just relieved he hadn’t died because of her.

  “Here goes,” David said. “Tell me when to stop.”

  Jess moved closer to the screen. The images they were about to see, no one had seen for thousands of years. There could be nothing more important for her. For the Family.

  David tapped through three overexposed photos until he came to the first image of the wall map. The hair on the back of Jess’s neck bristled. It was an exquisite piece of artwork, the colors pure and the execution polished. There was nothing primitive about it.

  “Those lines crossing the oceans,” David said as they worked, “they could be shipping routes.”

  Jess had been thinking the same thing.

  “So, my question is, is this a map made by a culture that managed to chart the entire globe about nine thousand years before Europeans did, and history somehow forgot about it?”

  “My family didn’t forget,” Jess said.

  “No, really, Jess. To map the entire world by ship, that’s the work of generations. Hundreds of voyages, at least. Maybe thousands if you think of all the ways ships can be lost at sea.” He lifted an eyebrow. “I know your Traditions say the First Gods were advanced, but this advanced?”

  “The Traditions tell us the First Gods scattered us to the Twelve Winds. They don’t say how. But it makes sense if we went by sailing ships—they’re wind-powered.”

  “And then what? All your ships sank?”

  “All our ships . . . left.”

  “To the White Island.” David studied the image on the screen. “Do you think that’s on this map?”

  Jess found she couldn’t answer, but that was exactly what she hoped. Of the eight temples remaining to be located, there was still a chance to find a table that held all twelve lost artifacts. Before Su-Lin and Andrew could destroy them.

  David tried another way to break her silence. “I admit I don’t know a lot about history.”

  “But?”

  “Some people think we were preceded by an earlier, more advanced civilization, that it was wiped out by a global catastrophe, and that became the source of our legends of a universal flood. What if that’s what happened to your family’s First Gods?”

  “You’re talking about the Sea Kings,” Jess said. Every member of the Family was aware of history’s fringe theories describing a fantastical advanced society in the dim past, if only because some of those theories owed their origins to certain misremembered stories of the Family itself. “Sometimes they’re called Atlanteans.”

  “As in the Lost Continent?”

  “Exactly. But you can file those stories with Ironwood’s aliens. There’s no solid geological record of a global catastrophe in historical times. Not even in the Family’s records.”

  “What about all those mammoths flash-frozen in Siberia?”

  “Urban myth,” Jess said. “Lots of mammoth carcasses in Siberia, but—without exception—there’s significant decay. All that’s left is bone and tusks, hide and hair. There’s never been a perfectly preserved find. That young mammoth they dug up on television a few years back? It froze before rotting because predators had torn it open and eaten its internal organs. Wasn’t much more than a shell.”

  “Then how about a huge meteor or comet impact?”

  “Again, lots of those in historical times, but most impacts cause localized effects, not global.”

  “You said ‘most.’ So some aren’t?”

  This was her territory of expertise. “There’s a good case for a series of significant impacts eight to ten thousand years ago. Some of them might be connected—parts of the same body, a shattered comet or meteor, striking different locations at almost the same time. Others . . . well, their timings are too far apart to be anything other than individual events.

  “But there is one well-documented impact that took place about twelve thousand nine hundred years ago. Something big detonated over the Great Lakes region of North America. Some say it coincides with what’s called the Younger Dryas—an anomalous cooling period that lasted over a thousand years in the northern hemisphere. Sort of a localized version of nuclear winter. There’s evidence to suggest that particular climate change was responsible for disrupting the continent’s Clovis culture.”

  She stopped to explain. “They’re the first people to establish themselves in historically significant numbers in North America.”

  David was still with her. “But it took a thousand years?”

  Jess nodded. “The cooling lasted that long. Clovis culture probably collapsed over a generation or two.”

  “So not an instant catastrophe?”

  “Well, there’s suggestive evidence of huge fires in regions that were close to the
projected impact point. But overall? No, not instant, at least, not in the way other impacts affected other people.”

  “So, if there was no global disaster to wipe out the First Gods, what do you think happened to them?”

  “They didn’t vanish without warning. The Traditions say that they told us they were leaving. To go to the White Island. And they promised to come back. They just didn’t say when.”

  “Or why.”

  Jess hesitated. David couldn’t know he’d just touched on the real mystery of the Family. One that had cost Florian her life—and threatened his, and hers. “Or why,” she agreed.

  Thankfully, David’s attention was back on the image of the ancient map. “What we do know is that they marked the location of the Cornwall temple on this. And I saw the same cross on an island in the Mediterranean, in Africa, India . . . I know there were others, but I didn’t see everything I shot. Who knows what else they marked?”

  “Only one way to find out,” Jess said.

  David pressed the key to start the program.

  In less than a minute, the Haldron mainframe quilted together sixty-seven separate images. The completed picture—an extraordinary world view—filled the screen side to side.

  The first thing David did was click on the command that rotated the image, so that north would be at the top.

  “Where do we start?”

  Jess took a deep breath, excited, apprehensive. “Cornwall.”

  David expanded that section of the map, and they began. In less than twenty minutes the two of them completed the work of lifetimes. Twelve temples around the world.

  “Anything else?” David asked.

  In addition to the four already known, the digitally preserved map showed the same bladed cross marking a location on Malta, two in Africa, and one each in Tibet, Indonesia, the American Southwest, the tip of South America, and the maritime region of Canada. Red lines drew connections to all of the temple locations accessible by sea. Black lines marked overland routes and linked ports, none of which were temples. The map showed more than forty separate locations on those routes.