Oracle (15 page)

Jade turned slowly, trying to recall where to go next, and then pointed once more into the tangle of foliage. Ten minutes of slow bushwhacking brought them to a tall evergreen tree that did not look much different than the hundreds like it they had already passed.

“This is the one,” Jade announced.

Professor looked around at the other trees.
“The one what?”

She shrugged out of her backpack and dropped it on the ground.
“This is where we need to dig.”

The waterlogged tropical
soil was no match for the collapsible entrenching tools they had picked up in San Jose. Jade felt a little professional shame at the amateurish exploration—this kind of treasure hunting was more Maddock’s style—but circumstances had given her little choice. She consoled herself with the knowledge that she wasn’t just digging random holes like a relic hunter; she knew precisely where to look, even if she didn’t know precisely what she was going to find.

There was a scratching noise as the tip of her digging tool scraped against something hard, not one of the tree
’s sturdy roots, but something made of stone. With even more eagerness, she began scooping dirt away from the spot and soon revealed a large stone surface, curving gently away in every direction.

“
Another sphere,” Professor observed, not without a trace of admiration. “A big one by the look of it. At least four feet in diameter.”

“
It must have been buried centuries ago. The tree grew right on top of it. No one was ever going to find this one.”

Professor put his hand over his mouth and coughed, though Jade distinctly heard the word:
“Bootstrap.”

I can
’t disagree
.
Without the premonition, there’s no way we would have ever known where to look.

In any case
, this was exactly the way she remembered it.

She kept shoveling, exposing more of the sphere. Unlike any of the others they had encountered since arriving in Costa Rica, this one was in pristine condition. It was astonishingly smooth and when she brushed away the dirt with her gloved hands, it shone like a piece of polished granite.

She glanced up at the others and then took off her gloves. “Ok, I’m going to try touching it. I have no idea what’s going to happen.”

She reached out, laying a fingertip on the dark stone surface. It was warm, much warmer than she expected, though she couldn
’t tell if it was a real effect, or just her nerves reacting with her imagination. She placed both palms against the sphere.

“
I’m definitely feeling something,” she said. “Heat, and a tingling, like static electricity.”

“
There have been similar reports about the spheres on the mainland,” Professor said. “They retain heat and may even have their own magnetic field. That might account for what you’re feeling.”

“
But no visions?” asked Dorion, sounding almost disappointed.

She shook her head.

“What’s that?” Professor pointed to the still covered top of the sphere. Jade cleared away more of the dirt to reveal something carved in the surface.

“
It’s a petroglyph.” They had seen carvings on the spheres at the museum and at Finca 6, mostly spirals and other curving lines that looked like they might have been constellation maps, all of them badly weathered, so as to make interpretation a guessing game. This one was in much better shape. “It looks like a fish,” Jade said.

“
Or a dolphin,” Professor said. “In fact, it looks a lot like the dolphin petroglyphs at Easter Island. What’s that on the right side? Waves?”

Jade brushed away more dirt to reveal a zigzag line that looked like a
W
but in the process, uncovered more lines carved in the sphere. Soon, she had uncovered a row of symbols that curled around the top of the sphere:

Jade felt her
earlier excitement vanish like a candle flame in a stiff breeze. “W C O M? ‘Welcome’? Is this some kind of joke?”

Professor stared at the letters without even a trace of amusement.
“Jade, that’s Phoenician writing.”

She looked at the carving again in disbelief.
“You’re kidding, right?”

“
Why is that important?” asked Dorion.

“
A lot of people believe that the Phoenicians discovered the Americas two thousand years before Columbus,” Jade explained. “There’s never been anything approaching definitive proof though.” She turned back to Professor. “What’s it say?”

“
Jade, I know a few things, but I’m not Wikipedia.” He nevertheless screwed his face up in concentration. “The Phoenician alphabet—technically it was called Proto-Canaanite—was a precursor to the Greek, so there are a lot of similarities. That last letter for example is exactly what it looks like, an ‘M.’ Mu in Greek.”

He studied it a moment longer.
“Sigma… That hook shape might be lambda. Phi? Or maybe something else. The Greeks added some sounds and tossed out others. Could be a ‘Q;’ the Greeks didn’t have one of those. And of course, mu. I think ‘slphm’ or maybe ‘slqm’ is probably closer to the mark. The problem is that Semitic languages were written without the vowels, so it’s like an abbreviation, the way we might write ‘bldg’ for ‘building.’ Oh, wait. Semitic languages were also written right to left, so we have to reverse it. ‘Mqls’ or ‘mphls.’ Hard to say what the vowel sounds were supposed to be. If we had a computer, we’d crack this in about two seconds.”

“
M-ph-l-s,” Jade enunciated each letter as a separate syllable, and then it hit her. Professor’s eyes went wide as well; he had heard it too.

“
What?” Dorion’s gaze flitted between them. “What does it say?”

“
Omphalos,” Professor said, almost reverently. “It’s the Greek word for ‘navel.’”

“
And Gil Perez wrote about the ‘navel of the moon.’ This can’t be a coincidence.”

“
Wait,” Dorion said. “I know this word, ‘omphalos.’ There is a stone artifact at Delphi called ‘Omphalos.’ I visited there when I began my search. It isn’t a sphere, though.”

“
The Greeks believed the Omphalos—the navel of the world—was at Delphi,” Professor explained. “What you saw was their representation of it. It’s supposed to resemble an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes. Rhea, the mother of Zeus, made it to fool her husband Cronus, who wanted to devour his own children. There are several more like it all over the region. No telling which, if any, is the original.”

“
Could there have been a dark matter field there at Delphi?” asked Jade. “Maybe that was the true source of the Oracle’s visions?”

Dorion shook his head.
“I was there. I felt nothing.”

“
Or maybe it was once there and somebody took it,” Jade suggested.

Professor pointed at the sphere.
“You think that’s the original Omphalos?”

“
Or another representation of it. Think about it. The Phoenicians were sailing the eastern seas at least a millennium before the time of Christ. The Bible talks about the Phoenician King Hiram sending a fleet out from the Red Sea on a two year long voyage to the land of Ophir to bring back gold for Solomon’s temple. No one has ever been able to figure out where Ophir is, but it was located somewhere to the southeast off the Red Sea. What if Ophir was in the Americas? The Phoenicians could have sailed that far.”

“
So this sphere, and all the others, were supposed to be copies of the original?”

“
They may have been more than that,” suggested Dorion. “The spheres might have acted as dark matter collectors, especially if they were in close proximity to an existing field. The original Omphalos, if that’s what it was, may have seeded additional spheres with enough dark matter to begin accumulating additional particles on their own.”

“
Of course, that’s just a hypothesis,” he added sheepishly.

“
Okay,” Professor said. “Let’s say I buy that. How does that explain what we found under the pyramid?”

Jade considered this for a moment.
“Okay, we know there’s no trace of a Phoenician presence in the Americas, aside from this.” She gestured at the sphere. “And a handful of artifacts of suspicious provenance. Whatever they tried to do here didn’t work out. Maybe the locals wiped them out, took the Omphalos, and headed north, where they folded it into their own religious worldview. The Omphalos became the Great Goddess.”

Professor wagged his head uncertainly,
then grinned. “Well, it’s not a bad start, but there are a lot of holes in it. If you were one of my students, I’d tell you to prove it.”

“
Your students hated you,” she retorted. “That’s why you’re not teaching anymore.”

But she knew he was right. She was still trying to think of a better answer when Professor suddenly turned his head sideways and peered off into the jungle.
“Do you hear that?”

Jade listened. She could make out the croaking of frogs and scattered birdsong, fainter still the sound of surf pounding the rocks, but after a moment, she too heard the sound that had caught Professor
’s attention, the whine of a distant engine and a faint rhythmic thumping sound.

Professor turned away slowly, as if merely curious to see what was causing the noise, but after taking just a few steps, he broke into a run. Jade started after him,
then almost as an afterthought, shouted back to Dorion, “Come on!”

She caught up to Professor just a short distance away, on a rocky point that jutted up from the landscape like a broken tooth and gave an almost unrestricted view of the entire island. He motioned for her to take cover, and she pulled Dorion down behind a tree, but not before she caught a glimpse of two dark shapes out over the water, moving in from the east.

Helicopters.

It took less than two minutes for the two aircraft to reach the island. They were civilian birds, big enough to hold several passengers, the sort that might be used for island hopping with groups of tourists, but it was immediately clear that the men inside were not day-trippers.

With the two aircraft hovering just a few feet above the water, the side doors slid open, and bodies began pouring out, at least ten men from each helicopter. They wore military style fatigues and tactical gear, and carried a variety of weapons—mostly assault rifles outfitted with various scopes and other attachments. The total lack of uniformity suggested they were almost certainly hired guns, and the question of who had hired them was answered when, even at a distance, Jade recognized one of the men splashing up onto the beach, rifle at the ready.

“
Hodges?” she asked.

“
Hodges,” Professor confirmed. “I guess you didn’t see that coming.”

Isla del Caño, Costa Rica

Professor drew his
pistol as if just having it in his hands gave him the confidence to meet this new overwhelming threat. It didn’t.

“
Take Paul and head for the eastern side of the island. Find a place to dig in. I mean that literally. Cover up and stay hidden. Our only chance is to hold them off long enough for someone to come investigate.”

Jade drew her own gun.
“No.”

“
Damn it, Jade, this is no time for a pissing match. I have experience with this sort of thing.”

“
You have experience with twenty-to-one odds?” She shook her head. “No way. We stick together.”

Professor growled under his breath.
“Will you at least follow my lead?”

“
Sure. You have experience with this sort of thing.”

He let that pass without comment.
“Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

Hodges flinched as
the report of a Kalashnikov echoed across the beach. He had only just waded up onto the sand and already the first shots had been fired. He raced toward a cluster of the hired gunmen to see if they had, by some lucky chance, taken out Chapman or one of the others. They had not. The men were gathered around the bullet-riddled corpse of a park ranger.

A man holding an AKS-74, smoke curling from the muzzle, shrugged.
“No witnesses, right?”

Hodges frowned, but nodded his assent. He wasn
’t happy about having to utilize this ad hoc collection of mercenaries that Gutierrez had foisted on him. Some of them, he knew, were former Mexican Army and
federales
—at least he assumed they were “former”—while others were contract killers who ran errands for the
narcotraficantes.
  It was a motley collection, but evidently the paycheck Gutierrez had promised was more persuasive than former loyalties. Although Hodges was nominally in command, they responded to his directions about as well as a pack of wild dogs.

The helicopters had moved away from the drop zone and were circling the island to provide aerial surveillance. Not that it would do much good; the forest canopy afforded good cover, and Chapman was, after all, a former SEAL. He was in his element.

If, of course, he was here at all.

Hodges had to give Gutierrez credit. While he had been cooling his heels at Teotihuacan, the Mexican multi-billionaire had cast a wide net, just in case the targets had somehow escaped the fuel-air bomb. Sure enough, an informant had reported seeing people matching the description of Chapman and Jade Ihara, boarding a flight to Costa Rica. Hodges had been dubious about the report; informants made their money by telling people like Gutierrez what they wanted to hear, regardless of whether it was factual. Nevertheless, it was a lead that couldn
’t be ignored, and Hodges had headed south to see if, by some miracle, Chapman and the others had survived.

He had not yet attempted to contact Tam Broderick, and if Chapman really was alive, his cover was already blown. Worse, Broderick would know that the organization had been infiltrated. Still, it couldn
’t be helped. This was war, and sacrifices had to be made.

More shots rang out of the jungle, not the crack of supersonic rounds from an assault weapon, but the throatier bark of a handgun report. The pistol shots were answered by semi-automatic fire, and Hodges hefted his own AR-15 and headed in the direction of the battle.

Well, that answers one question. Chapman had survived. If there was even a chance of salvaging his cover, it would depend on a swift resolution to the immediate situation.

He charged up a trail leading into the interior of the island and soon found the body of a fallen mercenary. There was more scattered shooting from up ahead but no more pistol shots. The mercenaries didn
’t have a target. Hodges kept going.

He soon caught up to two more of his men. They were scanning the area, focusing their attention on a slope that rose above the trail.

“Did you see them?”

The nearest man shook his head and spat indignantly.
“The bastard ambushed us. Killed Raul and ran. We never saw him, but I think he’s up there.”

“
Then let’s—”

A shot rang out from above and
the mercenary spun half around in a halo of red. Hodges bolted for cover behind a nearby tree as did the surviving mercenary, but no more shots came. Hodges leaned out from behind cover, just far enough to sweep the hillside.

Chapman was probably already gone. Outnumbered as he was, hit and run tactics were the only way the man could hope to stay alive, and if he had enough bullets, it wasn
’t beyond the realm of possibility that the former SEAL might actually win the fight, or at least stay alive long enough to put one of those lucky shots through Hodges skull.

Swift resolution
, he thought. “Pete! Can we talk about this?”

Several seconds passed and Hodges was about to give up on the idea of a parlay when a voice, loud and closer than he expected, came out of the jungle.
“A little late for that, don’t you think?”

Hodges drew back. He quickly found the other mercenary and, gestured for him to attempt a flanking maneuver. The man seemed to understand and slipped stealthily into the woods.

Hodges took a deep breath, then called out again. “I hope not. I’m sorry about the way things went down. I had to make a judgment call.”

Silence.

Hodges knew he had to keep Chapman engaged, keep him talking, in order to give the mercenaries a chance to fix his location.

“
I’m going to show my cards, Pete. Maybe then you’ll understand. Maybe you’ll even consider joining me. We could use a guy with your skills.”

“
We? You got a mouse in your pocket?”

Hodges jerked. The voice had come from a different place. Chapman was moving, flanking
him
and getting closer, and now he was alone. He picked up and fell back, racing parallel to the trail. Fifty yards later, he spotted four more mercenaries coming up the path.

Thank God!
He got down behind a tree and called out again. “You deserve an explanation, Pete. No matter what you might think, we’re on the same side.”

“
That doesn’t sound like an explanation.”

Still close. What
’s he trying to do?
The mercenaries, alerted by the exchange, fanned out to either side of the trail and started searching for a target.”

Chapman called out again.
“How can you be working for them, after what they did to your family?”

“
Pete, you don’t think I’m actually working for the Dominion?”

“
Who else?”

Hodges weighed his options. If he could convince Chapman to hear him out, to join him, that would be a win-win situation. If not, he might be able to flush his foe out so that the mercenaries could finish him off, but doing so would mean putting himself in Chapman
’s sights.

No victory without sacrifice.

“Pete, I’m going to step out in the open. Flag of truce. I just want to talk.”

Chapman didn
’t answer.

Hodges waved
one of the mercenaries over. “I’m going to step out in the open. If he shoots me, watch for the muzzle flash and let him have it.”

The mercenary tipped him a nod of grudging approval.
“You got some cojones, amigo.”

Hodges wished he felt as brave as the gunman seemed to think he was. With his heart pounding furiously in his chest, he slung his rifle across his back and walked out onto the trail, hands raised.

“Flag of truce,” he repeated. “I know you’re an honorable man.”

There was a sound like a cough or maybe harsh laughter from somewhere in the trees, but Chapman said nothing. When Hodges spoke again, he did so at a softer volume, so that his voice would not be heard by the mercenaries at his back.
“It started in Norfolk…”

Jade put the
last fig leaf in place and then took a step back to view her handiwork. The leaves were spread out to cover a rectangular area about four feet wide and eight feet long.
Perfect.
They won’t be able to miss it.

She glanced up the hill to where Dorion waited behind a screen of leaves and branches, waved, and then headed into the jungle to check on Professor. There had been a lot of shooting earlier, but after that she had heard talking and figured Professor had made good on his plan to stall Hodges and buy them enough time to finish laying in their defenses, such as they were.

As she crept through the trees, she could hear Hodges’ voice, but he wasn’t speaking loud enough for her to make out more than the occasional word. There was a very good chance that Hodges was also stalling, trying to give his men a chance to sweep around their flanks, so instead of trying to get closer, she hunkered down behind a tree, gun drawn, and waited.

Suddenly, a hand clamped over her mouth, and another caught her hand, preventing her from discharging the pistol. She started involuntarily, trying to twist free, and then saw Professor
’s face above her own. He let go of her hand and held a finger to his lips, then let go of her altogether and motioned for her to follow.

He led her through the jungle, closer to the sound of Hodges
’ voice, stopping only when his words became distinct.

“
—could not allow something like that to happen again,” he was saying. “It’s not just the Dominion. You get that right? It’s everyone. Muslim extremists… Christian fundamentalists with an apocalypse fetish. Hell, even those kooks waiting for the mother ship to come out of the comet. These people are out there and they’re just waiting for something to light their fuse.

“
It doesn’t even have to be something like what you found in Teo, or what the Dominion found at Atlantis. These people operate in a fact-free environment, but when it does turn out to be something really special? Something supernatural? Then it’s a thousand times worse. That’s why the Norfolk Group was formed.”

Up to that point, Jade had not understood what Hodges was driving at, but with his mention of
“the Norfolk Group” the pieces fell into place. Not content merely to work with the Myrmidons against the Dominion, he had chosen to align himself with a different kind of secret society—one dedicated to suppressing discoveries that might embolden religious radicals and opportunists like the Dominion to launch terrorist campaigns, or even make a bid for world domination.

Professor touched a finger to his lips again, and then cupped his hands around his mouth so that the sound of his voice would travel up into the tree tops.
“So you’re the good guys, is that it?”

As soon as he was done speaking, he gestured for Jade to follow again, moving fifty feet further down slope, just in case Hodges
’ men were trying to pinpoint the sound of his voice.

“
Look, I won’t lie to you. The Group was formed by wealthy men who know that another Norfolk or 9/11 will crush the world economy. They’ve worked hard to get where they are and they don’t need a bunch of crazies turning the world upside down. So yeah, maybe they’re doing it for the wrong reasons, but it’s the right thing to do, Pete.

“
What you found down there under that pyramid? That’s exactly the kind of thing that could touch off the next firestorm. Thousands dead. Maybe millions. Maybe a lot more if the economy goes. It’s better just to bury these things.

“
I know you must feel like I betrayed you. I wish there had been time to do things differently. Hell, I wish that there had been nothing at Teo but rocks and bones, but wishing won’t make it so.”

He stopped as if waiting for Professor to respond, and when that didn
’t happen, he went on. “I don’t want to kill you, Pete. We’re on the same side; we both want a world safe from the Dominion and everybody else who wants to flush it down the crapper. What do you say? There’s always room for one more.”

“
Just one more?” Professor called back. “Let me guess. Part of the deal is that I give up Jade and Paul.”

He flashed
her a look that said,
Not a chance
. Jade was surprised by just how much that reassured her.

“
Loose lips sink ships, Pete. I know you can keep a secret, but the others?”

Professor pointed up the hill and mouthed the word
“Go!” Even though Hodges didn’t know it, the parlay was over; the war was back on.

With Professor behind her, Jade crept up the hill, making certain to keep lots of forest cover between
herself and the mercenaries. She could still hear Hodges, droning on about sacrifices for the greater good and the need for absolute secrecy, but his voice became fainter with each step she took. By the time they reached the top of the slope, where Dorion waited, she could no longer even distinguish him from the ambient jungle noise.