Harvey Bennett Thrillers Box Set 2

by Nick Thacker

  “I ran inside, only to find many people holding their faces, covering their stomachs. There was a horrible stench, and I believe some guests had vomited.”

  Floros, a member of the museum’s special events catering staff, is currently receiving treatment for third-degree burns and chemical ingestion at Laiko General Hospital of Athens.

  Police and state officials have closed the museum indefinitely for analysis, as well as for safety precaution. “We don’t understand what we’re dealing with here,” one officer, who chose to remain nameless, explained. “These people are dead, and we don’t know if they infected anyone else, or how this disease spreads. If it’s airborne, if it’s still alive, we just don’t know.”

  Another survivor, Jennifer Polanski, was attending the event with her husband, Jonathan Polanski, a respected American politician and lawyer. Her husband was found among the dead. Jennifer is also receiving treatment for chemical burns at Laiko and will undergo esophageal surgery early next week.

  “It was… like everyone was melting,” Polanski says. “The people… everyone… they were just melting. Their faces, their hands. Even mine.”

  At this time, the local police have asked for the support of the national Hellenic Police’s Special Counter-Terrorist Unit, and have asked that citizens and tourists remain clear of the museum while the investigation is underway.

  Police Chief Tsouvalas has released a statement: “At this time, we are in no way expecting or anticipating a follow-up attack. We believe this act of terrorism to be anomalous, and while we hope to increase the level of security and protection provided at public institutions such as this, we do not want this event to cause any fear or anxiety to the public at large.”

  We will continue updating this page as details are released.

  6

  Sarah

  SHE FROWNED, UNSURE OF WHAT IT meant.

  Odd.

  She read the text again, trying to understand what it was all about.

  ‘We are twice armed if we fight with faith.’

  Finding nothing useful, and knowing a quick search online would likely turn up the originator of the quote, she continued to read.

  ‘My dearest Sarah: —’

  She smiled again. Her father was a modern-day romantic, and he enjoyed nostalgia and elegiac references to a simpler time. His stately openings in his letters were no exception.

  ‘I do hope this letter finds you well. My research has taken me around the globe, and were it not for my fitful health I would be content to stay abroad for the remaining breaths I have been allowed.’

  He closed the first paragraph and then lost the nostalgic flair and fell into a more familiar, casual rhythm:

  ‘I’ve sent you an artifact I discovered while visiting Greenland. I thought it might be helpful in your research.’

  Sarah frowned. Greenland? When did he go to Greenland? And why would this be helpful for studying ancient American history?

  She shook her head, continuing to read as she smiled along.

  ‘It is a most unusual piece, as it does not seem to fit my paradigm of Greenland’s history. More importantly, if we are to believe what I am inclined to guess, the piece itself seems to be quite ancient.’

  She read past his signature ‘— your dearest father —’ and saw the postscript:

  ‘P.S.: consider it an early birthday gift.’

  Again, she frowned. That’s odd. My birthday is not for another two months. It was only August, and the cooler winds from up north apparently hadn’t gotten the message that summer in Michigan was supposed to be coming to a close.

  In addition, her father hadn’t included any ideas as to just how ancient the artifact was — that would have been too easy. Her father was a fan of puzzles, and it seemed as though he’d just sent one to Sarah.

  She chuckled, wondering what absurd ideas her father had come up with this time. She read the remainder of the letter, finding no more details of the artifact but only updates on his health — good, but not without numerous scoldings from his doctor to slow down a bit, her father’s retirement plans — ‘there’s no such thing as a true retirement’ — and a thank-you for the birthday gift she’d sent him.

  She folded the letter again and placed it back inside the envelope.

  “What did it say?” Alexander asked.

  She shook her head. “Not much. The usual fanciful writing, a flair for the dramatic, and a birthday wish.”

  Alex laughed. “Nothing he couldn’t just email over?”

  “Nothing at all,” Dr. Lindgren said. “It’s not like he’s a Luddite — he uses email all the time — and he’s a gadget geek, too. I think it’s just that he thinks I appreciate the extra touch of a real letter.”

  “You do appreciate it.”

  She grinned up at the handsome undergrad. “Can’t say I don’t. Still, he wants me to check this little thing out,” she said as she grabbed the object from the table. “Sending an email would have been quicker. ‘Hey, Sarah, check this thing out I’m going to send you,’ would have worked just fine.”

  “True. And it would have given you time to ask the necessary follow-up questions, like ‘where the heck did you find this little circular rock?’”

  “Greenland, actually,” she said.

  She felt the circular rock for a few more seconds, feeling the grooves along the edge and the indentation in the center and protrusion on the opposite side. She could tell it was well-made, even if it had been underground for some time. But how much time? she wondered. And where exactly in Greenland had he found it?

  She had always appreciated her father’s romanticism and flair, but in times like this, when he was asking her professional opinion, she wished he would have just cut to the chase.

  “Thoughts?” she asked.

  Her assistant looked at her, then at the rock, then shrugged. “Beats me, Doc. Seems like it’s in good shape, so my guess is that it’s been underground, but dry.”

  She nodded. “Or it’s not very old. But he did say he believes it to be ‘quite ancient,’ whatever that means.”

  “So, Vikings?” Alex said. “That’s most plausible. But it doesn’t help us with our research hypothesis, does it?”

  “No, not really. The Vikings were pretty prolific, ending up all over the place. But they’re not old enough. We need actual, hard proof that Berengia wasn’t the only way early settlers got here.”

  Her hypothesis was that the Americas had been settled long before travelers found the Bering Strait and walked across it during an ice age. She believed that there had been humans settling North, Central, and South America many thousands of years before that.

  The problem was that the evidence currently circulating didn’t support that conclusion.

  She lifted the artifact up and held it up to the line of light that was streaming into the tent. The medallion was worn, but its distinct shape and texture was still intact. She’d seen articles this well-preserved before, and it meant that the item was either a forgery — thus not as old as it purported to be at all — or it had been meticulously stored.

  “So it could be a Viking artifact, even though it doesn’t help us much. Maybe some sort of idol, a tiny shrine to Odin or something.”

  She nodded. “Maybe. But then it wouldn’t exactly be old enough for him to categorically explain it as ‘quite ancient,’ would it? The era of Vikings is well within the accepted standards of ‘history.’ But you’re right — I’m not sure what else it could be, if it’s real. What’s the oldest thing we’ve found on Greenland?”

  He shrugged. “Viking stuff, I believe. Your father wouldn’t send over a forgery, would he? What would be the point of that?”

  She shook her head. “No, he certainly wouldn’t. Which tells me this — whatever it is — was well-preserved, if he’s right about how old it is. But what is it?”

  Again Alexander shrugged. “You’re the expert, boss.”

  She smirked. “Right. I’m supposed to know everything a
bout everything because I’m the professor. Alex, I’m an anthropologist. I don’t study this sort of thing. Didn’t you learn that in your Intro to Earth Sciences course?”

  Alex laughed, a hearty, genuine chuckle. His long curls of black hair bounced jovially as he crossed his arms in front of him, preparing to get back to whatever it was he’d been doing before Sarah’s package came.

  He smiled down at her.

  She sighed. In another life, maybe, she thought.

  She barely had enough time to push the thought out of her mind before someone new entered the tent.

  7

  Rachel

  RACHEL RASCHER PUSHED HER HANDS through her hair, then looked up.

  “We need to push forward with the next test,” the man in front of her said. “Immediately. If we want to capitalize on the —”

  Rachel Rascher raised a hand, silencing the man. The scientist was pacing, thinking out loud, but she’d already made up her mind.

  “No,” she said, calmly, “we wait. There’s not enough of the original mixture left to increase the regularity of the tests. The trial was a success, but it was a limited success. We need to keep as much of the mixture secure as possible, until we are confident we have a synthetic replacement. We’ll use a portion of the remaining original compound for the first phase of the trials.”

  “But we’re close, Rachel. We can move forward as early as this evening with a second test. If the modifications we’ve made are anything close to what we experienced in Athens —”

  “No,” she said again. “We are not going to add another test until the scheduled event tomorrow night. Get Frederick Rap down this evening to clean up after the test, and give me the reports he’s prepared of the last three events, including this one. As always, make sure he’s there only after hours, when everyone else is gone. He’s not cleared.”

  Or rather, he’s not one of us, she thought.

  “Okay, I can do that,” the man said.

  “Shaw,” she said.

  He looked at her. “Yes?”

  She smiled. “I know it’s getting stressful. The first phase trial forced us to speed things up, but we almost have what we need.”

  He nodded. “I know.”

  “And I know where your loyalties lie, Shaw.”

  He nodded again, even bowing slightly. “Thank you, Rachel.”

  “When this is over,” she said. “We’ll all look back and wonder why this took so long. Why we waited so long.”

  “The world will stop questioning us, that’s for sure.”

  “Agreed,” she said.

  He stopped pacing, walking over to the small table at the side of the room. Its surface was empty save for an unplugged desk lamp, and all of the drawers — except for one — were empty as well. Besides the wooden bureau and the table Rachel had converted into her workstation and the desk, there was no other furniture in the room. A television stood on a rolling cart, but she rarely turned the thing on. Electricity was a precious commodity down here, and she already had a couple power strips plugged into both outlets that ran the length of the ceiling. The light overhead was a simple bulb, hanging on a chain, that had been mounted directly into the stone ceiling.

  She shivered. It was cool down here, but it was the feeling it gave her that caused her to shake, not the temperature. So much history here, she thought. So many questions we haven’t answered yet. We just need to get inside the Hall…

  Shaw picked up a round, hollow stone object, turning it over in his hands. “This is all that remains?”

  “Of the original supply, yes.”

  She knew he understood. He knew how much of the original mixture was used for each of their tests and trials, and he knew how many of the storage containers they had gone through already.

  He twisted the two halves and opened the stone container. “But once we get the synthetic mixture proven and produced, we can ramp up testing once again.” Shaw spoke the words as if they were a question, not a statement of fact.

  “Yes,” she said. “But I am not interested in waiting around for a final solution to be developed.”

  He frowned, turning to stare at his boss. “Wait, I thought that was…” he paused. “Then how —”

  “There is more of the mixture inside the Hall. I’m sure of it.”

  “How do you know?”

  She forced air out of her nose. “It’s obvious. This supply — what we’ve been working through — is all that remains of what we found in the tomb. The Hall itself will not only have more of the mixture, but the original recipe that was used to create it.” She grinned. “Assuming the ingredients are existing elements, and not some fanciful alien creation, we will be able to produce as much as we want, and the trials can continue. An unlimited supply, in that case.”

  “The journal says so?”

  She nodded, her eyes flicking to the bureau against the wall, where in a locked drawer she kept her journal. The journal belonged to her, but it hadn’t been written by her. It was a record of the accounts of her great-grandfather and how he had come to find the Hall of Records.

  He had never been able to open the Hall, much to his — and his government’s — dismay.

  The location of the Hall of Records had been kept a tight secret since then, and only a handful of men and women had ever known that it was real, much less its actual location.

  The journal was a document written on weathered, brittle pages, bound inside a leather cover, that had barely survived the decades since it had been written. It was a brief account of her great-grandfather’s life and career, as well as the firsthand account of his discovery of an ancient document written by Plato himself, and an attempted translation of the remnants of that same document.

  Her great-grandfather assumed that Plato had intended the work to be released alongside two of his other dialogues, Timaeus and Critias, but for whatever reason, no surviving translation of the work existed. Further, no record of the work existed.

  That was, until her great-grandfather found the original documents, hidden inside a stone box, itself lost among countless familial artifacts. These artifacts had been collected and placed in a chest that had been passed down through his family for ages. The chest was mostly full of his family’s own memorabilia, worthless artifacts to most people, but it held lineage documents and family tree information for the Rascher clan, and her great-grandfather had studied and scrutinized each and every one.

  The stone box, thought to be some sort of elaborate paperweight, had apparently never been closely examined. When Rachel’s great-grandfather came into possession of the chest and the stone box inside, he had pored over every surface of the item until he found a way to twist it open, revealing a decaying and dilapidated scroll, written in Plato’s own hand.

  It depicted a list of instructions that had been given to Plato by the traveler Solon — the same man whom Plato had mentioned as having traveled to Egypt and back in Plato’s Timaeus. Plato had reportedly transcribed the words of Solon — which he had called the Book of Bones — onto parchment, at which point he had turned over his draft to a scribe to prepare for publication in a more permanent format. Whether the great philosopher himself had changed his mind or the scribe had simply lost the copy was unclear, but the Book of Bones had then completely disappeared from history shortly after the publication of Plato’s dialogue Timaeus.

  The knowledge of its existence to the modern world would have remained a secret as well, if not for Rachel’s great-grandfather’s discovery of it, degraded to time and weather inside its stone tomb. He had tried his best to decipher and translate the entire text, but fragments of the parchment had completely dissolved.

  But it was only by a stroke of luck — a serendipitous discovery by a research team working for Rachel’s predecessor — that Rachel had reignited the work on Plato’s lost Book of Bones.

  When Rachel took the position at the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities’ Prehistory Division, she and her team inherited the research of h
er predecessor. Apparently some divers, years ago, had come across a shipwreck off the coast of Greece that had once been bound for Alexandria. The ship had been carrying a collection of sealed urns, one of which had miraculously withstood the pressures and temptations of time.

  And inside that urn, the team had found the Book of Bones. They didn’t know it at the time — it had gone unexamined, stuffed onto a shelf in the stacks of a museum in Florence for years.

  But Rachel, upon entering her new position, had decided to establish her headquarters for her new division in Giza, Egypt, and collect all the ‘undeclared’ possessions of the Egyptian government under one roof. Her team found the urn, and the parchment inside, during one afternoon of examination, and she immediately recognized the words — some of this document was the same as the one her great-grandfather had tried to unravel.

  The parchment, written in Plato’s own hand, could have netted her millions on the antiquities market, launching her and the team into the archeological spotlight and generating an attractive amount of revenue for the Egyptian government.

  But she’d had other plans.

  Instead, she’d kept the Book of Bones inside its urn, locked away in a vault where no one would find it. Rachel had kept the discovery a secret, only sharing the photocopies of it with those in her close-knit, hand-picked circle of scientists and historians.

  Rachel hadn’t even shared the book with her major benefactors. The silent partners would have loved to know what she had found, but they would have wrested control of the book from her hands, then flaunted her finding as a groundbreaking discovery. But she wasn’t interested in fame for fame’s sake — she wanted more.

  Specifically, she wanted what she had spent her entire adult life chasing.

  She wanted the truth.

  She wanted the truth, and she wanted it to be known.

  8

  Rachel