“I wouldn’t put it past them. Although convincing the top members of President Taylor’s cabinet to join the conspiracy was a stroke of genius, if you ask me. All I know is if it wasn’t for you, they would have gotten away with it.” Leslie sipped at her coffee. “I hear Myers is pressuring the Justice Department to try them as war criminals and has already recommended the death penalty. I also heard he’s had dozens of others arrested too. It’s like the French Revolution all over again.”
She was talking about the Terror, a ten-month period from 1793 to 1794 when a zealous revolutionary government used public executions as a way of spreading fear and obedience throughout the population.
There was certainly no shortage of fear. It was one of the reasons the streets were so empty. People were staying put, only going out when they had no other choice. The coffee shop was no exception. Normally at this time of day, the place would be packed with long lines stretching out the door. The smattering of people here now only made the contrast that much starker. And those who were here looked stressed out.
Going to a minimum-wage job was the last thing on the minds of people who believed the end was near. They were getting their coffee fixes by buying in bulk and staying home. A growing chorus of voices online, however, was calling the whole thing a giant hoax. That the planet wasn’t about to get pummeled, that the story had been concocted by the government as part of a giant power grab. The rallies they held, initially attended by a few dozen strange-looking characters in black jeans and sweatshirts, were now numbering in the hundreds and thousands. The group’s biggest publicity stunt to date had been breaking into the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing and releasing canisters of tear gas on the scientists who had come to brief Congress. Kay’s eyes dropped to the file folder and the picture of Mia Ward and Jack Greer. She wondered where they were and what they were doing that Sentinel wanted them out of the way.
“What about you?” Kay asked instead. “Aren’t you worried they might hurt you?”
Leslie leaned in. “My father-in-law has a cabin in North Carolina. The plan is to pack up the family and leave tonight.” She plucked her purse off the seat next to her and opened it so Kay could see. Inside was a silver revolver with a black grip. “You have one, right?”
Kay shook her head. She scanned for the soldiers again but they were gone. “I was gonna get one after I was attacked, but my father talked me out of it.”
Leslie reached down and removed a small .25 caliber pistol she kept strapped to her ankle. She folded it in a napkin and slid it over to Kay. “Consider this a parting gift. Just in case we don’t see one another again.” Tears were already gathering along her eyelids. “Stay safe,” she mouthed. Leslie got up and walked out, leaving Kay with more to process than she had ever thought possible.
She had not gotten far when she saw a series of messages from her fiancé Derek.
Where have you been?
I’ve been trying to reach you.
She texted back: “Chasing a lead. I’ll come by your place tonight and tell you all about it.”
Your dad called. It was about your mother. Has he reached out?
Kay’s brow crinkled with concern. “I missed the call. What about her? She all right?”
Call him. Then call me right after.
The house phone rang twice before Kay’s dad answered. Judging by the noise in the background, the choir was in full swing and louder than ever. “Derek said you were trying to get hold of me,” she said, shouting over the racket. A woman two seats over threw Kay a dirty look. “Is Mom okay?”
“Yes, Kayza, your mother is fine. In fact, she is more than fine. Last night she sat up straight as a board and began talking. I tell you, it’s nothing short of a miracle!”
“Oh, Dad, that’s terrific,” Kay said, ecstatic. “I’ll bet Mom hasn’t wasted any time belting out her favorites with the choir.” Her mother had been one of the choir’s founding members when Felix had opened his ministry. It was part of the reason he had invited them to keep vigil by her bedside. If anything could pull her from the darkness, he had hoped it was the sound of her beloved choir.
“Well, no, she’s not exactly singing.” There was something in her father’s voice, the slightest hint of hesitation, concern.
“What do you mean? What’s she doing?”
“Kay, I’m not sure. From the moment she woke up she’s been scribbling. She’s gone through nearly all the paper in the house.”
She knew her father well enough to know that trace of worry in his voice was over her mother’s soul. He might not want to come right out and admit it, but he was starting to think some mischievous spirit had jumped under her skin while she had been lying there, sick and vulnerable. It certainly explained the extra oomph coming from the choir.
“Dad, take a good look,” Kay practically ordered him. “What do you see?”
There was a pause as he did what she asked. “Page after page, it all looks the same.”
“Are they drawings?” she asked, exasperated. “Is Mom drawing pictures?”
“No, not drawings, Kayza,” her father replied, fear rising in his voice. “All I see are zeros and ones.”
Chapter 41
Greenland
Jack came to pinned against the back wall of a house, his legs, arms and upper torso covered in ice and snow. He struggled to move. More importantly, he struggled to recall what had happened. The last thing he remembered was calling out a warning and seeing a blizzard exploding before his eyes. He realized now that blizzard had been a jagged chunk of ice crashing next to them.
Tamura was the first to appear. She staggered into the house and proceeded to start digging Jack out. Moments later Dag joined in. Once Jack’s arms had been freed, he was able to help them with the rest. They lifted him to his feet. Jack searched himself for injuries.
“Everyone accounted for?” he asked.
Dag shook his head.
Jack hurried from the building and into what looked like a war zone. A mound of ice boulders nearby had a metallic hand sticking out the top. He ran over as fast as his legs could carry him and began digging Anna out. When he reached her head, he wiped the snow from her digital face.
“Anna, you with me?”
The screen was black.
“Anna!”
Slowly, faint features began to emerge. But where her eyes once sat there were now two X’s. Below that, her tongue flopped out between slightly parted lips.
Jack frowned until he understood she was pulling his leg.
The screen flickered and her regular features returned.
“You nearly gave me a heart attack,” he said, pulling her upright.
She bent forward, inspecting her legs.
Soon, all were accounted for except Gabby. From the street, it was clear a few of the surrounding buildings had been destroyed by falling ice. Could she have been inside one of these when they were hit? Everyone pitched in to help search, calling out to her over the radio as they dug.
“Uh, Jack,” Grant said, motioning, his voice somber.
Jack was suddenly overcome with a pang of fear and anguish. “Please don’t let Gabby be dead.” He repeated the words over and over, until they became a mantra. He crossed the street and arrived at the shell of a building where Grant was waiting. It looked as though a bomb had gone off inside. The walls were blown clear out and a gaping hole, nearly ten feet wide, remained where the floor had once stood.
The others circled around, staring down into the yawning black mouth at their feet. Jack got down on his hands and knees and switched on his helmet light.
“It looks like a fifteen- to twenty-foot drop,” he said, scanning back and forth until he centered the beam over what looked like the white boot from a biosuit.
“I see something,” he shouted, pointing. A mound of broken ice boulders lay beside her. Before anyone could talk him out of it, Jack dropped down, landing in what turned out to be pulverized ice crystals. In a matter of minutes, he dug Gabb
y out and sat her up against a wall that appeared to have been cut out of the bedrock.
“Is she okay?” Tamura asked.
The visor on Gabby’s helmet had a crack running down the front of it. Jack removed it and set it aside. He slid his left glove off and pressed the pads of his fingers against her carotid artery, feeling for a pulse.
“She’s alive,” he shouted. “She must have been standing in the doorway when the boulder knocked out the floor and pulled her down.”
Mullins leapt in, landing in the mound.
“That looked fun,” Dag said from above, sounding like a child anxious to play a new game.
Jack glanced up. “I’m not sure how we’re gonna get her out of here.”
“I heard about a situation like this in a riddle once,” Mullins said, searching around. “If we push everything we find into a pile, we might be able to make it to the top.” He disappeared from view for a moment and returned with an armful of dirt mixed with white sticks. He tossed them onto the snow pile and returned for more. “You gonna help or what?”
Jack crawled over to the items Mullins had just dropped and picked up one of the sticks. “Where did you find this?”
“They’re all over the place,” he said, breathing hard.
“These aren’t sticks,” Jack said, noticing their unusual shape. “They’re bones.”
Chapter 42
Washington, D.C.
“This is turning into one hell of a day,” Kay said, blowing a curl of rebellious hair out of her face. “Please tell me you found something.”
Lucas’ embarrassed expression was not a promising sign. “Cracking the laptop’s password was a snap. I used a plain old vanilla ripper program.”
Kay crossed her arms. “Why do I sense a big, fat ‘but’ coming?”
Lucas’ eyes traced down to Kay’s waist. “If what I found is anything to go by, a big fat butt isn’t your problem. This is.” He swung the laptop around. On the screen was the frozen opening frame of a video. Lucas clicked the play button and proceeded to roll his eyes up and stick his tongue in the side of his cheek, mimicking someone minding their own business.
Right away, something about the video was making her uneasy. For starters, it had not been properly edited. Through shaky camera motions, she watched a woman entering a hotel room to meet a middle-aged, muscular man in a light suit. Within seconds, they were locked in an intimate embrace. They tore off each other’s clothes with lust-filled abandon and proceeded to engage in a whole range of perverse and demeaning sexual acts. As the man ripped away what remained of the woman’s clothes, Kay saw her own face and gasped, her hand flying up instinctively to cover her mouth.
“It’s you,” Lucas said, with noticeable surprise. “Is this why you had me crack the laptop, to destroy a batch of poorly shot revenge porn?”
Kay’s jaw was moving but only the tiniest squeak was coming out. She clicked back a few seconds and watched over and over the part where her face was revealed.
“This isn’t me,” she pleaded, bony fingers dancing along her scalp.
Lucas’ eyes dropped to some imperceptible spot on the desk between them. “Listen, I’m not here to judge. What you do in your spare time…”
“I’m telling you,” she cried out, her hands balled into fists. “That woman may look like me, but I’ve never done anything like this before.”
“What about when you were kidnapped? Do you think it’s possible…” He held back, trying to be delicate, but what he was suggesting was not making any sense. “That you were drugged and made to perform in a sick pornographic film?”
Screams of pleasure and pain echoed up from the laptop. She showed him the pictures she’d found in that sick bastard’s manila folder. In each of them, she was unconscious. In a handful of others, her eyes had been kept open with strips of medical tape. He flipped through the still shots as she skipped forward in the video, a look of shock and nausea plastered on her normally serene features. Then, somewhere within the last two minutes, the scene seemed to end and the man controlling the camera departed the hotel room. The camera followed him, only to emerge within the warehouse on Kendal Street in Ivy City. The same one she had visited the other day.
“It’s a movie set,” she said, a wave of relief washing over her. “See, it isn’t me, it’s an actress.”
They both watched, but you could only see her from the back, dressed in a robe, before she disappeared through a metal door.
“I believe you,” Lucas said, “really I do. But I’m not sure anyone else will. For all intents and purposes it’s you. So what’s the point of all this? Someone trying to extort you?”
“No,” Kay said, nibbling on her lower lip. “Not extort. They’re trying to shut me up. I’m getting the distinct impression that nothing is as it seems and the closer I get to the truth, the more nervous these guys become.”
Chapter 43
Greenland
Before long, Jack discovered the underground tunnel had served more than one purpose. Like the catacombs beneath Rome and Paris, shelves had been cut into a hard metamorphic rock called gneiss to hold the city’s dead. Unfortunately, most of what they found there had turned to dust ages ago. But at some point, hundreds, perhaps thousands of residents had descended into this creepy subterranean labyrinth in search of shelter from the world above. Had it been to escape the firestorm from the impact sixty-five million years ago? The walls still bore some of the strange, ghostly etchings they’d carved into the rock. One of the images resembled a flower, drawn by the unsteady hand of a child.
During World War II, the London Tube had served a similar purpose. But unlike in the Tube, it seemed nearly all of those gathered here had perished. The floor was a mix of rock and soil and heaps of fossilized bone.
“This tunnel system heads north for quite a ways,” Mullins said, returning from a brief scouting expedition. “I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point it leads straight to the pyramid.”
“If not,” Jack said, “we may still be able to pop up behind the Israeli soldiers and take them by surprise.”
Mullins turned to Gabby, whose eyes were starting to open. “How’re you feeling?”
“Right now I see two of you,” she replied, her fingers feeling a gash on the side of her head. “Does that answer your question?”
Jack and Mullins began helping the others descend.
No sooner had he landed then Dag rushed over and began studying the bones. “I swear I’ve seen a femur just like this before. It must be twenty-four inches long. Six inches longer than the average male femur.”
“It’s not human, that’s for sure,” Grant said, setting down his cases and peering over Dag’s shoulder.
“The alien colony theory is officially debunked,” Dag said, winking at Jack. “My guess is these people or creatures or whatever you wanna call them looked a hell of a lot like the large statue we found in the temple.” Dag drew up a picture he’d taken with his glasses and held up the femur to compare.
“Try projecting the image,” Jack suggested. “Increase the ratio until it’s the same size as the bone and then place it inside the hologram, see if it fits.”
“I’ve seen them do that in crime shows,” Tamura said. “You know, where they find a skull and then overlap a picture of the person and an image of the skull to see if the features line up.”
“Yeah, they seem to.”
“But here’s the million-dollar question,” Gabby said, rising off the ground with Jack’s help. “What are the odds you can find enough DNA for Grant to sequence?”
“Slim, I’d wager,” Rajesh admitted, eyeing the bone with disgust.
Dag shook his head. “That’s what paleontologist Mary Schweitzer thought too until she cracked open a T. rex bone back in 2005 and found blood vessels and soft tissues still inside.”
“Hold the boat,” Grant shouted, returning from out of the darkness with a skull. It looked about ten to fifteen percent bigger than a human skull with a protruding
mandible. The brow ridge was swept back over a large brain cavity. Its mouth featured two pairs of upper and lower canines, along with large incisors and several sets of flattened molars. “The teeth are an unusual mix of carnivore and omnivore. Which is strange because my first impression was that we were looking at the skull of a wolf.”
“But Dr. Holland,” Rajesh said, “what you’re holding hardly looks like a wolf at all.”
“Yeah,” Mullins chimed in. “I’m no scientist, but I grew up on a farm and I’ve seen my fair share of dead dogs and coyotes and I can tell you with certainty this isn’t either of those.”
“Perhaps not now,” Grant said, shifting the skull in the light. “What we’re seeing here might be the product of millions of years of evolution.”
“So you think a civilization of wolf people lived here,” Eugene said, mockingly.
“I’m not saying anything,” Grant objected. “I’m simply attempting to understand who or what this skull might have belonged to in life.”
“May I see that, Dr. Holland?” Anna asked, her metallic arms outstretched.
“Be my guest.”
She flipped it over in her hands. “For a creature to transition from wolf to this would take an enormous number of morphological changes,” she told them.
“How many, would you say?” Jack asked her.
“Approximately one hundred and twenty-five thousand.”
“Over what period of time?”
Anna’s eyes flickered. “That is more difficult to say, given it is impossible to know the precise conditions in which the creature evolved.” Jack gave her a look. “My best guess is seventy-five to a hundred million years, give or take a few million.”
“Well, that pretty much narrows it down,” Dag said, clapping his hands together.
“There is one other program I may be able to apply,” Anna said. “If Dr. Holland’s assertion that this specimen was descended from the Canidae family tree—that is to say, dog-like mammals—is correct, then I may be able to extrapolate from existing data in order to put some flesh on the bone.”
Extinction Series (The Complete Collection) Page 47