Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (13 page)

Thus, the Red Room was unsecured by electronic systems or biometric hand scanners, retinal readers or numbered keypads. Entrance was granted only by personal recognition by three guards posted outside its doors. Sometimes the simplest precautions were the strictest in the world of high security.

As Ironwood approached the Red Room, he noted with approval three former marines, all of a type, attentive-eyed, solid with muscles. There was no attempt to hide the bulge of the weapons they carried under their smart hotel-staff blazers.

Two of the guards simultaneously turned their keys at wall-mounted stations sited far enough apart that one person could not operate both at the same time. The third opened the heavy door. Its Kevlar-reinforced
ceramic core—bullet- and blast-proof—was discreetly masked by pale oak veneer.

Ironwood nodded at the guards as he passed into the Red Room. “Thank you, gentlemen.” Respect was earned, and these men had his.

High overhead, the Red Room’s ceiling was a frozen sea of curved, reflective panels studded with bright lights. The deliberate visual chaos was designed to hide overhead remote-controlled cameras that could move ceaselessly and undetectably from table to table on their search for cheaters—if the room were ever restored to its original purpose.

Now it contained all of the trappings expected of a research facility for new gambling technology. A traditional carousel placement of video slot machines was oriented toward the main door, each machine with its covering console removed to expose electronic workings, while their screens flashed with seductive displays.

The rest of the visible space was occupied by banks of computer equipment, also in constant operation. A conference table against a featureless beige back wall was littered with file folders, empty coffee cups and soft drink cans, and crumpled candy wrappers.

The air was cold. The background hum of industrial air-conditioning was noticeable; the murmured conversation of eight technicians, barely audible.

Whenever the representatives of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission wanted to check for unauthorized, private high-roller playing of unsanctioned games, they were welcome. The Red Room was exactly what everyone expected it to be.

Except that it wasn’t. Because of what lay behind the featureless beige side wall, through the single cylindrical darkroom door, installed not to keep light out but to maintain the temperature on the other unseen side.

The eight technicians were also not what they seemed. Unofficially, each made five times the salary of Osman Mirza, who was, as Encounters’ manager, the highest-paid member of the resort’s staff. At least on the resort’s official books.

“Hey, boss.” Keisha Harrill led Ironwood’s Red Room team. She wore a blue T-shirt with a large Union Jack above the word
GREECE
, which Ironwood found comical for someone whose expertise involved mapping. Just twenty-eight, Keisha was already set for a comfortable retirement due to the seven-figure bonus he’d paid her to reject Google’s latest offer.

A few of the other technicians looked up from their workstations for a moment, curious about what new challenge he might be bringing them. Of the eight people on his handpicked team of specialists, four men and one woman were close to Keisha’s age, young and eager and brilliant, as
innovative mathematicians are apt to be. The other two were veteran engineers, both in their fifties. When it came to building custom computers from scratch, experience counted as much as innovation.

“What can we do for you?” Keisha asked.

“I had an idea. Something to try while we’re waiting for a fourth set of search coordinates.”

Ironwood was pleased to see that with those words he had her complete attention. The work the team did in this room on his behalf was not something he could ever discuss by e-mail or by phone. If the government ever learned what went on here, they wouldn’t call him to the Hill for testimony—they’d lock him up and vaporize the key.

“What if we compare the first three sites, you know, come up with all their points of similarities? If we find some other locations that have the same ones, we’d have ourselves some new target spots to check.”

Keisha fingered her long, beaded dreadlocks as she considered the request. “That’s cool. In fact, Frank’s been working on that since we got the hit on that third set of coordinates.” She called over to a member of her team. “Frank? You mind coming over here?”

Frank Beyoun reluctantly wandered over to join Keisha and Ironwood. He was short and bearded, wearing tattered jeans, sandals, and an untucked green and brown flannel shirt. If Frank’s outfit ever changed, Ironwood had never seen it.

“Any luck?”

“Haven’t cracked it.”

Keisha gave the glum mathematician an encouraging look. “Explain to the man, Frank.”

“The thing is the first site, in India, it’s in a river valley. Inland, low altitude, reachable by boat back when it was built. The second’s in the Andes. But high altitude. Way inland. Unreachable by boat. Third’s in the South Pacific. Originally above sea level. On an island. Boats all the time.” Frank looked away as if he were embarrassed by his failure. “So far we found nothing else to link them. Other than the three outposts have identical designs.”

“Okay, Frank, that’s all we needed,” Keisha said. “Back to it.”

Frank nodded and shuffled off toward his station.

Ironwood had deliberately held back a few details from the team, though he’d shared the important ones they needed to do their work. Now he reminded Keisha of one of those details. “Don’t forget we found identical designs
and
similar artifacts in all three outposts.”

The carved stone tables in the outposts in India and Peru were virtually the same. Merrit had reported there was a similar-sized table in the
underwater outpost in Polynesia. Then there were the two black meteorites, from India and Polynesia. Each was inscribed with an identical diagram of the solar system.

Keisha looked thoughtful. “I don’t think there’s any question the outposts were built by the same people, what with the ones in India and Peru constructed within a few hundred years of each other. My guess is the one in Polynesia will turn out to have similar dating, too. That said, it’s no big shock the artifacts in them are the same.” Her smile was playful, questioning. “You ever going to tell us what the artifacts really are?”

Ironwood winked, letting her know there was no chance in hell of that. “Just what I told you before. Furniture and carvings.”

Keisha properly didn’t press the matter. “Anyway, the point is—”

A warning chime sounded, and she broke off. The main door was about to open.

“Keep going,” Ironwood said. “It’s just J.R.”

“Okay, well, the point is, we’ve yet to identify a common factor that accounts for why the outposts were built where they were built.”

“What about the one in Peru? It’s not too far from Machu Picchu. That’s a sacred site. Maybe some ley lines nearby? Earth energy? Any chance there’re some of those lines at the India and South Pacific finds?”

Though it made sense to him, Ironwood didn’t expect his suggestion to go down well with this particular brain trust. He was right.

“If there
were
such a thing as mystical ley lines,” Keisha said, “you can be sure geologists and physicists would be happily engaged in rewriting the laws of nature at Sedona and Glastonbury and Rosslyn and who knows where else. And I personally would be checking to see if they ran anywhere close to the outposts.”

“But there’s no such thing, is what you’re saying,” J.R. interrupted as he entered and joined their conversation. Ironwood smelled the reason for his son’s tardiness and attitude—he’d stopped at a bar or, more probably, lifted someone’s drink order from one of the hostesses’ trays.

“What I’m saying,” Keisha said pleasantly but firmly, “is, if phenomena like ley lines or Earth energy lines are real, their existence has yet to be demonstrated with appropriate scientific rigor. Bring me the evidence, and I’ll change my mind.”

Ironwood smiled. That intellectual openness was why he’d chosen Keisha to lead his team. His only point of disagreement with her was on what constituted appropriate evidence.

His son, however, was a different matter. No choice there.

“J.R., they’re waiting for you in security. Novak’s going to put you on rotation. Pick up some coffee on the way.”

Ironwood could see the resentment in his son’s eyes—his usual reaction to parental orders—but J.R. wisely moved toward the door and left without further comment.

“Hey, boss,” Keisha suddenly added, “if you’ve got the time, we can show you something new we’re trying. No results yet, but you never know.”

Ironwood brightened. He loved new things. “What’ve you got?”

Keisha led him to the room’s biggest display, nine feet on the diagonal, turned so it couldn’t be viewed by anyone coming through the main door. She picked up a remote control with a large touch screen and tapped it several times. “Remember I mentioned Glastonbury before?”

Ironwood nodded, intrigued. Glastonbury was a small English town in the county of Somerset, and of particular interest to him. Among the many legends associated with the place, some maintained it was where Joseph of Arimithea had traveled about thirty years after the death of Jesus, and where he’d built the first church in Great Britain as a secure fortress in which to hide the Holy Grail.

A series of place names materialized on the giant display.

Keisha moved her finger across the remote, and a highlight bar flashed down the list until it reached
GLASTONBURY/SOMERSET/ENG 51.09N 02.43W
. “Here we go.” She tapped again. At once, an aerial image appeared of a small town with a distinctive triangular layout surrounded by multihued farm fields.

The aerial perspective zoomed in.

“Glastonbury Abbey,” Keisha said. “World’s oldest Christian church. At least, probably the oldest one originally constructed aboveground. Built around
A.D
. 60, more or less.”

The zoom stopped.

In a green field, the white outline of a building was visible—the ruins of the abbey. Ironwood knew he was looking at stones that had been put into place almost two thousand years ago. Moments like these always filled him with awe. How long humans had lived on this small world—and after all that time, how little they knew.

“So,” Keisha said, “this is one of those places we thought we’d search on a hunch. See if there had ever been an outpost here.”

“You already told me you didn’t find one.”

“No outpost, but under that hill—”

“It’s called a tor,” Ironwood corrected. “Glastonbury Tor.”

“Right. Under that tor, then, there’s a structure that’s not in the textbooks. Take a look.”

Ironwood watched the screen, hooked as always, as his illegal $20 million investment came to the fore.

Keisha tapped the remote, and all the colors on the screen shifted, becoming wild and garish. “False colors,” she’d explained to him once, arbitrarily assigned shades chosen to heighten the differences between various materials. On the screen, the tree leaves were now white. The grass beneath them, orange. The white stones of the ruins were bright red. The cars parked in the nearby lot were black.

“Switching to SARGE,” Keisha said. She hit a key, and the parking lot they’d just been looking at suddenly disappeared. Apparently, it hadn’t been built back in 2005, the creation date of the particular version of the SARGE database he’d acquired. “Now we take a one-meter slice to eliminate surface structures . . . following the topo contours . . .”

The trees disappeared, and the bright red stones of the abbey ruins shifted slightly as only the foundation material remained visible. All the other surface detail disappeared as well. Instead, a spidery set of black and green lines appeared against a multicolored mottled background.

“Pipes?” Ironwood asked.

“Drainpipes, for the most part. There’re lots more at two meters. But we’ll go straight to five meters below ground . . .”

The image shifted again. Now a smaller rectangle of red stones appeared where the abbey ruins had been. Ironwood knew that meant that sixteen feet or so under the abbey, another, older structure had once stood. Likely a Roman temple. It was common practice for early Christian churches to be constructed on the sites of pagan temples.

“Five meters is where we start to look for the outposts in this kind of soil. Want to try?” Keisha held out the remote.

Ironwood couldn’t resist playing with his toys. He tapped the control.

On-screen, a bright blue in-scale floor plan appeared of what he’d taken to calling an alien outpost. A moment later, that floor plan began flickering over the screen, angled one way, then another, back and forth, appearing and disappearing so quickly he could only see it as an afterimage. It was how the computer program was attempting to find any pattern in the high-contrast mottling of the site’s soil and stone matching the layout of an outpost.

The same technique was used by the military to analyze surveillance photos. While a human eye might be unable to notice the camouflaged silhouette of an enemy tank, a computer could apply that outline to every possible point in a photo, at every possible angle. The pattern search was time-consuming. It was also virtually infallible.

After half a minute, the flickering stopped and a message appeared:
NO MATCH
.

“Now,” Keisha said, “in an actual search, we’d be covering a square
kilometer at a time, and we’d go down in half-meter increments. It took us three days to do the full search of that tor.”

She tapped the control again. “Here, let me take you to the fun stuff right away.”

Ironwood watched the screen intently, anticipating it would soon reveal the familiar outline of a megalithic burial chamber beneath the abbey. The hills of Great Britain were riddled with them.

Then the screen refreshed and he blinked, surprised. The structure hidden far below the abbey was five times bigger than any megalithic burial chamber he had ever seen; moreover, its walls were remarkably straight, and all its angles were at ninety degrees.