by M. G. Harris
“I’d like to shower, if I could,” Jackson said. “Then I really need to email the lab.”
DiCanio seemed almost to have forgotten about him.
“Of course,” she said, removing four sodas from the kitchen refrigerator. “Hafez will show you to a room you can use. Then he’ll show you the office. We have broadband Internet access. I’ll need to use the main computer, and the scanner. But there’s another machine. Feel free to use it.”
Jackson paused. “Maybe I’ll send the emails first. Then I can relax.”
DiCanio merely gazed at him expectantly as she pulled the tab on a can of lemon Perrier.
“When should I tell them to expect me back?” Jackson asked, facing her down.
“If everything works out, we’ll get back to Interlaken tomorrow. My driver can take you to Zurich and you can fly out to San Francisco. Unless you’d like to come back to Chaldexx, talk some more about the hypnoticin experiments.”
Even in the stupefying haze of tension, Jackson could still just about recall what it felt to be a scientist, genuinely and purely fascinated with science for its own sake.
She’d expect me to want to know more about hypnoticin.
“Absolutely. I’d really love to discuss that some more, Melissa, if you have the time.”
Jackson went into the office. He breathed a sigh of relief that the screen of the computer he’d been assigned wasn’t overlooked by the operator of the larger computer. Nevertheless, he remembered the remote monitoring icon which Connor had pointed out to him in the NRO base at Abu Shahrain. Was DiCanio paranoid enough to spy on people in her own, inner sanctum? He glanced around but couldn’t see any kind of camera pointing at the screen.
It was a risk. But he had to find out what was happening with Marie-Carmen. DiCanio’s body language did not suggest that he was under suspicion – yet.
There were many messages in his inbox. Jackson forced himself first to change the password, using ten alphanumeric characters in his new password. His email account was beginning to accumulate a wealth of evidence. He had to keep it secure at all costs.
He opened a new browser window and began composing an email addressed to his lab boss. In a separate window he simultaneously read the only email in which he was actually interested.
Jackson,
The DNA code; you were right, as hard as that seems to believe! The message makes sense when read in Sumerian!
The amino acid sequence translates literally as:
Dubsag lugal anunnaki. Melim idim. Igilul na til dubsag melim.
(I have no idea how correctly to interpret the grammar, so I’ve guessed at the punctuation.)
In English:
Before Lord(s)Anunnaki (those who came from Heaven and Earth), frightening splendor makes men weak. Awakened Man is long-lived owner (of) frightening splendor.
The bracketed suggestions are my own attempt to make some grammatical sense of the phrasing. I’ve ignored one of the repeated amino acids. Words are rarely repeated that way in a linguistic sense so it would make sense that, occasionally; the linguistic meaning would bow to the biological!
Could ‘frightening splendor’ refer to this new-found ability which you claim to have? Or could it be something else?
I found the names of the main deities: they were An (god of heaven), Ki (goddess of Earth) their son Enlil (God of wind), and Enki (God of the watery abyss).
Ki is also known as Ninhursag.
As well as denoting deities, ‘An’ and ‘ki’ also refer to heaven and earth as places.
An.un.na.ki is used in this context as ‘those who came from Heaven and Earth’.
You asked me to find out how what happened to Eridu: the city was destroyed by a tremendous storm. The sky darkened during the day. But read for yourself: this is from the ‘Lament For Eridu’:
The evil-bearing storm went out from the city. It swept across the Land – a storm which possesses neither kindness nor malice, does not distinguish between good and evil. Subir came down like rain. It struck hard. In the city where bright daylight used to shine forth, the day darkened. In Eridu where bright daylight used to shine forth, the day darkened. As if the sun had set below the horizon, it turned into twilight. As if An had cursed the city, alone he destroyed it.
When did this happen? I don’t know. Maybe this was the flood? The King List certainly finishes listing the Eridu kings after the flood. Or maybe it was an earlier event.”
As Jackson read, blood thundered in his ears; revelation flooded through him.
Ki is also known as Ninhursag
He memorized the translation as rapidly as possible, lips moving slightly as he mumbled it to himself. Finally, he read the epilogue to Marie-Carmen’s email, in which she described her flight from the hotel. For a few seconds, he could barely move with fear. He read the email again hurriedly, almost unable to believe what she’d written. What he saw chilled his bones.
His predicament was far worse than he’d imagined. Jackson’s hand trembled as he closed all the windows and emptied the record of the pages from the Web browser’s history and the temporary Internet files. He placed his hands in his lap, trying to hold them still. His breath came in short, irregular gasps, which he struggled to control. Fear was invading him now, filling out his body like a balloon
DiCanio approached the room, carrying a small tray on which she’d placed two drinks and a plate of snacks. When she looked at him, she was visibly surprised.
“You’re shaking.”
“It must be the air conditioning,” he managed to say, “against the wet shirt.”
“Hit that shower, right away!” Her tone was both maternal and domineering.
Jackson stood, watching as she took her seat. She had a digital camera, and the replica of the Adaptor. Once she’d sent off the scanned image of that text and her people had translated it, he knew it would be over for him. If only they’d thought to use something other than a well-known text! Discovery of a quote from an existing text would surely be too suspicious for DiCanio to remain taken in much longer.
Like a dead man walking, Jackson stumbled towards the shower room.
Rescue was nowhere in sight. Jackson understood finally who he was dealing with, exactly who he had been dealing with all along.
Frightening Splendor
Jackson leaned his forehead against the cool tiles of the shower cubicle as the water sprayed over his head. He was exhausted. The staples in his wound tugged uncomfortably against the skin. He was still reeling from the implications of what he’d read in Marie-Carmen’s email.
There was little doubt. His life was in danger, more than at any point until now. As he showered, he began to galvanize himself against the imminent threat. He knew that his own resourcefulness, which may have made the difference up to this point, could not save him. Knowing that his fate lay almost entirely in someone else’s hands was terrifying.
Once again, Jackson found himself thinking about his friend, PJ. How much had PJ really known that day in the airport? He thought back over PJ’s somewhat tenebrous words to him that day.
Something is coming.
The DNA had encoded for a molecule which bound not only to PJ’s phoenix maize protein, but also to the human version of that protein. In Chaldexx’s hands this molecule, ‘hypnoticin’, had been found to confer in the carrier an eerie ability to plant suggestions in other people’s minds. Jackson couldn’t deny that he’d sensed something preternatural when he’d looked into the eyes of Connor and his men. They’d struggled to hang onto their orders. Under the influence of Jackson’s voice, they had appeared perturbed, perplexed, yet unafraid.
But Connor was able to resist. If DiCanio had been truthful about anything, it was this: hypnoticin wouldn’t work on Jackson or his brother. Given that DiCanio appeared to have no knowledge of the bio-toxin that was exuded by the Adaptor, his resistance to hypnoticin was likely central to her decision to recruit Jackson.
Marie-Carmen’s translation of the Adaptor
sequence threw up possibilities which seemed incredible, unthinkable. Yet as much as Jackson struggled to avoid their implications, he couldn’t.
Was it possible that extra-terrestrial visitors had long ago introduced foreign DNA into the human genome?
He had to admit that there was no evidence to prove that some external tampering had never occurred within the human genome. In Jackson’s own mind, if this had taken place it had done so without any intelligent direction – accidental contamination of a species’ DNA from biological material imported on a comet. Such a theory still hovered on the periphery of respectable scientific debate. Some quite influential members of the scientific community had voiced a similar opinion, including Francis Crick the Nobel-prize winning co-discoverer of the DNA structure.
Once DNA found its way into the terrestrial canon, there were a number of mechanisms by which DNA could move from one species into another. The most likely was within the infectious cycle of a virus. The fact that joust, phoenix and now Chaldexx’s human homolog – the hypnoticin response factor – were all retrotransposons, the evolutionary result of ancient retroviral infection, only confirmed in Jackson’s own mind the likelihood of their relatedness.
Seeing that underground chamber with his own eyes, touching the strangely alien surfaces of the caskets, the Adaptor and altar, had introduced within Jackson the beginnings of a new belief.
Connor and DiCanio had independently alleged that the material from which those structures were made was artificial. Both agreed that the construction was ancient beyond any other building previously found on the planet. DiCanio claimed to know that the structures which her organization had found in Mexico might even predate the notorious caldera explosion of 74,000 years ago. Which could be linked to the recent discovery that, at the same time, the human race had been reduced to a population of 10,000 individuals.
Could this mean that whoever had built the structure had belonged to some even more ancient civilization, previously unknown to current society, the very memory of which had been extinguished by the holocaust caused by the Sumatran caldera explosion that had formed Lake Toba?
As Jackson thought about what he’d read in Marie-Carmen’s emails, the translations of the ancient clay tablets of the Sumerian civilization, he wondered whether in fact some memory of a pre-holocaust civilization had in fact persisted.
Before Lord Anunnaki frightening splendor makes men weak. Awakened man is long-lived owner of frightening splendor.
Whether PJ had been aware of it or not, this was the real, the biologically-encrypted message which he’d sent Jackson.
‘Frightening splendor’ had to refer to some aspect of the mental power unleashed by hypnoticin, at least in human beings who carried the gene for the hypnoticin response factor.
Why encode the message of power, the description of the effects of the protein within the very molecule’s code? To Jackson, this seemed far-fetched, even for a supposedly impenetrable ancient race. The properties of proteins were derived from their three-dimensional shapes and other chemical factors which led ineluctably from their amino acid composition. Attaching a linguistic interpretation to those amino acids should not be able to influence the resulting molecule.
He wondered if it were not after all possible that it had been the other way around. Possessing the amino acid sequence of a ‘molecule of power’, the ancient scientists may have taken the names of each component of the molecule from a sentence or phrase which described its activity. In this way, the amino acids were named from one or more original, significant protein. Their use in other contexts might be irrelevant, as randomly meaningless as our own names for amino acids. Hence the supplementary signs – or ‘determinatives’ – found in both the Sumerian script and Maya scripts used on the Adaptor: this was the ancient scientists’ way of saying, “But when you see the logogram differentiated like this, it refers to the amino acid named after this word.”
The conclusion Jackson drew from this was so thrilling that even under the needles of hot water, he felt his skin turn to goose flesh.
Had he stumbled across the genetic secrets of an ancient race?
The Adaptor that he’d held in the chamber had been inscribed with fifteen symbols; in Mayan on one side, in Sumerian on the other.
PJ’s DNA molecule was fifteen amino acids long – the sequence of hypnoticin.
Was it possible that the Adaptor was inscribed with an encoded version of the same sequence? Jackson felt his skin turn to goose flesh. That amino acid sequence wasn’t merely the key to ‘frightening splendor’ – the weakening of wills in the people around. It was the formula for something else – something involved in the function of the Adaptor. And it was possible that at this moment, Jackson was the only person alive who knew.
Jackson’s had only agreed to go to Iraq out of fear of Hans Runig, following the deadly attack at Kleine Scheidegg. Hans Runig wanted his help to stop Melissa DiCanio. Yet fundamentally, Hans Runig and DiCanio wanted the same thing – the Adaptor, the secret of PJ’s molecule.
Marie-Carmen was right. There were now too many coincidences.
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.
The truth had been within reach almost from the beginning. But Jackson had only seen it when he read Marie-Carmen’s last email.
Ki, the ancient Sumerian deity, the Earth Goddess, also known as Ninhursag.
Ninhursag. Hans Runig.
It was an anagram; the sly jest of an adversary who couldn’t resist a sardonic jab at her prey. Hans Runig was nothing more than a virtual being; the alter-ego of Melissa DiCanio.
What this implied about DiCanio’s own vision of herself and the members of her organization was troubling enough. Moreover, it hinted at a strategic process; detailed planning whereby DiCanio had created her own apparent nemesis. An alternate identity that she could use to investigate, secretly, anyone on the track of hypnoticin.
Whether he’d allied himself with DiCanio, or with Hans Runig, DiCanio had ensured that whichever team Jackson chose, he was working for her.
How many other members of her organization had been taken in like this? How widespread was knowledge of DiCanio’s double existence as Hans Runig? Or had that particular identity been created for the sole purpose of trapping the any scientist who stumbled across the fifteen-letter sequence of hypnoticin?
PJ was one such person. Once he’d fallen into the trap, the jaws of this particular Venus had begun to close. He’d become inexorably ensnared, crushed in a relentless grip.
Somehow, PJ had caught a faint whiff of the danger he faced, in time to set up the message for Jackson. Yet . . . it was still too much of a coincidence. Jackson’s recruitment had been crucial to DiCanio’s organization, on the basis of his resemblance to Connor. Connor had only been assigned to the NRO within the past six months, by which time Jackson’s involvement with PJ had been long established.
The more he thought about it, the more the reach of DiCanio’s power alarmed him. He had only begun working on joust as a result of a suggestion from DiCanio. The same might well be true of PJ Beltran. Connor’s own move to the NRO had been surprising, and sudden. Could it be that Connor too had been subject to her Machiavellian manipulations?
Over dinner in Grindelwald DiCanio had told him, “The society includes several individuals placed quite highly within the United Nations.” So far as Jackson knew, they were all hand-picked on the basis of their occupation and the fact that they could use hypnoticin.
Jackson was shivering as he dressed. Slowly, he pulled on his jacket, almost absent-mindedly checking the pockets. It was beginning to look as though his arrival at this house in Manama was an appointment that had been made for him some years ago.
***
As he stepped out of the bedroom, he knew instantly that the ordeal had begun. Standing guard outside his door, Kazmi stood impassively, distan
t; anger visible only in the grim set of his mouth as he brandished a pistol. Without saying a single word, Kazmi cracked the gun across Jackson’s jaw. The force of the blow knocked him to the floor. For an instant, his vision blurred. When he opened his eyes he saw drops of blood trickling across his cheek.
DiCanio’s voice was now as cold, as brutally aloof as he remembered she’d been when they first met in Houston. “It would seem you haven’t been altogether honest with us, Jackson.”
There was no way that DiCanio could yet be absolutely certain of the truth. Jackson realized that prevarication was the only way to buy more time. His mouth filled with the warm, rusty taste of blood. He spat on the floor.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he yelled.
“Pick him up,” ordered DiCanio. Kazmi complied, dragging Jackson to his feet.
DiCanio leaned forward, opened her mouth slightly. She lowered her eyes, seemed about to lift her right hand, perhaps to strike him, but at the last minute stayed the impulse. When she spoke her words were forced, hard and brittle as icicles.
“Jackson. Sweetheart. Don’t waste any more of my time.”
Stars and Stripes
For the second time that day, Jackson had felt himself on the receiving end of the aggression of a professional warrior. The reality was unprecedented in his experience. The shock of his own nerves jarring, the crunch of his own bones and the letting of his own blood under the force of another adult man’s fury; no filmic version of such an event could have prepared him.
Connor had last wrestled Jackson when they were fourteen, not yet fully grown. Since then, he’d successfully avoided most contact sports, had never been in a fight. Even the few kick-boxing classes he had taken had been solely concerned with the practice of balletic movements. No substitute for real, hand-to-hand fighting.
“Jackson: I think that this Adaptor is a fake.”
He wiped blood from his mouth and said nothing. DiCanio shook her head. “Better speak up now, darlin’ or things gonna get a whole lot worse.”