The Joshua Files - a complete box set: Books 1-5 of the young adult sci-fi adventure series plus techno-thriller prequel

by M. G. Harris

  “How can I be related to you, never mind be your twin? What, now you’re an eco-terrorist? Or working for one? You really believe that this is all she wants?” The sarcasm intensified. “So, DiCanio has, according to you, control of an international organization of brilliant, well-connected people. Who may or may not have some capacity for practicing a level of hypnosis? Somehow, this organization has found a possibly functional counterpart to this ancient technology? You think that she’s out to help anyone but herself? Lookit; if she wanted to help the world, why keep the organization secret? Why not go public, at least within the intelligence community?”

  Jackson looked scornful. He longed to tear off the duct tape and let rip, finally, with some of the indignation that had been building up inside him. He’d transgressed, but then so had Connor and the whole NRO. Governments pretty much by-passed any laws they felt like ignoring: that was the only way that Connor and his ilk had been allowed to remain in Iraq for so long. Now they’d been hoarding an ancient treasure that by rights belonged to the Iraqi people.

  Connor was only just getting warmed up. “Bro, I had no idea you were this stupid. You actually buy into this whole idea that the governments of the free world don’t actually want to protect its citizens? That people like me are so dumbass that we go fight for something that’s not really worth dying for? Don’t you get that the governments of the world are already waking up to global warming?”

  Jackson merely rolled his eyes. Of course his brother would respond this way; he’d anticipated it. Connor trusted the chain of command, and was motivated in everything by a passionate love for his country and what he often referred to as ‘the free world’. Jackson, on the other hand, refused to ignore the plight of the ordinary people on whom all of the world-changing ideas would inevitably tread. In the days when they’d still seen each other regularly, the brothers had invested hours in trying to persuade each other. In the end it had been pointless; consensus never reached, the validity of each other’s viewpoints rarely even acknowledged.

  Connor stood, arms folded, looking down at his twin who looked back with studied indifference. The two men were now indistinguishable except for the grey duct tape which still covered Jackson’s mouth. Their silent stand-off was interrupted when Connor’s sergeant joined them, carrying something which Jackson had to admit looked very much like the Adaptor.

  Connor handed the replica of the Adaptor to Jackson. “We took the logograms from the text of the Lament. When your friends translate it, they’ll get nothing other than part of the story of the fall of Eridu.”

  Jackson stared. How was he supposed to explain that?

  “Your friends had better buy this story for long enough for us to get to them.”

  With increasing despondency, Jackson examined the replica. This was far heavier than the original that he’d grabbed less than an hour ago. The advanced ceramic material used in the chamber was lighter, more translucent. If DiCanio had the original of the Adaptor from the Mexican chamber, Jackson would have no chance. On the other hand, in the absence of any physical comparison, this replica might just buy him a few hours.

  He thought gloomily about the total failure of his mission. He was still in the dark about the true purpose of the chamber. Even if DiCanio knew or suspected, he could no longer trust her reaction when she discovered his deception. Escape from DiCanio had to be his priority now.

  Connor spoke again. “OK, brother, this is goodbye. You can remove the gag, but one word from you and it’s over, got that?”

  Jackson glared back, began peeling back the tape, careful to avoid tearing his lips. When he’d finished, Connor handed him a paper cup filled with water.

  “Good luck, Jacko,” Connor said, softly. “There’ll be a gun on you all the way out, so don’t go for any heroics. You’re gonna walk free from this place, just as if you were me. Go back to your rendezvous. You’ll be seeing us again real soon.”

  The two airmen stood aside as Jackson stepped reluctantly past. Once outside in the base, he walked by, this time keenly aware of the sullen, wary stares he drew from the staff. He walked directly to the base entrance, where two different guards from the ones he’d seen earlier saluted him.

  The road back to Basra passed right in front of the base but the tiny village of Abu Shahrain was much closer, only ten minutes’ walk. As they’d agreed, Jackson walked to Abu Shahrain. Hafez Kazmi was waiting in the main street, sitting next to the taxi. It had parked next to a small café, and Kazmi was smoking and drinking from a can of Pepsi.

  Crumpling his can, he threw Jackson a slow, hostile glare. “What took you?”

  “There were people in the chamber,” said Jackson. “They were conducting some kind of experiment. I had to wait, in hiding, until they finished.”

  Hafez’s expression instantly transformed. He dropped his cigarette, took the replica Adaptor, turning it over in his palms. Fascinated, he said, “This is incredible!”

  Jackson watched in silence for a moment. Kazmi had absolutely no qualms about handling what he seemed to believe was the real Adaptor.

  She’d been holding out on him. DiCanio didn’t know about the bio-toxin. The Sect’s inside informant was good, but even they hadn’t infiltrated every secret of the NRO’s.

  “They seemed real excited about whatever it was doing,” Jackson warned. “We need to go because they may be going back down there.”

  “You did good, man!” Kazmi slapped Jackson’s back. “How did the hypnoticin go?”

  “It did the job. Hardly needed it, though. Looking like this, they didn’t ask any questions.”

  “I knew it. There’s no-one we could have put in that place and gotten that result.”

  “Except Connor himself,” said Jackson, watching Kazmi keenly.

  Transfixed by the intricate inscriptions on the artifact, Kazmi was still distracted. “Yeah, sure,” he answered, the sarcasm plainly obvious in his voice.

  Jackson said nothing. It was looking as though DiCanio had not actually approached Connor, after all. She’d lied. Her plan had always been to recruit him. Now he thought about it, she must have begun working on a plan quite some time ago, gathering information about him. The Mexican newspapers had reported that Jackson was in Mexico and under suspicion of involvement in PJ’s murder. DiCanio could easily have seen those stories, if she’d been following the news of PJ’s death. She would have realized that Jackson was vulnerable as at no other time in his life. She would have guessed that if she offered him a way out of the country, he would have to take it.

  It had culminated in her emailed invitation to visit her in Chaldexx. Jackson had taken it for granted that he’d been a hasty afterthought, the plan quickly executed before the artifacts were shipped out. Yet Jackson had seen little evidence that the chamber was being imminently emptied.

  No; there was evidence that DiCanio may have acted opportunistically, but she’d taken advantage of some long-range planning. Given that, he wondered what else DiCanio had managed to achieve in that time.

  Had she left him an escape route?

  Ninhursag

  At the Basra Sheraton, Jackson and Kazmi arrived to find DiCanio checking them out of the hotel. Jackson had removed his uniform jacket and tie in the car. Now he carried the jacket inside-out over one arm. When DiCanio spotted them, she broke into a grin, giving them a tiny wave. She’d changed into an outfit of white linen: loose trousers and a long over-shirt, an aquamarine silk scarf thrown lightly around her neck. Her eyes were hidden behind a pair of smoky brown sunglasses with jeweled borders, the blonde in her hair shone golden in the sharp light. Kazmi’s mood too was light, confident. Jackson did his best to emulate the couple’s good humor. Under the cover of his shirt, the hairs on his arm prickled, he felt rivulets of sweat beading and trickling down his back.

  Kazmi lifted the suitcases and lead the way towards the waiting car, where the two bodyguards once again sat in the front. The man in the passenger seat was speaking into a small headset, noddi
ng twice before he told Kazmi, “All set.”

  Once the doors closed, DiCanio touched Jackson’s shoulder. “You’re drenched! You should have taken a minute to change your shirt.”

  Jackson decided to go on the offensive. “You sent me into the field, Melissa. Don’t be so surprised if I worked up a little sweat.”

  DiCanio seemed just a little put out, but fortunately for Jackson, Kazmi appeared to find the exchange amusing. “Leave him in peace, woman. What he did took guts. The boy’s a scientist, not a soldier.”

  Thereafter, DiCanio said nothing more on the subject, but put a degree of space between her and Jackson. Kazmi handed DiCanio the replica of the Adaptor.

  DiCanio held the object in one hand, then two, pensive. “It seems a little heavy. I think it’s heavier than the one we have. It’s in pretty great condition, though. Look at how crisply defined the logograms are. It looks almost as though it were made yesterday.”

  Jackson decided to say nothing, waiting to see where she took this line of thought.

  “Describe to me exactly where you found this.”

  Jackson responded with an elaborate description of the chamber, emphasizing the pristine condition of all the caskets and the central altar.

  “The Adaptor sat in some kind of depression, right in the middle of the altar. One end was near another depression in the horizontal plane of the altar. Like a battery, but with only one terminal. It wasn’t actually slotted into the depression; I’m pretty sure that’s how they activated it.”

  “Sounds identical to what we found in Mexico,” DiCanio said when he’d finished describing the chamber. “I think that you can activate the mechanism inside each casket by pressing the appropriate altar plate. I think the Adaptor energizes or otherwise powers the altar. Maybe it really is a battery. I wish you’d tried to find out what happened if you slotted the Adaptor into position.”

  “I didn’t like to risk it,” Jackson lied. “I’d already been down there a while. I kind of wanted to get out of there as fast as possible.”

  DiCanio seemed, reluctantly, to agree. “We’ll find out soon enough, when we get this to Mexico. It would have been good to know now.” She looked at the artifact again, with some disquiet. “Maybe the heat had some effect on the molecular structure. That happens with some enamel; heat can make it disintegrate. This doesn’t seem as crystalline as the one we have. Tell me, was the rest of the chamber made of exactly the same material?”

  Jackson decided to limit his lies to the absolute minimum. He was quietly terrified that he’d be caught. Even to have got this far seemed faintly unlikely. Yet, DiCanio wanted so badly to believe in his success that she was, Jackson could see, making one of the worst mistakes a scientist could make; she was choosing to interpret an anomaly in her own favor.

  “The altar and caskets were made of something that looked like marble, or alabaster, not so ceramic as this. Honestly, I didn’t really recognize the stone either.”

  DiCanio was nodding again, unable to take her eyes off the replica of the Adaptor, whose inscription she now scrutinized closely. “It is ceramic,” she said, her tone curt. “We did the tests. It’s definitely artificial, not stone. We didn’t test the Adaptor; I didn’t want to risk further damage to the inscriptions. Everything else down there is made of a very strange material. Not like anything we were able to find in any patent database.”

  Jackson waited to see if DiCanio would make any mention of the age of the chamber, or its biological properties. But she said nothing.

  So, I’m still to be kept in the dark, thought Jackson, with no small measure of anger. Clearing his throat, he came straight out with his question. “How old is the chamber in Mexico?”

  DiCanio eyed him, quite suddenly, with curiosity. She seemed to be considering whether the question was fair. “Maybe seventy-four thousand years old.”

  He didn’t have to fake his astonishment. “How could you know that? If it’s an artificial ceramic? You can’t carbon date back that far, so I’m assuming the method’s not carbon-based.”

  DiCanio pursed her lips momentarily.

  “You can date back beyond 50,000 years. There are other, newer techniques. We used electron spin resonance. Trapped energy in a sample is measured from its response to high-frequency electromagnetic radiation in the presence of a magnetic field. People have used the technique to date hominid remains back as far as one hundred thousand years. Of course we can’t be too precise, but we think that we can be accurate within a couple of thousand years.”

  “Seventy-four thousand years,” Jackson repeated thoughtfully, “the same date as the supervolcano explosion which created Lake Toba?”

  DiCanio looked at him, her eyes wide, solemn. “Exactly, Jackson. Exactly.”

  Jackson lapsed into a silence that allowed the knot of fear deep in his belly to slowly unravel. DiCanio’s car had arrived at Basra International Airport. And all through the journey, he’d glimpsed absolutely no evidence of their being followed.

  Where the hell was Connor?

  ***

  Once aboard the jet, Kazmi took the pilot’s seat while the remaining four, DiCanio, Jackson and her two bodyguards strapped themselves into the comfortable passenger seats. To Jackson’s bewilderment, instead of turning the jet inland to fly back over Iraq, towards Western Europe, Kazmi took the plane out into the Persian Gulf, flying south along the coastline.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, openly anxious.

  “Relax, my friend. We’ll have you back in your lab in no time, along with the research funds we promised. First we’re going to our base in Manama in Bahrain. It’s been too long a day to fly back in one go. We’re going to rest and transmit some data to the team in Mexico, see if they can make a start on decoding these logograms.”

  “I took a look at the inscriptions,” remarked Kazmi. “Looks like Archaic period Sumerian. The logograms have some unusual kind of modifications.”

  “What’s on the Adaptor you found in Mexico?” Jackson asked, struggling to keep his manner resolutely innocent.

  “We haven’t been able to read it; too much erosion.”

  “What are these modifications?”

  Kazmi said, “Sumerian and Mayan scripts combine a number of linguistic types which are commonly seen in early writings. Both scripts employ logographic, pictographic and agglutinative aspects. They also have partial rebus elements.”

  Jackson interjected, “Rebus?”

  “Where the pictures tell you what sounds to make, but the meaning is not literal. For example in English, you might draw an eye, a can, the sea, a sheep, and it could read ‘I can sea ewe’ or correctly; ‘I can see you’.” Kazmi continued, “Moreover, it would appear that both languages use many logograms to mean more than one word.”

  “You take the meaning from the context,” Jackson said, without thinking. Kazmi’s eyes seemed to widen just a fraction, either surprised or impressed.

  “Ah, you know something of Sumerian?”

  Jackson had to fight the urge to swallow nervously. It was a stupid slip, one that he couldn’t afford. From now on, Jackson had to play everything as DiCanio would expect. No fancy moves, no surprises.

  “Seems like a logical explanation,” he said quietly, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Indeed, you’re quite correct. The appropriate meaning is sometimes taken from the context, but often the logogram is modified in a certain way, to denote the way it should be read. As it happens, the Adaptor we found also has strange modifications. The Mayan glyphs don’t actually make any sense, so far as we can tell. Which means that we can ignore them and attempt to guess the correct context. Or we can try to find out what they mean some other way.”

  Jackson deduced that they must already have tried to guess the logograms’ meanings, without success. They were clearly hoping that the Adaptor from Eridu had the same writing as that which was apparently effaced on the Mexican Adaptor. Sumerian writing had been initially deciphered in the nineteenth century;
Mayan writing had only very recently begun to be understood. In addition, there were many more translated Sumerian texts available.

  DiCanio and her organization were probably banking on the superior understanding of Sumerian writing to resurrect their project.

  ***

  They landed thirty minutes later, in a private airstrip in Manama. As the jet came in over the harbor, Jackson could see right away why DiCanio’s organization had chosen to set up a Middle Eastern base there, the city appeared bright, modern, spacious and orderly with neat grids of roads like the suburbs of a wealthy American city.

  A white, 7-series BMW was waiting for them. One of the guards remained with the jet, whilst the other guard joined DiCanio, Kazmi and Jackson in the car.

  They drove for about fifteen minutes, into the suburbs, stopped in front of a high metal gate. Jackson leaned over, trying to catch sight of the top of the gate. To his utter dismay he could see that the prongs of the metal gate ended in sharp points. Broken glass bottles, pressed into cement, lined the entire high peripheral wall. The only safe way out would be through the gate.

  The driver activated a remote device, opening the gate. Jackson watched closely where he put the remote, winced softly when he saw the man replace it in a pocket.

  The house was a modern, four-bedroomed house, stuccoed with gleaming white plaster, with grey tinted windows. Through the French windows at the back, Jackson could see a generous concrete patio, in the middle of which was a small pool of deep blue water, glacially still. Date palms lined the far end of the pool, providing welcome shade from the burning sun. Inside, the cool of the air conditioning hit them soothingly. Grey marble floors and crisp interior whites of the walls and furnishings created an atmosphere that Jackson found disturbingly clinical. It didn’t look as though anyone spent much time here. Some of the sofas still wore their plastic coverings.