Extinction Countdown (Ancient Origins Series Book 2)

by James D. Prescott

  “These aren’t sticks,” Jack said, noticing their unusual shape. “They’re bones.”

  Chapter 42

  Washington, D.C.

  “This is turning into one hell of a day,” Kay said, blowing a curl of rebellious hair out of her face. “Please tell me you found something.”

  Lucas’ embarrassed expression was not a promising sign. “Cracking the laptop’s password was a snap. I used a plain old vanilla ripper program.”

  Kay crossed her arms. “Why do I sense a big, fat ‘but’ coming?”

  Lucas’ eyes traced down to Kay’s waist. “If what I found is anything to go by, a big fat butt isn’t your problem. This is.” He swung the laptop around. On the screen was the frozen opening frame of a video. Lucas clicked the play button and proceeded to roll his eyes up and stick his tongue in the side of his cheek, mimicking someone minding their own business.

  Right away, something about the video was making her uneasy. For starters, it had not been properly edited. Through shaky camera motions, she watched a woman entering a hotel room to meet a middle-aged, muscular man in a light suit. Within seconds, they were locked in an intimate embrace. They tore off each other’s clothes with lust-filled abandon and proceeded to engage in a whole range of perverse and demeaning sexual acts. As the man ripped away what remained of the woman’s clothes, Kay saw her own face and gasped, her hand flying up instinctively to cover her mouth.

  “It’s you,” Lucas said, with noticeable surprise. “Is this why you had me crack the laptop, to destroy a batch of poorly shot revenge porn?”

  Kay’s jaw was moving but only the tiniest squeak was coming out. She clicked back a few seconds and watched over and over the part where her face was revealed.

  “This isn’t me,” she pleaded, bony fingers dancing along her scalp.

  Lucas’ eyes dropped to some imperceptible spot on the desk between them. “Listen, I’m not here to judge. What you do in your spare time…”

  “I’m telling you,” she cried out, her hands balled into fists. “That woman may look like me, but I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  “What about when you were kidnapped? Do you think it’s possible…” He held back, trying to be delicate, but what he was suggesting was not making any sense. “That you were drugged and made to perform in a sick pornographic film?”

  Screams of pleasure and pain echoed up from the laptop. She showed him the pictures she’d found in that sick bastard’s manila folder. In each of them, she was unconscious. In a handful of others, her eyes had been kept open with strips of medical tape. He flipped through the still shots as she skipped forward in the video, a look of shock and nausea plastered on her normally serene features. Then, somewhere within the last two minutes, the scene seemed to end and the man controlling the camera departed the hotel room. The camera followed him, only to emerge within the warehouse on Kendal Street in Ivy City. The same one she had visited the other day.

  “It’s a movie set,” she said, a wave of relief washing over her. “See, it isn’t me, it’s an actress.”

  They both watched, but you could only see her from the back, dressed in a robe, before she disappeared through a metal door.

  “I believe you,” Lucas said, “really I do. But I’m not sure anyone else will. For all intents and purposes it’s you. So what’s the point of all this? Someone trying to extort you?”

  “No,” Kay said, nibbling on her lower lip. “Not extort. They’re trying to shut me up. I’m getting the distinct impression that nothing is as it seems and the closer I get to the truth, the more nervous these guys become.”

  Chapter 43

  Greenland

  Before long, Jack discovered the underground tunnel had served more than one purpose. Like the catacombs beneath Rome and Paris, shelves had been cut into a hard metamorphic rock called gneiss to hold the city’s dead. Unfortunately, most of what they found there had turned to dust ages ago. But at some point, hundreds, perhaps thousands of residents had descended into this creepy subterranean labyrinth in search of shelter from the world above. Had it been to escape the firestorm from the impact sixty-five million years ago? The walls still bore some of the strange, ghostly etchings they’d carved into the rock. One of the images resembled a flower, drawn by the unsteady hand of a child.

  During World War II, the London Tube had served a similar purpose. But unlike in the Tube, it seemed nearly all of those gathered here had perished. The floor was a mix of rock and soil and heaps of fossilized bone.

  “This tunnel system heads north for quite a ways,” Mullins said, returning from a brief scouting expedition. “I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point it leads straight to the pyramid.”

  “If not,” Jack said, “we may still be able to pop up behind the Israeli soldiers and take them by surprise.”

  Mullins turned to Gabby, whose eyes were starting to open. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Right now I see two of you,” she replied, her fingers feeling a gash on the side of her head. “Does that answer your question?”

  Jack and Mullins began helping the others descend.

  No sooner had he landed then Dag rushed over and began studying the bones. “I swear I’ve seen a femur just like this before. It must be twenty-four inches long. Six inches longer than the average male femur.”

  “It’s not human, that’s for sure,” Grant said, setting down his cases and peering over Dag’s shoulder.

  “The alien colony theory is officially debunked,” Dag said, winking at Jack. “My guess is these people or creatures or whatever you wanna call them looked a hell of a lot like the large statue we found in the temple.” Dag drew up a picture he’d taken with his glasses and held up the femur to compare.

  “Try projecting the image,” Jack suggested. “Increase the ratio until it’s the same size as the bone and then place it inside the hologram, see if it fits.”

  “I’ve seen them do that in crime shows,” Tamura said. “You know, where they find a skull and then overlap a picture of the person and an image of the skull to see if the features line up.”

  “Yeah, they seem to.”

  “But here’s the million-dollar question,” Gabby said, rising off the ground with Jack’s help. “What are the odds you can find enough DNA for Grant to sequence?”

  “Slim, I’d wager,” Rajesh admitted, eyeing the bone with disgust.

  Dag shook his head. “That’s what paleontologist Mary Schweitzer thought too until she cracked open a T. rex bone back in 2005 and found blood vessels and soft tissues still inside.”

  “Hold the boat,” Grant shouted, returning from out of the darkness with a skull. It looked about ten to fifteen percent bigger than a human skull with a protruding mandible. The brow ridge was swept back over a large brain cavity. Its mouth featured two pairs of upper and lower canines, along with large incisors and several sets of flattened molars. “The teeth are an unusual mix of carnivore and omnivore. Which is strange because my first impression was that we were looking at the skull of a wolf.”

  “But Dr. Holland,” Rajesh said, “what you’re holding hardly looks like a wolf at all.”

  “Yeah,” Mullins chimed in. “I’m no scientist, but I grew up on a farm and I’ve seen my fair share of dead dogs and coyotes and I can tell you with certainty this isn’t either of those.”

  “Perhaps not now,” Grant said, shifting the skull in the light. “What we’re seeing here might be the product of millions of years of evolution.”

  “So you think a civilization of wolf people lived here,” Eugene said, mockingly.

  “I’m not saying anything,” Grant objected. “I’m simply attempting to understand who or what this skull might have belonged to in life.”

  “May I see that, Dr. Holland?” Anna asked, her metallic arms outstretched.

  “Be my guest.”

  She flipped it over in her hands. “For a creature to transition from wolf to this would take an enormous number of morphologica
l changes,” she told them.

  “How many, would you say?” Jack asked her.

  “Approximately one hundred and twenty-five thousand.”

  “Over what period of time?”

  Anna’s eyes flickered. “That is more difficult to say, given it is impossible to know the precise conditions in which the creature evolved.” Jack gave her a look. “My best guess is seventy-five to a hundred million years, give or take a few million.”

  “Well, that pretty much narrows it down,” Dag said, clapping his hands together.

  “There is one other program I may be able to apply,” Anna said. “If Dr. Holland’s assertion that this specimen was descended from the Canidae family tree—that is to say, dog-like mammals—is correct, then I may be able to extrapolate from existing data in order to put some flesh on the bone.”

  A scanning laser shot out from a spot above Anna’s forehead, passing over each of the skull’s features. A moment later, she fed an image into their glasses.

  The furry face staring back at them was stunning in its humanity. Large dark eyes, a swept-back forehead and a protruding nose and mouth.

  “It sorta looks like a werewolf,” Dag said, impulsively.

  “The brain cavity appears to be much larger than the wolves we know today,” Jack observed, marveling at what he was seeing.

  “They appear to have had bigger brains than we do,” Grant said.

  “Dr. Holland is correct,” Anna told them. “The average human brain cavity measures approximately eleven hundred to thirteen hundred cubic centimeters, while the skull I am holding is one thousand four hundred and twenty-five cubic centimeters.”

  “So they weren’t just hairy,” Gabby said. “They were also smart.”

  “Please keep in mind, Dr. Bishop,” Anna added quickly, “the visual I provided was only an estimate.”

  Jack cleared his throat. “If the head on the statue in the temple hadn’t been broken, we wouldn’t need to guess. Take a few of those bones with you for testing,” Jack suggested, “but hurry up. We’re running out of time.”

  Chapter 44

  Washington, D.C.

  Kay was on her way to her parents’ place when the call from Ron Lewis came through. Kay put him on speaker and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat.

  “There’s been a major policy shift at the White House and I want you to cover it,” he told her, his voice rough from years of foreign cigarettes and barking at young reporters.

  “I’m kinda in the middle of something big right now, Ron.”

  “Bigger than President Myers scrapping the underground bunker plan and deciding to fire a dozen nuclear missiles at that incoming alien ship? We’re in talks with his people to do a one-on-one sitdown. Tell me it’s bigger than that. I have a dozen reporters foaming at the mouth to grab hold of this one.”

  “Wait a sec. Didn’t he promise to uphold President Taylor’s bunker plan?”

  “That’s why I want you on it,” he shouted. “With that rabbit you pulled out of your ass, you’re up for a Pulitzer. You pretty much rocketed the Secretary of Defense all the way to the presidency. At the very least he owes you a one-hour sit-down.”

  Kay felt herself being wrenched in a million different directions at once. “Listen, something’s come to light about my source inside the White House. It’s something I need to look into.”

  “So you’re turning down an interview with the president?” Understandably, Ron sounded like a man having trouble giving away a bag of money.

  Kay bit her lip hard enough to draw blood. “Give it to one of the foamers,” she said at last, feeling all the air go out of her body at once.

  “If you say so,” Ron said, disappointment oozing off of his every word. “I’ll assume whatever you got going on, it’s big.”

  “Not big,” she said, before hanging up. “It’s huge.”

  Kay spent the next several seconds beating the steering wheel before Lucas called. Her already pounding heart sped up a little faster. “Tell me you destroyed that video and fried the hard drive,” she said, turning on her indicator and sliding into the right-hand lane.

  “Darling, that nasty video was nuked before you reached the elevator. That isn’t why I’m calling. After we were done, I kept snooping through this guy’s computer and found a program you might find interesting.”

  “I’m listening.”

  Just then a text came through from her dad.

  Cannot wait to see you! I made white bean chili, your favorite.

  “It’s a program called Face2face. It’s one of those Hollywood special effects things. That must be how they inserted you in the video.”

  Kay gripped the wheel, feeling bile rise up into her throat.

  “If this isn’t revenge porn,” Lucas said, “then someone really wants to blackmail you.”

  “No shit. And I’m not the only one. Did you find any social media activity on the laptop by any chance?”

  “Nothing.”

  That struck Kay as strange. “Not even a Facebook account?”

  “Uh-huh, nada.”

  Thinking, she tapped her right leg. That was when her phone pinged. A highlight dropped down from the top of the screen. All she saw was the moniker Laydeezman.

  “Lucas, let me call you back.” She hung up.

  She veered off the highway the first chance she got and pulled into the parking lot of a Grubb’s Pharmacy. She glanced down at the message.

  There’s something I would like to show you.

  Kay hesitated, her fingers hovering over her phone’s keypad.

  “I have the video you made. It’s been destroyed.”

  What video?

  “Stop playing games.”

  You mean this video?

  An attachment popped up.

  Kay felt hot blood rush up her neck and into her cheeks.

  I’m glad you pulled over. It isn’t safe to text and drive.

  Her face felt like a full-blown volcano. How was it possible he could see her? Jerking in the driver’s seat, Kay spun to see who might be watching her. One other car was in the parking lot. A few others passed by on the street. Her eyes tilted upward and found the traffic camera. A moment later, her gaze settled on her phone and the camera there as well. He could be watching her from any one of these, she thought, her stomach roiling. Or maybe all of them.

  With shaking fingers she clicked the attachment. A video began. It was the same one from the laptop, except this version was properly edited and even more graphic. Thick salty tears built up behind her closed eyelids.

  “What do you want from me? You sick bastard. I know about Hollerman and the little list of names you were compiling. And I know about your twisted organization and what you did to JFK.”

  Reputations are so easily tarnished in this day and age, Laydeezman replied, seeming to ignore her taunts. And here’s the most fascinating part. Even with the world in such a deep state of panic and fear, people still have time to read the gossip columns. It would be so terribly awkward having to explain to Ron Lewis and the rest of the staff at the Post how a graphic sex tape with you on it is circulating all over the Internet.

  “Back off or else, is that what you’re saying?”

  Such a quick study. I’m not surprised Trish Han saw you as a threat and tried to keep you beneath her all these years.

  “If you want me quiet? I’ll do it, but on two conditions.”

  A beat passed. I’m listening.

  “First, you destroy all copies of this disgusting tape for good. And second, you’ll agree to meet me face to face.”

  My apologies. Somehow I gave you the impression I was an idiot.

  “I’m not kidding,” Kay snapped back, her fingers flickering over the keyboard. “Meet with me, face to face. No more tricks. No cops. No traps. Just you and I. You do that and I’ll drop the investigation.” Her chest felt like it was about to explode.

  The pause which followed felt to Kay like an eternity.

  Then at
last, two final messages.

  38.9099°N 76.9917°W

  Tomorrow night. 11 P.M. Come alone or I guarantee, you’ll have more than some dirty little video to worry about.

  Chapter 45

  Greenland

  The team beat a path through the ancient crypt. Here and there, they ran into sections where the walls or ceilings had collapsed, forcing them to stop and clear enough space to pass. And yet the closer they drew to the pyramid’s base, the more bones they began to see. It was starting to look as though at some point near the end, a full-blown panic had set in, with thousands of bodies in tight quarters all pushing in the same direction. But to what?

  It was Jack’s turn to take point when he spotted another break in the tunnel ceiling up ahead. There was no telling yet whether they would be able to squeeze by, but the chunks of ice mixed in with the collapsed stonework made it clear what had happened.

  “If there’s a way to climb out,” Mullins suggested, “then we should look around and make sure we’re heading in the right direction.”

  Jack stopped. “Do you think that’s such a good idea? What if someone sees you and they follow us down here? We’re liable to die with our backs to a cave-in.”

  “Plus,” Eugene added, “down here we’re safe from ambushes and falling ice bombs.”

  Jack motioned to the collapse up ahead. “Safer, maybe, but definitely not safe.”

  “You may think you’re in charge, Jack,” Mullins fired back, his tongue spiked with venom. “But I should remind you, this is a military operation.”

  “If we listened to you, we’d still be up top, imprisoned by the Russians and little more than collateral damage in Stark’s attempts to liberate the facility. Speaking of that”—Jack turned to Anna—“I know we’re even further underground, but are you able to send a message topside?”

  “I may,” Anna said, doubtful. “What would you like to say?”

  “Let Admiral Stark know we’re still alive and heading toward the source of the blast wave. If the Russians are still in charge up there, it won’t matter since there’s a good chance they know we’re down here anyway.”