The Joshua Files - a complete box set: Books 1-5 of the young adult sci-fi adventure series plus techno-thriller prequel

by M. G. Harris

  DiCanio watched him for a moment and then asked. “Everything OK?”

  Jackson grimaced. “I must have left my cell phone in my room.”

  “Expecting a call?”

  He shook his head, tried to disguise his irritation with himself. “I guess not.”

  DiCanio had changed into a charcoal-grey and white silk dress. The fabric dipped just below the knee and clung at every curve. Jackson tried not to glance at her cleavage, which was set off by a single pendant of polished jade. He found himself wondering whether, if not for Marie-Carmen, he’d consider having a fling with a woman twenty years his senior. The way DiCanio held his eyes for just a fraction of a second too long made Jackson wonder if maybe she was having the same thought. Within a minute, however, his attention was distracted by a stunning Asian beauty that appeared at DiCanio’s side. In her early twenties, the woman was dressed in a silk sari, coral pink with a border of silver brocade. Her eyes were subtly made up in tones that just offset the cinnamon color of her skin. The overall effect implied softness, understated elegance.

  “Jackson Bennett, meet Priyanka Desai. She’s just won a prestigious Junior Research Fellowship to Aquinas College in The Other Place, as we like to call it in Cambridge.” DiCanio’s smile was like a warm beam of sunshine in which the Junior Research Fellow basked.

  Jackson shook Priyanka’s hand. “Congratulations! What’s your field, Doctor Desai?”

  The woman’s voice was rich and sensual; her pronunciation was cut-glass British with an Indian twang. “Call me Priya – please. I’m not a fully-fledged ‘doctor’ yet.”

  “Jackson Bennett. And – I’m not a ‘doctor’ yet, either.”

  “Why don’t agree not to hold it against each other?” Priya said with a steady gaze, her tone entirely suggestive. Jackson blinked in disbelief. Her meaning couldn’t have been plainer. He glanced back at DiCanio for a second, slightly thrown.

  Was he being set up with Priya?

  “I’m a chemist originally, but my doctoral research is in climatology.”

  Jackson’s gaze went straight to DiCanio, then back to Priya. “Anthropomorphic global warming?”

  Priya smiled. There was a trace of something concealed about her expression. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those climate change deniers.”

  “Denial?” He shook his head and grinned. “Heck, no. I guess you guys know what you’re talking about – it’s really not my area.”

  Priya smiled again, this time carefully. Delicately she said, “Well, I’m glad to hear that you’re not one of those who won’t give scientists credit for being experts in their own areas.”

  DiCanio turned to Jackson. “Whatever banal reports you read about from so-called climate change summits in luxurious resorts like Bali, nothing much really changes. The world’s economy is still addicted to burning fossil fuels. We fight wars to protect US oil interests.”

  “You don’t think the politicians are serious about climate change?”

  DiCanio shrugged. “I’m from Texas, honey; I know how the oil fellas think. They’re not going to sit back and watch their livelihood disappear. And these new guys in China and Russia? They make the good ol’ boys from my neighborhood look like a bunch of boy scouts.”

  DiCanio’s liberal views were well-known. It didn’t seem to square with her role as a successful business-woman, but that was increasingly common. San Francisco was rife with left-leaning millionaires. Even saving the environment was big business now.

  Jackson felt himself tuning out as Priya’s and DiCanio’s conversation become even more enthusiastic and political. He tipped more wine into his mouth. The two women were really getting going now. They didn’t seem to have noticed that they’d lost his interest.

  As he pretended to be surveying the room, he became aware of the claustrophobic, even conspiratorial ambience of the setting. He didn’t really follow politics, something else that infuriated his brother Connor. Maybe it was because with a dead war hero for a father and an ace pilot for a brother, any views to the left of Ronald Reagan’s would make for vigorous argument.

  He simply wasn’t interested in arguing about anything outside of his own field of research. It was too much distraction from his experiments. When Connor had once asked, “Do you actually care about anything apart from that goddamn genetics lab, or snowboarding or getting laid?” Jackson hadn’t replied.

  The raging log fire in one corner of the room provided the only significant source of light. The faces of DiCanio and her associates were animated, lit in flickering orange, from one side only. Everything else was in shadow. Something stirred within Jackson, an ominous knock at the edge of his consciousness.

  Still their conversation continued. The conversation had broadened to include a man seated opposite DiCanio, diagonally opposite from him. This rather saturnine man in his late forties was dressed in a midnight blue jacket over a white shirt, no tie. He seemed to enjoy the sound of his voice too. He didn’t once as much as glance in Jackson’s direction, but held forth to the apparently rapt attention of DiCanio and Priya.

  Jackson speared a perfectly round new potato on a fork. He dipped it into the plate of cheese. As a mixture of dairy fat and tang of flavor flooded his mouth, he reflected that maybe Connor was right. Maybe he didn’t think enough about things like politics. It certainly put him at a disadvantage for these types of gatherings of ‘high-powered’ intellects.

  Science was like that; all-consuming. It wasn’t like fighting battles or even war. Sooner or later, the fighting ended and Connor would be home. He was on his third sortie in Iraq now, yet they always ended. But science didn’t end. The immediate answer to every question you asked was just another question. And the appetite for answers could be insatiable.

  So Apocalyptic

  “You’re very quiet,” Priya observed. “Do we take it that you’re not worried about climate change?”

  Jackson smirked. “Hey, now. That’s like a ‘when did you stop beating your wife’ question.”

  “Priya’s kind of a firebrand on the topic,” DiCanio said. She nodded at a young, fair-haired waiter who was standing by silently. “Maybe Jackson would prefer to concentrate on the raclette – and the wine.”

  “It’s not that I’m not interested,” he told Priya. Her disappointed pout was all the more attractive for the fact that she obviously struggled to conceal it. “But I’m just a molecular geneticist. Like you – but unlike Melissa here – I don’t have my doctorate yet. Kind of need to focus, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Oh, and I admire focus,” DiCanio said as the waiter filled her glass. “Most especially in a man.” She gave Priya a benevolent smile.

  DiCanio turned to the man opposite her, who seemed finally to have decided to eat rather than talk. His close-cropped dark hair was flecked with silver, which gave him a slightly less bullish appearance than the extreme haircut might suggest. Jackson noticed how the man’s jacket bunched around his shoulders. He guessed that the guy probably worked out, pretty hard too.

  “This is Jonas Kitrick. He’s also based in Oxford.”

  “For a Cambridge professor, you have a lot of contacts in Oxford,” Jackson observed.

  “Sugar, I’ve been around. Oxford didn’t last very long though. Cambridge made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

  Jackson closed his eyes as if enraptured. “Man, I’ve always wanted to hear someone say that to me!”

  DiCanio laughed. It was a slightly disorienting sound, smaller and higher than he’d have expected from her rather strident, Texan- inflected voice. It sounded like the peal of bells.

  Jackson asked, “So, Doctor Kitrick, what’s your field?”

  Kitrick blinked slowly and without expression. He eyed Jackson with a faintly imperious air. “I’m an astrophysicist. My group works on dark matter, galaxy clusters, dark energy. . . ” His voice trailed off, almost as though he were too bored to answer.

  “Jonas is putting together a really exciting project,” s
aid DiCanio. “I like to think we’ll talk about it in more detail, when you’ve had a chance to know us all a little better.”

  Again, Kitrick blinked. Jackson sensed it was deliberate, rather than a reflex. Kitrick lifted his glass and paused before drinking. “And we, you,” he intoned.

  In total, Jackson counted five diners, apart from himself. A man in his late thirties with a Hispanic appearance sat to DiCanio’s right. He hadn’t joined the conversation that had so engaged Priya, DiCanio and Kitrick. DiCanio introduced him as Dr. Antonio Vargas, a geophysicist from the University of Utah.

  “I work on calderas…they’re massive, volcanic pools of magma which lie under the Earth’s crust.”

  “Like the one at Yellowstone National Park? The ‘supervolcano’? I’ve been hiking around there. A couple of times.”

  Antonio Vargas grinned broadly, showing a set of even, polished white teeth. He smelt of cologne. He wore a silk tie with a textured weave of six, tightly intertwined colors. Compared to other geophysicists that Jackson had met, Vargas seemed pretty well-groomed. In fact, as Jackson glanced around the table he had to acknowledge that the gathered company, who all seemed to be scientists of some type, had made a far greater effort with their appearance than him. Even if he hadn’t lost his suitcase in Mexico, he wouldn’t have been much better attired. Jackson couldn’t ever remember sitting down with such smartly dressed scientists.

  Vargas poured wine into his own glass and then Jackson’s. Then he answered Jackson’s question.

  “Actually, the Yellowstone caldera is a specialty of my university.” Vargas spoke with a cultivated tone and strong, Spanish inflections, which sounded quite different to the lilting, Mexican-accented English of Marie-Carmen and PJ.

  “When’s the next super-volcano explosion due?” said Jackson.

  Vargas seemed slightly embarrassed by Jackson’s use of humor. He paused very slightly before replying, “Do you know what would happen if the Yellowstone caldera were to explode?”

  Jackson glanced at DiCanio. She seemed again to be sitting back, like someone watching a performance for her benefit.

  Eventually, Jackson replied, “I’m guessing it wouldn’t be good.”

  “Imagine an explosion two-and-a-half thousand times bigger than the one which blew up Mount St Helen’s. You’d be able to hear it over much of the planet. The eruption would destroy everything within a thousand miles. Almost a thousand cubic kilometers of ash would be spewed into the atmosphere. Darkness and acid rain would fall over much of the United States, wiping out the harvest for that year, and for several years afterwards. It would be like a nuclear winter. The economy of the USA would most likely collapse, bringing down much of the rest of the world with it. The destruction and the knock-on effects would be devastating beyond our wildest imaginings.” Vargas paused as he surveyed the audience of Priya, DiCanio and Jackson. He ran the tip of a finger under his lower lip. “It might even be the end of civilization as we know it.”

  The waiter arrived and took their orders. After he’d chosen the grilled trout with almond rice, Jackson turned to Vargas. “The caldera is dead, right? It’s an extinct volcano.”

  “That’s what everyone thought. Until a few years ago. Lately it looks as though there’s activity. To be honest, there could be another explosion, any time in the next thousand years.”

  DiCanio spoke. “It wouldn’t be the first time something like this has almost brought the human race to extinction, either. I take it you’re aware, Jackson, of work on mitochondrial DNA in the human fossil record, which shows the changing rate of genetic diversity in human populations?”

  Inwardly, Jackson groaned. His scientific reading was way too specialized. He’d been lost for the past three years in the world of joust and transposable elements. But it didn’t look good to appear ignorant. He ventured an educated guess.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen that. They were trying to work out whether the human population today descends from a single point of origin, or several. The genetic diversity in human DNA is absolutely tiny; genetically we are all almost identical.”

  His gamble paid off. DiCanio interjected, “Yes, it’s been calculated that the people alive today must have descended from a population of ten thousand or less, who were alive around seventy to eighty thousand years ago.”

  Jackson frowned. “Right, but homo sapiens is, like, one hundred thousand years older.”

  “Exactly! So the question is,” DiCanio smiled, “what happened to all the people?”

  Jackson was fascinated. “You think it was a caldera explosion?”

  Vargas nodded. “There was an event, a cataclysmic explosion, in Sumatra, around seventy-four thousand years ago. The crater from the explosion is now known as Lake Toba.”

  “The timing for the Toba caldera explosion fits the model for near-extinction of humanity sometime around then,” DiCanio said gravely. “Imagine it. The sun blotted out for years. A sudden drop in temperature. The failure of agriculture; death of the wild game. Most people would have starved to death – or killed each other for food.”

  The food arrived. Jackson picked up his knife and sliced into the pinkish flesh of his trout. DiCanio seemed oblivious to the fact that he was eager to eat. She didn’t give her own food so much as a glance.

  “Think about those survivors, Jackson. There may have been fewer than ten thousand. All over the world, small pockets of people who somehow clawed their way through it. We are all their descendants.”

  “Well, Melissa, so far, so apocalyptic.”

  A note of formality entered her voice. “Maybe so, but get ready for the serious stuff.”

  Jackson could remember few days in which he’d had to listen to so much ‘serious stuff’, but he prepared himself for an even bigger revelation.

  “Earlier today I spoke of a society I’ve been involved with, Jackson. You’ve probably guessed that the people here today are some of the other members.”

  “Actually, I didn’t.”

  “Everyone here tonight was recruited to the society by me.”

  Jackson nodded, unsure of what to say.

  “The society has an interest in an object which is currently under the control of the US military, in Iraq.”

  He swallowed a forkful of rice drenched in almond sauce. “Iraq?”

  DiCanio leaned forward, speaking so that only he would hear. “Doesn’t the date three thousand BC mean anything to you, Jackson?”

  He shrugged. The narrow span of his knowledge could sometimes be a little embarrassing.

  “The oldest civilization on earth, the Sumerians of Ancient Mesopotamia, invented cuneiform writing around that time. They weren’t the only ones. All over the world, in cultures as disparate as the Maya in the Americas and the Ancient Egyptians, an explosion of culture began. Writing, the recording of history, collective efforts to divert rivers, farm inhospitable land, the construction of the first pyramids of Egypt, the cities of the Indus Valley, the ziggurats of Ancient Iraq, all had their roots around three thousand BC.”

  “And the Mayan Long Count starts in three thousand one hundred and fourteen BC,” Jackson said brightly, as one useful factoid came to him.

  DiCanio’s face was alight with fervor; she seemed to glow with conviction. “Exactly. Well, that’s when our gene appears, Jackson. That’s when it all begins.”

  “Not a coincidence, then?”

  Once again, DiCanio ignored his attempt to be glib.

  “As well as many extremely talented scientists, present company included, our society includes individuals placed highly within the United Nations. Their information is that back in 2003, the UN weapons inspection team did actually find something in Iraq.” She hesitated. “Something that might even have been worth going to war to capture. It wasn’t a weapon.”

  From the moment she’d mentioned Iraq, he’d begun to have a sense of where this conversation might lead.

  Was this why she’d brought him to Switzerland?

  “You know, m
y brother worked with some of those inspection team guys.”

  DiCanio smiled, rather enigmatically. He couldn’t be sure if she was trying to close him down or to convey that she already knew.

  “What they found, Jackson, was not a weapon. Yet the inspectors recognized, pretty quickly actually, that they’d stumbled across something of tremendous historical value. Now that we understand more about the finding, it’s pretty clear that they’ve found the secret to the origin of our society. The gene we carry, Jackson. We know where it comes from.”

  He gave a nervous laugh. “I’m almost afraid to ask.”

  “The weapons inspectors and your brother’s Air Force unit: they discovered an ancient burial chamber. Perfectly intact. A burial chamber older than any construction on the planet.”

  A Proposal

  The dessert course arrived: crisp meringues with soft, marshmallow centers under clouds of whipped cream. DiCanio seemed reluctant to say more on the subject of the mysterious burial chamber. In the meantime Priya was being drawn into a teasing conversation with the geophysicist, Vargas. Jackson couldn’t fail to notice the exchange of flirtatious gestures and words. It gave him an oddly voyeuristic sensation. Yet at the same time, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Vargas and Priya were actually performing for him.

  As he scraped the last traces of cream from his plate, DiCanio leaned towards him. She gestured that he should come in closer. “I’d like to leave now. Priya, also. I think it’s best if we take you back to your hotel. I don’t want to leave you alone with my associates.”

  Jackson stared, bemused. He wondered how DiCanio might react if he refused, yet found himself standing up, pulling on his jacket. The sight of Priya straining against the tight wrappings her sari proved too distracting. Vargas glanced at him. One corner of his mouth rose in a wry grin. “Sleep well, Mr. Bennett.”

  The car which picked them up was an E-Class Mercedes. The driver wore a dark grey suit with a plain tie and addressed DiCanio by name. By the time he dropped them at Jackson’s hotel, fresh snow lay almost two inches deep. To Jackson’s surprise, both Priya and DiCanio followed him into the chalet, whose sloping roof was now highlighted with a smooth coating of crisp white powder. He stamped his feet on the mat at the threshold and held the door open for the two women.