Subhuman

by Michael McBride

  “Surely the minister recognizes the importance of this discovery and is eager to take a look for himself.”

  “I know nothing about that, sir. Our orders are to deliver this package to you and escort you back to Cairo.”

  He held out the package and waited patiently for Evans to take it. The moment his hand was free, the officer leaned against the hood and lit a cigarette.

  Evans glanced back at Andrea before turning the package over and over in his hands. It was roughly the size of a notebook, wrapped in plain brown paper, and sealed with a red sticker with Arabic writing that he had to tear to open the parcel. The manila envelope inside was taped closed. He peeled the tape, lifted the flap, and shook the contents to the edge where he could reach them. There was an iPad, a plane ticket from Cairo to Johannesburg, South Africa, and a photograph of remains nearly identical to those in the cave behind him, only a whole lot less ancient.

  He looked up in surprise at the officer, who merely blew smoke from his nostrils and asked in a distracted tone, “Shall we be on our way then?”

  Evans couldn’t find the voice to respond. He just turned without a word and headed back to the camp to gather his belongings.

  9

  JADE

  O. R. Tambo International Airport

  Johannesburg, South Africa

  Jade still didn’t know what in the world she was doing there, let alone how she’d talked herself into dropping everything and boarding a commercial plane in Maiduguri bound for, of all places, Johannesburg. She figured it was only a matter of time before her work took her to South Africa, which the U.N. was monitoring closely for crimes of genocide as more than 70,000 Caucasians had been murdered since the African National Congress rose to power, but she hadn’t figured it would be this soon. Then again, this wasn’t really work, at least not as it pertained to her contract with the International Criminal Court. The U.N. had been surprisingly happy to release her from her obligations in Nigeria and had even been kind enough to provide transportation to the airport at whatever ungodly hour she’d been awakened.

  She’d been soundly asleep in her hotel room in Gubio, twenty miles southeast of the burned village of Musari, when she was roused by a sharp knock on the door. At that point, she couldn’t have been asleep for more than a couple of hours, just long enough to find herself disoriented and uncertain of where she was. Her notes had been spread across the comforter covering her legs, and her computer was open on her lap. She’d left on the lamp, which revealed a gecko staring down at her from the wall.

  A second knock had startled her so badly she’d knocked her laptop to the floor. She’d been halfway to the door when she realized she was only wearing a nightshirt and panties and scoured the floor for whatever pants she’d been wearing the night before. She’d had the presence of mind to don her hijab before answering the door.

  The Canadian peacekeeper Billings had retreated a step and apologized for disturbing her in such a manner. By then she’d recovered just enough of her wits to feign a reasonable measure of outrage. She hadn’t seen him since that first day in Musari, where she’d spent forty-eight hours straight documenting the atrocities of Boko Haram. There had been 204 people in that mass grave, each of them with wounds that needed to be photographed and causes of death that needed to be meticulously logged. Women and men alike had to be examined for rape and samples collected from their violated genitalia, scraped from beneath their fingernails, and swabbed from their teeth in the hope of building a database of DNA that could be used during the prosecution.

  Without the aid of dental records, they’d only identified a third of the victims when she returned to her hotel, emotionally drained and physically exhausted. She was beginning to suspect they would never be able to identify all of them, including the girl with the cranial defect who’d been buried beneath the mother and her infant. Her mouth had been disproportionately small, her chin too narrow, and her eyes had seemed to bulge from their sockets. Beare-Stevenson Syndrome, a genetic condition that caused the bones of the skull to fuse prematurely, often presented in a similar manner.

  Jade was ashamed of her initial reaction, which was undoubtedly the same one that poor girl had endured her entire short life, one of shock and revulsion at a face that had not only looked different, but alien. In the end, though, the girl’s deformity had brought her a swift and merciful end compared to the other twenty-six abducted women, who were still out there being abused in ways Jade refused to even imagine.

  Her first thought had been that Billings was making a romantic overture. He’d been holding something behind his back and wearing an expression she couldn’t interpret. Every other time she’d seen him there had been no mistaking who was in charge. His uncertainty had caused the fine hairs to rise along the backs of her arms. He’d handed her a file folder clearly marked Top Secret and waited in the threshold until he’d politely suggested that she invite him inside, where he stood with his back against the door while she perused the contents.

  The first couple of pages had caught her off guard as they pertained more to her work stateside in conjunction with the offices of various medical examiners. As a forensic anthropologist, she was often called upon to appear in court as an expert witness in relation to evidence collected from crime scenes, specifically that related to osteology and physical remains. While DNA testing was becoming more widely accepted, misinterpretations and flat-out mishandling of samples had tainted its reputation and had led to the release of innocent men wrongly convicted and guilty men who went on to kill again. Thus it was imperative that someone like Dr. Jade Liang, with her impeccable credentials and respected position in the field, be willing to sign off on potentially fallible results in order to sway a jury.

  There were several pages of PCR—polymerase chain reaction—tests that consisted of rows of black lines of varying width reminiscent of bar codes, if they were squashed and stretched like taffy. The labels had been redacted, although she could tell there were four different samples being compared. The PCR worked by using an enzyme to chop up segments of DNA, which were then placed in adjacent wells and exposed to an electrical current that caused them to flow through a gelatinous medium that separated them by size. This allowed for the visual comparison of similar samples that may have only differed by seemingly insignificant amounts of DNA, like with paternity testing.

  All four of the rows were nearly identical, suggesting a large amount of shared genetic material. One section had been circled by hand in red and didn’t correlate to the other three. The following page had shown the genomic makeup of that small section in detail, broken down into paired horizontal lines composed of four colors, almost like the bars on a soldier’s dress uniform, and represented the actual pairing of nucleic acids that composed the DNA helix. Above and below each line had been the combinations of amino acids that formed individual genes.

  “This can’t be right,” she’d said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “These lab results . . . they’re—”

  “Above my security clearance, ma’am.”

  She’d plopped down on her bed and wondered if she was still asleep and dreaming.

  Now here she was, nine hours later, sitting on a private plane with honest-to-God propellers and pontoons instead of wheels, with three people she’d never seen in her life and a pilot who looked a whole lot more like a bear than a man, without the slightest clue as to where she was going.

  Jade watched the tarmac streak past through the porthole windows of the Basler BT-67. She wished she knew their destination. It seemed illogical to fly her down to the southern tip of the African continent just to head back north again, and a plane this size couldn’t hold enough fuel to reach Argentina to the west or Australia to the east. Maybe Madagascar? The only thing to the south was ice and snow, neither of which appealed to her in the slightest.

  There were six high-backed leather chairs in the cabin: four on one side, two on the other, facing each other across small tables to eit
her side of the offset main aisle. The man across from her had sun-bleached hair and skin so tan it accentuated the age lines on his face. She thought he was probably a software designer or money-market manager, something that paid a lot and demanded little, allowing him to spend the majority of his time surfing, at least until she noticed the muscles in his forearms and the crescents of dirt under his fingernails and revised her guess to construction worker.

  The girl beside him wore a heavy gray sweater with skintight black jeans and looked like she hadn’t been outside in months. Her black-framed glasses were disproportionately large and her bangs were short. One side of her hair had a green streak, the other red. She barely looked old enough to drive, let alone to get a tattoo of doves in flight behind her ear. Her left hand moved restlessly, her fingertips tapping a frenetic rhythm on the pad of her thumb.

  The man to her left had his eyes closed, but she could tell that he wasn’t sleeping. He appeared to be soaking in everything around him without openly doing so. He had broad shoulders and a tapered waist, but carried himself in a manner that somehow seemed to diminish his size. Everything about him was so ordinary that she had to look at him several times before she was able to get a good idea of what he actually looked like. She wondered if he tried to make himself look just like everyone else, anonymous even in such close quarters.

  The plane banked to the south, offering a panoramic view of the city sprawled below them, the spike of the Hillbrow Tower driven into its heart. The prospect of being at the mercy of forces beyond her control was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating. She was grateful that Billings had agreed to track the GPS signal from her cell phone so at least someone would know where in the world she was.

  “Everyone settle in,” the pilot said. “Get some sleep if you can. We’ve got a long flight ahead of us.”

  The red sun bled through the windows as it descended toward the horizon. The plane gained altitude and the land fell away beneath her. The ocean shimmered as though countless rubies were submerged just below the surface.

  She knew it was only a matter of time before the waves turned to ice.

  10

  ROCHE

  25,000 feet above the Southern Ocean

  Martin Roche had been instinctively skeptical of William Connor. Then again, he was instinctively skeptical of everyone. It was more than his nature; it was a consequence of his training and of reading literally tens of thousands of private emails in which people bared the darkness inside their very souls. He knew what people thought about crop circles and how little respect they had for those who studied them. Even the most generous among them considered his field a pseudoscience at best, while most were quick to make snide comments about little green men, which was why he never discussed his findings with anyone.

  He posted his research on his website, which he’d gone to great lengths to ensure couldn’t be found without searching the right combinations of words that only people like him would know, and even then it didn’t appear on any of the major search engines. There was no mention of who he was, where he lived, or anything that could be considered even remotely personal.

  It was there he organized his photographs, temperature and radiation graphs, germination data, and every other quantifiable trait. There was only a handful of others who’d been granted administrative permissions so they could add their data to his own, and he’d never once spoken to any of them directly, online or off, let alone in person. The way he saw it, he was treading a fine line when it came to his agreement with the NSA. He might not have been sharing agency secrets, but with the way the news of crop circle discoveries was suppressed, he was obviously poking around where someone might not want him to go, someone with power enough to manipulate the mainstream media and dictate the dissemination of information on the Internet, and there were only a few government agencies, and even fewer private individuals, with that kind of power.

  Roche knew how paranoid that made him sound, but he’d eavesdropped on too many phone calls to think for a second that there were any secrets left in the world, which was why he hadn’t been surprised in the slightest when the initial contact was made through his website. Granted, the email had been sent semi-anonymously from a Hotmail account, but he hadn’t been out of the game so long that he’d forgotten how to track the sender’s IP address, which corresponded to a business computer registered to a man named William Connor. Fortunately, Roche still had friends inside the NSA who owed him a few favors, and within a matter of hours he had everything he could ever want to know about William Stephen Connor. Distinguished career as a Navy SEAL. Highly decorated: Silver Star, Purple Heart, Combat Action Ribbon, Afghanistan Campaign Medal. Medically discharged after a bullet to the chest cost him a lobe of his lung. Lured into the private sector by an executive security firm in Los Angeles that catered to the entertainment industry. Went freelance and spent the last six years in the employ of a venture capitalist named Hollis Richards, who seemed to have a sixth sense when it came to betting on a long shot and who spent a sizable amount of his ungodly fortune in ways that piqued both Roche’s personal and professional curiosity.

  By the time he went to bed on the day he received the cryptic email with the attached photograph and the e-ticket to Johannesburg, he’d already determined exactly where he was going, if not why. He remained on high alert and kept his instincts attuned to his surroundings. He’d known SEALs in the service, men who were every bit as smart as they were lethal. More important, he’d learned much about men with enough money to influence current events, and not only did Richards qualify, he’d done an exceptional job of keeping out of the public eye, at least until a subsidiary of his private corporation reached a land-lease agreement with the Norwegian government and backed what on the surface appeared to be a geological survey of the Drygalski Mountain Range. A routine oil, gas, and mineral survey, however, didn’t require the construction of an arctic research base stocked with state-of-the-art scientific equipment so specialized that Roche had to Google its uses.

  If there was one thing he’d learned in life, it was that knowledge was the currency of power, and it was best not to let anyone know how much he had, so he sat quietly and discreetly studied the others, who appeared every bit as uncomfortable as he was and seemed to know even less. Roche would have recognized them if they were part of the small world of crop circles, in which he sometimes thought he was the only one not actively making a documentary.

  The woman with the dark hair and emerald eyes looked at each of them in turn, nodded to herself as though reaching some sort of decision, and removed a folder from the satchel beneath her seat. When she spread its contents out on the table in front of her, Roche realized that despite everything he had learned, he knew absolutely nothing.

  He recognized the PCR—polymerase chain reaction—tests. He’d commissioned several for various species of crops to determine if whatever made the circles had altered their DNA, but their genes were nothing like these. These had to have come from some higher order of animal, whose relation to his work couldn’t have been less clear.

  “Tell me if one of you can make some sense of this for me,” she said.

  “It’s a PCR test,” the tan guy across from her said.

  “Thank you. I might never have figured that out on my own.”

  “You asked.”

  “No, I asked someone to explain the data to me, because from where I’m sitting, it looks an awful lot like the subject has twenty-four pairs of chromosomes.”

  “That can’t be right,” Tan Guy said. He turned the page so he could better see it and furrowed his brow. “Where did you get this?”

  “You didn’t get the same thing?” Green Eyes looked from him to the younger girl, then settled upon Roche. “That’s not why you’re all here?”

  Tan Guy pulled a folded eight-by-ten photograph from the back pocket of his jeans, opened it, and flattened the creases before handing it to her.

  “Where did you get this?”

&
nbsp; “From the police officer who picked me up. Technically, from the Egyptian Minister of State for Antiquities, but—”

  She spun it so that it was right side up for him and tapped the subject of the photograph.

  “I took this picture.”

  Roche caught a glimpse of a dead girl’s face, her eyes staring blankly at the camera from beneath another woman’s arm.

  “So you can verify its authenticity?”

  “Verify its . . . ? I examined this girl’s remains before personally covering them with a tarp.”

  “Hold up, hold up.” He took his cell phone from the backpack stuffed under his seat and rifled through his pictures until he found the one he wanted. “I took this picture in a cave under the royal tombs in El-‘Amarna less than a week ago.”

  Roche visibly flinched at the sight of it. Very rarely did anything take him by surprise, but the sight of the picture he’d received from the IP address corresponding to William Connor’s computer did.

  Tan Guy cocked his head and stared at him for a long moment before speaking.

  “You’ve seen this, haven’t you?”

  Roche brought up the image he’d received. The composition was different, but there was no doubt the subject was the same. His showed a close-up of a mummified face with deformed features and an oblong head. He set it on the table beside the folded picture of a dead girl he could clearly see shared similar physical traits.

  “What about you?” Green Eyes asked. She nodded to the younger girl, who wore an expression of complete and utter confusion. The tapping of her fingers momentarily ceased, but started right back up when she spoke.

  “I don’t think I’m in the right place.” Her voice trembled, as though she were on the verge of tears. “This isn’t right at all. I don’t know anything about dead bodies. I’m a graduate student in seismology.”

  Her fingers became a blur of motion. She self-consciously tucked her hand under the table she shared with Roche.