The Lost Angel

by Sierra, Javier

  These were the same characters that the project’s best analyst—one William L. Faber—had studied years ago. He said they were part of a language called Enochian during the Renaissance and that was later used by a small group of mediums in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Faber believed that whoever could correctly pronounce the words—and there was no way to learn other than to study Enochian—could bring the adamants to life and control their electromagnetic powers.

  Every indication was that William L. Faber was close, very close, to cracking the code when he went missing.

  In Turkey.

  Probably searching for his son.

  84

  It was only a gut feeling.

  Still, Andrew Bollinger had learned to trust it. All of a sudden, while surrounded by empty Coke cans and used Styrofoam coffee cups, he knew exactly where to begin answering the question his old friend Roger Castle had asked. After staring long and hard at the data from Spain and Turkey that the White House had sent him, it hit Bollinger like a bolt of lightning.

  How did I not notice it before? These were not identical signals. The first one wasn’t emanating from a fixed point; the second one was. Moreover, the first one seemed to be moving on a direct course toward the second one. Of course, the goal wasn’t to try to figure out what message those stones were sending but rather where the signals were being sent. And at the moment, it didn’t look like they were being aimed at a planet in outer space.

  That’s what gave him the idea.

  From his office in the operations center, he quickly telephoned the VLA telescope’s satellite chief and asked him to concentrate his surveillance on a specific range of radio waves. He knew this should only take about a half hour, an hour at most. He needed to isolate any natural electromagnetic signal that might be crossing the ionosphere at that moment with a frequency of 1,420 megahertz and a wavelength of twenty-one centimeters.

  “Let’s start with”—he peeked down at his monitor—“as close as you can get to thirty-nine degrees, twenty-five minutes north, forty-four degrees, twenty-four minutes east.”

  Bollinger had to repeat the coordinates.

  “And remember, I’m only interested in signals that might be broadcast from that location and at that exact frequency.”

  “Broadcasting at that frequency?”

  The skepticism in Lawrence Gómez’s voice irked Bollinger. But Gómez, a fifty-six-year-old engineer, had seen and heard just about everything in his career, and he had never heard of anything or anyone being able to broadcast at a powerful 1,420 MHz. Nor could he imagine why his boss would have any interest in chasing LGMs—little green men.

  “Keep the commentary to a minimum and get me results, Mr. Gómez,” Bollinger said.

  Nine minutes later, all twenty-eight of the VLA’s two-hundred-thirty-ton satellite dishes turned eastward in unison, like sunflowers chasing sun. Then the computerized network honed in on the area the National Security Administration’s satellite had detected the signal. To his amazement, Gómez found what he was looking for almost immediately. Over the next nineteen minutes, his spectral analyzer captured data from a powerful singular emission, just as he’d been told. And when the computer took the next step and calculated the direction of the signal, Gómez couldn’t believe his eyes.

  “It can’t be . . .”

  Gómez ran the numbers again and got the same result. He recalibrated the computer, taking into account the signal’s residual rebound in the Heaviside layer of the ionosphere, and reanalyzed the course. He did it twice. There was no denying it. The powerful unexplained electromagnetic stream was pointing directly at . . .

  “The sun? You’re sure?” Bollinger’s usually tan complexion paled.

  “I’m sure of it, Dr. Bollinger. It’s sending out a signal at the exact frequency of the element hydrogen. And what’s even more unbelievable . . . the sun seems to be responding with a similar emission. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say they were communicating.”

  Bollinger felt a shiver run down his spine.

  “Have you been able to determine whether it’s a sequenced signal?”

  “You mean whether it could be the result of . . . intelligent life?”

  “Yes,” Bollinger stammered.

  “Not yet, sir. That’ll take a little more time.”

  Bollinger turned around in his chair, staring at the poster of the solar system in his office. A fiery giant took up most of the left side of the image. The artist had shown the sun’s flares licking the tiny planet of Mercury. The sun contains 98 percent of all matter in the solar system, the poster’s tagline read. To Bollinger, the phrase now read like a threat.

  Outside the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, winter was on its way. It had rained more than usual this fall, and Bollinger had longed for the sun to show its face and stave off the impending cold.

  Now he wished he’d never even thought it.

  He turned to face his computer and composed an e-mail to two recipients. God, I hope I’m wrong. The Air Force’s Fiftieth Weather Reconnaissance Squadron in Colorado Springs had a division dedicated to space weather prediction. And so did the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, not far from the White House. If the sun had displayed any unusual activity in the last few hours, both of them should have picked up on it. Only those scientists could help ease his mind. The only other time he’d ever seen a stone “speak” was just before the great solar storms of 1989, the ones that caused the massive blackout in Quebec and billions of dollars in damage to satellites and power grids. Some even speculated that the solar flares might have been responsible for damaging the navigation system of the Exxon Valdez, which struck a reef and spilled thirty-seven thousand tons of crude oil in Alaska. If the president was right and other crystals were now “speaking,” it was a threat worth taking seriously.

  He knew each time the sun pulsed unexpectedly, it unleashed billions of tons of plasma into space. Traveling at more than nine hundred miles a second—about two million miles an hour—the burst would reach Earth in two to three days. They couldn’t take any chances.

  “Urgent,” the message began. “Have you detected a CME in the last few hours?”

  Just typing those three initials was enough to worry him. A coronal mass ejection was about the worst thing our nearby star could do to our tiny planet.

  He hit the send button, and off it went.

  Now, all he could do was wait.

  85

  My head felt like it was going to explode.

  After seven hours and forty minutes of flight—hearing the high-pitched whistling of the helicopter blades and the warning bells every time we tripped a radar signal or received permission to cross into French, Italian or Greek airspace—I felt like I’d spent all day on a roller coaster. I’d barely been able to sleep. And I wondered how much more twisting, turning and turbulence my body and mind could take. Fortunately, I didn’t have to find out, as we approached our destination in northeastern Turkey. The helicopter touched down gingerly, and I barely noticed it. My back was in knots, my mind couldn’t process another bit of information and all I dreamed of was a soft bed to lay my head on.

  Maybe that’s why Dujok unexpectedly clapped me on the shoulder, jolting me out of my stupor.

  “C’mon, we’re almost there!” he said, trying to hearten me.

  It was already nighttime in Turkey and the air was cold and crisp, the moonless night studded with stars. The Sikorsky X4 had landed in stealth mode just three hundred yards from our destination, and under the cover of stillness and darkness, we moved in. I trudged like a zombie at the back of our group, dragging my feet, buffeted by the icy dry wind.

  I didn’t feel like taking another step, much less taking one toward that vast crater that Dujok had located using his laptop. I was out of breath as we reached the edge of the precipice.

  But this is the place where Martin’s adamant had signaled it was, at the bottom of what Dujok called the Hallaç
crater. Still, standing at its edge in the dead of an icy night—despite our night-vision goggles and the warm clothes Dujok had given us—I was overcome with anxiety. The crater was easily forty yards deep and its walls had been baked to a glassy hardness by the pounding Middle Eastern sun. I had no idea how we were going to get down.

  “If we’re going to go down inside the crater, I don’t think I—”

  “We’re not going into the crater, Ms. Álvarez,” Dujok said. “We’re headed toward the building next to it. That’s where Martin’s signal was coming from.”

  “You mean . . . that building?”

  About a hundred yards away, down a slight slope, was a sizable fortress that looked to have been abandoned years ago. Despite the darkness, I could see its walls were covered in bullet holes. I was no ballistics expert, but I’d restored enough Galician churches damaged during the civil war.

  “But what if Martin’s captors are still inside?” I whispered, hurrying to keep up.

  “You leave that to us. They won’t be a problem,” Dujok said flatly.

  Dujok, his two armed men, Ellen Watson and I soon reached the perimeter. The main building was attached to three other smaller buildings, which also looked abandoned. But the principal two-story had a gabled roof and a small tower, like a minaret. A courtyard stretched out toward another building—the one that was blacked out in satellite images—that looked unlike any building I had ever seen.

  Steel plates unevenly covered the tower, which rose out of the ground like the fang of some gigantic underground creature. It was spartan, with no windows or any other unnecessary architectural features. And although it appeared ancient, it also had a sort of avant-garde design.

  “Keep moving,” Dujok said, snapping me back to the task at hand.

  “What is this place?”

  “An antenna.”

  “A . . . what?”

  “An antenna, for high-frequency signals . . . Come on, keep moving.”

  “But . . . it looks ancient.”

  “It is.”

  We walked quickly and quietly toward the larger building’s main entrance and stood on either side of the door, waiting for Dujok’s instructions. The front door, of massive wood reinforced with steel plates, was wide open, and it was quiet inside. Ellen Watson, who was the only one besides me not armed, piped up.

  “We’re just going to waltz in?” she asked.

  Dujok nodded. “That’s right. And you two are going to lead the way,” he told us.

  “Us?” Watson said. “Oh, I don’t think so . . .”

  “Well I do,” Dujok said. And with that, he pointed the business end of his Uzi right at my chest. “Move. That’s an order.”

  86

  Not even Dante could have imagined such an inferno.

  A wave of plasma more than sixty thousand miles long, burning at more than 100,000 degrees Fahrenheit, burst from the sun’s outer crust. The two STEREO-class space probes—nicknamed Ahead and Behind—that NASA had placed in orbit around the sun were the first to detect the eruption. Together, they help construct a three-dimensional image of the sun and its surface. However, since they weren’t positioned to detect any radiation going to the sun—why would anyone ever do such a thing?—they did not detect the powerful magnetic beam that struck near Sunspot 13057.

  Sunspot 13057 had been no bigger than the size of Earth—tiny in comparison to the massive sun. But thirty seconds after the signal from Earth began, the spot’s intense magnetic field began to fluctuate—and grow. It soon swallowed up Sunspots 12966 and 13102. And that amount of turbulence was enough to trigger the STEREO probes to begin recording automatically, without any input from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and to begin transmitting data back to Earth. The multimillion-dollar instrumentation soon determined that Sunspot 13057 had exploded. The dark spot was soon replaced by a roiling tower of plasma shooting up at nearly two hundred miles a second.

  What came next was off the charts for any activity ever recorded from our sun.

  The plasma burst came crashing back down onto the star’s surface of liquid fire the way an old oak tree might as it tumbled into a placid lake: The shock wave sent ripples out as far as six hundred thousand miles, producing a tsunami of magnetic energy and blazing gas of unimaginable temperatures. A quintillion of high-energy particles—primarily protons—shot out from the sun’s surface into space, followed by the most intense spiral of solar radioactivity that the STEREO space probes would ever detect.

  That alone would be enough to put the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory into the history books.

  But then the Ahead probe’s ultraviolet cameras picked up something else.

  Like twisted cosmic fingers, a magnetic current nearly twenty-five thousand miles across reached into space. Meanwhile, fissures five times the size of Earth opened and closed on the surface of the sun, like hungry mouths eager to feast.

  In just eight short minutes, that radiation would engulf our tiny blue planet—and that would be just the beginning.

  Between eighteen and thirty-six hours later—if the calculations were correct—the plasma would reach Earth and rain down like liquid fire. The space probe calculations would soon predict where the hellfire would strike the planet. Humanity was facing the largest coronal mass ejection this planet had ever known, a class X23 event whose consequences no one could predict.

  Just as the space probe Behind relayed its calculations for where the magnetic tsunami would make landfall, a message popped in from the director of the radio telescope in Socorro, New Mexico: “Urgent. Have you detected a CME in the last few hours?”

  But the Goddard Space Flight Center had more pressing concerns at the moment. They had just calculated where the plasma would meet Earth.

  And they needed to notify the Turkish authorities immediately.

  87

  We took our first uneasy steps into the building by the crater.

  There was no light, the ground was covered in debris and my legs were shaking from utter terror. I couldn’t understand why Artemi Dujok—Martin’s friend, the man who’d risked his life to find me and bring me here—would now force me inside at gunpoint and glare at me as if I were his worst enemy. Ellen Watson didn’t know what to make of it, either. Haci stood behind her with his machine gun poking into her back, dutifully following his sheikh’s orders. But what was Dujok’s plan? He was no fanatic—or didn’t look like one, anyway. I felt there must be some logical explanation, something I was missing. So when I noticed a look of delight, not tension, in his face, I couldn’t imagine he would put me in harm’s way.

  Dujok led us through a labyrinth of hallways and empty rooms in complete silence and down a flight of stairs to the bottom floor, which did have power. When the light first came on from a single bulb hanging from the ceiling, I shielded my eyes and kept my hands there for a second. Haci prodded me with the barrel of his machine gun.

  “Yu-lia Al-vrz!” he said rudely.

  Then I opened my eyes.

  And the shock washed over me in an instant. Despite being halfway across the world in a place so far from anything I’d ever known, I recognized this room.

  So did Ellen Watson.

  I spun on my heels and glared at Dujok for an explanation, but with nothing but a threatening stare he ordered me to turn back around. “You still have a lot more to see,” he grumbled.

  There was no doubt about it: The filthy, crumbling walls and peeling paint, graffiti on the plaster that hadn’t crumbled, the rickety table beneath the single hanging lightbulb—it was the room in Martin’s kidnapping video. His plea had been recorded in this very place.

  A thousand questions rushed to my mind.

  “Well, well, well . . . You finally made it. I do hate to be kept waiting,” said a voice I recognized from the doorway behind me. His was a perfect queen’s English, measured and seemingly happy to see old friends. “We’ve all been expecting you, love.”

  That voice, that haughty pompo
us tone. I spun around again to prove what my memory already suspected.

  My God . . .

  “Daniel . . . ? Daniel Knight?”

  He stood in the doorway in a thick parka and heavy mountain boots, his unmistakable ruddy face and bushy red beard cutting more of a menacing figure than he deserved.

  “I’m happy to see you remember me. It’s been, what, five years since the last time we saw each other, love? Five years and not a single phone call. I’m hurt . . .”

  “You know this man?” Watson said.

  I nodded. “He was at my wedding. An old friend of my husband’s.”

  “Oh, I’m much more than that, love.”

  “It’s true. He also taught me how to use my adamant.”

  Daniel Knight wasn’t armed, but it was clear he was the one in charge. Still, I couldn’t understand what a bookworm like him was doing there or, more important, why he hadn’t ordered Dujok to lower his weapon.

  “Where’s Martin?” I asked sharply.

  “Come on now, love,” he said, stepping closer and putting his index finger to my lips, “you should be a little happier to see me. After all, I’m going to give you the answers to all your questions.”

  “I want to know where Martin is.”

  “Your husband is in perfect health. As a matter of fact, he’s been waiting for you, too . . . Would you like a spot of tea?”

  “T- . . . tea? At a time like this? What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “You need to stay hydrated, love. And your friend, too,” he said, turning his attention to Ellen. “You’ll need to save your strength for all the work ahead of you.”

  “Work? What are you talking about, Daniel?”

  “Oh, Julia, come on, now,” he said, shaking his head, as if I should already have known the answer to my own question. “The work that is your destiny—like it or not.”