Trujillo screamed until he felt the woman’s teeth enter his throat.
And then he screamed no more.
18
EVANS
Göbekli Tepe
Evans stood at the edge of the stone escarpment and consulted the image of the constellation Cygnus superimposed over Göbekli Tepe. If Tess’s calculations were correct, the point that aligned with the brightest star in the Northern Cross, the one all of the observatories behind him had been designed to track, was just over the next rise. He stared out across the desolate valley toward a limestone precipice from which a single twisted pine tree grew.
“What’s over there?” he asked.
Sadik shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun. He was sweating even more now, if such a thing were even possible.
“The entire plateau is composed of the bedrock from which the megaliths throughout this site were quarried.”
“You haven’t found anything else over there?” Jade said.
“As you can plainly see, there are no structures of any kind.”
“There has to be something,” Evans said and commenced picking his way down the rocky slope.
“I assure you,” Sadik said, “there is nothing of interest to you over there. In fact, we had to cordon off a large section after the most recent earthquake. We have strict instructions not to allow anyone up there until a geologist from the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources has evaluated its structural integrity.”
“Trust me,” Anya said as she passed the archeologist. “There’s nothing up there that could be half as dangerous as what we’ve been dealing with for the last year.”
“We should at least return to the trailer and equip ourselves with the proper protective—”
“I just want to take a quick peek,” Evans called back over his shoulder. “If there’s anything up there that warrants further investigation, I promise we’ll take all necessary precautions.”
The loose sand and gravel gave way to sparse clumps of wild grasses and briars. He found it hard to believe that any number of people could have designed a settlement to match a constellation composed primarily of stars not visible to the naked eye, but considering he’d found the site using a map tattooed on the remains of a giant entombed three hundred miles from here, he was willing to set aside his skepticism, at least temporarily.
“They quarried the limestone from the ground directly beneath their feet,” Sadik said. “The sharpened edge of a stone blade dulled as quickly as it cut, which means it took several months to chisel a single megalith.”
“If each of them weighed multiple tons, how did they get them down one hill and to the top of the next?” Jade asked.
Anya answered for him.
“They laid logs side by side and used them to roll the stone blocks, almost like a primitive conveyor belt.”
“Exactly,” Sadik said. “Until recently there was a well-preserved megalith only partially carved from the bedrock. We believe they fractured it during the process of excavating it, so they were forced to leave it behind. Much to our good fortune. It is from this mistake that we were able to understand how the founders of Göbekli Tepe were able to accomplish such a magnificent feat.”
They crested the rise to find random chunks of limestone protruding from loose soil barely deep enough to hold the roots of the wild grasses. It was a small miracle that the pine tree crowning the plateau had been able to grow at all.
Evans stared out across the vast expanse of weeds and exposed stone, beyond which gray clouds scudded across the sky. Metal posts had been staked in a circle around the central region. The yellow caution tape strung between them snapped on the rising wind. The ragged pine tree grew amid jagged stone outcroppings at the heart of the ring. Something about it nagged at him.
He glanced again at the image on his phone. If the GPS coordinates were accurate, the point corresponding to Deneb was somewhere within the cordoned zone.
“I didn’t realize that Turkey was prone to earthquakes,” he said.
“This region sits on the Anatolian Plate,” Sadik said. “There are two major strike-slip fault zones to either side of us. Seismic activity is commonplace.”
Evans couldn’t seem to look away from the tree. Its sparsely needled branches were so thin that they hardly appeared strong enough to support the handful of pine-cones that had managed to grow.
“Must have been a heck of an earthquake to cause structural damage to bedrock like this,” he said. “How strong was it?”
“Four-point-nine on the Richter scale.”
He thought of the petroglyph of Ahura Mazda from inside the tomb in Mosul. The bearded deity had been depicted raising a pinecone in one hand, and holding a canister in the other, directly underneath it, the same canister that had been carved upon the megalith in the ruins behind him.
“Strange to think that this plateau withstood twelve thousand years of seismic activity only to be done in by an earthquake under five in magnitude. How long ago did it happen?”
“Just under two weeks,” Sadik said. “I remember it specifically because it was the same day as the solar eclipse.”
Evans glanced back at Jade, who read his expression and offered a subtle nod. He returned his gaze to the pine tree. He was by no means a botanist, but he did understand that a tree needed three things to grow: sunlight, water, and soil. No tree could grow without water, let alone in a few inches of loose dirt, which meant that not only was the soil underneath it considerably deeper, it either trapped some amount of precipitation above the underlying limestone, or the roots had found access to some other subterranean source.
He stepped over the caution tape and struck off toward the tree.
“What are you doing?” Sadik asked. “You said we would return to the trailer for protective gear. This area is too dangerous to proceed without it.”
“You’re probably right,” Evans said, “but I didn’t travel all this way to play it safe.”
Besides, he didn’t believe in coincidences, and arriving to find the specific area he was searching for cordoned off was a bigger one than he could swallow. He wasn’t so far removed from the incident at Teotihuacan that he’d forgotten how an earthquake had exposed the entrance to the ancient subterranean maze and caused Enigma to emerge from the shadows. Was it possible that similar underground warrens awaited them beneath the superficial limestone? And if so, what did they contain? They needed to find out before the masked paramilitary group that had nearly killed them in Mexico to claim the mummified remains caught wind of their discovery.
“I must insist you turn around,” Sadik called after him. “Mine is not the most forgiving government when it comes to violating its directives. Any perceived violation could lead to the revocation of our permit . . .”
The wind carried away the archeologist’s words as Evans neared the tree. The surrounding limestone had been thrust upward at odd angles by the seismic activity, forming what looked like a jagged crown around its trunk. The stone that had been exposed to the elements for millennia was pale gray and covered with red lichen, while the undersides, which, until recently, had been lodged in the earth, were considerably darker and clotted with dirt. The tree itself leaned to the southwest, the roots on the opposite side pulled out just far enough to expose the rich, dark soil underneath them.
Evans crouched and dug through it, but only encountered more roots. He’d been so certain he’d find either a hidden orifice or the canister from the petroglyphs. They were going to have to remove the entire tree, which would probably cause Sadik to have a coronary, but they couldn’t risk being beaten to the prize, especially if it had anything to do with the virus that had killed every living being inside the tomb in Mosul.
He stood and waved the others closer. They were already across the tape and halfway to him, treading carefully to avoid the crevices in the unstable limestone. If they wanted to get that tree out of there in a hurry, they were going to need help, specifically the kind that required
some oil to grease the bureaucratic wheels of the Turkish government, not to mention some heavy equipment.
Evans walked several paces away and removed his cell phone from his pocket. He was just about to call Roche when he noticed the megalith Sadik had described earlier. The edges had been rounded by the erosive forces of nature, but the T-shape remained clearly defined. As was the diagonal fissure across the middle that had caused its makers to abandon it, only it was more than a mere crack now. The upper half stood at an angle to the lower, revealing a narrow opening.
“Guys?” Evans said and knelt on the ground beside it. “I think I found what we’re looking for.”
He tilted the screen of his phone to get a better look. It produced just enough light to reveal that the hole continued straight down, well beyond its reach.
The megalith hadn’t been left behind because its builders broke it; they’d deliberately placed it over the hole to make sure that no one who didn’t already know it was there would ever be able to find it.
Evans jumped to his feet, prepared to share his revelation with the others, only to find them facing away from him, holding their hands up at their sides. Sadik stood before them with a pistol in his hand. His face was positively dripping with sweat.
“I really wish you hadn’t found that,” he said.
19
TESS
The Hangar
Tess could feel all of the disparate events beginning to coalesce, and it was up to her to figure out what was about to happen. Or, more precisely, where it was about to happen. If they were right, the three similar crop circles represented not just specific dates and times in the planetary cycles, but locations, as well. The pattern from Alton Barnes had led them to Göbekli Tepe, where, theoretically, something had transpired to coincide with the solar eclipse nearly two weeks ago. While she had no idea what that might have been, hopefully their team on the ground would be able to solve that mystery any second now. In the meantime, it was up to her to determine the other two locations, and she needed to do so in a hurry, because in just over twenty-four hours, the Earth’s shadow would eclipse the moon, triggering an unknown phenomenon with potential global ramifications.
She brought up the AuthaGraph world map, with its strangely contorted continents angled diagonally from the upper left to the bottom right, on the first of the four monitors on the wall behind her desk and overlaid the extraneous data points from the re-creation of the night sky Subject Z had carved into the ceiling of its Antarctic cell. The cluster over southern Turkey was readily apparent, as were maybe a dozen others spread across the landmasses, too many to examine without something resembling a plan of action.
The three crop circles from July 1990, in Wiltshire County, England, were displayed on the adjacent monitors. She’d scaled the one from Alton Barnes—officially classified as CC1—to fit the map, and then adjusted the other two to match. While they all had the same basic elements, there were subtle distinctions between each of them. The Earth, the moon, Mars, and Jupiter all looked the same, with minor differences corresponding to the positions of their tuning fork-shaped appendages, which marked the time of day on each. The locations of Saturn, Neptune, and Venus varied, although not by so much that they warranted special attention. The only glaring variance between them—outside of the order of the Earth and the moon—had to do with Saturn.
The crop circle from Stanton St. Bernard—CC3—depicted Saturn with one ring instead of two, while the one from East Kennett—CC2—featured two Saturns: one exactly where it was supposed to be, between Jupiter and Neptune, and a second, inexplicable instance far to the right of all of the other planets. Curiously, the body of what she’d come to think of as Sat2 was larger than that of Sat1, and more closely resembled the Saturn of CC1, which had aligned with Nineveh.
“Could it be that simple?” Tess said aloud.
She zoomed in on the AuthaGraph map until she could clearly see the Middle East, from the Black Sea in the north to Ethiopia in the south, and Greece in the west to Afghanistan in the east. She overlaid CC1 so that it aligned with the cities from the ancient Assyrian map, placed CC2 on top of it, and then centered Sat2 over Nineveh, which caused the remainder of the crop circle, the portion that matched CC1, to slide across the Mediterranean Sea and partially off the screen to the left. Considering all of Subject Z’s data points were on the land now, that couldn’t possibly be right, could it? Then again, the continents had been steadily moving apart since Pangaea broke apart.
And then she saw it.
If she kept Sat2 on Nineveh and rotated the design roughly 40 degrees counterclockwise so that Neptune aligned with Kalah, just as it did with CC1, the planets ran diagonally down through Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Egypt.
“I need an older map!”
Tess rushed across the room to Kelly’s computer, opened the map of ancient Mesopotamia, and forwarded it to her system. Dashed back to her desk. Brought up the file, adjusted the scale, and substituted it for the detail section of the Middle East on the AuthaGraph map.
The pattern was unmistakable.
Sat1 aligned with Palmyra, a primitive settlement in Syria. Neptune and Uranus matched Haræ and Oriza. Jupiter fell upon Damascus and Mars marked Jerusalem. The gap in the line connecting Mars to the moon signified where it crossed the southeastern corner of the Mediterranean, while the moon itself corresponded to Tanis. The bull’s-eye of the Earth landed squarely on Giza, home of the pyramids and the Great Sphinx. Mercury and Venus coincided with Faiyum and Saqqara, respectively.
It made perfect sense. Göbekli Tepe and Giza were two of the most important sites in the Old World and also the most inexplicable. Both were architectural anomalies, marvels of physics, and monuments to technology and skills beyond those of the people of the time. And if she was right, then the extra data points from Subject Z’s carving of the night sky should line up—
“Perfectly,” she finished out loud.
Tess switched from the ancient Mesopotamian map to Google Earth and zoomed in until she was able to clearly see the dots aligned with Giza. In fact, three of them synched perfectly with the pyramids of Menkaure, Khafre, and Khufu. It was only then that she made the connection.
Just as the pattern over southern Turkey had formed the constellation Cygnus, this one formed Orion. His belt consisted of the stars Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka—the Three Sisters—each of which corresponded to a pyramid. The Sigma Orionis system and the Orion Nebula, which combined to form his scabbard, fell upon the mortuary temple and the tombs. The buildings that corresponded to the remainder of the constellation’s primary stars—Betelgeuse, Meissa, Bellatrix, Rigel, and Siaph—were impossible to find, thanks to the constantly shifting desert and the modern city that had grown up around the—
“Pyramids,” she said. She looked at the printout of the fourth crop circle, CS4. It was so different from the others that she’d unconsciously either discounted its significance or considered it unrelated, but now that she knew what she was looking for, she could tell exactly what it represented. The small, scattered dots outlined the coast of Antarctica, while the large circle with the fork-like extension marked the South Pole. The bull’s-eye corresponded with what they theorized to be the lost city of Atlantis, where they had discovered the pyramid with the transformative powers. Was it possible the Egyptian pyramids served a similar function?
This was huge. She had to tell someone. They needed to dispatch a field team to Giza right now.
Tess ran out of her office and sprinted down the hall. Hit the stairs so she didn’t have to wait for the elevator. Blew through the door and hurtled down the corridor. Burst into the command center.
“I figured out the second location!” she shouted.
Maddox whirled to face her, his eyes wide, his lips a grim line. His right hand instinctively sought the pistol holstered to his hip. His expression softened and his hand fell away from his weapon, but for the most fleeting of seconds she’d been certain he was going to draw it. “You
startled me, Dr. Clarke.” He offered an embarrassed smile, one she was more than a little surprised to discover made her lower abdomen tingle. Something about his scars made him seem vulnerable, and maybe even a little dangerous. She’d never thought of him in a romantic light, but perhaps it was high time she did. “Trust me when I say that’s not an easy thing to do.”
Behind him, the image on the main screen switched from an aerial view of Göbekli Tepe to a nondescript jungle. The shaky footage from the live drone feeds on the surrounding monitors made her queasy.
“Where are Martin and Kelly?” she asked.
“In the field,” he said, “but I’d be happy to relay your findings.”
She’d been so caught up in her work that she’d forgotten they were on their way to the medical facilities at USAMRIID to meet with Dr. Friden, whose name she’d heard countless times while she was in Antarctica. He was the microbiologist who’d insisted upon bringing the mouse that had caused so much trouble.
“The second crop circle leads to Giza, which just happens to align with the constellation of Orion. Or at least part of it.”
“You’re certain?”
“One hundred percent.”
Maddox smiled and turned to face his team of information specialists.
“Task another satellite,” he said. “I need eyes on Giza. And find me the nearest drone.”
There was a flurry of activity at the workstations below the bridge. Lines of code scrolled across several of the screens as his men performed their tasks. One jumped up from his seat and ran past her, presumably on his way to the Arcade, which housed stations resembling video game consoles from which to remotely control a veritable armada of drones.
“Excellent work, Dr. Clarke,” Maddox said. “I knew you’d be able to crack the code. What about the other crop circles?”
“The fourth—the one that looks nothing like the others—aligns with Forward Operating Base Atlantis, which we probably should have recognized from the start.”
Mutation Page 12
