“No way!” said the mechanic. “It was burned like that when we found it.”
“I thought security found it.”
“They found it—we pulled it out of the ditch.”
“So how did it burn, Dr. Reinhardt?” Mr. Mallory asked.
“I told you on the phone, we left it because it wouldn’t start and headed back to campus on foot to—”
“So you’re saying you don’t know how it got burned?”
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying.” He frowned at the mechanic. Mr.Mallory looked to the latter, as well.
The garage man continued to insist the Jeep was already burned when they found it, and after several moments of back and forth, Mallory suggested he and Cam drive out to the accident site.
They got into Mallory’s dusty, dark blue Volvo and belted up. Then he started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot onto the campus drive. The air-conditioner blasted hot air at them as it labored to bring down the temperature. “While we drive over, why don’t you tell me what happened,” Rudy said, pulling a small recording device out of his coat pocket and balancing it on the cup holder between them. Except it wasn’t just a recording device, for on its readout screen a bright green circle flashed dead center: the car was clean of listening devices. Rudy glanced at it, then at Cam, and said, “Well. Guess they aren’t as suspicious of you being a spy as I feared. I thought they might slip a bug in while we were talking to the mechanic. Go ahead and debrief.”
So Cam told him and the recording device all that had happened since Sunday, ending with his poolside breakfast with Swain and the director’s demand he make public renunciation of his faith or lose his position at K-J. “There’s no way I’m going to do that, Rudy,” he concluded.
“But he’s given you until Monday, right?” They were approaching the overlook area by then, which was once more milling with visitors. Cars overflowed its parking lot, lining the service road on both shoulders, forcing Rudy to slow as he threaded his way between them.
“Yes, until Monday morning,” Cam confirmed.
“It may not matter anymore by then. . . .” He glanced at Cam. “I don’t think he seriously suspects you of being a spy. You just made him mad when you went out with McHenry last night. We should probably chip her before tomorrow night’s reception. Do you think you can get her to go for it?”
“I’ll try. Though with Swain’s ban, it’ll be hard for me to actually do the chipping.”
“One of my team can do it. See if you can set up a time and place.”
They passed out of the clog of cars, and Rudy sped up as they headed westward, gradually turning south to parallel the ridge. Ahead, thunderheads towered over the Catalinas in great billows of white.
As they drew even with the outcropping south of the overlook, Cam gestured to the side of the road. “There. They’ve moved all the boulders onto the shoulder.”
“And look at all the potholes and cracks in the pavement that have been newly filled. . . .” Rudy slowed the car. “Backhoe tracks on the shoulder . . .” He turned his gaze up the road again. “Where’d you crash?”
“Up there a bit.” Cam gestured toward the opposite shoulder, still ahead of them.
Rudy eased the Volvo to a stop and turned off the ignition. “Let’s have a look, then.”
They got out of the car into the humid oven of midafternoon before a storm. A chorus of cicadas buzzed loudly around them as they walked up and down the road and Rudy took measurements, photographed skid marks and tire tracks, and found the charred spot in the ditch where the Jeep had come to rest. He put a few soil samples into small manila collection bags and tucked them into his shirt pocket.
“Where’d you shoot him?” Rudy asked finally.
Cam gestured farther up the road. “That’s where the security vehicles took off into the desert, too.” He pointed southwest. “The chopper crashed out there.”
“You said you thought you’d hit him? There should be blood spots, then.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Let’s have a look anyway.” Reaching the clearing where Cam had shot at Frogeater, they searched both ground and grass for blood but found none. They did, however, find the two slugs Cam had fired— both of them flattened from contact with something. Rudy put them into a collection bag.
“I have to say I’m glad they’ve got him,” Rudy remarked. “It’s a bit unnerving to think something like that was out here running around free.”
“You saw them get him, then?”
“No, but we did see them bring someone back in a body bag from the search area west of the crash. They slid it right into one of the emergency vehicles and immediately rushed it back to the campus— not to the clinic, but to the big hangar on the south side. The truck drove in and they shut the doors, and we have no idea what happened afterward.”
“Gen told Poe they had him in a lab. Maybe the entrance is in that hangar.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s at the Vault. Does McHenry have any idea what Frogeater wanted to show her there?”
Cam looked at him in momentary surprise, then recalled that Rudy had known about the note on the bottom of the plastic tree frog hours before Cam had. “No.”
“I had a man stationed there last night,” Rudy said, “but obviously Frogeater never showed up.”
“Shall I go and have a look?”
“No. You have no reason to, particularly in light of your stated views on the matter of extending longevity. You’ve already irritated Swain enough, though I seriously doubt he’ll send you away just because you won’t renounce your faith.”
“And why is that?” Cam asked as they headed back to the road. When Rudy did not immediately answer, he added, “You still haven’t told me what this is about. Why he’s after me in particular.”
Rudy continued to walk along in silence for a bit, then said, “About five years ago a huge underground explosion and a violent electromagnetic pulse occurred near his Ecuador research facility. Supposedly no one was seriously injured, nor was the facility significantly damaged. They claimed not to know what the source was. Many regarded it as a natural earthquake, assumed to be the site of a new fault line.”
“Well, EM pulses have recently been associated with earthquakes— thought perhaps to be precursors of some sort.”
“How did you know that?”
Cam shrugged. “I have an interest. . . .”
Rudy scowled at him sidelong, then faced forward, shaking his head. “You really are a geek at heart.”
“So you don’t think it was an earthquake, then.”
“No, all the measurements that came out of Ecuador are startlingly close to what happened at Tirich Pazu. Even more significant . . . immediately after the destruction of the facility, there were stories among the natives of a giant golden-skinned monster ravaging the local villages. Then a fleet of helicopters flew in and gunfire echoed through the mountains for a few days, after which the choppers flew away and no one saw the monster again.
“Not long after that, Swain’s people hacked into the DOD, looking for information on Tirich Pazu and delving into your file specifically. Of course, there’s nothing in it about that mission, but even so, he started making discreet inquiries at the various institutions where you’d worked.”
Cam frowned at the pavement before him, heat radiating from the black surface. “So you think they opened a sarc, the monster ran amok for a few days, and somehow they managed to recapture it without losing their entire team?”
“Well, as I said, it’s speculation, but yes.”
“And what does that have to do with me?”
Rudy eyed him sidelong. “Actually, I was hoping you might tell me.” He paused. “Have you had any more flashbacks?”
Cam nodded. “They seem to be coming pretty regularly. Just yesterday I recalled the day we were shown the Tomb of the Thousand Warriors. Remember all those black cubes that had piled the floor around the sarcophagi pedestals?” He paused, feeling his pu
lse rise. But much as he wanted to derail his thought train from the direction it was headed, he pressed on. “I think Swain’s meditation boxes and Institute icons are modeled after them. In fact, I think some might even be the real thing, because yesterday Gen Viascola brought one to the unity meeting and it’s what threw me into the flashback right there in the middle of everything.” He paused. “Have your people examined any of them yet? To see what exactly they are?”
Rudy regarded him, deadpan.
Cam frowned. “You already know what they are.”
“So do you,” Rudy said. “You were in Garzi’s lab that day, before we’d even seen the tomb, remember? When he explained all about them.”
Cam shook his head, pressing his mind for a memory of what Rudy was describing.
“We were all standing there beside the sarc they’d brought in to examine, and while he was speaking—”
As he spoke, an image of the sarcophagus overlaid the reality of the roadside, and Cam stood again in the cavernous main laboratory of the Tirich Pazu facility in Afghanistan. The sarc lay on a steel examining table amidst the gathered group of foreign scientists, lab technicians, and other interested persons. It was some twenty feet long and five feet high, and in the bright white light of the fluorescent ceiling lights it looked like a gargantuan dried seedpod. Its nubby, wrinkled surface was brown veined with green, and studded with black three-sided points.
Dr. Ahmed Garzi, the US-born and -trained Afghani cell biologist who was heading the examination, informed them that the pods had been laid out in ranks in the tomb, each on its own pedestal, some with what appeared to be weapons at the foot of those pedestals, as if they were some sort of army. Wood and metal fragments from those weapons had dated the chamber to four thousand years ago.
Barely had he said those words than the whole pod expanded, as if it were drawing a breath, sending all the spectators jumping back in alarm.
Garzi chuckled at their reaction. “Yes,” he said. “Despite its age this vessel is living, biological material, though like none we’ve ever encountered. This pod has so far been impervious to cutting, piercing, tearing, burning, and all other methods of dissection. It gives before the pressure source—saw, needle, scalpel, arc welder—for a time, then flings it away with what we think is a kind of magnetic pulse. Any implement involving electronics is immediately fried, and sometimes half the lab, as well.
“Just obtaining enough samples to study has been a major challenge, and mostly we’ve had to use aged cells on the verge of sloughing off. Still, we’ve obtained enough to learn that on the cellular level, as one would expect, they are also unique. The nuclei are exceptionally large and robust, the chromosomes triple the usual number. Cellular organelles include the mitochondria and Golgi apparatus standard to Earth life-form cells, in addition to several other structures whose purpose we’ve so far been unable to determine. The cell walls are exceptionally strong and resilient, and allow respiration, yet have formed an airtight, watertight outside surface. It’s unclear whether waste products are excreted or recycled, but if the latter, then these cells have essentially lived off themselves for millennia. There is also some electrochemical process we are still identifying.
“This electrical activity manifests in an emanation similar to our brain waves, but at much higher and lower amplitudes than ours.” He paused, frowning. “We suspect they are capable of interacting with the environment—turning lights and instruments on and off, and even, some think, communicating with receptive humans. Several technicians have experienced visions and hallucinations when working in their proximity. Others reported the relocation of objects and instruments around the lab that no one can account for, and we’ve actually recorded sounds and voices whose source and even identity we cannot pinpoint.”
He paused again. “We have concluded they are not native to Earth but have come from—”
He was cut off as the pod shivered and a deep groan echoed through the room, sending the entire group leaping back in unison. The shiver traveled over the pod’s surface in a way that only a rubbery outer skin would have accommodated. At first they all stood in rigid, alert silence, but when nothing further happened, they began to relax, and Garzi continued with his presentation.
They had found 1005 of these pods in the temple of Nimrod. Why they had been put there, he did not know. What they were, likewise he did not know, though in the year since they had discovered the things, they had observed not only the groaning and shuddering but also the curious expulsion of obsidianlike cubes. In fact, he pointed out one of the larger three-sided spikes that poked out of the pod before them. “That one is probably very close to expulsion now,” he said. They’d been examining it for six months before the first one was expelled. A second cube had come out three months later, but none since. There were many more found in the tomb. Piles of them, in fact.
The count had been something like five thousand, he’ d said. As of yet, they had no idea what the cubes were. “Perhaps an accretion of waste. Whatever it is, we’ve been unable to cut it, break it, dissolve it, X-ray it, or really, analyze it in any way.”
“Perhaps they’re seeds,” Cam suggested.
The Afghan scientist shrugged. “If so, none appear to have germinated.” He paused. “Like the pods they come from, they do seem to have odd mental effects on those who handle or work around them, so we keep them all in a lead-lined vault.”
Rudy asked if the pods had been X-rayed or otherwise scanned in an attempt to determine the contents. Garzi said they had been X-rayed, but results were inconclusive. Seeming suddenly ill at ease, he turned the discussion back to the black cubes—which, like the pods, generated low-level electricity.
“Come and help me.” The voice sounded clearly in Cam’s head, startling him. Not in his ear, but in his head. He glanced around, but no one looked at him, everyone staring at Garzi or the pod with varying degrees of attentiveness.
Another shiver convulsed the pod and he saw one of the black points jut outward from the elastic hide, then fall back again, and then once more press forward.
“Ah,” said Garzi. “Here it comes now.”
Cam stood transfixed as the pebbled surface contracted and released and the three-sided point grew ever larger. Then in a burst of thick viscous fluid, it broke free and fell to the floor—not a triangular pyramid, but a solid black cube, its faces slightly bigger than the palm of his hand.
“So now you’ve seen how it works,” said Garzi.
“It is time to let me out. . . .” the voice commanded again.
A current of panic blasted through Cam—
And abruptly he stood once more at the side of the service road south of the overlook picnic area, sweating in the 105-degree heat, his heart hammering at his breastbone. From over the mountains, thunder rumbled.
He looked up at Rudy, who was watching him closely. “You all right?” his friend asked.
“I remember now,” Cam answered. “That was the first time they spoke to me.”
Rudy’s dark eyes narrowed. “And have they spoken to you here?”
“No.”
He walked to the side of the car and pulled open his door, waiting until Rudy went round to the driver’s side and got in first. Cam followed him, and a window of silence ensued as they fastened their seat belts. But instead of starting the engine, Rudy asked quietly, “You’re sure. Because if they have, maybe you shouldn’t—”
“They haven’t.”
But for a moment his friend continued to study him, searching his face. Finally he seemed satisfied and faced forward, turning the ignition key. The engine roared to life, and Rudy did a tight U-turn, heading back for the Institute’s main road, the half-cool air-conditioning blowing in their faces.
After a few minutes, Cam said quietly, “You still haven’t told me why Swain would be interested in me.”
“We think he wants you because you are apparently the only person to survive the opening of a sarc.”
He glanced at
Cam repeatedly, as if expecting him to remember something again or in some way confirm his words.
Cam grew aware of his heart thudding dully in his chest and throat and ears, too rapid to just be a result of the heat and the walk. Images flashed through his mind—a massive puddle of blood pooling out of the dying Garzi, who clutched at his sleeve and sought to speak a warning. . . .
And then it cut off as completely as the flipping of a switch. He swallowed. “I don’t think I was present,” he said finally, frowning at the tremor in his voice. “But why would it matter if I was?”
“Because then you’d probably know how to open them.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
After returning to her desk, Lacey waited until she heard Gen leave the area before accessing Cam’s file. Sure enough, there was a notation of his having been arrested for assault while he was at Cold Spring Harbor three years ago and an additional psychiatric evaluation that noted his problems with paranoia, particularly when it came to the government and authority figures. He had repeatedly accused his superiors—or various arcane objects—of trying to control his mind.They speculated it was a result of his ongoing problems with posttraumatic stress disorder.
There was also an addition to the comments about his faith and the church he attended, noting that some had accused the organization of being a cult because of the way adherents were encouraged to attend daily and submit to the pastor “as if he were some kind of god.”
Not one of those notations had been in his file the first time she read it, and she was absolutely certain of that because she’ d been looking specifically for references like them. Thus, like the addition of her new scar, attributed to a beating from Erik, Cam’s file had been doctored just as hers had. But for what purpose? So Gen could direct Lacey’s attention to them in an attempt to get her to distrust him? Or—more likely—part of the plan to frame him for Manny’s death . . . ?