by Sean Ellis
Callsign: King
( Chess team mystery - 1 )
Sean Ellis
Jeremy Robinson
Callsign: King
Sean Ellis
Jeremy Robinson
PROLOGUE
Afar District, Ethiopia-One week ago
Moses Selassie ate alone.
This was not unusual. A solitary person by nature, Moses had never been one to seek out company, especially among those whom he considered intellectually inferior. There was no arrogance in this; he simply found conversation with most of his countrymen-gossip, facile complaints about the state of the economy, discussions about the latest football match-to be unbelievably tedious. By all rights, he should have been teaching at the University, shaping the young minds that were, in his estimation, the very future of Ethiopia…of all Africa, but instead his education and connections at the University had been able to secure him only this position: a common laborer. In Colonial times, he would have been called a ‘bearer.’
Colonial times, he thought darkly. Nothing had changed. The wealth and dignity of Africa was still in the hands of outsiders. Where once there had been European monarchies, now there were multi-national corporations pillaging the natural resources of the continent and leaving only scraps for her indigenous people. He had once dreamed, like his namesake, of leading the beleaguered people of his nation to freedom from their oppressive absentee landlords. Now, those dreams were as empty as the dust that blew across the Great Rift Valley.
But tonight, he had other reasons for keeping himself apart from the two dozen or so laborers the foreigners had hired. On the previous day, he had broken with his custom by hanging on the fringes of a knot of idlers as they bantered about the fate of the expedition. It had been three days since anyone had come out of the cave, and tension in the camp, both among the bearers and their foreign minders, was starting to reach the boiling point.
Something has happened in there, one of the men said.
Perhaps they found something, another suggested. Treasure?
Moses had seen the collective reaction to that suggestion; a gleam of avarice shone from the faces of the men. It was of course very unlikely that the cave contained a trove of gold or uncut diamonds, but there were other kinds of treasure in the Rift that these men would not appreciate. Excavations in the Great Rift Valley had yielded some of the oldest remains of humankind, and many believed that the earliest ancestors of the human race had emerged here. It was exactly the sort of “treasure” that brought foreigners to the Rift; it was, he felt quite certain, the goal of this expedition. He had inquired about his new employers before leaving Addis Ababa; he doubted that a company called Nexus Genetic Research would be lured in by promises of gold or petroleum, but they would certainly have an interest in the wealth of knowledge that might be gleaned from the bones of the oldest ancestors of Homo sapiens.
And that was when he had made up his mind. He had to know what was in the cave.
The division of labor in the camp was explicit. Initially, their role had been to unpack and assemble the tents, and to provide logistical support in the form of cooking meals, and refueling and maintaining the generators. A few of the men had assisted in uncovering the cave entrance, but once that task was finished to the satisfaction of the research team, no laborers were permitted to leave the ad hoc compound. The meals they prepared for the researchers were shuttled to the site by the armed security team-all foreigners-and even those men were not permitted inside; the meals were left in insulated containers by the entrance.
But something was wrong. Three days had passed without anyone emerging from the cave to collect the meals.
The rumors began to flit about the camp like moths around a spotlight. Moses heard only what was said by the other bearers, but even from a distance he could see that the foreigners were likewise troubled by the situation.
Shortly after breakfast, the camp manager, accompanied by two men from the security force, approached the cave entrance, and after fifteen hesitant minutes, ventured inside. Moses surreptitiously observed the manager’s assistant clinging to a handheld radio, receiving reports every few minutes until interference from the mass of earth enveloping the cavern cut off that avenue of communication. Following that, nothing. It was as if the three men had stepped through a portal to another galaxy.
The foreigners had compartmentalized their operation too well. Communications with the outside world had been restricted to the scientific team. The computers which they used to initiate a connection via the satellite dish on the edge of the camp were inside the cave, connected by several hundred meters of fiber optic cable, so the only way for the increasingly distraught assistant to seek guidance from his distant superiors was to likewise venture inside.
As the hours of the day ticked by, the fear and frustration simmered at a slow boil. Many of the Ethiopian labors were preparing to desert the camp. The security guards, evidently tipped off to the growing discontent, made a conspicuous show of force, doubling the guard on the vehicles and establishing several observation posts on the perimeter of the camp.
Though he felt no loyalty to the foreigners, Moses had no interest in deserting the camp. He was not immune to the fear of what might be happening inside that ragged slit in the hillside, but his curiosity was even more powerful. The researchers had found something in there, something important, and he wanted to know what it was.
He tried to force himself to eat everything on his plate, but the food was like sawdust in his mouth. When he could choke down no more, he threw the half-eaten meal away and wandered into the maze of tents. He did his best to appear nonchalant, which given the anxiety level in the camp was no simple feat, and charted a course that brought him to the edge of the compound closest to the cave entrance. Two thick cables-one to deliver electrical power, the other the fiber-optic line-snaked out from the camp, reaching across the emptiness to disappear into the barely visible gap in the hillside. Moses fixated on the insulated bundles; they would mark his path into the cave.
Although the security force had been largely redeployed to watch for deserters, the primary focus of the expedition-the cave itself-had not been abandoned. Two guards were posted at the edge of the camp. To the west, the sun was just kissing the horizon, casting its rays sidelong across the landscape, and Moses knew he would never get a better chance. Taking a deep breath, he emerged from his place of concealment and began striding toward the nearest guard post.
He could see the security man squinting into the sunset in a futile effort to identify him, and offered a friendly wave. The guard hesitated, as if reluctant to let go of the assault rifle he held at the low ready, but raised his right hand to return the greeting. For Moses, that casual gesture was the signal to go.
He bolted forward, running directly at the guard, and closed the distance before the confused man could even think about dropping his hand back to the pistol grip of his weapon. Moses bowled into him, knocking the man backward into the uncoiled nest of concertina wire that ringed the camp. Because he was anticipating the impact, Moses recovered quickly. Using the stunned guard like a stepping stone, he launched himself over the wire.
The second guard, half-blinded by the setting sun, did not immediately grasp that his comrade had been subdued, but when he heard the sound of footsteps out in the open, he knew something was wrong. Moses heard a shouted warning but paid it no heed. Instead, he aimed himself at the twinned cables and started running as if his life depended on it; in fact, it did.
He’d only gone a few steps when the report of a gun, shattered the silence. Then the sound repeated again. And again.
But no bullets found him and after only a few seconds he saw the cave e
ntrance clearly against the hillside, only fifty meters away…and then thirty meters…and then, almost abruptly, he was inside.
He did not linger there to congratulate himself. He didn’t think the security men would come in after him, but their bullets might. He kept running, barely even looking at this new subterranean environment, until the only sound he could hear was his own pounding heartbeat.
As the initial surge of adrenaline drained away, his legs turned to rubber. He sagged against the smooth wall of the cave and struggled to bring his breathing under control. After a few moments, when he was certain that he was not being pursued, he pushed away from the wall and took his first look at his surroundings.
He had never been in a cave before, but this one was nothing like his expectations. Although the entrance that he and the other laborers had helped uncover in the early days of the expedition, before being confined to the camp, was just large enough to admit one person at a time, the tunnel into the hillside was considerably larger. Moses reckoned that it was big enough to accommodate a truck.
The interior of the cave was illuminated by a chain of drop lights, suspended from pitons that had been hammered into the wall. The bulbs cast their light on bare stone; there were no calcium formations or phosphorescent lichens, no pools of seepage, only dust and dry rock. But there were sounds in the distance, the noise of human activity, deeper underground. Moses resumed his journey.
The passage wended back and forth, descending on a steep grade, and then abruptly opened into an enormous chamber. The incandescent light bulbs revealed only a fraction of the immense cavern, but from what he could see, Moses guessed it might be large enough to contain a football stadium. But that was only the first surprise.
Unlike the passage, this chamber was not empty. The floor was covered in what looked, at first glance, like enormous pillars of white stone.
“Bones,” Moses whispered. Not human bones, but the skeletal remains of much larger animals. Thousands of skeletons, many still adorned with a sheath of desiccated tissue, were piled up deep on the floor of the vast cavern, as far as the eye could see and the electric lights could reveal.
Along one nearby wall, he saw large plastic cargo cases stacked in an orderly row, and nearby a series of folding tables with laptop computers and other electronic devices, but the screens were dark and there was no sign of the research team. As he made a cursory examination of the equipment, Moses realized that someone had cleared a path, leading into the heart of tangled nest of bones. The noise he had heard earlier was coming from somewhere along that path.
The bones rose up on either side of Moses as he advanced toward the disturbance, shrouding the way ahead in shadows, but there was enough ambient light to guide him along. After about forty meters, the path opened onto a large circular clearing, and there Moses found the source of the noise. His eyes were drawn to the movement, and after a few moments he could distinguish the familiar features of the scientists who had gone into the cave several days before, five men and two women. They were working among the bones, but their activity didn’t look like careful research. They were building
There were ten originally, Moses thought. Where are the rest?
Something had gone very wrong in the cave and Moses intuitively recognized that the people he saw were either the victims of some terrible tragedy, or were its perpetrators. He held back, observing them, without drawing attention to himself.
The seven researchers moved like automatons. Their faces, haggard and drawn, were expressionless. They rooted in the bones, casting most of what they grasped aside, but occasionally they would take their discoveries to the center of the clearing and add it to the strange structure that was taking shape there. Moses edged forward to get a better look.
It’s a temple, he thought. A shrine. But to what?
Driven by curiosity, he risked moving into the open. He needn’t have worried. One of them passed within arm’s reach after having placed a smooth curved bone on the shrine; the man’s eyes did not even flicker in his direction. The laboring researchers were oblivious to his presence, and indeed to any external stimuli. Nothing mattered to them except the bones.
Moses knelt at the shrine and peered inside. An eighth researcher lay there, arms crossed and hugging something to her chest, but otherwise, unmoving…dead? No, he detected the gentle rise of the woman’s breast with each breath.
He recognized her instantly: Dr. Felice Carter, one of the geneticists, and the only black member of the research team. He didn’t think she was African-probably an American, descended from African slaves taken across the ocean centuries before-but the mere fact of her skin color awakened in him a sense of kinship. Without quite knowing why, he reached into the curious construct of bones…
No, not bones, he thought, and in a rush of understanding he realized what the cave was.
…and pulled the unconscious woman into his embrace.
The noise stopped.
As he hefted Felice onto his shoulder, Moses saw that the other researchers had abruptly stopped digging in the bone pile and were now all facing the shrine. Their eyes were still devoid of expression, but they were, unmistakably, looking at him.
Moses ran.
One of the men stood between him and the path through the bones, but Moses did not hesitate. He lowered his unburdened left shoulder and charged, bowling the man backward into the bone pile. Moses recovered without stumbling and resumed his flight, but through the sound of his own footsteps and the rush of blood in his ears, he could hear the others close behind.
His journey out of the bone chamber and through the tunnel passage seemed to take only a few seconds, yet at every step he felt certain that the men and women giving chase would catch him. Only as he exited the cave did it occur to him that he might be in even more danger outside, where the security force with their assault rifles would no doubt be waiting. Trusting that they would check their fire when they saw that he carried Felice, he quickened his pace.
But no one was waiting for him outside the cave entrance. The expected confrontation with the guards did not occur. Their attention was consumed by the riot that had broken out in the camp.
Evidently, the sound of shots being fired at Moses had been enough to light the fuse on the powder keg of discontent among the laborers. Perhaps believing that the security guards were beginning to execute some of their comrades, the bearers had unleashed a campaign of destruction. Thick columns of smoke rose into the twilit evening sky, marking the location of tents that were now being consumed by flames. A dull roar-shouts and screams-rolled across the floor of the Rift, punctuated by periodic gunshots.
Moses paused for just a moment, but a glance over his shoulder confirmed that the mindless pursuers were still coming, and faced with what seemed like two equally bad choices, Moses elected to brave the chaos in the camp.
The guards he had passed on his initial egress were gone. Moses could see figures moving in the haze of smoke, but no one took note of him as he entered the camp and made his way through the wreckage.
His goal was the parking area where the expedition’s vehicles had been sitting idle for more than a week, but when he got there, his hopes of a quick escape evaporated. Several of his fellow bearers apparently had the same idea, and they were armed with captured rifles. Gathering the last shreds of his courage, Moses approached one of the armed men.
“Please. You must give us a ride.”
Another man, leaning against the front fender of a dust streaked Land Cruiser, evidently the leader of the impromptu gang, shouted: “Of course you may ride with us. Five hundred thousand birr. For each of you.”
It was an obscene amount of money, and the man surely knew that none of the bearers possessed even a fraction of that, but Moses felt a glimmer of hope. “She is one of their scientists. Her company will pay what you ask.”
The gang leader grinned, but before the deal could be finalized, a disturbance behind them caused the armed bearers to brandish their weapons. M
oses turned and saw the haggard forms of the scientists from the cave charging toward them.
One of the gunmen shouted a warning and jabbed his weapon meaningfully at the approaching horde, but the researchers, in the grip of some primal fury, did not show the least sign of being intimidated. They swarmed around the vehicles, and in the space of a heartbeat, overwhelmed the gang.
Not a single shot was fired. The rifles, taken from the security force, had already been fired empty. Nevertheless, the attacking group seemed to recognize their deadly potential. With preternatural strength they wrenched the weapons from the hands of the gang, and then commenced bludgeoning the would-be extortionists.
Moses had witnessed a fair amount of violence in his life, but nothing like this. The crunch of bones being shattered and the wet squish of organs rupturing were an assault on his senses. The savagery left him stunned for a moment, so stunned in fact that he almost failed to grasp that he and Felice remained untouched.
Why aren’t they attacking me? Attacking us?
He had the good sense not to let the opportunity slip away. He crossed to the nearest Land Cruiser and climbed into its spacious rear seating area. Only when the door was closed behind him did he shift Felice off his shoulder. Without missing a beat, he crawled through the space between the front seats and settled in behind the steering wheel. Thankfully, the key was in the ignition. He gave it a twist and felt a wave of relief as the engine turned over.
It was a short-lived emotion. He looked up and found that the researchers had left off their grisly task and were now pressed close against the windows of the Land Cruiser, peering inside.
It’s her, Moses realized. They’re protecting her.
But that wasn’t quite right. He recalled the shrine they had been building around her. They weren’t her guardians; they were her worshippers, and they weren’t about to let him steal their goddess away.