The Ganymede Project

by Susan Glinert Stevens

  A signed picture of Russian cosmonauts hung on the wall. Next to it was a framed, cartoonish drawing—a child’s picture of an eagle—edged in an abstract, red-brown motif.

  At a light table in one corner of the room, Vladimir and Katrina pored over satellite photography. Katrina looked through a binocular scope. She focused with one hand and held a cigarette in the other. Vladimir slowly cranked the take-up reel, dragging film across the light table.

  “Stop,” Katrina said. This is the area I want. Area 51.” Vladimir stopped cranking. Katrina looked up from the scope. Dark circles underlined her bright green eyes.

  “You look like hell,” Vladimir remarked, under his breath.

  “And you look like the American cartoon, Orphan Annie,” she said, running a hand through his puffy, frizzed hair.

  “Hey, don’t! It’s the style. I’m just trying to blend. Okay?”

  “You are becoming decadent.”

  “Lenin would approve of my disguise.”

  “He’s dead. Hand me the sleeve,” she said, with annoyance.

  He gave her a clear plastic sleeve, slightly wider than the film. Katrina took it, then wiped her eyes with the back of a hand. “This business the other night... I can’t seem to sleep, so I just work. At least during the putsch, I knew who the enemy was. I could mentally prepare for that. Here—”

  “Maybe you should carry a gun. I’d feel safer. All Americans carry guns.”

  “Why would a clerk at the Russian Embassy need protection?”

  Vladimir laughed.

  She removed the cigarette from her mouth and parked it on Vladimir’s lips for safe keeping. “Here, hold this.”

  He didn’t miss a beat. “I’m going to stop smoking, soon. Most Americans don’t smoke. It’s bad for your health.”

  She cut the film with a loud, angry SNIP, then stuffed the frame inside the sleeve.

  Vladimir grew silent, waiting out the awkward moment as his sister drew boxes around three areas in the frame with a grease pencil.

  “I want enlargements of the test area, the research complex and the power plant,” she said. “See if you can find prior coverage for comparison.”

  She handed Vladimir the sleeve, removed the cigarette from his mouth and replaced it in her own.

  “Katrina?” Vladimir asked.

  “What?”

  “Sverdlov is FBI counterintelligence.”

  “So?”

  “Brotherly advice. Don’t let the shooting incident affect your judgment. Don’t fall for some American cowboy.”

  “That’s stupid. He’s a source of information.”

  * * *

  Yuri stood over a freezer drawer containing Jack’s body. Elliott Briggam, standing beside him, sneezed, tugged on a well-pressed linen handkerchief that flared decoratively from a coat pocket, blew his nose with it, then jammed it back into his rumpled tweed coat, eyes watering.

  “I think I’m allergic to some of the chemicals they use here,” he said, teetering on a step stool that compensated for his short height.

  Yuri nodded. They closed the drawer.

  Briggam stepped down, opened a manilla envelope, and spread pictures across a stainless steel examination table.

  “This is how we found him. Ah—-tzuuu!” He sneezed again, spattering the photos with tiny spots of spittle.

  The pictures showed Jack sprawled in an alley, one hand propped against a gray concrete wall.

  “It was the knife wounds that got him,” Briggam said, wiping his nose with a finger.

  Yuri flipped through the photos.

  “Coroner thinks he was stabbed somewhere else. They dumped him in the alley and left him for dead. Only he wasn’t quite dead.”

  Yuri looked at the last photo. It showed the concrete wall next to Jack’s hand. On it was scrawled the wordMAJOR .

  “At first we thought it was gang writing, along with the other crap on the wall. The lab tested it. It was Jack’s blood.”

  Briggam put the photos back into the envelope. “What was Jack up to the day he was killed?”

  Yuri was far away in thought.

  “Hmm? Sorry.”

  “What was Jack doing that day? I’ll need a statement.”

  “Debriefing a government agency. The Russians were monitoring their conversations. Standard procedure is for NSA to tell them to tighten up. Only Jack was having a hell of a time finding the agency.”

  Yuri paused for a moment, then turned with a start. “Fontanova!”

  “What?” Briggam asked.

  “We had a surveillance operation on the Russian Embassy. Katrina Fontanova discovered what we were doing. She’s a Major in the Russian Army.”

  33. RATTUS NORVEGICUS

  30 April 1994

  John Anderson and Zfar Jafri entered at the rear of the large, 200-seat lecture room. Jafri carried a small plastic cooler. Students filed out of the room, headed toward other classes. A view of live microbes still projected on a screen.

  At the front of the room, Doctor Rita Li—sixty years old, white-hair, trim figure—presided over a ‘feeding frenzy’ of information. Students snapped at the tidbits she informally dispensed, then fed off each other.

  She moved to one side, talking quietly but enthusiastically to a particular hungry male who could have been a football player. He asked questions about the lecture.

  “So, um, meiosis is when the diploid number of chromosomes gets reduced?”

  A long necklace of imitation pearls spilled down Doctor Li’s cleavage. As she talked to the male student, she tugged on it, bringing the end up from the depths. It bobbed up and down like a fishing line in search of a fish. The action had a hypnotic effect on the student. She toyed with him.

  “Verygood,” she said. “Just remember, in meiosis we are dealing with sex cells dividing. It’s a cellular maturation process that prepares the egg and sperm to fuse with each other.”

  As Anderson and Jafri approached, Li disengaged from the flirtation. “Ah, John. Hello,” she said.

  She turned to the male student. “Please excuse me. I think you’re on the right track with this.” She touched the student’s arm and whispered, “If you need more help, see me in my office.”

  The student nodded, smiled nervously and departed.

  She grinned and took Anderson by the arm. “I have such fun with this course.” She studied him. “I haven’t seen you since the Tellus Board meeting, when we approved your funding request.”

  She reached a hand toward Jafri. “Hello. I’m Rita Li. Just call me Rita.”

  She tugged at her necklace, hypnotizing Jafri.

  “Umm... Zfar Jafri. Just call me Zfar.”

  “Zfar, zo good,” she laughed. “Are you working with John on the Groom Lake project?” Jafri nodded, then looked at Anderson.

  “Zfar brought me something from Groom that I thought you should see,” Anderson said.

  Jafri put the cooler into the sink on the lab workbench. He opened it, revealing a rat encased in a double plastic bag atop a layer of ice.

  “Zfar has a friend who works at the site,” Anderson said. “He found this in the Test Area. It’s not native.”

  “Of course not,” Li said. “It’sRattus Norvegicus —the brown rat. It’s the species we usually dissect to illustrate mammalian anatomy.” She picked up tongs and began to reach into the bag. “May I?” she asked.

  “Before you touch it, I have to warn you. There’s a possibility this animal died in some sort of germ warfare experiment,” Anderson said.

  Li retracted her hand and dropped her smile. “Then let’s take it to the containment lab. I’ll work on it there.” She replaced the lid.

  * * *

  Richard Chandra reviewed analysis of Thought Tunneling Devices, beginning with initial 1947 autopsy reports. Plowing through volumes of uninspired technical material was boring.

  He turned on the news as a diversion and poured a drink of ice cold liquor. He wondered which of these things—the TV or the drinking—c
ould kill more brain cells.

  He had enough to spare.

  Looking at the world through the glow of Jack Daniels, he marveled at how daily news broadcasts could instantly coordinate and synchronize thoughts, ideas and actions on a global scale. What got broadcast was a mix of reality, speculation and pure lies. He was an expert on the last category.

  Caveatemptor.

  Mankind had known dimly for centuries that ideas had power. However, until recently, ideas diffused slowly though the collective consciousness.

  The Nordic Edda began as a verbal story-telling tradition. It developed over hundreds of years. It seized the minds and viewpoints of particular human tribes for successive generations.

  Today’smythsweremovies,newsandTVshows .

  Television, telecommunications and computers transformed the lethargicZeitgeist into a fast tempo rap beat.

  Even the written word—from newspapers to novels—reflected a world view shaped by a channel-switching ethos. Short. Choppy. Fragmented and fractured. And technology accelerated the pace.

  Butwherewasthemeaning?

  Maybe truth was a Gestalt effect—a mosaic pattern. Maybe if an objective observer took in enough data, the fractured bits and pieces would have some meaning—like a Byzantine mosaic viewed from a distance.

  Ideaswouldconnect.

  A TV news report suddenly penetrated Chandra’s brain like an ice pick.

  “Finally, tonight,” the news anchor said, “I’d like to pay tribute to Jill Sommer, one of our most intrepid reporters. In what we can only believe was a random act of violence, she was shot at a hotel near Rachel, Nevada. She is now in critical condition—a tough-minded reporter with a nose for blockbuster news. Jill, we’re with you. We need you. Pull through.”

  Chandra punched off the TV.

  He teetered into the kitchen and tried to empty his glass in the sink. It dropped, shattering on the floor.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Fractured bits and pieces of glass tore through his bare feet, leaving a mosaic of footprints contoured in blood.

  * * *

  All the pieces! Dmitry thought. This was a very complex puzzle.

  He scanned the strange computer code on his screen. He would have to decompile it into assembly language before he could make sense of it. By cross-checking network logs and other data, he might be able to determine how this code found its way into the embassy’s classified system.

  The code was surprisingly compact. It attached itself to the print drivers.That’s how it was able to control the printers . But modulating them to produce an audio output—to make them talk in a human-like voice—was something he had never seen.

  There was a level of technology here that baffled him.A good mystery .A good chess game ...Could there be more than one rat ?

  34. WALPURGIS NIGHT

  30 April 1994

  White Mountain

  Glowing embers from a campfire filled the black sky, rising and dispersing like clouds of weightless fireflies. The embers were drawn into the night by desert wind and consumed by a predatory darkness.

  Ben Nightwalker sat near the fire’s edge with Thomas, a seven year old boy, and Lilith, a fourteen year old girl. They were relatives. Fractional kindred spirits.

  In the background, they heard a Night Chant. Thehatathli —medicine man—assisted an elderly woman into the ceremonialhooghan .

  “She will sit in the Magic Circle,” Ben explained. “Then they’ll say prayers to theYeis . She has a bad leg, so they’ll take sand from the picture and put it on her leg.”

  Lilith chewed gum, rolled her eyes and shook her head. Thomas listened intently—a wide-eyed believer.

  “We’re lucky to be here,” Nightwalker said to the girl. “It’s an honor Old Joe invited us.”

  Lilith squinted in disbelief. “Uncle, do you know what I could be doing right now? Do you know what I’m missing on TV? You don’t have a clue. This is so... bizarro. She’s sick. They should get her to a real doctor.”

  “People can choose how they want to be healed. She has chosen her way. You should respect her for that.”

  “How can I respect anything when I’m bored?” she asked.

  Ben thought for a moment. “Let me tell you a story. It’s one that Joe taught me. It goes back to the earliest times.”

  * * *

  Yuri scanned the alley—a dead-ended place where Jack had met his dead end—an end now documented in white chalk, patches of semi-dry blood and a signpost to Jack’s last thought—”Major.”

  His own blood boiled at the possibility that Major Katrina Fontanova may have orchestrated the killing.What’s going on here below the surface? Is the vulnerable princess actually an inhuman animal? Did she orchestrate the killing because Jack exposed something? Could she invoke diplomatic immunity and get away with it ?

  He ducked under the yellow ‘Crime Scene’ tape and stepped into the darkness, probing with a flashlight.

  Maybe there’s something here they missed, he thought.Something that will help make sense out of all this .

  * * *

  Ben told the story.

  “In the land of the Kisani, they didn’t have rain and they didn’t have snow. Late in the autumn, they heard in the east the sound of a great voice calling. They listened. They waited. Pretty soon, the voices got nearer and louder.”

  “Weird,” Thomas said.

  Ben solemnly nodded. “Strange beings came. They didn’t talk. They made many signs to the people, as if instructing them. But the people didn’t understand.”

  “When the gods had gone, the people tried to figure out what it all meant. Then in the morning, when the sun came up, they could see walls of water moving toward them on all horizons except to the West. They all moved out to a high hill, hoping that would save them.”

  “Some of the animals tried to use their special skills or knowledge, but no one succeeded.”

  “Did the people drown?” the boy asked.

  “No,” Ben said. “A young man and an old man came up with a solution. The Elder had seven bags of dirt from the seven sacred mountains. His son spread the earth on the ground and planted reeds. The reeds grew quickly. They all joined together, like a hollow rope, and became a single gigantic reed with a hole in its eastern side. The people entered through the hole and it closed up. The water moved in. It surged outside the reed, sayingYin ,yin ,yin .”

  “The water rose fast, but the reed grew faster. By sunset, the reed had grown up close to the sky. The people sent out a badger. When he returned, his legs were stained black with mud. He had clawed through the night sky. The people went through the badger’s hole, where they met other animals and beings. The reed had become a tunnel to another world.”

  “What creatures did they find?” the boy asked.

  “Well. There were the giants—the alien gods. Most of them were killed by the people. We don’t have to fear them anymore.”

  The boy grinned.

  “What we have to fear are the devils,” Ben said, in a hushed voice.

  The fire popped. The girl shuddered. “Creepy!”

  “Tell me about the Devils. I’m not afraid,” Thomas said.

  “They are the Tsindi. There is a Tsindi with every corpse. The dead man’s spirit goes to the lower world, but the demon remains with the body.”

  The girl shuddered again. The boy laughed nervously.

  “The Tsindi looks like a corpse,” Ben said.

  * * *

  This is where they found his corpse, Yuri thought, looking at the chalk outline.There’s the wall filled with gang markings .

  Talk to me, Jack.I’m your partner. Here are your toe marks where they dragged you, face down, into the shadows. They thought you were dead, but you weren’t. They were clumsy. Stupid. You kept your wits, even as life drained out of your body. What were you thinking those last moments?

  * * *

  The embers burned low, then blossomed back in an explosion of flame, fanned by a night wind from t
he East. The chant stopped.

  Old Joe, the medicine man, materialized from the darkness and approached the fire. “Do you remember what to do and where to go?” he asked, handing Nightwalker a pouch.

  Ben nodded.

  “Good.”

  Joe looked at the boy, smiling the faintest of smiles. “This is a special night. You and Ben have a very special role to play.”

  Ben stood and lashed the pouch to his belt. Joe patted him on the shoulder, then returned to the ceremonialhooghan . The chant started again, like some vocal narcotic, capturing thoughts and feelings in a convergent world of reality and illusion.

  Ben looked at Thomas. “Do you still want to help me?”

  The boy nodded.

  “You have to be able to follow me—to run fast.”

  “I can run fast!”

  “Good! They’ve given me the kethawns—little cigarettes and sticks. They’re sacrifices.”

  “What for?”

  “Payment to theYeis for healing. We have to run to the place of sacrifice. Just follow me. Then we run back. We can’t cross our trail when we return. Also, we can’t walk through an ant hill.”

  Lilith rolled her eyes.

  “Ready?”

  Thomas nodded. They took off running.

  * * *

  Gillford Chisholm moved tentatively, furtively, like a prickle-haired cat, following Yuri into the alleyway, slinking into shadows, both hunter and hunted. When he heard that Jack Dugan left a message—coded in blood—he thought it was time to revisit the scene. Maybe there was something else he overlooked. Evidence.

  And now this FBI man searches. Everyone else is gone, but he still searches. Looking for clues. Looking for me.

  He closed and opened his eyes slowly, the way cats do when they think about prey.He’s not so big. I could take him. I could surprise him . He felt the bulge under his breast pocket.I could—