Clay turned to leave last when Palin stopped him. “John Clay.”
Clay stared back, awash in the bright blue outline of the portal. “Yes?”
Palin stepped forward. “I don’t know what your search will reveal or what knowledge you may glean. But remember, great knowledge requires great wisdom. Beware of the leap.”
67
The humidity and smoke overwhelmed them immediately. Coupled with the heat, it felt as though they had walked back into a damp furnace. Some smoke had dissipated, allowing them to breathe a little easier. However, much of the mountainside was still obscured.
Clay coughed and looked at Borger. “Okay, Will, where to?”
Borger looked around. If it was the water they were after, there was only one logical direction: uphill. He peered over a slow moving bank of smoke to the top of the mountain. There was a small cliff where part of the peak had long since eroded and fallen away. Under the afternoon sun, it resembled a half dome with its one side sheared off.
Clay stopped them before they started up the embankment. “We need to get Dulce someplace where she can rest.”
“Agreed,” replied Caesare. “You three go ahead. I’ll take them.”
“Where are you going?”
Caesare coughed then smiled devilishly. “I have an expensive and rather comfortable helicopter they can stay in.”
Clay nodded and began trudging up the rocky hill with Alison and Borger.
They stopped periodically for Borger to sink the instrument into the soil and wait for a readout. As he suspected, the frequency of enzymes in the water decreased as they moved to either side of the incline but increased as they climbed higher. The source was above them.
The enzyme concentrations increased rapidly as they neared the top and the half dome-shaped wall. And once they reached the base of the cliff, the measurements went through the roof.
“Wow!” Borger shouted. He looked up at the sheer rock before him, rising almost eighty feet over his head. There was a thin streak of water running down the face. Clay and Alison watched as Borger stood up and placed the instrument against the trickling stream of water.
The display on the instrument went to zero. Borger tried again in another spot. Still nothing.
“That’s weird. The enzyme count just disappeared.”
Alison peeked over his shoulder. “How could it disappear? It’s the same water.”
Borger traced the stream down to the ground with his finger. “It is the same water.” He raised the sensor up again and placed its metal spike against the water one more time. “What happened to it?”
“Maybe there’s another stream.”
They spread out and looked for more running water.
“Here’s one.”
Borger ran over to Alison and measured it in multiple spots. Nothing. They found two more streams but no enzymes.
“I don’t understand.” Borger stepped back and looked to the top of the rock wall.
Clay moved behind them, studying the rock face. It seemed unusually smooth, as did the rock on which they were standing. He followed the original streak of water all the way down, from the top of the wall to the bottom of the hard, gray speckled stone beneath their feet.
Then it hit him.
Clay moved in closer again and examined the bottom of the cliff. “It’s not coming from the top,” he said, looking at both of them. “It’s coming from inside the rock.”
The two ran over to the base of the rock, where Clay was watching the water trickle down over the tip of his black boot. Borger measured to the right and left, finding strong signals on both sides.
“You’re right. There’s gotta be something inside.”
Clay took a small step back and studied the face again. He repeatedly looked to the right then back to the left. There was something very different about the face directly above them.
“I’m no expert, but does this section look different to you two?”
Alison and Borger stepped back with him and stared at it. “It looks flatter.”
“Yeah, it does.”
“Look at that.” Clay pointed to a tiny indentation in the stone that ran straight up the face. There was another on the other side of the water. He stepped back further and examined the stone beneath their feet. “And does this rock look unusually level to you?”
“It does.”
Clay walked forward again and touched the cliff face with his hand. “There’s something on the other side of this.”
68
The strips of interior lights came on automatically, and everyone in the cabin instinctively looked up. The sun was nearly past the horizon and evening was setting in. With all the windows and vents closed, very little of the smoke got inside the immaculate cabin. The helicopter’s auxiliary system powered everything except the air conditioning, making the inside more than comfortable if only a bit warm.
With his pack on the floor and leaning against the table, Borger focused intently on his laptop screen. From behind him, Clay looked on over his shoulder. In the back of the cabin, Alison and DeeAnn foraged through the small kitchen and found enough food for several meals. Or at least several salads.
“Man, this guy wasn’t a health nut…he was a health freak.”
“You have no idea.” DeeAnn glanced out at Dulce, still lying comfortably on one of the soft leather seats next to a dozing Steve Caesare. The thought that Alves’ body was laying somewhere outside gave her the creeps.
A few minutes later, the two women brought the food out and set it down, just on the other side of Borger’s computer. On the screen, both men studied a still frame satellite image of the mountain. They were zoomed in on the cliff.
Borger tapped one of his keys and the image slowly rotated. “Not much to see from the air.”
“No, there isn’t.” Clay tilted his head at the picture. “We can’t see the cliff face.”
“And there’s nothing noticeable on the back side either.”
Clay straightened back up and folded his arms. It had taken them the remainder of the afternoon to hike around the back slope of the mountain, and they had found nothing. Nor did using Borger’s instrument help them find any trace of the synthetic enzyme. Whatever was coming out of that rock was coming out from within the cliff face.
He sighed and took a break, thanking Alison when she handed him a bowl of salad with a few pieces of salmon on top. He took a bite and leaned back onto the arm of one of the seats behind him, thinking. If this mysterious enzyme was the true source behind the giant plants and their special replicating abilities, then the Chinese had jumped the gun. They had something truly amazing, but it may not be the source they believed it to be. And if the plants were that valuable, he wondered what the enzyme itself was capable of.
Clay’s eyes opened in the darkness to find Borger shaking him by the arm. The lights in the cabin were out, leaving only the glow of Borger’s laptop to illuminate the white seats nearest the table.
“Clay!” Borger whispered. “You awake?”
He blinked his eyes and forced them open. “Yes. What is it?”
“Come here!”
Clay pushed himself quietly out of the chair, careful not to wake Alison who was reclining next to him. He followed Borger back to the computer and squinted at the bright screen. He was still displaying the aerial view of the mountain.
Borger sat down in front of him. “I think I found something. This is the picture we were looking at earlier, right?”
“Right.”
Borger nodded. “Okay, do you see anything different?”
Clay squinted closer at the screen. “No.”
“That’s correct.” Borger looked back over his shoulder amusedly and whispered. “Sorry, that was a trick question. Look at the picture again and tell me if you see any trees or plants around the cliff base.”
“Nope.”
“Exactly. Strange don’t you think?”
“Yes. It is.”
“See, I got
to thinking…if whatever is in this water can make those plants grow like that, then why isn’t anything growing closer to the rock face? You’d think everything would be a hundred feet tall, right?”
Clay looked curiously down at Borger. “Right. Maybe the terrain is too rocky.”
“I thought about that.” Borger’s whispering was getting louder. “But how rocky would it need to be for something not to grow with this water?! I mean, geez, it would probably have to be molten lava or something.” Borger turned back around to Clay. “But what if…nothing was supposed to grow there?!”
Clay eyed Borger and looked back to the screen. “You mean, as in, by design.”
“Right. Remember how flat the base is, and those lines you saw going straight up the rock. On top of that, we have something coming out of the rock that we’ve never seen before. Now we have an area in front of it where nothing grows. Not even with this super water. Don’t you think those are a lot of coincidences?”
“It’s artificial.” Clay finished Borger’s thought.
“Exactly! And here’s the biggest clue of all. I kept thinking, ‘why isn’t anything growing there? Why are there only rocks?’”
Clay suddenly grabbed Borger’s shoulder. “The rocks!”
“The rocks!” Borger nodded. He zoomed the picture in and leaned back out of Clay’s way. “Now look at the picture and ignore the top of the mountain and the cliff. Look just at the rocks, and bear in mind they look like rocks on the screen, but they’re actually boulders.”
Clay studied the screen for several seconds. “Are those…shapes?”
“It sure looks like it, doesn’t it?” Borger began typing. “Now look what happens when I invert the color in the picture.”
The picture color instantly switched. The areas that were dark now appeared in shades of white. And the light areas, including the rocks, appeared black.
Clay immediately shot a look at Borger. “Those are definitely shapes!”
“I think those giant boulders on the ground were ‘arranged.’”
Clay remained quiet, studying the black shapes. They were hard to identify, but the curves and angles were unmistakable. The boulder groupings also appeared to be laid out in three separate places, together forming a perfect triangle near the base of the cliff.
“I think they might be hieroglyphs,” Borger whispered.
“I’ve never seen hieroglyphs like that,” commented a female voice.
Borger jumped in his seat, and both men spun around to see Alison standing behind them in the dark.
“Geez, Alison! You scared the crap out of me!”
He hadn’t jumped, but Clay was grinning at her. “That was impressive.”
Alison shrugged, playfully.
They turned back to Borger’s glowing screen. “Do you know a lot about hieroglyphs?” Clay asked.
“Not really. I took some courses in college,” she said quietly. “But I’ve never seen anything quite like those.” She leaned in between the two men. “Hmm.”
“What?”
“There may be some similarities to the Mayan stuff. But I can’t be sure. It’s been a long time.”
“What about Egyptian hieroglyphs?”
Alison shook her head. “No. Those look very different. Egyptian’s wrote in long lines of script. These are more like the picture blocks used in the Central Americas.”
“Do you think they can be translated?”
Alison thought about the question and shook her head again. “I have no idea. Maybe if other drawings have been documented somewhere else, but that’s a long shot. Even the Rosetta Stone, which contained detailed one-to-one translations, took years. Here, we only have three pictograms to go on. And that’s not enough.”
Borger slouched back in the chair, folding his arms in frustration.
“Or…”
Alison and Borger looked at Clay. “Or what?”
“Or we try something else.” Clay turned and grinned at them. “It just so happens, I know a beautiful woman who has a hell of a computer system, designed specifically for translating languages.”
69
The giant Pathfinder ship rocked gently over the ripples rolling across the western Caribbean. The white hulled ship was anchored less than a mile from Georgetown. Overhead, the dark sky was filled with bright stars from both the northern and southern hemispheres, complimented by a faint sliver of moon. Aside from the watch crew, there was virtually no movement or sound to be heard. It made the hand that shook Lee Kenwood awake even more startling.
Lee jumped in his bed and peered up into the darkness at the outline of Captain Emerson.
“Mr. Kenwood,” he whispered, careful not to wake Chris Ramirez in a nearby bunk.
Lee rubbed his eyes and squinted. “Captain Emerson?”
“Come with me.”
“Huh?”
“I need you to come with me, son. You have a phone call.”
“For me?”
“Yes.” His silhouette stood up straight. “Please hurry.”
Lee scrambled out of his bunk and followed him outside in nothing but a pair of swim trunks. They passed through three different metal doors before emerging into the warm Caribbean air. Emerson stopped and turned to face Lee, handing him a phone.
He fumbled for a moment but managed to get it to his ear. “Hello?”
“Lee, it’s Alison.”
“Ali? Where are you? What time is it?”
“Never mind. Listen, I need to ask you something important about IMIS.”
“What is it?”
“How hard would it be to translate one written language to another?”
Lee looked confused. “For IMIS? It would be a piece of cake.”
“What about an old language? And I mean really old, as in ancient?”
“Uh, I don’t know. I guess it would depend on what it was. You mean like Latin or something?”
“I mean hieroglyphs.”
Lee raised his head, surprised. Captain Emerson stood next to him, still watching. “Hieroglyphs? You mean as in Egyptian?”
“More like Mayan.”
Lee scratched the back of his scalp, thinking. “Yeah, I think we could. We’d have to feed in a lot of data and do some programming, but yeah, we could do it.”
“How long would that take?”
“For the data? Not long. It would take me some time to program though. Then there’s testing and debugging. Probably a few weeks.”
“How about a few hours?”
“What?!”
“We need to do it in a few hours.”
“Are you kidding?!”
On the other end of the phone, Alison glanced at Clay. They knew it was only a matter of time before one or more of the nearby countries responded to the fire. And according to Clay, Admiral Langford was trying to delay that, but his misdirection would only last so long. “No, Lee, I’m not kidding.”
Lee exhaled and ran a hand through his messy hair. “I don’t think we can make it, Ali. Even if I can do some quick and dirty programming, with no testing or debugging, we have no way to manually feed any existing data into IMIS. I wouldn’t be able to do it fast enough from this ship.”
“Okay,” she replied grimly. “Hold on.”
Alison covered the microphone and looked at Clay. “Lee thinks it’s possible, but not without someone on the ground. Which, we don’t have.”
Clay and Borger frowned in unison.
“Oh, I believe we do.” Caesare was awake and delicately eased his seat up from a reclining position. With a grin, he stood up and came into the light.
“You believe we do what?”
“I believe we have someone on the ground.”
The single bed was small, even for him. But he didn’t mind. Truth be told, he actually relished it, especially right now. He hadn’t slept all night and he was beginning to lose feeling in his left arm, but Juan Diaz didn’t care. Instead, he stared down lovingly at the sleeping face of his six-year-old sister.
<
br /> Her little face, with olive skin and dark eyelashes, looked almost angelic as she breathed quietly beside him. It wasn’t his idea, but she begged him to stay with her. Diaz had arrived home less than twelve hours ago and headed directly to his parents’ house. Angelina was thrilled to see her big brother and immediately ran into his arms. If he didn’t know better, he would have suspected she somehow knew just how close he had come to death in Brazil. After that, all he wanted to do was to see his family.
Diaz suddenly raised his head when he heard his cell phone ring in the living room. In one controlled fluid movement, he quickly slid off the side of Angelina’s bed and loped lightly down the hall.
He held the phone up in the darkness and peered at the number. He didn’t recognize it. With a low voice, he accepted the call. “Hello?”
“Juan! It’s Alison!”
“Ali?”
“Juan, where are you?”
“I’m home. At my parents’ house. Where are you?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But we have an emergency and we need your help!”
“Sure, Ali. Anything.”
“Good. Listen carefully.”
The 1970s style gray building was three stories high with an unusually long overhang above the main entrance. The double automatic doors were locked, and the only visible light was glowing from a few small fixtures left on throughout the night for maintenance purposes.
The University of Puerto Rico was founded in 1900 as the first higher education center on the island. It had since grown to become the best University system throughout the Caribbean. But at four in the morning, most of those University buildings were closed. The three-story Mayagüez Campus Library was no exception.
What was an exception was that for the first time in twenty-three years, Superintendent Jose Mignucci had been awoken in the middle of the night and by the governor of Puerto Rico himself. Fifteen minutes later, Mignucci stood in front of the library building, waiting patiently and wondering what the hell it was all about.
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