“I have no idea. At this point, it has yet to be determined if the mummified bodies found in the cavern are even Native Americans.”
At Painter’s side, the physics professor cleared his throat. “Hank, tell him about the carbon-14 dating of the remains.”
Painter’s gaze shifted from one professor to the other.
When Kanosh was slow to answer, Professor Denton spoke in a rush, impatient and excited. “The archaeology department dated the bodies to the early twelfth century. Well before any Europeans ever set foot in the New World.”
Painter didn’t understand the significance of this information or why Denton seemed so worked up about it. The dating simply lent credence to the fact that the bodies were Native American.
Denton reached to the table and slid the old dagger toward Painter. He remembered the physics professor gesturing with the same blade earlier.
“Take a closer look at this,” Denton said.
Painter took the knife and flipped it over in his hands. The hilt was yellowed bone, but the blade looked to be steel, with a handsome, almost watery sheen across its surface.
“The dagger was recovered from the cave,” Kanosh explained.
Painter looked up sharply.
“The local boy who escaped the chamber after the murder-suicide fled with this knife in hand. Afterward, we confiscated it from him, as it’s illegal to remove relics from an Indian burial site. But the unusual nature of the blade required further investigation.”
Painter understood. “Because Indians of that time didn’t have the technology to make steel.”
“That’s right,” Denton said, staring significantly at Kanosh. “Especially this type of steel.”
“What do you mean?” Painter asked.
Denton returned his focus to the dagger. “This is a rare form of steel, identifiable alone by its unusual wavy surface pattern. It’s known as Damascus steel. Such metal was forged only during the Middle Ages in a handful of foundries in the Middle East. Legendary swords made from this steel were prized above all others. It was said they held the sharpest edge and were all but unbreakable. Yet the exact method of their forging was kept secret and eventually lost sometime during the seventeenth century. All attempts to replicate it failed. Even today—while we can produce steel as hard, if not harder—we still can’t make Damascus steel.”
“Why’s that?”
Denton pointed to the towering electron microscope humming in the neighboring alcove. “To make sure my initial assessment was correct, I examined the steel at the molecular level. I was able to verify the presence of cementite nanowires and carbon nanotubes within the metal. Both are unique characteristics of Damascus steel and give the material its high resilience and toughness. Universities around the world have been studying samples of this steel, trying to figure out how it was made.”
Painter fought to make sense of this news. He was familiar with nanowires and nanotubes. Both were by-products of modern nanotechnology. Carbon nanotubes—artificially created cylinders of carbon atoms—demonstrated extraordinary strength and were already being incorporated in commercial products from crash helmets to body armor. Likewise, nanowires were long, single chains of atoms that showed unique electrical properties and promised coming breakthroughs in microelectronics and computer-chip development. Already the nanotech industry had grown into a multibillion-dollar industry and was continuing to expand at a blistering pace.
All of which raised a question in Painter’s mind. He pointed to the strange dagger. “Are you suggesting these medieval sword makers were capable of manipulating matter at the atomic level, that they’d cracked the nanotech code way back in the Middle Ages?”
Denton nodded. “Possibly. Or at least, someone knew something. Other traces of ancient nanotechnology have been found. Take, for example, the stained-glass windows found in medieval churches. Some of the ruby-colored glass in those old churches can’t be replicated today, and now we know why. Examination of the glass at the atomic level reveals the presence of gold nanospheres, whose creation still defies modern science. Other such examples have been discovered, too.”
Painter struggled to put this all together in his head. He picked up the knife. “If you’re right about all of this, how could this dagger be found here in America, buried among bodies dated to the twelfth century?”
He noted a shared glance between Denton and Kanosh. The Indian historian gave the smallest shake of his head toward the physicist. The man seemed anxious to say more, his face reddening with the effort to remain silent. Eventually he glanced away. Painter recalled the angry words he’d overheard as he entered the lab: This may be the very proof we’ve been looking for! Why are you so obstinate?
It seemed the two scientists had further speculations on the matter, but for the moment they were reluctant to share them with an outsider. Painter didn’t press the subject. He had a more immediate question to broach first.
Turning, he faced Kai. “So tell me more about the men who were hunting you. The ones in the helicopter. Why do you think they were trying to kill you?”
Kai seemed to shrink into herself. She glanced to the professor, who gave her a kindly nod of reassurance. When she spoke, there remained an edge of defiance in her voice.
“I think it’s because of what I stole,” she said. “From the burial cave.”
“Show him,” Kanosh said.
From inside her jacket, she slipped out two gold tablets, each about eight inches square and a quarter inch thick. One of the pair appeared to be freshly polished; the other remained coated in a black tarnish. Painter noted some writing inscribed on the surface of the plates.
Kanosh explained. “There appeared to be hundreds of such tablets in the cave, secured in stone boxes and wrapped in juniper bark. Kai stole three of the plates as she made her escape.”
“But there are only two here.”
“That’s right. She dropped one as she fled the cave, in full view of the cameras.”
Painter let that sink in. “You think someone saw it. And they came looking to see if she had more gold.”
“If it is gold,” the physics professor added.
Painter turned to Denton.
“Like the dagger, I examined one of the plates under the electron microscope. While the tablets appear gold in color, the metal is harder than it should be. Much harder. Normally, gold is a relatively soft, pliable metal, but these tablets are as hard as gemstones. Microscopic analysis of the metal revealed an unusually dense atomic structure, made up of macromolecular structures of gold atoms fitted tightly together like a jigsaw puzzle. And the whole matrix seems to be held in place by the same cementite nanowires found in the dagger.” He shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Their value is incalculable.”
“And apparently worth killing for,” Painter added.
With those words, the lights suddenly went out. Everyone froze, holding their breaths. A few battery-powered emergency signs glowed from the hallway, but cast little light into the laboratory. A low canine growl rose from underneath the table, raising the hairs on Painter’s arms. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he spotted a stocky, shadowy shape slip around the foot of Kanosh’s chair, keeping guard.
“Hush, Kawtch,” the professor warned in a soft voice. “It’s all right, boy.”
Kowalski let out a loud huff. “Sorry, Doc. But this time I think you should be listening to your dog. There ain’t nothing right about any of this.”
Kai crept from her own seat and circled to stand in Painter’s shadow. He reached back and took hold of her wrist. Under his fingertips, he felt her pulse quicken as something loud crashed off in the direction of the stairwell, echoing down the corridors.
The dog, Kawtch, growled again.
Painter whispered to the physics professor. “Is there another way out of here? An emergency exit.”
“No,” came his hushed, scared response. “The lab is underground for a reason. All exits are by the stairwell a
nd lead up to the main building.”
So we’re trapped.
Chapter 12
May 31, 1:12 A.M.
Takoma Park, Maryland
“Take the next left,” Gray instructed the cabdriver.
To Seichan, Gray’s anxiety was plain to read. After getting that frantic call from his mother, he remained wound up tight.
Leaning forward from the back and pointing with an outthrust arm, he looked like he wanted to climb over the seat and take the wheel himself. His other hand still clutched his cell phone. He’d tried calling his parents’ house several times during the ride from D.C. out to the Maryland suburbs, but there had been no answer, which only set him further on edge.
“Turn on Cedar,” he ordered. “It’s faster.”
As he perched on the edge of his seat, Seichan stared out the window. The taxi sidled past the Takoma Park library and swung into a shadowy maze of narrow streets lined by small Queen Anne–style cottages and stately Victorians. A heavy canopy of oaks and maples turned the roads into leafy tunnels, whose bowers muffled the glow of the occasional streetlamp.
She watched the dark houses and tried to imagine the lives of the people inside, but such an existence was foreign to her. She remembered little of her own childhood in Vietnam. She had no memory of her father, and what she remembered of her mother she wished she could forget: of being ripped from her arms, of her mother being dragged out a door, bloody-faced and screaming, by men in military uniforms. Afterward, Seichan spent her childhood in a series of squalid orphanages, half starved most of the time, maltreated the rest.
These quiet homes with their happy lives held no meaning for her.
At last, the taxi turned onto Butternut Avenue. Seichan had been to the home of Gray’s parents only once. At the time she’d been shot and fleeing toward the only man she could trust. She glanced over to Gray. It had been almost three months since she’d been this close to him. His face, if anything, had grown more gaunt, his features detailed in harsher lines, softened only by full lips. She remembered kissing those same lips once, in a moment of weakness. There had been no tenderness behind the act, only desperation and need. Even now, she remembered the heat, the roughness of his bearded stubble, the hardness of his hold on her. But like the quiet homes here, such a life was not for her.
Besides, the last she knew, he was still casually and intermittently involved with a lieutenant in the Italian carabiniere. At least, that was the case months ago.
Gray’s eyes suddenly pinched in worry, revealing the deep-set creases at the corners. She faced forward. The street was as dark as the others in the neighborhood, but ahead, a small Craftsman bungalow with a wide porch and overhanging gable blazed with light, every window aglow. No one was sleeping there.
“That’s the house,” Gray instructed the driver.
Even before the cab pulled to a full stop, he was out the door, tossing a fistful of bills at the driver. Seichan met the cabbie’s eyes in the rearview mirror. He looked ready to respond harshly at such rude treatment, but she stared him down, silencing him. She held out a palm.
“Change.”
She left him a small tip, pocketed the rest, and climbed out.
She followed Gray as he hurried across the street, but his goal was not the front porch. To the side of the house, a narrow driveway stretched to a single-car garage in the back. The roll-up door was open, lights on, revealing two slight figures silhouetted in that glow. No wonder no one had answered the house phone.
Gray stalked quickly down the driveway.
As Seichan drew near the open garage, she heard the whining sound of a saw motor, the bite of steel into wood, smelled the cedar scent of sawdust.
“Jack, you’re going to wake the entire neighborhood,” a woman begged plaintively. “Shut things down and come back to bed.”
“Mom . . .” Gray hurried forward into the middle of the drama.
Seichan kept a few steps back, but Gray’s mother still noted her with a pinch of her brows, trying to identify the stranger who accompanied her son. It had been two years since they’d last set eyes on each other. Slowly, recognition and confusion played across the older woman’s face—and not unexpectedly a flash of fear.
Likewise, Seichan was shocked at how aged Gray’s parents appeared, frail shadows of their former selves. His mother, her hair disheveled, was dressed in a housecoat, cinched at the waist, and slippers. His father, barefoot, wore a pair of boxers and a T-shirt, exposing his prosthetic leg, belted at the thigh.
“Harriet! Where’s my sander? Why can’t you goddamn stay out of my stuff?”
Gray’s father was standing at a workbench, his face red with fury, his brow damp with exertion. He struggled to secure a piece of wood into a vise clamp. Behind him, a table saw idled with pieces of oak cut into haphazard sections scattered on the floor beneath it, as if he’d been trying to construct the pieces of a wooden puzzle whose solution only he knew.
Gray stepped forward and unplugged the saw, then crossed to his father and tried to gently guide him away from the workbench. An elbow lashed out, striking Gray in the face. He stumbled back.
“Jack!” his mother yelled.
His father looked around, confused. Realization seemed to sink through whatever fugue state the man was in. “I’m . . . I didn’t mean . . .” He placed a palm on his forehead, as if feeling himself for a fever. He reached an arm toward Gray. “I’m sorry, Kenny.”
Gray’s face flinched a bit. “It’s Gray, Dad. Kenny’s still in California.”
Seichan knew Gray had a brother, his only sibling, who ran some Internet start-up in Silicon Valley. Gray, his lip split and bleeding, approached his father more cautiously.
“Dad, it’s me.”
“Grayson?” He allowed his son to take his arm. Eyes, red-rimmed and exhausted, stared around the garage. A flicker of fear passed over his face. “What . . . where . . . ?”
“It’s okay, Dad. Let’s go inside.”
He sagged, wobbling a bit on his bad leg. “I need a beer.”
“We’ll get you one.”
Gray guided him toward the rear door to the house. His mother hung back, arms crossed tightly over her chest. Seichan stood a few paces off, unsure, uncomfortable.
His mother’s gaze, brimming with tears, found her face. “I couldn’t stop him,” she said, needing to explain to someone. “He woke up all agitated. Thought he was back in Texas and was late for work. Then he came out here. I thought he was going to cut his hand off.”
Seichan took a step toward her, but she had no words to comfort the distraught woman. Seeming to sense this, Gray’s mother ran her fingers through her hair, took a deep steadying breath, seeming to draw a bit of steel into her back. Seichan had seen Gray do the same many times before, recognizing at this moment the true source of his resiliency.
“I should help Gray get him back to bed.” She headed toward the house, crossing close enough to reach out and squeeze Seichan’s hand. “Thank you for coming. Gray always shoulders too much alone. It’s good that you’re here.”
His mother headed toward the door, leaving Seichan in the yard. She rubbed the squeezed hand, still warm from the touch. She felt an inexplicable tightness in her chest. Even this small bit of inclusion, this bit of familial closeness, unnerved her.
At the door, Harriet turned toward her. “Do you want to wait inside?”
Seichan backed away. She pointed toward the front of the house. “I’ll be on the porch,” she said.
“I’m sure it won’t be long.” With a small, sad smile of apology, she let the door close behind her.
Seichan stood a moment longer, then crossed back to the garage, needing to do something to steady herself. She turned off the light, pulled closed the door, then headed to the front of the house. She climbed the porch and sank onto a bench, bathed in lamplight from the front parlor. She felt exposed, her body limned against such brightness, but no one was about. The avenue remained dark and empty—yet so inviting
. She had a momentary desire to flee. The streets were her only true home.
Eventually the lights in the house began to go off, one by one. She heard muffled voices but could not make out the words. It was the slow rumble of family. She waited, trapped between the emptiness of the street and the warmth of the home.
At last, a final light blinked off, sinking the yard into shadows. She heard footsteps; the door opened to the side. Gray came out, letting loose a long sigh.
“Are you okay?” she asked softly.
He shrugged. What else was there to say? He came and joined her. “I’d like to stick around for another half hour or so. Make sure everything stays quiet. I can call you a taxi.”
“And go where?” she asked, letting a little black humor blunt the grimness.
Gray sat down next to her, leaning back. He remained silent for a long moment before speaking again. “They call it sundowner’s syndrome,” he said, plainly venting, or maybe he was trying to make sense of it himself, to give his pain a name. “Dementia symptoms get worse at night for some Alzheimer’s patients. Don’t really know why. Some say its hormonal changes that occur at night. Others that it’s an unloading of the day’s accumulated stress and sensory stimulation.”
“How often does this happen?”
“Getting to be regular now. Three or four times a month. But he should be fine for the rest of the night. Outbursts like this seem to exhaust him. He should sleep well. And once the sun’s up, he does much better.”
“And you come out here every time?”
Again that shrug. “As often as I can.”
A silence settled over them. Gray looked off into the distance, likely into the future. She suspected he was pondering how long he could keep it up on his own.
Sensing a distraction might do him good, Seichan turned the conversation toward their other problem. “Any word from your partner?”
Gray shook his head. His voice grew firmer; he was on steadier ground with this subject. “No calls. It’ll probably take until morning for the archivists to do a thorough search. But I think I figured out why that letter—the one from Franklin to that French scientist—turned up amid all the Guild activity of late.”