David tried to recapture his attention. “Look. It takes weeks to run simple searches without being detected. Searches that a dedicated lab could do in a day or two.”
Pinstripe was already pushing away from the table, getting to his feet.
David saw his sale evaporating; he retrenched immediately. “Okay, okay. Forget I said anything. I’ll do it your way.” He shoved a hand into his pocket to dig for his keys but stopped as Pinstripe’s next words changed everything.
“You got an invite upstairs. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
It seemed redundant to have a presidential suite in a hotel within sight of the White House. Then again, other countries had presidents whose visits required similar accommodations. Tonight, the figure sprawled on the yellow brocade sofa beside a woodburning fireplace was anything but a public official, though he was often a target of their investigations.
He was oversized himself, six foot five, three hundred pounds, and instantly recognizable from near constant exposure in the news.
David revised his speculation about potential access to resources. Holden Stennis Ironwood had been on the Forbes billionaire list for more than a decade, hovering easily in the top ten even in the throes of global recession. He owned telecom companies, bought and sold entire news organizations, cornered strategic metals, and was building his own orbital tourist rocket in Nevada. This man could buy the world.
Ironwood held out his hand without getting up. The man’s heavy grip was crushing, and from his predatory smile, he knew it.
“Now you know who you’re dealing with, you’re thinking you should’ve been charging more.” As familiar as his face, Ironwood’s voice was a raspy baritone with a down-home southern twang, the same as Pinstripe’s.
“Pretty much.”
“That’s what I like.” With a grunt, Ironwood swung his bare feet onto the thick Persian rug and sat up. Piles of newspapers and magazines, in many languages, were scattered on the floor around him. “You stay honest, we can do business.” He nodded to Pinstripe, who swept David with a metal-detector wand. “You are honest, right?”
“I’m selling you restricted data from army files that technically I don’t have access to.” The wand squealed as Pinstripe moved it over the backpack. David handed it over without being asked.
Ironwood’s expression was the look of command, just like Kowinski’s. The billionaire’s good ol’ boy routine was exactly that: a routine. David had no doubt that the mind behind it was as sharp as the creases on the colonel’s uniform.
“Honest with me,” Ironwood said. “The army’s corrupt, just like the government. Stick it to those fools, I say.” He stood up, towering over David, as formidable physically as he was financially. “But you try and stick it to me . . . Well, you’re a smart guy. You can figure it out.” He looked over at Pinstripe. “J.R.—everything aboveboard?”
J.R. had sorted the contents of David’s backpack on the table in the dining alcove: gym clothes in one pile, two old paperbacks, a small black iPod tangled in earbuds, an even smaller digital recorder, and a phone.
“So far.” He removed the batteries from David’s phone and recorder, then shoved everything, including the iPod, into a lead-foil bag intended to protect film from X-rays.
Ironwood padded over to another alcove, this one with a well-appointed kitchen. “Who’s got the files?”
David held up his keys and drew the end off his army key fob to reveal the flashdrive. “I’ll need a computer.”
Ironwood opened the refrigerator, waving a hand at J.R., who took the keys from David. J.R.’s attitude said he didn’t like being waved at. “So you have a proposal for me.” Ironwood pulled out a bottle of generic diet cola, filled a cut-glass tumbler, and drained it. “Go.”
In the few minutes it took David to lay out his idea, Ironwood was back on the sofa, feet up, eyes closed.
“So what’s it going to cost me?”
“The computers and peripherals would be the most, maybe a hundred thousand. Another fifty for lab equipment and supplies.”
“What about millions of DNA samples? Collection costs? Personnel?”
“All that work’s been done for us. The Genographic Project. Six or seven private genealogical companies. Another dozen universities. The information already exists. We just need to sort through it.”
Ironwood rubbed his nose, eyes still closed. “Those companies and universities, they just give us access to their data?”
“The universities, yeah, and we—you—can buy most of the rest of it. Everyone trades in information. Last month, I downloaded the published mitochondrial DNA sequence of a Neandertal for free.”
Ironwood opened one eye to look at him. “I thought it was ‘Neanderthal.’ ”
“Six of one. The first specimen was found in 1856 in a valley in Germany, the Neander Thal—spelled t-h-a-l. In German, you say th like t, like thyme in English, but before long, scientists anglicized the pronunciation of the name. Meanwhile, around 1900, the Germans changed a bunch of spelling rules, and t-h-a-l became t-a-l. Now you see ‘Neandertal’ spelled both ways, but the fashion’s to go back to the German pronunciation.”
“The fashion.” Ironwood sat up, fully awake. “You ever hear of Charles Fort?”
David hadn’t, but whatever Ironwood wanted to talk about was fine with him. No one else was going to help him find someone with his markers who lived beyond a twenty-seventh birthday. When, not if, the army discovered his misuse of its resources, the inevitable investigation and delay would literally be fatal for him. It’d be months before anyone took him seriously and even planned to repeat his research.
Ironwood warmed to his lecture. “Fort was a great man. A scholar. Died in ’32, but he was one of the first to blow the whistle on the scientific establishment. You know the way they gather evidence to support their pet theories, then disregard any findings that contradict those theories. I’m sure you’ve seen that in action, right?”
David needed this man’s help, but that didn’t mean he had to agree with everything he said. “Sometimes you make a bad measurement, so you want to exclude that from your research.” He shrugged. “Though sometimes the exception does prove the rule.”
“Exactly!” Ironwood aimed a finger at David as if he held a gun. “How about Richard Feynman? You heard of him?”
“Sure. Manhattan Project. Quantum physics. Probably one of the top scientists of the twentieth century.”
“No ‘probably’ about it. He said the same thing about exceptions to the rules.”
“And that is?”
“If the rule has an exception that can be proved by observation, then the rule’s wrong.” Ironwood stared hard at David. “These clusters you’ve been selling to my man, you ever think it passing strange that a junior tech in a government lab is the first to come across something as big as this—I mean, nonhuman DNA?”
“Not really.” David had checked the literature, asking himself the same question. “Lots of other workers noted the results, but they—”
Ironwood didn’t let him finish. “They call the results a processing mistake, or a contamination error, and the greatest discovery of all time is flushed down the crapper! You’ve looked at the data and the clusters. Do you know what you’re seeing, Dave? Because I surely do.” He heaved himself off the sofa and stood up in all his immensity. “What you’ve found is absolute scientific proof—proof—of what the government has always known, and always hidden from us. But you—I believe you have stumbled on the smoking gun.”
David didn’t understand.
Ironwood gave his shoulders a painful squeeze. “Welcome aboard, Dave. You’re gonna help me put our lying government out of business, and we are gonna turn this world upside down.”
With that, David realized Ironwood was giving him his funding and his lab, but he still had no idea why. Nor did he care.
But others did, and their infrared laser measuring the vibrations of the suite’s windows recorded every word
.
FOUR
Nathaniel Merrit was still alive.
An hour after his capture, his shaved scalp beaded with sweat in the tropical sun, he was tied up on the teak deck of his own chartered dive boat—a fourteen-meter Azimut hired out of Tahiti, a three-day trip from the atoll. Partly covered by a blue nylon tarp, a body lay under the bench on the port side of the deck. Renault.
Then someone familiar slid open the teak door of the forward cabin and stepped onto the deck.
Florian MacClary.
Over the three years they had been in opposition, they had never met, though Merrit had read her dossier often enough. There was little doubt her people had an equal file on him.
He revised the picture he’d built of his sixty-year-old adversary. In person, she was more imposing. Her hair had fewer dark streaks. Her steel gray wetsuit was zipped open to reveal a well-toned body in a black bathing suit. Against the dark fabric, a large, ornate silver cross hung from a thin silver chain—an unusual item to wear while diving.
She gestured to a large cooler on the deck between them. Earlier the blue plastic container had held cans of Coca-Cola, water bottles, and a few Hinano beers. Now it protected the artifact from the underwater treasure chamber. Immersion in saltwater was the standard procedure for preserving anything retrieved from long submersion.
“We finally beat you to one, Merrit.”
He stayed silent, testing the tightness of the yellow nylon rope that secured his hands behind his back. At the same time, he checked for any sign of the two divers who had captured him.
He spotted them, anchored astern on their own dive boat—a sleek, fifteen-meter catamaran, sails furled, twin hulls gleaming white against the jewel blue waves. A crew of three could easily handle her, so it was probable the two divers were MacClary’s only crew. He liked the odds.
In the forward cabin of his own boat, Merrit caught sight of Krause at the wheel. Krause glared back at him with open hatred.
Merrit looked up at his captor. “Krause gave you some inside help.”
Florian MacClary, looking suddenly fatigued, sat on the Azimut’s side bench, steadying herself with one hand though the ocean swells were gentle.
“Tell me about the help you had. Finding this place.”
Merrit seized on his advantage. “You didn’t know this site was here. You followed me.”
The slight flicker of her pale green eyes told him he was right.
Whatever she had planned to say next, Merrit sensed that she changed her mind. Instead, she knelt on the deck and reached into the cooler, carefully removing the irregularly shaped, football-sized artifact.
It was similar to the one he’d recovered in the Andes, smoothly pitted and cratered everywhere but on its one flat, polished side. The pattern engraved there, as far as he could tell, was the same. From the reverent way MacClary handled it, the object had special meaning to her.
“I need to know,” she said. “Do you have any idea what this is?”
Merrit had some idea what the object meant to his employer, but there was nothing to be gained by sharing that information. He made a show of studying the artifact more closely, wondering if she would share information with him. As long as they were talking, he still had options.
“It’s a meteorite. Nickel-iron. Someone told me most of them are formed in a star, just before it explodes. That one landed here a long time ago. Someone found it, cut it in half—more or less—polished the cut surface, and carved that pattern into it.”
“Not a pattern. A map. Of the solar system.” MacClary’s fingers lightly traced the almost invisible lines cut into the smooth metal surface. “On the boundary, this band of stars, and then the sun, here in the center. Six planets circling it. Mercury. Venus. Earth with its moon. Then Mars, Jupiter with its four major moons, and a ringed Saturn.” MacClary shifted her attention back to him. “Is any of that significant to you?”
Merrit changed the subject. “What happens now?”
Krause hadn’t moved from the wheel. It wasn’t hard to guess what he wanted to happen next. Renault’s body was still in its wetsuit. The air tank had been removed, but Merrit could see the outline of the buoyancy vest under the tarp. That could mean the rest of the diver’s equipment was in place, as well.
But it seemed MacClary hadn’t finished her interrogation. She cradled the meteorite as if it were as fragile as a newborn. “Do you know when this map was carved?”
Merrit shook his head. Sweat stung his eyes. It was late afternoon, and the flybridge deck overhead provided no shade from the sun.
“Nine thousand years ago,” she said.
Merrit thought he had heard this before, but it was just a number, no different from millions or billions.
“Nine thousand years,” MacClary repeated softly. “When historians tell us our ancestors were just beginning to settle in the first villages, just beginning to learn about agriculture.” She gazed at the incised meteorite. “The heliocentric solar system in this map—with the sun in the center—doesn’t even show up in ancient writings until Aristarchus of Samos—270 B.C. Almost seven thousand years after this was carved. Even then, the idea wasn’t generally accepted until Copernicus proposed it seventeen hundred years later. And Jupiter’s four major moons, Saturn’s rings—you can’t see those with the naked eye. They don’t turn up again in the astronomical records until Galileo recorded his own observations through his first telescope in 1610. So how is this map possible?”
MacClary was speaking as if she were alone, as if she weren’t on a slowly rocking dive boat under a blazing sun in the middle of nowhere.
“Can I move into the shade?” Merrit asked. He made himself sound exhausted, unthreatening.
MacClary gave no indication that she’d even heard him, still lost in contemplation of the artifact, so he acted. “Right. I’m sitting in the shade.” He dropped to his knees and awkwardly shifted his body until he was sitting against Renault’s body. “Okay.” He began working his hands behind his back.
Taking no apparent notice of his movement, MacClary gently replaced the artifact in the cooler, then stood to face him, answering the question she’d just asked herself. “There’s only one explanation, Merrit. You must know it as well as we, or you couldn’t be finding our sites before we do.”
Merrit kept his silence.
“You won’t tell me, will you?” MacClary fingered her pendant cross as if drawing strength from it; she seemed to make a decision. “May the gods forgive you your desecration.” She spoke with a strange mixture of pity and contempt. “Because I won’t.” She raised her hand, signaling the white catamaran to come alongside the boat.
Merrit heard the catamaran’s engine growl to life, and when MacClary’s dive boat bumped into his, he was rocked forward, away from Renault’s body. But that no longer mattered.
One of Florian’s divers jumped from the catamaran onto the deck of Merrit’s Azimut. The diver was tall and black, in a loose white linen shirt and trousers. MacClary spoke to him in French, instructing him to take the recovered artifact onto her dive boat.
The diver hefted the water-filled cooler and its contents as if they weighed nothing. He asked MacClary what they should do about le captif.
“Rien,” she answered. She glanced back at Krause. Merrit understood. He was not her problem anymore.
MacClary’s diver nodded, turned, and stepped up on the Azimut’s side bench, heavy cooler in both hands, timing the swell of the waves for the perfect moment to leap from boat to boat.
Merrit timed the waves as well.
Just as the diver tensed to make his move, Merrit sprang from the deck, trailing nylon rope from his wrists, Renault’s yellow-striped knife in hand. With the same sure motions he practiced every day, with the same sense of calm he felt while diving, he swept out one leg, throwing the man off balance, the attack enhanced by the sloshing water in the cooler.
“Florian!” The cry came from MacClary’s dive boat—her second diver.
<
br /> Merrit’s momentum didn’t falter as the white-clad man fell back onto the deck and Merrit slashed once, deeply, across his throat. The man’s groping hands couldn’t stem the fountain of blood that spurted with each heartbeat of his dying body.
Before Krause could even make it halfway through the forward cabin of the Azimut, Merrit had wheeled to face a startled MacClary and smoothly grabbed her and twisted so he stood with his back to the bulkhead, one arm around her chest, Renault’s knife at her throat.
MacClary instantly resisted, attempting to drive her heel into his instep, but Merrit countered swiftly, slamming the knife haft into her temple.
“Try that again, you’re dead. Understand?”
Her body shuddered with fear or shock. Merrit didn’t care which. He shouted the question again, violently shaking her as he did. “Understand?”
“Yes!”
“Then tell them!”
Krause was in the doorway to the cabin, transfixed by the sight of the knife at MacClary’s throat. The second of MacClary’s divers stood on the catamaran, struggling to keep an Uzi submachine gun trained on Merrit despite the rocking of both decks.
“Stay where you are,” MacClary called out.
“Throw the Uzi in the water,” Merrit ordered.
The gunman hesitated.
Merrit put pressure on the blade and felt MacClary stiffen as she tried to pull away. “Do it!” she cried.
The diver’s face twisted in anger, but he pitched the weapon overboard.
“Now both of you,” Merrit ordered him and Krause. “Into the water. Swim for the rocks.”
Neither one moved.
“After I’ve left, you can swim back to the cat. I only want the artifact.” He put his lips close to MacClary’s ear. “You’ve read my file. You know I can kill all three of you if I want.”
“Go!” Florian said.
Her diver leapt into the water. Merrit inched forward to see the man resurface, shake his head free of water, then strike out for the barren atoll one hundred meters distant.
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