by JC Ryan
As the lead investigator explained, they either had an unusually experienced killer or more than one. The careless disposal of the latest victim, thought to be only a week dead when they’d found her, indicated the latter. However, an active killer or killers of this level of brutality was someone they wanted caught immediately, before another victim met with the same grisly fate. The fact the killer had been able to both snatch the victim and dispose of the body while leaving no clues indicated he was experienced. Investigators hadn’t determined whether other victims left in archaeological sites were his work or not.
The briefing went on while Carter mused on the task ahead of him. Wounds on the body were ante mortem, the medical examiner had found. The victim must have undergone unimaginable pain. The girl was only Liam’s age, Carter thought. His outrage at the crime threatened to undermine his usefulness. The only positive finding was that she had not been sexually assaulted. It was little comfort, however. Carter’s fists alternately curled and uncurled, and he became aware of his strong desire to throttle the responsible party barehanded. Such a monster could not be called a man. Carter couldn’t bring himself to believe a woman would be capable of it.
“What about other sites?” he asked. “I understand the archaeological aspect is why I was requested to assist. I still don’t know how I can help, though. Have there been other bodies discovered?”
“We haven’t completed the search,” the lead investigator replied. “But yes, we’ve discovered unauthorized disturbances at Lesnes Abbey, the Greenwich Saxon Cemetery, and in several spots along the Parkland Walk.”
“I’m not familiar with the latter,” Carter confessed.
“I suppose it would be too modern for your interest. It was once the route of part of one of the London and North Eastern Railway’s lines. Built in 1867 and finally closed for good in the 1970s. Very overgrown in places. Good hiding place for a body, frankly.”
“I see. And I assume you’ve determined all these bodies are the work of one killer?”
“Not at all. However, there’s loads of investigation to do. Identifying them comes first, of course. Then cross-checking everything.”
“And what did you envision I’d be able to help with?” Carter said again. He couldn’t see any role for himself in the investigation. He waited to hear their ideas.
“Some of the remains are skeletal. We’d hoped you could tell us what’s recent and what isn’t. At least, for those that have been found in archaeological sites. And we don’t know, but we hope it’s possible something in the way the bodies have been concealed will help link them.”
Two questions clashed for attention in Carter’s mind. “Wait – you’ve found some that aren’t in archaeological sites?”
“We’ve got unidentified remains from several cases, yes, and some appear to be related by the amount of damage to the bodies.”
“I see. And regarding those found at archaeological sites – aren’t you doing carbon dating?”
“Yes, but that takes time. We were hoping you could tell us visually.”
Carter thought for a moment. “I may be able to. But not with the accuracy of carbon dating. However, any help I can give, I’m happy to. This bas… this killer must be stopped.”
“Agreed sir. This bastard must be stopped. And preferably given his own treatment, though I suppose due process must be given precedence. I’ll have to refer any other questions to the investigator who raised the possibility of the Nabatean involvement. I’m sure that’s why he requested you specifically. I’ll have an answer for you tomorrow.”
Carter grinned ferociously. These were his kind of people after all, despite his impression of their proper and formal Britishness, as he called their demeanor in his mind.
True to his word, Carter’s escort chauffeured him to Oxford street, and then guided him to Marks and Spencer, where he purchased several pairs of casual long pants and shirts suitable for outdoor activities, and one good suit, a couple of ties, and some dress shirts. He’d have to buy an extra suitcase to get home, he supposed, but at least he wouldn’t appear in another meeting wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and boat shoes.
With that thought came a grim smile. What difference did his apparel make, when a killer who was willing to brutalize children walked the streets of London?
9
LIU’S DISCOVERY IN the Library of the Giants was momentous. The Sirralnnudam had it wrong or had left something out. Mackenzie kindly refused to think that Liu could have mistranslated it. The bottom line was that it wasn’t the respirocytes themselves that were created with the diamondoid material, but instead composed the nanobots that manufactured the super-cells.
Liu had burst into Mackenzie’s office on the morning of her discovery, looking as if she’d been up all night. As Mackenzie learned moments later, she had been. But even though she looked like a bad night’s sleep, she was wide awake and, as Dylan described it, bouncing off the walls.
“Has she been like this all morning?” Mackenzie asked him.
“Off and on. She woke me up about three hours ago shouting about some Greek dude who discovered something while taking a bath and was so excited he jumped out of the bath and ran naked through his house shouting Eureka! Eureka!”
Mackenzie couldn’t help but giggle at Dylan’s description of Archimedes’ momentous discovery that the volume of water displaced in the bathtub was equal to the volume of the part of his body he had submerged.
Dylan was unfazed by Mackenzie’s snickering and continued. “She calmed down long enough to make my breakfast, but I’ve had a hard time holding her back from running straight to your house. I’m just grateful she wasn’t in the bath when she made this discovery, otherwise she would have been naked now.”
By now, tears of laughter were running down Mackenzie’s face.
Liu kept trying to interrupt. “Mackenzie… Listen… Hey!” Dylan had his hand around her upper arm, preventing her from jumping up and down. When he stopped talking, she took her chance. “Mackenzie, you’re doing it wrong!”
Mackenzie managed to stop laughing and made her sit down and draw a deep breath. “Now, slowly… what do you mean ‘I’m doing it wrong’?
Liu took another breath. Mackenzie held hers. Dylan let go of her arm and stopped talking.
“I found the plans for the respirocyte generator in the Library of the Giants,” Liu said.
“What?!” Mackenzie shouted. “You’re kidding! You’re not kidding… Liu, if you’re kidding, I’m going to kill you.”
Liu jumped up and hugged Mackenzie, then both women started jumping up and down, laughing, and screaming. Dylan stood there with a stunned expression.
“Have you two gone nuts?” he asked.
The office door burst open, and Mackenzie’s assistant ran into the room to see what the commotion was about. Not far behind her, the others ran in, all talking at once.
Dylan brought the chaos to an end with a voice that sounded like the crack of a whip. “Everyone shut up!”
Silence descended like a conductor had signaled the orchestra to stop playing. Dylan, still using his command voice, said, “Let’s go to the conference room and sort this out. Move out!”
Once in the conference room, Mackenzie had recovered her composure. “Please sit down, everyone. Liu has an important announcement, and then we’ll discuss it.”
Liu remained standing as the others took their seats.
“Cut to the chase, Liu,” Dylan ordered.
“Okay. Long story short, I’ve found plans for the respirocyte generator in the Library of the Giants. You’re on the wrong track.”
The room erupted in chaos again until Dylan yelled, “Hey!” Then, when the scientists had quieted, Mackenzie signaled Liu to go on.
“I’m not technical,” she explained, “but I’ve been helping Mackenzie with her research for a long time. I know you’ve been working to create cells to hold and release larger quantities of oxygen. And I know you’ve been using adamantine as the buil
ding blocks.”
The nano-engineer and the chemical engineer slowly nodded in agreement.
“The plans I’ve found use a different approach. They use the same material, but instead of forcing it into a fullerene shape, it’s used as the raw material for a self-constructing nanobot, whose job it is to assemble super-sized hemoglobin molecules for a self-renewing source of respirocytes.” Liu was out of breath when she stopped.
Mackenzie’s wasn’t the only jaw that dropped. It was such an elegant model. Using the body’s own components to manufacture an unlimited supply of respirocytes, all of which could absorb and carry more oxygen to wherever it was needed in the body – such a simple concept. Why hadn’t they thought of it before?
Mackenzie knew why. She had been led astray by Frietas’ theory and the apparent confirmation in the Sirralnnudam translation.
“This will solve the toxicity problem,” she said, almost to herself.
“It sure will! We only need to figure out how many of the nanobots to inject, and how long we can expect them to work,” her assistant agreed.
Excited conversation broke out among the scientists, rising to the level of a crowded room before Mackenzie quieted them using her own version of Dylan’s command voice.
“Liu, was there anything else?”
“Yes. And I have the translation with me if you want to read it for yourself. I’ve also emailed it to you.”
“I haven’t…”
“I know. I got here before you opened your email. Anyway, the nanobots are affixed in the lungs somehow. That’s where they do their thing.”
“’Their thing’ being manufacturing the respirocytes?”
“Yes.”
“Once more, you’ve proven how invaluable you are to us, Liu. How can we ever repay you?”
Liu looked at Dylan, a question in her eyes. He shrugged. She blushed and turned to Mackenzie. “Well, seeing that we’re dealing with Eureka moments… I’m going to need maternity leave…”
Another round of whooping and congratulations went up, and Mackenzie got up to hug Liu, then Dylan. “We’ll make it happen. That’s awesome, Liu! And Dylan, of course.” She smiled. Just days ago, she’d been speculating about this, and she was so happy it was happening already. “The kids are going to be thrilled. But Carter’s going to be unhappy he wasn’t here to hear the news out of your mouth.”
Dylan spoke, a note of grimness in his voice. “By the time he gets back, she’ll be showing. It was time to break the news. You can tell him if you want, Mackenzie.”
“No, that’s your news. You’ll just have to tell him on video call. I know he’ll be happy for you.”
They stood awkwardly for a moment, and then Mackenzie said, “Liu, you’d better go and get some sleep. All-nighters aren’t good for babies. We have some planning and discussing to do here. Could I get that copy of the translation?”
“Of course.” Liu handed over the flash drive and leaned against Dylan. “You know, I am tired. Let’s go home, Dylan.”
As soon as they’d left, Mackenzie opened the discussion. “Okay, what do we need to do now?”
“I need a way to flush the foreign bodies from my rats,” said the vet.
“I need to figure out how to keep the nanobots in the lungs where they belong,” said the clinician.
“I think we all know what the three of us need to do,” said the nano-engineer, sweeping his hand around to include his chemical and mechanical colleagues.
“And I need to devise a new database and a program to automate the data collection,” said the data specialist.
“Then let’s get to work.”
It had been eight a.m. on the dot when Liu flew through the door. It seemed both a long time ago and only a few minutes since then, but Mackenzie noted it had been not quite an hour. Her administrative assistant was due in any minute. She’d have her print out copies of Liu’s translation for everyone, and then she’d get on a voice call with her husband, if he was available. Even if she couldn’t share Dylan and Liu’s personal news, she could tell him about the breakthrough.
10
THE DAY AHAB found the correct karst spring was almost an anticlimax in a way. He’d previously located several that were large enough to enter, but none had led far before petering out in cracks too small to navigate. He had to believe that the geology hadn’t changed enough to cut off his entry to the underground cave system he believed was the site of the ancient Labyrinth. But when he found the right one, he knew it immediately.
Ahab had learned through rumbles in the worldwide archaeology community that Carter Devereux had made other discoveries as important as the now-famous libraries of the ancients. There were rumors about the discovery of the super-intelligence of dolphins and, although hard to believe, that Devereux had found a way to talk to them. He’d been skeptical at first, but then he’d reconsidered. If he was willing to believe in a half-man, half-bull, mythical beast, then surely talking dolphins weren’t much of a leap.
The remaining vestiges of his skepticism died the moment he saw a dolphin swimming back and forth in front of a large opening upstream of the karst spring he’d followed from the surface. It almost appeared as though the animal was a sentry.
Ahab considered what he knew of dolphins. They’d long been known to be intelligent, that much he knew – it was just the notion they had a society and a language that he’d found hard to believe. They also appeared to be friendly to humans. He had read and heard the stories about them saving and helping humans. Ahab’s psychological makeup however, didn’t understand altruistic behavior, so he found it hard to swallow that such a notion may be attributed to animals.
In any case, he didn’t think they were dangerous. His first attempt to enter the underwater opening made him rethink that conclusion, though. The dolphin met him before he’d swum within yards of the opening and rebuffed all his attempts to get around it. Based on the rumor that Devereux and his wife had found a way to converse with them, he tried signing to it.
He pointed to the opening and then to himself, and pushed the water in front of him sideways, indicating the dolphin should move aside. The dolphin chittered back at him, and when he failed to respond, wagged its entire body from side to side, as if it was shaking its head to say, “No”!
Fascinating, but I must be wrong, he thought. It couldn’t have understood me. Nor would it have used a human gesture to communicate, surely.
He tried it a different way to test his theory. He pulled a dive knife from its holster on his hip and brandished it.
This time, the dolphin didn’t bother with utterances. It simply wagged ‘no’ again, and refused to let him pass, but stayed well out of the reach of his knife. There was no mistaking it now. The dolphin was actually guarding that opening. Perhaps it was a female with young. Information about dolphin behavior, aside from rescuing distressed swimmers, was missing from Ahab’s body of knowledge, but it appeared he wasn’t going to get to explore that opening today.
He resolved to retreat, look up dolphin behavior, and come back. With a spear-gun if necessary. No animal was going to thwart his purpose. Not if he had anything to say about it.
The next day, armed with everything he could gather from the internet on dolphins, he returned. He left his stun-gun on board the yacht for his first attempt. Instead, he took a bucket of fish to lure the dolphin away, if it was still there. He’d learned there were sharks near Crete, though he’d seen none in his extensive explorations. According to something he’d seen after Googling the question, there were forty-seven different species of shark that called the Mediterranean home, at least fifteen of which could be dangerous to humans. So, he didn’t particularly want to kill the dolphin if he could help it. Blood in the water could attract even the shyest of sharks, but since sharks prey on dolphins, he especially didn’t want dolphin blood in the water.
His scientific curiosity had turned up several facts that weren’t germane to his problem, one of which was the method to determ
ine if the dolphin was male or female. He couldn’t find anything online about communication with the beasts, but he didn’t intend to reason with this one. If he couldn’t lure it away, he’d try stunning it somehow.
Ahab had little hope of engaging in combat with a dolphin and winning, even with his uncommon strength. He estimated the dolphin was at least ten feet long, and according to the National Geographic website weighed perhaps as much as 1100 pounds. His memory of its appearance was that it was amused at his efforts, but he learned that was because its mouth, like all bottlenose dolphins, curved up at the ends naturally, so it seemed to be smiling. But now he knew better and would not be fooled by its friendly face.
His main advantage would be the fact he could hold his breath longer. Thanks to the respirocytes in his body, he could outlast the dolphin underwater as it would be forced to surface every ten to fifteen minutes. Perhaps he could dart past it when it did that. The most frustrating thing about that was if he’d known it yesterday, he would already know whether this was the cave system he was looking for or not.
His guess was that there was a good reason the dolphin was standing sentry, for he could think of no other description for its behavior. There had to be something inside that the dolphin didn’t want him to discover. If it wasn’t guarding its young, then did he dare believe that it knew of the beasts that had once lived in the caves? Was it protecting him from perceived danger?
Ahab prepared for his dive by hanging the bucket of fish over the side of the yacht, where he could reach it once he was in the water. Then he climbed over the side and dropped easily into the water. This time, he’d donned a face mask, so he could try to talk to the dolphin, and swim fins to enhance his natural speed in the water. To be sure he could get past the dolphin once he’d lured it from its post, he’d also rented a Scubajet – a propulsion device that looked like a miniature torpedo, capable of operating underwater for up to six hours of battery life. It wouldn’t outrun the dolphin if it decided to race him to the entrance, but it would give him a chance at gaining the inside while the dolphin was distracted.
