The Pandora Room: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

  “Why isn’t Dr. Tang here?”

  Kim replied with a shrug. “She’d been talking to many of the staff today, general medical inquiry, but I haven’t seen her in a couple of hours.”

  Walker leaned closer to her, dropping his voice even lower. “This all seems to have unsettled her more than I’d have expected. Do you think—”

  A tap on his shoulder made him turn, and he saw Sergeant Dunlap had come up behind them. With his filtration mask on, his face was difficult to read.

  “Is something wrong?” Kim whispered.

  Dunlap glanced at her for a moment, then seemed to make up his mind and focused on Walker. “Can we step outside? There’s something we need to discuss.”

  Walker frowned. Had Dunlap discovered who he really worked for, or was this about something else? Only one way to find out.

  “Let’s go,” he said and then turned to Kim. “We’ll talk later.”

  Kim gave him a curious look, but then her attention returned to Sophie and the gathering below, and Walker followed Dunlap down another corridor, wondering how long he would have to live down in this stone labyrinth before he had the map of it in his head. Dunlap seemed already to have learned to navigate the place.

  You’re not going to be here long enough to need to know, Walker told himself.

  But he paid attention, anyway. It felt unsafe somehow. Unsettled. If there was anything he’d learned in working for the government, it was that he always needed to have an escape plan, just in case.

  NINE

  Dr. Tang rarely found herself curious about the minds and thoughts of others. She typically observed human interactions as if she had landed on another planet whose customs were inscrutable. Large groups made her nervous, and small groups made her more nervous still. One on one, or with just a few other people, she felt functional, but even then she rarely considered what lay beneath the superficiality of words and emotions that were plainly expressed. So when she began to wonder what the dig personnel thought about the Pandora Room—what they believed, what they knew, how it felt to be forbidden from viewing the jar—she surprised herself. But this was a time of surprises for her.

  The greatest surprise of all was that she felt afraid.

  The staff was gathering upstairs, but that was too large a crowd for her. From the moment she had first entered the Pandora Room and felt the ominous weight of the air in there, Dr. Tang had wanted to be by herself. Over the past day, there had been conversations and small meetings and phone calls where her expertise had been requested, but everything she had said was pure conjecture. If they were fortunate, nobody would ever know if they had anything to fear from the jar.

  Yet here she was, standing outside the thirteen steps that led down to the Pandora Room. There were two sentries outside the entrance. Dr. Tang had been here when the USAMRIID techs came through—two men, both wearing hazmat suits. She’d asked them if they had a spare for her and had been told that they had brought several additional suits. That news comforted her. Her filtration mask was probably sufficient, but if she wanted a hazmat suit, she could have one.

  Ebola she could handle. What frightened her was the unknown.

  She didn’t want to be among those crowded into the atrium, but neither did she want to be alone in the west wing quarters that had been assigned to her and Kim. She had decided to explore more of the underground city, but she had not meant to find her way here. Her feet had led her, and now she discovered that those same feet were reluctant to lead her away.

  Even there in what she’d heard referred to as the column chamber, she could hear voices coming up the steps from the Pandora Room. Lamar Curtis had been there on his own at first, doing his best to translate the writings on the walls and the altar. Then he’d been joined by the USAMRIID techs. Their words were muffled, but she could make out enough to understand they were discussing the precautions necessary to move the jar. First they would drape it in plastic, then clear the area before lifting it just enough to place it into a transport crate—what one of them called the contagion box. Dr. Tang had seen similar precautions taken many times. They would pack the box carefully to make sure the jar didn’t shift much when the time came to transport it.

  Just get it out of here, she thought. Stop wasting time.

  “Ma’am?” one of the guards said, staring at her. “Are you all right?”

  Dr. Tang laughed softly, her voice shaking. She had put on a hooded sweatshirt, the one with the striped Princeton P on the chest that reminded her of Riverdale High School in the old Archie comics.

  The scuff of a footfall made her flinch, and she glanced over to see Martin coming through the chamber, moving past the shadowed columns toward her.

  “I’m sorry if I startled you,” he said.

  “Not at all. I’m a bit jumpy on a good day.” Dr. Tang decided she wanted to be anywhere but here. “I’ll speak with you later, Martin.”

  He gave her a strange look as she moved past him but did not try to engage her any further, and she was glad. Dr. Tang had never been good at small talk, and she discouraged it whenever possible.

  Hurrying up the corridor, Dr. Tang moved away from the column chamber with a sense of both relief and deeper anxiety. This section of hallway seemed rougher than much of the labyrinthine city, strangely isolated from the rest. Somewhere ahead were the stairs that led up to the room Dr. Durand’s team had discovered by breaking through a false wall, so it made sense that it felt quiet and disconnected down here.

  She paused and exhaled, leaning against the wall. Her nerves were frayed, and she needed a moment for herself. With a glance in each direction, she pulled down her filtration mask—against her own explicit instructions—and breathed a bit easier. Aware of the irony, Dr. Tang snaked her hand into the pocket of her sweatshirt and pulled out a package of Parliaments and a lighter.

  Dr. Tang tapped out a cigarette, tipped it between her lips, and fired up her lighter. The first inhalation of nicotine flooded her with relief. Delicious carcinogens. The guard had asked if she was all right, and what kind of question was that, anyway? Of course she wasn’t all right. She was in a part of the world where people tended to violently disagree about things like borders, part of a team tasked with delivering a potential biohazard into safe hands, and there was something about this place, this subterranean city, and that damned room.

  A shiver went through her, and she took another drag on her cigarette to dispel the chill. What had she felt yesterday when she’d entered the Pandora Room? Not fear … at least, not fear of contagion. The room had felt impossibly full, almost alert, though such a thing was impossible. It had felt to her as if somehow the room sensed her presence and objected.

  Or had it been the room? Might it not, instead, have been the jar?

  Fucking madness. She knew it. After the long journey and so much exposure to new people, she had just been tired and claustrophobic, perhaps having a new sort of anxiety attack, or simply fearful of what unknown diseases might be sealed inside that jar. Anything else, any other explanation, was just idiocy or lunacy, and Dr. Tang could not decide which she would have preferred.

  One thing she did know, however, was that she had zero interest in going back inside that room, but she knew that she would have to do so eventually.

  When she took her next drag on the cigarette, her hand shook.

  She heard footsteps and looked up to see Martin coming back from the Pandora Room.

  “You caught me,” she said.

  Martin gestured toward her cigarette. “Seems counterintuitive, if you don’t mind me saying. Someone in your line of work smoking.”

  She smiled thinly. “I’ve worked in a lot of places where there are diseased corpses putrefying around me because people are too busy trying not to join them to remove them. Cigarette smoke helps mask the stink, and it kills my own sense of smell. I’m afraid I’ve gotten into the habit.”

  Martin blanched. “Shit, Doc, I guess you’ve earned it. Have another one.”
>
  Dr. Tang saluted him with her cigarette. “I’m sure I will. I don’t like it down here.”

  “I’ll see you upstairs? Sophie’s talking to the whole team.”

  “I’ll be along soon,” she told him.

  Martin waved and carried on along the corridor. Dr. Tang continued smoking and listened as the sounds of his passing had faded to silence again. She took a long draw on her cigarette and exhaled a thin puff of gray smoke, watching the smoke dance and waver in a swirling breeze that seemed to come from nowhere.

  Drawing in another lungful of smoke, she blew a billowing ring and watched the same thing happen. Closing her eyes, she felt the draft moving around her and turned to examine the wall several feet back along the corridor. A thin line ran down the rock face like some kind of seam, and at knee height she found an actual crack. When she put her hand in front of it, she could feel cold air whispering past her fingers, and she shivered. Despite the meticulous architecture of the place, it was still made of stone that had settled over many long centuries. The hollow behind the wall must have been a ventilation shaft.

  Dr. Tang took another drag on her cigarette. The tip flared orange in the gloom of the corridor, and she wondered what the hell she was doing here.

  Your job. You are doing your job.

  She had been at a conference in Tel Aviv when the call had come in. She had consulted for the U.N. before, and this had seemed like another job like that—good money to visit a site of concern, not an active outbreak of any kind. Dr. Tang had done plenty of fieldwork, but teaching was a hell of a lot safer. Not for the first time, she wished she had stuck to teaching.

  A sound made her look up, squinting into the interplay of light and darkness back along the tunnel in the direction of the Pandora Room. What had it been? A cry, she thought. A shout, but muffled by distance and the soft curves of yellow stone. There came an echoing crack, and another, and she froze.

  Dr. Tang dropped her cigarette and ground it out with the heel of her boot. She slipped her filtration mask into place and began to retrace her steps, knowing that she should listen to the wise cowardice of her heart and head the other direction but unable to resist the urge to investigate and to help if she could.

  Her steps quickened along with her pulse.

  The crack in the corridor wall had been forgotten.

  * * *

  Evening had set in when Walker and Sergeant Dunlap stepped outside. The sun had vanished below the horizon, but the western sky remained the vivid shade of indigo that always seemed to hint at the night’s unspoken promise. Walker glanced in that direction, and the sight gave him a moment’s respite before the trouble he knew was to come. Dunlap hadn’t asked him out here for a romantic stroll.

  “What’s on your mind, Sergeant?” he asked, tugging down his filtration mask. Unlike Sophie and her inner circle, he hadn’t been inside the Pandora Room without it on, so he felt it was safe out in the fresh air.

  Dunlap pulled down his own mask and glanced around.

  “Come with me,” the sergeant said, leading him on a diagonal path away from the sentries who stood at the dig’s entrance.

  Nightfall had dropped a blanket of quiet over the camp. No truck engines growled, and the shouts of soldiers had ceased. Guards were posted around the camp, men and women were moving from one tent to another, and from a distance there came the deep bass thump of old-school hip-hop. A ripple of laughter rose from another direction, but for now those aboveground were doing much the same as those below—waiting.

  “Pretty sure we’re alone,” Walker said, growing irritated.

  Dunlap stood a bit straighter, lifted his chin. “Dr. Walker, my CO told me I was to keep you in the loop, treat you like you’re the man in charge—at least in charge of me. I find that strange, sir, but I’m in the army and I know how to follow an order. So I’m making this report to you.”

  Walker made sure his face betrayed nothing, but he knew the sergeant had to be wondering why he was supposed to treat a civilian scientist like a ranking officer.

  “Go on, Sergeant. What’s troubling you?”

  “I’m hearing chatter. One of the Kurdish sentries was talking—maybe he figured I didn’t speak the language, but I know it well enough. From what he’s saying, word of this is everywhere.”

  Walker swore quietly. “Exactly what we figured would happen.”

  “This Kurdish sentry … he heard about it from his brother, who called him to ask what was going on here.”

  “The brother’s a soldier, too?”

  Dunlap shook his head. “No, sir. That’s what I’m saying. The brother’s a fucking grocer up in Amadiya. A Turkish woman came in—a journalist—and apparently she’d been asking a number of other merchants and businesspeople in town. Man-on-the-street interviews, that sort of thing, to find out what people thought about Pandora’s fucking box being found nearby.”

  Walker stared at him, but all he could think about was the world they lived in now. He’d anticipated the Turkish government learning about the Pandora Room, but if it had already filtered down to journalists in the neighboring country, then the whole populace would know about it soon enough. Many would already know.

  “We’ve got a unit of U.N. peacekeepers on the way to accompany the transportation of the jar, wherever it goes from here,” Dunlap went on. “But there are hundreds of American soldiers in this area and thousands of Kurdish fighters. Most of them are deployed where they’re needed, but we’re only going to be here for a couple of days, maybe three at most. Not enough time for us to get any significant backup.”

  “You think someone’s going to make a move?” Walker asked.

  Dunlap exhaled. “This part of the world, someone is always going to make a move.” He glanced across the camp, seemed to hesitate, and then beckoned for Walker to follow. “Come with me.”

  For the second time that night, Walker let the sergeant take the lead. He found that he liked Dunlap. The guy had an air of zero bullshit around him. Solid and intent on doing his job. As they crossed the camp, Walker listened to the noises of the people and the land around them. He wished whoever had their music playing would shut it off. This region went through periods when it was a powder keg. Tensions were not unusual. But the last thing anyone wanted to do was to give the conflicting powers in Kurdistan something else to argue about.

  They reached a line of military tents, things large enough to sleep twenty soldiers. Parked in the midst of them was a Humvee with a passenger door open. As they neared the vehicle, Walker realized this was the source of the hip-hop pumping out across the camp. Across the front seat of the vehicle, a lone officer lay propped on a stained pillow with a reading lamp, a book open on his chest. Walker caught a glimpse of the cover—Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry.

  Dunlap rapped on the side of the Humvee. “Lieutenant Cobb?”

  The lieutenant didn’t startle. He glanced up over the top of his book as if he’d known they were coming, and maybe he had. With a sigh, he dog-eared the book and set it aside, then slid himself over to the open door and settled there with his long legs dangling. Lieutenant Cobb had to be at least six foot three, and if he intended to sleep across the front seat, he’d be folded up in a fetal position for the night, but maybe he felt safest that way, inside the armored vehicle. Or maybe he was just a weird son of a bitch. He had shaved his head bald, but dark stubble had grown in. The deep tan of deployment in this part of the world couldn’t hide the dark circles under his eyes.

  “You must be Walker,” he said, with a head-to-toe glance.

  “Lieutenant,” Walker said. “Maybe you could turn the music down?”

  His nostrils flared as if he’d smelled something dead, but the lieutenant obliged—a little. The thumping bass line still resonated across the camp. Walker could feel it in his chest, punching him in the rib cage with every beat.

  “You want to tell him what you told me?” Dunlap said.

  Lieutenant Cobb studied Walker again. Obviously, the
two men had discussed this in advance, but he gave another few moments over to the evaluation.

  “Who do you work for again?” the lieutenant asked.

  “National Science Foundation. But it’s all the same government, Lieutenant. I’m just not one of the folks with the guns.”

  Dunlap leaned against the Humvee and crossed his arms. “Whoever he works for, he’s the guy they sent to make sure shit doesn’t get out of control down below.”

  “I thought that was Major Bernstein,” Lieutenant Cobb replied.

  “Up top, that’s the major, sir,” Dunlap said. “Down below, Walker’s the one someone back in D.C. is listening to.”

  “I’m here as part of the U.N. observation team,” Walker corrected him. “Kim Seong’s in charge of that.”

  Dunlap smiled. “This isn’t a coalition conversation or a U.N. conversation. This is us figuring shit out.”

  “Fair enough,” Cobb said, reaching back into the vehicle and turning the music down a bit more. He ran a hand over the stubble on his head. “Short version. Sergeant Dunlap shared his concerns with me, and I have my own. We have two men in custody—twin brothers who were stalking Dr. Durand and her team in Amadiya some days ago. These two assholes didn’t know a thing about the Pandora Room. They just wanted to know what Indiana Joan and her crew had found down there, because whatever it was, there are factions in the Turkish government who might have made an argument over where it belonged.”

  “This isn’t news,” Walker told him. “The Turks have lodged complaints throughout the process.”

  “These two guys won’t say exactly who they were working for,” Lieutenant Cobb went on. “But they were willing to tell us who else was paying attention to the dig.”