She had to shove her hand into the pocket of her jacket as there was nothing she could do to stop it from doing its thing. Roche would recognize its significance, and he would understand what it meant. She knew what leaving was going to do to him, largely because she knew what it was going to do to her.
Kelly was halfway down the hill when she heard what at first sounded like thunder in the distance. It quickly resolved into the frenetic techno beat of a helicopter streaking across the plains from the south.
Roche obviously heard it, too. He stared in its direction with an expression on his face that she hadn’t seen since Antarctica, one that reminded her that there was still so much about him she didn’t know.
The helicopter drew contrast from the slate-gray sky, a sleek black dragonfly coming in far too low. She didn’t need to have Roche’s military experience to recognize that this wasn’t an ordinary chopper. It reminded her at first of the Coast Guard MH-60 Jayhawk that had rushed her from Corvallis to Seaside in advance of the tsunami she’d predicted, only this one was obviously manufactured for speed. It was upon them before she even reached the bottom of the hill. It buzzed the upper canopy of the beech grove as it banked around the field and started its final approach.
Roche attempted to discreetly wave her back uphill, but he must have forgotten who he was dealing with. She was at his side when the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk settled into the onion field maybe two hundred feet from where they stood. It looked like the same model that had rescued them from the research station in the Drygalski Mountains and ferried them to the Aurora Borealis—the repurposed Coast Guard icebreaker that served as the mobile base for the organization known as Unit 51—where she had spent several days recuperating from her injuries and sheer exhaustion before being debriefed and sent to Argentina to begin the long journey back home.
Cameron Barnett, who claimed to have been the silent partner of Hollis Richards, the reclusive billionaire who’d initially gathered them all at AREA 51, had made professional overtures toward her at the time. She thought she’d made her feelings on the matter of serving as a consultant crystal clear, especially to a group whose purpose he wouldn’t explain until after she signed a stack of nondisclosure agreements. Apparently she was going to have to try harder this time.
The motor whined and the rotors ramped down, from uprooting and hurling organic debris in every direction to merely flattening it to the ground. A man emerged from the copilot’s door, clutched his cap to his head, and ducked as he ran toward them.
Roche took her by the hand and used it to draw her partially behind him. Her left hand. Not even her mother held her left hand. She was so surprised that she allowed him to do so without protest.
The man pulled up several feet from them and raised his head so that they could see his face. While Kelly recognized it, she couldn’t put a name to it. Like all the others on the Aurora Borealis, he wore his dark hair closely cropped and had the angular features and sharp eyes of a bird of prey. She didn’t need to see his black fatigues or the red triple-inverted-triangle insignia on his shoulder to know he served under Barnett in Unit 51.
“I apologize for dropping in unannounced,” he said, “but I’m afraid time is of the essence.”
“What can we do for you, Special Agent Morgan?” Roche asked. His voice was hard and firm, almost as though he’d become another person.
“Very good, Mr. Roche. Always maintain the advantage by keeping a potential adversary off-guard.”
“Is that what we are? Potential adversaries?”
“I’d like to think that’s the furthest thing from the truth, and yet judging by the expression on your face, and that of Ms. Nolan, I would say that has yet to be determined. At least from your perspective. Mine? I come bearing more than an olive branch; I bring you an opportunity I think you’ll find more than a little intriguing.”
“You can just climb back into that helicopter of yours and head back to wherever it is you came from,” Kelly said.
“But you haven’t even heard my offer.”
“We don’t need to.”
“You’re in that big of a rush to get back to Oregon?”
Roche’s grip loosened ever so slightly, although he made no outward display of his surprise. Or his hurt.
“Don’t worry,” Morgan said. “We already made arrangements with Dean Parsons to secure your services.”
“He doesn’t own me,” Kelly said. “And he definitely doesn’t have the right to pimp me out.”
“You should probably take that up with him. I don’t think he shares your viewpoint.”
“We’re done here,” Roche said.
“Let me show you what I have to offer, and if you still aren’t interested, I’ll get back in the chopper and you’ll never see me again.”
“I don’t believe that for a second.”
Morgan smiled. The expression was genuine, and yet didn’t appear at home on his face.
“I wouldn’t either.” He reached into the breast pocket of his black jacket, removed a folded piece of paper, and handed it to Roche. “I’ll be waiting in the chopper.”
Without another word, he turned and struck off across the field.
Roche released Kelly’s hand and unfolded the piece of paper. It was printed on thick stock, the kind used for photographs to retain the quality and resolution of the image. On it was what appeared to be a sheet of reinforced glass, only Kelly couldn’t be entirely sure since there was nothing but darkness on the other side. A design had been painted onto it using an odd spectrum of colors, which she could tell represented a thermal gradient.
The design was exactly the same as the crop circle they stood in at that very moment.
“You know where this leads, don’t you?” Kelly said.
The motor screamed as the rotors accelerated, buffeting Morgan as he fought to open the door and climb inside.
“Go back home,” Roche said. “I’ll let you know what I find.”
He handed her the photograph and stared across the field toward the helicopter. He gave her an awkward hug, braced himself against the violent wind, and walked away from her.
Kelly looked at the picture. Her hand was fretting so badly she lost her grip and the printout blew away.
“Wait,” she said in a voice so small that even she couldn’t hear it.
She ran toward the helicopter and caught up with Roche before he reached the sliding door. This time she took his hand, and together they climbed into the chopper.
11
EVANS
Teotihuacan
Jade’s appearance at the site had rattled Evans. It wasn’t so much the fact that she was there as much as the timing of her arrival. He couldn’t shake the feeling that her showing up on the same day they discovered the bodies wasn’t entirely coincidental, but, for the life of him, he couldn’t imagine how they could possibly be related. Worse, now he had to figure out what he was going to do with her. She wasn’t the easiest person to get along with. He couldn’t deny they shared chemistry, but half of the time it was the kind that made him want to strangle her.
They walked while she told them about what she’d seen in Nigeria. Evans had needed the air—he’d felt as though he were being cooked alive in that trailer—and Jade hadn’t wanted to say anything in front of the graduate students. At first, she seemed reluctant to even talk with Anya around, but Evans was grateful the younger woman was there. With all of her talk and the many questions she asked, it bought him some time to think.
“You’re certain it was a drone,” Anya said.
“Were you not listening?” Jade said.
“I mean, versus whatever we want to call them. Originals. The F1 generation. Full-blooded aliens like Dale Rubley.”
“Please don’t say it like that.”
“Why not?”
“It sounds absurd.”
“More absurd than this thing wading into a river filled with crocodiles to get away from you?”
Evans opened his mout
h, but Jade shut him down.
“Not a word out of you.”
He smirked and looked out across the ruins. The dirt path cut a winding course through green fields positively crawling with black-and-white-striped iguanas that sprinted for their underground burrows as they approached. The walls of the Cuidadela—the Citadel—flirted in and out through the branches of the tree-yuccas and pepper trees.
“Tell me again what it said to you,” Evans said.
“It said ‘We know you.’”
“You’re sure it said ‘we’?”
“Are you questioning my memory or my integrity?” Jade asked.
“Neither. I’m just trying to make sense of it.”
Jade sighed.
“Sorry.”
“And after that?” Evans asked.
“ ‘We still live.’”
“Jesus,” Anya said. “That can’t be right. I saw it get shot.”
“We all did,” Evans said. “And even if it didn’t die, how in the world do you propose to find it? And for what possible reason?”
“To release it,” Jade said.
“It can’t still be alive, can it?” Anya said.
“Even if it is,” Evans said. “I think we can all agree that none of us is in any hurry to see it again.”
Evans led Jade and Anya through the trees. The walls of the Citadel rose above them. They were roughly thirty feet tall, a hundred feet thick, and a quarter mile to a side, enclosing a giant square large enough to accommodate the entire population of the ancient mecca. The fortifications were easily strong enough to withstand a siege of historical proportions, although who possessed an army ferocious enough to wage that manner of war was a matter of speculation.
The three of them ascended the lone set of stone stairs on the northern wall and stared down upon the massive courtyard. The Temple of the Feathered Serpent was offset to the far eastern side, opposite the main entrance from the Avenue of the Dead to the west, and surrounded to either side by the rubble of buildings believed to have housed administrative offices. The temple was actually a pyramid, although it had fallen to ruin, with the majority of the seven-tiered structure persevering as little more than a rounded mountain of stones. Only the very front of it had been preserved by the construction of the four-tiered Adosada platform, which shielded the ornate sculptures from time and the abrasive elements. The sculpted heads of Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc, the fanged god of storms, protruded from bas-reliefs featuring the undulating bodies of plumed snakes. With the exception of a ceremonial stone platform set midway between the entrance and the Adosada, the remainder of the vast enclosure consisted of little more than flat, bare earth, where Villarreal stood in the shade of a hastily erected canopy tent, facing a row of laptop computers balanced on a padded gray storage case.
A handful of graduate students walked slowly back and forth through the field in a grid-like pattern. Some pushed ground-penetrating radar units that looked like lawnmowers with bicycle wheels, while others carried magnetometers reminiscent of football goalposts made of PVC pipes.
Villarreal shielded his eyes from the sun and watched Anya, Evans, and Jade descend the inner staircase from the wall before walking across the courtyard to meet them. Evans had worked with the archeologist off and on since his arrival six months ago, but had never really been able to get a good read on him. All of the researchers at Teotihuacan maintained a measure of autonomy, and yet Villarreal always seemed to have a hand in whatever he was doing. He could easily chalk it up to Villarreal taking an interest in Anya, for whom Evans felt an almost paternal attachment. Maybe that was the reason he couldn’t seem to bring himself to embrace Villarreal’s involvement in everything they did. Then again, it was also possible that he simply didn’t like him, which was his instinctive reaction to those he perceived as his competition in the field.
“Come, come!” Villarreal said. “You must see this!”
The moment the archeologist recognized the dead man’s carving as a feathered serpent from which the tree of life grew, he’d rushed off to gather the equipment and the personnel he needed to play a hunch he hadn’t been willing to share with any of them. At least until he summoned them from the trailer, which undoubtedly meant he was seconds away from telling them just how right he’d been.
“What did you find?” Anya asked.
“The tree of life traditionally grows from the body of the Great Goddess, from whom all life is believed to have originated. The archetype of the tree of life, or the world tree, spans countless religions from around the world and serves as a bridge between the heavens in its branches and the underworld through its roots. I theorized that its usage in conjunction with the visage of Quetzalcoatl was less metaphorical than it was literal. And I was right.”
Villarreal guided them beneath the canopy and gestured toward the computers, which had been turned in such a way that the sun didn’t wash out the screens. He offered each of them a bottle of water from a portable cooler and introduced himself to Jade, really playing up that whole Antonio Banderas thing he had going for him, much to Anya’s chagrin.
Evans looked from one monitor to the next, and then to the graduate students dripping with sweat as they marched the remote sensing devices through the courtyard. He took a long drink of the lukewarm water and rolled the bottle along the back of his neck, for all the good it did him.
“How did we not find this before now?” Evans asked.
“Because until recently it was not filled with water,” Villarreal said.
Jade leaned in front of them and looked from one monitor to the next.
“What am I supposed to be seeing? This one over here looks kind of like an ultrasound.”
“That’s essentially what it is,” Anya said. “In much the same way that an ultrasound shows a cross-section of anatomy in depth, like the different layers of skin and muscle, the ground-penetrating radar shows the layers of earth beneath your feet.”
“It works by firing high-frequency radio waves straight down into the ground,” Evans said. “The boundaries between the different layers of strata cause those waves to refract in any number of directions. Those that reflect back to the surface are collected and used to form an image like this one, which demonstrates the transition between the various layers of topsoil and the underlying limestone.”
“So these peaks in the horizontal bands correspond to significant differences in density, like between topsoil and rocks,” Jade said.
“Right,” Anya said. “That’s exactly what we look for when we’re searching for ancient burials. Human remains and grave goods will cause the same kind of spikes in the data stream.”
“The inherent flaw with the system is that it’s limited by the nature of the strata,” Evans said. “Radio waves are a form of electromagnetic radiation, and as such are subject to the same physical laws of conductivity. Most types of rock are naturally resistive, so the radio waves have to fight against them the entire time, which limits the maximum depth we can image to less than fifty feet, at the very most, but if you look at the label on the Y-axis, you can see that right here we’re able to go all the way down to a hundred feet in places because—”
“Water naturally conducts electricity,” Jade finished for him.
“The magnetometer is fairly similar,” Anya said, “only rather than interpreting depth, it records spatial variations in the Earth’s magnetic field caused by different types of materials.”
“Like an MRI,” Jade said.
“Exactly, but instead of creating pictures based upon the inherent differences between tissues, this allows us to see materials we wouldn’t ordinarily think of as magnetic.”
“You can use it to find buried archeological features,” Evans said. “Like clay or brick. Decayed organic matter. Even burned topsoil from a campfire extinguished thousands of years ago. But because of the relatively small differences in magnetic properties, its effective resolution is generally limited to what we call near-surface phenomena, unless you hav
e a distinct demarcation in the strata.”
“Or, as in this case, the strata is moving,” Anya said through an enormous smile.
Jade stood in front of the third monitor for several seconds before looking back at Evans.
“So when you combine them you’re able to create a map of subterranean features.”
“Kind of an oversimplification,” Evans said, “but yeah. That’s what you’re looking at.”
“That’s not a natural formation,” Jade said.
“No, it’s not.” Evans stared at the image on the screen and what had to be several thousand feet of narrow tunnels beneath their feet. “It’s a maze.”
12
TESS
The Cage, FOB Atlantis
Tess had been watching Subject Z for so long now that she felt as though she could intuit its mood from its behavior. Or at least she’d thought so until today. Something had changed in its demeanor since it reacted to Director Barnett’s question by smearing the pig’s blood on the window, something that made her believe that everything it had done up until this point was essentially a grand performance for their benefit. All of the notes she’d taken, the correlations she’d made, the research she’d done . . . it was all for naught. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that the creature had been in control of the situation since the very beginning and not, as she’d foolishly believed, the other way around.
Of course, she wasn’t about to let it know that she’d caught on to its ruse. She’d gained a minuscule advantage, one she was certain wouldn’t last very long and needed to be exploited, but she had to be careful. She had to proceed as though nothing had changed, although with the way its thermal representation stared at her through the monitor—as though it could not only see her, but inside of her—made her wonder if it couldn’t do just that.
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