The Devil Colony

by James Rollins

  “Sorry,” Janice said—she preferred to be called Janice, though he still found such informality uncomfortable. She removed her arm from his shoulder.

  He pinched his brow, trying to interpret the small muscle movements in her face, trying to connect an emotional content to them. The best he could come up with was that she was hungry, but that probably wasn’t right. Due to his Asperger’s syndrome, he was wrong too often in his assessments to trust them.

  She slid a chair over, sat down, and placed a cup of green tea near his elbow. “I thought you might like this.”

  He nodded, but he didn’t understand why she had to sit so close.

  “Riku, we’ve been trying to figure out why this surge out west happened.”

  “The Iceland bombardment of neutrinos coursed through the planet and destabilized a third source.”

  “Yes, but why now? Why didn’t this deposit destabilize earlier, following the Utah spike? Iceland went critical, but not this new deposit out west. The anomaly is troubling the other physicists.”

  Riku continued studying his screen. “Activation energy,” he said, and glanced to her as if this should be obvious. And it was obvious.

  She shook her head. Was she disagreeing or not understanding?

  He sighed. “Some chemical reactions, like nuclear reactions, require a set amount of energy to get them started.”

  “Activation energy.”

  He frowned. Hadn’t he just said that? But he continued: “Often the amount of energy is dependent on the volume or mass of the substrate. The deposit in Iceland must have been smaller. So the quantities of neutrinos from the Utah spike were sufficient to cause it to destabilize.”

  She nodded. “But the neutrino burst from Iceland was much larger. Enough to destabilize the deposit out west. To light that fatter fuse out there. If you’re right, this would mean that the western deposit must be much bigger.”

  Again, hadn’t he just made that clear?

  “It should be 123.4 times larger.” Just speaking the numbers helped calm him. “That is, of course, if there is an exact one-to-one correlation between neutrino generation and mass.”

  Her face went a bit paler as he gave this assessment.

  Uncomfortable, he turned back to his screen, to his own puzzle, to the tiny flickers of neutrinos.

  “What do you think those smaller emissions are?” Janice asked after a long moment of welcome silence.

  Riku closed his eyes to think, enjoying the puzzle. He pictured the neutrinos flying out, igniting the fuses of the unstable deposits, but when they hit the smaller targets, all they did was excite them, triggering minibursts.

  “They can’t be the same as the unstable substance. The pattern is not consistent. I don’t see any parallelism. Instead, I think these blip marks are a substance related to those deposits but not identical to them.”

  He leaned closer and reached to the screen but dared not touch it. “Here’s one in Belgium. One or two again out in the Western United States—but they’re obscured by the new burst. And an especially strong response from a location in the Eastern United States.”

  Janice shifted forward. “Kentucky . . .”

  Before he could fathom why she had to lean so close, his world shattered. Sirens blared, red lamps flashed along the walls. The noise cut through his earplugs like knives. He slammed his palms over his ears. To the side, the others began to yell and gesture. Again he could divine no meaning from their faces.

  What is happening?

  On the far side of the room, the elevator doors opened. Figures in black gear burst forth, spreading wide. They had rifles in their grips. The head-splitting rat-a-tat of their weapons drove him to the floor—not to dodge the barrage of bullets, but to flee the noise.

  Screams only made it worse.

  From beneath his desk, he saw Yoshida fall and roll. A large chunk of his skull was missing. Blood was pouring from his head. Riku could not take his eyes off the spreading pool.

  Then someone grabbed him. He fought, but it was Janice. She snatched a handful of his lab jacket and dragged him around his desk. She pointed her arm toward a side exit. It led to an open cavernous space, a former mine, but now home to the Super-Kamiokande detector.

  He understood. They had to flee the lab. It was death to remain hiding here. As if to underscore this thought, he heard the pop-pop of rifle fire. The invaders were killing everyone.

  Staying low, hidden by the row of desks, he followed Janice as she headed to the side exit. She burst through, and he dove out at her heels. She slammed the door behind him and searched around.

  Gunfire echoed from the tunnel ahead. It was the old mine shaft that led to the surface. Besides the new elevator, it was the only way into or out of the facility. The assassins had both exits covered and were converging here.

  “This way!” Janice reached back and tugged his arm.

  Together, they fled in the only direction they could, running down another tunnel. But Riku knew it led to a dead end. The gunmen would be on top of them in a matter of moments. Thirty meters farther along, the tunnel emptied into a cavern.

  He could see the domed roof stretching far above him. It was draped in polyethylene Mineguard, to block radon seeping from the rock. Beneath his feet was the Super-Kamiokande detector itself, a massive stainless-steel tank filled with fifty thousand tons of ultrapure water and lined by thirteen thousand photomultiplier tubes.

  “C’mon,” Janice said.

  They dashed together around the electronics hut. The cavernous space was littered with equipment and gear, with forklifts and hand trucks. Overhead, bright yellow scaffolding held up cranes, all to service the Super-Kamiokande detector.

  A harsh shout in Arabic rebounded behind them, echoing off the walls. The assassins were sweeping toward them.

  Riku searched around. There was nowhere to hide that wouldn’t be discovered in seconds.

  Janice continued to draw him along with her. She stopped at a rack of diving gear—then he understood.

  And balked.

  “It’s the only way,” she urged in a hard whisper.

  She pushed a heavy air tank, already equipped with a regulator, into his arms. He had no choice but to hug it. She turned the valve on top, and air hissed from the mouthpiece. She grabbed another tank and rushed to a hatch in the floor. It opened into the top of the giant water-filled vault below. Divers used the hatch to service the Super-Kamiokande detector’s main tank, mostly to repair broken photomultiplier tubes.

  Janice fumbled the regulator’s mouthpiece between his lips. He wanted to spit it out—it tasted bad—but he bit down on the silicon. She pointed to the dark hole.

  “Go!”

  With a great tremble of fear, he stepped over the opening and jumped feetfirst into the cold water. The weight of the tank pulled him quickly toward the distant bottom. He craned up and saw Janice splash overhead, pulling the hatch closed behind her.

  Complete and utter darkness swamped him.

  Riku continued his blind plunge, screaming out air bubbles as his feet crashed into the bottom. He crouched on the floor, hugging his air tank, shivering—for now in fear, but the cold would soon make it worse.

  Then arms found him and encircled him. He felt a cheek press against his, so very warm. Janice was holding him in the dark.

  For the first time in his life, a touch felt good.

  May 31, 5:32 P.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  “It took Archard a full month to sail to Iceland,” Dr. Heisman was saying. “The seas were especially rough.”

  Gray sat at the table beside Seichan as the curator set about summarizing the contents of the back half of Fortescue’s journal. Sharyn had finished the translation while Gray had been raising the alarm concerning a possible attack in Japan.

  His knee bounced up and down. He needed to hear this tale, but he also wanted to be at Sigma command, to find out if the Japanese physicists were okay.

  He glanced to Seichan.


  Is she just being overly paranoid?

  He didn’t think so. He trusted her judgment, especially when it came to the Guild. He had promptly called in the warning to Kat, who had alerted Japanese authorities of the potential threat. They were all still waiting to hear back.

  “On that long trip,” Heisman continued, “Archard spent many days writing at length concerning his theories about the pale Indians, the mythical people who gave the Iroquois’ ancestors these powerful tokens. He’d collated the stories he had heard from many tribes, hearing often of white men or white-skinned Indians. He collected rumors from the colonists who claimed to have found evidence of previous settlements, homesteads of non-Indians, as evidenced by the sophisticated building techniques. But mostly Archard seemed fixated on a possible Jewish origin to these people.”

  “Jewish?” Gray shifted taller in his seat. “Why?”

  “Because Archard describes some writing found on the gold Indian map. He thought it looked like Hebrew but different.”

  Sharyn shared the passage from the journal. “ ‘The scratches on the map are clearly those of some unknown scribe. Could they have been written by one of the pale Indians? I have consulted the most learned rabbinical experts, who all agree that there appears to be some commonality with the ancient Jewish writing, yet as one, they say it is not in fact Hebrew, though perhaps related to that language. It is a confounding mystery.’ ”

  As she read, Heisman grew more excited, nodding his head. “It is a mystery. While Sharyn was finishing her translation and you were busy contacting your people about Japan, I received word on something that was troubling me about that early sketch of the Great Seal, the one with the fourteen arrows.”

  Heisman reached to a stack of papers and pulled it free. “Look beneath the Seal itself. There is some faint writing, almost like notations.”

  Gray had noticed the marks before but hadn’t placed any significance on them. “What about them?”

  “Well, I consulted an ancient-language expert. The writing is an odd form of Hebrew, just like Archard mentioned. The curve of letters beneath the Seal spelled out the word Manasseh, which is the name of one of the ten lost tribes of Israel.”

  Gray’s attention sharpened. Hours earlier, Painter had passed on information speculating that these ancient people, the Tawtsee’untsaw Pootseev, could possibly be descendants of a lost tribe of Israel. Painter had also referenced the Book of Mormon, whose scripture contended that an exiled tribe of Israelites had come to early America—specifically the clan of Manasseh.

  Heisman continued: “In fact, the Founding Fathers seemed a bit obsessed with the lost tribes of Israel. When the committee to draft the original Great Seal first got together, Benjamin Franklin expressed a wish for the design to include a scene out of the Book of Exodus, when the Israelites went into exile. Thomas Jefferson suggested a depiction of the children of Israel in the wilderness.”

  Gray studied the sketch of the Seal. Had the Founding Fathers known about this lost tribe reaching these shores? Did they somehow learn that the “pale Indians” described by the Iroquois were in fact exiled Israelites?

  It seemed that way. They must have been trying to incorporate that knowledge into the Great Seal, to memorialize the tribe.

  Heisman’s next words suggested that Gray was right. “What I find odd is that the tribes of Israel were all represented by different pairs of symbols. In the case of the Manasseh clan, it was an olive branch and a bundle of arrows.” Heisman glanced up to Gray. “Why would the Founding Fathers plant the symbols of the Manasseh tribe in the Great Seal?”

  Gray suspected that he knew the answer to this question, but he had a more immediate concern. He waved Heisman onward. “That’s all well and good, but let’s continue to the place where Fortescue reached Iceland . . .”

  Heisman looked disappointed, but he slid the draft of the Great Seal aside. “All right. Like I said, it took Archard about a month to reach Iceland, but eventually he grew confident that he’d found the right island, as marked on the map. But once there, he had no luck in finding anything. After twenty-two days of searching, he began to despair. Then his luck changed. One of his searchers dropped an apple while investigating a rather lengthy cavern system. It fell down a chute no one had noted. A lamp lowered down that hole revealed a glint of gold near the bottom.”

  “They found the spot,” Seichan said.

  “He goes into great length describing the deep cavern. How stone boxes held hundreds of gold plates inscribed with the same proto-Hebrew writing. He also found solid gold jars filled with the oft-mentioned silvery dry elixir. He was quite excited and drew many pictures.”

  From the tick in the curator’s voice, it was clear that he was also excited. Heisman slid one of the pages over to Gray and Seichan. The curator tapped the picture in the center. “Those are the golden containers for the elixir.”

  Gray stiffened at the sight. The drawing showed tall urns topped by various sculpted heads: that of a jackal, a hawk, a baboon, and a hooded man.

  “Those look like Egyptian canopic jars,” he said.

  “Yes. Archard thought so, too. Or at least he recognized that they were of Egyptian origin. He postulated that perhaps the pale Indians were in fact refugees from the Holy Lands, some secret sect of magi who had roots in both the Jewish faith and Egyptian traditions. But such speculations came to an abrupt end. After this point in the journal, his writing becomes very sloppy and hurried; it’s clear that he was in a state of panic.”

  “Why?”

  At a cue from her boss, Sharyn began to read. “ ‘I have heard word that a ship approaches Iceland. That the Enemy has discovered our investigation and closes upon us. They must never find this cache of lost treasures. My men and I will do our best to lure them away, to keep them from this island. Pray that I am successful. We will strike for the coast, to the cold mainland, and draw them after us. I will take a small sampling of the treasure in the hopes that I can still reach the shores of America. But I leave this journal as a testament, in case I fail.’ ”

  Heisman crossed his arms. “That’s how the journal ends, with Archard fleeing his enemy. But I think we can piece together what happened after that.”

  “The Laki eruption,” Gray said.

  “The site of that volcano is not far from the coastline. Archard must have made it some distance, but then catastrophe struck.”

  Gray had witnessed such an event himself. He pictured the explosion, followed by the violent volcanic eruption.

  Heisman sighed. “After that, we know from Jefferson’s letter that our Frenchman went into deep seclusion, regretting the actions he had taken, actions that led to the death of more than six million people.”

  “Until he was summoned twenty years later by Jefferson to undertake a new mission. To join Lewis and Clark on their sojourn west.” Gray let the pieces fall together in his head. “According to the date on the map you showed us earlier, Jefferson concluded the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. That very year, Jefferson commissioned his friend Captain Meriwether Lewis to put together a team to explore those former French territories and the lands west of there.”

  Gray’s head buzzed with the certainty of his assessment. “Fortescue went with them. He was sent to find that spot on the Indian map, to find what Fortescue himself believed was the heart of the new colony, that lost city.”

  Seichan kept pace with him. “And he must have found it. He vanished out of history, and Lewis was murdered.”

  Gray turned to Heisman. “Do you have a map that marks the trail that Lewis and Clark took?”

  “Of course. Just one moment.” He and his assistant combed through their stacks and quickly found the right book. “Here it is.”

  Gray stared down at the page. He ran a finger along the trail, starting at Camp Wood in St. Charles, Missouri, and ending at Fort Clatsop on the coast of the Pacific Ocean.

  “Somewhere along this route—or close to it—has to be the location of the lost Fourteenth Colon
y.”

  But where?

  His phone rang again. He’d left his cell on the tabletop; a glance at it showed Sigma’s emergency number.

  Seichan saw it, too.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said, and headed again to the door. Seichan dogged his heels and joined him in the hall.

  He flipped open the phone. “Monk?”

  “It’s Kat, Gray. Monk’s on his way over to meet you with a car.”

  “What’s wrong? What’s the news from Japan?”

  “Bad. An assault team killed nearly everyone at the facility.”

  He swore silently. They’d been too slow.

  Kat continued: “But two key personnel survived. Japanese authorities fished them out of the neutron detector’s water tank. Rather clever place to hide. They were whisked into PSIA custody at our request.”

  PSIA was the acronym for the Japanese intelligence agency. Calling in the latter was a wise precaution. If no one knew about the survivors, Sigma command had a chance to get a step up on the Guild. Kat knew it, too.

  “I’ve been on the phone with one of them,” Kat said. “An American postgraduate student. She reports that before the attack, the Japanese physicists had been making no headway on discovering the source of the latest neutrino surge. But she related something odd, something that was noted by the other physicist who survived. He was concerned about some spotty neutrino bursts he’d detected. I didn’t give this detail much thought until she told me where those readings originated.”

  “Where?”

  “Maybe one or two sites out west, but he couldn’t pinpoint the locations due to the background rush of neutrinos from the larger spike. Of the two he was able to identify, one was in Belgium.”

  She let this piece of news hang. It took Gray only a breath to recognize its significance. He remembered Captain Huld’s description of the hunters who’d come to Ellirey Island before Gray and his team. He’d said they were from Belgium. Monk must have made the same connection. It could be a coincidence, but Gray wasn’t buying it.