Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (2 page)

Then he hesitated, awed by this room.

His eyes fixed on the domed ceiling, more than twice his sword’s reach above him. In the light of his torch and the concubine’s lamp, he saw the gleam of hundreds of small disks of silver, their arrangement matching some of the patterns of the stars at night. The circular, plastered wall beneath was overlaid with other patterns: swaths of brown and green against blue, cut by black lines that arced across the blue from point to point. Why anyone would do this made no sense.

Contemptuous of what he couldn’t understand, the chieftain scraped his sword across the wall nearest him, destroying the profane art, then thrust his torch at the silent woman. She retreated, seeking refuge behind a round stone table set in the center of the vault.

The chieftain’s interest quickened: The table’s twelve inscribed wedges each held an object. He slashed his torch across the table, spraying fat and burning sparks of tinder, then growled in sharp frustration. Only one of the objects looked valuable—a square of gold a hand-stretch across and three fingers thick, with the death’s-head face of a shadowman embossed upon it. The other objects were common: a lump of pitted rock, a long wood dowel jacketed in tin and fitted with a slender haft, a coiled and knotted rope; craftsmen’s tools, nothing more.

With his torch he backhanded the tin-wrapped wooden dowel, and from the sound it made when it hit the floor, it was hollow, weak—useless. With his free hand, he took the gold square, at once realizing by its lack of weight that it wasn’t even solid. Instead, it was a pile of gold sheets, held together on one side by cords of sinew.

Growing anger sweeping through him, he flipped roughly through the thin layers of gold, finding only a different, meaningless pattern on each, some like the ceiling stars, others like the pointless shapes on the painted wall, and almost all bordered by rows of small symbols of no meaning to him.

“Where’s the rest of their treasure?” he demanded.

The woman’s voice was steady, but her eyes showed fear as she answered in the language of his own people. “This
is
their treasure.”

The chieftain let his rage explode. He slammed the worthless stack of golden sheets on the table and shouted at her. “The shadowmen had a ship. My sons watched them load it. They took no treasure with them. Where did they hide it?”

“This is all there ever was.” She dared meet his eyes again. “All that’s needed.”

“Liar.” At least he’d found gold here, as paltry an amount as it was. The concubine might know of other vaults. He edged around the table, slowly swaying his sword and his torch, each a snake poised to strike.

The woman backed away from him, her hand grasping at something that hung from her neck on a leather cord.

It was the hated symbol of the shadowmen—a cross formed by a circle above a diamond sail. They painted it on the sails of their ships. In their temples and circles of quarried rocks, they carved it out of stone. The woman’s cross was silver, though, and could be melted and reworked into a proper symbol worthy of sacrifice to the spirits of the green.

“Give me that! I’ll make it serve the true gods.”

“Not my gods.” The woman’s back was against the wall.

The chieftain stepped closer. “You serve theirs?”

“They have none.”

Fearless as he was in battle, the chieftain felt a thrill of unease in the presence of her sacrilege. “Then there’s none to save you or them.” He raised his sword, and only then did he hear the faint rasp of a foot on stone and turn his head to the open doors just as the spear flew at him.

It struck his unprotected side beneath his uplifted arm, and he grunted, dropping his sword, his chest pierced by a thunderbolt of icy cold.

Sword arm useless, he toppled sideways against the curved wall, his torch sparking against the floor. With his other arm he strained to reach around and yank the spear free. Because of his girth and his chest plate, his trembling hand closed on nothing.

In the failing light of the torch and the glow of the oil lamp, the chieftain could just make out the two figures who now stood over him. The woman and—a
youth.
The spear-thrower. A stripling not yet grown had felled a chieftain.

Even worse, his killer was one of
them
: shadow-dark skin like no man of oak, black eyes narrowed by lowered lids, hollow cheeks and flattened nose.

“I saw you leave,” the chieftain wheezed, each breath an agony.
“All
of you . . .”

“They returned to their home,” the woman said. “To the White Island.”

Uncomprehending, the chieftain watched as she pulled apart the circle and the sail to reveal a slender silver blade. “Then who is . . .”

“My son.” She put the blade against his throat. “The shadowmen have no gods, because
they
are gods. And they gave us their bond they will come back to save us.”

“My sons . . . their sons . . . will avenge me,” the chieftain gasped as he felt the bite of the blade, then nothing else as the false stars spiraled into darkness and he died thinking only of his sons, their sons, and vengeance.

But his body was never found, nor was the treasure understood.

Until the day the gods returned . . .

“Is that human?”

David Weir was dying, and the reason was on his computer, even though he didn’t understand it. His finger moved reflexively to strike the key that would blank the screen, but he stopped himself.
Too late.

“Sorry, ma’am. I didn’t know anyone was still here.” He turned, covering his surprise. It was almost ten on a Friday night. Last time he’d looked, all the workstations in the lab’s open office space were empty, computer screens dark. He’d been so lost in his search, he hadn’t heard approaching footsteps—unusual for him. His mother used to say he had better ears than a dog. As a child, he’d been able to detect his father’s pickup make the turn onto their street five blocks away.

“Budget hell.” Colonel Miriam Kowinski hefted the thick green binder she carried. From his one year’s experience as a civilian technician in the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, David knew those two words were as much of an explanation as his boss would be giving him.

The colonel leaned forward to peer more closely at his screen, then frowned. “Mitochondrial DNA. But some of the markers are wrong.”

“It’s a reference sample.” The lie came easily.

“Chimp?”

To the untrained eye, the electrophoresis patterns on his screen would resemble smeared, ghostly photographs of banded worms lined up side by side, some sections dark, some light, with a scattering of small numbers and letters running to either side, spelling out gibberish. Kowinski, though, wasn’t just another army bureaucrat. She was a trained forensic biologist. It would be foolish to underestimate her.

“Closer to human. Neandertal.” David held his breath, gambling that the colonel’s expertise didn’t stretch to extinct hominins.

“Really.”

“Yeah. A twenty-nine-thousand-year-old Neandertal baby. From the Mezmaiskaya fossil.”

“Is this a personal project?”

David knew why she asked. The lab’s primary mission was to identify
the remains of American military personnel through DNA analysis, not just for present conflicts, but for wars past. Beyond that, if resources and personnel were available, the lab could use its expertise to aid outside researchers in cases of scientific or historic interest. It could also help other government and law-enforcement agencies carry out drug tests, develop forensic evidence, even determine parentage in child custody cases.

However, “personal projects” were just that—personal and unauthorized. Illegal.

“No, ma’am. It’s part of that new quality assurance protocol I’m developing.”

Colonel Kowinski regarded him impassively. She’d folded her arms over her budget binder, holding it close. Despite the late hour, her olive drab jacket was still buttoned and crisp. Her sleek salt-and-pepper chignon might as well have been molded from plastic, not a hair escaping.

“Go on.”

David couldn’t tell if his supervisor wanted to hear more because she was interested or because she sensed, correctly, that he was lying. Either way, he felt ready. The old saying was true: Imminent death did have a way of concentrating the mind.

“The lab’s been collecting DNA from every recruit since 1992. That’s just over three million samples.”

Kowinski tapped her budget binder with a short, polish-free nail. “I’m aware of the statistics.”

“Well, statistically, there’s always an error rate in sequencing DNA samples to create a genetic profile.”

The colonel said nothing, and David continued. “Out of three million samples, we can estimate a few thousand of our profiles will be incorrect. Since it’s expensive to repeat the sequencing of all three million to look for just a few flawed results, I’m hoping a mathematical analysis of the profiles in our database will find the errors instead.”

“The Neandertal connection, Mr. Weir. It’s late.”

David pushed on. “We know the mitochondrial DNA in every cell of every human in almost all cases passes directly from mother to child, without sexual recombination with the father’s DNA. So, technically, every person on Earth today can trace their genealogical descent back to a single female who lived in Africa about a hundred and fifty thousand years ago and—”

“Mitochondrial Eve.” Kowinski interrupted to remind him he wasn’t shining a visiting politician.

David instantly jumped ahead to details he hoped would distract her even more from what was actually on his screen. “Okay, so when we compare
nine hundred and ninety-four key mtDNA sequences from people around the world, the average number of those sequences that differ between any two people is eight, and the maximum is twenty-four. That’s how closely related every person is—less than a three percent difference.

“MtDNA from Neandertals, though—that differs from modern humans by twenty-two to thirty-six sequences, with an average of twenty-seven.”

He touched the screen’s incriminating image with one finger to draw her attention where he absolutely needed it. At the same time, he tapped the function key that expanded that image, to force the codes beneath it off the screen and out of sight.

He shot a glance at Kowinski, wondering if she’d caught his manipulation of the image.

“That difference indicates the last common ancestor we and the Neandertals shared dates back to maybe four hundred and fifty to five hundred thousand years ago.”

“This helps quality assurance how?”

“It gives us a baseline for identifying improperly processed samples in our database. So I set up a simple comparison program—strictly using the lab’s idle computer time—comparing our samples with this one.”

Kowinski’s expression was unreadable. “Couldn’t you use a set of standardized human sequences just as easily?”

“Oh, I’m using that technique, too. My program compares our samples with a range of ten different datasets. It’s a statistical study more than anything else. The Neandertal sequences just add another range of values to make comparisons with. After a couple of hundred thousand runs, I should be able to cut it down to the two or three sets that consistently give the best results in identifying erroneous results.”

“And you’re only using idle computer time.”

“Yes, ma’am. For now it’s strictly a background program that runs as an adjunct to the lab’s standard quality checks.”

Kowinski’s clear eyes studied him. David tensed, unsure what he’d do if the verdict went against him.

“I don’t suppose you’ve found any Neandertals among our recruits.”

“Only in the marines, ma’am.”

The colonel’s smile was brief but humanizing. “Carry on, Mr. Weir.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

David waited until he had seen the main doors of the lab offices swing closed behind her before he restored the full image on the screen, complete with the identifying codes that ran along the bottom.

If Kowinski had been able to read those codes, and understand them,
she’d have realized the DNA they described did not come from
Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.
She’d have realized why he was working late and alone, and why he’d felt the need to lie to her.

Because the DNA sequence that was on the screen, that carried the genetic markers of something other than human, was his own. Working swiftly, David copied the eight personnel files from his computer to the small flash drive he had hidden in a U.S. Army promotional key fob. Then he wiped his work history from his hard drive, so that no investigator could ever recover any trace of what he’d done. Or discovered.

Thirty minutes after the colonel, he signed out of the drab, utilitarian armed forces facility. As usual, the guards gave his backpack only a cursory inspection.

In the parking lot, beneath the impersonal gaze of the lab’s exterior security cameras, David walked unhurriedly to his beat-up Jeep and tossed his pack onto the passenger seat, handling his ring of keys casually, as if they weren’t keeping company with a flash drive of files worth at least another ten thousand dollars to him. Just like the last two sets.

He waved to the parking lot guards at the gate and sat back as they shone their flashlights into the Jeep, then opened the barricades for him.

Focused on survival, David pushed the speed limit all the way to Washington, D.C., and his meeting with his buyer that might save his life.

Tonight, using a computer program roughly similar to the one he’d described to Kowinski, he’d succeeded in identifying a cluster of eight more individuals among the lab’s database of more than three million—proof that there were others like him. So far, though, he’d failed to find the exception to the rule. Those who shared his nonhuman DNA markers had one thing in common: They were younger than twenty-seven or they were dead.

David Weir was twenty-six.