“I’m afraid so,” his companion spoke in an unexpectedly calm voice. “Do you really think the world works above such things? Every great achievement comes with a price, usually paid in human life. It’s time for you to grow up, Kirk. Besides, I have people who handle these things for me. It’s not like I’m asking you to pull the trigger.”
Hoffmeyer nodded absently and feigned a smile. He wanted to believe the old man, but somehow he knew he was already in over his head. As he reached for a bottle of dry gin from the mini-bar beside his leg, his hands began to tremble. The same thought kept coming into his mind as he poured. All the alcohol in the world would not rescue him from the cold wave of panic that was about to sweep though his body.
9
Two questions surfaced in Katie’s mind as she approached the building. Would her swipe card still work, and if it did, would it raise the red flag that screamed she had returned? She closed her eyes as she ran the magnetic strip through the reader. The soft clunk of the lock’s bolt being released told her that at least her first concern was no longer valid. Unfortunately, it was the less worrisome of the two.
The hallway inside was lit only at the ends by emergency lights at the exits. Directly in front of her were the labs, and within them, her small office cubical. Her first thought was to grab some personal things from her desk, but she feared there would not be enough time. She tried her card again at the door to the microscopy room, successfully unlocked it, and moved quickly past the mechanical prep tables to the storage room beyond. If her assailants had retrieved the film and brought it to the museum as she suspected, the unused darkroom at the far end of the specimen shelves would be the logical place to hide it, especially if Baranov planned on having it developed. She was nearly certain that he was the one responsible for her experience in the Gobi.
Hanging from the end of Tamara’s keychain, she found a small LED flashlight and pressed the button. The bluish glow barely shown two feet in front of her, but she couldn’t risk turning on the overhead lights. Katie knew the layout of the room with some certainty. One of her duties was to catalog and track all the specimens as they entered the museum. She had built a database to automatically track the items, assuming someone took the time to enter the assigned number into the computer. It had won the praise of her immediate supervisor but had become another aggravating step for the drilling teams who now had to input the code before removing the fossils.
As she felt her way down the first row of shelves, she began thinking about her grandfather’s journal. Had her assailants found it or had it remained hidden from sight? Her hope was that they had just taken the film and not probed any deeper. At least her grandfather’s letter had not still been hidden in the journal. She had removed it the day before and had forgotten to slip it back into the binding of the journal where it was usually kept.
Ahnenerbe. That mysterious word, written in the margins of the letter to her grandmother, had started her quest to uncover the truth. Dmitri had learned from the British Mission at Lhasa that the Germans were investigating the indigenous peoples of Tibet. In the letter, her grandfather revealed that the Ahnenerbe Society had one objective—to build an historical record that matched the Nazi ideology. Beyond the absurd claims of a Germanic super race in Tibet, what bothered him most were their attempts to construct a new history explaining away the truth that the earth and its inhabitants were created by God. Hitler and his cronies had wanted to erase God from the minds of German people.
Philosophy had been the least of her grandfather’s concerns, however. He had something much more important to protect from the Ahnenerbe. In his explorations across the Tibetan plateau, he had discovered something he regarded as biblically significant that would shatter the myths of evolution and trample Darwinian thought. Those were things he had also written in the letter. Had he been successful? Katie didn’t know and her grandmother refused to discuss it. She seemed panicked when Katie had pressed her, as if some dark force were waiting to swallow them up. Unfortunately Katie was beginning to understand her grandmother’s reluctance to enlighten her.
Rounding the final row of shelves, her penlight caught the outline of the door to the darkroom. It had been on Katie’s “to do” list to move the clutter from in front of the door and repurpose the room as a second fossil prep room. That was clearly no longer an issue. Someone had beaten her to it, which only confirmed her suspicions that something was amiss.
Katie quickly tried the handle and found it was locked.
How could she get into it? Who had the keys? She could almost feel her heart pounding in her ears as she searched her mind for a solution. Baranov’s office! she finally concluded. There was a key box next to his desk, but certainly his door would be locked as well. At least it was worth a try.
As Katie turned she heard a noise, faint but discernible, from the hum of the heating system vents above. It sounded like muted voices from another part of the building, and then… footsteps.
She quickly moved to the end of the shelves and was about to run when the lights suddenly flashed on. With only one exit available, she was trapped. Her mind raced as the footsteps entered the room and headed in her direction. When they were almost upon her, she ducked beneath a broken worktable that had earlier been crushed beneath the weight of triceratops skull. Someone had moved it into the storeroom until it could be repaired.
“I put it in here,” one of the men said. She immediately recognized the voice of Sergei Baranov.
Katie craned her neck around a jumble of tarps that were piled in front of the broken table. There were two men, Baranov and a second man who had his back to her. Baranov was wrangling keys from his pocket.
“I’d call this a room full of rocks,” the unknown man spoke. His unintelligent comment and guttural tone told her plenty about him.
Baranov ignored his comment. “There’s a large bag with straps on the back table,” he instructed. “Go back there and get it. We’re going to store it in here.”
Katie looked to the right and realized that Baranov was sending the man in her direction. She eased as far back against the wall as possible and remained absolutely still. The man’s feet passed within inches of her and then stopped.
“What do you want me to do about that car outside?” the man asked. “I know a guy who can run the plates for you. Only cost you a hundred or so.”
The long pause before Baranov answered seemed like an eternity to Katie.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a professor from the institute driving it. It’s an old piece of junk. It probably wouldn’t start and he had to leave it. I’ll ask about it tomorrow.”
“Well, that’s up to you. Now let me make sure I understand the plan. You’re going to call me when you’re ready to deliver. I come here, get the film, and then meet you at some predetermined location. And just to make sure there’s no problem with the transaction, you want me to bring some extra protection. When is this thing going down?”
“It shouldn’t be more than a couple of days. A guy from the Natural History Museum in New York is coming here tomorrow. I have to stall him until I can meet with another interested party arriving from Germany the following day.”
“Ah, supply and demand,” the unknown man observed.
“It’s how fortunes are made.” Baranov shrugged. “Grab one of those tarps over there,” he said as he pointed.
Katie clinched her fists tight when she realized he was motioning in her direction. When the man reached down to remove one of the tarps from the pile in front of her, his attention was suddenly drawn toward a long bone that rested against the opposite wall. The profile of his face was in full view of her.
“Hey,” he exclaimed with childish excitement. “Is that one of those boronto… somethings, the ones with the long necks? I had a toy one when I was a kid.”
“Brachiosaurus,” Baranov corrected. “Yes.”
“I love that part,” the man continued with some detached thought, “you know where that one sne
ezes on the kid in Jurassic Park. I laugh every time I see it.”
Baranov half smiled and nodded. “I remember that. Really funny stuff.”
His companion grabbed the tarp, never noticing Katie crouched beneath the broken table, her eyes closed in earnest prayer. He walked back toward his employer, threw the tarp over the shelf holding the film, and then stepped from the darkroom as Baranov locked the door. The sound of footsteps leaving the room was followed by a click that returned the room to total darkness.
Katie remained in her hiding place for a few seconds more, inaudibly saying the same words over and over again. “Thank You, thank You, thank You.”
She was still shaking as she recalled the details of the unknown man’s face—the thick stubble of black facial hair and a scar, which ran from his right eyebrow to his temple. But most of all, the horror was the cold and lifeless look in his eyes. They were a beautiful shade of pale blue, yet she knew any beauty in the man was only a facade. The man behind those eyes was the one who had tried to kill her in Mongolia.
10
In a small conference room with a good view of the rocky Taiwanese coastline, Jake Evers braced his injured leg with both hands and gently rested it on the chair beside him. Sam, who was sitting across from him, flipped on the projector as Cindy made her way around the table to the screen at one end of the room. The image which gradually appeared before them was difficult to see with the full midday sun shining into the room. Realizing the problem, Cindy flipped a switch on the console beside the computer and automatic blinds were lowered.
Jake began to make out that the image on the screen was a copy of the journal page that was open before him. Intersecting lines with numbers written across them covered the entire page. There were also crude triangles and trapezoids of varying heights scattered about. In the lower right hand corner, he found the telltale symbol of crossed, two-ended arrows with the letters N, S, E, and W at the four tips.
“One of Dmitri’s maps,” Jake concluded.
Cindy reached for the pointer braced against the corner of the screen. “Specifically,” she began, “it’s a map of the location where he made what he referred to as his most important discovery. Notice the shapes on the map. Because of their jagged peaks and varying dimensions, I believe the triangles represent mountain peaks and the numbers above the connecting lines are distances between them in meters.”
Following her assumption, Jake studied the map once more and nodded his agreement. “Makes sense,” he responded.
“What about the long rectangles at the bottom?” Sam asked.
“Not a clue. I’m still working on the translation. There could be other clues too. Dmitri wrote about mountains and ice crevasses.”
Jake took in the image, paying special attention to the numbers which filled a large portion of the page. The spans between landmarks were either in hundreds of meters or less than ten. The shorter distances all converged on the rectangular shape, which Sam had noted. Twenty or so meters from the northwestern corner of the rectangle was a small shape that looked like an upside down ice cream cone, although the angle at the peak was much wider. It rested upon a square box in front of a dotted triangle.
“Is that shape some sort of building?” Jake wondered, pointing to the object.
“Or a row of buildings,” Sam added. “There are others barely visible in the background.”
“You know who needs to see this?” Cindy asked.
“Wade Jarvis,” Jake and Sam answered simultaneously.
“Exactly. If anybody can figure this out, it would be him. Did I hear that you guys left him in Russia?”
“It was more a measure of good will,” Jake replied. “You know Tom Strobel? He’s the guy at the U.S. Consulate in St. Petersburg who handles all of our excavation permits.”
“Sure,” Cindy acknowledged. “We worked together for a while in D.C.”
“When we called him about our agreement with the Russian Academy,” Jake explained, “he said they were having some network problems that had their entire system locked up. Wade’s reputation is well known in the business and Tom had heard that Wade was working for us. He asked if we could bring him along to take a look at their problem.”
“I’m sure he can fix it,” Cindy replied. “He’s the smartest person I know, if not one of the strangest.”
Jake smiled at the comment. It was a fair description. Wade Jarvis had started college in the early seventies and had been consumed by the culture of the time. Though brilliant, especially in mathematics and computer architecture, he was perpetually working toward a college degree, which he could never quite finish. His argument had always been that the coursework could never keep up with the technology, so there was no way to conclusively say he had mastered it. His friends, like Jake, suspected the truth. Admired for his idiosyncrasies, Wade enjoyed the attention of his younger classmates too much to part company with the academic world.
“Have you uncovered anything else besides this map?”
“Aside from his scientific notes, the journal contains mostly personal information. He was married. His wife was also born in Russia. One thing I found interesting were several almost fatalistic comments. In them he writes very personal things about himself and his wife whom he loved dearly. He wanted the reader, perhaps someone who found the journal in case of his death, to know who he was and understand his life’s passion.”
“Which was?” Sam asked.
“Simply put, I would say biblical truth, or maybe more correctly, biblical fact. Dmitri Petrovich spent his life in pursuit of objects described in the Bible. He was an adventurer, not unlike an Indiana Jones, but his adventures were less academic and more impassioned. I guess you’d call him a treasure hunter. The first entry in that journal was July 1942. The last one was September 1963. Across those years he had witnessed the horrors of war and the communist takeover of Eastern Europe. With the Christian world collapsing around him, he wanted more than anything to find tangible evidence of biblical stories. He thought it would save the world.”
“Did he find anything?” Jake asked.
“That’s still a big question mark,” she answered. “In his last journal entry, he said that he had nearly completed the task. There’s no indication if he was successful. It may simply not have been that significant after all.”
“Except for one thing,” Jake responded. “If the journal is connected with the spacecraft we found in the desert, then someone is still interested in Dmitri Petrovich and is willing to kill for it.”
Jake rubbed his aching head as he sorted through the information. The journal had to belong to the young woman and unless she had brought it along for a casual read, which seemed unlikely based on its fragile condition, Jake had to guess that it was somehow related to the capsule.
“How much more time do you need to finish the translation?” he asked Cindy.
“At least another couple of days.”
“Is there any way I can get a copy of the journal pages?”
“Sure,” she replied. “You can even keep the original if you’d prefer. Since it’s in such bad shape, I’ve been working from a copy anyway.”
“Thank you, Cindy,” Jake said, pushing his chair back from the table. He stood slowly and adjusted his weight to his uninjured leg. “That might come in handy.”
“For what?” Sam asked pointedly.
“A Russian road trip. It’s the logical place to look for answers to this riddle, and I need to collect Wade anyway.”
“Don’t take this wrong, big brother,” Sam scolded, “but you hardly look fit for duty. We were planning on checking you into a hospital for a more thorough exam once we got to Taipei. Doc did a good job of patching you up, but we have no way of determining if you have injuries beyond the obvious.”
“Trust me,” Jake said, gripping his brother’s shoulder. “I’m fine. The leg injury seems pretty minor except for the blood loss. Once my red cell count is back to normal, I’ll be back to square one. Besides
, I could use some R and R.”
“R and R,” Sam repeated as he gave him a sideways glance, “in Russia?”
“Why not?” Jake shrugged.
Sam laughed. “You know what this is all about, don’t you, Cindy?”
“The girl,” she replied.
“Yep,” Sam firmly stated with a grin.
Jake’s initial look of denial gave way to a smile. He tried to formulate a different tact to his argument, but he knew it would get him nowhere. “I have to find out if she made it back safely,” he said honestly. “It’s been my constant thought this morning, and it will not go away until I know for sure. OK?”
“Want me to go with you?” his brother asked. “The attempt on your life was tied to that girl. If you find her, you may be walking into a hornet’s nest.”
Jake shook his head. “I need you and Murray to finish up the Gobi project. It shouldn’t take more than a day to track down the address you gave me. I’ll find the girl, make sure she’s OK, and then meet up with you guys later in the week. Does that work for you?”
Sam glanced over at Cindy and winked. His feigned look of disapproval was only comprised by the smirk forming at the corners of his mouth.
“And I always thought the older child was the responsible one,” he gibed. “At least that’s the comparison Mom used to make…every time I got in trouble.”
“And she was right,” Jake replied.
“Uh huh,” Sam grunted. “Did you ever tell her about Egypt?”
“Egypt wasn’t my fault and you know it.”
“That’s not the way Murray tells it.”
“Oh, and just what does Murray say?”
Knowing the pattern of relentless bantering that was about to ensue, Cindy cleared her throat loudly. Waving a scolding finger in the air, she ended their conversation.
“You should at least concede to Sam’s point,” she urged. “You’ve had your share of misadventures before, but nothing like this. You could have died.”
The Genesis Conspiracy Page 6