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

  The Adaptor.

  He picked it up, turned it over. The surface felt somewhere between smooth alabaster and a synthetic textile. There was a very slight textural give to the surface. It was somewhat larger than a TV remote control and cool to the touch. Both sides of the relic were carved with tightly packed, intricately patterned markings.

  On one side, wedge-like symbols that looked vaguely familiar. He’d seen markings like this before – on various museum trips. He guessed that this place must be part of a lost ancient Sumerian city.

  The reverse side completely threw him. The symbols were also glyphs, but bizarrely, they were in an entirely different language. Jackson stared at the symbols.

  They looked exactly like ancient Mayan hieroglyphs.

  Who Are You Working For?

  Jackson slid the Adaptor into his inside jacket pocket. The temptation to look around the chamber was almost unbearable. He had only seven minutes before the effects of hypnoticin wore off. He took one last look at the chamber before he turned to leave. The elevator was as he’d left it, the platform waiting, the lever extended.

  Relief began to well up inside him. Just five more minutes and he’d be out of there. He rode the elevator up, watching the square patch of light at the top of the shaft grow larger. When the lift finally stopped, Jackson froze.

  Five yards away, in the passageway that connected the makeshift elevator shaft to the rest of the base, stood three soldiers in camouflage combat uniform. Jackson was staring down the barrels of their side-arms, faced by the soldiers’ stony glares. From behind them came a voice that he recognized.

  “Jackson Bennett, as I live and breathe.”

  The soldiers parted to let Captain Connor Bennett pass. Connor fixed Jackson with a look of utter disdain. “Imagine my surprise to hear that I’d been seen reporting early for duty.”

  “I imagine you’d be confused,” Jackson’s eyes flickered around the room. There was no obvious exit route. He gazed directly at his brother. “I’d prefer it if you were pleased to see me. We are brothers after all. That’s what I want, Connor, I want you to be pleased to see me.”

  “Fuck that! Get down on the floor.”

  Jackson stood his ground. He threw back his shoulders, gazed past Connor and at the three soldiers. Firmly, he said “Put the guns down, fellas.”

  One by one, with expressions of amazement, they did.

  After a moment Connor turned around, stunned. “Get your weapons up!”

  “No, leave them,” interrupted Jackson. At least one of the soldiers seemed to be trying to lift her handgun, but the soldier to her left placed a hand on her arm. It seemed to be enough.

  Connor didn’t visibly react, except to gaze thoughtfully at Jackson and then at the three soldiers.

  “It’s his voice.” One of the two male soldiers spoke, musingly, in a lilting Tennessee accent. “He’s doing something with his voice. Makes me wanna listen to him all day.”

  Connor’s eyes blazed for a second. Then with breath-taking speed, he clasped his hand to Jackson’s mouth, overpowering him, forcing him to the ground. There was a brief struggle but Jackson was no match for his brother’s power and training.

  Connor hissed against his ear, “Is that it, bro’? Have you learnt some kinda Eastern mind-control shit?” In the next second Connor’s hands were conducting a search of Jackson’s body. When he found the Adaptor he paused for a moment, incoherent with rage. When the power of speech returned, he yelled at the three soldiers.

  “GET BACK!”

  The men leapt backwards. They still wouldn’t aim their weapons.

  Connor gripped Jackson’s head, pounded it against the floor. Pain enveloped him like a cloud. Jackson had an acute sense of the harnessed violence, the barely contained rage of his brother. If Connor hadn’t been in uniform, anything could have happened.

  As it was, Connor’s fury was transient. Within a minute, the discipline of his training kicked in. Connor knelt down, one leg holding Jackson in place. A soldier pulled a roll of duct tape from his equipment belt, tossed the roll across to Connor, who pulled it tight across Jackson’s jaw.

  With a final shove, Connor released Jackson, who threw himself onto the ground where he sat, leaning back on his hands and watching his brother. Breathing hard, Connor shook his head in disgust. He took a plastic Ziploc bag from a pocket. With immense care, he placed the Adaptor inside the bag.

  “You lousy jerk; you could have killed them. You’d better be ready to talk, or I’m gonna kick the crap outta you.”

  Jackson stared back at his brother, mute. This was the Connor he remembered, the arrogant, violent older brother.

  ***

  They sat him at a desk and thrust a laptop computer in front of him. Jackson had been stripped down to his boxers and shirt. Duct tape was sealed tight across the lower half of his face.

  “Here’s how it works; I ask questions, you type the answers. You got that?”

  Jackson nodded. Until now, he’d never been properly afraid of his brother, whose opprobrium he’d faced his whole life. If it wasn’t the lack of order in his room, it was his unkempt appearance, or his lack of love for team sports. As the boys grew older, the points of disagreement had become more political. He’d always known the boundaries. He could see now that his incursion into his brother’s domain was likely to be unforgiveable. Connor would never forget that he’d used their physical resemblance to compromise Connor’s professional operation.

  “Question One: real obvious; who are you working for?”

  Jackson typed: Hans Runig

  Connor looked unimpressed. To the sergeant sitting opposite Jackson, who was typing notes into another laptop computer, he said, “Check that out.”

  They waited for a few seconds.

  “He’s Swiss . . . listed as a stockholder for a number of companies. Biotech, nanotech.”

  “Arms industry?” asked Connor.

  The sergeant shook his head. “No direct connection.”

  Jackson was puzzled. Hadn’t DiCanio suggested a connection between Runig and the Department of Defense?

  Connor walked around the table, looking directly into his brother’s eyes.

  “Question Two: why? I know you came for the artifact, but for what reason?”

  Runig wants it, typed Jackson. There’s a second chamber, in Mexico.

  Connor’s shock was palpable. He appeared to weigh the implications of this statement, remaining silent for quite a few minutes.

  Then: “Why, Jackson? What’s in this for you?”

  Jackson typed his response. Money, he answered, adding, for my research.

  “To think I was ready to believe that this Runig forced you into it. Or maybe the money was just to sweeten the deal? Tell me this; where’d you get that leg wound?”

  He appeared contrite. Of course. He should have thought to make more of that.

  “Well, for once I’m speechless. So your squishy liberal sensibilities don’t matter when your science is at stake, huh?”

  Jackson tried hard to look defiant.

  Connor’s next question threw him. “How did you know you were immune?”

  Jackson blinked. He shrugged. The question was meaningless. Immune to what?

  “Do you even know what this place is?”

  Jackson typed: Ancient burial chamber?

  “So that’s it: the dipshit UN leaked.” Connor shared a conspiratorial glance with the sergeant. “No, Jackson, ‘burial chamber’ is what we told the UN. It’s ancient all right, a whole lot more than anyone would suspect. But it’s not a burial chamber. When the UN inspection team found this place back in 2003, it was hermetically sealed. We found biological material inside some of the caskets, hairs and dust containing skin cells. We’ve carbon dated those remains to around three thousand BC. Here’s the killer, Jackson. Turns out that those caskets aren’t made of stone. We tested the material with mass spectrometry – it’s artificial. Some kind of ceramic which uses organic molecules in its
matrix. Those organic molecules were too old to carbon date, Jackson. Know what that means?”

  Jackson was too stunned to respond. Carbon dating was a technique of limited efficacy in determining the age of any samples older than 50,000 years. How could a structure like the chamber he’d seen be older than 50,000 years? Humans had only been building even semi-permanent structures with stone or brick since around 6000BC.

  Even as he typed it, he balked at the suggestion: Extra-terrestrial origin?

  Connor shrugged. “The same thought occurred to the powers-that-be. That’s why the NRO were called in to manage this op. But we’ve no evidence of any non-earth material here. The biological remains are human. The caskets and the central platform are made of this ceramic material. There’s nothing in the atomic composition that doesn’t occur naturally and pretty abundantly here on earth.”

  Once more, the brothers faced one another.

  “How are you doing that thing with your voice?”

  Jackson typed: A drug.

  He hadn’t agreed to keep DiCanio’s secrets. Now that it looked as though she’d kept information from him, Jackson felt nothing but resentment. He only had DiCanio’s word that hypnoticin didn’t work on him. What if it did, what if she’d been playing him from the beginning, as Runig had said?

  Connor didn’t look too convinced by the reply. “A drug? Sure. When are you meeting Runig?”

  He typed: Twenty-five minutes.

  “You’re going to lead us right to him, little brother. Don’t imagine you’re taking the artifact. You’re gonna give Runig something else.”

  With this, Connor opened a drawer in the desk, from which he took something that looked exactly like the Adaptor.

  “Looks pretty genuine, don’t it? We made a couple of plaster cast replicas. Standard archaeological practice. What with the somewhat deadly nature of the genuine article – we can’t leave it around. In fact, if we hadn’t been running tests today, it wouldn’t even have been in the chamber.”

  Jackson stared blankly.

  “You don’t know about the bio-toxin?”

  He shook his head.

  Connor’s eyes widened. “Boy, did your Hans Runig get his intelligence wrong. The artifact – and the receptacle for it in the chamber – is impregnated with some kind of poison gas. I was the first person to touch it. Apart from you, bro, I’m the only person I know who can. If you’d gotten any closer to those soldiers, you’d have killed them.”

  For a long moment, he stared into Jackson’s eyes. “Or maybe your friend Runig did know. This thing you’re doing with you voice – it didn’t seem to affect me. You and me are the only two people I know of who can touch the artifact and survive. Yeah.” He paused. “It’s no coincidence that they picked you, is it?” Connor stood up. “You’re a piece of work, you know that? I’m almost glad that mom and dad are dead. If they knew what kind of traitor they raised.”

  The captain turned to leave, locked the door behind him. Then Jackson was alone. He waited for a few minutes, and then searched the room for hidden cameras. He found none.

  DiCanio had evidently fallen short of telling him a few details.

  Was it possible that she hadn’t known that the Adaptor was impregnated with an airborne toxin? Jackson stalled for a moment. He hadn’t actually seen evidence of any toxin. Yet Connor’s reaction when he found the Adaptor in Jackson’s pocket had been instantaneous – he’d acted to protect the three soldiers. It didn’t make sense that he’d invented the toxin.

  There was more; DiCanio seemed to be misinformed about the true age of the chamber. Yet her estimate had been in the right ball-park as far as the human remains went. What had Connor meant when he’d said that the chamber was not for burials?

  Jackson thought about the discrepancy between the age of the structure and of the biological remains found. The most logical conclusion seemed unbelievable: the chamber had been built over 50,000 years ago and last used in 3000BC.

  But 50,000 years ago there’d been no humans except Stone Age hunter-gatherers.

  What was inside those caskets? Connor had mentioned traces of human remains. Were the caskets actually sarcophagi? Or something else?

  The laptop computer was in front of him. He desperately wanted to talk to Marie-Carmen. Maybe she’d have some insights. Mainly though, he wanted to know that she was all right. That last email of hers had made confusing reading when he’d glanced at it at Kleine Scheidegg. She’d mentioned ancient Sumeria. Now, in the context of what he’d seen in the chamber, Jackson was eager to read it more closely.

  He was about to grab the laptop, when he remembered Marie-Carmen’s warning about Hans Runig’s efforts to trace their Web-based activities. Surely, within a military establishment the computers would be safe from Runig’s prying eyes?

  Jackson opened a Web browser window and logged into his email. He checked to see if Marie-Carmen was logged into the instant messenger service. She wasn’t.

  The last email he’d received from Marie-Carmen was still there.

  Worried About Iraq

  Hey – you’re too busy to think about me?

  Jackson, this idea of going to Iraq worries me. You receive secrets, messages over the Internet, telephone calls, a jet to Switzerland, now it’s Iraq. It’s like you’re a chess piece, being moved around the board.

  Do you know that Abu Shahrain is the modern name for the Sumerian city of Eridu? I’ve been reading translations of Sumerian literature on a website owned by the Oriental Institute at the University of Oxford. There is a very famous document known as the Sumerian King List. It claims to list all the rulers since the beginning of time. Here’s how it begins:

  After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridu. In Eridu, Alulim became king; he ruled for 28800 years. Alaljar ruled for 36000 years. 2 kings; they ruled for 64800 years. Then Eridu fell and the kingship was taken to Bad-tibira.

  Like the Ancient Maya, the Sumerians seem to take a much longer view of history than most cultures. If you add up all the time accounted for by the Sumerian King List, it comes to over two hundred thousand years. The first part of the Kings List ends like this:

  In 5 cities 8 kings; they ruled for 241200 years. Then the flood swept over.

  Ancient historians still can’t agree on a date for the biblical flood, but if you take the least controversial date, that’s around 2000BC.

  So the Sumerian King List, if taken literally, suggests that Eridu was first founded around 244,200 years ago!

  But the most interesting part is this: remember what I found in that bizarre article about the clay tablet with the strangely modified logograms? The three words which, in translation, matched part of Pedro Juan’s sequence, were:

  Before Lord Anunnaki

  The logogram translated in the article as ‘master’ is lugal. Which also means ‘lord’, ‘king’ or ‘owner’.

  An.un.na.ki or Anunnaki was the Sumerian term for a collection of deities who are first written of in a document known as the Atrahasis.

  Some people think that the Atrahasis is the original source of the flood story. The original clay tablets of the Atrahasis date back to 1700BC. But parts of the same story have been found on even older tablets. The Atrahasis is probably a retelling of an oral tradition which had existed for hundreds or even thousands of years before.

  And here’s where the document first mentions the Anunnaki.

  When the gods instead of man

  Did the work, bore the loads,

  The gods' load was too great,

  The work too hard, the trouble too much,

  The great Anunnaki made the Igigi

  Carry the workload sevenfold.

  Some people have interpreted this as suggesting that the Anunnaki created human beings to work the land for them. Also, there’s a definite implication of an extra-terrestrial origin for the Anunnaki; even the context of their full name, which literally means ‘the people who came from Heaven and Earth’.

  We
ll look, I see all kinds of strange conspiracy theories in my own field – for example, the idea that the Maya originated in a mysterious land to the west (some crazy people suggest Atlantis).

  It’s important not to over-interpret these kinds of mythologies. I mean, people in Britain don’t actually think that there was a real Camelot, do they?

  What worries me is that there are too many coincidences.

  Why does DiCanio need you to retrieve this artifact? I think the answer to that is crucial. I don’t think she’s being straight with you.

  How is your leg? Is my handiwork holding up?

  I haven’t forgotten your final comment. But I’m going to need confirmation of that in person, OK?

  Marie-Carmen

  Jackson read her email three times. He was struck by a line of reason extending through the enigmas of the chamber, the Adaptor and the DNA sequence. Previously tenuous connections now appeared solid.

  Connor, DiCanio and Runig had almost certainly arrived at the same conclusion: the inscription on the Adaptor was a kind of instruction; part of a formula to activate the chamber.

  All three parties had access to most of this same information. Except for one piece of information, something he himself had almost overlooked, something which had seemed too ludicrously improbable to be worthy of inclusion: PJ’s message.

  Marie-Carmen’s strategy of searching the Web for fragments of PJ’s DNA sequence had been a stroke of genius, Jackson now realized. Nothing else could have connected them to the extraordinary article about Sumerian knowledge of amino acids. Exactly the kind of off-the-wall connection that had put Jackson and Marie-Carmen ahead of Connor’s team, DiCanio and Runig.

  PJ may not have known it, but he did send me a message; a message thousands of years old.

  Pressing the reply button, he wrote:

  Marie-Carmen,

  I’m in some trouble here; got caught trying to leave with the artifact. I can’t tell what’s going to happen now, but I’m going to play things as safe as possible.