Harvey Bennett Thrillers Box Set 2

by Nick Thacker

  Alex frowned, but the excitement never left his face. “I’m excited because it further proves that Sarah’s theory was correct. I think she was on to something, and now I’ve got even more proof to help her case.”

  Reggie chose to ignore the fact that Alex had slipped into an informal tone, using Sarah’s first name. “And what exactly was this ‘study’ you did?”

  “Well, I think it’ll take a bit longer than two minutes to fully explain, but essentially I believe I have found genetic proof that there was a group of settlers that reached the eastern shores of the Americas long before the Vikings.”

  “Before the Native Americans too, you mean?”

  “Well, I’m saying these settlers were the Native Americans. But they came to America long before the nomadic tribes from present-day Russia.”

  “They came from the Bering Straight before the people we knew about?”

  Alex shook his head just as Mrs. E slowed the watercraft and aimed at the small wooden dock extending from the beach. “No,” he said. “I’m saying they didn’t come from the Bering Strait at all. They came from somewhere else entirely.”

  Reggie examined the kid, suddenly feeling — and mirroring — his excitement. Everything they’d learned tonight seemed to be falling into place, in a strange, crazy way. The puzzle was far from finished, but he felt as though they now had most of the pieces.

  They started walking toward the front of the boat, where the port-side bench was acting as the stepping-off point to the dock. Ben and Julie were already up, standing on the stair and preparing to hop across to the floating dock.

  Mrs. E hovered and idled the engine, getting within a few inches. Alex started forward, but Reggie grabbed his arm.

  He swung around, a bit of fear in his eyes.

  “Hey, kid,” Reggie said. “One more question. Do you have any idea when these guys came to America?”

  Alex shrugged. “Sort of, but it’s hard to tell for sure. Best guess I have, based on…” he stopped. “Well, like I said, it’ll take a bit more time to explain everything, but…”

  Reggie waited.

  “Best I can tell, they came sometime between 11,000 and 10,000 years BCE.”

  60

  Ben

  THE FLIGHT WOULD BE A good five hours of well-needed respite for Ben. Even though he hated flying, he had to admit that sitting in a luxury jetliner cabin, an entire row to himself, dry, and a stiff drink in hand was a decent way to travel.

  They’d been given a change of clothes; one of the small perks of Mr. E’s brilliant mind for detail was in thinking through some of those small items that often were forgotten. In this case, he’d had the flight crew purchase a small wardrobe of cheap clothing at an outdoor store in town before preparing their plane. The sizes were a bit off, but Harvey Bennett wasn’t about to complain about the way he looked.

  He was dry, and he was comfortable. He had a mystery to solve, and Alex — young as he was — would be a good asset to have. His comment about the timing of the westward expansion of early humans was intriguing, and he was excited to hear more.

  And best of all, he was holding a cold glass of whiskey. It was Irish, something from the Bushmills distillery, but he was far from picky and Reggie had informed him that it was a very quality selection.

  “Ben,” Julie said, suddenly standing above him in the wide aisle between the rows. “You up?”

  He nodded. “I can’t sleep on planes. The rest is good, though. We all need it.”

  “No joke,” she said, twisting around and plopping down into the seat next to him. He couldn’t help but notice her petite, tight figure as she bent around the chair. “I think Reggie’s been working on something back there.”

  Reggie had taken up his position at the back of the plane, opting for silence and isolation instead of camaraderie and companionship with the others. Apparently he hadn’t slept much, if at all, and when Ben popped up to look, he saw his friend’s head down, his tongue poking out the side of his mouth. Deep in thought.

  “Is he ready to explain what it is that’s got him so worked up?”

  “I think so. He told Mrs. E he figured something out, and she told me. Alex is already back there, bugging him to let him in on it.”

  They’d decided to bring Alex along, since he had been on his way to Cairo anyway to see family. He’d done them a huge favor rescuing them from the island, and the least they could do was offer the kid a free ride home.

  Ben laughed, stretching. “That’s pretty funny.”

  Julie smiled. “Yeah, I think our old pal’s a bit jealous.”

  “A bit,” Ben replied with a snicker. “Guy’s so worked up about this Egypt issue he doesn’t even realize he’s got a major competitor in Alex.”

  Julie threw her head back and started to laugh, then stifled herself. “Stop it! He’s just preoccupied.” As if remembering why they were all there, and what was at stake, her temperament changed. “He’s… just stressed, that’s all. With Sarah gone now, he’s not quite sure what to do. That’s why he can’t sleep.”

  Ben nodded. “Can’t blame him. I’d be the same way.”

  Julie laughed again. “Right. You’d be destroying everything in sight. Cracking skulls and all that.”

  Ben looked up at her. “Well you know, you’re worth it.” He winked at her.

  “Come on, Casanova,” she said. “Let’s go see what they’ve figured out.”

  They walked to the back of the plane and waited in the second-to-last row, both of them standing and leaning over the seat backs so they could see Reggie and Alex, sitting side-by-side now, looking down at Alex’s phone’s screen.

  “You besties figure anything out yet?” Julie asked.

  Reggie’s face told Ben he wasn’t exactly enthused by Julie’s description of their relationship.

  “We… know that Egypt is where we’re supposed to be heading,” Reggie said.

  “Good. I’ll tell the pilot to keep on going in the same direction,” Ben said.

  “We figured out that Cairo is where the Sikorsky is headed, because Alex’s research shows that Egypt has a lot in common with the ancient Atlanteans.”

  “Wait…” Julie said. “What? Egypt and Atlantis are related?”

  Alex winced, looking sidelong at Reggie. “Well, not exactly. I guess you’d have to assume that there was an ancient Atlantis first.”

  Reggie frowned. “You know what, kid? Let’s just go ahead and assume there was. Got it? And that ‘Atlantis,’ or whatever it was, is now under the ocean on a massive island just northwest of Santorini.”

  Alex put his hands up in front of him. “Okay, okay. So — in that case, Egypt and Santor — Atlantis — do have a lot in common. They’re geographically close, of course, but they could also have some similar history. If these ‘Atlanteans’ are the same group of people I’ve been studying, I think they taught the Egyptians just about everything they knew.

  “If we believe Plato, the Atlanteans were around somewhere about 10,000 years before Plato wrote about them. At that point in time, Egypt was nothing but an idea, if that. Nomadic hunter-gatherers would have been the only people around. But at some point in Egypt’s history, called the ‘Predynastic Era,’ we started to see civilization emerge. Pharaohs showed up, their version of kings, and the groups began to converge into a unified people.”

  “That’s Egyptian History 101,” Ben said. “Even I knew that.”

  “Right,” Alex replied. “But what’s interesting is that if you ask some people, they don’t buy the idea that these nomadic tribes eventually coalesced into one larger group and taught themselves how to farm and build.”

  “They don’t?”

  “They don’t,” Alex said. “Because most scholars agree that civilizations develop slowly over time, domesticating animals so they no longer have to hunt, then farming land so they don’t have to gather fruits and nuts, and learning to build sturdier structures the longer they stayed in one place.

  “But thei
r development into a powerhouse civilization happened remarkably fast. It’s as if they woke up one day and suddenly knew how to farm, keep animals, build massive temples and structures, and generally be a civilized society all in a matter of centuries, as opposed to the millennia it usually takes.”

  “Wow,” Mrs. E said. “So you are implying that the Atlanteans taught them?”

  “Well, I’m implying that someone did. I don’t know if Atlantis has anything to do with it or not, but my point — and my research — is that there was someone teaching their ways to the rest of the world, long before we thought that was possible.” Alex cleared his through. “We also know that there are some interesting similarities between their genetic makeup.”

  “Really?” Mrs. E asked. “How can you know that?”

  “Well, again, we can’t know anything for sure. But we can find similar genetic compositions in the DNA of both strains of humanity. The Egyptians and this older, unknown race — going with Reggie’s assumption, Atlantis.”

  “Strains of humanity?” Julie asked.

  “Sorry — races. Every race is a bit different, of course, but we’re all human. So we can use modern genetic testing to analyze similarities between these races, and then compare and contrast the results. We’re pretty accurate with the results, but we’re not exactly sure about why we’re seeing those results. Meaning we don’t know if a particular genetic trait was a mutation, a bloodline-related addition — someone married someone else from a slightly different race — or something else entirely.

  “We do know, however, that there are groups of genetic material that exist only for certain racial profiles. We can then follow the historical proliferation of these groups, starting from their origination point — the earliest place in the earliest time we believe that group of genetic material appeared.”

  “That’s fascinating,” Ben said. “It’s like a map with timestamps of where and when humans came from.”

  “Exactly,” Alex said, smiling up at him. “It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty dang close. Anyway, we can map these different groups, and the races that eventually came out of them, and then get a better idea of how humans migrated — and propagated — across the globe during prehistoric times.”

  “Wait,” Julie said. “Prehistoric times? I thought this was all for modern-day stuff? How do we really know where certain groups of humans were back then? I mean, if we’re digging up bones and stuff, there’s not a whole lot of difference between races of Homo sapiens, right? So how do we tell the difference?”

  “That’s what I’m studying. And my mentor is one of the premier experts in the field. Basically, we do study modern-day humans. We access the database of human mitochondrial DNA samples in repositories worldwide, then compare those results with our own data. And our own data shows that these ‘groups,’ called ‘Haplogroups,’ spread around the globe in statistically significant chunks. We can test a person now and see what Haplogroups are present in their DNA, then compare that to the map, showing the general route that combination of groups took to end up in their present location.”

  Ben nodded along. “That makes sense. So you’re saying there’s a group — a Haplogroup — for the Atlanteans, and that they ended up in… Egypt?”

  “No,” Alex said, glancing at Reggie. “Again, I’m not saying, or willing to admit, there’s an ‘Atlantis’ at all. But there is a Haplogroup that seems to have originated more than 10,000 years BCE, and that they had the technological knowhow to build sailing vessels.”

  “Sailing vessels? These guys knew how to sail?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Polynesians did it long before we used to give them credit for. But what’s more remarkable is that they did it over far greater distances. If they started in Santorini, where you guys think these people were from, getting to Egypt would have been nothing but a quick hop over a puddle to them. My research shows that they traveled all the way to the Americas, by way of island and continent chains, over the course of thousands of years.

  “And my research proves that they were able to do it long before we even thought humans were capable of writing anything down.”

  61

  Julie

  JULIE’S MOUTH FELL OPEN. “So we’ve got good evidence that there were humans, civilized humans, traveling around the world, eventually settling in America?”

  Alex nodded. “Best I can tell, yes. The Haplogroup X lineage is traceable all the way to American Indian tribes, mostly centered around the Great Lakes region. But what’s interesting is that the X group of genes doesn’t have any presence in the far-western United States, Northwest Territory, Alaska, or Asia.”

  “So they didn’t come from the Bering Strait,” Julie said.

  Alex shook his head. “They couldn’t have. It’s impossible.” He pulled out his phone, checked that it was connected to the in-plane WIFI network, then motioned for them all to lean in closer. “Here, look. I’ll show you an image of the map I’m working on for my research.”

  He flicked around the screen and Julie saw a map of the world, certain countries and regions darkened by pencil-drawn splotches.

  “These dark areas show the places where there’s at least a small presence of our modern-day society’s ancestral descent that test positive for the Haplogroup X group of genes, and the darkest areas are where the concentrations of Group X are highest.

  “If the first settlers to the Americas came from Asia via the Bering Strait, there would be pockets of humans that can trace their lineage back to one of those regions that test positive for Haplogroup X. But there aren’t. Instead, we’ve got pockets of humanity exhibiting Haplogroup X around the Great Lakes, New England, then up through Nova Scotia, Greenland, the UK, then down and around the Strait of Gibraltar.

  “Following it back further, we’ve found the genes are strongly present on both sides of the Mediterranean, including Egypt. Best guess we’ve got is that the original location — or home — of these Haplogroup X’ers is somewhere in the present-day Aegean Sea.”

  Julie swallowed. “Alex, that’s exactly where Santorini is.”

  He nodded, looking down. “I know. As crazy as it sounds, there might be something to your ‘Atlantis’ theory.”

  “I don’t think it’s just a theory anymore, kid,” Reggie said. “If you give me your phone, I’ll show you the research Sarah’s old man was working on.”

  Alex obliged, and handed Reggie his phone. Reggie found a browser and opened a tab, where he loaded a map of the Aegean Sea. It took a moment to load, but eventually Julie could see that he’d loaded a map created by satellite imagery, showing a bit of the underwater contour of the ocean floor in the relatively shallow sea.

  Reggie explained what Mrs. E had previously shown them, that Plato’s description of an island on which the civilization he had called Atlantis perfectly matched the geographic features of the now-sunken island to the northwest of Santorini. Santorini itself, Reggie explained, was included in Plato’s description — the ‘ring within a ring’ of the concentric volcanos.

  Alex nodded along, his eyes growing wider the longer Reggie talked. Eventually he sat, silent, as he looked at everyone hovering around him.

  “This… this is big,” he said. “This is very big.”

  “We agree,” Reggie said. “And you’ve given us another major piece of the puzzle. It seems like this civilization predates even the Ancient Egyptians, long since thought to be the first highly advanced civilization. But I’d bet that your ancestors in Egypt weren’t as clever as they thought — I’d bet they were taught a lot of what they know by some visitors. Some Atlantean visitors.”

  “I think you’re right,” Alex said. “It’s hard to argue with. My research basically proves that there was some advanced civilization floating around the globe, teaching people how to live and work and build cities, long before anyone thought that was possible — and I’m pretty convinced the epicenter of this civilization was somewhere right in the middle of the Aegean Sea. I used to
think it was Crete — maybe the predecessors to the Minoan civilization, perhaps — but this… this changes my mind. And the second strongest concentration of Haplogroup X is in Egypt. Cairo, to be exact.”

  “Wait,” Julie said. “What about remains? The bones of whoever these people were? Shouldn’t we be able to find them and determine exactly how old they are?”

  Alex nodded along, as if anticipating the question. “Of course. Well, consider that the vast majority of the civilization is now buried under soot and earth, and all of that is completely submerged underwater. So there’s not much to find, really. Even with state-of-the-art submersible technology it would take a lot of luck to find a spot worth excavating, and even then it’s a crapshoot — most of what we’d dig up would have to be carted away to clear the area. Underwater excavation is a timely, and very expensive process.

  “Add to that the fact that bone decomposition is a matter of decalcification and dissolution, and since the hydroxyapatite and collagen are —”

  “You’re saying it’s not possible,” Reggie said.

  “No, I’m just saying it’s highly unlikely. Most of the human matter would have disintegrated. It would simply have ceased to exist after that amount of time, and —”

  “But that’s only 10,000 years,” Ben said. “What about dinosaurs? We know they existed, and they were here long before 10,000 years ago.”

  Alex nodded. “Sure — you’re talking about fossilization, usually through permineralization. The thing is, we believe fewer than ten percent of all animals that ever lived became fossils, and those usually happened through sedimentation, drying, and crystallization of the ‘hard parts’ of the animal. So if this civilization left anything behind, it wouldn’t have been preserved underwater. Any fossilized remains we find will almost without a doubt be somewhere besides Santorini. Which is another reason to look elsewhere, and it’s still unlikely that we’ll find anything large enough to test.”