Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (19 page)

“Have the locals stake out his house.”

“You don’t want to talk to him?”

“The cars that were involved in this disappeared too quickly. They’ve got to be someplace close.”

“Why don’t we take it straight to Ironwood? He’s at his casino. We could go shake him up.”

Lyle understood the satisfaction that would come from such a move, but it wasn’t feasible. “Ironwood’s many companies give him more than
three hundred domestic locations where he could be hiding the stolen database. Until we find out where it is, we’re not knocking on any doors.”

At least in that regard, Ironwood’s theft of computer data from the air force was more of an old-fashioned crime than one of the cyber persuasion. Computer files with the plans for a new jet engine or directed-energy weapon could be e-mailed anywhere in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. Once stolen, they were impossible to retrieve.

The SARGE database, though, was literally massive. The computer terminology for its size—850 terabytes—held no particular meaning for Lyle. Its physical specifications did: Original or copy, with off-the-shelf commercial components it would take a fourteen-foot truck to move the storage units that could hold that much digital information, along with the necessary cables, power supplies, shelves, and cooling system. In fact, the database was so valuable, whoever stole it would make more duplicates. So they were talking several trucks.

Region 7 had tasked a team of specialists to monitor all the computer communications in Ironwood’s corporate empire for any sign that the air force database, or selected parts of it, were being transferred to potential buyers. Lyle’s goal was to find the actual, real-world location where all the truckloads of physical equipment were being maintained. “Shaking up” the prime suspect wasn’t the best way to go about accomplishing that mission, no matter how much fun his junior agent thought that might be.

“We should go back to the kid’s private lab,” he said. “See if he left anything that points to a meeting tonight, or where he was planning to go.”

Roz closed her laptop, disappointed. “Weir never leaves anything.”

“Always a first time.”

Lyle’s phone buzzed. He read the ID, answered. “Yeah, Del?”

“He’s back.”

Lyle connected the dots. “Weir’s at his lab?”

“Yes, sir. And he’s not alone.”

Jess was used to remote jungle huts, desert tents, and corroding ruins, so the half-finished state of David Weir’s workroom didn’t concern her. But the smell did. Acrid. Something like fermenting vinegar.

“There’s the computer system I put together.” Weir pointed under a plywood-and-sawhorse table at three silver-gray boxes with Apple logos on their sides. They seemed to be in a bed of tangled cables. “Not as fast as a purpose-built sequencer, but good enough for what I need it to do.”

Jess took one of the metal chairs and positioned it to face the table with the computer screens as Dom circled the room, checking its high windows, being certain the front and back exits were securely locked.

She turned her attention to Weir. He was studying a screen with bands of color. Ever since she’d told him she knew there were nine more clusters to find, there’d been no more need to threaten him with a gun or confinement. He’d brought her and Dom here without protest. She still hadn’t decided if she’d send him back to Zurich for further questioning by the Family, and she wouldn’t make that decision until she had learned more about his work for Ironwood. Fortunately, Dom hadn’t yet realized she was acting on her own.

“So why’d your computer call you?”

“Well, it appears I share a gene sequence with a pig. Hold on.” He leaned down and typed on a keyboard. The screen changed. “Has to do with hemoglobin. No surprise. The program was supposed to filter out gene matches that are already known.”

Jess didn’t care about any of that. “Show me how you find geographic clusters.”

Weir seemed hesitant. “It might not be that simple. What do you know about genetics? The human genome?”

“Assume ‘nothing.’ ”

“Okay. So . . . human beings have forty-six chromosomes. That’s twenty-three pairs, in the nucleus of all of our cells. Well, almost all of our cells. Then there’s mitochondria that—you really need to hear all this?”

Jess nodded. “I do.”

Weir pulled up a folding chair and sat down next to his computer table. “Okay, well, all chromosomes, human and mitochondrial, are made of bundled DNA. That’s deoxyribonucleic acid—amino acids, nucleotides. There’re four different types: adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine.” He paused, but Jess said nothing.

Weir moved on. “We call those four types A, C, G, and T. You can think of them as chemical letters. They can go together in different sequences, making different words, you might say, and according to the way they’re put together, like computer programming code, they tell the cell how to build certain proteins.

“Anyway, human beings have about three point two billion of these nucleotides—letters—making up our genetic information. The complete set is called our genome. But it turns out only about one percent of those three point two billion letters make up our actual genes. We’ve got about thirty to forty thousand of them setting our hair color, eye color, how tall we can grow, almost all of our physical characteristics, maybe even a lot of our mental abilities, probably our behavioral tendencies as well . . . So . . . by looking for specific differences in a person’s DNA, especially in the DNA contained in their mitochondria, which are—”

“You’re right,” Jess said. “Maybe I don’t need to hear everything.”

“Bottom line—specific DNA differences can tell us where that person’s ancestors came from.”

This was what she had come for.

“You can map that?”

“
I
can’t, but there’s a research program—the Genographic Project—that’s doing the work. They’ve created a map, and a timetable. A well-established one—of mutations. They’re called polymorphisms, and they’re in the human genome. And we can find that timetable on the Y chromosome of men and in the mitochondrial DNA of men and women.”

Weir sat back, the fingers of one hand pushing back an unruly strand of black hair. He suddenly looked deeply tired.

“Knowing when and in which geographical regions those mutations arose is how we can track three major migrations of humans out of Africa in the past hundred thousand years. And that tells us whose ancestors originally went north into Europe, and whose went east into Asia, and whose settled India, Australia, and whose crossed into North America, and like that . . . all with reasonably specific dates.”

“Do any of these markers prove what you say Ironwood believes, that humans interbred with aliens?”

Weir’s dark, unusual eyes considered her. “There’s absolutely nothing in mainstream genetic research to support his beliefs. Best I can figure is he’s reacting to information he’s getting from some other sources. What he calls ‘archaeological and cultural anomalies.’ ”

Jess could guess what those anomalies might be. The Family hadn’t been able to completely cover up all the physical evidence of its existence and influence through history. Though no legitimate researcher had ever managed to find a pattern in the few clues that remained in the open.

Weir glanced back at his three computer screens, which flashed with rapidly changing bar charts. “Look, Ironwood’s not completely off base. The program these machines are running—the one I got the call about—it’s comparing genes within the human genome to genes in other animals. I mean, we do share genes with all sorts of other species, and that points to all life on the planet arising from a common ancestor. But there’s no compelling evidence that at any time in the history of life on Earth an extraterrestrial source of DNA was inserted into the process. No matter how much Ironwood hopes it was.”

“No compelling evidence,” Jess said. “Which means there
is
some kind of evidence, even if it’s not that convincing.”

Weir turned suddenly and looked toward Dom, and Jess followed suit. Her bodyguard was holding a finger to his earpiece.

“The car?” she asked. They had driven here in an armored Suburban. Rather than sound an audible alert, the SUV’s alarm, if triggered, signaled Dom’s phone.

Dom nodded.

“Go,” Jess said. The Suburban was a tempting vehicle in a deserted neighborhood.

Dom pulled his Glock automatic from his shoulder holster, pausing only for Jess to draw her own pistol to cover Weir while he was gone. Then he sprinted for the room’s back door.

“Uh, there’s an alarm on that door,” Weir said. “If he opens it, it’ll—”

Click. The metal door was open and Dom was through it. No alarm.

Jess turned back to Weir. “The evidence,” she prompted him. “That’s not too compelling.”

Weir was staring at the back door, now swinging shut, as if trying to work out how Dom had bypassed the alarm.

“David.” She said his name sharply, as if trying to get a child’s attention.

He gave her an odd look. “What’s your name?”

Caught off guard, she surprised herself by breaking another of Emil’s interrogation rules. “Jess. Jess MacClary.”

“Well, Jess, in my experience, if you sort through a large enough random selection of genetic profiles, there’re always a few individuals with markers that don’t match any known human genome.”

“How few?”

“Maybe one in a hundred thousand. But the markers are extremely rare. The Genographic Project? It’s got about four hundred thousand genetic profiles. That means, at best, there may be four people in that database with unidentified mutations. Anything that insignificant is usually dismissed as an error, assuming they’re even looking for it.”

“So how did
you
find out about them?” Following his reasoning, with the world’s population closing in on seven billion, Jess calculated there’d be at least seventy thousand people alive right now with unidentifiable DNA.

“I used to work at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Lab—”

“In Maryland. I know.”

“Then you also know I had access to a database almost eight times bigger than the Genographic Project’s. When I was doing quality assurance there, I happened to turn up a profile with nonhuman genes. I thought it was an error. I ran a check, and I found another individual with the same markers, and then another . . . and that’s it.”

“How’d you end up here?”

“I dug into the literature to see if anyone else had come across what I did. I figured somebody must have, and I wanted to see what theories they might have developed to explain them. A lot of the research in this particular area is . . . let’s say, on the fringe of science. Someone on one of the Web sites I was searching—I thought it was the people who ran the site—sent me e-mail, inviting me to meet—”

“Ironwood?”

“Not till later. I ended up selling some data to a guy called Merrit who worked for him.”

“And that data was your geographic clusters. And he’s hired you to find more for him.”

“Yeah.”

Jess knew she was lucky Dom had stepped out to check the SUV. Su-Lin’s instructions, which her bodyguard knew as well as she did, had been unequivocal: If Ironwood’s technician had any connection to Florian’s death, she was to ship him to Zurich without delay—and David had that connection.

Even so, Jess wasn’t ready to reveal that to Dom or anyone else just yet. Not if she had a chance to advance Family knowledge of Ironwood’s ability to find their temples—Florian had died because of it. This technician might have important information, and Jess knew that once Emil had David Weir in Zurich, she’d never talk to him again.

She spoke rapidly, summarizing what he’d told her, to be sure. “You sold Merrit your data for three regions—India first, then Peru, and then the South Pacific.” Data that Ironwood had used to find and loot three of the Family’s sacred temple sites.

David shook his head. “Two,” he said, “and not in that order. The first datasets he bought were for Peru and French Polynesia. For the last one—India—Merrit was still in the field, in the South Pacific. A different guy took me to Ironwood. That’s when he hired me directly. After I gave him my files on India.”

Jess stared at him, making a connection that he couldn’t. David’s third cluster had only confirmed what Ironwood had already found. It hadn’t led him to it.

Three years ago, the Family’s longtime rival for ancient treasures had uncovered a lost temple of the First Gods in the Ghaggar-Hakra dry river valley of India—something the Family had searched for, for generations, and had finally decided was the stuff of myth. The Family’s investigation of Ironwood’s success where they had failed led them to conclude he was simply lucky. There were hundreds of significant ruins in that region, most still unexplored, and one of his teams had just by chance been the first to
excavate at that location. The MacCleirigh Foundation had promptly pressured the local government to exclude Ironwood’s dig team from the site and give the Foundation sole access.

Now, in just the past four months, Ironwood had located two more temples.
After
he’d bought David’s data.

“Your turn, Jess. Tell me what you know about ‘the other nine.’ ”