The Lost Island

by Douglas Preston

  Amiko said nothing.

  “There are two issues here,” Glinn began, his voice mild, reasonable. “The first is that we’ve discovered a medicine that will change the lives of every human being on this planet. It’s that significant. Of much less importance, but still extraordinary, is our discovery of a living hominid—”

  “Our discovery?” Gideon said acidly. “You had nothing to do with it.”

  “Your discovery of a living hominid, a relative of our species, a variant of Homo neanderthalensis. That this creature lives in the same place as the miracle drug and apparently feeds on it is unfortunate. By landing here, by identifying the plant and obtaining samples, we can bring the drug to humanity. By studying the creature, we can learn much about our origins. Two birds with one stone. That is why we’re here. And truly, the Cyclops needs to be protected, if only from itself.”

  “You’re not going to put him in that cage,” Amiko said.

  “We need to create the right habitat for him.”

  “Habitat,” Amiko repeated. “You mean, zoo?”

  “He can’t be turned loose just anywhere to fend for himself. Certainly you can see that. We will find a suitably appropriate habitat for him to live out the rest of his days.”

  “Amiko’s right,” said Gideon. “He’ll die in a cage.”

  Glinn continued on, his voice infuriatingly calm. “Mr. Garza and I ran countless scenarios on this. We chose the route with the highest probability of success. That route requires us to go in fast and hard, get the lotus, and get out. To establish a Cyclops preserve, we’d have to enter into negotiations with the Nicaraguan and Honduran governments—for whom this island is disputed territory. That would mean going through our State Department and diplomatic channels—a sure route to failure. We’re here, we’ve taken possession, and by the time anyone finds out, we’ll be gone. The Cyclops is in the way. We will do all we can to save it. But the lotus comes first. We’ll be doing God’s work in bringing this miracle to the human race.”

  “God’s work?” said Amiko. “You really are crazy.”

  “Not at all. This medicine is not for the benefit of one corporation, one nation, or one socioeconomic class. The goal of our client is to use this discovery to benefit the world.”

  “Your goal is right, but not like this! That Cyclops saved my life! And Gideon’s!” Amiko’s voice was on the verge of breaking.

  “It’s the only way.”

  “It’s not the only way. You can’t do this.” She swallowed. “Wait until you see him, you’ll understand. He’s a person, he’s almost a human being. But even more than that, he’s the last of his kind. You can’t take him away from his home. Please, Eli, let him live out his last days here, in peace, in the place he knows and loves, where all his memories are.”

  “I am indeed sorry, but that can’t happen.”

  “For the love of God, don’t put him in that cage!”

  “The cage is only temporary—”

  In one smooth, practiced motion, Amiko pulled the .45 from the drysack and pointed it at Glinn. The aide raised his M16, but Glinn made a sharp gesture for him to put up the rifle.

  “I’ll kill you before you put him in that cage,” Amiko said. “I swear to God.”

  Glinn contemplated the .45 with a steady gray eye. “I already know you won’t use that on me.”

  “You son of a bitch, I will!”

  “Then do it.”

  Amiko raised the barrel and fired it into the air, the massive pistol giving off a deafening boom, then lowered the muzzle again. Glinn continued looking at her. A group of soldiers burst into the tent, but Glinn again held up his hand. “Let me handle this.” He glared at Amiko. “I’m still waiting to see if you’re a killer. You want to stop this? You can do it by pulling the trigger.”

  Amiko stared at him, her chest heaving, the gun shaking in her hand. Suddenly she rushed at him, swinging the gun like a club. The aide launched himself forward to tackle her, grabbing for the gun, but she was too quick, spinning around and striking him in the head with her foot. The two soldiers threw themselves into the struggle, one punching her hard in the face. Seeing this, Gideon joined in without thought, tackling one soldier and sending him sprawling into the side of the tent, while kneeing the other solider in the diaphragm. The tent came down around them with a tearing of canvas and clattering of poles. Others joined the fray and in a moment it was over. Gideon found himself jammed facedown on the ground, knees pressed into his back. He could hear Amiko amid the wreckage of the tent, screaming like a wild woman.

  “Clear this mess away,” came Glinn’s cool voice.

  The tangle of torn tent fabric and bent poles was whisked off, leaving Glinn sitting, unscathed, in his wheelchair. Amiko was pinned by two men, her nose bloody, screaming at Glinn.

  “Let Gideon up,” Glinn said.

  They released him and Gideon stood up, spitting blood from a cut lip.

  “You bastard,” Amiko screamed at the top of her lungs. “You won’t just kill him, you’ll be responsible for the extinction of his species!”

  “You are a bastard,” said Gideon, staring at Glinn, and then at Garza. Garza hadn’t participated in the melee. His face was a hard, neutral mask.

  “You won’t get away with this,” Amiko continued yelling. “The world will know! You cage that Cyclops, you’ll pay!”

  Glinn shook his head. “You are thinking with your emotions.”

  “Go to hell!”

  “Please take her away until she’s rational.”

  She was hauled away, cursing and spitting. Glinn turned his gray eye on Gideon. “You seem…confused.”

  “I’m not confused about the way you’re treating her. It’s outrageous.”

  “I want you to understand why I’m doing what I’m doing. Give me credit for caring what you think.”

  Gideon stared at him. He could still hear Amiko outside, yelling, screaming, and threatening. He didn’t quite know what to make of her outburst, pulling the gun. The intensity of her rage, its extreme suddenness, shocked him. Glinn, on the other hand, almost appeared to have expected it.

  “As I was saying, this is the best—and the only—way to succeed. If we let the local governments become involved—even if they don’t destroy the island in their squabble over it—they will seek to monetize the discovery. They will cut an exclusive deal with a multinational pharmaceutical company to bring the drug to market. The end result is that the drug will be expensive and available only to the privileged. And they’ll put the Cyclops in a real zoo and monetize that as well. The way to stop this is to do what we are doing now. A preemptive strike. Our client, who is completely trustworthy and a man of goodwill, will found a nonprofit organization that will breed the plant and distribute it free to any qualified research group, government, and pharmaceutical company that wants it. In this way, the drug will come to market at the lowest possible cost.”

  He paused again and eyed Gideon with peculiar intensity. “I’d think you, of all people, would want to see this drug developed.”

  Gideon said nothing. Glinn had touched him where he was most vulnerable. But caging the Cyclops remained an ugly, ugly decision.

  Glinn went on in his reasonable voice. “The logic is inescapable. We will do all we can to help the Cyclops, but it cannot remain on this island. According to our computer simulations, we have twenty-four hours before our presence here is discovered and investigated. If we don’t have the lotus by then, we will fail.”

  Gideon winced slightly as Amiko, outside, let forth another shrill outburst. “As always,” he said, “you make everything sound so inevitable. But I want no part of it.”

  “And you shall have none. Neither you nor Amiko. Tomorrow morning, Manuel will fly you both to Managua, and from there you will return to the States. Your work is done. And exceedingly well done, if I might say so, despite the contretemps at the end.” He gestured toward the sound of Amiko’s screaming. Glancing in her direction, Gideon could see that
the two men holding her were having a hard time; she was amazingly strong for someone so small.

  Suddenly a thunderous roar came from the wall of jungle. Gideon turned his head in time to see an extraordinary sight. The Cyclops came bursting from the foliage, his yellow eye fiery with rage, his mouth open, exposing long, yellow canines, his gigantic, muscled frame radiating ferocity, his silver hair streaming behind him. He carried a club in one massive hand and a spear in the other. He rushed straight at the men holding Amiko, who were so stunned they seemed momentarily paralyzed. He swung the club, which literally exploded the skull of one of the men, and grabbed Amiko.

  “I want it alive!” cried Glinn.

  Several men rushed forward, Tasing the creature with flashes of blue light, the crackling sound mingling with his terrible roars as he swept them aside with a massive arm. The Tasers only seemed to enrage him more. Now other men rushed up with a metal net, which they flung over him. Thrashing maniacally, the Cyclops clawed it apart with his hands, the metal strands snapping and twanging like guitar strings as he tore the net to pieces, Amiko fighting to help free him from the entanglement.

  Men with rifles were hastily taking up positions, leveling their guns.

  “No!” screamed Amiko, “don’t shoot!” But the rifles went off with popping sounds—tranquilizing darts. Half a dozen stubby syringes buried themselves in the Cyclops’s back and side. He gave another jungle-shaking bellow and flailed about, pulling them out and flinging them away.

  “Again!” Glinn ordered.

  “No!” Amiko screamed, trying to place herself between the Cyclops and the shooters.

  A second round of well-aimed shots hit the Cyclops. The soldiers backed off as he came to a staggering halt, his great eye rolling grotesquely, his mouth distorted, spittle drooling out. He flailed about hopelessly for a moment, and then collapsed on the ground, his guttural cries dying into a choking sputter before going silent.

  In five minutes, the soldiers had loaded his gigantic body onto a dolly and rolled him into the cage. Amiko, who had been tackled and recaptured, had finally stopped screaming and fallen silent.

  Glinn turned to Gideon. “The creature came to rescue her. Impressive. Now that we’ve captured the Cyclops, we can get moving on phase two—finding the lotus.” He gestured at the headless body of the man lying in the wet ashes of the clearing. “That was unfortunate. Manuel, could you please have it taken care of?”

  Garza went off in silence and soon was directing a group of men removing the body. Glinn gestured for Amiko to be brought to him. Her hands cuffed behind her back, held by two burly men, she was led forward.

  “It’s over,” Glinn said. “There’s nothing you can do for the creature now. If you promise to behave, I’d like to release you.”

  Silence. And then Amiko said, in a strange, cold voice: “You can release me.”

  The two men undid her cuffs and let her go.

  “The men will stay with you, however, until you depart.”

  “You’ve overlooked one small fact,” Amiko said.

  “And what is that?”

  “You won’t find the lotus—without his help.”

  57

  GIDEON AWOKE BEFORE dawn, bleary-eyed and deeply discouraged, unable to sleep due to the miserable roaring of the Cyclops, which had gone on for most of the night. The bellowing had finally died down, and he had managed a restless hour of sleep before being awoken for the flight home. As the sun rose over the treetops, Gideon and Amiko—with her two armed guards—were standing to one side while the chopper sat in the landing zone, warming up, ready to take them away.

  Amiko looked like a ghost, pale, her bloodshot eyes set in pools of dark skin.

  “Are you all right?” Gideon asked, taking her arm.

  She silently pulled away.

  The soldiers indicated it was time to board. Garza was in the pilot’s seat, his face set, unreadable.

  For a moment, Gideon hesitated. Where was Glinn? All their hard work and sweat, the dangers they’d endured—and now they were being hustled back to civilization. It all felt wrong. It made him angry. He glanced back in the direction of the security enclosure. The Cyclops had started bellowing again.

  One of the soldiers gestured with his weapon. With a sigh, Gideon hoisted his drysack over one shoulder and climbed up into the chopper after Amiko. The soldiers shut them in.

  He settled into his seat, buckled in, and put on the headset. A moment later the Sikorsky lifted off, rising above the jungle canopy, Garza at the controls. As the chopper gained altitude, Gideon could see the top of the island, floating high above the sea like a green paradise, but now marred by the scorched LZ, the camp, and several other brutally fresh clearings hacked out of the jungle. Directly below, he could see the Cyclops, shaking the bars of his cage and staring upward with that hideous eye.

  He glanced over at Amiko. Her face was dark and strange. It chilled him how she had gone from pleading with Glinn, to a sudden eruption of furious violence, to this cold and forbidding silence.

  The chopper banked over the canopy, flying along the spine of the island. But instead of winging out over the sea, when the chopper reached the end of the island it began to slow. Then it swung around and abruptly descended toward a rough clearing EES had cut out of the jungle on the far side of the tabletop. A moment later they landed.

  “What’s going on?” Gideon asked.

  Garza turned around in his seat, taking off his headset and indicating they were to do so as well. “I’ll tell you what’s going on,” he said over the whine of the engine. “You’ve been hearing Glinn talk about his ‘client.’ I’m surprised you haven’t figured it out yet. There is no client. Or rather, the so-called client is Glinn himself.”

  Gideon stared at Garza.

  “From the very beginning of this project,” Garza said, “I’ve been concerned about Glinn’s behavior. He was so secretive, holding his cards close, never revealing the name of his client. I’m his right-hand man; I’ve always had a place in the inner circle. Not this time—it was an inner circle of one.” He paused, frowning. “I’ve seen Glinn go off the deep end before, and I’ve begun to see the signs of it again. He’s after the lotus to heal himself. And he’s not going to give it away. He plans to make big money on it.”

  “Do you know this for a fact?”

  “I know it because I know Glinn. I’ve been through this before, with the meteorite business.”

  “Meteorite? You mean, the one you mentioned in the bar?”

  “Exactly. This is a continuation of that same story. When we talked before, I never told you what the meteorite was, exactly. Now you need to know. It was a seed.”

  Gideon stared at him. “A what?”

  “You heard me. It was Panspermia on a grand scale, a huge alien seed, floating through space for God knows how long. It fell to earth a few thousand years ago and was lying dormant on a frozen island. Eli collected it for the Lloyd Museum, but the project failed, the ship sank, and it went to the bottom of the South Atlantic. Planted. Where it found the ideal conditions it needed to sprout. And grow.”

  “My God.”

  “It’s Eli’s white whale. He prided himself on never failing—and on that op, he failed colossally. He thinks that whatever is growing down there threatens the earth—that it’s his fault, and his responsibility to kill it. That project has always been in the back of his mind. But he’s estimated that he needs a billion dollars to mount an expedition to kill that thing. I believe this drug is how he’s planning to finance it.”

  “So all that talk of giving the drug to the world…is a lie?”

  “Oh, he’ll give it to the world—for a price. On top of that, the drug is also for himself. To cure his injuries. Glinn believes he must lead the expedition, and in order to do that he has to be able to walk and have use of his limbs.”

  Gideon felt stunned. All along, he’d been thinking about what the lotus might do for him. He’d never considered that Glinn had his own ag
enda. It was so obvious, once it was pointed out.

  “Glinn is going to get all of us killed,” Garza said. “I’ve seen it before. I saw one hundred and eight people die when the Rolvaag sank, and I never want to see anything like that again.”

  Gideon looked at Amiko, then turned back to Garza. “So what’s your plan?”

  “Simple. We bypass Glinn, get the lotus, and get the hell out of here ourselves. We give it to science, freely, for the benefit of mankind. What Glinn was claiming to do, but we do it for real. It’s up to us to pull this off.”

  “How?” Amiko suddenly asked.

  Garza turned to her. “You said something back there that struck me. You said we wouldn’t find the lotus without that creature’s help. Is that really true?”

  “Yes,” said Amiko.

  “Can you control him? Keep him in check?”

  “I think so,” Amiko replied.

  Gideon looked at her in surprise. She was looking steadfastly at Garza with an expression of dark intensity.

  “To release the Cyclops,” Garza said, “you’ll have to get past the electrified enclosure. I’ve got the codes to its cage.” Garza pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and gave it to her. “He came to rescue you. He trusts you. You free him and get him to dig up a lotus and bring it back here. Then we’ll set him free and take off with the lotus. We’ve got six hours before Glinn expects me back. Think you can do it in six hours?”

  “You know I can.”

  “Gideon, you in?”

  Gideon said nothing for a moment, and then spoke slowly. “A stash of lotus is hidden in a cave near here, below, in the cliffs.”

  Garza stared at him. “You never said anything about that.”

  “It’s true,” Gideon replied. It seemed a more prudent course than freeing the Cyclops.

  “Then that’s the answer to all our problems,” said Garza. “I’ll wait here while you two go get it.” He removed his .45 and handed it to Amiko. “You may need this.”

  She took it, shoved it in her waistband, and rose up from her seat. “Let’s go,” she said to Gideon.