“The next clue,” he said. “But to what?”
10
BARNETT
22 miles south of Calamar, Colombia
“Over here,” Brinkley said.
Barnett forced his way through the snarled branches of the ceibas and emerged to find the special agent crouched over a body lying prone on the detritus. Brinkley shined his handheld infrared beam onto the side of the man’s face and checked for a carotid pulse, but it was obvious from where Barnett stood that there wouldn’t be one. The flesh along the dead man’s exposed back appeared green through the night vision apparatus. It had been opened from below his shoulder blades all the way up to the base of his skull, revealing a portion of his spine and the surrounding musculature, upon which the clouds of flies buzzing around the clearing had been feasting before their intrusion.
“He’s still warm,” Brinkley said. “Granted, it’s the middle of the night and it’s still eighty degrees, but I wouldn’t guess he’s been dead for more than a couple hours.” He lifted the man’s outstretched arm and let it drop limply to the ground. “Rigor mortis hasn’t even begun to set in yet.”
“Until now, Zeta’s been avoiding overt demonstrations of brutality,” Barnett said. “It knows we’re getting close and doesn’t have the time or luxury of being able to sneak through the jungle.”
“It’s possible it stumbled upon this guy and had no choice.”
Barnett knelt beside the man, whose skin was dark, his face acne-scarred, and his eyes glazed. A loop of his shoulder strap protruded from underneath him. He rolled him over to reveal the AK-47 squashed into the mud and shined his light around the clearing until he caught the reflection of brass casings.
“He saw it coming,” Barnett said. “He got off a handful of shots before turning tail and trying to run. It was on him before he took two strides.”
“A man with a Kalashnikov doesn’t wander off into the jungle on his own,” Brinkley said.
“No, he does not.”
The implication was clear. This man was part of a larger group, probably drug smugglers, which meant it was possible that not only were there more men to infect and turn into drones, there was also a potential means of transportation out of the Amazon.
What little breeze permeated the canopy shifted and brought Barnett a whiff of wood smoke. He stood and headed in that direction.
They caught up with Sheppard a hundred feet ahead through the underbrush, surrounded by dead men who looked like they’d been attacked by a herd of wild animals. The ground surrounding them was positively carpeted with spent shell casings. He glanced back at them and readjusted his grip on his SCAR with his bandaged hand.
“They died hard,” he said.
“But at least it was over quickly,” Barnett said. He stepped over the bodies, noting the expressions of sheer terror frozen on their lifeless faces. While their deaths might not have been protracted, there was no doubt their final moments had been excruciating. “Maybe twenty seconds. Start to finish.”
Morgan emerged from the faint haze of smoke trapped beneath the lower canopy, beckoned them in his direction, and disappeared back into the forest.
Barnett followed him through a snarl of lianas and saplings. A faint glow materialized in the distance through the swaying branches, followed by a smell he associated with a luau. By the time the camp came into view, he already knew what to expect. They passed an empty stable, the weathered gray plank walls and the desiccated hay on the hardpan spattered with dried blood. The rusted shackles bolted to the posts set in the middle of each suggested something other than horses had been housed inside. The back of the main building was riddled with bullet holes. Through the open doorway he could see the bodies of naked women, their flesh savaged and their remains cast aside amid drums of industrial solvents and garbage bags full of coca leaves.
He signaled for Morgan and Sheppard to head around the side of the structure while he and Brinkley secured the interior, which took all of about thirty seconds. Beyond the storage room, the rear half of which contained an arsenal of assault rifles large enough to overthrow just about any government, was a production room overflowing with cocaine in various stages of manufacture, from a crust that resembled concrete to mounds of uncut powder worth millions on the street. Or would have been, anyway, were it not for the dead woman sprawled across them, her blood clotted into a red paste. Like the others, the wounds on her back had undoubtedly been inflicted by Subject Z, which, again, made no effort to feed upon her flesh. The victims had been dispatched in the quickest and most efficient manner possible and their bodies left to rot where they fell.
The front entryway was lined with bricks bound in duct tape. Several columns had been knocked over and scattered throughout the entryway. He followed them out the main entrance toward where Morgan crouched in the glow of a dying bonfire, which had dwindled to cinders crackling in logs the size of tree trunks and a charcoaled human skeleton. He fingered the edge of the tire tracks in the dirt.
“How long?” Barnett asked.
“Can’t be more than a few hours.” Morgan stood and surveyed the scene. “A single industrial transport vehicle arrived and backed around the fire to align its tailgate with the main entrance. The driver climbed out. Went around to the cargo hold of his vehicle, presumably to roll up the gate. Proceeded into the building. He appears to have been in the process of loading the bed when he realized something was wrong and got the hell out of here so fast he nearly went straight off the ramp and into the jungle.”
Barnett followed the tracks to where the wooden ramp lay at the bottom of the dry riverbed. The ferns on the opposite bank were flattened where the right front tire rode up onto them. The trunks of the adjacent trees were either broken or scored from the impact of the bumper. He caught twin flashes of eyeshine from the shadows before a jaguar darted away from what was left of the man it had dragged into the brush.
He swept his infrared light across the rocky bed. Bunches of bananas were strewn across the ground amid coffee beans scattered from ruptured burlap sacks.
“His gate was still open when he took off,” he said.
Morgan nodded. He understood the implications.
“If Zeta was on that truck, it could easily be a hundred miles away by now,” he said. “We should call for aerial support.”
“We have no idea what kind of vehicle we’re looking for.”
“The axles are too close together to be a semi and too far apart to be a pickup. And look at the way the branches overhanging the riverbed are broken to about ten feet in height. We’re looking for a panel truck. No doubt about it.”
“So where’s it going?”
“Coffee beans and bananas are Colombia’s chief agricultural exports. For my money, they’re heading for the nearest port.”
“Figure out which one that is,” Barnett said and stared up the makeshift road to the point where it wound back into the jungle.
They couldn’t afford to allow the creature to reach that port, where it could board a vessel bound for anywhere in the world. They needed to figure out the truck’s destination and get there before it arrived.
If Subject Z managed to get off the continent, they’d never find it again.
11
TESS
The Hangar
Tess woke with a start. It took her several moments to realize she was still in her office and didn’t have the slightest clue whether it was night or day. She’d fallen asleep clutching a printout of the tattoo, which she was convinced was more than just a map. There was something strikingly familiar about it, but she couldn’t seem to put her finger on it. She’d printed out dozens of copies and scribbled all over them in an effort to figure out what nagged her about it, and yet she couldn’t seem to scratch the mental itch. Hopefully a few hours of sleep would allow her to approach the problem with a fresh set of eyes.
She set the paper aside and rose from her seat. Yawned and stretched her arms over her head. Walked behind Kelly’s desk an
d switched on the monitor displaying the old Assyrian map upon which the tattoo had been overlaid. There was something familiar about the size, shape, and relationship of the circles to one another, a pattern screaming to be recognized . . .
There was a coffee machine down the hall. Perhaps a little caffeine would get her sluggish neurons firing—
Tess was halfway out the door when she caught a glimpse of the monitor behind her desk from the corner of her eye and stopped dead in her tracks.
She turned and stared at the depiction of the night sky Subject Z had carved into the ceiling of the cavern that had served as its prison in Antarctica. The answer had been staring her right in the face the whole time. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t recognized it before now. She’d been so focused on finding the patterns among the stars that didn’t correspond with the night sky on September 21 of the previous year that she’d failed to recognize the pattern in the space between them.
It wasn’t simply that she’d been looking at the wrong thing, however, but rather from the wrong perspective. The stars representing the coastlines of South and Central America had been readily recognizable, as had those corresponding to the tectonic plates that led inland from the Pacific Ocean to the ruins of Teotihuacan. So recognizable, in fact, that she’d ignored their lack of precision, or perhaps she’d unconsciously chalked it up to Subject Z having been forced to fit the design into a fixed amount of space amid thousands of stars. The problem was she’d failed to take into account the curvature of the domed cavern ceiling. Her computer program had done a miraculous job of re-creating the creature’s work, but had displayed it as a flat, two-dimensional image, which was all she’d needed at the time to determine the date in question since that data was also stored in two dimensions.
Tess sat at her desk and set to work. Without the precise measurements and angulations of the cavern now buried beneath countless tons of rock and ice, she was going to have to work backward. She brought up the AuthaGraph world map, which had been specifically designed to better illustrate the spherical planet on a flat surface. Traditional maps were all based on the Mercator projection, a sixteenth-century rendering that preserved navigational lines on a rectangular grid demarcated by latitude and longitude, thus distorting the true size and shape of nations and continents. Greenland appeared to be as large as Africa. Canada and Siberia were stretched and elongated. Antarctica covered the entire bottom of the map. The more accurate rendition presented Africa rotated forty-five degrees clockwise in the upper left corner and Antarctica, roughly the same size as Australia, in the lower right. In between were Asia, which appeared to twist toward the center of the map, and the Americas, which had been rotated counterclockwise a full forty-five degrees away from it.
She took a deep breath and laid the creature’s star chart on top of it.
It took some manipulation and a few subtle distortion filters to align the path Subject A had taken from Antarctica to Mexico City with the coastline, but once she did, everything fell into place. All of the additional data points not corresponding to stars aligned with landmasses. Not a single one landed on an ocean. Her original attempts to plot the extraneous stars on the map had placed clusters in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the Caspian Sea, and northern Siberia. Now those same clusters fell squarely on southern North America, northern Africa, and western Asia; specifically the thin neck of Mexico along the Caribbean Sea, the Nile River Basin of Egypt, and a region in southeastern Turkey, respectively.
Suddenly, she was wide awake.
Tess zoomed in on the points of data that aligned with Turkey. There were dozens of dots arranged in a seemingly random manner, nearly all of them the same size, with the exception of nine that were not only larger but varied in size among themselves. A quick count and double-count confirmed there were a total of eighty-four points of data that must have taken Subject Z hours to carve in such detail. She might not have learned everything she wanted to about the creature, but she’d learned enough to know that it didn’t do anything without a reason.
She glanced across the room at Kelly’s monitor. The cluster of stars looked as though it corresponded to the same geographical location as Göbekli Tepe, but she didn’t have nearly enough locational data to confirm her suspicions.
“There has to be a connection,” she said and swiveled from side to side in her chair.
Tess abruptly leaned forward and started typing. She found an aerial photograph of the ancient Turkish site where her teammates were heading. There were several circular temples surrounded by square grids where excavation was only beginning, inside of which were the arcs of partially exposed outer walls. The T-shaped pillars were considerably larger than the other structural components and cut from stone a much lighter shade of gray, making them stand apart even from so far overhead, almost like the stars themselves.
“Well, what do you know?” she said and tilted her head to the side to view the screen from a different angle.
Tess closed the aerial image and opened the survey plans of Göbekli Tepe from the German Archeological Institute. The map had been created using a combination of ground-penetrating radar and magnetometer readings, and showed the temples that had already been excavated, as well as sections of those still buried underneath them. The way the walls of the structures overlapped at different depths made it difficult to determine how many there were, but it didn’t matter. She’d seen what she’d needed to see.
The pattern of stars Subject Z had carved into the ceiling corresponded to the megalithic pillars buried at various depths both on top of and beneath the man-made plateau. All but the nine larger points of data, which corresponded to the precise center of each of the circular temples, labeled Enclosure A through I on the map. The structures formed a pattern that almost looked like a cross, only the horizontal bar was disproportionately long and turned upward at the ends.
She lifted her monitor from her desk and angled it until the cross stood upright.
The design was as clear as day.
It was more than just a cross. Along with the seventy-three smaller stars, it formed an unmistakable pattern anyone who’d spent as much time staring up at the stars as she had would recognize immediately.
The temples hadn’t been built on top of each other; they’d been built on tiers and buried together as a whole, a primitive, five-story mecca that had been hidden beneath a veritable man-made mountain.
Take away all of the dirt, and from high above the site it would be clear that the pillars of the 12,000-year-old complex formed the constellation Cygnus.
12
JADE
Göbekli Tepe,
anlıurfa Province, Turkey
Not for the first time, Jade wondered what she was doing here. Archeology, specifically the speculative nature of it, was about the furthest thing from her specialty, and yet here she was on the other side of the globe, en route to one of the oldest historical sites known to man. The funny thing was a small part of her was actually beginning to enjoy it. At least the part where they explored the unknown and attempted to unlock its secrets, if not the part where they risked discovering the pathogen responsible for killing the creatures inside the tomb in Mosul, which was the whole reason they’d brought her along in the first place.
As the lone medical doctor among them, she was potentially the only one standing between life and death, assuming she was able to recognize the threat in time. After all, if Roche was right about the implications of the human bones he’d seen in the VR re-creation of the burial chamber, it wasn’t just the creatures like Subject Z that needed to fear the virus. The acting director had called them several hours ago while their plane was refueling at Faro Airport in Portugal and explained his theory about the single set of human remains, which made total sense given the context of the situation. The creatures had to have been exposed to the virus somehow, and using an infected man as bait to lure them into the cavern meshed with the physical evidence.
The tomb had been created for j
ust that purpose and then hurriedly sealed once the monsters were inside. The sacrificial offering, of course, had been ripped limb from limb in the most violent manner possible, but the pathogen had begun to work its magic before any of them could so much as attempt to find a way out, and, if that were truly the case, then they were potentially dealing with something even more insidious than Ebola, something capable of eliciting symptoms within a matter of hours.
They’d arrived at anlıurfa GAP Airport to find a Škoda Kodiaq waiting for them on the tarmac. The silver SUV was essentially the Czech version of the Volkswagen Tiguan, only bigger. The gear they’d requested had been loaded into the back, as verified by the checklist taped to the dashboard beside a GPS unit that had already been programmed with their destination, which lay somewhere ahead of them along the narrow road, the asphalt blurring past beneath them as they sped toward the unknown.
A flock of hairy sheep materialized to the right side of the road and faded behind them just as quickly.
“How much farther?” Anya asked from the back seat, where she reclined with her legs stretched across the upholstery and her shoulders propped against the wide window.
Evans glanced from the road to the GPS module.
“Four kilometers.”
This part of Turkey reminded Jade of Wyoming, with vast stretches of yellow grasses and bare earth covering low, rolling hills as far as the eye could see, marred only by the occasional stunted pine tree. It was hard to believe this place had once been lush and fertile, harder still that anyone had ever chosen to live here. There was obviously a reason that places like this ended up abandoned. There was no shelter, let alone water, within walking distance in any direction.
Mutation Page 8
