Fearful Symmetry: A Thriller

by McBride, Michael

  “How long do you think someplace like this will last before mankind ruins it?” she asked.

  Brooks stepped up to the ledge beside her. The wings of bats whistled past, just overhead.

  “Nature perseveres. One way or another. The mudslides wash away the roads and the avalanches seal off the passes. If there’s one thing I’ve learned through the course of my work, it’s that nature never fails to rise to a challenge. It either outright wins or finds a way to adapt.”

  “And that’s where we come in.”

  “Millions of years too late.”

  Adrianne laughed.

  “Better late than never, I guess.” She turned to face him. “Now. Seriously. You really should get back before Dr. Murray and Julian polish off dinner.”

  “If it’s more of that root soup, then they’re welcome to my share. I don’t know if it didn’t agree with me or if it was actively trying to kill me.”

  He followed her through the maze of beeches, sandalwoods, and laurels toward the flickering light of the fire, which made the trees cast strange shadows that danced through the underbrush. It was remarkable just how much the patterns of light passing through the branches looked like the stripes of a tiger.

  “Can I ask you something, Dr. Brooks?”

  “For the thousandth time, while we’re in the field you can call me Jordan.”

  “All right, Jordan. I’ll ask you straight up.” She stopped and turned to face him. “What aren’t you telling us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Pretty much exactly that. Here we are, halfway around the world in the land that time forgot and we’re not taking in the sights, you know? We’re making a beeline for something and I, for one, would like to know what.”

  “What makes you think there’s anything I’m not telling you?”

  “For starters, Dr. Murray was last in the field when Bush was in office, and we all know he’s the kind of guy who wouldn’t risk getting his L.L. Bean’s dirty if it weren’t guaranteed to get his face in front of a camera. Then there’s Julian, whose research focus is so far removed from the rest of ours that I can only assume he’s been brought along because of that specialty specifically. Assuming, of course, that his old man isn’t funding the entire expedition. And our guide? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he has knives strapped to every appendage and a military-issue Type 54 semiautomatic under his parka. Trust me. I know. I’m an Army brat. I’ve lived on just about every base around the globe with a father and two brothers. The only thing they loved more than talking about shooting stuff was actually shooting stuff.”

  “You seem to have this whole thing figured out. What about you then? Why do you think you’re here?”

  “Because I’m brilliant.” She flashed a smile and winked. “And because you expect to need my expertise. More precisely, my knowledge of population models in the wake of evolutionary divergence and speciation. You don’t haphazardly throw together such a potentially prestigious and expensive expedition in so little time without knowing exactly who you want and why you want them before you even set out. So I ask you again, what aren’t you telling us?”

  “All will be revealed tomorrow.” He tried to step past her on the narrow game trail, but she moved to block him. He ended up face to face with her, so close he felt her breath on his chin when she looked up at him and stared right into his eyes. “I promise. Tomorrow. And don’t worry. It’ll be more than worth the wait.”

  Brooks squeezed her shoulder and eased past her. She smelled of jasmine and lotus blossoms and sweat. The lines between professor and student often blurred in the field, but the last thing he wanted right now was a distraction, no matter how enticing. Not with history awaiting him.

  When he didn’t immediately hear her following, he knew what was coming and kept walking so she had to speak to his back, denying her the ability to read his expression.

  “You have a mercenary guide leading four evolutionary anthropologists with very narrow fields of focus directly to something you already know you’ll find. Your expertise is the influence of viruses on physical evolution, while mine is the subsequent prediction of how that population fits into its ecosystem and the dynamics of either its ultimate proliferation or extinction. But my specialty, like yours, is in vector-borne evolutionary impetus, which brings us to the necessity to bring along someone who—regardless of his outward idiocy—is a genius when it comes to understanding the physiological effects of plants on the human body. Throw in someone as camera-friendly as Dr. Murray and you have all the makings of a highly-publicized discovery that will not only change the field, but make a whole lot of corporate interests a butt-load of money in the process.”

  Brooks smiled to himself. She’d hit the nail on the head, but the truth was even more extraordinary than she imagined. Instead of giving her the credit she deserved, though, he decided to have a little fun at her expense.

  “That’s a fantastic theory. Assuming you’re right, what do you expect to find?”

  She hesitated before speaking.

  “I’m not entirely sure.”

  “Then I guess you’ll just have to wait and see.” He nearly chuckled out loud. She was going to be up all night agonizing over what they would find. “Sleep well.”

  He stepped from the forest into the glow of the fire. The clearing appeared to have been designed specifically as a campsite. The upper canopy overhung the circle of bare earth to spare the tents from the brunt of whatever rain might come and left just enough space between the branches for the smoke from the fire to rise unobstructed into the sky. He sat on a stone by the fire and waved away the flies hovering over the plate of food they’d saved for him.

  The light inside Warren’s tent threw his shadow against the fabric as he rolled out his sleeping bag. Julian was already way ahead of him. He leaned against the broad trunk of an oak tree with his eyes closed and a contented smile on his face. Only Zhang appeared restless. He sat on a fallen log to Brooks’s right with a pensive expression on his face as he studied something he held up to the firelight between his fingers. Brooks recognized it as the clump of white fur Zhang had untangled from the branch near where the deer had been killed. Or at least he initially thought so. It almost looked like he’d unraveled it and stretched it out to make it longer than he would have expected, even from the belly fur of a tiger. In fact, it was thinner, more like hair than fur.

  Zhang caught him looking and held it closer to the fire. It smoldered and shriveled upward toward his fingers. He rubbed them together and dropped the remains into the flames.

  He rose and struck off into the darkness without saying a word, leaving Brooks alone by the fire with the smell of burnt hair.

  Fourteen

  Excerpt from the journal of

  Hermann G. Wolff

  Courtesy of Johann Brandt, Private Collection

  Chicago, Illinois

  (Translated from original handwritten German text)

  January 1939

  We spent three days wandering aimlessly—in my estimation, anyway—during which time we did not encounter another living soul. While König grew increasingly distant, Brandt’s frustration built to an almost maddening crescendo. He was accustomed to being able to take his measurements of villagers even while waiting out storms and the customary diplomatic snags. The only evidence of human intrusion were the sporadic cairns and chortens, which supposedly spoke some secret Buddhist tongue in which none of us was versed. Most had been reclaimed by the vegetation centuries ago, but a few demonstrated more recent carbon scoring from the burning of incense, which fueled Brandt’s frantic search for where those responsible might have gone.

  König vanished into the brush before any of us rose for the day, leaving us to wonder if today would be the day he didn’t return. Despite his arrival every night with wild game upon which to feast, he continued to look more and more gaunt. He said little, contrary to his nature, and appeared to be in the process of consumption by some malady or oth
er. Its evidence was in his eyes, which never quite seemed to focus upon you when he spoke, but rather upon some point in the distance that only he could see. While I had not known him as long as some of the others, I knew him well enough to recognize that whatever it was that called him to the hunt every day was something he viewed as his personal mission in life to collect. We all recognized the air of obsession about him, and something more perhaps, something which, were we dealing with anyone else, we might have called fear.

  That left Eberhardt, Metzger, and me to essentially plot our course without the direction of our leader or our anthropologist. Metzger proved exceptional at harvesting the pelts of the animals König left for us to tend to as though we were his man-servants, not his colleagues. He was also quite adept at tanning the hides and curing the meat. The benefits of a Bavarian upbringing, he claimed. And Eberhardt turned out to have a nose for exploration, as well. It was his instincts that led us to search the higher ground, rather than merely content ourselves with the relative comforts of the lowlands, where we enjoyed both the occasional spot of sunlight and the tea leaves and fresh berries it produced.

  Of course, we also had our own jobs to do. Despite the loss of the vast majority of his supplies, Eberhardt created maps of stunning quality and detail on whatever paper he could scrounge—including hard-bargained pages from this very journal—for later transposition onto more fitting media. He fashioned a drawing compass from the whittled bones of waterfowl and constructed a magnetic compass from the needle in our surgical kit and the treasured lodestone he found beneath the Himalayan ice. He also became increasingly fascinated with the Buddhist relics we encountered and would often waste precious hours meticulously drawing them, while we all knew that this was a subject of considerable contention between our generous benefactors in the Ahnenerbe and the Christian beliefs of our Führer, who outwardly condemned the worship of such false prophets while not-so-secretly borrowing from their symbology. It was one such drawing that sent König into a fit of rage when he saw it. He held it to the fire and waved it in front of Eberhardt as it burned, claiming the SS did not fund this expedition to commemorate the blasphemous idolatry of these godforsaken heathens. According to König, ours was a simple task: Find evidence of our Aryan ancestry, catalogue every minute detail about the location, and return to the Fatherland with incontestable proof. Eberhardt had suggested the task would be much easier to complete if König were to actually help us on occasion, rather than vanishing into the forest before each new dawn, to which König merely smiled and said that was exactly what he was doing.

  It was at that point we first began to question his sanity.

  We did not see König for two days after that. Not until we discovered the cliffs.

  Brandt, on the other hand, abandoned his one-man search for the mysterious race he was certain was somewhere out here, waiting to be found, in an effort to help expedite our progress. He assisted Eberhardt with his drawings and noted the differences between the various chortens we had failed to appreciate, like the petal designs and seven steps of the Heaped Lotus Stupa, which commemorated the birth of the Buddha, and the octagonal steps of the Stupa of Reconciliation. His anthropological insights allowed us to paint a picture by which to better understand the sanctity of this valley and its importance to the surrounding peoples.

  Metzger’s mood darkened seemingly by the hour as his magnetic readings, which at first had been wildly encouraging, became inconsistent and arbitrary. The composition of the rocks and soil varied from one kilometer to the next, despite the constancy of Eberhardt’s primitive directional compass. He speculated the equipment had been damaged by the careless Sherpas, but had been unable to diagnose the problems, let alone fix them. In the end, his only option had been to precisely record the readings and hope time and perspective would allow him to understand them. The rest of us were outwardly supportive, but knew exactly how failures of such magnitude were perceived and plotted to distance ourselves from him upon our return, even though privately we knew there was no better geologist in all of Germany.

  I collected samples of the flora, both pressed and dried, in hopes of publishing a collection to coincide with the release of the film of our explorations, tentatively titled Erstaunen [Astonishing] Tibet. Unfortunately, the lack of anything truly amazing would probably necessitate a change to something along the lines of Langweilig [Boring] Tibet, for all of the lackluster footage I had obtained. At least up until we found the remains of the shapi.

  Not coincidentally, that’s also where we caught up with König.

  We came upon him standing in the middle of a clearing at the base of a sheer limestone cliff perhaps three hundred meters tall, his rifle pointed into the forest opposite us. Brandt hailed him and nearly received a bullet for his courtesy. I will never forget König’s wide eyes staring down the sightline of his Browning as he took aim at us, nor the sweat beading his brow or the way the barrel trembled in the grasp of our master hunter. He gasped for air when he finally pulled the stock from his shoulder, as though he had been holding his breath for a great length of time. When he turned away from us, we looked to one another in confusion before comprehension dawned.

  Arches of blood climbed the stone wall at such an angle as to suggest violent force. Nearly that of a bullet passing through a deer at close range, I speculated, and yet we had heard no shot. Considering we nearly always heard the sound of König’s rifle fire, which echoed through the deep valley in such a way as to make the origin of the sound impossible to divine, the fact that we hadn’t heard anything, coupled with the freshness of the blood, proved the animal had been dispatched by other means. And Lord only knew what those means might have been, judging by the condition of the shapi’s remains. The once mythical goat-antelope had been rendered as though by a ferocious beast twice its size, perhaps even several of them. Its long fur was tangled in the azaleas and lotus flowers, its customary golden locks discolored by blood, which, Metzger noted, miraculously dripped from the leaves of a birch tree high above it. Its carcass was hollowed and bare, its bony framework devoid of musculature in the least aesthetically pleasing way possible. Only its blunted head and snout remained remotely intact, despite its broken horns.

  We had all read the fantastic accounts of the Champawat Tiger killed by the British hunter Jim Corbett thirty years ago, not far from where we entered Tibet, in fact. The monster had killed more than four hundred men from Nepal to East India before it was eventually tracked using the trail of blood left by the young villager it had carried off to devour. It was said to have entered villages in broad daylight, roared to cause panic, and then plucked off its victims one by one in the ensuing chaos. We had even heard tell of a tiger leaping onto the back of an elephant and carrying off its mahout as we were leaving Gangtok.

  I am certain we all believed ourselves invulnerable to a large extent, or at least that such things only happened to the primitive villagers of this godless land. It wasn’t until that moment when we realized that such beasts undoubtedly knew no distinction between heathen and Christian meat. I saw the truth etched upon König’s face as he knelt and studied something on the ground, as I had witnessed him doing with the odd footprint I filmed on the way into the valley. He traced it with his bare fingers, then turned and looked straight up the rock cliff. He stood, cocked his head, and then pointed at a ledge perhaps ten meters above our heads.

  It took him a good fifteen minutes to reach it, by which time the smell of the carcass had drawn nearly every fly in the Old World and things I had no desire to confront skulked and scurried through the underbrush. König crouched upon the narrow ledge with vultures wheeling overhead and nodded to himself as if in confirmation of an inner suspicion we believed to mean the beast had waited up there for the shapi to graze within range before pouncing. It was impossible to interpret König’s body language when he vanished inside of himself as he did then, possessed as he was by the primal hunter within him.

  He looked to either side as though g
auging how best to descend before cautiously turning, bracing himself against the escarpment, and peering upward. He stayed in that position for the longest time before once more turning to face us so quickly he nearly fell from his perch. There was no mistaking the excitement on his face. It wasn’t until I was standing nearly directly beneath him and staring past him, hundreds of meters up the face of the cliff, that I saw what he had discovered and felt the same surge of exhilaration.

  Fifteen

  Yarlung Tsangpo River Basin

  Motuo County

  Tibet Autonomous Region

  People’s Republic of China

  October 16th

  Yesterday

  “You sure you’re up for this, prof?” Julian asked.

  Brooks stared straight up at the sheer limestone face and had to focus all of his energy on mustering his resolve. The cliff was much steeper than he’d envisioned and their route up it significantly less obvious. Had Brandt’s directions not been so accurate and had he not seen the proof that the old man had been here, he would have found it hard to believe that anyone from the König Expedition would have not only seen what could only be viewed from this one vantage point, but would have had the courage to go up there after it. He adjusted his climbing harness over his thighs and groin and nodded his readiness to Julian.

  “All right, Jordan.” Adrianne repositioned the digital video camera mounted to his helmet so its line of sight was as close to Brooks’s point of view as possible. “You’ll have to factor in displacement of roughly two inches laterally, but, all in all, I think this is going to work perfectly.”

  “And you’re certain we can strip his audio from the footage?” Warren said.

  “This is the twenty-first century, Dr. Murray. Anything the microphone picks up is recorded on a separate track, so you don’t have to worry about anything he says ruining your voiceover. Unless the camera incurs significant physical damage while it’s recording, anyway.”