Changeling (2 page)

“I know,” the man replied, his voice as flat and emotionless as his visage. “I had hoped that you would fail.”

“But why? I have passed the test. I am worthy to enter the vault.”

“This is not for you.”

The blade flashed and the torch fell from Apollonius’ hands, plunging the chamber once more into darkness. As his life drained away, along with the water in which he lay, Apollonius heard a sound like the grinding of a millstone. The vault was opening, but he would not live to see what lay within.

LOST

Sydney, Australia—Three weeks ago

First Officer Jeanne
Carrera was surprised to see Captain Seth Norris already seated in the cockpit, idly thumbing through a printed weather report. Norris was punctual, always arriving on time but he rarely showed up early and never got to a plane ahead of her.

“Turning over a new leaf?” she remarked as she stowed her carry-on.

“Hmm?” Norris glanced up and offered a polite smile.

“You’re early. You’re never early.”

He shook his head dismissively. “Traffic was lighter than I expected. I made good time.”

She settled into the right seat. “How was your weekend?”

“Good. Amelia’s birthday was yesterday. I’m still coming down from all the sugar.”

Carrera laughed, but her mirth hid a strange disquiet. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but something felt wrong, like déjà vu but different. She knew that Norris’ had been looking forward to his daughter’s party almost as much as he had been dreading having to interact with the eight-, now nine-year-old girl’s mother—his ex-wife. Nothing strange about that.

So why do I feel like I stepped into the wrong scene in a movie
?

She wondered, for a fleeting instant, if she was dreaming but the moment passed as quickly as it had come and she dismissed her reaction.

Yet, as they worked through the pre-flight checklist, exchanging idle banter, the feeling kept coming back intermittently, like the flicker of a fluorescent light bulb about to die. Eventually, Norris took note.

“Are you feeling okay, Jeanne?”

There it is again. What the hell is going on
? She managed a wan smile and a shrug. “Yeah. Just…weird.”

The captain straightened in his seat, his expression instantly serious. “What’s weird?”

“It’s nothing. Just a little spooked.”

“A little spooked isn’t nothing. Your subconscious might be picking up on something that your conscious mind is missing.”

She laughed, though it was an uncomfortable sound. “Since when did you become so superstitious?”

Even as she said it, she realized that the source of the strange feeling was Norris himself.

Amelia’s birthday
.

Norris never called his daughter by her given name. Whenever he spoke of her, he almost always said, “my little girl” or sometimes “my daughter.” When he called her by name, which was rare, he always used the pet name “Mellie.” But today, he had called her “Amelia.”

Despite the still-unexplained incongruity, Carrera felt an odd sense of relief. Simply knowing what it was that felt out of place had eased her concerns. She felt as if a bothersome sliver had finally been tweezed out of her subconscious.

“It’s nothing,” she reiterated, and this time she meant it. Maybe the birthday girl had scolded him about his refusal to use her proper name. Carrera could remember when she had demanded that her own parents cease and desist from using nicknames.
I was probably about the same age as Amelia.

“You’re sure?” Norris pressed. “Four hundred and twenty-two people are about to put their lives in our hands, so if for any reason you don’t want to fly, you need to let me know.”

“Seth, it’s fine. I’m good.” And she was, even though she didn’t know why Norris had started referring to his daughter in a different way, or why he had shown up early when he almost never did, or why he was suddenly insisting that she pay attention to her intuition when she had never known him to do that….

Even though there was no explanation for any of those things, the satisfaction of having figured it out was enough to put her mind at ease.

Mostly.

They concluded the pre-flight checks and finished boarding, and as Norris greeted the passengers and briefed them on the itinerary for the trans-Pacific flight, Carrera made the final preparations for take-off. As she watched him work and listened to his voice on the public address system, she found herself scrutinizing everything he did, every minor perceived deviation from his normal routine. She could not tell if he was acting differently, or if she was merely being hypersensitive, but from a technical standpoint, his flying was spot on.

About two hours after take-off, Norris handed the controls over to Carrera and rose from his chair to stretch his legs. There was nothing unusual about this. Flying, particularly on a long trans-oceanic route, was mostly a struggle against tedium. There was very little for the pilot to do aside from remaining vigilant and ready to respond to the unexpected, which could mean anything from steering around pockets of turbulence to coping with mechanical or electrical failures. Carrera focused her attention on the instrument panel while Norris stepped into the lavatory.

Although her initial discomfort had long since passed, Carrera continued to be plagued by the surreal sense of dislocation she had experienced before take-off. She could not shake the feeling that she was actually asleep and dreaming everything. The phenomena was so persistent that she felt compelled to test the reality of her circumstances by checking to see if the printed weather report made sense. She had heard that, in dreams, written text often changed or was illegible, but the weather reports were completely normal. She was not dreaming then, but she definitely felt like she was in the Twilight Zone.

“Still spooked?” Norris asked from behind her.

“Is it that obvious?” She smiled without looking back and quickly added. “Not spooked exactly, just feeling a bit…odd.”

“If I may ask, when did it start?”

Carrera craned her head around to look at him. Norris was standing just behind her, his arms crossed over his chest. The pose was all wrong; he never stood like that. Or did he? She shook her head. “Honestly, it was when you called your daughter ‘Amelia.’”

“Ah. And that’s not something I usually do.” Norris said it more like a statement than a question. He tilted his head back as if embarrassed by the mistake. “Well, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details.”

Carrera’s forehead creased in confusion. “What do you mean?”

Norris smiled and then moved with the speed of striking viper. Carrera did not even have time to yelp in alarm. The captain clapped his left hand over her mouth, stifling any potential cry for assistance. His right drove something into the side of her neck.

Carrera felt a sharp twinge, like a bee sting, followed by a bloom of icy cold radiating away from the spot. She caught a glimpse of a discarded syringe falling to the carpeted floor, and then his right arm snaked around to immobilize her. She tried to struggle out of his grasp, but whatever he had injected into her neck was already having an effect. Her muscles felt leaden. Even breathing was an ordeal.

She gasped a word, a single question that was muffled by the hand still clamped over her mouth.
Why
?

Norris however seemed to understand. As darkness closed in from the edges of her vision, Carrera thought she heard him say, “Not for you.”

PART ONE- SKULLS

Peru

“Aliens!”

The familiar refrain echoed across the open stretch of sand, setting Jade Ihara’s teeth on edge. “I swear to God,” she muttered, “if he says that one more time, I’m going to personally start an intergalactic war.”

Beside her, Pete “Professor” Chapman chuckled. “Careful, now. Don’t get caught on camera biting the hand that feeds.”

“Easy for you to say,” Jade retorted. “You’re not the one watching your career slowly circling the drain. I can’t believe I ever thought this was a good idea.”

Nevertheless, she stopped and glanced around to make sure that their conversation was not being captured on video. They were already a hundred yards away from the squat museum complex—Jade thought it looked more like a police station or a military base than a repository of ancient culture—which seemed to be the focus of attention for the camera crew, but she knew Professor’s admonition was warranted. With modern technology, it was sometimes hard to tell when the cameras were rolling. While the crew of
Alien Explorers
—a cable television documentary program with a penchant for making elaborate connections between ancient civilizations and little green men—did most of their work with state-of-art video and audio production equipment, she knew they also liked to sometimes fold in candid footage shot with handheld digital video cameras and even smart phones, which in the final edit, gave the finished product a sort of gritty verisimilitude.

The arrival of the video crew still rankled her. Jade realized now that that deal with the production company had probably been in place long before she was hired and there was little doubt in her mind that her sex and physical appearance—the daughter of Japanese and Hawaiian parents, she had been called an ‘exotic’ so many times, the line made her want to throw up—had played a more important part in her selection for the archaeological crew than had her expertise. Her employer—or more accurately, an attorney from the legal department of the foundation that was sponsoring the dig—had made it clear that she was to give full cooperation and support to the cable television producers who had taken over the site.

Camera-friendly good looks notwithstanding, after two days of watching her carefully excavate tomb shafts, the crew had mostly lost interest in her. The on-site interview with Jeremiah Stillman, publisher of the fringe magazine
Alien Legends
, and esteemed “extraterrestrial astronaut theorist” who had arrived late the previous evening, was much more engaging than watching Jade removing dirt by the teaspoonful. Still, a viral video outing her as a skeptic would definitely not be a good thing.

Aside from Professor, the only other person to hear her was an intern, Rafi Massoud, and he was part of her team, not the production crew.

“You’re not going to rat me out, are you Rafi?”

The young man, a second-generation Arab-American and a student at UCLA, raised his hands in an exaggerated display of innocence. “I’m with you, Dr. Ihara. That guy’s a kook. No way am I putting any of this on my CV.”

“Oh, don’t be so Old School,” said Professor. He cocked his felt Explorer fedora forward in a near perfect imitation of Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones. “Everyone craves the spotlight, even the Ivy League guys. Trust me, no one is going to think less of you—academically speaking—for doing your job on camera, even if they edit it to make it look like you’re saying something you aren’t.”

“I know,” Jade sighed. “But…” She nodded toward the front of the museum where Stillman was holding up an unusually shaped human skull, which he claimed to have found while roaming the dunes, and gesticulating emphatically. In her best approximation of his voice, she said: “Aliens!”

Professor grinned. “It sells. Better, it gets the kids interested. Admit it, you’re secretly hoping that we do find something not of this world. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have taken the job.”

“Not true. I took the job for the money. That’s why it’s called a job.”

He was not completely wrong, though. While she had spent the last eight months doing very little that could be described as archaeology—long distance guest lecturing via telepresence and researching possible future projects—Jade had passed up several opportunities to get back in the field simply because the invitations were even less interesting than being cooped up in a library with a stack of dusty old books.

There were other reasons for her professional hiatus, however. To borrow a cliché from criminal parlance, Jade Ihara had been laying low.

Several years earlier, her search for the legendary pre-Columbian city of Cibola had put her in the cross-hairs of the notorious international quasi-religious criminal conspiracy known as the Dominion. She had subsequently tangled with them on numerous occasions, and in so doing, had painted a target on her back. The Dominion, in all its many forms, was obsessed with ancient symbols of power—artifacts that might be used to solidify their grip on the world, and which might, as she had seen more than once, actually possess supernatural attributes. As even more recent events had demonstrated, the Dominion was not the only enemy who might want to do her harm, which was how Professor had come to be her constant companion.

A former Navy SEAL and a genius in his own right—he came by his nickname honestly, with two post-graduate degrees—Professor was now working, in a semi-official capacity, for a division of the Central Intelligence Agency, acting as both a bodyguard for Jade and a sort of watchman, on the lookout for anything that might hint at some new threat, while at the same time, using his own not inconsiderable body of knowledge to buttress his cover as her research assistant. It was not the cush assignment that some of his peers might have imagined. The threats Jade faced were real, and all the more ominous since there was no way of knowing from where the next attack would come. And, if she was honest with herself, Jade knew that she could be a bit… prickly.

She liked Professor, liked him enough to entertain the possibility that their relationship might someday extend beyond the professional, beyond friendship, but she also knew that was a bad idea. He was now her closest friend and confidant, and if they took things to the next level and it went horribly wrong—something that seemed to happen whenever she led with her heart—it would ruin the perfectly acceptable status quo.

On Professor’s advice, she had spent the last eight months on what could only be charitably termed as a ‘sabbatical.’ She had spent a lot of time in the water, snorkeling in Waimea Bay and surfing the North Shore of Oahu waiting for Professor to give her the signal that it was safe to go back to her old life. After six months, the tedium had become unbearable and over his objections—truth be told, he was a bit overprotective—she had started looking for work again, whereupon she had quickly been reacquainted with the reality of just how boring, not to mention political, archaeology could sometimes be.

The offer to work at Wari Kayan, the ancient necropolis of the Paracas culture on the slopes of Cerro Colorado in Peru however had been too intriguing to pass up, partly because the expedition was being underwritten by a not-for-profit foundation with very deep pockets—a welcome change from the miserliness of academia—but mostly because it was a chance to lay her hands on one of the most sensational discoveries in modern archaeology: the Paracas skulls.

The Paracas culture had inhabited the western slopes of the Andes mountain range from 1200 BCE until their eventual assimilation into the Nazca culture which endured until about 750 CE before fading almost completely from history. Although the Paracas produced astonishingly beautiful polychrome ceramic ware and intricately patterned textiles, their greatest claim to notoriety stemmed from the relatively recent discovery of unusual elongated human skulls in Paracas burial shafts.

There was no great mystery to the skulls. The Paracas, like many other ancient cultures throughout North America and indeed, the rest of the world, had practiced a form of body modification known as “artificial cranial deformation.” In early infancy, Paracas children would have their heads bound tightly with blankets and sometimes wood planks, which had the effect of distorting the natural shape of the skull as it grew and hardened. The practice had been observed in several extant societies well into the 20
th
century and was in fact still done in some remote Pacific island cultures. It was generally believed that the reason for the custom was primarily aesthetic; ordinary round skulls evidently weren’t considered sexy enough.

The discovery of deformed skulls on the Paracas peninsula would have been simply another footnote, but for the close proximity of another intriguing archaeological mystery. A hundred miles away in the remote Nazca desert, an ancient civilization had created hundreds of enormous geoglyphs—shapes of animals and other elaborate geometric patterns—which were so large that the only way to identify them was looking down from altitude. Some scholars even speculated that it would have been necessary to have an aerial perspective in order to execute the patterns. In the latter half of the 20
th
century, the so-called Nazca Lines had provided fodder for alien astronaut theorists like Erich Von Daniken, who cobbled together a patchwork hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitors posing as gods, influencing ancient cultures and facilitating the creation of everything from the pyramids of Egypt to the
moai
statues of Easter Island, with little regard for the fact that most of the cherry-picked “evidence” to support the idea was easily explained without the influence of visiting alien astronauts.

Jeremiah Stillman was not the first UFO enthusiast to connect the deformed skulls found at Paracas, which did sort of look like Hollywood’s vision of an extraterrestrial creature, to the nearby Nazca lines, but he had been fortunate enough to live in the Information Age, where cable television and the Internet provided a platform for conspiracy theorists and fringe scientists to publicize their ideas without any meaningful scrutiny. Stillman had been quick to glom onto a persistent, and completely fraudulent, claim that genetic testing conducted on the Paracas skulls had yielded alien DNA. When confronted with the evidence, the “expert” had defended his position by alleging a government conspiracy to suppress the truth, a common and completely unassailable strategy for the true believers.

Yet, despite the fact that Jade found Stillman both professionally and personally distasteful, she could not completely discount the possibility that he and other alien astronaut theorists might be onto something. The Nazca Lines, which incorporated Paracas motifs,
were
unusual, and while much of what was generally believed about them was exaggerated—you didn’t need to be in orbit to see them—there was no good explanation for why they had been made. Similarly, while artificial cranial deformation was well-understood, it was reasonable to ask why, throughout a thousand years of history and prehistory, people all over the world had made a conscious decision to change the shape of their children’s skulls. Was it possible that they were trying to make themselves look more like their “gods”?

Jade knew from personal experience that almost anything was possible. She had seen too many strange things in her travels to dismiss anything out of hand.

It was unlikely in the extreme that she would find anything remotely resembling proof—one way or the other—in her excavation at the Wari Kayan necropolis, located on the Paracas Peninsula of Peru. It was virtually impossible to prove a negative hypothesis—the non-existence of aliens or absence of alien involvement with the Paracas culture—and even if she found something that refuted the popular theories of men like Stillman, such evidence would do little to shake the faith of the true believers. Such was not her intention however. She wasn’t looking for proof any more than she was looking for fortune and glory. She was a digger, interested only in finding things that had been lost to the ages.

They made the short trek across the virtually barren sand dunes to the foot of the rocky rise known as the Cerro Colorado ridge, where the ancient Paracas had laid their dead to rest in vertical shafts cut into the summit. Several of these had been found, most pillaged by grave robbers, but several more remained unexcavated.

Jade picked her way up the sixty-foot slope, following a well-trod but unmarked route used by both archaeologists and tourists, and made her way to one of the target sites they had identified during the initial survey a week earlier. She shrugged out of her backpack, removing from it the tools of her trade—a small plastic trowel, an icepick, and a stiff bristled brush—and then squatted down beside the sand-filled shaft to commence digging into the past. Professor and Rafi moved to different sites and did the same.

She worked methodically, spooning out sand quickly without screening it. Unlike a habitation site—a former village or city ruin—there was little chance of discovering artifacts in the upper layers of fill, and in the unlikely event that she did, the plastic blade of the trowel would do little if any damage. The work proceeded quickly as she fell into a familiar rhythm, and soon she had cleared a knee-deep pit nearly five feet across. She was just about to lower herself into the hole when Rafi called out to her. She rose slowly to avoid a head-rush, and then hiked over to see what the student had discovered.

Rafi had made faster progress than she, removing several cubic feet of dirt from a shaft. He now stood in the shoulder-deep pit shining a small flashlight down at the sand underfoot. Centered in the cone of illumination was a brown-gray protrusion that she immediately recognized as the top of an elongated skull.