“Interesting . . .”
The buds pinched off and floated among the fimbriae. He grabbed his iPad and played the 528 Hz tone. The buds rooted themselves where they were and tapped into the existing network.
Sound caused transformation and electricity triggered multiplication, implying either that the threat of electrocution had caused asexual reproduction as a means of self-preservation or in response to the increased demand for conductivity. Considering the nature of the response to the higher-pitched sound, he felt confident excluding the former explanation, but if the latter were true, what would be the biological or evolutionary advantage of being able to conduct a charge? Maybe the conductivity was like the sound in the sense that the organism only responded properly to the correct frequency and he simply hadn’t applied the right electrical charge for the system of function at peak efficiency.
Two steps forward, one step back. That was science all right.
Friden slid back from his desk and rubbed his eyes. Hopefully things would make sense after getting something in his stomach and attempting to drown himself in multiple pots of coffee. He poured some food into Speedy’s dish, grabbed his iPad on the way out the door, and opened the file containing the archaea’s genome so he could peruse it while he ate. Maybe there was something hidden among the sequences of DNA that he’d missed.
29
EVANS
Evans had dived once on vacation as a kid, but this wasn’t anywhere close to the same thing. The dry suit was heavy and unwieldy and he could still feel the coldness of the water through the multiple layers of clothing underneath. The darkness didn’t help, either. The lights mounted to his mask illuminated the water directly in front of his face, yet did precious little to give him even a general impression of his surroundings. When it came right down to it, he wasn’t the right man for this particular job, but there was no one more qualified to evaluate what he’d seen on the feed from Kelly’s camera.
She was waiting for him outside the entrance, which was unlike any he’d seen before. The inner structure, however, was reminiscent of the Great Pyramid of Giza the way both ascending and descending corridors branched from the primary passage. He followed her upward through the narrow tunnel until she crawled out of the water into a massive vaulted chamber reminiscent of Giza’s Great Gallery, at least in terms of its overall structure. The style, however, was a fascinating amalgam of ancient cultures and styles. The statues with their magnificent anatomical detail and artisanship were like something from the classical age of Greece or Rome, while the gods themselves were a cross between those worshipped by the Egyptians and Sumerians, and yet completely unlike either.
“Are you coming?” Kelly asked from the far side of the chamber, where her lights illuminated a hole in the wall near the floor.
“Yeah.”
Evans took off his flippers and reluctantly followed her on his hands and knees through the tunnel into a large room analogous to the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid in structure, although entirely unlike it in every other respect.
“Wow.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Kelly said. “You can see why I wanted to wait for you before going any farther.”
Evans stepped cautiously into the room. The floor was smooth, the stones perfectly joined. A greenish-blue spiral pattern wound outward from the center, where a single column supported the weight of the high ceiling. It was covered with the same oxidation as the design beneath his feet, but it scraped off easily enough to reveal the copper underneath. He glanced down at the pattern carefully worked into the stone and imagined this room as it must have been long ago. With the firelight reflecting from the polished metal, the effect would have been breathtaking.
“What is it supposed to be?” Kelly asked.
Evans could only shake his head. He simply didn’t know. The ancient Egyptians used the pillars inside their temples to tell a story. Most utilized a papyrus motif to illustrate their creation myth—man being birthed from the primordial marsh—but this one seemed entirely ornamental in a way he attributed more to the showcasing of wealth than anything remotely spiritual. The ancient Egyptians and Sumerians were the first to mine copper ore, although this structure pre-dated them by thousands of years. They principally alloyed it with tin to make bronze for the sake of adornment, as copper itself was considered ordinary and unattractive.
A lone egress marred the opposite wall. It was roughly the same size as the one through which Evans had just crawled, although nowhere near as deep. He crossed the room and peered inside. The tunnel appeared incomplete. It terminated against a flat stone barrier maybe eight feet in. He didn’t see the vertical shaft branching upward from it until he was all the way inside.
“Did you go up here?” he called. His voice echoed from both above and behind him at the same time.
“Up where?”
“I’ll take that as a no.”
Evans twisted his torso and cautiously rose to his full height. The blocks to his left were staggered in such a way as to create a staircase running diagonally behind the rear wall before doubling back upon themselves and continuing higher. He was nearly to the top when he caught a reflection from something on the ground. It was a tarnished silver stickpin roughly two inches long with an ornate T-shape inside of a circle at the end. Upon closer inspection, the design looked more like the elaborate cross-guards and blade of a broadsword.
“This shouldn’t be here,” he said.
“What shouldn’t?” Kelly asked as she rounded the bend behind him.
He held up the pin for her to see, then closed it in his gloved hand.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Beats the heck out of me.”
He continued upward until a gap between structural stones opened upon a chamber maybe half as wide as the one below it, but easily twice as tall. There was an elevated black ring set into the middle of the floor that almost looked as though it had been designed to hold the pedestal of an enormous statue that was conspicuously absent. Thick copper bands radiated outward from it like the rays of the sun. Where they met the walls, they continued upward in straight lines all the way to the roof, where they again traveled inward and converged directly overhead.
Evans stood in the center of the ring and turned in a circle. His lights made the oxidized copper in the walls appear to turn around him like the bars of a carousel. There was no other way out of the chamber, at least as far as he could see. He crouched and used the blunt end of the stickpin to chisel away the black crust covering the ring, revealing the silver metal underneath it.
He stood once more with a perplexed expression on his face and turned to Kelly.
“What’s down the descending corridor?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then I suppose it’s time we found out.”
He brushed past her and started down the steep stairs. Something about the pin gnawed at him. It was more than the fact that silver wasn’t even first mined until five thousand years ago or that it had been formed into what could have passed for a lapel pin. If they were right about this structure being somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand years old, then none of these metals should have been here. Whatever society flourished here would have been more advanced than any other on the face of the planet for another five to ten thousand years, and yet here it sat, frozen beneath two vertical miles of ice and at the bottom of a lake carpeted with the bones of its former inhabitants.
What in the name of God happened here?
Evans crossed the spiral and passed the column. Crawled through the tunnel and blew past the statues. He barely remembered to put on his flippers before crawling into the hole and propelling himself downward into the water. He had to contort his body to pass from the ascending corridor back into the descending, where the current guided him deeper into the darkness. He’d gone maybe fifty feet when a small passage opened above him. He paused only long enough to acknowledge its existence before continuing downward to where the tunn
el leveled off.
Everything was beginning to take shape in his mind. None of the walls were covered with the sludge that had formed on everything else on the bottom of the lake, which meant that the pyramid had been sealed until they figured out how to open it, and yet somehow someone had to have gotten inside to lose the pin. The only other people to lay claim to this part of the continent were the Norwegians, who undoubtedly wouldn’t have granted Richards’s request to build his station here had they known about the ruins directly below it, and the Germans, who’d installed their communications center right in the mouth of the tunnel that led straight into the lake. They must have also found a passage that led them into this pyramid, and the only other way in had to be from underground, which would explain the reports of flooding at Snow Fell.
The passage opened into a larger flooded chamber much like the one beneath the Great Pyramid, in the center of which the supposed bottomless pit was clogged with debris. This one had a similar hole, although it remained open. The current flowing into it dragged everything that wasn’t physically attached to the structure across the ground, over the elevated rim, and down into the shaft.
Evans leaned back and braced his hands on the ground, but only managed to slow his advance. He barely glanced at the walls around him, which, unlike the higher levels, were bare and utilitarian. They weren’t composed of blocks like the rest of the pyramid, but rather from an existing cavern that had been reshaped to meet their needs.
He slid along the ground until his heels contacted the rim of the well and slowly flattened himself against it, wrapping his arms around it and leaning as far as he dared over the hole. His lights illuminated twin blurs of motion that from above resembled spinning paddle wheels and the lava tube underneath them through which a subterranean river flowed.
30
JADE
Jade sat on the edge of the elevator platform, beneath one of the weak lights, and opened her laptop on her thighs. She hadn’t even been down here for half a day and already the lack of natural light was beginning to affect her psyche. She couldn’t imagine how horrible a place like this would be in the winter when the sun set for months at a time, especially in such close confines and with so many other people. She was a solitary creature by nature. Not that she minded being in the company of others, but she needed her own space to which to retreat when she wanted time alone in her own head, a space a whole lot bigger than her quote-unquote suite in the research station.
The truth was that she was somewhat socially awkward and the effort of maintaining an amiable façade was exhausting. The others’ voices, their mannerisms, their mere presence was already grating on her nerves. If the elevator hadn’t been recalled to the surface to bring down the engineering crew and their equipment, she would have happily commandeered it and reveled in the silence all the way to the top. Immersing herself in her work offered her last hope of escape.
Her computer had already analyzed the data from the LiDar scan and reconstructed it into a three-dimensional model of the inside of the now-collapsed building they were calling a temple, whether that was actually the case or not. The reconstruction was so accurate that it was even more lifelike than a photograph, which could only capture details in two dimensions. This program essentially created a hologram that allowed her to visualize even the most minute details, like the depth of the imperfections in the stone or the striations in the cortex of a bone, and turn it on any axis in order to examine those details from every conceivable perspective.
Her first thought was that several individuals, possibly a family unit, had gathered their livestock and taken shelter inside the structure before some unknown catastrophe struck. Now that she had the ability to study the scene as a whole, however, a new narrative was beginning to take shape. The program allowed her to filter out the overlying sediment, allowing for increased visualization of the remains. Anya had described them as abandonment context, which was accurate in the strictest sense, but their overall arrangement lacked the randomness Jade associated with historical excavations and more closely resembled what she would expect to find in the wake of a violent attack.
The animal bones were clustered together as one would expect to find in the den of a predatory species. For the sake of clarity, she divided the other remains into human and nonhuman hominins. The human remains were similarly gathered, while those of the nonhuman hominins reflected what one might traditionally consider abandoned, as though these individuals had simply died and no one had survived to bury them.
In many ways it reminded her of a case she’d worked in conjunction with the ATF maybe ten years ago in Brownsville, Texas. Several undercover agents had infiltrated the Gulf Cartel’s arms-trafficking operation, which funneled drug money into the U.S. and weapons back into Tamaulipas through Metamoros. The ATF had received actionable intel from one of its men on the inside and had surrounded the warehouse where the weapons were stockpiled, but something had gone wrong. Agents had heard shots fired inside and attempted to penetrate the building when it suddenly caught fire. By the time they were able to enter the smoldering ruins, everyone inside had been dead for some time.
The blaze had been deliberately started by the smugglers in an attempt to cover their escape, but backfired when they found the tunnel they’d dug underneath the building had collapsed. Their remains had been found in the same room as the undercover agents they’d executed, where they’d tried to barricade themselves from the fire, which worked remarkably well and might have saved their lives had they been able to keep the smoke out. Their asphyxiated bodies had been found in similar positions to those of the nonhuman hominins, leaning against the walls where they’d been overcome by the smoke, while their victims had been heaped in the center of the room like refuse, their clothes stripped from them in a futile effort to block the vents and the gaps under the doors.
The walls had been similarly gouged and scored by the various implements the traffickers had employed in vain to hack and carve through the cinderblock walls, right down to their final, desperate attempt to claw their way to freedom with their own fingers, which Jade believed was exactly what had happened inside the temple. If she looked at the submerged scene in that light, she could see how the rubble in the doorway could have been from a barricade that collapsed with the rest of the building. That didn’t explain the teeth marks in the bones, however, or the fact that they’d been broken to harvest the marrow, unless they hadn’t barricaded themselves inside, but rather had been sealed inside, where they’d survived for as long as possible on the human and animal remains.
Crunching rocks announced Anya’s approach. She climbed up onto the platform and plopped down beside Jade without asking her permission.
“Looks like the laser scanner worked perfectly,” Anya said. “You can even see the reliefs carved into the stone.”
“That’s the whole point.”
“You use this system for crime scenes?”
“Some.”
“I would imagine that most are pretty easy for someone with your skills to read.”
“Most killers aren’t the brightest people. They tend to leave trails that anyone with a modicum of common sense can follow blindfolded.”
Anya laughed.
“That’s what we try to do in archeology, too, only the majority of the clues have been destroyed by the elements or buried by time.”
“That’s the difference. In my field, I can’t afford to guess.”
“Finding that conehead must be eating you alive then.”
Jade glanced at Anya from the corner of her eye. In a way, the younger girl reminded her of herself, right down to the sarcastic quips.
“You could say that.”
“The one I found in Russia was the same way. Totally out of place with her surroundings and not really buried as much as cast aside.”
“Two different scenarios, I assure you.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Anya drew her knees to her chest and turned around so as to better see t
he others where they’d gathered around the makeshift command center on the opposite side of the platform. “It was the deformed cranium that got me thinking . . . what if the conehead wasn’t supposed to be there? I mean, the remains were totally unlike all of the others we recovered from the site, all of which had been formally interred.”
“I found mine in a mass grave filled with hundreds of other people, none of whom should have been there.”
“You’re missing my point. What if the act of the burial was coincidental? What if the conehead wasn’t part of the village’s population, but rather separate from it?”
“Like she just wandered out of the jungle in time to get shot with all of the others? That would be some pretty lousy timing.”
“Not if there was something that served to entice her.”
“What could possibly entice her? The sound of gunfire? The screams of the dying?”
“Maybe the smell of all that death.”
“That’s one hell of a supposition.”
“I found my conehead on the fringes of a village fortified against an unknown enemy and later abandoned and burned to the ground. Where did you find yours again?” Anya smirked and hopped to her feet. “It looks like there’s something going on over there. Care to join me?”
Jade glanced back at the others, who encircled the laptop connected to the station. She recognized the chief engineer on the screen, the one who’d been so caught up in his work that he hadn’t even acknowledged them when they walked past. Rubley, she thought. Something like that anyway.
“Give me a minute,” Jade said and watched Anya cross the platform before returning to the 3-D model on her laptop. She pictured the three nonhuman hominins sitting inside the stone room with no way out and only the carcasses on the floor to sustain them as they desperately clawed at the walls. She tried to imagine what they could have done to warrant being entombed in such a ghastly manner. And she thought of a deformed girl with the scent of raw and burning meat in her nostrils sneaking from the forest in time to take a bullet. Suddenly she couldn’t help but wonder if Anya was right and the presence of the humans in relation to the nonhuman hominins really was coincidental. They might as well have been animals, like the rest of the bones, if their sole purpose had been to serve as food.
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