Search

by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  “Don’t make such a big thing out of it, Mr. Ironwood. We know you accessed another database.”

  Gotcha, Ironwood said silently. He closed his eyes to savor the moment. “No, Agent Lyle, I did not. You tell your expert all that information came out of your database, and your database alone. If he can’t tell you how I did it, I can. And that answer fits on one computer disk. You tell him that, and then you call me back and I’ll tell you what kind of a deal I’ll cut for you to get that disk.”

  “You don’t want to play it this way.”

  “You set the rules, son, so don’t throw a tantrum just ’cause you lost a round. By the way, in case you want to go changing those rules or something foolish like that, so far I’ve had no intention of turning SARGE over to someone who doesn’t share my love for my country. But I promise you, any of your friends come parachuting out of the sky to throw me into a Globemaster or what have you, then SARGE and my disk are going to end up exactly where you don’t want ’em to end up. You got that?”

  “I gave you a chance to do the right thing.”

  “Now I’m giving you the same opportunity. When you get your head straight, you call back. Have a nice day.”

  Ironwood snapped the phone shut. He had to make this right. If he didn’t, how could he ever face Nan again?

  THIRTY-NINE

  “At least the Cornish temple was destroyed.”

  “That is the least of it, Andrew,” the Defender of São Paolo hissed into her microphone. “They’re both still alive!”

  The silence that followed was oddly flattened by the noise suppression built into the headphones she wore, essential for helicopter flight. In theory, the elegant cabin of the Foundation’s Dauphin Eurocopter was quiet enough for passengers to carry on an unassisted conversation. Nevertheless, when the aircraft transported the Family’s defenders, for privacy and security the pilots and passengers wore communications headsets.

  “Cross found them once,” Andrew finally said. “So they will be found again.”

  Su-Lin didn’t think that was likely. Jessica was too much like her aunt Florian. She’d be aware what the Cross attack in the temple meant: that all her efforts to cover her tracks had failed. That the Family had been literally minutes behind her.

  “Jessica will not repeat anything she’s done since we lost her in Boston. She won’t use public airports. Who knows how many passports she has, but she won’t use any of them more than once. She’s going to be impossible to follow now.”

  Su-Lin looked out the large passenger window at the lights of the city. Different parts of Zurich glowed different colors, reflecting the era of the various lighting systems clustered below. Rich orange in the oldest sections. Actinic blue along the modern thoroughfares. Sickly yellow where newer lights strove for anemic efficiency. It was a jigsaw pattern of time, and Su-Lin thought it fitting that she was above it all, just as her ancestors had remained behind the scenes of the city, from its beginning.

  It was intolerable that she even faced the prospect of losing her position, and her power, all because of other people’s mistakes.

  “Perhaps we don’t have to follow her.”

  Su-Lin had no idea what he meant. “Give up, you mean?”

  “Not at all. Consider her position.”

  “Andrew, if she has even a tenth of Florian’s wealth, she has all the options money can buy.”

  “No, she doesn’t. Think, Su-Lin. She’s not doing this on her own. She needed David Weir to find the temples, and David Weir—”

  Su-Lin broke in. She understood. “He needed Ironwood.”

  She could almost hear Andrew’s self-satisfied smile. “And, as our associate told us, that particular source of aid is at an end.”

  It only took a moment, then Su-Lin relaxed. “She’s going to the Shop.” It was the only place Jessica could go now to continue her search for the Family’s past.

  “That’s where I’d send the next team from Cross.”

  However, there was a potential problem in taking such drastic action in the Family’s most secure archive: its Australian director, Victoria, Line Claridge. The Defender of Canberra had proven herself independent enough that her loyalty could not be assumed.

  “We’ll have to be careful. Victoria was Florian’s friend.”

  “She knows what’s best for the Family.”

  “I’ll speak with her,” Su-Lin decided. “Sound her out, find out if she’s heard from Jessica. But, Andrew, it might not be wise, or even possible, to count on Victoria’s assistance.”

  “We do have other friends in the Shop, don’t we?”

  Andrew was right. Regardless of Victoria’s help or hindrance, there were those on her staff who could always be counted on to do the right thing.

  High above Zurich, Su-Lin placed the first call to Australia.

  FORTY

  It was David who caught the first clue: Orion was upside down.

  Between them, he and Jess could only name four constellations: the Big and Little Dippers, Taurus the Bull, and Orion the Hunter. The last was reproduced by seven silver disks on the domed ceiling of the chamber, but David noticed something different about the arrangement of the four outlying stars. Seen from the northern hemisphere, Orion was most often in the southern sky, and the stars that were farthest apart were to the left. On the dome of the Cornish temple’s inner chamber, that pattern was reversed.

  At Jess’s request, Haldron Oil’s director of exploration sent over Burt McGilford, a soil engineer in the Aberdeen office, whose hobby was astronomy. The moment he saw the star map, he pronounced it a chart of the southern sky. Then, in a dense Scottish brogue, he pointed out several other constellations that neither David nor Jess had heard of, including the Telescope, the Microscope, and the Air Pump.

  The most significant, though the smallest, was Crux, the Southern Cross.

  In the northern hemisphere, McGilford explained, observers had Polaris, the Pole Star, to indicate the north celestial pole. In the southern hemisphere, there was no star in a similar position, so observers had always relied on the Southern Cross, tracing its long arm southward for four and a half lengths to find the other celestial pole.

  David and Jess were familiar with the use of stars for navigation, and their question for McGilford was: How could they calculate the specific place on the planet where the specific stars on this map could be seen in this specific configuration?

  “You can’t.” The Cornish chamber’s star map, which matched far southern skies as seen from South America or Africa or Australia, could only be used to calculate latitude—the measure of how far a point was above or below the equator. Latitude, McGilford emphasized, was relatively simple to ascertain. Longitude—how far east or west a point was from an arbitrary starting position—was not. Precise navigation, he explained, required calculating both latitude and longitude.

  That led the engineer into a treatise about how, in modern times, the arbitrary starting position—0°—dividing the Earth into western and eastern hemispheres had become the line of longitude that runs through Greenwich, England. To be able to calculate how far east or west a point might be from the Greenwich Meridian, two separate pieces of information were required: the positions of particular stars above the horizon, and the time those positions were observed. Precise timekeeping was so necessary for the art of navigation, the oceangoing powers of the seventeenth century—France, Spain, and England—offered prizes amounting to millions of today’s dollars for anyone who could devise a way to accurately determine longitude at sea. The first reliable method had been a new type of clock, invented in the late 1700s by a Yorkshire carpenter, that kept accurate time even on a moving ship.

  “People sailed around the world before the 1700s,” David said. “How did they make maps without knowing longitude?”

  “There’re plenty of other methods that were in use, y’see.” The amateur astronomer smoothed his mustache, enjoying this unusual call on his expertise. “The trick was to have an alman
ac of celestial occurrences, such as when a particular star or planet would be moving behind the Moon, or the arrangement of Jupiter’s four major moons, or—”

  Jess interrupted. “Sorry, but what about Jupiter’s moons?”

  “Well, their orbits are as predictable as any other, and the fact that there’re four of them has them behaving like the hands of a clock—different arrangements of them occur only at specific times. That means, if you’re having an almanac showing the arrangement of the Jovian moons at midnight in London, when someone in Australia is seeing that exact arrangement, they’ll know what time it is in London, and then they can work out what time it is for them where they are, and that’s how they’ll calculate their longitude. Easy enough to do on land, but a sight more difficult on the heaving deck of a ship at sea.”

  “Possible, though?” Jess asked.

  “Aye. All you’re needing is a telescope that’ll let you resolve the moons. In fact, it was Galileo who first saw those moons, and who first came up with the idea of using them like a giant clock in the sky.”

  Jess’s face lit up, and David knew they had another clue.

  “The sun map!” Jess said as soon as she and David were alone again. “It’s the time stamp that says when the stars in the chamber were observed. That’s how we know.”

  The inscribed meteorite was the only artifact ever recovered from a Chamber of Heaven. Of the three sun maps known to be in existence, one was in the MacCleirigh Foundation in Zurich, far below their corporate tower in the Shrine of Turus. The other two, retrieved from the temples in Peru and the South Pacific, were in Ironwood’s possession.

  In her last communication before her murder, Florian had confirmed that the diagram on the Polynesian meteorite was identical to the one on the sun map in the Family’s Zurich shrine.

  Jess’s eyes flashed with her excitement. “If each Chamber of Heaven is like every other one in layout and in size, then the world maps are probably the same. Same for the arrangement of stars on their ceiling domes. Identical. Since the stars can tell us the latitude they were observed from, and the sun map can give us the longitude, all we have to do is put them together and—”

  “We’ve got the exact point on the globe from which they were observed.”

  “The one point that’s not marked on the map,” Jess agreed.

  “The White Island.” David looked thoughtful.

  “You’re not convinced. Why?”

  “Everything you’ve told me about the First Gods says they were teachers. They gave people gifts of knowledge.”

  “Including astronomy.” Jess quoted again from the Traditions. “ ’The measure of the sun and moon and stars . . . so they would not fear the confusion of days.’ ”

  “And they created that world map, which we’re assuming shows the location of all their temples, and the routes between them.”

  “Right . . .”

  “So why hide the White Island?”

  “Because, if that’s what the missing location is, it’s not hidden at all. The answer’s in the Chambers, and the First Gods left us everything we need to find it.”

  “Except, if the sun map’s the key, we don’t have one. Your family does, and so does Ironwood.”

  Jess had the perfect answer to that problem. “We only need the information on it—and I know where to find that.”

  “Stochastic resonance,” Captain Kingsburgh said.

  Jack Lyle folded his hands on the tabletop before him and looked across the room at the four fifty-inch video screens. One displayed the life-sized image of the U.S. Space Command computer specialist seated at a matching table in Colorado Springs. The other screens showed two uniformed air force image analysts to either side of him. The paneled wall behind Kingsburgh and his associates was identical to the one behind Lyle and Roz Marano. The illusion cast by the two videoconferencing studios that this meeting was taking place in one location, not two, almost five thousand miles apart, was nearly perfect. Though Lyle would’ve been just as happy with a phone call.

  “Enlighten me, Captain,” Lyle said.

  “It’s counterintuitive, but simply put, it’s a method by which an overlay of noise or static—that is, random information—is applied to an existing signal, making the detection of subthreshold information—the parts of a signal that are technically just below the limit of what we should be able to detect—much easier to, um . . . detect.”

  “Easier,” Lyle repeated. “Now you’re speaking my language. How much easier?”

  Kingsburgh rocked his hand back and forth. “In signal analysis, we gain four to five times the sensitivity, more or less.”

  “And you think this is what Ironwood has done to increase the amount of information he’s been able to extract from the SARGE database.”

  The captain’s chin jutted out. Lyle read that as a defensive gesture. “It’s an approach, Agent Lyle. The only plausible one we can think of. But if Ironwood’s being truthful, he’s managed to retrieve considerably more information than should be possible, even with this technique. I mean, the ground-penetrating, synthetic-aperture radar used by the EMPIRE satellites—that system can’t possibly penetrate as deeply as the Cornwall printout indicates. Not even under optimal conditions.

  “Our guess is there’s some kind of radiation scattering going on and he’s managed to develop an algorithm to isolate that from the main signal. How’s that even possible? We don’t know. But if he is being truthful . . .” The captain’s next statement clearly was as painful to utter as it was for Lyle to hear. “It’s probably the most important advance in geospatial intelligence since satellites. With this technique, the world becomes transparent. There is literally no place left for our enemies to hide, short of digging a mile-deep hole.”

  “So this is something that we need?”

  “It’s a game changer. Whoever controls that algorithm wins.”

  That was enough for Lyle. “Thank you for your input, Captain, and thank you to your staff.”

  Kingsburgh nodded; then he and his analysts left their studio.

  Lyle sat for a moment, contemplating the image of the empty room thousands of miles away.

  “We’re going to have to make a deal with Ironwood, aren’t we?” Roz asked.

  “Let’s not go there yet.”

  “We have other options?”

  “One in particular.”

  David’s body told him it was midnight, but the sun blazed overhead, and local time was early afternoon. He felt raw, his hearing still affected by the explosions in the Cornish temple. Jess seemed more collected. She’d slept soundly on the flight from India and showed no sign of time-zone confusion.

  Four hours after their impromptu astronomy lesson, David and Jess were on a Bombardier Global Express XRS leased to Haldron Oil. Twenty-five hours later, with a single refueling stop in Bombay, they’d changed planes in Sydney, New South Wales. Four hours more and they were in Australia’s Northern Territory.

  Twice they’d been processed by immigration officials, and both times Jess had produced new passports with new names. American for India, Canadian for Australia.

  “How about I drive?” Jess already had her hand on the right-side door of a dusty white Toyota Land Cruiser in the Thrifty Car Rental parking stall.

  David shrugged, not inclined to argue. He opened the Cruiser’s left-side door and climbed into the passenger seat. Its leather covering stuck unpleasantly to the back of his already sweat-soaked shirt. The cabin itself was uncomfortably hot, even with the vehicle parked beneath an awning.

  A Haldron employee had met them in the Sydney airport with a packet of outback gear and clothing. They’d changed on the plane north. Now they were in khaki shorts and short-sleeved shirts, long white socks and leather boots, and wide-brimmed hats. David held his hat on his lap. He’d wear it later.

  “You’re sure about this?”

  Jess turned the key in the ignition. The diesel engine started rough, evened out.

  “They’ve t
ried to kill you twice now,” he added. “So knocking on their door might not be the best idea.”

  Jess adjusted the air vents to direct the air-conditioning at her face. The outside temperature was over 100°F. The southern hemisphere was moving toward summer.

  “Su-Lin didn’t tell Willem about the people who came after me in Canada,” she said. “So whatever she’s doing, whatever she’s hiding, she believes not all the other defenders will agree. Willem was my aunt’s . . . great love.”

  “I thought defenders weren’t supposed to get involved.”

  “They’re not supposed to turn on each other, either. Victoria Claridge was a good friend of Florian’s. If Su-Lin didn’t share news about me with Willem, my guess is she hasn’t told Victoria.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “Then this is where I’d end up anyway. Locked up in the Shop in the middle of nowhere. I’d rather think about what’ll happen if I’m right.”

  “So would I,” David said. His future was now tied to hers. Without access to her family’s records, he had no chance to improve the genetic odds of his survival. Or even find out if survival was possible.

  They drove from the lot to the entrance to Roger Vale Road, following it to the two-lane highway that led to Alice Springs, the small town located in what was almost the exact geographical center of Australia. Before they reached the Alice, Jess took a sharp turn onto another two-lane road that passed for an outback highway and started driving east.

  “How far?” David asked.

  “Fifty klicks.”

  The landscape was startlingly orange-red, flat and dusty, broken by stark and endless hills to the north. But for the sparse olive-green and dun-colored desert plants and grasses here and there, it might as well have been Mars. “You weren’t kidding about the middle of nowhere.”

  “That’s the whole point,” Jess said. “In the event of nuclear Armageddon, the Family’s collection would survive. Of course, ten years after we moved everything out here, the CIA built a satellite ground station ten miles to the west of town, and the whole area became a target.”