OTHER TITLES BY JON JEFFERSON
WRITING AS JEFFERSON BASS (IN COLLABORATION WITH FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGIST DR. BILL BASS)
Carved in Bone
Flesh and Bone
The Devil’s Bones
Bones of Betrayal
The Bone Thief
The Bone Yard
Madonna and Corpse
The Inquisitor’s Key
Jordan’s Stormy Banks
Cut to the Bone
The Breaking Point
Without Mercy
WRITING AS JON JEFFERSON AND DR. BILL BASS
Death’s Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales
Beyond the Body Farm
Identity Crisis
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Jon Jefferson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542049870
ISBN-10: 1542049873
Cover design by Jae Song
For The Amazing Jane.
And for the millions of other smart, strong, courageous women
doing heroic work around the world.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
I: THE DRAGON BOWL
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
II: THE MURDEROUS INNOCENCE OF THE SEA
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
III: WAVE GOODBYE
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
Taburiente Volcano
La Palma, Canary Islands—250 miles off the northwest coast of Africa
Megan O’Malley’s head whipped around, her red hair swirling and her brain reeling as she tried to make sense of what she’d just glimpsed out the car window. Was it a hallucination? An artifact of jet lag and fatigue and altitude-induced oxygen deprivation? It most certainly couldn’t be what it appeared to be, because what it appeared to be—in the fraction of the second that she’d seen it—was the Eye of God: an immense, unfathomable eye of blue, set in a vast, stony brow.
O’Malley hit the brakes, and the rental car, a tiny Toyota Yaris, slithered to a stop on the shoulder of the road, a cracking two-lane snaking along the rim of an immense, cratered volcano. The car bucked and the engine died. The clutch, she reminded herself. Don’t forget the clutch. The rental car had a manual transmission, and she hadn’t driven a stick in years.
The shoulder was narrow and the road treacherous; if she’d skidded a few feet farther off the pavement, the car would have gone careening down the mountainside. Beyond the shoulder, the slope angled a thousand feet and then dropped away altogether, sheering off into a cliff. Far below the edge was an unbroken sea of clouds, surrounding the shattered volcanic cone like a fleecy Christmas-tree skirt. A mile below the cloud tops lay the Atlantic, a fact she knew because she had landed at the coast three hours before and had been shifting and twisting upward ever since. The view was stunning, but what the hell had she just glimpsed out her window?
Granted, she was here—“here” being the rim of an ancient volcano on La Palma, home to one of the world’s best observatory complexes—to investigate a celestial mystery. But the mystery she’d come to investigate—to solve—had nothing to do with God and everything to do with science. An astronomer and a planet hunter, she had come from Baltimore to Spain’s Canary Islands on a quest for Planet Nine, a huge, as-yet-unseen orb circling the sun somewhere in the outer dark, far beyond the known planets.
Her celestial search couldn’t begin until nightfall. Meanwhile, the unsettling something she had seen—the Eye of God, she seemed to have named it—required further research. As a scientist, she had a duty, or at least a compulsion, to seek an explanation.
Even without the Eye, the setting would have seemed strange and forbidding. The combination of elements—craggy lava around her, white and silver telescope domes looming above her, and the sea of clouds below—gave the place a stark, otherworldly look, as if she had teleported to some scientific outpost on Mars.
O’Malley parked on the shoulder, the car’s engine ticking with heat, and wondered if she’d really seen the Eye or had simply imagined it. She rolled down her window—a manual crank (Christ, how long since she’d used one of those?)—and leaned out, scanning the terrain behind and above. All she saw was a brown mountainside strewn with brown rocks ranging in size from eggs to elephants. Baffled, she jammed the gearshift into “Reverse.” The gears gnashed, and the clutch caught with a series of whiplash-inducing jerks. She lurched backward for fifty yards and stopped, this time remembering to depress the clutch, then scanned the slope to her left once more. Nothing. Bloody hell, she thought. I know I didn’t make that up.
She eased out the clutch again, more smoothly this time. Backing up another two hundred yards—back to the curve she had rounded just before she and the Eye had swapped glances—she stopped again, then began creeping forward, retracing her earlier approach, this time at a snail’s pace.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Then, suddenly, there it was, staring at her once more. She stomped the brake, and the car shuddered to a stop, the engine bucking and stalling again. “The clutch, O’Malley, the clutch,” she scolded. She leaped out, her “nerd purse”—the waist pack containing her wallet, passport, and iPhone—snagging on the seat belt. After disentangling herself, she hipped the door shut and turned to glare at the mountainside. Nothing but rock glared back. In the space of three seconds and ten feet, the Eye had winked shut again.
She walked slowly up the road, scrutinizing the slope, her gaze as focused as a laser. As she walked, buffeted by a rising afternoon wind, she heard a soft, high-pitched moan, a keening sound that made the hairs on her arms and neck prickle. And it was precisely then, mid-prickle, that she found herself staring anew into the Eye of God.
But this time, the Eye was not vacant and bottomless; this time the Almighty’s Eye contained—or, rather, reflected—an immense square building, centered precisely in the pupil. O’Malley whirled and looked behind her, though she knew perfectly well that behind her lay nothing but open air and, far below, the sea of clouds concealing the Atlantic.
She turned back toward the Eye to see if it was still there, still open. It was, and she began picking her way up the rocky slope, dodging the ankle breakers underfoot. Every few steps she stopped to glance over her shoulder, as if a building might materialize in midair. And why not, after all, given how suddenly and inexplicably the Eye itself had appeared?
Abruptly she stopped in her tracks and laughed, one quick, barking “Ha!” She, of al
l people—Megan O’Malley, rising star of the Johns Hopkins astronomy department—should know a telescope mirror when she saw it, even an outrageously oversize mirror sitting buck naked on a mountainside.
The mirror wasn’t actually round, she saw now. It was octagonal—a concave, fifty-foot STOP sign—pieced together from hundreds of small, square mirrors, their surfaces polished and silvered to perfection, their edges butted together as tightly as bathroom tiles. And the immense “building” reflected at the center of the mirror was actually a suitcase-size metal box—an electronic detector—suspended in front of the mirror, at its focal point.
The detector was magnified a thousandfold by the gigantic mirror, and as O’Malley entered the field of view, she, too, was magnified a thousandfold. Her head appeared the size of a Mount Rushmore president’s; the pores of her nose gaped like potholes in a battered Baltimore street; her chin sported a rogue whisker as thick as a tree trunk. Christ, she thought, like I need the world’s biggest makeup mirror to see my flaws. She already saw her imperfections at high magnification, unceasingly and unrelentingly. What was it David had said years before, when he’d leaped from the roller-coaster car of their brief marriage? “If you liked yourself even half as much as I did, we could’ve been epic.” David was a bit of a wimp—more sensitive than any woman O’Malley knew, or at least more sensitive than any woman she liked—but he was right about the ruthlessness of her self-critical gaze; she saw that flaw, too, of course, as clearly as she now beheld the whisker in her chin, seemingly thick enough to call out for a chain saw. “A pause for reflection,” she announced wryly, and then—holding her vast head motionless in the mirror—she plucked the giant whisker with gargantuan fingers, giving the world’s biggest wince as her mammoth mouth squawked “Ow.”
Now that the Eye had morphed—from cosmic miracle to tool of the trade—her logic circuits rebooted. Even aside from its immensity, the Eye was unlike any telescope she had ever seen. It was a reflecting telescope, obviously, but there was virtually nothing to it except for the huge, segmented mirror, plus one slender, curved arm supporting the detector at the focal point. Framing either side of the mirror, so delicate as to be nearly invisible, was a web of cables, trusses, and pulleys—the motorized mechanism used to control the mirror’s movements, angling it toward this exploding supernova or that imploding galaxy.
The wind gusted and the eerie, ethereal moan intensified, and O’Malley realized that the haunting music came from the telescope’s cables, singing in the wind like the rigging of a ship. As she walked around, studying the setup, she noticed another mirror—an identical twin—perched on the hillside a hundred yards away. She smiled. God, it seemed, was no one-eyed Cyclops after all; God had binocular vision. And God’s binocular vision, she deduced, was X-ray vision: these must be MAGIC-I and MAGIC-II, the observatory’s pair of X-ray telescopes, designed to study not stars and planets but pulses and bursts of invisible energy from deep in the cosmos.
As she drew near the instrument’s base, she spotted an information plaque, from which she learned that the telescopes had a tragic history. When MAGIC-II was finished—the very night before the ribbon-cutting ceremony, in fact—the astrophysicist who had designed the instruments fell to his death from a scaffold, where he’d been putting on the finishing touches in the darkness. Perhaps the haunting sound was more than just wind and wires after all; maybe the massive telescopes were lamenting their dead creator. Or perhaps he himself was shrieking, his falling scream forever caught in the wires.
Glancing westward, O’Malley noticed the sun sinking toward the ocean of clouds, and she realized she’d better hurry if she wanted to get checked in, unpacked, and acquainted with her assigned telescope before dark. She turned downslope and began picking her way back toward the Toyota.
Just then another car topped the grade and rounded the crater’s rim. The driver glanced up at O’Malley, and then the woman’s head jerked and her mouth gaped as she, too, beheld the Eye in astonished confusion.
Fresh from the disorienting sight herself, O’Malley smiled. But her amusement was short-lived. “Hey,” she yelled as the car hurtled directly toward her own. “Look out! Look—” Metal crunched and plastic shattered as the new arrival rear-ended O’Malley’s car full tilt, without so much as a token tap on the brakes. The tiny Yaris lurched and, with a metallic snap, jumped out of gear. As O’Malley watched in frozen horror, her car ricocheted forward, rolling along the road’s narrow shoulder and then angling off the edge and jouncing down the volcano’s flank—moving slowly at first, then faster and faster, like some bad-karma illustration of Newton’s law of gravity. It sailed off the cliff and cartwheeled into the sea of clouds, taking with it O’Malley’s clothes, her books, her laptop—everything except the few essentials zipped into the pack that was clipped to her waist. After a long, quiet pause—even the wind and the eerie moaning seemed to stop to listen—she heard a distant but telltale sploosh!
O’Malley stared at the tiny hole the car had punched in the vapor. “Well, shit,” she said, turning to address the all-seeing, unblinking Eye of God. “I guess I should’ve gotten the comprehensive coverage after all.”
I: THE DRAGON BOWL
CHAPTER 1
Isaac Newton Telescope
Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos
La Palma
Nice butt, thought O’Malley as the Spaniard sauntered away, his snug, faded jeans luminous in the glow from the telescope’s control console.
The Spaniard—Iñigo Rodriguez—was O’Malley’s liaison at the observatory: her host, guide, mentor, telescope technician, and new fantasy object, all rolled into one.
Iñigo turned and looked back over his shoulder. The shoulder, outlined beneath a tight sweater, was also nice—muscled, but not so big as to be beefy. His hair, black and wavy, fell almost to the knitted collar. “If you have a problem, just call me.”
“I will, thanks” was what she said. But what she thought was My problem is it’s been forever since I’ve gotten laid. Can you help me with that, Señor Iñigo? Suddenly she had a naughty thought. Or should I say . . . Señor In-ya-go? She sighed and rolled her eyes. Focus, O’Malley.
She redirected her attention to the control console of the instrument, the Isaac Newton Telescope. The INT was much older and far smaller than MAGIC, the immense pair of exposed X-ray telescopes perched on the slope a half mile away. With a diameter of eight feet, the INT’s concave mirror was modest by twenty-first-century standards—a fraction the size of the biggest optical telescopes here on La Palma or at the world’s other top observatories. Still, if Galileo could discover the moons of Jupiter with a handheld spyglass, she could make her astronomical mark with the INT. If she looked in the right place, and if the planets—the known ones and the unknown—aligned for her.
She entered a set of coordinates into the control console, pivoting the telescope toward a cluster of stars directly overhead. As of yet, no one had succeeded in spotting O’Malley’s quarry, provisionally named Planet Nine; its existence had only recently been inferred from slight irregularities in the orbits of the other outer planets. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune all wobbled slightly, as if something—something distant but massive—was tugging on them from the outer dark. Whoever first found and photographed that something would have naming rights, as well as a lasting place in astronomical history, so O’Malley was doubly eager to be that person.
She pulled an oversize, borrowed jacket around her shoulders—a guilty loan from the woman who had sent her car off the cliff. The woman had also given her a ride the rest of the way to the observatory, where she, too, was heading: not an astronomer, she’d explained, but a friend of an astronomer. O’Malley had accepted the coat with more grace and gratitude than she had accepted the woman’s apology. It was a challenge to be gracious when all of her warm clothes, toiletries, and even her precious laptop lay submerged beneath the sea cliff.
Zipping the coat against the chill, she turned to the teles
cope’s control panel. She was here; that was what mattered. The quest, the prospect of being the one to find Planet Nine, was enough to make up for the loss. Almost.
But her excitement didn’t last long. Ninety minutes later, the rush—even the memory of the rush—evaporated. “Shit,” O’Malley said to herself, or to the telescope, or to the heavens. It had taken a solid hour to get the telescope trained on the speck of sky she was searching. Then, just when she’d locked onto it and programmed in a series of overlapping time exposures with the telescope’s camera, something had jarred the scope, jolting its gaze toward an entirely different speck of sky somewhere to the south. Now she’d have to start all over again. “Shit,” she repeated. “Shit shit shit.” An hour’s work—an hour’s telescope time, of which she had precious little—down the drain, all because of . . . what? Grit in the telescope’s bearings? A slamming door somewhere in the observatory? A powerful thunderclap? No, not thunder, she thought. I’d’ve heard thunder. Besides, the sky’s clear as a bell.
It was entirely possible that this new, randomly revealed sliver of sky was full of signs and wonders—incipient supernovae, binary stars, the birth of new galaxies—spectacular stellar phenomena, far grander than the dark sphere whose cold and lonely existence she was hoping to confirm. But planet hunting was what she was here for; it was all she was here for; it was what she’d spent the past year preparing for and proposing and pleading for the chance to do.
“Iñigo?” She called into the darkness and waited for a response, but got none. “Iñigo!” Where the hell was the handsome tech? Earlier, when she’d checked in to her cubicle-size room in the Residencia, he’d been impossible to shake, despite multiple hints. He’d hovered, making small talk—chatting about the island, the observatory, the World Cup—when all she’d wanted to do was shower and wash her underwear—the only pair she had now, the pair she’d been wearing for thirty hours straight. Was that too much to ask? Ten minutes of hot water and five minutes with the blow-dryer? And now, when she actually needed him, he was nowhere to be found. “Iñigo, help!”
Wave of Terror Page 1
