The Cosega Sequence: A Techno Thriller
Page 19
“And the world, ready or not, will be completely changed.”
Gale nodded and quoted Clastier: “Once illuminated, it will forever alter all that is known.”
END OF BOOK ONE
PREVIEW
COSEGA STORM
Book Two of the Cosega Sequence
Tuesday July 18th
Gale and Rip sat in the courtyard surrounded by a funky desert house, outside Taos, New Mexico. Gale had been trying to convince Rip that they were finally safe, but he couldn’t get past his nervousness. For a week, ever since they’d run off with ancient artifacts from an archaeological dig in the mountains of Virginia, the FBI, Vatican agents, and who knew who else, had been relentlessly hunting them. A trucker friendly to their cause sent them to Grinley, an ex-con, drug-dealing, whacky old man in whose house they now hid.
“We had a great sleep, Grinley’s cooking us breakfast, and for the first time we have a whole day ahead of us to study the Eysen,” Gale said.
“Okay, I’ll try to relax,” Rip replied.
“Good. Now let’s try to figure out how Clastier knew about the Eysen,” Gale said.
Before Rip could respond, the swirl within the Eysen raced through rivers of colors. An image of a man scrawling lines onto heavy paper with a quill pen floated inside the Eysen. The bearded man, perhaps forty or fifty years old, sat at a small, pine table. Fading sunlight came into his room.
“What language is he writing in?” Miraculously, the image zoomed closer to the page as if responding to Gale’s question.
“My God, I think it’s Spanish. How could that be?” Rip asked.
“How? Wait, do you see that? "Muchas veces nos preguntamos el verdadero valor de la vida humana. Buscamos interminables años como otros han buscado siglos de los siglos. That’s the same. I don’t believe it. Rip, that’s the opening to the Clastier Papers!”
Grinley’s dog, Deeohjee, suddenly barked on the other side of the house, shattering the quiet morning. Something was wrong. Rip stashed the Eysen back into his pack, Gale grabbed hers, and they ran inside.
Grinley disappeared up a spiral staircase leading to the roof. Deeohjee barked out by the road and then went silent. A minute passed before Grinley slid down the railings.
“They killed my dog!” Grinley moaned, “They killed Deeohjee.”
“No!” Gale cried.
“Who? Did you see anyone?” Rip asked, looking around frantically in the windowless room.
“Yeah, and it ain’t the FBI,” Grinley snapped.
Rip thought of the Vatican agents.
“Those men out there are bloody commandos!” Grinley yelled.
“What?” Gale asked.
“They’re here for us.”
“They ain’t here to buy weed, that’s for damn sure!”
Grinley pushed them around a corner and opened his gun cabinet. “Want one?”
Rip looked at Gale as Grinley pulled out several automatic rifles. “You two better not stay. Not gonna be good for any of us if you’re caught here.”
“How can we get out?”
Grinley grabbed a manila envelope out of the cabinet.
“Follow me.” He led them into a bathroom they hadn’t noticed before, and pulled something inside the drain. The entire tub opened on two hydraulic tubes. Below that, he lifted a hatch. It was a short drop down to the ground. He looked up at a video monitor in the corner; there were armed figures dressed in black moving through the bushes. “Go! There’s no time.”
“Where’s it lead?”
“Find your way. Follow it to the end. Go.”
“But . . . ” Gale started to ask.
Grinley shoved the envelope into Rip’s hands along with a gun and a flashlight. At the same time, he pushed him down into the entrance of a tunnel. Gale slung her backpack over her shoulder and followed. Grinley closed the hatch on top of them, the tub dropped back into place, and then he headed back up to the gun turrets.
“Come on,” Rip said, pulling her as she stared up at the dark slab they had just come from. They raced through the narrow wooden passageway until the wood ended, maybe three hundred feet into the darkness. From there the going got tough; it was a primitive tunnel, not more than two feet wide most of the time.
“Where does this go?” Gale asked, stumbling on the uneven ground.
“I don’t know. It seems to be an old lava tube that someone chiseled out.” Rip hit his head. “Oomph!”
“Are you okay?”
“We need to slow down a bit. It’s just too narrow.”
“They may already be after us. They may have killed Grinley and be on their way.”
“We’ve got to keep moving. Grinley wouldn’t have sent us if there wasn’t a way out. He may be buying us time, holding them off.”
Gale screamed.
Rip spun the light. She’d gone down hard. He grabbed to pull her up. Her wrist, bloody. “Yow,” she moaned, gritting her teeth. “My leg.”
“Can you walk?”
“Is there a choice?” As Gale tried to stand, a terrifying sound, inches from her head made her freeze. “Rip,” she whispered as if it was a two-syllable word.
“Do you need help?” He turned slowly in the narrow space.
“Snake.”
He also froze, then heard the rattle. He moved the weak beam of his light down to her. Less than a foot from her face, a large rattlesnake lay coiled, and poised to strike. Gale hardly dared to breathe. Rip thought of the Grinley’s gun, but there were too many reasons that was a bad idea.
“Don’t move,” he said, searching for a rock. Gale didn’t need to be told. He found one, not as big as needed, but he threw it anyway. The light dropped and went dark at the same time.
Gale screamed.
“Damn,” he said, trying to feel for the flashlight.
Gale jumped up and bumped into him. He found the light and it still worked. The snake was gone; unfortunately, they didn’t know where.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Your rock hit me, my knee’s bleeding, but the snake didn’t bite me, I’m fine.”
“Good, let’s keep moving.”
Gale limped along, heart still pounding.
“I can’t believe we haven’t surfaced yet,” Rip said, a few minutes later. “Doesn’t it seem like we’re going slightly downhill?”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
Finally, they saw light. The tunnel ended at a small opening. Rip climbed up the rocks and peered through a space he could barely squeeze into and gasped.
“What is it?” Gale asked.
“It’s the God damn gorge. I’m looking down a sheer cliff- maybe five or six hundred feet.”
“There’s no way down?”
“Not unless you can fly.”
Table of Contents for Book One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
END OF BOOK ONE
PREVIEW COSEGA STORM
A Note from the Author
About the Author
Hear More From the Author
Also By Brandt Legg
Acknowledgements
Book Two – Cosega Storm
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Tuesday July 18th
Soldiers had surrounded the house. Ripley Gaines and Gale Asher had known Grinley for only a day, when he’d shoved them into a dark, dusty passage under the house in the high desert of New Mexico. They’d followed it to its end at a sheer cliff six hundred feet above the Rio Grande River. Automatic gunshots echoed off the canyon.
Gale felt as if the narrow tunnel walls were closing in on them. A week ago she’d trashed her life, as a successful writer for National Geographic; by following Ripley Gaines, the world-renowned archaeologist, on a daring flight to protect an ancient artifact. The things he’d discovered in the mountains of Virginia were so controversial and valuable that FBI and Vatican agents were relentlessly hunting them. More than a dozen people had died since the find and she was, at least partially, to blame.
“We’re trapped,” Rip growled.
“Maybe the soldiers won’t find the tunnel. We can just hide down here until they go away.”
“They know we were in the house. They’ll tear it apart. They’ll find the tunnel entrance. They’ll be here any minute. We’re finished.” After a week of running, Rip had finally snapped.
Gale sat down on the rocky floor. Her wrist throbbed from a fall minutes earlier. She wiped the blood trickling down her arm and leg. “We could go back up and maybe . . . Rip, bring the flashlight, quick!”
Rip scrambled down from the tiny opening. “What?”
“I think the tunnel turns.”
Rip scanned the wall next to her and saw another shaft. It couldn’t have been more than eighteen inches wide and five feet high, but it was a passageway.
“Come on,” Rip said, helping her up. Squeezing into the new tunnel required removing their packs and considerable twisting. The darkness swallowed the flashlight’s beam as the walls continued to narrow ahead. They held their packs, stooped, and pushed into the black.
Nanski and Leary, the two Vatican agents tracking Gale and Rip, had taken shifts for the past twenty-four hours; one slept at the hotel while the other watched the San Francisco de Asís Mission Church, both unaware of the FBI agents watching them.
“This is the day. We’re going to finally catch Gaines and Asher.” Nanski said as they met up. “I’ve been praying on it.”
Leary pushed a second stick of spearmint gum into his mouth. “Why are you so sure they’ll come at all, let alone today?”
“As I’ve told you before, if they’re in Taos, they came here for one reason, to find Clastier.”
“I still don’t understand how they expect to find a long-dead, humiliated priest?” Leary absently traced his fingers around the cross- etched in the hair at his temple.
“You haven’t studied the mysticism of Catholicism or you’d know that the answers we seek are always surrounding us. They want to know about Clastier; he was here and so his answers are here.”
“Yeah, well, we’re here too, so I don’t think they’ll get the chance to find answers at the church. But I’ll happily arrange a personal meeting for Gaines and the late Mr. Clastier. Hope they don’t have any trouble finding him in the crowds of hell.”
Chapter 2
The FBI had tracked Nanski’s credit card and obtained his plate numbers from a hotel in Albuquerque. Now agents were following both Nanski and Leary, hoping they would lead them to Gale and Rip. Because of interference and corruption from the Attorney General’s office, and the NSA’s interest in the case, the FBI Director had tapped into DIRT, a long-classified section of the Bureau. The acronym stood for “Director’s Internal Recon Team.” The select agents were handpicked by the Director and operated outside the Bureau’s normal protocol and procedures. Two of DIRT’s top operatives had been assigned to tail Nanski and Leary.
The senior agents in charge of the investigation, Dixon Barbeau and Wayne Hall, ate breakfast burritos a few miles from the church in a private conference room at the New Mexico State Police district headquarters. They were in direct contact with the DIRT surveillance team situated around the church.
“Clearly, the Vatican agents didn’t capture them in West Memphis,” Hall said. “It’s damn frustrating that not only do we need to apprehend Gaines, but with our own Attorney General working against us? Then we also have to waste time working around a couple of religious roughnecks who are trying to beat us to the artifacts.” He poured more coffee. “I want to arrest those Vatican boys in the worst way. I know why we have to wait, but eventually, when we’re sure we can keep them behind bars; I’m going to enjoy bringing them in, even more than getting Gaines.”
Barbeau studied the map of New Mexico on the wall. “Why Taos?” he asked, mostly to himself. “Why would two of the most wanted people in the world bring three stolen artifacts to Taos, New Mexico?”
“Where else should they go? Taos has a large anti-establishment community. Maybe they’ve got friends here who can hide them.” Hall, just trying to keep the conversation going, knew the Bureau hadn’t turned up any connections in Taos to either Gaines or Asher.
“Why not flee the country? Booker Lipton is one of the richest people in the world. We know he’s involved in this mess. Why hasn’t he whisked them off to some part of the world outside our reach?”
“There may be places beyond the reach of the Bureau, but is there anywhere in the world where the Vatican doesn’t have influence? Does a place exist where the NSA can’t get to someone?” Hall asked, rhetorically. He’d felt from the beginning they were missing something. One of the top archaeologists in the world stealing an artifact is strange enough, but the week-old case had spun out of control. Agents from the Vatican were killing witnesses; and interference from the White House, NSA, and the Attorney General’s office made it difficult to keep track of all the moving pieces.
“Maybe we should pick up Booker Lipton?” Barbeau asked.
“Think we can find him?”
“He’s a smart man, I’m sure he’s well out of the country, but the Director is working on it through higher channels.”
Hall nodded as he skimmed the manuscript of Gaines’ upcoming book, The Future of the Past. After the murder charge went public, his publisher quickly complied with the subpoena, and the PDF had hit Hall’s inbox the night before.
“It’s well written, accessible. Makes archaeology seem exciting, like all the answers to the world’s problems can be found in the past,” Hall said. “I’m only eighty pages into it, but I have to say it again: Gaines could make more money lecturing and writing, kind of the Stephen Hawking of archaeology. So why throw it all away?”
“And I’ll tell you again. He got greedy and he didn’t think he’d get caught.”
“Where did that first lead come from? I mean, I was on my way to the dig site hours before he’d committed any crime. How did we know?” Hall asked.
Barbeau dropped his fork and swallowed a bite of green chilies hard. “Jesus, I never gave it a thought. There’s nothing in the file,” he said, dialing the Director’s number. “How could we have known so fast?” Barbeau repeated while waiting for the Director to pick up.
Hall continued to read Gaines’ manuscript while only half-listening to Barbeau’s side of the conversation with the Director. He noticed a new email – the Bureau had received a second document containing edits that had been removed from the final version of The Future of the Past. A note explained that the sections on Gaines’ controversial Cosega Theory were being saved for his next book due out a year later. Hall opened the PDF and began reading.
Gaines’ writings went on to detail the current version of the history of man. “Our earliest recognizable ancestors showed up four to six million years ago. Until roughly 200,000 years ago, during the Middle Paleolithic period, anatomically modern humans evolved from Homo sapiens. And it wasn’t until about 50,000 years ago that the emergence of language, culture, and basic technology happened. Truly modern humans, using agriculture, have been around only 10,000 years or so. But what if that’s all wrong? What if in all those millions of years another society existed?”
Hall looked up and considered the question, then returned to Gaines’ argument. “There is considerable evidence to support a radically different thesis. Tools found in England dating back more than two million years; others in Argentina that are three to five million years old; modern human footprints in volcanic ash dating to three point six million years ago. Bones of anatomically correct humans found in multiple locations from two to four million years in the past. Many more tools are over hundreds of thousands of years old in Africa, Lake Huron, and Mexico. Finds disputing the current views number close to a thousand. Too much evidence to ignore.”
Hall found the list surprising. Gaines was bucking the entire scientific community. There were pages of footnotes backing his claims, but Hall knew the most important proof was probably what Gaines had pulled from the cliff in Virginia. “What did he find?” he whispered to himself.