Chapter 3
Jack Menard studied the woman’s reaction.
Shock and horror widened Lorna’s eyes. She covered her mouth with a hand. But only for a moment. After the initial surprise, he also recognized a glint of concern. Her eyes narrowed again, her lips drawn tight in thought. She moved closer to the cage.
He joined her and cleared his throat. “What type of monkeys are they?”
“Cebus apella,” she answered. “Brown capuchin monkeys, native to South America.”
Jack stared at the two who shared the small cage, squatting in their own filth, huddled and scared at the back of the cage. Their limbs and backsides were a deep chocolate brown, their faces and chests a softer tan, their heads capped in black. They were so small he could have cupped one in the palm of his hand.
“Are they babies?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. The fur coloring suggests they’re adults. But you’re right. They’re way too small. Pygmy versions of the breed.”
But Jack knew that wasn’t the most shocking aberration. With a quiet cooing noise, Lorna coaxed the pair to move toward the bars. Her coldly professional manner seemed to melt away, her face softening, relaxing. The pair of monkeys responded to her. Still hugging each other, they crept forward, clinging tightly. Not that they could ever truly be apart.
“Siamese twins,” Lorna said.
The two were joined at the hip — literally — fused together, sharing three legs but bearing four arms.
“Poor things,” she whispered. “They look half starved.”
They came to the bars, plainly needing reassurance as much as sustenance. Their eyes were huge, especially in such small faces. Jack sensed their hunger and fear and also a trace of hope. He reached into a pocket and removed a granola bar. He ripped it open with his teeth, broke off a piece, and handed it to Lorna.
She gently passed it through the bars. One of them took it with its tiny fingers — then the pair retreated to share the prize, huddled around it, nibbling from both sides. But their eyes never left Lorna.
She glanced to Jack. For a moment, he saw the girl he remembered from his school days, before he left for the Marines. She had dated his younger brother Tom during their sophomore year — and the summer thereafter. He shied away from that memory.
Lorna must have sensed that well of pain. Her face hardened, going professional again. She nodded to the other cages. “Show me.”
He led her along the rows of cages, shining his flashlight into the shadowy recesses. Each enclosure held a different animal, some familiar, some exotic. But like the monkeys, they all bore some twisted abnormality. They stopped next at a large glass-walled terrarium that held a fifteen-foot Burmese python curled around a clutch of eggs. The snake looked ordinary enough until its coils slid more tightly around the eggs and revealed two pairs of folded vestigial legs, scaled and clawed, remnants of its lizard-like evolutionary origin.
“It looks like a severe form of atavism,” Lorna said.
“And that would be what in English?”
She offered him a small apologetic smile. “Atavism is where a genetic trait, lost for generations, reappears in an individual.”
“A genetic throwback?”
“Exactly. In this case, a throwback to a time before snakes lost their limbs.”
“That’s a mighty long throw, isn’t it?”
She shrugged and moved on. “Most atavism is caused by the accidental recombination of genes. But I don’t think it was accidental here, not with these many cases.”
“So you’re saying someone bred them this way on purpose. Is that even possible?”
“I can’t rule it out. Genetic science has come a long way and continues to push boundaries. At ACRES, we’ve successfully cloned wild cats. We’ve even merged a fluorescent protein from a jellyfish to produce a cat that glows in the dark.”
“Mr. Green Genes. I read about that,” he said. “In fact, it’s one of the reasons why I called for you. I needed an expert on genetics and breeding. Someone to tell me who could have produced this bizarre cargo.”
He led her through the hold. A wire cage held a mass of winged bats the size of footballs.
“Vampire bats,” Lorna said. “But they’re ten times the size they should be. May be a form of primordial gigantism.”
Similarly a caged fox down the row was the size of a bear cub. It hissed and growled and threw itself against the bars. They quickly moved past, stopping briefly at a tall cage that held an ordinary-sized parrot, but it had no feathers.
It cawed loudly, leaped to the front bars, and studied them while cocking its head back and forth. Jack had a hard time hiding his disgust. There was something so alien and wrong about its appearance.
Lorna just moved closer. “When baby parrots first hatch, they’re featherless or covered only with a light down. I don’t know if this one’s stunted into an infantile state, or if it’s a throwback, too. In fact, it’s theorized that birds are the closet living relatives of dinosaurs.”
Jack didn’t argue. The creature — leather-skinned and beaked—
definitely had a prehistoric look to it. But what really got him unnerved was the sharpness of its attention.
The bird leaped back to its perch, spouting a garble of Spanish. That aspect of the parrot — the ability to mimic — remained intact. It began to screech a string of numbers in English, its pronunciation and diction sounding perfectly human, if pitched slightly sharper.
“…three one four one five nine two six five…”
They continued onward, then Lorna stopped in mid-step. She stared back at the cage as the bird continued to screech out numbers. It went on and on without stopping.
“What is it?” he asked.
“That parrot…those first numbers…I can’t be sure…”
“What?”
“Three one four one five. Those are the first five digits of the mathematical constant pi.”
Jack remembered enough from high school geometry to know about pi, represented by the Greek letter?. He pictured the number in his head.
3.1415…
Awe filled Lorna’s voice as the parrot continued its numerological tirade. “Pi has been calculated to trillions of digits. I’d love to find out if the numbers the bird is mimicking are sequentially correct. And if so, how long of a sequence the parrot has memorized.”
As the bird continued without pause, Jack noted a hush fall over the hold. The mewling, growling, even shuffling of the other animals grew quiet, as if they too were listening. Eyes, reflecting the light, seemed to stare toward them from the dark cages.
With a shake of his head, he moved on. He had a crime to investigate.
“What I really wanted to show you is back here.”
He led her to the larger pens at the stern end of the hold. One pen held a nursing lamb and its mother. But rather than curly wool, the animals’ coats hung straight to the ground, more like a yak’s pelt than a sheep’s. But that’s not what Jack wanted to show Lorna.
He tried to urge her on, but she paused at the next cage. The occupant of that pen lay stiffly on its side atop the hay floor, legs straight out, eyes wide and fixed, dead. It looked like a miniature pony, but the creature was no larger than a cocker spaniel.
“Look at its hooves,” Lorna said. “They’re cloven. Four toes in front, three in back. The earliest ancestor of the modern horse—Hyracotherium—was only the size of a fox and had the same digital division.”
She crouched to examine the dead body. The hoof of one toe had been torn away. Its head bore signs of fresh concussions, as if it had panicked and thrashed against the bars before it died.
“Looks like something scared it to death,” she assessed.
“I can guess what that might have been.” Jack headed toward the very back of the hold. “This way.”
She followed. Irritation entered her voice, along with a thread of deeper anger. “What were these people doing? For that matter, how di
d they do it?”
“That’s what I hoped you could answer. But we have a bigger and more immediate problem.” They reached the last pen. It was large and heavily barred. Hay covered the floor, but no animal was in sight. “We found the door dented and broken open when we came down here.”
“Something escaped?” Lorna glanced from the empty pen back toward the passageway and stairs, clearly recalling the blood trail.
“We need you to tell us what it was,” he said.
She frowned at him. “How?”
He pointed as something buried beneath the hay shifted. A weak mewling followed.
Lorna glanced to him, her face shining with curiosity. He pulled the door and held it open for her to enter.
“Be careful,” he warned.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Thanks for following me on this latest journey. As before, I wanted to take this last moment to separate fact from fiction. I also hope this spurs some further investigation by readers. To aid in this, I’ve listed some of the books below that inspired this storyline.
So let’s start at the beginning. The Prologue. The Magi relics are indeed stored in a golden sarcophagus at the Cologne Cathedral, and the caravan that transported the bones from Milan to Cologne was indeed ambushed in the twelfth century.
Moving on to the first chapter, Super Black is a real compound developed at the National Physical Laboratory in Britain. The Eight Ball is a real structure at Fort Detrick (sorry for knocking it over), and liquid body armor is, amazingly enough, real, developed by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.
I won’t go into such specific detail with the rest of the novel. I just wanted to use the above examples to demonstrate how what might seem wild in this novel may have some basis in fact. For those interested in more specifics, please check out my website (jamesrollins.com).
The Imperial Dragon Court is an actual European organization that traces its roots back to the Middle Ages. It is a ceremonial and benevolent society of aristocrats of varying influence. The bloody subsect described in this book is of my own imagining and not meant to disparage anyone currently in the Court.
As to the heart of this novel, it would take volumes to discuss the truth behind both m-state metals and the long trail they trace throughout history. Luckily, that volume has already been written, following in great detail the path from the Egyptians to modern times, including the strange effects of Meissner fields, superconductivity, and magnetism. I encourage anyone with even a slight interest in this topic to pick up Lost Secrets of the Sacred Ark by Sir Laurence Gardner. It was my own personal bible for this novel.
Speaking of bibles, if you were wondering about the conflict in the early Christian church between the followers of the apostles John and Thomas, a pair of great books on this topic were written by National Book Award — winning author Elaine Pagels: Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas and The Gnostic Gospels.
For those interested in more details of the Magi and a possible brotherhood that still exists today, I recommend Magi: the Quest for a Secret Tradition by Adrian Gilbert.
I also recommend and am indebted to Robert J. Hutchinson’s When in Rome, a Journal of Life in Vatican City. It is a great and entertaining source of insight into the Vatican and its history.
Finally, I hope my own novel entertains but also raises some questions in the readers. In that vein, I’ll end this discussion of fact and fiction by endorsing the primary adage of Gnostic tradition: to seek the truth…always and in all ways. It seems a fitting finish to this novel. So to quote Matthew 7:7,
“Seek, and you shall find.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
IN A BOOK of this scope, I needed a legion of supporters: friends, family, critics, librarians, curators, travel agents, dishwashers, and pet-sitters. First, thanks to Carolyn McCray, who red-inked every page before anybody else, and Steve Prey, for his thoughts and insights that evolved into the artwork within these pages. Then, of course, I’m honored to acknowledge my posse of friends who meet every other week at Coco’s Restaurant: Judy Prey, Chris Crowe, Michael Gallowglas, David Murray, Dennis Grayson, Dave Meek, Royale Adams, Jane O’Riva, Dan Needles, Zach Watkins, and Caroline Williams. And for all help with languages, my heartfelt appreciation to my friend from the Great White North, Diane Daigle. A special thanks to David Sylvian for his boundless energy, support, and enthusiasm and to Susan Tunis for her fact-checking of all manner and substance. For the inspiration for this story, I must credit the books by Sir Laurence Gardner and the pioneering research of David Hudson. Finally, the four people whom I respect for their friendship as much as their counsel: my editor, Lyssa Keusch, and her colleague May Chen, and my agents Russ Galen and Danny Baror. And as always, I must stress any and all errors of fact or detail fall squarely on my own shoulders.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Rollins is the bestselling author of six previous novels: Subterranean, Excavation, Deep Fathom, Amazonia, Ice Hunt, and Sandstorm. He has a doctorate in veterinary medicine and his own practice in Sacramento, California. An amateur spelunker and a certified scuba enthusiast, he can often be found either underground or underwater.
To receive notice of author events and new books by James Rollins, sign up at www.authortracker.com.
ALSO BY JAMES ROLLINS
Sandstorm
Ice Hunt
Amazonia
Deep Fathom
Excavation
Subterranean
About the Publisher
Australia
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Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au
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Map of Bones sf-2 Page 47
