Genome (The Extinction Files Book 2)

by A. G. Riddle

  Chapter 21

  Conner could smell the smoke from the growing blaze in the distance. The chatter over the radio told a story of chaos and disorder. The fire was spreading from home to home, and people were evacuating—breaking curfew—to escape before it reached them.

  Through the bay window in the living room, he saw a garage door open. A black BMW pulled onto the street and sped away.

  He made his way to the garage, where the van’s back doors sat open. Doctor Park was inside, staring at a flat screen with wavy lines in blue, green, and red.

  “How long?”

  Park didn’t look up. “Not long. Twenty, maybe thirty minutes.”

  Conner wondered if they had that long.

  He retreated back into the home, through the kitchen, and into Lin Shaw’s bedroom. On the dresser was a picture of Peyton, Andrew, Madison, and Lin at the Grand Canyon. An apt metaphor for the person not pictured: the children’s father, Lin’s husband, William.

  Conner picked up the picture—and stopped. He felt something on the back—a piece of metal. He turned over the frame.

  A key was taped to the back.

  It was small, the right size for a padlock, or perhaps a safe. The head and shoulder were painted white, while the shaft, teeth, and tip were plain silver. Why?

  He pulled drawers from the dresser and emptied them, searching for a padlock or safe. He pulled the covers off the bed and flipped the mattress. He rifled through the closet. Nothing.

  He went to the window and scanned the back yard for a garden shed or storage building. Nothing there either. He went from room to room, ransacking the house.

  Where was the last place anyone would look?

  He walked into the hall, reached for the cord, and pulled down the stairs to the attic. They wobbled and creaked as he climbed. He pulled the string connected to the exposed light bulb. Empty. Nothing up here but exposed rafters, a buzzing HVAC unit, and blown-in insulation.

  He walked back down the stairs, frustrated.

  If the key was to a safe, he would have found it by now. Had Lin Shaw left the key just to mess with anyone who invaded her home? He wouldn’t put it past her. But he wasn’t ready to give up.

  He walked back into the bedroom.

  The room had no walk-in closet, just two strip closets hidden behind louvered folding doors, standard for the era. He compared the insides. Yes—there was a difference. The one on the right had extra white molding, like what would surround a window or door. The strips ran along the back corners, where the side walls met the back wall.

  Now he was getting somewhere.

  He tossed the clothes on the floor, pushed against the back wall. It gave, just a little, but too much for regular drywall on studs. He searched the entire back wall, but there was no keyhole.

  A small, two-level shoe rack lay on the floor. He threw it out, revealing only the narrow planks of the hardwood floor.

  Conner settled back onto his haunches. As his eyes moved over the white, wooden base molding, he stopped. One part didn’t reflect light like the rest. He ran his hand over it, and felt the wood turn to metal—a round disc. A small piece of computer paper had been clear taped in the middle. He tore it off.

  A keyhole.

  He put the tip of the key on the face of the lock and scratched, revealing silver metal. He smiled. Very clever. Before painting the lock to match the trim, Lin had inserted the key, so as not to get paint inside the keyhole. That explained the strange paint pattern on the key.

  He slid the key in, and heard a click as he turned the cylinder. He pushed against the back wall. It didn’t swing wide, only cracked a few inches, but it was enough for Conner to squeeze through.

  A string hung down from a light bulb, just like in the attic. He turned it on, then stared, mesmerized, at what he saw. He quickly closed the wall behind him and squatted to examine the items Lin had hidden. For good reason.

  In the corner, an old military uniform was folded up. Conner knew it hadn’t been worn in over seventy years; the nation that issued it no longer existed. But the Nazi uniform was unmistakable.

  Beside the garment sat a shoebox. Conner carefully removed the lid. A stack of photographs lay inside, mostly black and white, with creases like cracks in concrete, worn ends, and rounded corners. Most were of a middle-aged man, Caucasian, European descent.

  On the wall, a world map had been spread out and dotted with colored pushpins. The pins marked locations outside major cities, but Conner didn’t recognize their significance. He drew out his phone, snapped pictures of everything in the tiny room, and uploaded them to the Citium server.

  Then he dialed a phone number.

  “Yes,” Yuri said, emotionless as always.

  “I found something at Lin Shaw’s house. You need to see it.”

  Chapter 22

  The vast situation room was teeming with activity. Yuri’s people were performing admirably, moving the pieces into place. Soon the Looking Glass would come online, and his life’s work would be complete.

  Yuri stepped through, avoiding the empty coffee cups that littered the floor like debris washed up on a beach, and entered the conference room, where Melissa Whitmeyer and two other ops techs were waiting.

  As soon as he sat down, the red-haired woman began her report.

  “The dev team estimates they’re halfway finished on Rapture Control. They wish to remind us that estimating completion progress is not an exact science.”

  She waited for Yuri, who simply nodded.

  Whitmeyer turned the page and exhaled. This was bad news; Yuri sensed it.

  “We just heard from Captain Mikhailov on the Invisible Sun. They’ve searched the surface and the Beagle. The incursion team she sent is dead.” Whitmeyer paused. “She’s identified evac locations and is preparing to search them, beginning with Post-Rogers—”

  “Tell her not to bother. Lin Shaw is gone. And we can assume she found what she was searching for on the Beagle.”

  “We’ve activated our assets embedded in governments. No reports of contact yet.”

  “There won’t be. Lin is too smart for that. She’ll stay off the radar until she needs to surface.”

  “Where does that leave us?”

  “Chasing her is futile,” Yuri said. “We need to figure out where she’s going—and be there waiting. And we need to figure out what exactly she’s working on. She no doubt has collaborators. If her project is a threat to the Looking Glass, even containing her might not be enough.”

  “Suggestions?”

  “Dig deep into her past. I want a list of all the locations that might have meaning for her. All the locations that are tied to those scientists who died on the Beagle. Find the intersection points. I want small teams to stake out the locations. Don’t ask, just send them as soon as you identify potential targets. And I want a tactical team prepped and ready to go on a moment’s notice.”

  Chapter 23

  The plane flew through the darkness toward the North Pole. The shortest route to Oxford was over the top of the Earth, past Greenland and Iceland.

  Peyton sat in a chair facing a long couch that held her mother, Avery, and Nigel. The two SEALs stood, hovering nearby.

  “Lewis Carroll. Author of Alice in Wonderland,” Avery said. “Though the sequel seems more relevant: Through the Looking-Glass. But how did you get to Lewis Carroll from ‘A Liddell’?”

  “A Liddell is Alice Liddell,” Lin said. “She was the inspiration behind the novel. She was a girl at the time Carroll wrote the book. Her father was the dean of Christ Church, a college within the university. And Carroll—his real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson—studied at Oxford and became a professor there. He was a polymath—a writer, logician, mathematician, photographer, even an Anglican deacon.”

  “Yeah,” Nigel said. “Didn’t know all that. Here’s what I do know: he’s dead. Has been for a while. Like since the 1800s.”

  “True enough,” Lin said. “But the Bodleian has been around far lon
ger than that. Since the 1200s. And it’s famous for keeping rare and first edition books. If I’m right, we’re looking for one of those first editions. A rare first edition of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland.”

  Off the coast of Greenland, the sun broke above the horizon. Peyton watched the soft orange glow turn to rays of white. It blinded her at first, and a throb of pain came next, quickly, like fingers pressing on her eyeballs. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt the warmth touch her face. She hadn’t seen the sun for a month and hadn’t realized until now how much she had missed it.

  The last month had revealed so much about her life she hadn’t known. The truth about her father and brother. Her mother’s involvement in the Citium. Desmond’s. It was like she had lived her life in darkness. Now the truth was coming to light. It hurt at first, but she was slowly beginning to open her eyes. She saw the sun on the horizon. And she was ready for it.

  Chapter 24

  In the winter of 2003, Desmond spent every waking minute in the library overlooking San Francisco Bay. Yuri arrived weekly, and Desmond always had a new wrinkle to his answer to the mysterious question.

  “We walked upright. Primates don’t. Chimps. Bonobos. Gorillas. It’s more than just appearance.”

  Yuri sat quietly under the multi-level chandelier, waiting.

  Desmond continued. “Walking upright had a huge impact on our evolution. The female birth canal became narrower at the exact same time that our brains were getting larger. This obstetric dilemma had a huge impact on our offspring. We developed openings in the skull called fontanelles that essentially allow babies’ heads to compress during birth. The anterior fontanelle actually stays open for two years after birth, allowing the brain to expand further. That’s completely different from chimpanzees and bonobos. In their offspring, brain growth occurs mostly in the womb. The anterior fontanelle is closed at the time of birth. Their brain growth is already done.

  “Which is why, if you compare our babies to those of apes, the apes’s babies are far more developed. You’d have to gestate a human baby for eighteen to twenty-one months to achieve similar development at birth. Compared to other species, our offspring are born almost completely helpless. They need their parents, so those parents bond with them. As a result, we form villages, social structures to protect our young. Family units. Evolution met that biological challenge—that obstetric dilemma—with a cultural, societal solution. One that makes us human.”

  He waited, hoping, but Yuri shook his head.

  “It’s a piece, but not the key, Desmond. Dig deeper.”

  Desmond did. He read day and night. Christmas came and went. Months passed. Then New Year’s. Looking out the window, he expected to see the Golden Gate Bridge coated in snow, but it was the same shade of burnt red he’d seen the first time he’d come here. He’d never get used to seeing the years turn without snow on the ground. San Francisco, despite its latitude, seemed to exist in a bubble. The winters were mild and the summers were dry, as if it didn’t observe the rules of nature.

  February rolled around. Valentine’s Day. It always reminded him of Peyton. He wondered if she had met someone. If she was happy. If Lin had been wrong. A part of him hoped she was. Another part hoped she wasn’t.

  The next day, Yuri sat in the library, waiting.

  “Communication,” Desmond said. “On the Beagle, they examined Neanderthal fossils. Their throats were different. They couldn’t make sounds like us. So they never developed complex language. We did.”

  “You’re getting closer.”

  Yuri walked out, and Desmond threw a book at the wall.

  Huan ran in. “Sir?”

  “Just getting my exercise, Huan.”

  “Can I get you any—”

  “No. Thank you.”

  Desmond changed in his room and rode the elevator to street level. He ran through Telegraph Hill, past Union Square, and out of the financial district. Somewhere in the Mission District, he stopped thinking about the question.

  The answer came to him not long after.

  He called Yuri the next morning. “I’ve got it.”

  “I’m on my way,” the older man said.

  Instead of sitting, as he usually did, Yuri stood, the morning light beaming in through the towering window.

  “Story,” Desmond said.

  Yuri sat.

  “Fiction. That’s what we had that they didn’t.”

  “Continue.”

  Desmond threw open a book with expedition notes from the Beagle. “This is from a place in Spain. It’s called the Cave of Altamira. These paintings were made thirty-five thousand years ago.”

  “Steppe bison,” Yuri said.

  “You’re familiar?”

  “I was there when we excavated it,” he said quietly. “But they aren’t fiction. These beasts existed at the time the artists painted them.”

  “True. Our real breakthrough was imagination—specifically the ability to imagine something that didn’t exist.” Desmond stood. “The Neanderthals had fire. They buried their dead, cared for their sick. Walked upright like us. Made stone tools. But these were mostly reactive adaptations. We imagined. In our mind’s eye, we saw things that didn’t exist. We imagined what the world would be like when they did exist.

  “You asked me about the early Australians. Why did they reach the island when the Neanderthals never had? When the Denisovans never had? Imagination. They imagined a device that would carry them across the sea. A raft maybe, perhaps a simple boat. And they created it, and sailed. They found a land with abundant calories to power those massive brains, those biological computers that rendered new realities in their minds, simulations of the future they could choose from.”

  Yuri smiled. It was a genuine gesture, unlike anything Desmond had ever seen from the older man. “Yes, Desmond.”

  “So… that’s it? What you wanted me to find?” Desmond said. “The quintessential human trait: imagination, fiction, simulation. Powered by energy our brain could use.”

  “Yes. It’s what makes us completely different from any species before us on this planet. It has been the singular key to all of our progress. And it’s part of a pattern. It points to the path of our species.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will.” Yuri stood. “When you answer one final question.”

  Desmond shook his head.

  “Patience.” Yuri took a step away. “The pieces will fit together. But first, I have something for you. A reward.”

  “What kind of reward?”

  “A trip.”

  “Where?”

  “It would seem, for you, that all roads lead back to Australia.”

  They left that night, on a private plane, chartered from SFO. They flew for seventeen hours, playing chess on the table between the plush seats, taking turns sleeping on the couch, Desmond asking questions occasionally, Yuri always brushing them off.

  To Desmond’s surprise, it was night when they landed. They had flown into the sunset, their path rotating with the Earth.

  Yuri said nothing about their destination, though the airport directories told Desmond he was in Adelaide. The last time he had walked through this terminal, Peyton had been with him, on a journey to retrace his past, hoping he found resolution. That had failed. Was Yuri trying the same thing? The outcome would be the same.

  He had been here exactly one other time—as a child, on the day he left Australia for America. Another woman he loved had held his hand that day: Charlotte, towering tall above him, her smile the only light in the darkness of his life.

  That darkness had never truly ended. And as he followed Yuri through the airport, he wondered if it ever would. If he was on a fool’s errand. If there were truly answers here. But Lin Shaw had assured him that he could be with Peyton. That was all he wanted. That was enough for him to follow Yuri’s road, wherever it led.

  A car was waiting outside the airport. The drivers were professionals—dark suits, bulges under the armpits. Desmo
nd was surprised, but he sat in the back and said nothing. They stopped in the country, outside a cemetery in a small town Desmond knew well. A drizzling rain had begun, and the sun was rising over the hills as they stepped out and weaved through the grave markers, Yuri carrying an item covered in a black trash bag.

  “Do you know what today is?” Yuri whispered.

  Desmond realized instantly. “The anniversary. Twenty years since the bushfires.” The fires that had killed his family—and changed his life.

  Yuri’s pace slowed, and he pulled the black bag off the item he carried, revealing a wreath. He handed it to Desmond as they came to a stop.

  Desmond stood there a long moment, the heat of the sun warming his face, a summer breeze blowing past him. He stooped, placed the wreath on the grave marker, and read the names. Alistair Anderson Hughes. 16 February 1983. Elizabeth Bancroft Hughes. 16 February 1983.

  “Look closely,” Yuri whispered. “For what you don’t see.”

  Desmond glanced back at Yuri, studied the man’s impassive face, then focused on the grave markers. There were two, where he expected to see three: larger ones for his parents and a small one for his infant brother. “Conner,” he whispered.

  He looked back at Yuri. “He’s buried elsewhere?”

  “That would be an assumption. We don’t make assumptions. We form hypotheses. And test them.”

  “Two possibilities,” Desmond said. “He’s buried elsewhere—or he isn’t buried at all.”

  “Correct.”

  Desmond rose. “What do you know, Yuri?”

  Yuri turned and walked back toward the car, the sun on his back. It took every ounce of will Desmond possessed not to run and tackle the man and hold him down until he revealed exactly what had happened to Conner. The two gun-wielding men looming at the car were only a minor deterrent; Desmond would have fought an entire army for the answer. But he knew Yuri would never yield under force. He was made of the same stuff as Desmond: strength forged in fire.