The Joshua Files - a complete box set: Books 1-5 of the young adult sci-fi adventure series plus techno-thriller prequel
Page 29
“Let’s hope they make it, the other two. What do they call themselves?”
“Erin-si. Fletcher says it means ‘People of Memory’.”
“What do they remember?”
Connor shrugged. “Let’s hope they remember how to save the planet from whatever they think is headed our way in 2012.”
Jackson finished rewriting his email to Marie-Carmen and leaned back so that Connor could inspect what he’d written. Then he encrypted the message and pressed ‘Send’. He took a long sip of the hot, watery coffee. “So, are you going to follow up DiCanio’s death?”
“We’re actually thinking of sending you to the funeral to find out who shows up,” Connor replied, sneaking a grin.
“Not a great idea. I suspect our next meeting wouldn’t go very well.”
“It might never happen. Chaldexx still hasn’t reported that she’s missing.”
“Would you? Their investors are going to get pretty mad.”
“Let’s see,” Connor said. “Maybe give one of your contacts at Chaldexx a call, when you get to London.”
Jackson thought back to the moment he’d seen DiCanio fall. Was it possible that she’d survived? No-one had rushed on deck to help her; the boat hadn’t turned around to allow anyone to exact their revenge. It had appeared as though the boat, losing its captain, had simply sailed out to sea, where it might remain for days or even weeks before DiCanio’s body would be found.
Yet that other guy, Simon Madison, had simply disappeared from the pier. Had he found his way onto the boat, after all?
With some reluctance, Connor told him, “Your plane’s waiting on the tarmac.” He gazed at Jackson for a few seconds, seeming to search for the right words. “When you find your girl, bring her in. We can protect you both.”
“When I find her? She could be anywhere.”
“The second I hear anything, bro’, you’ll know.”
Jackson gave a weary nod. Three days growth of beard and the slightly different nap of his hair already emphasized the differences between them. The wounds in his torso were bandaged now, his chest felt lopsided. Compared to Connor who was tanned, fit and smooth-shaven, dressed in his uniform slacks, blue shirt and tie, Jackson looked spent and exhausted. The brothers embraced for several seconds. Then without another word, Jackson strode away from Connor and towards the military transport plane.
Arriving at the RAF airbase in Fairford, England, Jackson took a taxi to London Heathrow where he checked in on a British Airways flight to San Francisco. As soon as he’d passed through security, he went straight to the electronics store and bought a new cell phone. By the time his flight was ready to leave, Jackson had configured the device to receive email from his account as well as news articles from a collection of RSS feeds. He strolled through the corridor to the waiting airplane, and periodically checked for a message from Marie-Carmen. From that moment until the moment when the in-flight announcer asked passengers to turn off their phones, Jackson hardly took his eyes off his cell phone, waiting for the tell-tale, blinking red light that might bring news of Marie-Carmen.
Twelve hours later as Jackson was climbing into a taxi at San Francisco International Airport, an article hit his cell phone’s RSS news feed.
Scientist reported missing in Middle East yacht mystery
DOHA, QATAR: A Cambridge University neuroscientist, Professor Melissa DiCanio was declared missing late yesterday by Qatar officials after fishermen discovered her empty yacht and raised the alarm.
The motorized boat had been abandoned and had floated into the Persian Gulf. The cause is uncertain. While divers are currently out searching for bodies, the international scientific community is wondering what she was doing in the Middle East.
Professor DiCanio was born in San Antonio, Texas. She began her career at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston. She has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford.
In 2006 she was awarded the Cambridge University Chaldexx Chair of Neuroscience. Since then DiCanio divides her time between her research group and her post as Chief Scientific Officer.
Colleagues have expressed anxiety. Chaldexx CEO Michael Carter commented: "Melissa is part of a family here at Chaldexx. We’re obviously concerned for her safety. But our work will continue, in dedication to her vision and insight. We hope she will return to us soon."
Chaldexx BioPharmaceuticals is a privately-held company based in Interlaken, Switzerland. The investors must now hold their nerve during an uncertain time as the company faces speculation about the possible impact of DiCanio's loss.
It was beginning to look as though Connor was right: one way or another, DiCanio had decided that the time had come to exit from public life. Jackson’s pulse sped as he checked his new messages. Apart from another flurry of emails from the lab, there was one new message. It wasn’t from Marie-Carmen.
The subject of the message was ‘Message from Ninhursag’. The sender, once again, had routed the email through an anonymous mail server.
Jackson,
I regret that you have turned your back on your true family. We would have treated you well.
Our organization exists. It is a commemoration of the event by which the ancestors achieved the resurrection of their ancient civilization. The future is our dominion, Jackson. No-one else has foreseen with such vision. All others strive for continuation. Only we accept and embrace the fundamental truth: civilization as it is organized on this planet is a moribund concept. It doesn’t even require a cosmic event to deliver the death blow.
Yet such an event is coming in 2012 – the hurricane that will cleanse – something about which those in power are perfectly well aware. Don’t expect them to save the planet – all they care about is the continuity of their own hegemony. We alone have accepted that this is a chance for a renewal of humanity.
The end is coming. Our time is now.
If you ever change your mind, we will welcome you. Remember Jackson, your powers, your potential make you valuable, irreplaceable. Your duty to your planet, to the human species should be clear. You know how to reach me.
Your sister in the Sect of Huracán.
The timestamp on the email showed that it had been sent at 23:42 on December 7th – the night before the shooting at the harbor in Doha. The somewhat cryptic nature of the message was puzzling. Surely the time for clarity had arrived, yet DiCanio chose this time to descend into obfuscation. Was she really the author of the message? Or had she simply been replaced with another member of this ‘Sect of Huracán’?
There was only one thing he could think to try now: the ‘Hans Runig’ website. Grimly, he typed the fifteen-letter sequence of hypnoticin into his cell phone’s web browser.
This time no text box opened; the site appeared to be dead.
Those Who Waited
All the way home from San Francisco Airport Jackson rode the taxi, distracted; the damp fog that swirled was as tangible in his head as in the streets of his home city.
There was no comfort in going home, only the return of his solitude and the promise of the daily grind of work. Maybe it was the pale grey light after the dazzling sun of Iraq, maybe it was the fact that he’d come home empty-handed. He couldn’t even muster the usual excitement for his research.
PJ Beltran was dead. There would be no collaboration with Chaldexx BioPharmaceuticals, whose staff now behaved almost as though he had never existed.
As agreed with Connor, he’d called Andrew Browning at Chaldexx whilst in London, waiting for his flight to the USA. Browning had been ‘unavailable’. All email Jackson sent to Browning was automatically, if politely deflected. Although he had the impression that DiCanio’s apparent disappearance had induced a shockwave within Chaldexx, Jackson couldn’t help but find it odd that no questions were being asked of him. Andrew Browning, at least, was aware of Jackson’s meeting with DiCanio, just two days before she disappeared. Wasn’t Browning even a little curious about the events following their flight from Switzerland?
Or maybe what troubled Jackson was the continued silence from Marie-Carmen. Her final email had been sent during her exit from the Acapulco Princess. Where had she been since then? Hovering around the confines of his subconscious was the grim possibility that she’d been captured by DiCanio’s organization.
Jackson kept reminding himself that without his old cell phone, he and Marie-Carmen couldn’t call each other. Even if he’d dared to try, even if he believed that the danger from DiCanio had abated, Jackson had no record of her phone number, or address; only her email, which he had memorized. All other contact details had been stored in his old Blackberry, which he had to assume, since he’d dropped it into DiCanio’s chauffeur-driven car, was now in the possession of DiCanio’s people. Marie-Carmen couldn’t go home, couldn’t switch on her phone. It simply wasn’t safe.
Logically, rationally, the ominous silence from Marie-Carmen could be explained. The trouble was that for days now, Jackson had been incapable of much rational thought when it came to Marie-Carmen.
Apart from the single question he’d asked Jackson during the night they spent outside the fort in Qatar, Connor hadn’t wanted to discuss Marie-Carmen.
“If they got to her, they got to her. Or maybe she went home? Go home, get some rest, then try to get in touch with her. Who knows, bro’? Maybe she went cold on you.”
The prospect of returning to work wasn’t enough of a distraction, in fact he found himself actively avoiding the idea. Professionally, Jackson knew he’d made a Faustian bargain with regards to his research. The NRO would guarantee his funding, but the work would never be published. He would help the NRO in their continuing investigation into the secrets of the Sect of Huracán, as Jackson supposed he should now refer to DiCanio’s organization.
Jackson would have to start from the remaining sample of PJ’s DNA sequence, which he’d posted from Mexico City to his friends, Adam and Rosalie. This would allow him to study PJ’s version of the hypnoticin gene in its original context. PJ had discovered a natural source of hypnoticin – but where? Chaldexx had, according to DiCanio, searched for and failed to find such a gene. DiCanio had wanted that gene badly. She’d gone to murderous lengths to try to steal it from PJ and Jackson.
Jackson’s findings about hypnoticin would remain a state secret. Fame and fortune might elude him, but what did it matter? He had unknowingly stumbled across one of the world’s most astonishing secrets.
If somehow, an ancient civilization had found a way to introduce one gene into the human genome, who was to say it stopped there? Their descendants, others like Jackson and Connor, might have untapped abilities of which they were not aware.
The Sect of Huracán would have come to the same conclusion. They would doubtless continue with their own plans – whatever they were. Connor seemed certain that some crisis would threaten the planet at the end of 2012. But his – and the NRO’s – idea of saving the world was probably quite different from that of the Sect.
From what Jackson had seen of them, the Sect of Huracán was not to be trusted.
The taxi drew up in front of the three-story wood-fronted house in which his apartment was located. Jackson stared out of the taxi window. The fog had almost dissipated; he could see his apartment through a thin veil of mist.
He walked to the door, heard the taxi drive away behind him. A cyclist flew past; there was the sound of a car door opening, a group of students towards the end of the road, mere outlines in the mist. They were laughing. As he faced the porch, Jackson groaned, remembering his lost keys, which he hadn’t seen since his slide down the forested hillside in Tepoztlan. Exhausted, despondent and aching, he leaned his head against the door.
Behind him, he heard keys jingle, and a voice; her voice.
“Looking for these?”
Jackson turned around. Marie-Carmen was standing just feet away. Her hair was loose and fell in waves over the collar of her thigh-length brown leather jacket. She smiled at him, quizzically. He glimpsed the beginning of a warm smile. Against her chest, Marie-Carmen clutched was a brown paper bag of groceries. Dangling from the fingers of her right hand, a small bunch of keys rattled.
“You dropped them in the car that first night.”
Jackson could barely move; he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
Marie-Carmen took a step towards him. “When you left Switzerland, I knew they’d got you; Hans Runig, Ninhursag: we should have thought about Sumerian mythology, right from the beginning. It was DiCanio, all along. I figured the safest place for me was the one place you couldn’t be; your place. I still had the addresses of those people you asked me to mail your DNA to; I met Adam and Rosalie. They told me where you live.”
The one important address he had never entered into his old cell phone, Jackson realized, was his own.
Finally, he found his voice. “How could you stop contacting me, just like that? Didn’t you know what that would be like for me?”
Marie-Carmen put down the groceries. When she spoke, her tone was careful, her voice gentle. “Jackson, I couldn’t risk that you’d joined them. I had to know, before we met again, which side you were on.”
Jackson said, “You know, don’t you? That I’m one of them, I’ve got the gene.”
Marie-Carmen nodded. “It was the only reason for them to be so determined to get hold of you. It was always you they wanted, not just the DNA.”
“I could never join them, Marie-Carmen. They killed PJ, they killed Simon Reyes.”
“They threatened PJ’s family, too. They’re in hiding now”
Jackson hesitated for a second. “I can help them to stay hidden. My brother made me an offer . . .”
“Better than what DiCanio offered you?”
“It was less millennial secret society of illuminati, more run-of-the-mill clandestine government agency.” He shrugged. “I don’t have a lot of choice, to be honest.”
“I see; so this isn’t all due to eleventh-hour patriotism?”
“Marie-Carmen,” he said softly, “they killed PJ.”
“I know. I don’t think DiCanio and her people will easily give you up.”
“They have some serious competition; you, my brother Connor.”
As they talked, they drew closer, Marie-Carmen reached up, tentatively fingering the lapel of his jacket. With a teasing murmur, she said, “Look at your haircut . . .”
“You should have seen me in his uniform,” was Jackson’s laconic reply.
Marie-Carmen moved her hands up to his shoulders. “But Connor, he’s this all-American, action-man, fighter pilot guy – isn’t that right?"
“Yes, that’s right. You’d hate him.”
She squeezed him, gently. “I’ve missed you.”
He leaned in, his lips close enough just to brush against hers, and whispered, “I hope you kept my place all nice.”
“Aren’t you going to take me inside?”
He let himself be drawn against her, wincing slightly as she pressed against the wounds on his chest. The cold, wet air felt like home then, and the pale lights of the building seemed finally to welcome him.
But when Jackson closed his eyes he saw the unending sands of the desert; forgotten mounds in the wilderness, thousands of years of buried memories waiting, and no-one there to witness them. Somehow, through all the terrors of history, those memories had survived.
Until he felt the warmth of Marie-Carmen’s breath against his cheek, his thoughts were of those who waited.
Thank you for reading THE DESCENDANT – A JOSHUA FILES PREQUEL
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Did you know that there is an Alternate Reality Game based on THE DESCENDANT?
Acknowledgements
The Descendant was my first novel, written almost a year before the first Joshua Files book launched my career as a p
ublished author. Heartfelt thanks to my dear friend Dr. Magda Plebanski, who read and loved an early version of this story.
Also to my agent Peter Cox for encouraging me to bring my ‘techno-thriller manuscript’ out of the drawer, also to former Joshua Files editor Polly Nolan, who helped me to craft a quality manuscript from that first draft. It was wonderful once again to work with talented young designer, Gareth Stranks who created the jacket art.
Huge and special thanks to Richard Howse for his excellent creative and technical genius in bringing The Descendant Alternate Reality Game to life on the Internets! Most of all, thanks to my husband David for his patience and support as well financial, marketing, and technical advice and assistance.
Finally, thanks to all the readers of The Joshua Files who supported me through that series. I hope that you’ll enjoy this extra tale from my little fictional world.
Sumerian translations were provided by the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature
Black, J.A., Cunningham, G., Ebeling, J., Flückiger-Hawker, E., Robson, E., Taylor, J., and Zólyomi, G., The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/), Oxford 1998–2006.
Copyright © J.A. Black, G. Cunningham, E. Robson, and G. Zólyomi 1998, 1999, 2000; J.A. Black, G. Cunningham, E. Flückiger-Hawker, E. Robson, J. Taylor, and G. Zólyomi 2001; J.A. Black, G. Cunningham, J. Ebeling, E. Robson, J. Taylor, and G. Zólyomi 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005; G. Cunningham, J. Ebeling, E. Robson, and G. Zólyomi 2006.
First published in the UK by Darkwater Books, 2012
Darkwater Books is an imprint of Harris Oxford Limited.
41 Cornmarket Street, Oxford, OX1 3HA
This electronic edition published in 2014 by Darkwater Books