Strokk blinked out of the flashback, breathing deeply, staring at his sister, who had put on her headphones and continued monitoring the camp. He fixed his headphones back over his ears and listened to the distant conversation, but mixed with the small talk he could still hear the Afghan women, shouting, laughing, cursing him.
Antonio Strokk knew he would continue to hear their voices until the day he died.
Chapter Thirteen
001101
1
December 16, 1999
Cameron Slater had always been fascinated by ancient history. From an early age he had dreamed of becoming an archaeologist, losing himself in the history of a place, peeling back the layers of time, searching, digging, piecing together the ancient past, bringing back the legacy of past civilizations, saving the work of generation upon generation. His passion had driven him through school in UCLA, in Stanford, in Georgia Tech, earning degree after degree, slowly becoming an authority in the subject, traveling to distant places in search of the past, probing beyond the surface, formulating his own theories, however controversial and unconventional they may have seemed.
Cameron Slater was a diffusionist, believing that the ancient world was quite intercultural, cross-pollinated, with distant civilizations having been in contact at some point in their pasts. He had found evidence of this claim everywhere he had looked, in the graceful lotus motifs decorating the necks of Incan vessels, found not only on the frieze of the Great Ball Court at the Mayan city of Chickén Itzá, but also adorning the towering granite columns at Karnak, Egypt. Cameron had also found evidence in Mayan structures built in the shape of the Egyptian letter M, called ma, signifying country, the universe. In the practice of mummification, originating in Egypt, diffusing throughout the world, through India, Indochina, Polynesia, and the Americas. In the Egyptian god Horus showing a remarkable resemblance to Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent of ancient Mexico. In their daily lives, sharing passions for similar entertainment, like wrestling, phallic cults, respect for dwarfs, and building stepped pyramids. From linguistic parallels to burying rituals. Where Egyptians placed small strips of papyrus in burials, the Aztecs included a lot of paper with their dead. Or the bearded Phoenician oarsmen carved on a 700 B.C. relief, striking an incredible resemblance to a pre-Columbian incense burner discovered in Guatemala. And the list went on and on, the parallels unending, mind-boggling, challenging, but also evident, undeniable.
Cameron Slater gazed at the dark temple, across the moonlit cenote, remembering his trips, his excursions, the mountains of Peru, the jungles of Venezuela, the mangroves of Guyana, inhospitable to all but those who had chosen to learn to live from the land. He remembered the primitive expeditions, the intense heat, the mixed rewards of sweet successes and the heartbreaking disappointments of failed excursions. He recalled the villages, the natives, their customs, their dances, their hospitality. His mind traveled back to his earlier archaeological days, the romance of the field drawing him with savage power, controlling his will, blocking out the outside world, just as it did tonight, possessing him with intoxicating force.
He had found a unique site, a virgin location, untouched by outsiders for millennia, surviving so many waves of invaders, of destruction, of subjugation. Cameron Slater took in the magnificent sight, the ornate roofs, the corbel arches, the geometrically perfect pyramid. He listened to the sound of the night, mixed with the incessant clicking of Susan’s laptop as she put the finishing touches to her search routine.
Susan Garnett.
Cameron wasn’t sure why he felt so attracted to this stranger. An attraction that went well beyond the short-lived relationships with females in the archaeological circle, or the occasional adventure with locals during an expedition, like the daughter of the coffee merchant in Venezuela, the adventurous sister of his Peruvian mountain guide, or that unforgettable dancer outside Brasília, who taught him a thing or two about the most ancient of human pleasures.
Perhaps he should just keep it professional to make it easy for him to walk away when this was over. Cameron Slater, world traveler, noted author, distinguished speaker, had never entertained the notion of being tied down, of belonging to someone. His life had always revolved around archaeology, around his work. Even his own brownstone in Georgetown was nothing more than an extension of his office, a base of operations, easily moved to another school if the right grant came through for the right research project. In the twenty years since obtaining his Ph.D., Cameron had moved dozens of times, from the East Coast to the West, and back to the East Coast, and many places in between, living the nomad life of a modern archaeologist, living out of a suitcase, always going where the field research of the moment was, where the grants sent him, sometimes for months at a time, without having to pick up the phone and explain his sudden decision to anyone.
So what makes you so special? He thought, shooting Susan Garnett—busily tapping the keyboard of her laptop—a puzzled look.
God, she’s lovely.
He looked at all of her, under the moonlight, at her delicate arms, bent at the elbows, long fingers tapping the keys with that familiar comfort that came from repetition. A thin neck, fine features, captivating hazel eyes that drew him in every time she locked them on him. And that smile, honest, welcoming, yet mysterious, with a secret past, which only kindled his feelings.
Inhaling deeply, Cameron shook his head, looking away, trying to let it go, forcing the Brazilian dancer into his mind, remembering her glistening body, soaked from swimming in jungle pools, cool water dripping onto him. Let it go, Slater. You won’t be able to give her the time.
Just let it go.
2
The electromagnetic meter on her screen began to move a few seconds before the event, almost imperceptibly, but strong enough for Susan Garnett to notice. The bars in the upper frequency range stirred into life, reaching the two-decibel level.
She had wondered if her system would freeze, and now she realized that it would not, perhaps because she stood in the center of this celestial force, like in the tranquil eye of a hurricane, safe from the storm, isolated from the winds, but still very much within the path of the virus.
Cameron Slater sat next to her, by the edge of the cenote, the gray light from an orange moon high in the sky casting a wan glow across the site, mixing with the off-white glow of her screen. Lobo stood behind them, peering at the screen over their shoulders.
The digital counter on her system kicked in, marking the start of the event, due to last fourteen seconds. EM activity flurried, particularly in the upper frequencies. The bar identifying frequencies between 900 MHz and 1 GHz peaked at the 20 dB mark. She noticed no changes in temperature or humidity. The hard drive in her system whirled, downloading a digital image of the EM noise, sampled once every millisecond, creating a huge file of binary code fourteen million lines long and largely reflecting the upper end of the selected frequency spectrum.
As the event ended, right before the EM activity vanished, the entire frequency spectrum bounced up to the 20 dB mark for a fraction of a second.
“Let’s see what we’ve got.” She worked the keyboard, pulling up the binary file. Rows and rows of ones and zeroes filled her screen.
She activated her custom disassembler in an attempt to translate the huge binary file into assembly code.
The screen changed to:
“Great,” she said, hitting N before looking at Cameron. “My disassembler doesn’t recognize it. Let me try something else.”
Susan remote-logged in to the FBI network using the Navy’s dedicated satellite link and followed the path of the Sniffers, which, as on previous nights, had converged on the Hughes satellite and down to her current location. She launched her custom petri dish software to dissect the virus captured tonight by her software cocoons.
Susan reviewed the first six iterations of the mutation sequence of this virus, quite similar to the ones she had seen in previous days, with every replication showing a completely different si
gnature.
“Nothing different here,” she said more to herself than to her small audience. In addition to Cameron and Lobo, two SEALs also watched her work the system.
She ran her software against the main body of tonight’s captured virus.
“It’s all the same as before,” she said, shaking her head. “Only seven percent can be disassembled. The same damned seven percent that I’ve been looking at for the past five days!”
She did a sanity check anyway, pulling up each of the disassembled sections, finding the daily counter, which triggered the activation of the virus at the exact same time every day, with a daily adjustment to compensate for the decreasing duration of each event as the virus counted down to the end of the millennium. She reviewed the section managing the duration of the daily freezes and watched in disappointment as the routine that defined the event to take place at one A.M. GMT on January first remained undecoded.
She brushed back her damp hair. Humidity levels had reached eighty-two percent. Susan began to get concerned about the reliability of her system in such a moist environment. If the humidity reached the inner workings of her laptop, it could short circuit something, killing her work.
She chose to keep going until it reached eighty-five percent. Then she would shut everything off and wait until the morning sun burned off the haze.
Lobo and the other SEALs lost interest and walked away. Cameron remained by her side.
“Got to hurry,” she said, going on to explain the incompatibility of high humidity and electronics while she continued tapping keys.
Susan compared the undecoded routine from tonight’s virus with that of the previous days, finding that it had not changed. All ones and zeroes were in the exact same location. She performed a multiple DIFF between tonight’s virus with that from the previous nights, finding that once again, 260 bytes did not match with any of the previous viruses.
“Odd,” said Cameron, leaning forward. “So within the virus released each night there are 260 independent bytes?”
“I think I forgot to mention that. Why?”
“Well, the Maya had two calendars. I told you about the Long Count calendar, which is based on solar movement, like our Gregorian calendar. But there’s also a religious Calendar, which had thirteen 20-day months, or 260 days.”
Susan sat sideways to him. “That is odd. Do you think there’s a clue somewhere in there that might help us decode it?”
“How many of these independent binary segments do you have?”
“The events started on the eleventh, but my cocoons didn’t go into effect until the twelfth, which means I have five, including tonight’s.”
They spent a few minutes reviewing the strings on the screen, but nothing seemed obvious. Then Susan noticed the humidity level rising to eighty-five percent.
“That’s as much as I want to push the hardware,” she said, powering down the system.
He helped her put away the high-tech gear in waterproof hard cases, leaving out only the solar-cell electric generator to begin charging the batteries at first light.
They sat side by side looking at the stars. By then all the SEALs were sleeping, save for the two on guard duty. They stood in between the small temple and the courtyard, covering both entrances to the site from a safe distance.
Moonlight continued to glow, casting a gentle shine on the polished limestone. The resonance of the site echoed the distant howling of monkeys and the chirping of birds in a rain forest serenade that changed pitch according to the gentle breeze blowing down from the mountains to the south.
“Sounds beautiful,” she said.
“The Maya used their skills to build objects not just of architectural beauty, but also of harmony with the land. This place abounds with harmony. It flows with a hidden, yet powerful energy that emanates from the very stone used to build it, from the arrangement of buildings around a cenote, simple but with amazing resonance to capture the natural sounds of their jungle, to make it a part of the jungle. In our societies we want to delineate between civilization and the wild. We have concrete and we have grass, skyscrapers and parks, parking lots and meadows. We always like to polarize, to divide, to set up boundaries. The Maya believed otherwise, carrying their fenceless concept to other senses, like these natural sounds bouncing off the limestone that also came from the same jungle, like the sweet smell of the orchids growing out of those magnificent ceibas, like the way light bounces off the structures, reflecting it to the surrounding vegetation, providing unity to their world.”
Susan remained quiet, wondering about a man who could see so much, who could articulate such thought-provoking words, just as he had done the night she’d met him, letting her inside his mind so naturally, without dominance, in the same manner with which he had been looking at her in the past two days, never obvious, never intrusive, yet always courteous, respectful, oftentimes out of his peripheral vision, even as he regarded the stars beyond the circular opening in the trees.
She interlaced her fingers while hugging her knees, glancing at her fingernails, suddenly wishing they were better cared for, perhaps with just a little polish. Susan narrowed her eyes at the thought. Until now the shape of her fingernails had not mattered.
Cameron pulled out the pack of Camels and leaned it in her direction. “One is not going to kill you.”
Susan regarded him strangely. “How did you know I—”
“The way you looked at me when I used one for the ticks. The way you handled it when I gave it to you to burn the ticks off of your other leg after you got uncomfortable.”
She pulled one and held it between her index and middle fingers, the filter brushing against her lips. Cameron produced a lighter and extended it toward her while lighting it with a single flick of his thumb, holding the flame steadily in front of her. She leaned forward, her fingers brushing the side of his hand, drawing with forgotten pleasure. Then she watched him light one for himself, automatically cupping the cigarette with one hand while holding the lighter in the other, the pulsating flame showering his rugged features with yellow light. He did this with the same fluidity that she had observed earlier, when he had studied the glyphs, or when he had saved that soldier from a horrible death. Who was this man, who made her feel so secure, so comfortable? Who would risk his life to save another’s without hesitation one instant, and the next would notice little things, like the expression on her face when he had pulled out the pack of Camels the day before, or the way her fingers handled the cigarette?
“It’s been a very long time,” she said, filling her lungs, holding it, slowly releasing it.
“I know.”
She turned to him. He had not said how long has it been? Or, why did you quit? He had said I know. He was reading her once more, understanding just by the way she acted that it had been a very long time since she had smoked. “Why do I get the feeling that I can’t really keep secrets from you?”
“I hope you don’t find that intrusive.”
She continued to regard him with intrigue. “I don’t find anything you do intrusive.”
3
Ishiguro Nakamura disassembled a six-inch telescope on a large boulder breaking the dense vegetation, where they had decided to spend the night. Jackie had set up her instruments next to him, including a microwave receiver that scanned the same frequencies as their radio telescope back at Cerro Tolo, but lacking an astronomical range. According to their calculations, once they got beneath the celestial beam, they would not need anything but the receiver to pick up the transmission.
The petite Japanese-American woman unplugged her battery-operated equipment and carefully stored them in waterproof containers before stowing them away in their oversize backpacks, disappointment hardening her soft features.
“We’ll be there tomorrow night,” Ishiguro said reassuringly.
Jackie continued to frown, admonishing eyes turning to Kuoshi Honichi, peacefully snoring inside his sleeping bag. The corporate liaison had twisted his ankle just a
half hour after leaving the riverbank, slowing down their progress to a crawl as the muscular Porfirio had to help him walk while Jackie navigated and Ishiguro hauled both Kuoshi’s and his own backpacks. Ishiguro had wanted the guides to take him back to the boat, but the obstinate junior executive would not hear of it, demanding that if he didn’t come along, the mission would have to be canceled.
“Why is he here anyway?” she said, crossing her arms and pouting.
Ishiguro wrapped his arms around her. She continued to hug herself but did rest her head on his shoulder. “There’s no reason for him being here,” she added. “And I don’t understand why you let him stay. We usually don’t let him get away with this crap back in Chile.”
“He’s armed,” Ishiguro whispered. “That’s why I didn’t just order the guides to take him back to the boat.”
Jackie made a face, glancing back at the short, lanky, and nerdy specimen of a man. “Armed? Are you serious?”
“A pistol. I first spotted it on him in the boat, and again when we had to wade through the mangrove after leaving the boat.”
She tilted her head. “I guess it is not a bad idea out here. Who knows what we will encounter. I’m just surprised that he has one. He just doesn’t fit the type.”
“I get the feeling that our corporate liaison may be something more than just a plain corporate liaison.”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “He’s a royal pain in the ass. The little bastard can’t even pull his own fucking weight.”
“Now, now,” Ishiguro said, rubbing a hand against her back. “That language is unbecoming of an eminent astronomer like yourself, discoverer of the first confirmed message from outer space.”
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