The Extinction Files Box Set

by A. G. Riddle

  “Then tell me: what do you do?”

  “What?”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m an investor in high-tech companies—”

  “A person can read that on your website. What do you really do? What are you really working on, Des?”

  A chill ran through him. He took another step back, as if realizing he was in the presence of an enemy. “What are you asking me?”

  His phone buzzed on the card table. He was torn between staring at her and picking it up. Finally, he broke eye contact and glanced at the screen. A message from Conner. That surprised him.

  Need to meet. At pier eighty. On Kentaru Maru. Urgent.

  “I need to go,” he said absently.

  “Why?”

  “My brother. He’s back.”

  “Where is he?”

  He turned to her. “Why do you care?”

  Her intense expression softened. “Please tell me, Des. And don’t ask me why.”

  He knew it then: his life was at a crossroads. Telling her would cross a line beyond which nothing would ever be the same.

  She stood stark naked in his study, surrounded by the books that he loved, that he had kept in his private collection. He knew one thing: he trusted her. She was genuine and pure, and in the darkest reaches of his mind he knew that she would never hurt an innocent person. And he knew that Conner would, and so would Yuri—because the world had made them that way.

  And so he told her where Conner was, and before he could say another word, she had scooped up her clothes and left, running, not looking back.

  He knew the truth then: she was somehow his enemy. What he didn’t know was why she had been sleeping with him.

  “He’s out of the memory,” Dr. Park said.

  Conner leaned into the back of the van. “Is there another location?”

  Park tapped the smartphone. “Yes. It’s… What the—”

  “Save it, Doctor.” Conner turned to Major Goins. “Begin.”

  The major began barking orders, and the garage sprang into frenzied action. His men shoved the X1 troops they had captured into the vans and the Humvees.

  Many of Conner’s men were still spread throughout the house. Now the windows shattered as they fired, full auto, spraying the X1 vehicles on the street. They launched two rocket-propelled grenades, both of which found their targets, leaving the enemy’s two camo-clad Humvees in flames. Conner’s men then raced to the garage and climbed into their vehicles.

  The Humvee in the motor court roared forward first, barreling past the open motor court doors onto Austin Avenue, charging head-on at the blockade of X1 vehicles. The second Humvee went next, but it cut a donut in the motor court, slipped around the house, and bounced through the back yard, flattening an aluminum fence as it trounced into a neighbor’s yard. One van followed in its wake, then the Tesla sedan.

  That left one van remaining in the garage.

  To Goins, Conner said, “Good luck, Major.”

  Conner climbed into the van, gathered Desmond in his arms, and with Dr. Park and two soldiers surrounding him, stepped out and walked back into Desmond’s home. Desmond hung limp, helpless, the tubes running from him capped. Conner descended the back staircase, into the dank basement, with its red brick walls lined with empty wine racks and classic arcade machines: Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Galaga. Conner stopped at the hidden door and pushed the brick in. Above, he heard the van crank and power out of the garage.

  He was first through the dark opening. The soldier’s lights guided his way into the man-made cavern. Dr. Park pulled the hidden door closed behind them, and the mercenaries released their sacks full of MREs, water, and weapons. They had enough to last for days. Conner hoped it wouldn’t take that long.

  From the catwalk, he looked down at the cavernous space, lit by the beams of their helmet lights. The racquetball court’s wood floor shimmered like an underwater lake.

  They descended and hid under the catwalk, just in case someone entered and did a cursory search.

  An hour later, Conner heard footsteps above, in the garage. He looked at his men, held a single finger to his lips, and clicked off his light.

  Chapter 43

  Yuri’s men were efficient and deadly. They activated the radio and satellite jamming arrays and rushed the visitor center. The reports from their suppressed rifles echoed across the green rolling fields as they moved through the parking lot and into the building.

  Yuri watched from a distance, through long-range binoculars, the muzzle flares like camera flashes in the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  When the all-clear was called, he walked across the hills with his personal security contingent, through the parking lot littered with dead bodies, and into the visitor center, where a small group of British and Spanish forces were tied and gagged. They’d be needed for radio communication—and as bargaining chips if it came to it.

  The commanding officer of the Citium Security forces was a Brazilian named Pablo Machado. Yuri walked close to the man. “You didn’t find them?”

  “They either left or they’re in the cave,” Machado said in a hushed voice. “We’re about to start interrogating—”

  “Don’t bother. By the time we get it out of them, it will be too late.”

  “So we’re going in?”

  “Yes. Assemble a small team. Your best. And hurry.”

  Deep inside the Cave of Altamira, Lin activated her radio. “Avery, come in.”

  “I’m here.”

  “We found it. Return to the rally point.”

  “Copy that.”

  Lin resealed the plastic container and handed it to Peyton. Without a word, she stood and began hiking away from the cave painting of the doe, now standing alone, the buck and fawn smeared from the stone.

  As Peyton walked behind her mother, through the cave’s dark corridors, holding the secrets her grandfather had buried so long ago, she felt that something had changed between them. Her mother’s secrets were out in the open now. All except for one: the truth about the code buried in the human genome. She wondered if that would be next. Or if her mother would continue to shut her out.

  Avery and Nigel were waiting on them in the hidden room. Despite the chill in the cave, Nigel’s brow was drenched in sweat and his cheeks were red.

  Chief Adams stepped forward. “We’re thirty minutes past due on our routine comm check.”

  “Proceed,” Lin said.

  Adams motioned to Rodriguez, who left in a jog.

  Lin called after him. “Tell them to send teams to carry these crates out.”

  “Does that mean you found it?” Nigel asked.

  “We did.” Lin took the container from Peyton and opened the top, the sound like popping a champagne cork. She took out the first page and scanned it. The words were German, handwritten. She flipped to the next page, then quickly rifled through the entire sheaf.

  “Mom, what is it?”

  Lin glanced over, as if remembering the others were there. “An inventory. As suspected.” She motioned to the crates. “They’re the missing pieces.”

  Nigel huffed. “Missing pieces of what exactly? I for one would like to know exactly what’s in there.”

  “We don’t have time—”

  “Mom. You owe us that much. And besides, if we’re separated… I think it’s better if we all know what’s going on.”

  “Very well. We’ll talk until the teams arrive.” Almost to herself, she whispered, “Where to begin?”

  She set the pages back in the container.

  “First, you have to realize that Kraus came to his conclusion about the human genome over time. He had other theories that preceded it. His initial theory was that the rate of human evolution was accelerating.”

  “Punctuated equilibrium,” Nigel said, nodding. “He believed we’re in the midst of speciation.”

  “What’s punctuated equilibrium?” Avery asked.

  Nigel turned to her. “Seriously?”

  “Sorry, I ta
ught tennis in college, not evolutionary biology. Is it like a deviated septum? I can show you what that is.”

  Nigel’s eyes grew wide.

  Peyton held up a hand. “Why don’t you tell us, Mom?”

  “Punctuated equilibrium,” Lin said, “is a theory proposed in 1972 by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. Before that time, evolutionary biologists had debated how new species developed. Most thought it happened gradually over time—what we call phyletic gradual evolution. But the fossil record doesn’t support that. It shows that when a species emerges, it is generally stable, with little genetic change, for long stretches of time. When evolution does occur, it happens rapidly—new species branch off in a relatively short period of time. On a geological scale, anyway.”

  “Why?” Peyton asked.

  “The trigger events for these periods of rapid evolution are a subject of debate. We know it happens when an organism is transported to a new environment.”

  “They’re forced to adapt to survive,” Avery said.

  “That’s right. Or if the species stays put and their environment changes, as occurred during the Quaternary extinction.”

  “That’s what they were studying on the Beagle,” Peyton said.

  “Indeed. The researchers found evidence that the Quaternary extinction was caused by two factors. The first was natural climate change on a global scale, specifically the end of the last glacial period, known popularly as the last ice age. If you want to get technical, we’re still in an ice age, one that has lasted millions of years—we’re just in an interglacial period at the moment. Anyway, at the time of the Quaternary extinction, the warming of the planet and retreating glaciers put many species at risk. Large animals that had evolved for cold weather died out, and those that survived fell prey to humans invading their environment. It’s hard to imagine the scale of this climate change. The ice sheets that covered much of Asia, Europe, and North America stopped advancing and started retreating. Within a few hundred years, an unimaginable amount of ice had melted—enough to raise sea levels thirty feet in places. If all the ice in Greenland melted today, it wouldn’t raise the oceans that much.

  “The biggest consequence, however, was on sea currents. The flood of freshwater into the Northern Atlantic pushed back on the flow of warm water from the equator moving north. That warmer water was redirected south, toward Antarctica, shrinking the ice there and changing the circumpolar winds. In the course of a thousand years, most of the planet went from being a frozen wilderness to a fertile world perfect for our species. It was almost tailor-made for humans. We were alive at exactly the right time. And it changed us.

  “That was Kraus’s central theory. That the end of the last ice age kicked off a period of rapid evolution for our species. In the context of punctuated equilibrium, we call the splitting of a species ‘cladogenesis.’ Some scientists on the Beagle believed that the human race was splitting into two species, but the genetic evidence they gathered didn’t support that. Kraus posited that one tribe developed a substantial genetic advantage—and it centered on how their minds worked. Art is the evidence of that change.”

  Lin motioned to the cave. “That’s why he was so interested in this place. Altamira is one of the oldest examples of cave art and fictive thinking. Kraus believed that the advent of art was a transcendental moment in our evolution. He believed…” She glanced at the crates. “He believed it was like opening Pandora’s box. Fictive thinking triggered a further acceleration in human evolution. If you compare our progress in the last thirty-five thousand years with the millions of years hominids inhabited the planet before, it’s like we’re a completely different type of organism. To him, there had to be a reason for such a dramatic shift—an environmental factor driving the change in our behavior. But we could find no environmental factor.”

  “That’s why you needed the Beagle,” Nigel said. “To take ice core, archaeological, and biological samples from around the world. In secret. You were trying to find evidence of environmental triggers in the past.”

  “Yes. Our first theory was HGT.”

  Nigel nodded.

  “Okay,” said Avery, “I’ll bite. What’s HGT?”

  “Horizontal gene transfer,” Lin said, “sometimes referred to as lateral gene transfer. Most of evolution occurs though vertical gene transfer—DNA being passed from parent to child. Horizontal transfer is when DNA is acquired from another living organism.”

  “It happens all the time in bacteria,” Nigel said. “One bacteria develops an advantage and transfers it to another. That’s how they become antibiotic resistant, among other things.”

  Lin nodded. “In our case, we thought perhaps there was some external source of DNA that was driving human evolution, almost like a symbiotic relationship—feeding us genes that advanced us.”

  “Like aliens?” Avery said, skeptical.

  “No, nothing that dramatic. We thought perhaps some symbiotic bacteria or virus in the gut. When Kraus looked at the long arc of history, he saw some very strange patterns. In particular, a certain synchronicity. Take these cave paintings, for instance.” She walked closer to the cave wall. “Cave paintings appeared at about the same time in multiple places in Europe and the Middle East. Why? How did fictive thinking—this evolutionary leap forward—occur almost simultaneously in independent populations separated by huge distances? The same thing happened with the development of agriculture, twelve thousand years ago. We found eleven different civilizations, completely isolated from each other, in which agriculture emerged independently, at almost exactly the same time. Or writing—the next great human breakthrough, as it allowed us to store data far more efficiently than we could through oral traditions. This, too, occurred at the same time, in at least three isolated groups.

  “To Kraus, this synchronicity was the ultimate evidence that there was an incredibly powerful force sculpting humanity. He called it the Invisible Sun. To him, evolution was like this cave, each chamber leading to another. Art, then farming, then writing—these are the three principal chambers humanity has passed through, and each has left a genetic mark. Kraus believed that the last chamber, a final great leap for humanity, was yet to come.”

  “The code,” Peyton said.

  “Exactly. Kraus believed that when we found the genetic bread crumbs left by the march of evolution, that they would form a code that could unlock the next great change in human existence—this one far more profound than art, farming, or writing.”

  “What is it?” Avery asked.

  “I don’t know. He didn’t either. And we didn’t have the technology back then. Human genome sequencing was impossible. And even once it was possible, it’s been cost-prohibitive until very recently.”

  “And now you’re ready,” Avery said. “You built Phaethon Genetics for just this moment. The recovery of these samples.”

  Lin studied the crates. “This moment is more important than any of you understand. The sacrifices that have been made. The giants whose shoulders we stand upon. We’re on the precipice of something incredible.”

  An awkward silence stretched out. In that hidden room, in the dim light, Lin Shaw seemed almost possessed.

  Boots pounded the cave floor. The makeshift door to the hidden room pushed in, and a hand forced it open wider.

  Rodriguez slid through the opening, followed by three SAS soldiers Peyton had never seen. Despite the chill in the cave, Rodriguez was sweating. And his gun was gone.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “We’re ready to load out.”

  Adams moved his head quickly, as if seeing something, then relaxed. Lin stared at him, then Rodriguez.

  Peyton sensed that something was wrong.

  To her surprise, her mother said, “Proceed, Corporal.”

  Chapter 44

  Peyton sensed a change happening in the room. It was as if one by one, the team was becoming aware of something—like prey learning that a predator was approaching. Lin appeared to realize first, then it moved like a wave to Ad
ams and Avery. Nigel was muttering something, apparently unaware. Rodriguez was trying to communicate something to Adams with his eyes.

  The hidden room deep inside the Cave of Altamira was cramped, but the three SAS troops were doing their best to spread out.

  Suddenly, Lin slipped behind the closest SAS soldier. A split second later, Adams leapt on top of the operative beside him. Avery moved behind the last man, drawing a combat knife and placing it at his neck.

  The room fell silent. No one moved.

  Peyton realized her mother was holding a handgun at the back of the soldier’s neck.

  The man slowly let his hands drift out. “Ma’am,” he said in a British accent. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding—”

  “Don’t.” Lin’s voice echoed in the small space like a slap.

  A silent second passed.

  “The boots. I know they’re Citium Security issue.” To Peyton and Nigel, she said, “Take their weapons.”

  When they had taken their guns and knives and radios, Lin pushed at the back of the man’s neck, prodding him to join the other two. “Is he here?” she demanded.

  The man’s face was stone. “Can’t say I know who ‘he’ is.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “Ma’am?” Adams said.

  “Yuri.” Then to Rodriguez: “Report, Corporal.”

  His eyes drifted down to the floor, a look of embarrassment and disappointment settling over him. “I hiked to the radio cutoff and requested backup to help with transport. The operator used the breach code word in his response.” He shook his head. “I turned and started running back, but they were already in the tunnel.” He swallowed. “I should have—”

  “Thank you, Corporal,” Lin said.

  Adams took out the cave map and pointed to a narrow passageway near the hidden room. “We’ll set up a chokepoint here.”

  “No,” Lin said. “We can’t fight our way out of here.”

  “Is there another exit?”

  “No. We’re trapped. And outgunned. And ill-supplied for a siege. Those are the certainties.”