Prophet of Bones (38 page)

The van took a right, leaving the main road and bumping its way down to a kind of access road. Mostly one lane, with occasional turnouts. A beaten mud track. The van slowed to twenty miles per hour.

Thirty minutes later, the van crossed through an open, swinging gate.

“Rise and shine,” Redbeard said. “We’re here.”

Lilli and Paul craned their necks for a better look. The view out the front windshield wasn’t particularly clear, but from what he could see, they’d arrived at some kind of military outpost. No, not military. Not quite. It had the wrong feel. A string of buildings spread out before them—low block buildings set at some distance from the road. Then the road curved and the whole of the complex suddenly loomed up into view, anchored by a huge gray building, as sprawling as an outlet mall. But set here in the middle of the Everglades, like a cult compound in the swamp.

The van came to a stop. The two men climbed out. A moment later the van door slid open. The sudden light was blinding. Heat and muggy air poured in.

“Get out.”

Paul stepped to the ground, shielding his eye.

Lilli followed.

As Paul’s eye adjusted, he saw an old man standing off to the side, surrounded by a phalanx of guards. He wore a white coat, but also a hat to keep the sun off his head. His face was buried in shadow.

The two men from the van stepped aside as the old man hobbled forward.

“Do you have the samples?” the old man asked. The question was pointed at Redbeard.

Redbeard pulled the baggie from the armrest of the van. The old man smiled and gestured to one of his guards. Redbeard handed the baggie to the man.

“See that Lee, in the cytology lab, gets that,” the old man said. The guard turned and headed into the building.

“Paul Carlsson,” the old man said, finally turning his attention to his new visitors. He extended a hand.

Paul didn’t shake it.

“I haven’t seen you since you were a baby.”

Paul blinked. He had no response to that. Lilli looked at him, confusion showing in her eyes.

“I’m assuming our friend Gavin has informed you of the peculiar situation we now find ourselves in?”

“Friend? You have an interesting way of dealing with friends.”

“Oh, but he
was
a friend,” the old man said. “Though that must seem strange to you now. But he made his own choices. I understand he used a gun to exercise his choice. I don’t see how there was ever another option for us. I also understand he fired first?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Our friend didn’t flip the table over and draw his gun? Because that’s how it was described to me. Are my men lying to me?”

Paul was silent.

“No? And then there was Margaret. I assume Gavin had some hand in that as well. Now, you never answered my question. Did our mutual friend inform you of the facts regarding the current situation? In short, do you know who I am?”

“Yeah, he told me about you.”

“Good,” the old man said. “Then this will go faster.”

The old man turned to the guards. “Put him in the guest quarters.”

“And her?” Redbeard said, gesturing to Lilli.

The old man waved his hand absently. “Same,” he said. And with that, he turned and walked away. But before he’d gotten very far, he glanced at Paul from over his shoulder. “We’ll talk later tonight.”

*   *   *

The guest quarters had bars on the windows.

Lilli sat on the bed while Paul moved through the room, opening every drawer in the dresser and both nightstands. The room was small and appointed very much like a hotel room, right down to the sturdy furniture.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for a weapon of opportunity.”

“What kind of weapon do you expect to find here?”

“That’s why it’s called ‘of opportunity.’ You know it when you see it.”

He opened the bottom drawer of the little desk that sat near the wall. He slammed it shut again. His gaze cast about the room. He bent low and looked under the bed.

Eventually, he sat next to Lilli on the bed.

“Nothing,” he said.

She touched his hand.

“You didn’t think they’d be dumb enough to leave anything dangerous in here, did you?”

“I had to check.”

Her hand slipped into his, and she squeezed.

*   *   *

Later, just as the light was leaving the window, a knock came on the door. A moment later, the door opened, and a guard stepped in.

“Paul, Mr. Johansson would like to see you.”

The guard was six-four, all shoulders—a linebacker in a suit.

“I’m not leaving without her,” Paul said.

“She’s staying here,” the linebacker responded.

“No.”

Another guard appeared in the doorway, even bigger, if possible, than the first one. Paul assumed the choice of guards was intentional. A way of saying something without saying it. A way of discouraging an independent opinion about whether he’d be leaving the room or not. Paul made the decision not to give in.

“If I’m leaving this room, she’s coming with me.”

“You’re making this more difficult than it has to be, Mr. Carlsson,” the second guard said. He spoke over the shoulder of the man in front of him. His tone exuded reasonableness.

Paul shook his head. “I’m not leaving her.”

The first guard’s tone wasn’t as patient as the second’s. “You
are
leaving her,” he snapped. He obviously wasn’t used to this kind of open defiance. “Now.”

Lilli touched Paul’s arm. “Paul, go.”

“Lilli—”

The reasonable guard broke in: “He says he wants to see you, and that means we’re going to bring you. The condition you arrive in is the only matter up for debate here.”

“I’ll be fine,” Lilli soothed. “I’ll be here when you get back.”

Reluctantly, Paul allowed himself to be convinced. He followed the men out of the room, and the first guard locked the door behind him.

They made their way down a long hall, then climbed a winding stair to another level. The stairs, Paul noticed, were designed to look like a DNA double helix.

“After you,” the guard said when they came to an enormous door at the end of the hall.

Paul pushed through the door, into a library.

The old man was standing before the stacks, looking up at the wall of books. Big, hardbound tomes filled shelves from floor to ceiling, extending the full length of the chamber. Here the lighting wasn’t fluorescent; instead, the warm, full glow of incandescence exuded from a series of panels along the back wall, and ceiling, and floor. An enormous wooden table dominated the room, while the table itself was dominated by yet more books, piled like an uneven cityscape—leather-bound skyscrapers stacked in mimicry of some blocky 1950s metropolis. Altogether there must have been thousands of books. It was as impressive a private library as Paul had ever seen.

“Have you heard of
The Modern Synthesis
?” The old man’s voice seemed to filter through the piles of books. It was the opposite of an empty church, where your voice might echo hollowly off the walls. Here your voice was eaten by the room.

“Yeah.”

“Have you read it?”

“It’s one of the banned books.”

“Have you read it?” the old man repeated.

“I have.”

“And what about this?” he asked, pulling a large dark book free from the shelves. The old man held the book out for Paul to see.

“The Bible?”

“Also a banned book, in some parts of the world.”

The old man placed the book down on the table and gestured for Paul to come closer.

Paul stood next to the old man, his leg brushing the table. The old man was tall but frail. Paul thought about killing him. The image flashed through his mind. His hands around the old man’s neck. The way his throat would feel when he crushed it. What his eyes would look like when the life had gone out of them.

“Turn to Genesis chapter three, verse twenty,” the old man said.

Paul turned the pages.

“Now read it.”

“‘And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.’”

“‘Mother of all living.’ What do you think of that?”

“I don’t think anything.”

“They were cast out from the garden for their sins,” the old man said. “God was angry, because they’d eaten the fruit of knowledge. His punishment was swift.” The old man closed his eyes and quoted from memory: “‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.’”

The old man opened his eyes and looked at Paul. “Thus were Cain and Abel begotton. And then Cain slew Abel. There is another verse I’d like you to read. Genesis four, lines sixteen and seventeen.”

Paul flipped through the Bible until he found the verse. He read aloud, “‘And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch.’”

The old man smiled. “You see, Paul, that was what got me. That was what started all this.” He gestured around himself, but Paul had the sense that he meant something larger. The entire compound. Everything. “That is what sent me down this path. Reading Genesis, when I was a young boy in school.”

The old man held out his hand, and Paul gave him back the Bible. The old man looked down at the pages, creased and yellowed with age.

“Because even as a boy I wondered…” The old man closed the Bible. “This boy Cain, cast out from paradise, who did he marry?”

Paul stared at the old man. “It’s an origin story.”

“Is it now? Come, sit,” the old man said. He gestured to a high-backed chair near the table. Paul sat, while the old man continued looking through his books. He took a pair of bifocals from the front pocket of his suit jacket and studied the spines, searching for titles he had in his head. One by one, he pulled down other books. Books on paleontology. Books on bones. And these books, too, like the Bible, were banned in various parts of the world, Paul knew. Or some of them, anyway.

“Tell me, Paul, did you find your room to be comfortable?”

“I’m not particularly interested in the accommodations.”

“I see; nor would I expect you to be. But still, so long as you aren’t uncomfortable, I suppose that’s fine. Aha!” The old man slid a book from its place on the shelf. “This is what I was looking for. Very rare, this one.”

He placed it on the table with the others and sank down into a nearby chair. They were sitting side by side, like dear friends. Paul imagined that a security camera recorded their every interaction. He pictured men in riot gear just outside the door, waiting to step in if he made the wrong move. But he could do it quick, he knew. But maybe not quick enough. Could he kill the old man before anyone had time to reach him? And then there was Lilli. Of course. And what would happen to her? The old man was no fool. For all Paul knew, there might be a gun trained on him right now, unseen.

“I knew your father for many years,” he said. “He was a talented scientist.”

“So I am told.”

“I see him in you.”

“Few people do.”

“Ah, but they’re not looking at the important things, are they?” The old man flipped through the pages of the book before him. He continued: “Aristotle wrote that, at his best, man is the noblest of all animals; also he is the worst. Your father and I had a parting of the ways. It pained me bitterly at the time, but I understood the reasons. Your father … was a difficult man, in many ways. Perhaps you knew this?”

“It escaped my attention.”

“Oh, I doubt that.” The old man smiled. “And your mother. She, too, was a brilliant worker, though perhaps not as gifted. Nor as afflicted. It is a trade-off, no? Do you understand about trade-offs?”

Paul understood.

“Let Lilli go,” he said.

The old man looked surprised. “So now it’s you who speak of trade-offs. Tell me, what do you have to trade, I wonder.”

“She has nothing to do with this.”

“Oh, but she does. Now.” The old man paused. “Paul, you must understand the position I’m in. This is a very delicate time—thanks in no small part to your own activities. The political situation is fragile at the moment, a circumstance you attempted to exploit to your advantage. Fortunately, Congressman Lacefield was amenable to negotiation.”

“He sold us out?”

“Traded you, more like.”

“For what?”

“Senate votes, of course. Politicians all have their constituencies to keep happy. And to be clear, the information you want to divulge would be uncomfortable to a large number of people on
both
sides of the aisle. The status quo is hardly ever served by rocking the boat.”

The old man opened the book lying before him. In it were large full-color prints of bones. It was a specialist’s book.

The old man’s eyes lingered on a glossy image of a skull. He touched the photo. “The magic is in the minutiae, isn’t it?” he said. “The careful measurement. The interpretations come and go like the tides, argued over like fashion, but the measurements themselves stay. Unassailable. I’m told that you’re a man who appreciates this also.”

“She won’t say anything, if you let her go.”

“In Java,
Homo erectus.
In Europe, Neanderthals. In Siberia, the newest DNA evidence points to something else entirely. As distinct as Neanderthals, but different. Bones found in a cave just outside Denisova.” The old man flipped through several more pages, his rheumy old eyes moving from photograph to photograph.

“
Homo erectus. Homo heidelbergensis, Australopithecus, Ramapithecus,
all these different things. These, Paul, are what we bred with when we left our garden.”

“You’re mad,” Paul said.

The old man smiled. “You’ve seen so little. You can’t possibly understand it all. You’re like a fish calling a turtle mad for telling of dry land. Do you think this is just a theory of mine?”

The old man stood. He closed the book, hiding its photographs.

“Here, Paul, let me show you.”

*   *   *

They took the hall to a stairwell and then descended to a deeper level of the building. Two guards fell into step behind them. They’d been standing just outside the door of the library.