Maze Master

by Kathleen O'Neal Gear

  Later, he’d reconsidered. Perhaps Yacob had not been real? Perhaps it had just been Satan whispering in his ear? Trying to turn him against the only person he trusted, Anna.

  So … the crucibulum. The maze.

  Was she one of them? Or his trusted friend? Only his beloved friend, Anna, could unlock it. Only Anna would protect the Marham-i-Isa.

  “I need to send a message again,” he said and started to rise to his feet.

  “Brother, do you remember that you told me you’ve been sending it out for years? Why do you need to keep sending it?”

  “She hasn’t responded. She hasn’t received it.”

  Gently, Stephen said, “If she isn’t real, she will never respond. Do you realize…”

  Stephen’s voice died as he abruptly turned and peered down the tunnel outside. “I hear footsteps. Lots of them. There’s lantern light down there.”

  “Get inside now, and be careful not to step on the shapes! Close the door and bolt it.”

  “But what if it’s someone who needs help? Shouldn’t we—?”

  “I can’t be captured! I’ve told you over and over. Now, get inside. Hurry!”

  Obediently, Stephen swung the door closed and bolted it. When he placed his ear to the door, candlelight reflected in his frightened eyes. “Who are they? I thought the island was empty.”

  “There are always people who stay.”

  “But the government ordered them—”

  “Hey!” a man yelled outside as he slammed a fist into the door. “Open up. I know there’s food and water in there. I helped pack that shelter! We want that food!”

  “Brother?” Stephen pleaded. “What should I do?”

  He extended a hand to the young monk. “Tiptoe through the shapes and come sit beside me. They’ll be dead soon.”

  CHAPTER 30

  OCTOBER 17. ISRAEL.

  The next morning at dawn, Martin stood with his hand propped on his holstered pistol, staring across the sand dunes. They’d made camp onshore last night, and he’d stood the last watch. The east glowed with a pink halo where the sun would soon rise. He took a deep breath of the sea-scented wind, and listened to the waves gently washing the shore. Out at sea, he thought he saw ships, but they were far away, just dark specks on the western horizon. They could be anything, he supposed, even islands.

  A few yards from where they’d staked the boat, Anna and Hazor slept, rolled in their rain ponchos. Anna had tossed and turned for the past few hours, never asleep for long. Each time she whimpered, Martin longed to go over, lie down next to her, and enfold her in his arms for long enough that she could get some rest. But that would leave no one on guard. Several times, her cries had awakened Hazor. Each time, the captain had dragged himself to a sitting position, leaned over and said, “I’m sitting here with my AK, Anna. You can sleep,” which seemed to help her.

  As Martin watched, Anna flopped to her back and opened her eyes to stare tiredly at the morning sky where a few stars still gleamed.

  He scanned the beach and ocean again, then walked across the sand toward her.

  When Anna saw him coming, she got up and dusted the sand from her pants.

  They stood facing each other, neither smiling.

  “You had a particularly bad night. I’ve never seen you so—”

  “We need to talk,” she said in a hoarse voice.

  “Okay.”

  Anna gestured to a rocky ledge fifty feet from Hazor, out of hearing, and led the way.

  Martin waited for Anna to sit, then dropped beside her. The sea breeze blew auburn waves around her face.

  “I need to … to try to tell you what’s going on.”

  “Finally?”

  Anna seemed to be examining the distant specks on the horizon. “When I said I thought the Marham-i-Isa inscription was a trick, a deception, that wasn’t quite right. Have you ever seen those children’s puzzles in grammar schools based upon different shapes? The ones that are composed of triangles, stars, rectangles, and other shapes, and when the children put them together in the right order the puzzle forms a dog or a house?”

  Martin studied the dark circles beneath her eyes. She looked utterly exhausted. “Sure, but why would Hakari need to encode—”

  “It’s not a code.”

  Martin shifted on the ledge to face her. “No?”

  “It’s not numeric or alphabetic, it’s spatial. A three-dimensional maze composed of geometric shapes drawn on a double helix. At least, I think it is.”

  “Didn’t Hakari tell you that God hid everything in plain sight? This isn’t in plain sight. It’s goddamn complicated. Are you sure, absolutely sure, that the maze isn’t some sort of bullshit genomic bibliomancy?”

  “Whatever it is, it is not bullshit. It’s daunting, I admit. But I understand why he did it. Hakari didn’t want the information to fall into the hands of the people who had hurt him. He’s desperately afraid it will be misused.”

  “So he’s suffering from extreme paranoia.”

  “Of course he is. My God, just before he went completely mad, the FBI broke into his office, ransacked his files, and stole half his research. They threatened to imprison him again. Fortunately, his increasing paranoia had led him to hide his most critical findings in a locker at the airport. That’s what he told me just before he cleaned out the locker and left for Nebraska to try and break into the nuclear bunker. I did not, by the way, know that’s what he had planned. I swear it. He didn’t even trust me by that time.”

  A curious thrumming had started in Martin’s ears. “He tried to break into a nuclear bunker? I never heard that on the news.”

  “Of course not. He made it all the way into the silo, sixty feet deep, before two soldiers took him down. The government couldn’t let that out.”

  “I won’t ask you how he did it, but tell me why he did it.”

  Anna ran a hand through her hair, tucking stray locks behind her right ear. “He was raving uncontrollably, yelling that no one would listen to him. He said he had to get their attention.”

  “They?”

  “The government. When the military caught him and threw him in the psychiatric prison, he just … shattered. The last time I visited him there, he kept shushing me, and whispering that the TV reporters were talking to him. He said he had to listen because the reporters had promised to tell him when the government was going to kill him.”

  “Sounds like he needed some serious Prozac. Why did they let him out?”

  Disdainfully, she replied, “They didn’t let him out. For seven months, doctors tore his mind apart. They cut his brain, drenched it in drugs, shredded his … his personality. When the doctors said he was no longer a threat, they dismissed the guards and let him mindlessly wander the facility at specified hours. Yacob … and others … helped him escape.”

  “Your friend, Yacob? The guy you were supposed to meet at Bir Bashan?”

  “And at Karnak.”

  “I’m stunned.” His brows lifted. “Up until this moment, I suspected Hakari and Yacob were the same person.”

  “No.”

  “Are you certain Hakari is alive?”

  A swallow bobbed in her throat. “No. He may have left the clues to the maze before he died.”

  “When did you last hear from Yacob?”

  “Long time ago.” She kept twisting her hands in her lap.

  “During that first lunch at the Café Verona, when I jokingly said the impure would inherit the world, you didn’t disagree. Why not?”

  Slowly, as though every muscle in her body hurt, she rose to her feet and looked down at Martin with those Renaissance Madonna eyes. They were filled with such sadness he felt her gaze in the pit of his stomach.

  “It’s difficult to explain, Martin.”

  “Try.”

  Anna nodded. “All right. Where to start…” She seemed to be sorting memories. “First, Hakari spent over half his life working to sequence the genomes of extinct species,” she said. “Don’t ask me why. I
truly don’t know. At one point, I was standing in the genetics lab, and he looked up from his desk and stared into space. When I asked if something was wrong, Hakari said the wrath of God lay scattered across the desk before him.”

  “What did he mean?”

  “Printouts for the latest sequences of the Homo erectus genome were lying on his desk beside an open Bible. The Homo erectus sample he was working with dated to around seven hundred thousand years ago. It seemed to me, and I could be completely wrong, that he was charting the genetic evolution of what he believed to be God’s wrath. He quoted 2 Samuel, 24:15: ‘So the Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel.’”

  Martin frowned out at the waves washing the sand. “I don’t get it.”

  “Remember the bones in the cave? What if Hakari deliberately placed both sets of bones in that ossuary as a clue to the origins of the LucentB plague? We know that plagues routinely devastated the ancient world.”

  “Like the plagues of Moses?”

  “Exactly. Five years ago Hakari predicted this was going to happen. He said he could trace the historical path of the virus back through the mutations in our DNA and thereby prophesy the future. Meaning, he could predict the next logical mutation, and he said he foresaw the Apocalypse. He was trying to create a vaccine—”

  “Hold on.” Martin’s memory kicked in. “Was he the guy who assaulted the surgeon general at an AMA conference? I remember seeing that on TV. He walked out onto the stage and shoved a bunch of papers into the SG’s hands and demanded that he look at them that instant. When the surgeon general refused, Hakari slapped him in the head with the papers and proceeded to shout biblical passages in his face. End of the World gibberish. Didn’t they lock him up?”

  “Yes, but that time it was just for a few days.” Anna held up a hand, asking for patience. “He was desperate, Martin. Hakari wrote letter after letter to the president, filled with detailed genetic descriptions. He told the president exactly how the virus would mutate into a global pandemic. I know because a geneticist from the State Department laughingly discussed it with me.”

  “How could he know about LucentB? I thought nobody did, prior to a few months ago.”

  “He said God had revealed the shape His wrath would take, and everything that Hakari said was going to happen, has.”

  When she didn’t say anything more, Martin ground his teeth in irritation. “Is that what this plague is?” A prickling sensation expanded across his chest. “His genetically engineered version of God’s wrath? Based upon an ancient genome?”

  “Before I got to know him, I feared the same thing.” Anna gazed out at the ocean, her gaze far away, perhaps in another time, perhaps with Hakari. “But he would not engineer a plague, Martin.”

  “Why not? Maybe he wanted to wipe out humanity for calling him a kook.”

  “He wouldn’t do that. He was the kindest man I’ve ever known.”

  “Not even to fulfill the prophecies of the Book of Revelation and bring about the Second Coming of Jesus?”

  Anna sighed. “At the very end, he thought he was Jesus, Martin. So far as he was concerned, the Second Coming had already happened. He once told me that on the day he was born the Book of Revelation had been set in motion. He believed he was the returned savior.”

  Martin studied her reverent facial expression. She had genuinely loved this man. Just as a mentor? Or something more? “You really fell under his spell, didn’t you?”

  She made a noncommittal gesture. “He was one of my heroes, yes, but I would not say I was under his spell.”

  “And…” He let the word hang, while he formulated how to ask the question that was worrying him. “Did you think he was the returned Jesus, Anna?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Sunrise had blushed color into her cheeks, giving her face a soft pink tint. “Well, if you’re right about this double helix maze stuff, I fear you may be the only person who understood him.”

  “I think it more likely that he understood me. That’s what worries me. He knows how I think. He trained my mind, after all.”

  “Why does that worry you?”

  “Don’t you see? He believed the genome was the true Bible. The real Word of God. Except in his genomic Bible, creation was an ongoing process. He said he could read the evolutionary history of creation in the DNA molecule. Don’t you find it curious that his reference to second Book of Samuel approximates the Golden Ratio, phi? You noted it yourself. If you divide you 24 by 15, you get 1.6. Phi is about 1.618.”

  Martin squinted at her. “I’ll admit it’s an interesting tidbit, but come on. Can any human being really think on this many levels at once? I mean, how—”

  “Trust me. He had an amazing mind.”

  Martin frowned at her, thinking about her strange confidence in a man who’d tried to break into a nuclear bunker, for God’s sake. “Talk to me about the Golden Ratio. Tell me what Hakari taught you about it. Maybe that will help me to understand.”

  “He taught his students that it was the most famous number in mathematics, a number that is found throughout nature in the spirals of a pinecone, a nautilus shell, the arrangements of flower petals. But it’s also present when determining the ratios of geometric figures like the rectangle or pentagon, or just writing out sequences of additive numbers.”

  “Additive numbers?”

  “Sure, take a regular Fibonacci sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55. The sequence comes from adding each new number to the last. So, 3 plus 5 equals 8. Five plus 8 equals 13, etcetera. Now start dividing them. Five divided by 3 equals about 1.66. Eight divided by 5 equals 1.6. Thirteen divided by 8 equals 1.625. As you continue the sequence, it grows even closer to the Golden Ratio. For example, 233 divided by 144 equals 1.618, and 377 divided by 233 equals 1.618.”

  Martin watched her pace back and forth before him. “And how does it relate to the inscription? Is it a formula for building something?”

  “I’m fairly sure it’s the instruction manual for navigating the maze. Which I think is the cure. But I’m not willing to discount anything at this point.” She gave him one of those smiles that did not reach her eyes.

  He gestured to the pocket beneath her slicker where she kept her notebook. “Does the letter pi equal 3.14, as in the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter?”

  She nodded. “In fact, I think the circle is attached to the spiral and acts as the portal to enter the maze. Phi tells us the spiral shape of the maze. Pi is the doorway.”

  “So, figuratively speaking, if you walk across the circumference of the first circle, the first pi, you will intersect a new wall in the maze. What is it?”

  “A heptagon.”

  “A heptagon?”

  “Sigma must refer to the diagonal length of a heptagon. Let’s forget psi for a moment. The next pi must mean we cut across a circle, and the next phi may be the diagonal length of a pentagon.”

  “So, you’re saying that if we walk through the circle until it intersects the edge of heptagon, follow the angles of the heptagon around until we intersect another circle, cut across it, and move around the angles of pentagon, we’re in the process of navigating the twists and turns of the maze, right? Why? What’s the purpose?”

  “Hakari’s trying to tell us something important about genetic structure.”

  “What does the tau, tau reference?”

  “I don’t know. Not yet. Right now I’m focusing on psi. While it could be a reference to the Golden Angle, 137.5 degrees, it can also be used to represent quantum wave function, as in the wave function of a photon.”

  Confused, Martin said, “A photon? You mean light?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which means?”

  She hesitated. “And God said, ‘Let there be light’? I think the shapes are constructed of light.”

  He frowned, as though trying to imagine what that might look like. “This is a three-dimensional mind maze, right? You have to find the way through the maze by using just your min
d?”

  “If I had access to a quantum computer I could write a program to visualize the 3-D image I’m seeing in my mind, which would help enormously. Obviously, I don’t. So all we have is our minds.”

  Purple flashes of dawn flickered across the ocean waves. Martin glared at them while he considered everything she’d told him. “Then the plague that’s killing millions is the last chapter of his Genomic Book of Revelation? The final wages of God’s wrath? That’s really depressing. No wonder he decided to break into a nuclear bunker. He was probably trying to commit suicide by soldier.”

  She eased down onto the ledge beside him again and frowned at the sand for a long time. “You’re right about one thing. This is viral Armageddon.”

  The salty fragrance of the sea became especially pungent for a moment, and then receded.

  Anna got that soft glitter in her eyes again, as though remembering some cherished moment she and Hakari had shared. “He wanted to save humanity, Martin. To find the cure, and not just for a disease, but for death itself. That was always his goal. He never wanted to hurt anyone.”

  Martin squinted, trying to see Hakari as she did: a mentally ill man tormented by delusions, huddling alone in some cold basement, terrified of being ripped from the cocoon of his madness. Anna—and maybe Yacob—was probably his only friend in the world. His last hope. And Anna knew it.

  After a few seconds’ hesitation, Martin carefully said, “Okay. I’m not a biologist, so there’s a lot of this that I don’t understand. But I do know biblical history. If Hakari is somehow blending the Bible and the genome to create the maze, you and I can figure it out.”

  A tired smile turned her lips. “I have to believe that. Keep in mind, from his perspective he’s leading us by the hand. We’re walking through the shapes of the genome in his footsteps, looking for the Word of God. He’s showing us what he found, showing us the way.”

  “And once you put the shapes of the maze together in the right order, like the child’s puzzle, you’ll see the dog at the end, right? And the cure is the dog?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  As he looked into her eyes, he had the sensation of being in deeper than he’d thought, part of him wanting to unfeel the things he’d started to feel for her. Her whimperings in the darkness, her need to be held before she could truly rest, and her desperation to solve the maze, all of it touched him deep down.