Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (47 page)

“Let’s get to full disclosure.”

“Well, that’s the thing. I’m told that the government can’t release what doesn’t exist.”

“The hell it doesn’t.”

“I’m being honest with you here, Mr. Ironwood. I’ve dealt with enough bleeding-edge technology cases to have heard rumors of some great store of alien technology. And, guess what? I haven’t. There are three Air Force generals in the room with me right now, all honorable men, and they have no knowledge of what you want, either.”

“Agent Lyle, you haven’t been listening to me. I didn’t go to all the bother and expense of getting a copy of your database to sell military secrets to the Red Chinese. I did it to find buried evidence of alien visitation. Visitation that is still going on today, that the government knows about, and that the people of the world deserve to know about, too.”

Lyle looked to DiFranza. DiFranza looked to the unsmiling civilian. The civilian shook his head once. DiFranza took the phone from Lyle.

“Mr. Ironwood, this is U.S. Air Force General Lou DiFranza.”

Lyle couldn’t hear Ironwood’s reply, but the general looked surprised by it. Then very surprised. “He hung up.” DiFranza passed the phone back to Lyle, spoke to his fellow general. “Bulldog, as of now, you are go on Operation Clawback.”

Lyle pushed away from the table and stood up. True, he had failed to make a deal with Ironwood. It was also true, now, that no deal had to be made. The Air Commandos would have his target in custody within eleven hours. Back to the States within a day of that. Justice would be served after all.

Still . . .

He walked over to DiFranza. “General, if I’m out of line, I never asked
this question. But when Ironwood wanted evidence of UFOs released, and that civilian—”

“Dr. Satomura. Psychiatrist,” the general said promptly. “Works extensively with Special Operations Command on hostage situations, ransom demands, areas of that nature.” He laughed, though Lyle thought laughter was a touch unfair.

“I see what you’re getting at, and no, there are no UFOs. No alien UFOs, that is.” The general leaned in conspiratorially close. “It’s no secret we have a lot of, let’s call them ‘interesting’ aircraft flying, but none of them are from Mars. Mak Satomura, he’s been through negotiations like this before, and when the subject makes an impossible demand, like wanting the government to bring someone back from the dead, or trading something for the president, or evidence of UFOs, that’s a sign that further negotiation is unlikely to produce a satisfactory outcome. So when Ironwood made that screwball demand, he was letting us know he never wanted to make a deal in the first place.”

Lyle had no reason to doubt that the explanation of the exchange he’d witnessed between the general and the civilian was a good one. But Roz? She would have had a completely different interpretation of it.

“Ironwood, he actually believes in UFOs and aliens, you realize,” Lyle said.

“Lots of people do, but they don’t put the safety and security of the United States at risk to pursue their delusions. He’s dangerous, Jack. You did an exemplary job proving he stole SARGE. You got his accomplices and his son in custody. And you tracked him down for us. That’s outstanding work. Now we’ll take it from here.” DiFranza held out his hand, and Lyle knew a dismissal when he saw one.

He shook the general’s hand. “Thank you, sir.”

“We’ll let you know how it plays out.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

Lyle left the Emergency Conference Room. A marine corporal escorted him to the Pentagon’s Metro entrance and watched as he passed back through the security scanners.

Lyle walked to his car in the lot under the pedestrian bridges, trying to decide why he felt so troubled.

He
had
done his job. Ironwood would be apprehended.

For all the man’s crazy talk, though, after speaking with him directly, Lyle’s instincts were telling him the complete opposite: Ironwood wasn’t crazy.

Lyle drove off, deciding to put some distance between himself and the
Pentagon listening posts that heard in real time every cellular phone call placed within a three-mile radius of the building.

He needed to talk to Roz.

He needed to ask her the question he couldn’t ask anyone else.

What if Ironwood was right?

“Has it all been a lie?” Bakana asked. “The Secret’s
lost
?” She looked pale, close to tears, stricken by the revelations that had been forced upon her.

Victoria was dismissive of her bewilderment. “You shouldn’t have heard any of this, but you have. Su-Lin was right to act to confine them.”

“Bakana, everything David said is true,” Jess said.

“There’s a way to settle this,” David said to Victoria. He still held the Taser. “Get Jess and me a detailed image of the sun map. Have an astronomer derive a date from it. Match it to the star map from the Chamber of Heaven. Then let everyone in the Family know the location of the White Island.”

“You can’t know the two maps will give you that location.”

“You can’t know they won’t. Unless you try.” He aimed the Taser at her. “The laptop. Use it.”

Victoria crossed her arms. Her refusal unequivocal.

“Consider this, then,” David said. “The First Gods shared their knowledge and gave you a secret to defend. Whatever it was, your Family lost it. Jess is giving you a chance to get that back. But you won’t even let us go looking for it. You’d throw away the Mystery of the Promise—just to preserve your own domain.”

“Finished?” Victoria asked.

“That’s up to you.”

“Fine. Put the weapon down. My security people are outside that door by now.”

“You never called them.”

“The blast door’s closed. It’s an emergency, and I’m not out there. I don’t have to call them.”

“Jess, can you check?” David kept the Taser leveled on Victoria. The defender stayed where she was, unreadable.

“I’ll have to open it,” Jess said. There was no glass in the door, no way to see into the hallway outside.

“Go ahead.”

She slowly turned the brass doorknob in the dark wooden door, opened it about an inch, and—

—the door flew open as a young man burst in, seizing her by the throat with one arm as he aimed a gun at David.

“Put it down, mate.” His Australian accent was strong. He wasn’t an operative from Cross in Zurich. He was one of the Shop’s—and Victoria’s—personal security guards. His weapon was unknown to David, but it was a firearm, not a Taser.

David made one last attempt to reach the scholar inside Victoria. “When did you become so afraid of the truth?”

“Put down the weapon,” she said, “or I’ll tell him to shoot you.”

David looked at Jess, saw only despairing resignation in her eyes. So he took a step to put the Taser on the corner of Victoria’s desk. The guard moved to retrieve it. In that split second of inattention, his gun moved off target as Bakana tripped him.

“Bakana! No!” Victoria cried.

David was already grabbing for the Taser as Jess leapt for the guard. The impact of her body threw him off balance. His gun swung up, fired blindly, and as he fell back, he struck his head on the sharp desk edge. His eyes lost focus, then closed as he slumped, unmoving.

As if in a trance, Bakana picked up the guard’s gun.

Jess held out her hand.

Bakana gave it to her. “The promise
must
be kept,” she said. Then she turned apologetically to Victoria and—her hand flew to cover her mouth.

The Defender of Canberra was in her chair, bloody hands pressed to her chest, staring at Jess with incredulity. “You’ve ruined us
all
. . . you’ve . . .”

Then she stopped as if seeing something at a great distance, and sighed her last breath. Her head fell forward.

Jess turned to David, stricken. “How did this—”

There was no time for regret, just action. “Bakana, how do we get out of here?” David asked.

Victoria’s assistant gulped, struggled to speak. “The . . . the blast door’s sealed. She was . . . she was right . . . it’ll take a day—”

“No,” David said. “There’s got to be another way.” He turned to Jess. “Talk to her.”

Jess put out a hand to steady the unnerved assistant. “Bakana, your instincts were right. This is about more than just me. It’s about all of us—the Family. I never wanted anyone to be hurt, but we have to learn the truth. It’s important that we find a way out of here. Can you help us again? Please?”

Bakana shook her head, apprehensive. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Victoria . . .” She sobbed.

David tried again. “This is a bomb shelter. Something with such a prominent entrance has to have another hidden exit. In case the main way out’s covered in rubble after an attack.”

The Cross operative swayed as he got to his feet, bloodied and sore from his fight with David. “Can you really find the White Island?”

“If we get out of here, yes,” David said.

The young man staggered to Victoria’s desk, ignored the body in the chair, and opened the screen of the laptop.

“Find what you need in here, and I’ll show you the way out.”

Jess knew she
had
betrayed everything she’d worked for all her life, everyone she’d ever known.

Victoria had been right.

But so am I,
she thought.

“Here’re the photographs,” Bakana said. Somehow she’d rallied, rationalized her participation in the events that had led to a defender’s death. As a researcher in the Shop, she was an expert in using its cataloguing system and found the sun map files in less than a minute. She turned the laptop around. “Is this what you need?”

David and the Cross operative had carefully laid Victoria’s body on the floor and covered it with a throw from the back of the leather couch. Then they had tied and gagged her security guard. Bakana had warned them there could be up to three others in the Shop, depending on whether or not they were inside when the blast door closed. So far, no one else had shown up at the office door.

“That’s it.” The image on the screen was a close-up of the diagram etched on the meteorite Jess had seen in the Shrine of Turus.

The photo’s sharp side-lighting gave high relief to the details. The six planets were there, each at a different point along its circular orbit. One moon for Earth, four for Jupiter, and a ring for Saturn.

“Is that what you expected?” Jess asked David. His simple search to unlock his personal genetic heritage to save his life had been swept into her own quest for the survival of her family’s whole existence. But she felt no guilt. Too much had happened. Her life and David’s were somehow intertwined: Neither of them could solve their mystery without the other. And with hunters on their trail, from the Family and from Ironwood, there was no way back for either of them.

David frowned. “Not sure. The planets all orbit at different speeds, so
how often do they take on this particular arrangement? Is this the whole diagram?”

Jess thought back to the artifact in Zurich. “This doesn’t show the decorative bands.”

“Do you have a photo of that?”

Bakana tapped a few keys, brought up another image. Now the diagram was smaller, but the entire cut face of the meteorite could be seen, including two engraved bands around the solar system. The outer band was a narrow ring of thin radial lines. The inner band, an apparently random pattern of dots.

“Those are the stars in the zodiac,” David said. “Whoever made the map might have imagined different constellations, but the stars would be the same.”

Jess confirmed it. “That’s the consensus.”

“Then I bet that’s the key. An astronomer could tell us when this specific configuration took place. You know, Mars in Aquarius, Saturn in Gemini. All at the same time. That kind of thing.”

“Bakana, is there an astronomer here we can talk to?” Jess asked.

“Tomasso. He’ll be in the archives.”

David looked at the bound and gagged security guard. “We’ll have to leave him behind.”

“I can lock the office.” The Cross operative wiped dried blood from his face with his sleeve.

“What about the other security guards?”

“If you trust me enough to give me the gun, you can be my prisoners.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Jess took the gun from David. She dropped the magazine from the grip, checked the chamber to be certain it was clear, then gave the gun to the operative.

“Now we trust you.”