Fearful Symmetry: A Thriller

by McBride, Michael

  And then there were others.

  Men in pith helmets with the twin sig runes of the Schutzstaffel insignia. Men in gray uniforms readily identifiable by the SS eagles and death’s heads on their peaked caps, by the Sigrunen and rank on their black collars, by their knee-high black boots and, most notably, by the swastikas banded around their arms. These were the same men doing the exact same things, only to a different type of subject. To naked men, women, and children, emaciated and branded, young and old, on the verge of death. Filthy and terrified. Surrounded by guards with rifles and in overcrowded barracks and behind barbed wire fences with smokestacks in the background, churning the ashes of their kin into slate-gray skies that wept cold rain.

  Brandt was in nearly all of them. The same man whose eyes and smile had undoubtedly had a much different effect on his subjects behind the fortified walls of Dachau.

  “I am an old man,” Brandt said. “Much has changed during my ninety-five years on this planet. Everything, in fact. We live our lives in the times, as you’ll one day learn. Judgment is reserved for subsequent generations; history is written by the victors of wars.”

  He turned around in his chair to face Brooks, who couldn’t bring himself to meet the old man’s stare.

  “I was just a child when the French and Belgians invaded the Ruhr and seized my father’s land as compensation for the unreasonable and punitive reparations demanded by the Treaty of Versailles, which my country had been unable to pay. Our families met soldiers with a display of passive resistance. They responded by executing more than a hundred civilians, among them mein vater.” He cleared his throat. “My father. I was three years old when he was bayonetted before my very eyes. I knew nothing of reparations or finances, nor did I care about the resulting hyperinflation that doomed our economy. All I knew was fear. And as I grew older, hatred. Like the rest of my generation. And that combination is a recipe for disaster, as history has shown us since. Maybe we knew as much at the time. But even history can’t show us how it all could have played out any differently.”

  “There’s no justification for the atrocities you committed.”

  “I committed no atrocities. Mine were crimes of inaction. Or perhaps failure to recognize the need to act would be more accurate. Maybe even deliberately so. You have to understand that this was a time of great scientific and technological advancement. A wonderful time to be a scientist. We were all swept up in it. Fields like theoretical and atomic physics, aerospace and genetic engineering were in their infancy and we made enormous strides thanks to the active support and funding of a government with its own agenda, which we believed at the time aligned with ours. Our prized evolutionary anthropology was elevated from a speculative pseudoscience to legitimacy by the office of the Ahnenerbe, Heinrich Himmler’s society for the study of Germanic ancestral heritage. He used his power and position as Reichsführer of the SS—the state police—to advance his personal theories about the enlightened origins of the German people, whom he believed descended from a mystical Nordic race that escaped the sinking of Atlantis, fled across the Gobi Desert, and settled high in the Himalayas, in a holy place known as Shambhala. These were the ancestors who would prove that the Germanic peoples were not meant to be ground beneath the heels of their European oppressors, that they were inherently superior. It wasn’t about the Jews. Not then, and not to us, anyway. It was about finding proof of the transcendence of our bloodline, about showing not only our own people that they were better than those who held them down, but the entire world. And thus, it was to academia and the field of anthropology that the Ahnenerbe turned when it commenced its quest to find the origins of the Aryan race.”

  “The Atlanteans who fled their sinking city and settled in the highest mountains on the planet.”

  Brandt smiled.

  “I know how it sounds now. So many of us believed it because we wanted to. Because we needed to. Despite how fantastic the legends sounded, even at the time. It wasn’t about the blond-haired, blue-eyed ideal. That was propaganda of Western creation. Did anyone really think that men with dark hair and eyes could sell such a notion to an entire nation? It was about the bloodline, the lineage. We were all caught up in the populist völkisch movement and the concept of returning to the greatness of our roots. Most of us, anyway. I didn’t buy into any of that, but I kept my feelings about the matter to myself. I was an anthropologist with a blank check drawn on a seemingly inexhaustible account with the freedom to truly advance my field. I might not have believed in the existence of Himmler’s Aryan race, but I did subscribe to the theory of human evolution and set out on my own personal quest to discover the origin of the species.”

  Brandt turned his chair and drove beside the long rows of preserved faces. He gestured with his left hand as he spoke.

  “At the time, I believed ours to be a collection of races descended from common ancestors. Still do, really. I traveled the world taking measurements with calipers and rulers and scales and all of the tools they now chuckle about in schools. I found the consistent differences between the peoples of this planet, the subtle physical variations that developed through the eons thanks to geography and the climate, behavior and society. I catalogued the spatulate-shaped incisors, advanced musculature, and steatopygia of the African peoples and the epicanthal folds and brachycephalic skulls of the Asian races.” He waved at the cases, where men, women, and children, most of whom were undoubtedly long gone, stared back at him with perpetually blank expressions. “I studied the brow ridges and nasal bone configurations of the indigenous tribes of South America and the traits both common and unique to Pacific islanders isolated by water and time. The subtle similarities between the Jews in Dachau and the peoples of Arabic descent, and their more prominent similarities to their fellow Germans, despite the lengths to which my colleagues went to demonstrate otherwise. And in all of them I found the commonalities of an analogous evolution—the trunk of the family tree of man, if you will—and yet I also found countless points of divergence I felt—and still feel—were distinct enough to warrant subspecies classification. But only once in all of my travels and explorations did I truly encounter something—shall we say—unclassifiable.”

  “Why are you telling me all of this? Why now?”

  “My boy, if there is one thing I understand, it is the nature of mortality. I may not be afflicted with some fatal disease, but I assure you, I am dying. It is simply the fulfillment of my biological destiny, and my time will come sooner than later.”

  “I can’t offer you absolution.”

  “I seek none. The choices I’ve made along the journey have been my own. They were educated, and yet informed by the times. Were I to have the chance to live my life again, I would certainly make the same choices in the same historical context. Science has never been a field beholden to morality. Roentgen sacrificed his own wife to radiation when he discovered x-rays. Marie Curie nearly blinded herself and suffered from anemia caused by carrying radioactive isotopes in her pockets. I merely utilized my station to gather the data that proved to be the foundation of a field devoted to the study and advancement of mankind. The world is and will be a better place for the existence of this institute and the dozens of others like it.”

  “So why bring me down here? Displaying any of this will destroy the reputation of the institute and cast a pall over the entire field.”

  “You remind me a lot of myself. A lifetime ago, anyway. Ambitious and adventurous, with a lust for knowledge and discovery for its own sake. Not for the money or the acclaim or the prestige, but simply because there are mysteries out there to be solved using clues hidden all around the globe, from the deepest oceanic trenches to the highest snowcapped peaks. Your work with the evolutionary impact of viruses is beyond anything I could have imagined in my wildest dreams when I exhumed my first partial hominin skull. You are the worthy inheritor not just of the leadership of the institute, but of my greatest discovery, one I’ve spent the majority of my life trying to understand.”
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  Brooks stopped and looked around him before affixing his stare on the frail old man’s back.

  “We’re nothing alike. I would never sacrifice my soul for my research.”

  “Soul? Let me know when you dig one of those up.”

  “My morality then.”

  “Morality is dictated by the prevailing winds of the time. Were our roles reversed, I have no doubt you would have made the same choices I did.”

  “I think maybe we should head back upstairs. I have actual job duties—”

  “I haven’t shown you what I brought you down here to see.”

  “I’ve seen enough.”

  “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

  The whirring sound of Brandt’s chair echoed in the vast room as he led Brooks toward a central display case taller and wider than all of the others, with its own set of environmental controls. It was dark inside to protect its contents from the damage of even the weak ultraviolet radiation emitted by the fluorescent lights. Brandt pressed a series of buttons on the control panel built into the pedestal and, with a shushing sound, the glass became transparent and the internal lead shielding retracted.

  Brooks found himself staring at the plaster mold of a face simultaneously both like, and completely unlike, all of the others. He stepped forward and appraised it. Turned and stared at Brandt, who smiled indulgently and tented his bony fingers in his lap. Looked back at the object in the case. It was positively surreal.

  Millions of thoughts collided in Brooks’s head as he scrutinized the object in the case. He managed to pluck four words from the tumult without once so much as blinking.

  “When do I leave?”

  Two

  Pai Village

  Motuo County

  Tibet Autonomous Region

  People’s Republic of China

  October 12th

  Five Days Ago

  Brooks shuffled out of the lodge that had been billed as the “Grand Scenic Resort.” In reality, it was little more than a rectangular wood-frame structure built on two-foot block stilts to keep it above ground that was hard and frozen and snow-packed nine months out of the year and flowing with mud and seasonal runoff during the remaining three. The walls were composed of irregular planks and the construction was shoddy even by backyard fencing standards back home. The exposed roof joists were covered by a patchwork of sheets and blankets, which also served as the doors over the open thresholds and the curtains covering the cutouts that passed for windows, a superfluous luxury considering he could see straight through the gaps between the slats. The resort claimed it was the foremost attraction in Motuo County and received four stars for its accommodations on a scale that must have been established by the frogs that had descended from the forest beneath the mist to take shelter under the floorboards, through which he could not only hear the cacophonous croaking, but see them squirming and flopping on top of one another through the cracks below him as he lay on the warped elm slab that passed for a bed.

  All five of them had been crammed into that one room, four along the back wall and one lengthwise beside the feet of the others, with barely enough space to walk between them. The outhouse was spacious by comparison and the smell was almost preferable to the continuous exposure to the wind and rain that passed straight through the walls and extinguished the diminutive flame in the stove they had lit for heat.

  All in all, though, he’d stayed in worse.

  He found a seat on a planed stump and wrapped his arms around his chest. He watched an elderly woman crumble brick tea and salt into a cauldron over the fire while he waited for the others to drag themselves out of bed, which, on a frigid morning like this one, was easier said than done. Especially considering they all knew they had a long, arduous day ahead of them. Several, in fact. Each of which promised to make this look like a night at the Ritz.

  Pai Village was internationally renowned as the springboard of the brutal trail to Motuo and their ultimate destination in the low-lying valley of the Yarlung Tsangpo River, enclosed on four sides by the towering Himalayas. It was a biome unto itself, completely isolated from the rest of the world, and the only one of China’s 2,100 counties to remain inaccessible by road, despite numerous attempts to construct highways that were thwarted by mudslides and avalanches. An air drop would be risky, thanks to the unpredictable weather, tempestuous winds, and mist-shrouded peaks, even if one could find a pilot willing to risk creating an international incident and being fired upon by the Chinese entrenched in the mountains, defending their borders from the “autonomous” Tibetans to the southwest and the Indians to the south, who themselves grew increasingly wary of the red tide rising to the north with each passing day. Thus the necessity for the four-day trek, which had required a staggering amount of money to bribe a Sichuanese trail boss named Zhang to escort them since westerners were forbidden from entering Motuo—“hidden lotus” in Tibetan—which Buddhist scripture designated the purest and holiest region due to its unique contiguous environment where frozen peaks descended into sub-tropical jungles.

  Brooks gratefully accepted a steaming wooden bowl of tea and a dollop of yak butter, which melted into the brew as she stirred it with her gnarled finger. His nod of thanks elicited a beaming grin and she shuffled back to the fire and commenced with arranging the ingredients for the morning meal. The sun was still an hour from rising, but already the curious Lhoba people eyed him from their windows, doorways, and alleys with open suspicion while he drank his tea and his colleagues emerged from their shared room and crossed the bare earth to warm themselves by the fire.

  Dr. Warren Murray was the Assistant Director of Hominin Studies at the Brandt Institute and President of the Department of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago. At forty, he was the elder statesman of the expedition, but carried himself as though he were even older than that. He was a native Australian who immigrated to Texas during his formative years, earned his undergraduate degree at NYU and his doctorate at Harvard, and had the unique accent to show for it. He was the most widely published of them by far, yet had remarkably accomplished that feat with a minimum amount of actual fieldwork. As an academic, however, his fingers had ready access to the purse strings of benefactors Brooks had never even met and his refined good looks—with his almost feminine lips and soul-deep blue eyes—generally got him whatever he wanted, which, in this case, had been to insinuate himself onto a high-profile expedition that would allow him to put to rest once and for all the rumors that he was soft. Knowing Warren, he’d probably also arranged endorsement deals and media exclusives, which was more likely the case.

  He was the first to join Brooks beside the fire and greeted him with a grunt. He beckoned the woman with a snap of his fingers. For as surprised as he was when she dropped the yak butter into his tea, he was even more repulsed by the unwashed finger she used to stir it. He mumbled something incomprehensible under his breath while he stared at the yellow swirl diffusing into his tea.

  “Sleep well, Warren?”

  “If you call tossing and turning on a lumpy wooden slab all night sleeping, then yes, I slept magnificently.”

  “You’re lucky you slept at all with that chainsaw roaring,” Adrianne Grayson said as she emerged from the blanket that served as the front door. She had her sleeping bag wrapped around her and a woolen Tibetan hat with earflaps over her blond hair, and still managed to pull off the look. With her blue eyes and the freckles on just the very tip of her nose, she was positively adorable. She was twenty-six, but looked eighteen, and one of the most ambitious graduate students Brooks had ever interviewed. She was a doctoral candidate from Penn whose thesis about the effects of vector-borne diseases on population models dovetailed nicely with his own regarding the physiological effects of viruses on human evolution. Thus the reason she had all but beaten down his door to join his department.

  “I have sinus issues, you know.” Julian Armstead swatted the blanket out of his way as he followed her. He had curly dark hair, a long face,
and a straggly goatee. He was the kind of guy who wore socks with sandals and undoubtedly wouldn’t pass a surprise UA, but he’d spent more time in the field than any graduate student who applied. Most of it was in more tropical locations than the one towering over the small village, where he’d probably done little more than comb the underbrush for mushrooms and marijuana, but he was an experienced climber, which was what had initially attracted him to Northern Arizona’s prestigious anthropology department in general and the sheer red plateaus and gorges of Sonora specifically. His doctoral thesis, while ill defined, revolved around the idea of creating a pharmacopeia of ancient holistic remedies that he not-so-secretly intended to use to impress his old man, the managing director of U.S. operations for pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb. And then sell it to him at a cost that would avenge every childhood slight. “And a deviated septum. It’s a legitimate medical condition. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “I can think of plenty of ways to take care of that for you. I’ve heard the quickest way to learn to breathe through your nose is by having someone hold a hand over your mouth.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “I wouldn’t?”

  Adrianne sat on a rock beside Brooks and rubbed her hands together over the fire. The silver polish on her nails reflected the flames. She must have just had them done before receiving his last-minute invitation. Julian crouched beside her, but moved when the smoke blew into his face. The old woman laughed and clapped him on the back when he started to cough.