by A. G. Riddle
Martin made an effort to look casual. He strode to his oak desk in the middle of the giant office. “Yes, actually. I’m afraid you’ve caught me at a bad time—”
“Don’t. I know it all, Martin.” Sloane turned around slowly and spoke deliberately, never taking his eyes off Martin as he walked toward the older man behind the desk. “I know about your little ice fishing expedition in Antarctica. Your meddling in Tibet. The kids. The kidnapping.”
Martin shifted his feet, angling to get behind the desk, to put something between the two of them, but Sloane altered his vector, approaching to the side. Martin stood his ground. He wouldn’t back away, even if the brutal man cut his throat right there in his office.
Martin returned Sloane’s stare. The younger man’s face was lean, muscular, but rough — not rugged — years of hard living had taken its toll. It was a face that knew pain.
Sloane stopped his prowling march three feet from Martin. He smiled slightly, like he knew something Martin didn’t, as if some trap had been sprung, and he was simply waiting. “I would have found out sooner, but I’ve been quite busy with this Clocktower situation. But I think you already know about that.”
“I’ve certainly seen the reports. Unfortunate and untimely, to be sure. And as you mentioned, I’ve had my hands full as well.” Martin’s hands started to shake slightly. He stuffed them in his pockets. “I had planned to reveal these recent developments — Antarctica, China—”
“Be careful, Martin. Your next lie could be your last.”
Martin swallowed and looked at the floor, thinking.
“I just have one question, Old Man. Why? I’ve collected all these threads you’ve spun, but I still don’t see your end game.”
“I haven’t betrayed my oath. My goal is our goal: to prevent a war we both know we can’t win.”
“Then we agree. The time has come. Toba Protocol is in effect.”
“No. Dorian, there is another way. It’s true, I’ve kept these… developments to myself, but for good reason — it was premature, I didn’t know if they would work.”
“And they haven’t. I read the reports from China, all the adults died. We’re out of time.”
“True, the test failed, but because we used the wrong therapy. Kate used something else; we didn’t know it at the time, but she will tell me. We could walk into the tombs by this time tomorrow — we could finally learn the truth.”
It was a long shot, and Martin was almost surprised when Sloane broke his unblinking glare. His eyes looked away, then down. A moment passed and finally, he turned around, pacing back toward the windows, taking up his original position when Martin had entered the room. “We already know the truth. And as for Kate and the new therapy… You took her children. She won’t talk.”
“She will to me.”
“I believe I know her better than you.”
Martin felt his blood rising.
“Have you opened the sub yet?” Sloane’s voice was quiet.
Martin was surprised by the question. Was Sloane testing him? Or did he think…
“No,” Martin said. “We’re following a more extensive quarantine protocol, just to be on the safe side. I’m told the site is almost secure.”
“I want to be there when they open it.”
“It’s been sealed for over 70 years, nothing could have—”
“I want to be there.”
“Of course. I’ll inform the site.” Martin reached for the phone. He couldn’t believe this break. The hope felt like a breath of fresh air after being under water for three minutes too long. He dialed quickly.
“You can tell them when we get there.”
“I’d like nothing more—”
Sloane turned away from the windows. The bloodthirsty stare had returned. His eyes burned holes in Martin. “I’m not asking. We will open that sub together. I’m not letting you out of my sight, not until this is over.”
Martin put the phone down. “Very well, but I must speak with Kate first.” Martin inhaled, straightening his back. “And now, I’m not asking. You need me, we both know it.”
Sloane looked at Martin through the window’s reflection, and Martin thought he saw a small smile cross his lips. “I’ll give you ten minutes with her, and when you fail, we’ll leave for Antarctica, and I’ll leave her to people who will make her talk.”
CHAPTER 31
River Village Slums
Jakarta, Indonesia
David watched the Immari Security officers pivot and then run into the five-room plaster home on the corner of the row. He had picked this home specifically because of its layout.
The men swept the rooms, moving in swift, mechanical motions, entering each room with their handguns held in front of them, jerking left, then right.
David listened from his hiding place as the men reported. “Clear. Clear. Clear. Clear. Clear.” He heard their pace slow as they walked out of the now “safe” residence.
When the second man passed him, David silently slid behind him, covered his mouth with a damp cloth, and waited for the chloroform to fill his mouth and nostrils. The man thrashed about, trying desperately to grab David as he lost control of his limbs with each passing second. David held tight at his mouth. No sound escaped. The man slumped to the ground, and David was about to turn his attention to the other man when he heard the radio in the next room crackle to life.
“Immari Recon Team Five, be advised, Clocktower reports a field locker in your area has been accessed. Target believed to be in close proximity and could be in possession of weapons and explosives from the locker. Proceed with caution. We’re sending backup units.”
“Cole? Did you hear that?”
David squatted over the man he had just incapacitated, apparently Cole.
“Cole?” the other man called from the next room. David could hear the dirt grinding below the soldier’s boots. He was walking slowly now, like a man marching through a minefield, where any step could be his last.
As David rose to his feet, the man burst through the doorway, his gun pointed at David’s chest. David lunged for him. They collapsed to the ground and fought for the gun. David slammed the man’s hands into the dirty floor, and the gun skidded to the wall.
The man repelled David off of him and began crawling for the gun, but David was on him again before he got far, gripping the man’s neck with the crook of his elbow in a tight strangle hold. He placed the heel of his hand on the man’s upper back to get more leverage. He could feel his prey’s airways close. Not much longer.
The man flopped back and forth and clawed at the arm around his neck. He reached down, trying to grasp… what? His pocket? Then the man had it — a knife from his boot. He stabbed back at David, connecting with his side. David heard his clothes rip and saw the blood on the knife, which was coming at him again. He slid to the side, barely missing the second jab. He moved his hand from the man’s back up to his head and using the cross-grip with his arm around the man’s neck, he ripped hard. The loud snap rang out and the man slumped to the floor.
David rolled off the dead mercenary and stared at the ceiling, watching two flies chase each other.
CHAPTER 32
Immari Jakarta Headquarters
Jakarta, Indonesia
Martin’s men had taken Kate deep underground, then led her down a long corridor that opened onto what looked like a large aquarium. The glass window was at least fifteen feet tall and maybe sixty wide.
Kate didn’t understand what she saw. The scene beyond the glass was clearly the bottom of The Bay of Jakarta, but it was the creatures moving about that puzzled her. At first she thought they were some sort of illuminated sea creatures, like jelly fish, drifting down to the bottom then floating back to the surface. But the lights were wrong. She walked closer to the glass. Yes — they were robots. Almost like robotic crabs, with lights that swiveled like eyes and four arms, each with three metallic fingers. They burrowed into the ground, then emerged with items in their mechanical ha
nds. She strained to see, what were the items?
“Our excavation methods have come a long way.”
Kate turned to see Martin. The look on his face gave her pause, worried her. He looked tired, dejected, resigned. “Martin, please tell me what’s going on. Where are the children that were taken from my lab?”
“In a safe place, for now. We don’t have much time, Kate. I need to ask you some questions. It’s very important that you tell me what you treated those children with. We know it wasn’t ARC-247.”
How could he know that? And why did he care what she had treated them with? Kate tried to think. Something was wrong here. What would happen if she told him? Was the soldier, David, right? “I will tell you, but I want the children back first,” she said.
Martin walked over, joining her beside the glass wall. “I’m afraid that’s not possible, but you have my word: I will protect them. You have to trust me, Kate. Many lives are at stake.”
“Tell me what the hell’s going on, and I’ll think about trusting you.”
Martin turned, walking away from her, seeming to ponder. “What if I told you there was a weapon, somewhere in this world, that was more powerful than anything you can imagine? A weapon capable of wiping out the entire human race. And that what you treated those children with is our only chance at survival, our only means to resist this weapon?”
“I’d say that sounds pretty far-fetched.”
“Does it? You know enough about evolution to know that it’s not. The human race isn’t nearly as safe as we think it is.” He motioned toward the aquarium wall, toward a robot floating down. “What do you think is going on out there?”
“Digging for treasure? A sunken merchant ship maybe.”
“Does this look like a treasure hunt to you?” When Kate said nothing, he continued. “What if I told you there was a lost coastal city out there? And that it was only one of many around the world. Around 13,000 years ago, most of Europe was under two miles of ice. New York city was covered by a mile of ice. In the span of a few hundred years, the glaciers melted and sea levels rose almost four hundred feet, wiping out every coastal settlement on the face of the planet. Even today, almost half the human population lives within 100 miles of the coast. Imagine how many people lived on the coast then, when fish were the most reliable source of food and the seas were the easiest method of trade. Think of the settlements and early cities that were lost forever, the history we’ll never recover. The only surviving record we have of this event is the story of The Great Flood. The people who survived the deluge from the glaciers were keen to warn generations that came after them. The story of the Flood is a historical fact, the geological record proves it, and the story appears in The Bible and all the texts we’ve recovered before it and after it. Cuneiform tablets from Akkadia, text from Sumeria, native American civilizations — they all tell of the Flood, but no one knows what happened before it.”
“That’s what this is about? Finding lost coastal cities — Atlantis?”
“Atlantis is not what you think it is. My point is that there is so much below the surface — so much of our own history that we don’t know. Think about what else was lost at the time of the Flood. You know the genetic history. We know that at least two species of humans survived to the time of the Flood — maybe three. Maybe more. We’ve recently found Neanderthal bones at Gibraltar that are 23,000 years old. We could find bones that are even younger. We’ve also found bones that were only about 12,000 years old — dated to around the time of the Flood — less than a hundred miles from where we now stand, off the main island of Java, on Flores Island. We think these hobbit-like humans walked the earth for almost 300,000 years. Then, suddenly, 12,000 years ago, they die out. The Neanderthals evolved 600,000 years ago — they had roamed the earth nearly three times longer than us when they died out. You know the history.”
“I do, and I don’t see what this has to do with kidnapping my children.”
“Why do you think the Neanderthals and Hobbits died out? They had been around a long time before humans walked onto the scene.”
“We killed them.”
“That’s right. The human race is the biggest mass murderer of all time. Think about it, we’re hard-coded to survive. Even our ancient ancestors were driven by this impulse, driven enough to recognize the Neanderthals and Hobbits as dangerous enemies. They may have slaughtered dozens of human sub-species. And that legacy shamefully lives on. We attack whatever is different, anything we don’t understand, anything that might change our world, our environment, reduce our chances of survival. Racism, class warfare, sexism, east vs west, north and south, capitalism and communism, democracy and dictatorships, Islam and Christianity, Israel and Palestine, they’re all different faces of the same war: the war for a homogeneous human race, an end to our differences. It’s a war we started a long time ago, one we’ve been fighting ever since. A war that operates in every human mind below the subconscious level, like a computer program, constantly running in the background, guiding us to some eventuality.”
Kate didn’t know what to say, couldn’t see how it could involve her trial and her children. “You expect me to believe those two children are involved in this ancient cosmic struggle for the human race?”
“Yes. Think about the war between the Neanderthals and Humans. The battles between the Hobbits and Humans. Why did we win? The Neanderthals had bigger brains than us and they were certainly larger and stronger. But our brains were wired differently. Our minds were wired to build advanced tools, solve problems, and anticipate the future. Our mental software gave us an advantage, but we still don’t know how we got it. We were animals, just like them, 50,000 years ago. But some Great Leap Forward gave us an advantage we still don’t understand. The only thing we know for sure is that it was a change in brain wiring, possibly a change in how we used language and communicated. A sudden change. What if another change is under way? Those children’s brains are wired differently. You know how evolution works. It’s never a straight line. It operates on trial and error. Those children’s brains could simply be the next version of the operating system for the human mind — like the new version of Windows or Mac OS — a newer, faster version… with advantages over the previous release — us. What if those children or others like them are the first members of a new branch emerging in the human genetic tree? A new subspecies. What if, somewhere on this planet, a group already has the new software release? How do you think they would treat us, the old humans? Maybe the same way we treated the last humans that weren’t as smart as us — the Neanderthals and Hobbits.”
“That’s absurd, those children are no threat to us.” Kate studied Martin. He looked different, the look in his eyes, she couldn’t place it. And what he was saying, all the talk of genetics and evolutionary history — telling her things she already knew… but why?
“It may not seem that way, but how can we really know?” Martin continued. “From what we know of the past, every advanced human race has wiped out every race they viewed as a threat. We were the predator last time, but we’ll be the prey next time.”
“Then we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“We’ve already crossed it, we just don’t know it. That’s the nature of the Frame Problem — in a complex environment, we simply can’t know the consequences of our actions, however good they seem at the time. Ford thought he was creating a device for mass transportation. He also gave the world the means to destroy the environment.”
Kate shook her head. “Listen to yourself, Martin. You sound crazy, delusional.”
Martin smiled. “I said the same thing when your father gave me the same speech.”
Kate considered Martin’s claim. It was a lie, it had to be. At the very least it was a distraction, a play for her trust, an effort to remind her that he had taken her in. She stared him down. “You’re telling me you took those children to prevent evolution?”
“Not, exactly… I can’t explain everything, Kate. I rea
lly wish I could. All I can tell you is that those children hold the key to preventing a war that will wipe out the human race. A war that has been coming since the day our ancestors sailed out of Africa 60-70,000 years ago. You have to trust me. I need to know what you did.”
“What is the Toba Protocol?”
Martin looked confused. Or was he frightened? “Where… did you hear that?”
“The soldier who picked me up from the police station. Are you involved in it — Toba?”
“Toba… is a contingency plan.”
“Are you involved?”
“Yes, but Toba may not be needed — if you talk to me, Kate.”
Four armed men entered from a side door Kate hadn’t seen before.
Martin turned on them. “I wasn’t finished talking to her!”
Two guards took her by the arms, forcing her out of the room and down the long corridor she had traveled down to meet Martin.
In the distance she heard Martin arguing with the other two men.
“Director Sloane said to tell you your time is up — she won’t talk, and she knows too much anyway. He’s waiting at the helipad.”
CHAPTER 33
River Village Slums
Jakarta, Indonesia
David slapped Cole again, and he came around. He couldn’t have been more than 25. The young man looked up through sleepy eyes that grew wide when they saw David.
He tried to draw away, but David held him. “What’s your name?”
The man glanced around, searching for help or maybe an exit. “William Anders.” The man searched his body for weapons but found none.
“Look at me. You see the body armor I’m wearing? You recognize it?” David stood, letting the man take in the head-to-toe Immari battle gear he wore. “Follow me,” David said.
The groggy man stumbled into the next room where his partner’s dead body lay, his head turned at an awkward, unnatural angle.
“He lied to me too. I’ll only ask one more time, what’s your name?”