Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (10 page)

Everything was different now.

Reims bowed his head again and gestured toward the elevators. “That one, please.” Hands clasped together, he nodded to the only car that could reach the top level. Jess spread her fingers against the spotless glass of the biometric scanner.

The elevator door glided open.

Jess walked in, and Herr Reims disappeared from view as the door closed. The car ascended smoothly. An eye-level panel displayed the passing floor numbers, then the words
PRIVATER FUßBODEN
. The car stopped. The door opened.

Jess stepped into the hallway, and her scuffed hiking boots sank into thick slate-gray wool carpet. The sudden softness underfoot triggered memories of all the times her aunt had brought her here. Her gaze went automatically to the priceless relics displayed against the fabric-covered walls. Each treasure glowed in subdued pools of light cast from tiny spotlights in the hall’s low ceiling.

On one wall ranged a set of portraits of men and women that spanned hundreds of years and distinct, diverse styles of art and clothing. The other wall bore a faded parchment, a silver-bladed cross, an Egyptian death mask, a small black leather-bound book barely a century old. Only the twelve family lines that made up the MacCleirighs would understand this collection’s unifying principle. Each relic told a story of past defenders and their fabled exploits.

Jess paused by the leather-bound book—a King James Bible published in San Francisco in 1897. Florian had loved telling her the story that went with this one—how the little Bible had come to have a bullet hole that passed only halfway through.

Jess wondered to whom
she
would tell the story.

Her reverie was broken by a familiar voice.

“Cousin.”

“Su-Lin,” Jess said, even before she turned to see her older relative approaching. “Cousin” was the Family’s honorific that merely indicated a member of the Family, not necessarily a close relation.

Su-Lin Rodrigues y Machado was a short, slight woman of middle years. Her skin was pale coffee in color, her eyes almond-shaped and gray, and her still-lustrous black hair was loosely twisted in a tress that hung down her back, just as she always wore it. Today, however, though Jess had never seen Su-Lin in anything but severe business attire, the older woman was dressed in classic black trousers, an immaculate white blouse, and intricately woven leather flats. Jess herself was still in the same dusty, wrinkled jeans and ExOfficio travel shirt she’d put on three days ago.

“You’re early,” Su-Lin said—an observation, nothing more.

“Ten years, at least,” Jess agreed. Then, reflexively, she dropped to one knee and reached out to take Su-Lin’s left hand. “Defender.”

Su-Lin motioned her to stand. “No, we’re the same now. The Twelve Restored.”

Jess responded to the phrase as automatically as she had knelt. “The Secret kept.”

“Until the Promise is fulfilled.”

The catechism said, Su-Lin reached up to embrace Jess, who bent down, feeling awkward, so much taller. Her cousin was defender of the Rodrigues family, a MacCleirigh line originally based in Lisbon at the height of Portugal’s golden age of exploration. When the British Empire achieved ascendancy, Su-Lin’s branch had relocated to São Paulo, Brazil, to become the inner heart of South America’s financial and political future.

The moment the older woman released her, Jess impulsively blurted
out the question that had tormented her since the Barrens. “How did she die? I need to know.”

Su-Lin’s gray eyes revealed nothing of her own emotions. “The others are waiting.”

The penthouse hallway ended in a pair of tall oak doors that shielded the most secure room in the Foundation building, where the Family’s trustees and officers met to set investment and funding strategies for tens of billions of dollars in MacCleirigh assets. The sanctum’s other function, however, had less to do with material concerns.

Su-Lin gave Jess a frank look of assessment. “Are you ready?”

Jess was. Su-Lin swung open the heavy doors and led the way into the Chamber of Heaven.

There were twelve other rooms like it in the world, one in each city in which a line of the Family was based. Like all the other rooms, this one was round, eight meters in diameter. Its ceiling was domed and painted with a midnight blue sky against which gold stars traced the constellations of the zodiac. In the center of the floor was a circular oak table. Its polished tabletop was bare, revealing darker woods inlaid in pale wood, creating a radial pattern of twelve equal segments. Each segment bore the stylized depiction of a flower or a mountain or an eye or another symbol—twelve in all.

Around the table, positioned one to each segment, were twelve oak chairs with an almost rustic, handmade quality jarring compared to the refined luxury of the rest of the Foundation building.

A casual observer might guess that the chamber’s round table was inspired, in part, by the legends of King Arthur. In fact, even the Family’s children, brought here in tour groups for their lessons every summer, knew that the Arthurian legends were inspired by the stories of Arturus Uther Brae, a defender who’d lived in the second century of the Common Era.

Su-Lin drew out one of the chairs and sat at the table. After a moment’s hesitation, Jess took the seat beside her. They were alone in the room.

“Jessica,” Su-Lin said as she folded her hands on the table, “you know everyone.”

Without any apparent trigger, the chamber’s curved wall panels moved up and out of sight to reveal ten large video screens. Above each was a separate display that identified a city and a local time, from London to Canberra and all points between.

Ten familiar faces looked out at Jess.

Of the Twelve now restored, five were female, she herself the youngest,
Su-Lin the next. The other three were in their fifties, their Lines based in Athens, Buenos Aires, and Canberra.

Of the seven men, Andrew McCleary of New York was senior. His Line had been the first of the Family’s to be successfully established in North America. Andrew was a distinguished figure, nearing eighty yet unbowed by age; tall, whip-thin, with thick white hair brushed back. His suit was Savile Row, marine navy. His clear blue eyes intelligent, measuring. Jess recalled there had been tension between Andrew and her aunt, but Florian had never said why.

Andrew, as eldest of the Twelve, spoke first, but with no words of condolence. “Jessica, at the moment of Florian’s death, by our traditions, you became Defender of Line MacClary. Is it your choice to continue in that role?”

Jess looked from screen to screen and found one face not quite as stern as the others—Willem of Macao, closest of them all to Florian, a fellow archaeologist and Defender of Line Tasman. When she was much younger, Jess had told Willem that he looked like a pirate with his shaved head and warm brown skin, and he’d sent her a photo from Belize in which he had an eye patch and an iridescent green and yellow parrot on his shoulder. Her aunt had been beside him, her bright face caught midlaugh. On the occasion of Jess’s confirmation as her heir, Florian had confided that Willem was why she had never married.

Defenders had few rules, but the most important was that no defender could marry another. The First Gods had created the Twelve Lines by scattering the Family on the Twelve Winds, and those Lines were kept distinct. The names of the Lines might change over the generations, reflecting marriages and changes in locale and customs, but the Family’s genealogists worked hard to chart the lines of descent, and to ensure that at no time would more than 144 individuals know that their direct family could be traced unbroken to the time of the First Gods. In that way it was easier to ensure the Family’s origins remained unknown to the outside world.

Now Willem, whose readout indicated he was in Reykjavik, Iceland, and not Macao, seemed to give her a signal, a barely perceptible nod of encouragement, as if telling her there’d be time for the two of them to talk, later.

“It is my choice,” Jess said.

“Have you been told how the Defender of Line MacClary died?” Andrew was a lawyer. He spoke crisply, as if he were leading her through a deposition.

“The messengers who came for me, they didn’t know. No one’s told me anything.”

“Emil,” Andrew said.

Jess looked to the screen marked
ROME
, where Emil Greco’s characteristic hard-eyed expression marked the man whose role it was to think of the worst possible thing that might happen to the Family, and then protect against it. He was solidly built with a thick mustache and goatee. He had trained her personally in small arms and hand-to-hand combat.

“Florian radioed in just before it happened.” Emil’s voice was deceptively gentle, his lilting Neapolitan accent making his words almost musical. “She was at the site of a new temple, Jessica.”

Jess blinked.
Another one?
Her aunt hadn’t told her of a new find.

“It was Ironwood.” Andrew offered the information matter-of-factly. “Apparently, he’s developed some method of locating them that we’re unaware of.”

Everyone in the Family knew Florian loathed Holden Ironwood and his rapacious plundering of historical sites to support his theories of aliens as mentors of humankind. She’d despised him even more for not publishing his finds. Jess had found that somewhat ironic since the MacCleirigh Foundation was also selective in the information it released about its own discoveries. If something had relevance for the Family’s history, outside scholars never heard of it.

“Did she enter the temple before . . .” Jess was unable to continue.

It was Willem who answered. Willem who understood. “Flo saw it, Jess. There
was
a Chamber of Heaven. An original. The temple’s underwater, so it’s not intact. But she did see it before she died.”

Jess silently thanked him for that small comfort.

Until the incredible revelation that actual Family temples had been found, the only MacCleirigh legacy of the earliest days, when the First Gods lived and worked among humans, had been the
Book of Traditions:
the MacCleirighs’ written memories that were taught as scripture to every generation of each Family line.

The
Traditions
described the Temples of the First Gods supposedly constructed by the Twelve Lines of the original Family, whom their gods had scattered throughout the world.

Until three years ago, the accepted interpretation of the
Traditions
was to view the twelve temples as mythical, not real, part of an allegorical story explaining how the First Gods had chosen the Family to work at their side to establish humanity’s first farms and schools and cities.

That scholarly interpretation had changed literally overnight with an Ironwood-funded team’s unearthing of an unusual structure near the Indo-Pakistani border. The ruins lay in what had been the heart of the advanced Harappan civilization, dating to 2500
B.C.E
. They matched
the temple descriptions in the
Traditions
, and they held an actual Chamber of Heaven.

It took more than a year for the Family’s archaeologists to learn of and take control of the site. When they did, the ancient stones confirmed their hopes—the temple ruins predated even nearby Harappan cities by an additional four thousand years.

If Ironwood had publicized his find, and he did not, the ruins in India would have been classified as a “historical anomaly.” They would have joined hundreds of other atypical finds that appear to fall outside the generally accepted timeline of history, without providing enough information to suggest that another timeline should be considered.

To the Family, though, the ruins were
proof
that their traditions were the literal truth. The original temples were myths no more.

Florian had drawn Jess into the feverish excitement of those early days, the renewed sense of purpose that reenergized every line of the Family. The new mantra became
If Ironwood can find them . . .

Then, less than two years later, another Ironwood expedition reached a second temple in the Andes. The Peruvian discovery had rocked the MacCleirigh Foundation: How could Ironwood’s information be so much better than the Family’s?

Now, Florian had been at the site of a
third
temple, again found by the Family’s old rival, within months of the second . . . and, somehow, her being there had led to her death.

Jess couldn’t restrain herself any longer. “What’s going on? What does Ironwood know that we don’t?”

Victoria Claridge, heavily tanned with permanent smile lines creasing her face, answered from Canberra. “That’s exactly what everyone at the Shop is working on, dear. We’re beginning a new translation of the
Traditions,
starting with cuneiform.”

Jess had been to the Shop. It was a vast, climate-controlled cavern in Australia where the Family had relocated its most precious artifacts during the Cold War scare of the 1950s. Under the administration of Line Claridge, it was now the Family’s key research facility.

Andrew interrupted. “If I may, this isn’t the time to discuss Ironwood’s technique.”