Fearful Symmetry: A Thriller

by McBride, Michael

  Brandt beamed.

  “That’s why I chose you, Jordan. You have the knowledge base to understand how it works and the ethical foundation to know where to draw the line between morality and divinity.”

  He leaned forward and took Brooks by the hand. The old man’s fingers felt like they were composed of bones as hollow as those of a bird. He smelled vaguely of ammonia.

  “I’m not going to be around forever, but I fully intend for this institution to be. This isn’t about playing God. This is about accomplishing what each of us set out to accomplish. This is about knowledge and understanding. This is about answering the most fundamental question in the field of anthropology. This is about learning, specifically, what causes a species to evolve and by which mechanism it does so.”

  “That knowledge could destroy the world in the wrong hands.”

  “Which is why I believe if anyone is qualified to safeguard that information, it is you, my boy.”

  Eighteen

  Yarlung Tsangpo River Basin

  Motuo County

  Tibet Autonomous Region

  People’s Republic of China

  October 16th

  Yesterday

  Inside the mountain was a karst formation reminiscent of the cave where they’d found the Buddhist grotto. Speleothems dripped from the walls like wax and the stalactites at the edge of sight high above had to be at least as tall as Brooks was. The wall through which he and Julian had crawled was honeycombed with small openings, some natural, others either carved through the flowstone or widened from existing fissures. He could only draw the conclusion that whoever interred the bodies had excavated the tombs from the inside and helped place the coffins from the top of the cliff using a series of ropes. The mystery of how the coffins were “hung” solved, he moved on to the more pressing question of why. Every bit as important was figuring out who had done so. If there were an indigenous tribe that didn’t take kindly to intrusion in such a sacred place, were their lives even now in danger?

  He thought of the condition of the remains. The wounds hadn’t been inflicted by men. The victims looked like they’d been attacked by a tiger or similar large animal with ferocious claws, although Brooks could think of few other native species that qualified. Again, he reflected on the plaster cast and possibilities he was unprepared to consider. He realized he was going to have to tell the others about it and deal with the fallout, but he would have to do so carefully. He was going to need their help if he had any hope of finding out what was going on here.

  “Look up there.” Brooks pointed to where his light shined on the wall opposite the tombs. “That’s how they get down here.”

  A series of ladders led from one steppe to another, clear up into the darkness beyond his light’s reach. They were old and made from wood lashed together by faded leather and spotted with near-petrified bat guano.

  Brooks tested the first with his weight, then tentatively climbed up to the first ledge, which was maybe three feet deep and artificially leveled. A golden urn filled with white sand and sticks of incense rested beneath a recess in the cavern wall, where a metallic prayer wheel imprinted with hundreds of tiny incantations and prayers was mounted. It squeaked when Brooks spun it, the sound echoing through the chamber. He turned to face the opposite wall.

  “I hope you guys are getting this.”

  He turned his head slowly and deliberately, allowing the camera to sweep across at least fifty openings, even more than he would have guessed from the ground. If there were a body entombed inside each of them, it would take days to examine them on the off chance that one held a body like Brandt had cast. Maybe the German expedition had simply gotten lucky with the first coffin. Then again, as he’d seen with the corpse that undoubtedly belonged to one of the men traveling with Brandt, there were definitely details the old man had neglected to share with him.

  Another ladder led from the first ledge to the second, maybe twenty feet from the ground. There was another prayer wheel covered with Tibetan characters and the faint residual scent of sandalwood. It was the same with the third level. On the fourth, they found themselves even with the highest excavations opposite them and nearly to the stalactites they had seen from the ground. Above them, the cavern roof narrowed to a fissure above the fifth ledge, from which an even longer ladder led upward into utter darkness. The gentle movement of air caressed his face as he looked up.

  “I thought you wanted to examine more of the coffins?” Julian’s voice echoed from the cavern below them.

  “We’ll get through them faster if we have help.”

  Brooks ascended to the final ledge, then climbed upward into a narrow chimney barely wide enough to accommodate his shoulders. There were actually several ladders tied together, maybe twenty feet tall.

  He found the entryway sealed when he reached the top and traced his fingertips along the underside of a heavy stone. It felt like the same yellow granite as the outer cliff wall. He placed his palms against it and pressed upward. The stone didn’t even budge.

  He braced his feet on the rung, leaned his back against the side of the chute, and pushed, harder this time.

  The stone rose just far enough to admit a sliver of light. There was no way they would be able to lift it up, even if he and Julian somehow managed to both squeeze into the top of the fissure and push together.

  He gathered his strength to try again, only this time, instead of attempting to raise it, he did his best to slide it. He was rewarded with a scraping sound and a pinprick of light. Each exertion produced the grinding sound of stone rubbing against stone and even more light. Pebbles rained down on him. As soon as he’d slid it far enough, he reached though the orifice and pulled himself out onto a slope positively covered with lotus flowers. To one side was the edge of the cliff and the source of the vines that cascaded over the edge, to the other a birch- and pine-crowned peak against the backdrop of the Himalayas.

  He trudged through the lotuses and stood at the precipice, trying to figure out the easiest route for the others to take to climb up here. To his right, the dense forest clung to the sheer slope by the force of will alone. To his left, he detected what could have been a trail running through the sandalwood and durian trees. Or at least an impression in the canopy that he hoped corresponded with a trail near their trunks.

  “Check it out,” Julian said. He crouched beside a plant with large leaves like an elephant’s ears and tall stalks covered with scarlet blossoms. “Persicaria affinis. Himalayan fleece flower. It’s almost unheard of to find one at such a low altitude. Can you believe the roots of this one plant can he ingested to cure the stomach flu or ground into a salve with more potent healing properties than Neosporin?”

  “It looks like rhubarb.”

  “That’s the beauty of it. All of these natural cures…just sitting there, waiting to be found. It’s like a treasure hunt trying to figure out which species are responsible for treating which ailments. I’m convinced that the cures to every disease are out there somewhere, hiding in plain sight. Can you imagine what it must have been like to be the first to discover its miraculous healing properties?”

  Brooks looked at Julian in a new light. That was exactly why he did what he did.

  “That must have been a pretty amazing feeling.”

  They found the trail hidden in the jungle. Infrequent use had allowed the shrubs to close over the path, nearly sealing it in sections and rerouting them into the underbrush. They couldn’t see a thing through the trees. Brooks figured as long as they followed the topography and continued to work their way downward, they’d eventually reach the valley floor, where the others waited and watched the feed from the helmet-mounted camera.

  Julian interpreted Brooks’s tacit approval as an invitation to point out every even remotely interesting species of plant. While he did his best to tune out the running narrative, Brooks had to admit the grad student had an almost encyclopedic knowledge base when it came to the identification and medicinal uses of plants
and weeds that all looked alike to him.

  “And that one there’s Urtica dioica. The stinging nettle. Its leaves and stems are covered with tiny hairs called trichomes, which act like the stingers of so many wasps. All it takes is the slightest contact, and next thing you know—boom—you’re being injected with histamine, acetylcholine, and formic acid. But if you dry out those same leaves, grind them to powder, and apply them directly to an open wound, they’ll help stanch the flow of blood and stimulate clotting. Imagine the medical applications. I’m talking about paramedics and military field medics. Think about how many lives could be saved with something as simple—and cheap—as a vial of powder you can just sprinkle on a laceration when there’s no time for sutures.”

  He extracted a plastic baggie from his pocket, inverted it, and collected the entire plant, roots and all, without being stung.

  “Oh. And there’s a cluster of Alpine bistort. Polygonum viviparum. You can eat its roots raw—although I recommend roasting them with some of these pink bulblets for a nuttier flavor—or boil them to make a bitter tea. They produce a potent anti-inflammatory response every bit as effective as ibuprofen. Maybe even more so, especially when it comes to the treatment of chronic inflammatory conditions like arthritis.”

  Julian crouched in front of the plant and brushed aside leaves reminiscent of a dandelion’s and what looked like cattails composed of pink flowers to reveal the moldering detritus from which it grew.

  “Nature provides everything you need to survive in any given environment,” Julian said. “You just have to know where to look for it.” He turned and grinned at Brooks. “Speaking of which, check this out. Pretty freaking amazing, right?”

  Brooks stared blankly at the ground for a long moment. He didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. When he looked up at Julian, the younger man was smiling patiently at him as though he were the student.

  “Do you see these brownish projections that almost look like little sprouts?” He pinched one and plucked it from the ground. Rather than roots, its bottom half was composed of a yellowish worm. “What you see here is actually two distinct species. Hepialus humuli—the ghost moth—spends the majority of the larval stage of its life cycle underground, feeding on the roots of plants like this bistort, where it inadvertently comes into contact with a fungus known as Ophiocordyceps sinensis. It either ingests a spore or inhales the mycelium, which allows the fungus to colonize the caterpillar’s body and turn it into one big reproductive vessel. This little sprout is actually the fruiting body of the fungus. Essentially one really ugly mushroom.”

  “Tell me you’re not supposed to eat it.”

  “People in Tibet and China have been eating them for their anti-aging and aphrodisiac effects for thousands of years. Only recently have we discovered that they increase the production of ATP in the body, dramatically improving stamina and physical endurance, and their cancer fighting properties are off the charts.”

  He popped it in his mouth and started crunching it between his teeth.

  Brooks had to look away. He resumed walking and pretended the crackling sounds coming from behind him were Julian’s boots on the trail.

  Brooks was starting to wonder if the path were actually leading them in an entirely different direction than he’d thought when he heard a crashing sound from downhill and saw a silhouette pass through the branches of a tree. Then another. And another still. His mind automatically recalled the plaster mask in Brandt’s basement and his heart nearly stopped. He flinched when Warren burst through the foliage, his eyes wide with panic.

  “Couldn’t you see me flashing the mirror?”

  Brooks remembered the frantic flashing from below as he examined the first body.

  “Yeah, but we were hundreds of feet up and we weren’t about to turn around—”

  “The man in the coffin,” Warren interrupted, and doubled over to catch his breath.

  Adrianne emerged from the trees, followed by Zhang, whose right hand was tucked under his jacket, near where he kept his hidden weapon.

  “I recognized him,” Warren said. “I know who the dead man in the coffin is.”

  Nineteen

  Excerpt from the journal of

  Hermann G. Wolff

  Courtesy of Johann Brandt, Private Collection

  Chicago, Illinois

  (Translated from original handwritten German text)

  January 1939

  It took the majority of the day for König to scale the face of the cliff. Our ears rang with the hammering of anchors while we moved the shapi’s carcass to a location far enough downwind that we were no longer pestered by the smell or the flies. The rain had only just begun to fall when König whooped in triumph and crawled out of sight into one of the hollows nearly invisible from every angle. By then we were sitting under an umbrella of tree branches, resting impatiently. Metzger smoked a cigarette while I filmed Brandt and Eberhardt tossing bits of dried meat to a once-mythical red panda.

  I rushed out into the open, the rain drumming on my pith helmet, and tried to shield the lens of the camera as I raised it toward where I had last seen König. He shouted something I could not understand and dropped what looked like a bomb from the hollow. I barely had time to duck out of the way, and even then I was struck across the back by wooden shrapnel with such force that I feared I’d been impaled.

  The others lifted me from the mud—as my hands were preoccupied with protecting the camera—and together we approached the mess of broken wood, amid puddles dimpled by the rain. We all stared at the body that had formerly been contained inside of it for several minutes without saying a word. We had recognized that the hollows served as primitive tombs, but we had all expected the remains to belong to monks, or maybe revered regents or government ministers. Even Brandt was surprised by the body upon which we dumbly stared as König rappelled down the cliff.

  I hesitate to describe the condition of the remains in the kind of meticulous detail Brandt reserves for his anatomical surveys and sketches. Suffice it to say, the body was in the advanced stages of rot and recognizable as little more than a skeleton with a brittle layer of skin and an almost comical moustache somehow still curled by wax. It was the uniform that confounded us most, though. Not that we didn’t recognize it, mind you. Its mere presence in such a place was an inexplicable juxtaposition. The man was of undeniable Anglo-Saxon descent and his uniform clearly identified him as British. The flash on his sun helmet marked him as an officer of the British Indian Army, the kind who populate our history books.

  König believed the man was party to the Younghusband Expedition of 1903, which he claims was in actuality an invasion by the British that culminated in the Massacre of Chumik Shenko, where more than six hundred Tibetans were slaughtered. Brandt argued that he was surely mistaken, for why would an enemy officer be interred in such a reverential manner when the crimes of his countrymen were so reprehensible? It was a question for which we could posit no answer. The only facts to which we were privy merely served to add to our confusion. After all, not only was it impossible to refute his affiliation, it was readily apparent that his suffering had been tremendous. Although none of us gave voice to our fears, there was no denying he had been attacked with a savagery one could only ascribe to a man-eating tiger.

  Despite my initial reservations, I filmed the remains, careful not to dwell on any one detail for too long, while the others argued about what to do with them. In the end, a decision was reached to leave the body at the foot of a nearby chorten for the monks we assumed were responsible for the incense we kept seeing. Surely they were better equipped to deal with the spiritual and physical demands of the dead man than we were.

  The sky opened then and released a deluge of almost biblical proportions. Were it not for our strict adherence to the tenets of our Christianity, we would have left the body for the animals, if they would even still have it, but despite our surroundings, we were not savages. We rolled the remains in a tarpaulin and sheltered them from the element
s as best we could. By the time we were finished, a star-less night had descended. Despite being soaked to the bone, both Brandt and König were eager to return to the tombs in hopes of examining the contents of the other coffins. For them, this was a mystery of the highest order and one, I’m convinced, they would have risked life and limb to solve were it not for the fact that we were several kilometers from our camp and continued exposure to the elements risked the onset of fevers we would be unable to break given our primitive surroundings.

  I believe we might have argued all night beneath an enclave of ficus trees, with the attenuated rain pattering the forest floor around us, had König not abruptly stiffened and silenced us. I will always remember the expression on his face when he looked past me and into the vast expanse of dark jungle at my back. His eyes grew wide and reflected an emotion I had never seen there before and one I am certain felt entirely foreign to a man who until that moment had never truly experienced fear. And that unspoken admission frightened me more than anything ever had in my life.

  We stood in silence, listening to the dysrhythmic patter of the rain and the thunder grumbling through the valley for several interminable minutes, during which time we scrutinized the darkness for any sign of movement and listened for a recurrence of whatever sound had so unsettled our ordinarily unflappable expeditionist. After a time, he spoke in a whisper, although his eyes never once ceased roving the forest. There was a cave nearby, one he had discovered earlier in the day prior to encountering the carcass of the shapi. We could bed down for the night and dry ourselves by a fire, if we could manage to gather enough dry wood. The way he gripped his rifle made me wonder if he were truly concerned with our physical well-being or if we were being drawn into the hunt.