Reliquary

by Douglas Preston

  He zipped up the cammos and then, as if remembering something, dug in his pockets and handed a set of keys to Hayward. “I meant to tape these to prevent any jingling. You’d better hold them for me.” From another pocket he removed his wallet and FBI identification, which he also passed to the Sergeant. “Please give these to Lieutenant D’Agosta. I won’t be needing them below.”

  He ran his hands quickly over his clothes, as if to reassure himself that everything was in place. Then he turned once again toward the trapdoor and lowered himself gingerly into the tube. “I appreciate your taking care of this for me,” he said, nodding at the valise.

  “No problem,” Hayward replied. “Send me a postcard.”

  The trapdoor shut over the dank, black tube, and Hayward sealed it with a quick twirl of her wrist.

  = 32 =

  MARGO STARED AT the titration, scarcely blinking. As each clear drop trembled and fell into the solution, she waited expectantly for a color change. The sound of Frock’s low breathing behind her—as he, too, stared at the apparatus—reminded her that she was unconsciously holding her breath.

  Suddenly the solution blossomed a bright yellow color. Margo turned the glass stopcock, stopping the flow of solution, and recorded the level on the graduated cylinder.

  She took a step back, aware that an unpleasantly familiar feeling was settling over her: a sense of unease, even dread. Standing motionless, she remembered the drama that had played out in another laboratory, a mere hundred feet down the hall and eighteen months into the past. It had been just the two of them that time as well: crowded around Greg Kawakita’s genetic extrapolator, watching as the program listed the physical attributes of the creature that would come to be known as Mbwun, the Museum Beast.

  She remembered almost cursing Julian Whittlesey, the scientist whose expedition had been lost in the depths of the Amazon. Whittlesey, who had inadvertently used a certain aquatic plant as packing fibers for the specimens he’d sent back to the Museum. Unknown to Whittlesey—unknown to all of them—the Mbwun beast had been addicted to the plant. It needed the hormones in the plant in order to survive. And when its own habitat was destroyed, the beast went in search of the only remaining source of the plant: the packing fibers in the crates. But by a supreme irony, the crates were later locked in the Museum’s secure area, forcing the creature to go after the closest substitute to the plant hormones it could find: the hypothalamus of the human brain.

  As Margo stared at the yellow solution, she realized that she was feeling something else besides dread: dissatisfaction. There was something strange here, something unexplained. She had felt the same way after the carcass of the Mbwun beast had been taken away following the slaughter of the Superstition exhibition’s opening night. Taken away, in a van with government plates, and never seen again. Though she’d never wanted to admit it, she’d always sensed, somehow, that they’d never gotten to the bottom of the story, never really understood what Mbwun was. At the time, she’d hoped to see autopsy results, a pathology report—something that could explain how the beast had known to come to the Museum in the first place. Or why the creature showed such a high proportion of human genes. Something, anything, that could bring the story to a close; even, perhaps, lay her own nightmares to rest.

  She realized now that Frock’s own theory of Mbwun being an evolutionary aberration had never completely convinced her. Against her will, she forced herself to think back to those few moments she’d actually seen the beast: charging down the darkened hallway toward herself and Pendergast, triumph in its feral eyes. To her, it had looked more like a hybrid than an aberration. But a hybrid of what?

  The sound of Frock shifting in his wheelchair chased her thoughts away. “Let’s try it once again,” he said. “To be sure.”

  “I’m already sure,” Margo replied.

  “My dear,” Frock said with a smile, “you are too young to be sure of anything. Remember, all experimental results must be reproducible. I don’t mean to disappoint you, but I fear that this will all turn out to be a waste of time better spent examining the Bitterman corpse.”

  Margo began setting up the titration again, swallowing her irritation. At the rate they were going, they wouldn’t have results on her finds at Kawakita’s ruined lab for weeks. Frock was famous for the care and precision of his scientific experiments, and he seemed—as usual—supremely unaware that time was of the essence. But then, like most great scientists, he was self-absorbed, much more interested in his own work and his own theories than anyone else’s. She remembered the conferences they’d had while he was her dissertation advisor, in which he would tell one story after another about his adventures in Africa, South America, or Australia, in the days before he became crippled—devoting more time to his own tales than to discussing her research.

  They had been working for hours on titrations and linear regression programs, trying to coax some kind of results out of the plant fibers she’d found at the site. Margo watched the solution, massaging the small of her back. D’Agosta had been certain there was some kind of psychoactive drug in the fibers. But so far they had found nothing to support that theory. If only we’d kept some of the original plant fibers, Margo thought, we could do cross-comparison studies. But the CDC had demanded that all traces of the original fibers be destroyed. They’d even insisted on incinerating her handbag, which she’d once used to transport some of the fibers.

  That was another thing. If all the remaining fibers had been destroyed, how had Greg Kawakita obtained some of his own? How had he managed to grow them? And above all else: why?

  And then there was the mystery of the flask at his lab marked ACTIVATED 7-DEHYDROCHOLE. The missing piece was obviously sterol: she’d looked it up, and had to laugh at her own stupidity. Of course she knew at once why it sounded so familiar—it was the most common form of vitamin D3. Once she had that figured out, it didn’t take long to see that the organic chem equipment in Kawakita’s lab had been a little setup hastily improvised for synthesizing vitamin D. But why?

  The solution turned yellow, and she marked the level: exactly the same, as she knew it would be. Frock, putting away some equipment on the far side of the lab, took no notice. She hesitated a moment, deciding what to do next. Then she moved to the stereozoom, where she carefully teased yet another small fiber from their rapidly dwindling sample.

  Frock rumbled over as she manipulated the microscope stage. “It’s seven o’clock, Margo,” he said gently. “Forgive me, but I think you’ve been working too hard. May I suggest we break for the evening?”

  Margo smiled. “I’m almost done, Dr. Frock. I’d like to do one last thing, then I’ll call it a day.”

  “Ah. And what might that be?”

  “I thought I’d just freeze-fracture a specimen and get a ten-angstrom SEM image.”

  Frock frowned. “Toward what end?”

  Margo stared at the specimen, a tiny dot on the glass stage. “I’m not really sure. When we first studied this plant, we knew it carried a reovirus of some kind. A virus that coded for both human and animal proteins. I wanted to see if this virus might be the source of the drug.”

  A low rumble shook Frock’s capacious front, finally erupting as a chuckle. “Margo, I would say it is definitely time for a break,” he said. “This is wild speculation.”

  “Perhaps,” Margo said. “But I’d prefer to call it a hunch.”

  Frock looked at her a moment, then sighed deeply. “As you wish,” he said. “But I, for one, need my rest. I’ll be at Morristown Memorial tomorrow, enduring that annual battery of tests they seem to force on you in retirement. See you Wednesday morning, my dear.”

  Margo said good-bye, watching as Frock wheeled himself out into the corridor. She was beginning to realize that the famous scientist did not enjoy being crossed. When she’d been his graduate student, timid and compliant, he’d always been utterly charming, the soul of gentility. But now that Frock was emeritus and she was a curator in her own right, expressing her own
ideas, he sometimes seemed less than pleased with the new assertiveness.

  She brushed the tiny sample into a specimen well and carried it to the freeze-fracture machine. Inside the machine, it would be encased in a small plastic block, frozen to nearly absolute zero, and cleaved in two. Then the scanning electron microscope would make an extremely high-resolution picture of the fractured surface. Frock was right, of course: under normal circumstances, a procedure such as this would have no bearing on their research. She’d called it a hunch, but in reality it was for lack of anything else to try.

  Soon, a green light appeared on the cryogenic machine. Handling the block with an electronic cradle, Margo moved it onto the cleaving stage. The diamond cleaver descended with a smooth motion, there was a faint click, and the block separated. Placing one of the halves in the SEM, she carefully adjusted the mount, scanning controls, and electron beam. In a few minutes, a crisp black and white image appeared on the adjoining screen.

  Staring at it, Margo felt her blood run cold.

  As expected, she could make out small hexagonal particles: the reovirus that Kawakita’s extrapolation program had originally detected in the plant fibers eighteen months earlier. But here, it existed in an unbelievably high concentration: the plant organelles were literally packed with it. And surrounding the particles were large vacuoles that held some kind of crystallized secretion—that could only come from the reovirus itself.

  She breathed out slowly. The high concentrations, the crystallized secretions, could mean only one thing: this plant, Liliceae mbwunensis, was only a carrier. The virus made the drug. And the reason they couldn’t find traces of the drug was because the drug was encapsulated inside the vacuoles.

  Well then, she thought. The answer was simple. Isolate the reovirus, grow it in a medium, and see what drug it produces.

  Kawakita must have thought of this.

  Perhaps Kawakita hadn’t been trying to genetically engineer the plant, at all. Perhaps he was genetically engineering the virus. If that were the case…

  Margo sat down, her mind working furiously. At last, things seemed to be dovetailing: the old research and the new; the viral matter and its host plant; Mbwun; the fibers. But it still didn’t explain why Kawakita had left the Museum to do this. And it didn’t explain how the Mbwun creature could have come all that distance from the Amazon rain forest, in search of the plants that the Whittlesey expedition had…

  Whittlesey.

  In an instant she was on her feet, hand pressed to her mouth, the lab chair clattering to the linoleum floor.

  Suddenly, everything had become perfectly, terrifyingly clear.

  = 33 =

  THIS TIME, WHEN Smithback was shown into the eighteenth-floor foyer of Nine Central Park South, he noticed immediately that the windows of the vast drawing room beyond had been thrown wide. Sunlight streamed in, gilding the sofas and rosewood tables, turning what had once seemed like a funeral parlor into a blaze of warmth and brilliance.

  Anette Wisher was sitting at a glass-topped table on the balcony, wearing a fashionable straw sun hat and dark glasses. She turned to him, smiled slightly, and motioned him to take a seat. Smithback did so, glancing admiringly at the vast green carpet of Central Park, unrolling itself northward to 110th Street.

  “Bring Mr. Smithback some tea,” Mrs. Wisher said to the maid who had shown him in.

  “Call me Bill, please,” Smithback said, shaking the proffered hand. He couldn’t help noticing that, even in the bright unforgiving light of the summer sun, Mrs. Wisher’s skin looked remarkably free from the ravages of time. It had a youthful resiliency, creamy and smooth without the flabby softness of age.

  “I appreciate the patience you’ve shown,” she said, withdrawing her hand. “I think you’ll agree it’s about to be rewarded. We’ve decided on a course of action, and, as promised, I wanted you to be the first to know. Of course, it’s to be kept a secret.”

  Smithback accepted the tea, drinking in the faint expensive aroma of jasmine. He felt a warm glow, sitting in this lovely apartment, with all of Manhattan spread out below him, drinking tea with the one woman every journalist in the city wanted to interview. It even made up for being scooped so humiliatingly by that smug bastard Bryce Harriman.

  “The Grand Army Plaza rally was so successful we’ve decided to push Take Back Our City into a new phase,” Mrs. Wisher said.

  Smithback nodded.

  “Our plan is quite simple, really. All future actions will be unannounced. Each will take place on a grander scale. And for every new murder that is committed, our people will descend on police headquarters, demanding an end to the outrage.” She raised one hand, smoothing a stray wisp of hair. “But I don’t expect we shall have to wait long to see some real changes.”

  “And why’s that?” Smithback asked eagerly.

  “At six o’clock tomorrow evening, our people will gather outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Believe me, the group you saw at Grand Army Plaza will seem minuscule by comparison. We mean to show this city we are deadly serious. We will move up Fifth Avenue, across Central Park South, and then north on Central Park West, stopping for a candlelight vigil at the site of every murder. Then we shall converge on the Great Lawn in Central Park for a final midnight prayer.”

  She shook her head. “I’m afraid the government of this city still hasn’t gotten the message. But when they see midtown Manhattan immobilized by countless voters, all demanding action—they will get the message, mark my words.”

  “And the mayor?” Smithback asked.

  “The mayor may well show up again. Politicians of his ilk can never resist a crowd. When he does, I plan to tell him that this is his last chance. If he fails us again, we are ready to mount a recall campaign. And when we’re finished with him, he won’t be able to get a job as dogcatcher in Akron, Ohio.” A wintry smile crossed her lips. “I’ll expect you to quote me on that, at the appropriate time.”

  Smithback couldn’t help smiling himself. This was going to be absolutely perfect.

  = 34 =

  IT WAS ALMOST complete.

  He stepped into the humid darkness of the Temple, running his fingers lightly along the cool orbs that made up the walls, caressing the organic surfaces, the hollows and swells. It was right that it should be built here: so like what had come before in that other place, yet so unlike. He turned and settled into the throne they had crafted for him, feeling the rough leathery surface of the seat and the slight give of the lashed members, hearing the faint creak of sinew and bone, his senses alive as never before. It would soon be complete. As he, now, was complete.

  They had toiled long and hard for him, their leader and master. They loved and feared him, as was his due, and now they would worship him. He closed his eyes and inhaled the thick, fragrant air that eddied about him like a fog. In times past he would have been repelled by the reek of the Temple, but that was before he’d acquired the gift of sensory acuteness. The plant had given him that, as it had given him so much else. Now, everything was different. The smell was like a vista to him, ever shifting, painted in every imaginable color, here bright and clean, there dark and mysterious. There were mountains and canyons and deserts of scent, oceans and skies, rivers and meadows, a magnificent panorama of fragrance, indescribable in human language. It rendered the world of sight flat, ugly, sterile by comparison.

  He savored his triumph. Where the other had failed, he had succeeded. Where the other had withered in fear and doubt, he had grown in strength, and courage. The other had been unable to discover the flaw that was hidden in the formula. He had not only found the flaw, but had taken the next step and perfected the glorious plant and the secret payload it contained. The other had underestimated the Children’s desperate thirst for ritual, for ceremony. He had not. He alone understood the ultimate meaning.

  This was the true manifestation of his life’s work—how galling to think he had never realized it before! It was he, and no other, who had the power, the intellect, and th
e will to carry it through. He alone could cleanse the world and guide it into its future.

  The world! As he murmured the word aloud, he could feel that pathetic world so far above him, pressing down upon the sanctuary of his Temple. He saw everything so clearly now. It was an overpopulated world, teeming with insectlike swarms that had no purpose, no meaning, and no value, their ugly little lives churning like the manic pistons of some senseless machine. They were above him always, dropping their dung, mating, giving birth, dying, tied to the slaving meat-wheel of human existence. How easy—and how inevitable—that it should all be swept aside, all of it, as one kicks open an anthill and grinds the soft white pupae underfoot. Then the New World could come: so fresh, so various, and so full of dreams.

  = 35 =

  “WHERE ARE THE others?” Margo asked as D’Agosta entered the small Anthropology conference room.

  “They’re not coming,” D’Agosta said, hiking up his trouser legs and sitting down. “Scheduling.” Then he caught Margo’s glance, and gave his head a disgusted shake. “Ah, what the hell. If you want to know the truth, they’re not interested. That guy Waxie, who you saw at Brambell’s presentation? He’s in charge of the case now. And he believes he’s already got his man.”

  “What do you mean, already got his man?” Margo asked.

  “Some nut they found in the park. He’s a murderer, all right, but he’s not the killer we’re looking for. At least, Pendergast doesn’t think so.”

  “And Pendergast?”

  “He’s on a little business trip.” D’Agosta smiled, as if at some private joke. “So whatcha got?”

  “I’ll start at the beginning.” Margo took a deep breath. “It’s ten years ago, okay? There’s an expedition to the Amazon Basin. It’s headed by a Museum scientist named Julian Whittlesey. There are personality conflicts, and the team splits up. For various reasons, nobody makes it back alive. But several boxes of relics are shipped to the Museum. One of them includes a hideous figurine, packed in some fibrous material.”