Oracle (25 page)

“
So we would have to actually have the original parchment in hand,” said Jade. “Well, I know that Roche had a bunch. Those won’t do us much good.”

“
You could break in and steal them.”

“
Don’t tempt me. Where else can we find Dee originals?”

Professor typed in
“Where can I find original John Dee manuscripts?”

“
The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at Oxford,” Jade said, reading the first result that didn’t mention Roche. “Wouldn’t mind going there.”

“
I’m not sure we’re going to find much more of use online. And if this is all we’ve got, then I don’t think we should get our hopes up.”

“
Try searching for Alvaro.”

Professor dutifully typed in:
“Alvaro Diego Menendez Castillo.”

“
I’m glad you remembered that,” Jade said. “I didn’t.”

“
That’s why you keep me around.” He scanned the results. “Nothing.”

He tried different variations, but there was not a single result that linked back
to the sixteenth century.

“
That’s not so unusual,” Professor said. “It could just mean that no one has digitized the historical account in which he appears.”

He tried other searches relating to Spanish history, ships that sailed from Mexico in 1593, ships that might have sunk along the way. Finally, he tried Gil Perez.

“Uh, Jade…”

She looked at the list.
“No way.”

Jade had gotten used to results that had nothing at all to do with what had been entered into the search engine. Common names yielded personal websites and Facebook pages, and no shortage of advertisements for White Pages and other paid people-finding services. She was completely unprepared for what the search for Gil Perez returned.

“‘The mysterious teleporting man’?”

Professor clicked on the page and Jade began reading silently.

On October 24, 1593, a Spanish soldier named Gil Perez was standing guard at the Palacio Del Gobernador in the Philippines.  Governor Gomez Perez Dasmarinas had just been assassinated by Chinese mutineers and the garrison was on high alert while they awaited the appointment of a new governor. A weary Gil Perez decided to lean against a wall and rest for a moment. When he opened his eyes, he was in a completely unfamiliar place. Unsure of what to do, he continued to do his guard duties until he was approached by soldiers who began asking who he was. When he attempted to explain that he was guarding the governor
’s palace, he learned that he was no longer in the Philippines, but in Mexico City’s Plaza Mayor. He had been teleported over 9,000 nautical miles away in the blink of an eye.

Because he was in a strange uniform, and because news of the governor’s assassination would not reach Mexico for several months, Perez was assumed to be a deserter and imprisoned. When a ship from Manila arrived, they not only brought word of the assassination but also said that they knew Gil Perez, and said that he had been missing since the night of October 23.

The story showed up, more or less word for word, on more than a dozen different web sites. One page indicated that the story had first appeared in print about a century afterward. Another site offered a skeptical examination of the details and explained why the story was nothing more than an urban myth.

“
This can’t be the same guy,” Professor said. “Even if the story is true…and I’m not saying it is…there wasn’t anything in that journal about being a palace guard in the Philippines.”

“
But the date,” Jade persisted. “It’s exactly the same.” She reread the account again. “In the journal, Perez said something about seeing the life he might have lived as if looking through a window. And he talked about opening the window and stepping through. What if he succeeded?”

“
We found his body. I’d call that a ‘fail.’”

Jade turned to Dorion.
“Paul, is there a possibility that a dark matter field could transport people between alternate dimensions?”

Dorion seemed excited by the prospect.
“When it comes to quantum mechanics, almost anything is possible. It may be that Perez—our Perez, the man we found under the pyramid—tried to bridge the universes, to open a door instead of just looking through the window. In so doing, he might have created instability in space-time, causing several universes to overlap.”

“
Maybe that’s what he meant by the life he might have lived; he saw the outcome of a different choice in life—the choice to be a lowly palace guard—and tried to switch places with his double. There was a hiccup and one Perez wound up dead in Teo, and the other got teleported to Mexico City.”

“
A hiccup?” said Professor. “Is that the scientific term for it? Can I point out a big flaw in this idea? The Perez in the story had no clue about any of this, and the sailors who arrived from Manila confirmed that Perez had gone missing. That means that the guy we found in the cavern might be the one from another universe.”

“
So?”

“
So, maybe the whole business with Alvaro taking the Moon stone happened in another reality.”

Jade shook her head.
“If that was true, we would have found the Moon stone in the cavern. Maybe things got mashed up, but the Moon stone was taken, and that means it’s got to be in our universe…somewhere.”

“
Then, as bizarre as this story is, it doesn’t really tell us anything.”

Jade clung to the story of Gil Perez like a lifeline.
“No, this has to be important somehow. We’re talking about someone teleporting! What  if,” she glanced at the iPad screen again. “What if we look for other stories like this? Unexplained disappearances. Maybe we can find the Moon stone’s footprint.”

Professor
’s expression was dubious. “Well, if you want mysterious disappearances, you don’t have to look very far. The route for Spanish galleons heading back to Europe went right through the Bermuda Triangle.”

Jade
’s eyes went wide and Professor hastily added, “But the Bermuda Triangle is just a myth, created by a writer in the 1960s. Most of the so-called disappearances have been completely blown out of proportion and have a perfectly rational explanation.”

“
Most? What about the ones that don’t? This makes perfect sense. Alvaro’s ship must have gone down. The Moon stone is sitting there at the bottom of the ocean. It’s probably the cause of those disappearances.”

Dorion weighed in.
“If we accept the premise that the dark matter field can cause people to shift between different universes, then this is not implausible.”

Professor made a low grumbling noise.

Ophelia, who had been following the discussion without comment, now spoke up. “If this Moon stone is there, at the bottom of the ocean, how would we find it?”

“I’ve read all the scientific explanations for why the stories about the Bermuda Triangle are probably exaggerated,” Jade said. “But there are cases that still defy a logical explanation. Those planes that left Florida and vanished without a trace—”

“
Flight 19,” supplied Professor grudgingly. “Five Avenger torpedo bombers went on a training flight in 1945. The flight leader radioed that he was off course and lost, and all attempts to talk them in or figure out where they were failed. The Navy searched for days in the area where they thought the planes had gone down, but found no trace. One of the search planes disappeared as well. The story of Flight 19 was what started people talking about the Bermuda Triangle. After that, every time a ship or plane went missing in the area, it added to the myth.

“
But sometimes planes and ships just disappear, even today. Flight 370, that Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 went off course and vanished in the Indian Ocean. Everyone wants to believe that there’s some mysterious force at work because we think our technology is foolproof, but it’s not. More than two-thirds of the planet is covered in deep ocean. It’s a great big haystack to lose a needle in. It’s just that simple. Unless you think there are other dark matter fields out there.”

Jade raised an eyebrow.
“Maybe there are.”

“
You’re worse than Bones,” Professor sighed.

Jade rolled her eyes at the thought of the six-foot-five Cherokee Indian, Uriah
“Bones” Bonebrake, Dane Maddock’s partner-in-crime, and like Professor, a former member of the same SEAL team. She and Bones had gotten off on a bad foot, and Maddock’s new relationship with Angel didn’t help, but Jade and Bones had actually gotten along pretty well when they’d last worked together. Jade recalled Bones’ fascination with unexplained phenomena. “We could probably use him on this. Anyway, my point is that we can take those stories—the ones that are still completely unsolved—and triangulate to find the center of the effect. At the very least, it can narrow our search area.”

“
The average depth of the Atlantic is nearly two miles down.”

“
If you can put us in the ballpark,” Ophelia said, “I can provide a search vessel with submersibles.”

“
There may be another way to narrow the search,” said Dorion. “In order to have that kind of effect at a distance, the field would have to be massive, much larger than what we observed in Teotihuacan.”

“
Could the Moon stone still be collecting WIMPs?” Jade asked.

“
Possibly. But that’s not what I’m getting at. There’s never been a way to detect dark matter, but if the Moon stone is exerting a significant effect on space-time—significant enough to make planes vanish from the sky—there will be measurable relativistic effects.”

“
Meaning?”

“
Meaning that time will distorted…we’re talking differences of perhaps only a few nanoseconds, but it’s a fairly simple thing to measure those differences with an atomic clock. We have one clock with us, synchronized to the FOCS-1 clock in Switzerland. As we move closer to a disruption of space-time, the clocks will desynchronize. Put simply, we can build a dark matter detector.”

“
Speaking of clocks,” Ophelia said, “it’s late. We should all get some rest. I’ve got a breakfast date with my brother in a few hours. I’m not looking forward to that.”

Jade felt a twinge of apprehension. Despite his intervention on their behalf, Laertes Doerner remained a member of the very group that had repeatedly tried to kill them.
“Maybe we should keep this just between us?”

“
I won’t be able to hide an ocean-going expedition. But you let me worry about Laertes.”

Professor sighed in defeat.
“I suppose none of you will be happy until we’ve had a look. But you do realize that, if there’s any truth to this crazy idea, the Bermuda Triangle will be a very dangerous place, and we’ll be sailing right into the heart of it.”

Jade grinned.
“Never stopped us before.”

Brian Hodges closed
his eyes and tried to imagine that he was somewhere else. With his hands and ankles zip-tied to a chair, there wasn’t much else he could do to deal with his imprisonment. He had no idea how much time had passed; hours, certainly. He knew that he had dozed off once or twice, but the uncomfortable chair to which he was bound made real sleep impossible. His captors had not fed him or even allowed him to go to the bathroom. His stomach had been grumbling for a while now and he had a splitting headache, though strangely, he didn’t feel the need to urinate. That meant he was probably dehydrated.

“
Can I get a drink of water?” he croaked. “You can’t treat me like this. I have rights.”

There was no answer. He had seen no sign of anyone since being tied up and left here in this cell. Had they forgotten about him?

There was a click at the door and it swung open to reveal an irritated-looking man with pale blond hair. He recognized the visitor immediately; Laertes Doerner, the man who had betrayed them to the Greek police.

Hodges felt a surge of defiance from the depths of his misery.
“What a surprise. You know they’re going to come after you.”

Doerner cocked his head sideways.
“The Group? Oh, I doubt that very much. You and Andres really screwed things up. The Group will be pleased that I managed to clean this mess up with only minimal blowback.”

“
Why did you turn us in?”

Doerner chuckled.
“Isn’t it obvious? Andres went after my sister. I couldn’t very well just stand by and let that happen.”

“
No victory without sacrifice,” Hodges muttered. “I lost my family. A lot of people lost sisters and daughters. What makes you so special?”

“
You mean apart from a net worth that runs to eleven figures?”

“
You’re a hypocrite. When the Group learns about this—”

Doerner waved his hand as if brushing away a bothersome fly.
“Don’t presume to know what the Group thinks. You’re not in our class. In any case, the Group won’t be learning of it. Not from you, at least. You see, somebody has to pay for your little incursion on Greek soil. Those gunslingers Andres hired are already on their way to the deepest darkest prison in Greece. You’ve got reservations there as well, unless…”