Changeling (27 page)

The world opened,
and Jade saw everything.

They came in vessels—spaceships, she supposed—that, to the primitive bands of hunter-gatherers who occupied the area, must have seemed like great monstrous beasts or spirits of the sky. With elongated skulls and unblinking black eyes, pale gray skin, long smooth sexless torsos, their appearance was remarkably like the images that would, in later years, inform descriptions of demons and much, much later, the entities known, to those who believed in such things, as “grays.”

Extraterrestrial visitors. Aliens.

The grays paid little heed to their human neighbors. The nomadic people might have been insects, scurrying about, unnoticed by the alien workmen, whose attention was consumed with the task of hollowing out the great tower, which would one day be called Bell Rock. When they excavated a cavity using tools that were beyond even Jade’s imagination, they used the overburden to fashion durable concrete with which to build structures and the machinery of the Vault. Jade had no sense of how many years passed while they labored. Decades. Perhaps centuries. When the machine was complete they turned their attention to the primitive humans, and Jade saw now that the grays had not been ignoring them after all, but merely making preparations. The Vault was, in fact, just the first phase of an experiment, and the humans would be, in scientific terms, the dependent variable. Lab rats.

To maintain the purity of the experiment, the grays took some of their subjects and modified them, imbuing them with enhanced intelligence and abilities with which to carry out the programming written into their DNA. Physically, they appeared no different, save for jet black eyes and smooth skin that seemed not quite fully formed—a blank canvas on which they might paint the faces of others whom they wished to impersonate as they went forth into the world to do their part of the great experiment. They, and all their scions through the ages, were the Changelings.

The experiment was a thing of simplicity. A man—a shaman or in later years, a priest—would be shown to a special place—the Hypogeum, or one of many such sites scattered across the world, whereupon they would be compelled to make a pilgrimage to this distant land, and there receive the vision. What exactly that vision would entail depended as much on the man and his preconceptions as it did on the machinery of the vault, for the great machine did not implant new ideas so much as stimulate connections between disparate memories and beliefs. That was, in fact, the whole point of the experiment, to see what wonders these men might accomplish with just a gentle nudge every thousand years or so.

Roche had not been far off the mark with his belief that all of reality was merely a holographic simulation being controlled by otherworldly entities.

It was not given to Jade to know if the grays continued to monitor their experiment, if the tales of demonic visitation and UFO sightings across the gap of history were actual encounters with the grays, or merely the product of random infrasound frequencies stimulating ancestral memories. She suspected the latter, just as she suspected that the experiment had gone awry over the millennia, the way a message handed verbally from one person to another and then to another got distorted with each telling. The Changelings, though bound to their purpose by genetic chains, continued to guard the vault, dissuading those whom they deemed unworthy of receiving the vision, men like Archimedes, who in their genius, might have envisioned a new way forward, a world built on logic and rationality, rather than superstition. Similarly, they used their chameleon-like abilities to infiltrate the halls of power, making subtle adjustments but when necessary, triggering upheavals and wars to reset the balance. Their signature was writ large across the tableau of history. Roche had seen it, though imperfectly, and it had ultimately cost him his life.

Jade’s view was crystal clear. She wondered what that seeing would cost her.

As her awareness returned, she caught a glimpse of what was transpiring less than a hundred feet away. Shah had left the vault’s interface, a room similar in design to the Hypogeum, situated right above the orb-shaped chamber where Jade now was. The spherical room served the same function as the lens in an eyeball, focusing the infrasound created by the machine and directing it into the interface. Shah had received a vision too, but of what, he alone knew. Now, he was with the others, the Changelings who had been waiting for him. Waiting for all of them.

They’re going to kill Professor
.

The thought snapped her back into herself. She needed only a fraction of a second to reorient herself, and another to find the wall with an outstretched foot in order to begin climbing back to the balcony. Urgency gave her a strength that had been lacking during her earlier mishap on the rope. A few moments later, she was able to reach the balcony rail and pull herself over.

She wrestled out of the harness and sprinted for the stairwell. She had no doubt of where it would lead. The vision had shown her the way forward and now she was intimately familiar with the stairwells and tunnels and passages of the vault. What was not as clear was what she would do when she arrived at her destination.

As she neared the top of the stairs, she slowed to a walk and flicked off her flashlight so as not to betray her approach. She could hear their voices clearly now, not a trick of acoustics but rather a matter of proximity. The woman Changeling was trying to convince Shah to kill Professor in order to hide the existence of the vault from the outside world, and from the sound of it, Shah was about to do it.

She saw shadows on the curving walls of the passage. A few more steps, and she would be able to see the bodies who cast them.

Her foot struck something. She froze, wincing at the clatter, but evidently no one in the passage beyond heard it. She looked down and saw what she had kicked. A semi-automatic pistol. There was a second one, still tucked in a clip-on holster, a few feet from the first. She took  both, clipped the second to her belt, then eased the slide back on the first to ensure that a round was chambered. She still wasn’t sure how to save Professor, but at least now she was had some equipment to work with.

Before she could take another step however, the sound of a shot assaulted her ears. The close confines of the passage amplified the noise and set Jade’s ears ringing deafening her even to her own cry of alarm. She ran forward, aiming the pistol ahead of her, ready to avenge Professor’s death.

There was a second shot, the sound considerably muted after the first, and then a third as Jade rounded the bend. Her eyes went immediately to the man lying motionless on the floor.

“Professor!”

Blood was fountaining from his chest, soaking his shirt and staining the floor beneath him.

So much blood
.

She did not let her gaze linger on him, but turned to look for the gunman and take her shot before he could think to shoot at her. Her attention fixed immediately on Shah who held the smoking gun. He was turned away from her, presenting his back as a target at point blank range. She could not miss.

But then another man dropped to his knees beside Professor. It was Jordan Kellogg. His hands were clutching his chest, trying in vain to stem the torrent of red flowing from a pair of wounds near his heart.

That was when Jade realized that the other dying man was not Professor, not her Professor, but the Changeling who had attempted to impersonate him. There was no uncertainty about this identification. The stricken man still wore the same clothes she had seen him in during their brief meeting in Malta. He even had Professor’s watch and fedora, though the latter item had rolled away.

The real Professor was still standing, unhurt, a few steps away from both Shah and the two Changeling men. He saw Jade and his eyes went wide in a mixture of surprise, fear, and relief. He shouted to her, words that she could barely make out. “Jade! Look out!”

Jade was not sure exactly what he was warning her about. Shah appeared to have come through for them, turning on the Changelings and sparing Professor. She swung the barrel of the pistol around, aiming it at the dark-haired woman in sunglasses who seemed completely oblivious to what had just occurred. That was when Shah finally noticed her. He spun around on his heel and aimed his pistol right at her.

Jade was caught off guard by the suddenness of this apparent reversal, but her nerves were already primed for action. Reflexively, she brought her own weapon to bear on him. In the brief instant that followed, she read his intention. His was not a reflex action brought on by her unexpected return. He meant to kill her.

He fired.

She fired… Or would have if Professor had not caught her in a low tackle that not only rushed her into the darkness behind them, but also removed her from Shah’s field of fire. In the tumult that followed, Professor managed to relieve her of the unfired pistol, whereupon he rolled onto his back and pumped several rounds in Shah’s direction. Jade wrestled the second pistol from it holster, but Shah was already gone, fleeing back down the rotunda. The woman was gone too, either having fled or in Shah’s company.

Professor looked over at Jade, panting to catch his breath, just as she was. His lips moved but she couldn’t make out what he said, so she answered simply, “Hey.”

He flashed her a goofy grin then got to his feet, hands gripping the pistol, and started forward. “Shah!” he shouted.

She heard that just fine, but no answer was forthcoming. “What the hell is he doing?” she said.

Professor returned an uncertain headshake and kept moving. He said something,
stay behind me
, or
keep your head down
. The ringing in her ears was gradually subsiding, but he was turned away from her and whispering. She hefted the pistol, muzzle pointing up, and followed.

They crept along at first, but then quickened their pace when it became evident that Shah was not waiting to ambush them. When they reached the doorway connecting the rotunda to the landing outside, Jade glimpsed movement on the spiral staircase overhead; Shah and the woman ascending but making slow progress, probably because the latter was being dragged along unwillingly.

Professor shouted again. “Shah! Let’s talk!”

Shah’s answer was a fusillade of rounds fired down the center of the shaft. The angles were all wrong for him to hit them, but the resulting spray of stone chips and bullet fragments drove Jade and Professor back through the opening.

“Idiot,” Professor rasped. He looked at Jade. “You okay?”

She laughed despite herself. “Stupid question.”
At least I can hear again
, she thought. “You?”

“Better than my evil twin.” He nodded in the direction of the stairwell. “What do you think got into Shah?”

Jade bit her lip guiltily. “You remember how I had to make a deal with him? Well, the deal was that if we found anything that might call the origins of Islam into question, I would let him destroy it.”

Something like anger or disappointment flickered across Professor’s face, but before he could voice his disapproval, Jade went on. “I didn’t have much choice. There was literally no one else I could trust. At least with Shah, I knew where I stood. And he did help. I just didn’t think we would actually find anything here that would fit the bill.”

“You really blew that call.” Professor’s demeanor softened a little. “I suppose given the circumstances it was the right thing to do. And I am grateful that you were willing to do that for me. So what do you think pushed him over the edge?”

“This place. It’s like a gigantic infrasound hallucination machine.” She decided now wasn’t the time to go into detail about what she had seen in her own frequency-induced vision.

Professor nodded slowly. “The Changelings told him that Muhammad and all the other prophets revered by Muslims came here to receive visions from God. I suppose, from his point of view, something like that—an alternative version of events that doesn’t agree with what the Quran teaches—could be construed as blasphemy.”

“And since he can’t destroy the vault, he decided the next best thing was to kill all the witnesses. The Changelings and us.”

Professor nodded. “There’s only one way out of here. If he’s up there waiting for us, we’ll have to shoot it out. But he’s already fired eight rounds. I counted. That means he has seven more, eight max if those Changelings kept one in the chamber, which I doubt. He has no training, no fire discipline. All we have to do is make some noise and get him to shoot off the rest of that magazine. Then we’ll leave on our own terms. Over his dead body if necessary.”

“I’m remembering the last time you counted the bad guy’s bullets. It didn’t end well.”

“Very funny. This time, I know he doesn’t have any extra rounds. Besides, you’re hardly in a position to be questioning my judgment.”

Jade thought better of replying. She gestured to the doorway. “Lead the way.”

He flashed a grim smile then stuck his head out. “Shah! We’re coming for you!”

There was no answering fire, so he circled the landing and started up the steps. Jade stayed close on his heels. The stairs were familiar to her, the memory of traveling them implanted during her vision, but it wasn’t until she was halfway up that she realized that she had been here before, actually as well as virtually. She had fallen through the central shaft after solving the ring puzzle and opening the door to the vault.