by Nick Thacker
She squeezed her eyes shut, focusing on the black nothingness the insides of her eyelids provided. She wanted Alex to walk in, to at least stand next to her and tell her it was going to be alright. Or even Jennifer, to offer her one of the anxiety pills she often saw the young woman taking.
Her mind raced, and inevitably ended up back at the letter. ‘My research has taken me around the globe…’
She knew that since her parents had split, her father had started the beginning of a year-long sabbatical from teaching to travel around the world. Since he was apparently now dating someone, he had no doubt ended up in some exotic locations, but to think that he had been kidnapped while somewhere remote made her shudder.
If that’s true, he could be anywhere.
There was no rhyme or reason to her father’s exploits, it seemed. He had always had an eccentric flair, wanting to travel around and study the cultures and histories of faraway places, seemingly for no other reason than the place was different from what he was used to.
That said, her father was also a true intellectual. He couldn’t help himself; he learned everything there was to learn about every subject he could get his hands on, with a restless desire to compartmentalize it into interrelated connections. Most of it ended up becoming dinner-time trivia, but his passion for learning and knowledge was contagious.
Sarah, their only child, had gotten the bug early, following her father’s footsteps into an academic career and a lifelong passion for travel and exploration.
So she had absolutely no idea where her father had been, other than what Agent Sharpe had told her: he had last been seen leaving his apartment in Stockholm. Where had he been heading? What was his plan? How long after he’d been seen in Stockholm had he disappeared?
And, most of all, the biting realization that what she feared most was very likely to be true. It was a truth she didn’t want to admit, yet there was something nagging at her, her subconscious unable to let it go.
She replayed the thought over and over again in her head while she picked up her own phone and dialed the number. The one she had memorized, yet hoped she wouldn’t have to use. The cellphone began to ring, and once again the thought crossed into her conscious mind.
My father has been kidnapped.
14
Rap
THE INTERIOR OF THE FACILITY WAS STARK. Empty, noiseless, save for the gently swinging bulbs above his head, and bare. The rock walls were cold to the touch, and gave the narrow hallways the feel of being inside a crypt.
Fitting, he thought, since we are in a crypt.
At least there were no more rats. Hundreds of them had been kept in cages stacked four high in the next corridor over, inside two of the largest rooms. Their squeaks had always been there, diminishing as he walked farther away from their corridor but never completely absent.
He shuddered, fumbling with his latex gloves. It was cold, thanks to the damp, cool stones that made up the underground structure, and the temperature did nothing to help with his trepidation. He wasn’t afraid, necessarily, but there still something off-putting about walking the halls of the facility in the middle of the night.
Rap Frederick veered to the left, following the lattice of carved hallways toward the room at the end of the line: Room 23. The sign above the door was like all the signs — plastic, mounted on a Velcro strip that had been stuck directly onto the surface of the rock. The doorway was natural, carved from the stone, but the metal door itself was new, sized and shaped to fit perfectly in the rectangular hole, set on two massive hinges that had been pounded into the core of the stone.
Room 23 was a medium-sized, low-ceilinged room that was twice the width of the hallway itself, forming a knobbed end to a long wing of smaller research rooms, and those parts of the crypt had been turned into labs, storage rooms, and a few offices. Most of the rest of the rooms in the crypt were empty, since the organization that had originally repurposed the rooms had no use for more than a couple wings inside of the labyrinthine, maze-like space.
Rap Frederick’s employer was a brand-new arm of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities called the Prehistory Division, and it was clear to him they were more interested in the privacy the space offered then they were in filling it with researchers and staffers. To date, he had only interacted with a total of three other humans during his employment here: the HR person who had hired him, a boss he only spoke with on the phone and via email, and a technician he sometimes passed on his way in and out.
Tonight was like most nights — he was here to clean up the mess left by the testing in Room 23. A double master’s degree in chemistry and applied biology apparently was only good enough to get him a glorified janitorial job at the ends of the earth, sleeping during the day and working while the city slept.
He sighed. At least the salary was good.
He tried not to notice the resonant, empty-sounding clicking of his heels as they smacked against the rock floor and echoed down the hall, and instead focused on the door to 23. It lay in front of him, looming, waiting for him to perform the same duties he’d performed twenty-two other times.
He wondered if there was anything significant about that. I’m cleaning 23 for the 23rd time tonight, he thought. He wasn’t superstitious, but there was something oddly appealing about ghost stories and myths when working for a department like the Prehistory Division.
The larger organization — the Egyptian Ministry of State of Antiquities — was a typical government structure. Poorly run but admirable in their efforts, the Antiquities Ministry had been established in 2011 with the charter to ‘preserve and protect the heritage and history of ancient Egypt.’ As such, much of their work was in finding and securing lost Egyptian artifacts, preventing theft, and protecting ancient sites.
The division Rap worked for, however, was all but invisible — he had been offered a job through his LinkedIn profile, but there hadn’t been any information online about the sector. The HR person he’d interacted with had told him it was due to ‘pressing legal concerns,’ and that if he took a few minutes to chat with them he would understand why.
He still didn’t understand what, exactly, those pressing legal concerns were, but he’d been impressed enough with the conversation that he’d traveled — on the company’s dime, of course — to the facility to take a look around. He wasn’t an historian or archeologist, but he had been immediately taken by the crypt which the Prehistory Division called their headquarters. He had been given a map of the facility on his first day, and told how to enter and exit. The folder also contained a list of the duties they required him to complete, and when.
The entire structure, surprisingly, was underground, hidden from view beneath a few hundred feet of sand and rock. The emptiness, he was told, was due to ‘just getting started,’ and the bare appointment of the research labs was due to the fact that the space had previously been an unused crypt, and the 1,000-year-old space had not been built to modern-day specs. He had also been told the division had not put more resources into the space due to ‘not yet reaching a full ramp-up of capabilities.’ He was confused, but he’d seen stranger things than half-empty corridors and clean, barren offices.
It was after a week of lonely, late-night cleaning that he began to get suspicious. Perhaps it had been because of the fact he was doing the job of a night janitor rather than a full researcher, or even that he still had yet to meet any of his coworkers — if they existed at all — or perhaps it was simply due to severe loneliness. Either way, he tried to reach out to the HR person who’d brought him in, but the number had been disconnected.
He’d given it another month, just to see if the paychecks kept coming in.
They did, every other week, and they were bigger than any he’d ever received, just as promised. They were bigger than any he’d ever heard of anyone in his career field receiving, for that matter.
So he kept his mouth shut. Not that he had anyone to tell — his family and friends were all stateside, and he wasn’t much
for heading to town and mingling with the Egyptian locals. Besides, he was sleeping when most of them were working, and working when the town went to sleep.
He reached Room 23 and flashed his keycard at the reader mounted on the metal door. It clicked and a green light appeared on it, and the door fell open a crack. He pulled the filtration mask up and over his mouth and nose, then pushed the door open wide.
The stench hit him first. He always tried to prepare for it, but there was no preparation for the completely intoxicating aroma of fecal matter and vomit, intermixed into a thick paste that covered the area around the drain and in front of the platform in the center of the room. The wave of odorous air hit him hard, and he stumbled backwards.
Smells like more than one day’s passed, he thought, trying to remain clinical. There’s a stronger tinge of chlorine in the air, that’s why I stumbled. He didn’t need to be a trained chemist to be able to identify the strong, potent smell of chlorine. It stung his eyes and inside his nose, somehow barely stronger than the underlying odor of death.
The foot-tall bell-shaped object stood on its platform near the center of the room, right next to a small drainage ditch that had been hewn into the rock floor by the technicians, and he started toward it. The smell may have been worse tonight, but the mess was smaller. The only spot needing a cleanup was the area around the bell and drain, maybe about five or six feet wide and two across.
Easy, he thought. One hour, tops.
He turned to the right and walked over to the wall on the right side of the room. Rap then opened the door of a tall, narrow cabinet that was standing in the corner, revealing the cleaning supplies he would need. He reached for a mop and a bucket, as well as a roll of paper towels and a hose that was coiled up nearby. The hose was fed through a hole that had been cored through the stone, then sealed with caulk around the hose’s skin, and the end had a nozzle that allowed him to jet-stream the chunks and detritus down into the sunken section of cut stone that acted as a drain, where it would eventually fall into a hazardous waste-collection container in the next room over.
As he sprayed and cleaned, he thought about the situation. He figured that the only reason the organization had hired a chemist rather than an actual janitor to do this job was that they needed his professional opinion of the remains upon entering the room. They didn’t just want 23 to be cleaned, polished, and shined back to its rock-walled and crypt-like state, they wanted to know if there was anything ‘out of the ordinary’ about the space.
And chemically speaking, anything ‘out of the ordinary’ in this case meant anything besides the mixture of vomit-and-fecal sludge and the hint of a chlorine-like smell, and to date he had not experienced anything besides that. The reports he would write up soon after completing the cleaning and reset tasks said as much, and because of the monotony of it, the isolation of it, he left each cleaning job with the minute feeling that he was wasting his life, his talents underutilized. Every now and then he even wondered if he’d come back the next time he was asked.
But he did come back every time. He knew that the job was far better than anything else he could get, and the work each night, while difficult, was short. A few hours a day and he was finished, and most days didn’t require a deep-clean of Room 23, but a simple tidying up of the rest of the subterranean facility. The salary was enough to keep him interested in coming back, but as a man with an interest in and a knack for science, he knew deep down that he was coming back every evening for another reason entirely.
He had been recruited to this job because of an affiliation with a particularly controversial religious group back in the States. Most people, at best, thought the organization was a bit uncouth. At worst, however, people protested their very existence. Rap was politically aligned with the group, but he’d never been one for public humiliation, so he tended to keep his involvement minimal, sidelined.
Apparently, however, the Prehistory Division of the Ministry of Antiquities in Egypt liked his particular brand of politics, as well as his background and education. They’d offered him far more than any other job he’d be able to find stateside, moving and living expenses, a car, and a retirement package.
And when he’d come aboard and learned a bit about what the organization he now worked for was trying to accomplish — what they were really trying to do — he understood the need for all the secrecy, the compartmentalization. He agreed with their premise, with their line of reasoning, and their projected outcome.
He’d drunk the proverbial Kool-Aid.
Sometimes he even thought he would be willing to sacrifice his time and energy for the cause, even without the attractive paycheck.
But that devotion, that loyalty, to the cause meant that there was a longing inside him to truly understand what it was they were doing with this little bell-shaped object. He had his theories — he was a scientist, first and foremost.
But he hadn’t had the opportunity to actually ask anyone what it was they were working on here. He knew the endgame, the final destination, but he didn’t understand this piece — his piece — of it all. He didn’t understand what, exactly, he was doing.
He wanted to know what the hell was going on in here — in Room 23. He had his theories, but without sufficient testing and time inside a laboratory, there was no way to know for sure.
He started cleaning, holding his breath as he sprayed the space with water and let the remnants and chunks drip and ooze into the drain.
15
Reggie
“WHERE ARE YOU NOW?” REGGIE ASKED.
Sarah’s voice cut through the cellphone and into his ear. “Great Lakes. On assignment, but the students can keep it going until I get back.”
Reggie sighed. “That’s a hell of a flight, Sarah.”
“Well I’m not asking you to cover the airfare,” she said. He sensed her bristling on the other end of the line. “I just need help, and I don’t know who else to call.”
Reggie was in Anchorage, sitting in his sparse apartment staring at the television-turned-computer-monitor with the video chat in full-screen mode. The large video playback window made Sarah’s face far larger than it should have appeared, and the poor connection caused her face to jump and freeze between sentences.
“I know,” he said. “I was just making small talk. Sorry.”
He and Sarah Lindgren had a bit of a strained relationship. They’d met on an island off the coast of The Bahamas, working together through an organization called the Civilian Special Operations. Reggie was a member, but Sarah had been considered a consultant on that trip.
They’d barely survived, and Reggie and Sarah had both wanted to take their new professional relationship to a more personal level. Ever since their return from The Bahamas they had tried to make it work, but neither wanted to admit what both knew was true: they weren’t meant to be together. Sarah was restless and constantly wanted to move around, to do field research and publish papers, as well as speak at universities around the world.
Reggie was content in Alaska, helping his new organization get off the ground. The CSO was currently working on a massive renovation of his best friend and coworker’s private cabin, and it was nearing completion. A second wing and second story, complete with a brand-new communications facility attached to it, the CSO headquarters would be a perfect mix of all the things Reggie loved: high-tech, modern appeal in a reclusive and hard-to-reach location.
“It’s okay,” Sarah said. “I’m just scared, I guess. He — he’s gone. Why would someone take him?”
“We don’t know that someone did,” Reggie replied. “I mean this Interpol grunt didn’t really tell you anything, right? Just that they can’t find him?”
“He said my father was ‘declared missing’ roughly forty-eight hours ago.’
“So he just walked to the grocery store and got lost,” Reggie said. “It happens. He’s old.”
There was a pause.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Bad joke. Sarah, I want to help you
. But I don’t even know where to start. And Mr. E is wanting to get us all together to talk about the future. Some multi-day meeting he’s trying to plan.”
Mr. E and his wife were their benefactors, the founders of and main investors in the CSO. They had recruited Reggie, his friend Harvey “Ben” Bennett, as well as Ben’s fiancée Juliette Richardson after hearing of their success tracking down a criminal organization in the jungles of the Amazon.
“I know,” Sarah said. “Just… there’s no one else I can call.”
Reggie sighed again. Dr. Lindgren was not just an acquaintance to him. She was more than a professional contact as well, and if it had been up to Reggie she would have been more than that still.
I’m not getting out of this one, he thought. He wasn’t sure Sarah was being rational, but he wasn’t about to tell her that. Instead, he took the indirect approach.
“Sarah, how do you know he’s been kidnapped? I understand your father’s a smart guy, but how can you be absolutely sure he isn’t just on some self-proclaimed mission or something?”
“My father would have told me he was going into the field, or at least told his new girlfriend where he was going. And he wouldn’t have been gone for more than a night. Where would he even sleep?”
“And you hadn’t heard from him since before The Bahamas?”
He could sense a hesitation. Her pause wasn’t just silence, it was as if he could tell she was considering her next words carefully.
“He — he hadn’t called or anything, but he wrote letters. The last one I got was delivered right before I got the call from Interpol.”
Something in Reggie changed. A sense, a feeling. He wasn’t sure what it was, and it certainly wasn’t strong enough to act on just yet, but he knew himself well enough to know that it was worth his attention.
