by Bill DeSmedt
Jeremy Bonaventure, ink still drying on his doctorate in classical civilizations, was eager to try his luck in the hunt for the Minoan equivalent of a Rosetta Stone. Crete was only to be a brief stopover en route, until he met the guide the Cretan Antiquities Administration had assigned him.
Ariadni Kalimanakis was a raven-haired beauty almost thirteen years Jeremy’s junior. A first-year archaeology major interning that summer at the museum in Iraklion, she had, thanks to her excellent English, been stuck with the job of babysitting a shy, bookish American.
Marianna smiled in her half-sleep at the unlikely pair, the scion of San Francisco society and the Greek fisherman’s daughter, touring the palaces at Knossos, the dig at Taras—anywhere and everywhere the tablets, door lintels, and other artifacts bearing traces of Linear A were to be found. It was mid-July before they finally boarded a packet-boat for the day-long trip to Thira.
Ariadni remained lost in thought all through that long afternoon, but by the time they docked she had made her choice. She knew full well it could spell ruin, not only for her own reputation, but for the honor of her family. Yet over the past weeks she had grown to love Jeremy for his gentleness, his breadth of mind, his depth of spirit. And she was not one to deny her deepest feelings, no matter the cost.
At sunset they left their pension and wandered up into the gentle, grassy hills above the village of Emborion. There, on that warm July night, with the full moon a shield of beaten silver rising out of Homer’s wine-dark sea, she gave herself to him.
It was a love story Marianna had heard again and again, told in less and less sanitized versions as she grew from childhood to adolescence. Told in exotic accents by a mother young enough almost to be an elder sister. In Marianna’s youthful imagination, this mythos, set at the fountainhead of a romance that still quietly infused her parents’ lives, came to take on the dimensions of an ancient archetype, of mysteries already old when the first Aegean civilization was fresh and new. Once she grew old enough to have the biological details more or less sorted out, she used to fantasize that she had been conceived on that first moon-drenched midsummer night.
Against all expectations, for all their differences of age and origin and temperament, Jeremy and Ariadni had made a life together. A life together filled with joy and learning, twin legacies they had bequeathed to their daughter, their only child. A life together tragically cut short on April 17th 1993, when they chanced to be on Hellenic flight 803 from New York to Athens.
Marianna rolled over and checked the clock on the nightstand again. Half-past three, and she had to be up by six. Up and back on the job, back trying to salvage what she could from the wreckage of her investigation, from the wreckage of her life . . .
The crash investigators were never able to determine if it had been a suicide mission or just a run-of-the-mill hijacking gone terribly awry. All they had to go on were the screams and curses—and the echoing gunshots—on the cockpit voice recorder. That, and the physical evidence strewn across a mountainside in Switzerland: 613,786 twisted pieces of Boeing 747, ranging in size from a tabletop down to a matchbook.
The two people Marianna had loved most in all the world. Who had loved each other more and better than anyone she’d ever known. And all of a sudden they were just—gone.
A hard lesson for someone only eighteen years old—for anyone, at any age: don’t even try holding on to those you love. You can’t.
Love dies.
In the waters off the island of Thira, where everything had once begun, everything came to an end. Marianna stood alone at the stern of her grandfather’s fishing boat and scattered the ashes of her mother and father wide across their beloved wine-dark Aegean. No ceremony. No prayers. Nothing.
Nothing but a single truth.
Love dies.
Yuri Vissarionovich Geladze had no eye for understated elegance, else he could not have failed to discern it in Rusalka’s spacious, high-ceilinged headquarters suite with its varnished, quarter-sawn anigre paneling and matching leather-topped desk. Or in the graying, ruddyfaced man seated behind that desk, draped in a caramel Lanvin blazer, its golden highlights complementing his cream-colored shirt and matching silken cravat. In the whole room, the only item that looked out of place was a distorted metal cylinder, no longer than a pencil and perhaps twice as thick, resting in the man’s manicured hands.
“You sent for me,” Yuri said. Not a question, merely a statement of fact.
Arkady Grigoriyevich Grishin, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Grishin Enterprises International, seemed not to hear. His fingers continued stroking the engraved surface of his talisman. For long moments still his gaze was held by the scene out the panoramic window to his left: a flotilla of small boats, their sails aglow in early morning light, wending their way upriver toward the gray towers of a suspension bridge. It was with seeming reluctance at relinquishing the view that Grishin sighed, pushed his chair back, and looked up.
“Ah, yes, Yuri. Thank you for coming so quickly.” The voice was quiet, cultured, pitched just above a whisper.
Yuri nodded impassively.
“To begin . . .” Grishin leaned back in his chair, and favored Yuri with one of his dazzling smiles. “Permit me to congratulate you on yesterday’s twofold success: a false trail for CROM and their lead investigator dead, all at once.”
Yuri permitted himself a tight smile. “Two flies with one slap,” he said.
“Yes, exactly. Ah, of course, Postrel’nikova herself is to learn nothing of this action on her behalf. Not even Sasha can be told.”
That didn’t merit a response. It wasn’t as if Yuri had, or sought, any social contact with the Project’s chief scientist or its head planner.
“In any case,” Grishin went on, “that is not why I asked you here. It seems another matter has arisen. Merkulov’s people have been tracking it for some time. I had been waiting for them to make some show of initiative on their own, but then . . .” Grishin’s handsome, regular features rearranged themselves to hint at a frown. A jewel-encrusted ring sparkled as his tanned hands pantomimed an indulgent helplessness. “Well, you know Vadim.”
“Yes.” Yuri shrugged. One might as well wait for some show of initiative from a stone as from Vadim Vasiliyevich Merkulov. The GEI security chief’s energies were directed, first and foremost, at protecting his own fat ass. It was, in fact, Merkulov’s continual reluctance to do the necessary that had led to Yuri’s engagement in the first place.
“Then this arrived.” Grishin looked down at the warped metal object resting in his hands. “Apparently the matter is more critical than we had thought. I fear you must miss tomorrow night’s gala in consequence.” He sighed as if breaking this sad news to an honored guest. “Vakhtang will coordinate security in your stead. Please brief him on the status of in-transit and on-site arrangements. But do so quickly. You must leave within the hour; there is a long way to go, in little time.”
Grishin nodded at the travel documents on Yuri’s side of the desk. Yuri took them and glanced over the itinerary: New York to Moscow to Krasnoyarsk to someplace called—Tunguska?
“And here,” Grishin handed him a sheet of thick, creamy paper, folded over twice, “is your subject.” In situations such as these, Grishin exhibited a certain delicacy: he would not speak the name of the victim in the presence of the assassin.
Yuri unfolded the sheet. Clipped to it were several color images—full, three-quarter, and profile shots of a thin, middle-aged man wearing a t-shirt, jeans jacket, and an American cowboy hat. The paper itself contained a single line of type. Unfamiliar English words, transliterated into a Cyrillic approximation.
Yuri sounded it out slowly: “Professor Dzhek Adler. University of Teksas.”
As the old Mikoyan-3 helicopter rattled its way into the heartlands of the Stony Tunguska, Professor Jack Adler’s faded blue eyes drank in the vista he’d come so far to see.
When he really got fired up, Jack’s forty-something, borderline-ugly face—a little t
oo narrow in the jaw, too thin in the lips, too broad at the forehead—radiated an intensity that made him seem almost young and good-looking. And right now he was wholly transfigured by the scene passing before his eyes. For, through gaps in the successor-growth canopy, he could see all the way down to the forest floor. Down to where the old forest lay strewn at the young one’s feet, its rotting trunks all aligned radially inward, pointing like thousands of directional arrows toward the epicenter.
Toward the secret heart of the cosmic mystery of the millennium.
They would not be following the path pointed by those arrows today. Instead, the copter was skirting the Great Swamp’s southwestern perimeter headed for Kulik’s Landing. By craning his neck, Jack could just make it out up ahead.
From the air, the landing on the banks of the sluggish Khushmo River hardly looked like the base camp for this year’s high-tech Tunguska expedition. More like a pioneer outpost, and a deserted one at that. Its scattering of rude log structures stood baking in the ninety-five-degree heat of a Siberian midsummer afternoon, silent and seemingly as forsaken as they had been throughout most of the seventy-odd years since the explorer Leonid Kulik had first built them. Only a pall of woodsmoke gave any evidence of human habitation.
The pilot set the Mi-3 down gingerly, as if the ground might buckle beneath its runners. Not an unreasonable concern: the permafrost that started just a meter below the surface had suffered incalculable stresses in the 1908 impact. That was almost a century ago, but who could say if the oddly fragile stuff was fully healed even now? Better safe than sorry, especially when burdening the treacherous substrate with the weight of a helicopter under load.
One major component of that load was strapped down right beside Jack. He directed a look of mixed affection and chagrin over at his inseparable traveling companion: a bulky black hardshell equipment case marked Fragile and Property of U. Texas, Austin. It was resting innocuously on the floorboards for now, but, soon as the rotors spun to a stop, the fun of moving it would begin all over again. Not a prospect Jack relished: the thing had to be half the size of his desk back at the Austin physics lab, with a mass nearly the equal of his own hundred eighty-five pounds.
Hauling this monster across thirteen time zones to the remotest spot on earth had taxed Jack’s strength and endurance near the limit. And he hadn’t had all that much to start with. Tall and stringy and slightly stooped, he was not what you’d call an imposing physical specimen. That shouldn’t have mattered much: theoretical physics was supposed to be one of those inside jobs with no heavy lifting. Not this time.
With a grudging assist from the pilot, Jack manhandled the unwieldy case out of the hatch and eased it down to the ground alongside the rest of his luggage. He clamped his trademark ten-gallon hat tight down on his head against the downdraft as the chopper lifted off for the return trip to Vanavara.
And left Jack all alone. He looked around, then down at the case. Was he supposed to lug the thing into camp by himself, in this heat? He couldn’t leave it sitting here, that’s for sure. Without the SQUID, the half-million-dollar instrument nestled safe inside the hardshell, there’d be no hope whatsoever of proving the far-out theories of one Dr. John C. Adler, mad cosmologist. With it well, let the Doubting Thomases beware!
Speaking of Doubting Thomases, Jack’s heart sank as he spied the one-man reception committee now emerging from the main lodge and lumbering toward him through clouds of gnats. Jack recognized that burly giant from the snapshots plastered all over the Tomsk University website: the organizer of this year’s expedition, the man who’d done his level best to block Jack’s participation in it: Academician Medvedev himself.
The man’s name, Jack recalled, came from medved—Russian for “bear.” It sure fit. Professor of Planetology and Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Dmitri Pavlovich Medvedev bulked tall and broad, barrel-chested and big-bellied in a way that bespoke muscle rather than flab. An unruly black mane threaded with gray reached almost to his shoulders, a match for the scraggly beard, mustache, and brows that framed his sneering mouth, bulbous nose, and glittering black eyes.
“Academician Medvedev.” Jack held out his hand and launched into standard Russian first-contact protocol: “Ocheripriyatno. Very pleased to meet you. I am—”
“I know who you are, Adler.” Medvedev brushed aside the niceties, along with the handshake. “And I wish I could say I were pleased to meet you. But, frankly, the only thing that would please me would be for you to return where you came from. Better yet, for you never to have come here at all.”
“I can understand your reservations about my research program, Professor, but I—”
“Research program?” Medvedev’s face reddened alarmingly. “What research program? You . . . you eat our food, drink our water, consume our fuel, occupy space that might instead have gone to a scientist,”—he did not quite say a real scientist, though that was what his tone implied—“a scientist with at least some prospect of advancing our knowledge of the Tunguska phenomenon. Instead, what have your American dollars bought you? The privilege of wasting our expedition’s time and resources on your . . .” The Russian waved his outsized hands in the air, momentarily at a loss for words to describe the enormity of it all, then exploded: “. . . your discredited fantasies!”
“Black holes aren’t fantasies, Professor. If theory alone doesn’t convince you they exist, the evidence from the Hubble galactic survey certainly should.” Ever since the late nineties, the Earth-orbiting Hubble telescope had been beaming back images of gargantuan black holes infesting the hearts of nearby galaxies and slowly swallowing them whole.
“Bah!” Medvedev’s arm slashed the air so ferociously Jack could feel the wind of it on his face. “No one doubts such monstrosities are real. But how could one of these have impacted the Earth without utterly destroying it, and the rest of the solar system, too?”
Jack sighed. “Black holes can come in all sizes, Professor.”
“Yes, yes,” Medvedev broke in again, “you will have an entire week in which to recount these fever dreams to any who will listen. I, for one, will not stand here being eaten alive by these infernal insects while you prattle on!”
And with that, he turned on his heel and stomped off in the direction of the camp, leaving Jack alone with the SQUID once more.
“Déjà vu all over again.” Yogi Berra’s immortal one-liner drifted through Marianna Bonaventure’s head as Compliance chauffeured her down John Street in the direction of the South Street Seaport. The same street where, less than eighteen hours ago, her quarry had . . . No, she’d promised herself she wasn’t going to get into that.
The cafes and storefronts lining the narrow street seemed subtly different today: sharper, realer, more fully dimensional somehow. Was that a trick of the clear mid-morning light, or just the way things always looked when you weren’t focused on the chase to the exclusion of all else? Not that this present operation wasn’t a pursuit, too, of sorts.
The Secure Terminal Unit beeped twice. Marianna was already reaching to jack in her headset when she remembered she wasn’t wearing one. Whole different look for this op: body armor, adieu. Business casuals were lots more comfortable.
“Bonaventure,” she said into the handset.
“Marianna? Pete. Listen, I’ve been thinking . . .” Uh-oh! She could feel her boss beaming his heavy-jowled frown at her all the way from Chantilly, Virginia. Pete was having second thoughts.
“Relax,” she told him, “we’re good to go. I’m moving to acquire as we speak.”
“It’s too tight on time, is what worries me. We don’t even know if Bondarenko will take the bait.”
“Already covered. As far as Sasha knows, he’s been in contact with the Archon resource for the past three days.”
“He’s what? You know damn well you can’t involve a civilian without authorization!”
“Take it easy, Pete. It’s done, okay? And it worked.”
“Marianna—”
&
nbsp; “Look, we wouldn’t have had time to set up the email spoof if we’d waited till we’d lost Galina first.” Slow down, inhale. “We’ve only got the one shot at this, what with the gala being tomorrow night. We had to have all our ducks in a row before Rusalka’sailed. You get that, don’t you, Pete?”
Pete wasn’t saying anything. Not a good sign.
“I knew you wouldn’t buy into it,” she went on, “so I just went ahead and did it. You’ll see; this is all going to pan out.”
The silence on the other end of the secure line was growing uncomfortably long. Pete could still pull the plug, and she couldn’t buck a direct order. C’mon, Pete, think it through. It’s not like you wouldn’t have green-lighted the Hail Mary eventually—you’d have just been too late.
“Okay,” he said at last. “Make it work.”
“Pete, you won’t regret it.”
She hoped.
“Dio mio, Jack, my arm hurts still!” Dottore Luciano Carbone slumped down by the campfire and rubbed his shoulder demonstratively. “That box of yours must weigh a ton. Why in God’s name did Medvedev make us drag it all the way out to choum seventeen?”
“Why do you think, Luciano?” Jack Adler grinned at the tubby, balding University of Bologna geologist—the only friend he’d made in his first half-day on site. A friend in need, too. If the little Italian hadn’t lent a hand, it would have taken all night to get up and running. Even so, it was well past the dinner-hour before they tramped back in, sweaty and exhausted, from what had to be the remotest choum, or birchbark tepee, in the camp.
The Italian stroked the black curls of his goatee. “That man does not like you so much, is what I think, to put you so far away.”
Jack chuckled. “I’m not exactly his favorite guest researcher, am I? But there’s a simpler explanation for sticking me out in the boonies. Hear it?”
He cupped a hand to his ear. Sure enough, the faint chuff-chuff-chuff of his diesel-powered compressor was audible even at this distance.