Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (4 page)

“So? You’re getting paid.” Pinstripe half turned away, touched his ear, and for the first time David noticed he had a small device in it.

David tried to recapture his attention. “Look. It takes weeks to run simple searches without being detected. Searches that a dedicated lab could do in a day or two.”

Pinstripe was already pushing away from the table, getting to his feet.

David saw his sale evaporating; he retrenched immediately. “Okay, okay. Forget I said anything. I’ll do it your way.” He shoved a hand into his pocket to dig for his keys but stopped as Pinstripe’s next words changed everything.

“You got an invite upstairs. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

It seemed redundant to have a presidential suite in a hotel within sight of the White House. Then again, other countries had presidents whose visits required similar accommodations. Tonight, the figure sprawled on the yellow brocade sofa beside a woodburning fireplace was anything but a public official, though he was often a target of their investigations.

He was oversized himself, six foot five, three hundred pounds, and instantly recognizable from near constant exposure in the news.

David revised his speculation about potential access to resources. Holden Stennis Ironwood had been on the
Forbes
billionaire list for more than a decade, hovering easily in the top ten even in the throes of global recession. He owned telecom companies, bought and sold entire news organizations, cornered strategic metals, and was building his own orbital tourist rocket in Nevada. This man could buy the world.

Ironwood held out his hand without getting up. The man’s heavy grip was crushing, and from his predatory smile, he knew it.

“Now you know who you’re dealing with, you’re thinking you should’ve been charging more.” As familiar as his face, Ironwood’s voice was a raspy baritone with a down-home southern twang, the same as Pinstripe’s.

“Pretty much.”

“That’s what I like.” With a grunt, Ironwood swung his bare feet onto the thick Persian rug and sat up. Piles of newspapers and magazines, in many languages, were scattered on the floor around him. “You stay honest, we can do business.” He nodded to Pinstripe, who swept David with a metal-detector wand. “You
are
honest, right?”

“I’m selling you restricted data from army files that technically I don’t have access to.” The wand squealed as Pinstripe moved it over the backpack. David handed it over without being asked.

Ironwood’s expression was the look of command, just like Kowinski’s. The billionaire’s good ol’ boy routine was exactly that: a routine. David had no doubt that the mind behind it was as sharp as the creases on the colonel’s uniform.

“Honest with
me,
” Ironwood said. “The army’s corrupt, just like the government. Stick it to those fools, I say.” He stood up, towering over David, as formidable physically as he was financially. “But you try and stick it to
me . . . Well, you’re a smart guy. You can figure it out.” He looked over at Pinstripe. “J.R.—everything aboveboard?”

J.R. had sorted the contents of David’s backpack on the table in the dining alcove: gym clothes in one pile, two old paperbacks, a small black iPod tangled in earbuds, an even smaller digital recorder, and a phone.

“So far.” He removed the batteries from David’s phone and recorder, then shoved everything, including the iPod, into a lead-foil bag intended to protect film from X-rays.

Ironwood padded over to another alcove, this one with a well-appointed kitchen. “Who’s got the files?”

David held up his keys and drew the end off his army key fob to reveal the flashdrive. “I’ll need a computer.”

Ironwood opened the refrigerator, waving a hand at J.R., who took the keys from David. J.R.’s attitude said he didn’t like being waved at. “So you have a proposal for me.” Ironwood pulled out a bottle of generic diet cola, filled a cut-glass tumbler, and drained it. “Go.”

In the few minutes it took David to lay out his idea, Ironwood was back on the sofa, feet up, eyes closed.

“So what’s it going to cost me?”

“The computers and peripherals would be the most, maybe a hundred thousand. Another fifty for lab equipment and supplies.”

“What about millions of DNA samples? Collection costs? Personnel?”

“All that work’s been done for us. The Genographic Project. Six or seven private genealogical companies. Another dozen universities. The information already exists. We just need to sort through it.”

Ironwood rubbed his nose, eyes still closed. “Those companies and universities, they just
give
us access to their data?”

“The universities, yeah, and we—you—can buy most of the rest of it. Everyone trades in information. Last month, I downloaded the published mitochondrial DNA sequence of a Neandertal for free.”

Ironwood opened one eye to look at him. “I thought it was ‘Neander
thal.
’ ”

“Six of one. The first specimen was found in 1856 in a valley in Germany, the Neander Thal—spelled
t-h-a-l.
In German, you say
th
like
t,
like thyme in English, but before long, scientists anglicized the pronunciation of the name. Meanwhile, around 1900, the Germans changed a bunch of spelling rules, and
t-h-a-l
became
t-a-l.
Now you see ‘Neandertal’ spelled both ways, but the fashion’s to go back to the German pronunciation.”

“The fashion.” Ironwood sat up, fully awake. “You ever hear of Charles Fort?”

David hadn’t, but whatever Ironwood wanted to talk about was fine with him. No one else was going to help him find someone with his markers who lived beyond a twenty-seventh birthday. When, not if, the army discovered his misuse of its resources, the inevitable investigation and delay would literally be fatal for him. It’d be months before anyone took him seriously and even planned to repeat his research.

Ironwood warmed to his lecture. “Fort was a great man. A scholar. Died in ’32, but he was one of the first to blow the whistle on the scientific establishment. You know the way they gather evidence to support their pet theories, then disregard any findings that contradict those theories. I’m sure you’ve seen that in action, right?”

David needed this man’s help, but that didn’t mean he had to agree with everything he said. “Sometimes you make a bad measurement, so you want to exclude that from your research.” He shrugged. “Though sometimes the exception does prove the rule.”

“Exactly!” Ironwood aimed a finger at David as if he held a gun. “How about Richard Feynman? You heard of him?”

“Sure. Manhattan Project. Quantum physics. Probably one of the top scientists of the twentieth century.”

“No ‘probably’ about it. He said the same thing about exceptions to the rules.”

“And that is?”

“If the rule has an exception that can be proved by observation, then the rule’s wrong.” Ironwood stared hard at David. “These clusters you’ve been selling to my man, you ever think it passing strange that a junior tech in a government lab is the first to come across something as big as this—I mean,
nonhuman
DNA?”

“Not really.” David had checked the literature, asking himself the same question. “Lots of other workers noted the results, but they—”

Ironwood didn’t let him finish. “They call the results a processing mistake, or a contamination error, and the greatest discovery of all time is flushed down the crapper! You’ve looked at the data and the clusters. Do
you
know what you’re seeing, Dave? Because I surely do.” He heaved himself off the sofa and stood up in all his immensity. “What you’ve found is absolute scientific proof—
proof
—of what the government has always known, and always hidden from us. But you—I believe you have stumbled on the smoking gun.”

David didn’t understand.

Ironwood gave his shoulders a painful squeeze. “Welcome aboard, Dave. You’re gonna help me put our lying government out of business, and we are gonna turn this world upside down.”

With that, David realized Ironwood was giving him his funding and his lab, but he still had no idea why. Nor did he care.

But others did, and their infrared laser measuring the vibrations of the suite’s windows recorded every word.

Nathaniel Merrit was still alive.

An hour after his capture, his shaved scalp beaded with sweat in the tropical sun, he was tied up on the teak deck of his own chartered dive boat—a fourteen-meter Azimut hired out of Tahiti, a three-day trip from the atoll. Partly covered by a blue nylon tarp, a body lay under the bench on the port side of the deck. Renault.

Then someone familiar slid open the teak door of the forward cabin and stepped onto the deck.

Florian MacClary.

Over the three years they had been in opposition, they had never met, though Merrit had read her dossier often enough. There was little doubt her people had an equal file on him.

He revised the picture he’d built of his sixty-year-old adversary. In person, she was more imposing. Her hair had fewer dark streaks. Her steel gray wetsuit was zipped open to reveal a well-toned body in a black bathing suit. Against the dark fabric, a large, ornate silver cross hung from a thin silver chain—an unusual item to wear while diving.

She gestured to a large cooler on the deck between them. Earlier the blue plastic container had held cans of Coca-Cola, water bottles, and a few Hinano beers. Now it protected the artifact from the underwater treasure chamber. Immersion in saltwater was the standard procedure for preserving anything retrieved from long submersion.

“We finally beat you to one, Merrit.”

He stayed silent, testing the tightness of the yellow nylon rope that secured his hands behind his back. At the same time, he checked for any sign of the two divers who had captured him.

He spotted them, anchored astern on their own dive boat—a sleek, fifteen-meter catamaran, sails furled, twin hulls gleaming white against the jewel blue waves. A crew of three could easily handle her, so it was probable the two divers were MacClary’s only crew. He liked the odds.

In the forward cabin of his own boat, Merrit caught sight of Krause at the wheel. Krause glared back at him with open hatred.

Merrit looked up at his captor. “Krause gave you some inside help.”

Florian MacClary, looking suddenly fatigued, sat on the Azimut’s side bench, steadying herself with one hand though the ocean swells were gentle.

“Tell me about the help
you
had. Finding this place.”

Merrit seized on his advantage. “You didn’t know this site was here. You followed me.”

The slight flicker of her pale green eyes told him he was right.

Whatever she had planned to say next, Merrit sensed that she changed her mind. Instead, she knelt on the deck and reached into the cooler, carefully removing the irregularly shaped, football-sized artifact.

It was similar to the one he’d recovered in the Andes, smoothly pitted and cratered everywhere but on its one flat, polished side. The pattern engraved there, as far as he could tell, was the same. From the reverent way MacClary handled it, the object had special meaning to her.

“I need to know,” she said. “Do you have any idea what this is?”

Merrit had some idea what the object meant to his employer, but there was nothing to be gained by sharing that information. He made a show of studying the artifact more closely, wondering if she would share information with him. As long as they were talking, he still had options.

“It’s a meteorite. Nickel-iron. Someone told me most of them are formed in a star, just before it explodes. That one landed here a long time ago. Someone found it, cut it in half—more or less—polished the cut surface, and carved that pattern into it.”

“Not a pattern. A map. Of the solar system.” MacClary’s fingers lightly traced the almost invisible lines cut into the smooth metal surface. “On the boundary, this band of stars, and then the sun, here in the center. Six planets circling it. Mercury. Venus. Earth with its moon. Then Mars, Jupiter with its four major moons, and a ringed Saturn.” MacClary shifted her attention back to him. “Is any of that significant to you?”

Merrit changed the subject. “What happens now?”

Krause hadn’t moved from the wheel. It wasn’t hard to guess what he wanted to happen next. Renault’s body was still in its wetsuit. The air tank had been removed, but Merrit could see the outline of the buoyancy vest under the tarp. That could mean the rest of the diver’s equipment was in place, as well.

But it seemed MacClary hadn’t finished her interrogation. She cradled the meteorite as if it were as fragile as a newborn. “Do you know when this map was carved?”

Merrit shook his head. Sweat stung his eyes. It was late afternoon, and the flybridge deck overhead provided no shade from the sun.

“Nine thousand years ago,” she said.

Merrit thought he had heard this before, but it was just a number, no different from millions or billions.

“Nine thousand years,” MacClary repeated softly. “When historians tell us our ancestors were just beginning to settle in the first villages, just beginning to learn about agriculture.” She gazed at the incised meteorite. “The heliocentric solar system in this map—with the sun in the center—doesn’t even show up in ancient writings until Aristarchus of Samos—270
B.C
. Almost seven thousand years
after
this was carved. Even then, the idea wasn’t generally accepted until Copernicus proposed it seventeen hundred years later. And Jupiter’s four major moons, Saturn’s rings—you can’t see those with the naked eye. They don’t turn up again in the astronomical records until Galileo recorded his own observations through his first telescope in 1610. So how is this map possible?”