Since then, I have funneled all of my energies into proving that the lineage of man has seen many forms and incarnations. If I can prove that Australopithecus africanus evolved from a primate, then there will be far less resistance to my theory that Homo sapiens descended from such primitive life forms. And eventually, when the world accepts my theories as fact, I will put forth the notion that our species is not the finished product of evolution, but rather just another of many stepping stones along the way, for I have seen what is to come and it both excites and mortifies me.
Yet no matter where my travels took me, Tibet was never far from my mind. The years following the war brought much instability to the region. All foreign relations were essentially severed and the country retreated into itself. With Communism taking root to the east, there was a sense of impending doom. And inevitability. The Kashag had called for help from anyone who would listen during the Sino-Tibetan War decades prior, but no one came to its rescue then, and they certainly were not about to start when Mao Tse-tung rose to power and any form of aid risked pitting the entire Western world against the butcher Stalin and the military might of the Soviet Russians.
It was during this time I commissioned my first expedition into Tibet. I utilized my own finances and made all of the arrangements from afar to avoid attracting the attention of those tasked with my oversight, a job that became increasingly relaxed with each passing day. Despite everything they had given me, there was simply one thing I would not share with them or anyone else.
Unfortunately, my men were turned away at the border. They lacked the creativity of their predecessors and returned with their tails between their legs. The second expedition penetrated Tibet, only to be captured and escorted across the border and to the American Consulate in Sikkim. The third, and final, expedition was launched in 1951, after the Tibetans signed over their sovereignty and the Communist PLA army commenced its formal occupation.
It was my hope that the country would be so overwhelmed with internal matters that it would be paying less attention to its borders and the presence of foreigners. I was proved wrong when first months passed, then years, without word from any of the men. I tried to convince myself they had been caught by the Chinese, but I knew better. They had made it to Motuo, just as I had years ago, and they had met with the same fate as my colleagues. While I escaped due to the serendipitous alignment of fortune and luck, they did not. And so I resolved not to send another expedition into that murderous valley. The hypocrisy of a man who could not bring himself to return sending others to die in his stead was not lost on me. If I were unwilling—nay, too frightened—to go back, then why should I expect anyone else to do so in my name.
And so I put Motuo out of my mind—at least as well as I could—while I threw myself into my work and began laying the groundwork for what I hope will be a global institute devoted to the understanding and advancement of the human species.
Until today.
The date is 11 November 1956, and the man who identified himself only as a representative of American Government—which, this far from home, I interpret to mean Central Intelligence Agency—has just driven away from our dig site near Lake Turkana in Kenya. In his possession were the effects of a man named George Johnson. They’d been confiscated from a Nepalese merchant who attempted to sell them to a member of the Tibetan resistance, who passed them along through some unknown chain of command that ultimately led to the CIA. No one knew what happened to Mr. Johnson or how his property ended up in the hands of this merchant, only that all attempts to return his effects were thwarted by an inability to locate him or his next of kin. The only other identifier was a phone number they were able to trace to the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago, which ultimately led this “representative” to me. He claimed his interest was solely out of professional curiosity, for in the worn satchel were bones of indeterminate specific origin, decidedly human remains, and a stack of negatives he had taken the liberty of developing.
I explained that the strangely shaped bones likely belonged to a primate, presumably of African origin, while the teeth were an odd assortment of tiger, gorilla, and human. Despite the subtle scrape marks I attributed to teeth, which I assume matched the dentition of the partial jaw from the satchel, I claimed not to see anything extraordinary about the human remains. The representative was most intrigued by the photographs, for in the background of several were locations of what I assume to be strategic military installations of some importance, and about which I truthfully could offer no useful insight. I apologized for being unable to help him, and while I’m certain each of us was able to see through the other’s ruse, he was gracious enough to let me keep one photograph he claimed not to care about in the slightest, one featuring a bald monk of Caucasian origin in a red robe against a backdrop of intertwining sandalwood and fig trees. Even without his brilliant blue eyes, I would have recognized the face of Johann Brandt anywhere, only there was something about the photograph…
Had the photograph not obviously been recently developed—and in color—I might have believed it to be much older than it was, for Brandt appeared not to have aged a single day since last I saw him nearly seventeen years ago.
As I sit here now, with the photograph by my side, I find myself on the brink of a revelation of the highest order.
Paranthropus and Australopithecus. One developed as a parallel branch that ended in extinction; the other as one in a long line of evolutionary progressions that culminated in the current form of man. They evolved independently of one another and only the passage of time proved which one held the most advantageous adaptations. Is it not possible that whatever impetus caused the changes in Eberhardt could have stimulated mutations of a completely different type in Brandt? After all, he demonstrated the most acute symptoms of the preliminary stages of the infection. Or perhaps transformation is more apt. Is it possible that while Eberhardt became an outwardly superior physical specimen like Australopithecus, Brandt’s mutations developed internally, like those of the ill-fated Paranthropus lineage? Could he have developed an immune system somehow resistant to the rigorous conditions of aging in much the same way the initial infection of chickenpox serves as a life-long inoculation against further outbreaks? And if this is truly the case, then what other miraculous feats is his evolved body capable of?
There is only one way to find out for sure, and if it takes the rest of my days, I will uncover the truth, for deep in the black heart of Motuo mankind is evolving into something more…something to which I am no longer content to merely bear witness, but rather a process in which I need to be an active participant.
Whatever the cost.
Forty-nine
Dbang-po Monastery
Himalayan Mountains
Tibet Autonomous Region
People’s Republic of China
October 23rd
Six Days Later
Brooks bolted upright with a loud hiss of air. The pain struck him first, like two knives simultaneously thrust into the sides of his chest. He grabbed for the source and found a small tube projecting from either side, near his armpits. They produced a hissing sound that corresponded with each breath. He traced their length and found them sealed with a gauze-like fabric.
He remembered the claws piercing his back and latching onto his ribs. The subsequent pain of his lungs collapsing, gasping to keep them inflated while his pleural cavity filled with blood.
They were chest tubes of a sort, ports through which the excess fluids could be suctioned from his chest.
His eyes made a crackling sound when he opened them, but he closed them right away. The light was too bright to see anything. He shielded his eyes with his hand and tried again.
The sun blazed through a wood-framed window set high into a wall composed of what looked like hand-carved bricks. He raised his other hand to block out the sun and surveyed the room around him.
He was on a wood slab barely wider than his shoulders. An orange- and red-stripe
d blanket covered his legs. There were candles melted to a crate that served as a nightstand. Images of the Buddha had been painted directly onto the walls so long ago the paint had cracked and fallen off in entire sections. A single golden Buddha statue sat in a recess inside the wall to his left, its right hand raised palm out in the Abhaya mudra. The swastika on its chest had been painted red to match the silk drapes hanging to either side of it.
He flung off the blanket and realized he was completely naked beneath it. The room was barely the size of a prison cell and there was no sign of his clothes or any of his other possessions.
“Adrianne.”
His throat was so dry the word came out as a croak.
He swung his legs over the side and tried to stand. His feet filled with pins and needles and he promptly crumpled to the floor. He could see the outer hallway through the gap underneath the door. There was no lock on the black iron handle.
Brooks pulled the blanket up over his shoulders, wrapped it around him, and held it closed in front of his waist. After several minutes he was able to stand and went to the window in hopes of identifying where he was. At first he saw only sky. He had to stand on his toes to see the rest of the world far below him. The pine trees could have been a hundred feet tall, but they looked like toothpicks from way up here. They covered the rolling hills and bathed the deep ravines in shadow. Snowcapped mountains rose from the horizon and into the clouds. They looked like the Himalayas, although not from any angle he had seen before.
He pushed the window open and recoiled from the cold air. He leaned out and looked to either side. A sheer escarpment to the left. Tibetan granite. Frosted pine trees growing from every ledge. There were buildings to his right. White pagodas with red tile roofs connected by narrow wooden bridges. Beyond them, nothing but sky and steep mountains covered with trees and granite faces hundreds of feet tall.
Yaks grunted and huffed in the distance.
He tightened his grip on the blanket and shuffled toward the door. The mere act of getting out of bed had sapped him of his energy. He felt as though he were made of ice and might shatter if he fell. His joints were stiff and ached, but not nearly as badly as his head. The fever had broken, though, and he no longer had the taste of blood in his mouth.
The door didn’t open onto a hallway as he’d expected, but instead a narrow flagstone terrace with thin wooden rails. He followed it in the only direction he could go, toward a passage in the granite. It led to a karst formation far grander than he would have ever guessed. Candles burned on every natural shelf formed by the flowstone. The stalactites cast flickering shadows across the domed roof. The pillars where the stalactites and stalagmites met had been sculpted into tall chortens and hollowed at waist height to house golden prayer wheels. A dozen monks sat on square pillows on the bare ground, hunched over large books with quills moving in their hands.
They didn’t appear to notice him as he passed between them, looking down upon their work. He couldn’t read the Tibetan characters, but he could certainly decipher the pictures. He recognized Warren and the markings used to show the wounds he had suffered, which brought back the memory of his colleague in the casket with painful clarity. The drawing reminded him of the kind forensic artists produced for murder victims. He saw Zhang, too, only the artist had moved on to detailed drawings of his hands and face. The various lacerations were marked and connected by straight lines to notations he couldn’t decipher.
Other monks labored over anatomical sketches of a different kind. He saw a human brain in both coronal and sagittal cross-section, the structures and functions clearly marked. One demonstrated acute cerebral inflammation and the points of contact with the skull where the cerebrospinal fluid, which protected the delicate tissues, had been shunted by the swelling. The resultant necrosis was largely localized, but also radiated inward toward the thalamus and hippocampus.
Another picture showed a brain both similar and completely different. While the shape remained constant, there was a dramatic increase in the size and depth of the convolutions in the gray matter and a wider layer of CSF to buffer the brain from swelling against the confines of the cranium.
When Brooks looked up again, the man he’d seen earlier stood before him, a scar on the side of his neck where Brooks had cut him with the pick.
“Where’s Adrianne?” Brooks asked.
The man stared at him with a vacant expression, his blue eyes affectless.
“The girl I was with. Das Mädchen. Wo ist das Mädchen?”
The monk turned and started to walk away.
Brooks grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around.
All of the monks around him jumped to their feet and stood at attention like soldiers.
Brooks didn’t care. He pulled the monk closer and growled right into his face, enunciating each word slowly and carefully.
“Wo. Ist. Das. Mädchen?”
The monk glanced over Brooks’s shoulder at the others, who hesitated for a moment before sitting down once more. He then looked pointedly at Brooks’s fists, balled in his robe, then up into his eyes.
“Please,” Brooks whispered. “Bitte.”
He released the robe and watched as the monk walked away from him. He followed at a distance, knowing with complete certainty that his body wouldn’t hold up to any kind of physical confrontation.
The monk lit a lantern from a candle burning on the wall and ducked through another fissure in the mountain. The tubes in Brooks’s chest prodded his insides when he stooped and walked in a crouch for a good ten feet before the walls again receded. The passage wound back to his left and opened onto another terrace.
The monk led him through a sparse room with a wooden slab for a bed and a blanket folded neatly on top of it. There were black and white photographs of Tibetan men and women dressed as though from another age. The young man with them was smiling and proud. Brooks recognized him as the man who’d been drawing what he speculated to be an evolved version of the human brain.
The doorway led to another room. It was identically furnished, only the pictures were of a young man and woman. The man wore the uniform and turban of the British Indian Army, the woman a silk dress. The vehicle behind them looked like it had been ripped right out of the twenties.
A wooden bridge spanned a gap between rock ledges. If it broke, he’d easily fall five hundred feet before encountering the top of the pine-covered slope.
They entered another room. Same bed, same blanket. Same black and white photographs, only these featured a man who couldn’t have been out of his twenties, posing with a young woman in a skirt and a swastika pin on her blouse. She wore her hair like Brooks’s grandmother had. There was the man again, this time mugging with four other boys, all of whom Brooks recognized from the pictures they’d found in the trunks. He looked up at the monk, who smiled sadly and nodded.
Brooks took the frame down from the wall, turned it over, and removed the backing. He slid the picture out and read the names written on the back. He flipped it over and compared them. Again they didn’t match what he expected, but at least they were consistent. Augustus König stood to the left with his rifle propped against his shoulder, a broad smile on his face, and a dead shapi at his feet. Kurt Eberhardt knelt over it, pulling its long hair up to his nose like a beard, his eyes alight with mischief. Otto Metzger stood over him with a crooked half-grin and a canteen of water he prepared to pour down the back of his friend’s shirt. Beside him was the man standing before Brooks now, a slender man with a pair of calipers protruding from his breast pocket. A man identified as Johann Brandt. And next to him was the man Brooks had known by that name for nearly a decade, a man whose reputation in the field of anthropology was above reproach, a man whose very life was built upon a lie.
A man named Hermann Wolff.
Brandt took the picture from him and stared at it for a long moment before setting it down on his bed. He led Brooks out the door and down a narrow flagstone stairway toward a building larger than all o
f the others. The gold eaves and finial and the red roof were faded by exposure to the elements. The whitewash was nearly scoured to the bare stone by the abrasive wind.
It towered three stories over them as they approached along a path through a large garden miraculously held in place against the cliff by a retaining wall of stacked granite. Prayer flags snapped overhead from where they’d been strung from the balustrades to various outcroppings on the cliff and the bridge itself. Lotus flowers of every color and hue bloomed to either side of the path. Amid them stood miniature chortens roughly three feet tall and hand-chiseled with the utmost precision, right down to the finest detail. Some were so old they were nearly worn smooth by the abrasive wind, while others were so new the mica in the granite reflected the sun. They weren’t as grand as the two-story chortens erected all across Tibet and India to house the ashes of fallen monks, but Brooks still felt as though he were a giant walking through the land of the dead.
And then the truth hit him.
That was exactly what this was. The chortens were urns housing the ashes of the deceased.
This was where Brandt was leading him. He’d demanded to see Adrianne, and now here he was.
He looked all around and saw a chorten that couldn’t have seen more than a couple rains. Incense sticks stood from a sand-filled pot and the prayer flags draped over the lotus plants had yet to wither.
Brandt said something to him, but the words eluded him. He walked from the path in a daze and stared down at the newest chorten. The grass was still dimpled from the footsteps of the mourners who’d cast offerings at the foot of the elaborate urn. He fell to his knees and let his head hang. Tears streamed down his cheeks and welled from his chin.
Fearful Symmetry: A Thriller Page 31