Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (20 page)

Jess considered her next move—one she knew Su-Lin assuredly would not approve. But centuries of library scholarship had led the Family nowhere. And now it seemed there was a chance to change all that. She, like all children of the Family, had been told that one generation of them would be called to change the future. What if this was the beginning of that call?

What if the key to discovering the Family’s lost purpose was to locate all twelve of the lost temples of the First Gods and reclaim their mysterious artifacts?

What if, with this outsider’s help, the Family could find the nine remaining temples the
Traditions
described?

And what if one of those was the
first
temple—where the Promise was made? Surely the Family would forgive her what she was about to do. She turned to David, prepared to make her offer.

The first burst of machine-gun fire tore through the warehouse door.

“Shots fired! Shots fired!”

Roz Marano pumped the brakes, and the Intrepid slid into the curb a long block from the converted warehouse.

Lyle pressed his earpiece tight. “Who’s shooting?”

The deserted street, glistening with rain, betrayed no sign of any activity.

Del Chang was reporting from the cable van positioned opposite the warehouse. He’d been describing the black Suburban and the man and woman who’d accompanied Weir into his unit—apparently at gunpoint. Then a green shape had moved on the night-vision screen.

“Shooter’s on the roof.”

Lyle and Roz were both out of the Intrepid now, running toward the warehouse, SIGs drawn, fingers off the triggers. Lyle heard a distinctive popping sound and echoes from the empty street—a submachine gun.

“There’s someone returning fire from the ground!”

Lyle hissed at Roz to stop advancing. The junior agent flattened against the wall of a darkened building beside him.

Now more automatic weapons fire. Roz looked at him, eyes bright, cheeks flushed. “Is this when we wait for backup?”

“Wish it was.” Lyle’s earpiece squealed as Chang gave more details.

“Three shooters now. Two on the roof. They’re concentrating on Weir’s unit.”

“Where’s the third?”

“On the ground. Came around from the back. I think there was another shooter on the roof, but the guy on the ground popped him.”

Lyle couldn’t figure it out. Someone had kidnapped the kid. Someone brought him back at gunpoint. Now someone was trying to kill him.

Roz summed it up with her usual eloquence. “What’s up with this guy?”

Priority one was still to preserve Weir as an asset to use against Ironwood. Lyle figured he’d work the rest out later. “Del—give us an approach. We’re going to take out the shooters on the roof.”

Gunfire came in near constant bursts now.

“You should be clear coming up the side. They’re directly opposite Weir’s, shooting across the parking—whoa!”

“Say again!”

“The guy on the ground picked off another roof shooter. Someone else is returning fire from the unit, too.”

The gunfire stopped.

“Last shooter might be withdrawing. Can’t spot him.”

“Let’s go,” Lyle said. “Close to the wall.”

He and Roz ran forward.

“There he is! Far end of the building—two now. Confirm two shooters still on the roof. Still . . . what’s that?”

Lyle’s bad knee raged with pain with every footfall on the pavement. He cupped his hand over his earpiece. “Say again? Del?”

“They’ve got something big up there.”
A fusillade of sharp gunfire sounded.
“Big exchange from roof to ground. Sir, I think they’ve got a shoulder-fired—”

That’s when Lyle heard a short whistle and saw the lightning-quick streak of light that stitched across the street.

The cable van exploded.

Machine-gun fire pierced the metal fire door of David’s lab, and, as Jess hit the floor, David scrambled for his computers, grabbed the wireless keyboard from the plywood table, then ducked beneath it. Gunfire
might
cause his death. Losing his data would guarantee it.

Hunched over, working swiftly, he typed a sequence of commands to copy the results of his latest run to disk just as the lights in his unit flicked off.
Power failure?
He listened intently, then relaxed. The battery backup for his computers hadn’t chirped.
No power failure. Good.
Jess must’ve turned off the overhead fixtures.

He stretched up to check one of his screens to be sure the commands were correct, then hit
ENTER
in the same instant the thud of a thunderous explosion outside coincided with a brilliant flash of red light through the high windows of his unit.

Jess was gone. The metal door gaped open.

Silence.

David leapt to his feet, ran for his equipment table. He quickly sorted through a pile of padded envelopes to find the ones with the genome data disks he’d ordered from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

More rapid-fire gunshots.

He dropped back to the floor as bullets ricocheted around him. Heard a can of Red Bull hiss as it was punctured, saw dark streams of spraying liquid.

Flat on his stomach, envelopes in each hand, he saw Jess again. Bent over, struggling through the open door, firing her gun one-handed into
the parking lot, the other hand dragging Dom inside. She hadn’t run off—she’d gone for her bodyguard.

A burst of machine-gun fire peppered the concrete floor beside her, and she let go of Dom and flattened against the wall beside the open door.

David shoved the envelopes in his waistband, started forward on his hands and knees.

For a heart-stopping moment Jess swung her gun around to aim at him, but he kept moving toward her. “I’ll get him!” David reached out for Dom, pulled him in.

Jess spun around in the same instant. A small magazine dropped out of her pistol’s grip, and she slapped another one in place.

She fired into the parking lot. Six times, David counted. Then she slammed back against the wall as another round of machine-gun fire poured through the door.

For just a moment, her eyes met his. A dozen questions whirled through David’s mind, unvoiced. Who the hell was trying to kill Jess? Was there any way out of this? How much ammunition did she have left?

Her red hair in wild disarray, she again reloaded as he tried to see how badly her unconscious bodyguard was hurt. The lab was dark. No light for a visual check, so David used his fingers. He unzipped Dom’s Windbreaker, ran a quick hand over the man’s T-shirt, stopping when he encountered body armor. Checked both Dom’s shoulders. The left was wet and sticky. Felt the weak, rhythmic gush of blood.

Beside him, Jess leaned out to shoot into the lot again. Steeling himself for the loud bang of her gun, David yanked off his own T-shirt, folding it to make a compress. First-aid courses had been mandatory at the army lab.

He pushed the wad of cloth hard against Dom’s shoulder. Kept the pressure steady.

Heard a groan. Good sign.

Jess stopped firing.

“How bad?”

“Ask again in twenty minutes.”

She took another quick look into the parking lot. No response. No gunfire. She resumed position, back against the wall, gun ready.

Then from a distance came the wail of sirens. David cocked his head to listen. Four police cars and an ambulance from the east. Two more police cars from the south.

Jess touched David’s arm, looked down at Dom, spoke quickly, clearly. “His full name is Dominic LaSalle. He works for Cross Executive Protection Services out of Zurich. He’s licensed to carry his weapons here. The Suburban is registered to Cross.”

She was giving him a cover story for the police, but he’d already worked out one of his own. Not only would it be truthful, it would satisfy the cops
and
protect his arrangement with Ironwood.

“He’s your friend,” she continued. “You were showing him your new lab. Someone tried to break in. To steal your computers. Dom drove them off before they could.”

“I won’t lie to the police.”

“Those clusters you found? You’re looking for an explanation for them, aren’t you? I know what it is.”

David almost relaxed the pressure on Dom’s shoulder. Almost.

“Who was here with you tonight?” she asked.

Approaching voices, shouting, noisy. The flicker of angry red reflected flames in warehouse windows beyond the unit’s open front door.

“Who was here tonight?” Jess repeated.

David made the only decision he could.

“Dom LaSalle. My friend the bodyguard. Lucky coincidence.”

Jess holstered her gun in the small of her back and pulled out his phone. “You help me. I help you.” She laid it on the floor beside him, held his gaze. “Expect a call.”

Then she darted out the back door and was gone.

Half a world away from the outpost being built on the shore of Cornwall, what would one day be an atoll was still an island.

Mordcai, Apprentice Master of the Star Paths, was grateful for the choice his elders had made in selecting this outpost’s site. Some outposts were in cold and rocky regions, far from the center of the world. Others were along inland riverbanks, and one, which he had visited himself, was set high in a range of mountains where the Navigators themselves had once traveled. This outpost, though, was in the midrange islands of the Ocean and endured no extremes of weather. Nor had its construction offered many difficulties, other than the transport of building materials from larger islands hundreds of stadii distant.

Fortunately, the
ahkwila
who inhabited the local islands had welcomed the
khai
and become eager students of the knowledge.
Ahkwila
wayfinders were common now, and trade routes among all the islands and even the great lands were established and secure.

Those routes were what Mordcai charted now, on the great world map in the Navigators’ Hall of Nan Moar. Beneath the precisely aligned silver starstones on the room’s domed ceiling, with brush and rule the apprentice master carefully plotted the paths between the local islands, and beyond them to the other outposts across the world. In time to come, even if everything the Navigators warned against was true, the outposts would remain. And, Mordcai thought with satisfaction, these routes that he now charted, combined with the starstones on the ceilings, and the gifts on the altar, would ensure that the knowledge would never be lost. Nor would the way home be forgotten, no matter how much the world might change.

On this midsummer morning, Mordcai knelt on the polished stone floor of the hall among his paints and brushes, spools of twine, and precisely shaped bars and rules of iron. Despite the heat of the day outside, the room was cool, insulated by the outpost’s thick walls.

He used a slender stone rod to scratch notations on a slate made easy to grasp by its woven wicker frame. In the warm amber light of a sputtering mollusk-shell oil lamp, he consulted a star path as recorded by Navigators’ glyphs pressed into a thin sheet of gold. Only then did he work the number markings on his slate to accurately convert the position of a star that could be seen in the hemispherical dome of the sky
to the cylindrical projection of the wall map. It was a calculation he could do easily enough without making marks, but he had two young students with him today, and the notations were for their benefit, to demonstrate the knowledge.

Adma, a true
khai
female, eight years old, softly chanted each step of the conversion as Mordcai scratched them onto the slate. Her head was shaved, following tradition, as was her mother’s, though Adma’s obsidian skin was not oiled. The fine white sand spun up by the winds on the island had led the young
khai
to abandon the practice. So, like many of the true children here, Adma was an unsettling blend of the old and the new.

Adma’s fellow student this day was Lisafina, an
ahkwila
female of twelve years. Despite being
ahkwila,
the girl was fortunate. One day, with Mordcai’s help, she would rise to become an adept wayfinder of the islands. Even now, she knew the night sky well enough for her years, and could name each local wayfinder star as it rose above the horizon, although the abstract notion of changing spheres to cylinders was something his lessons had been unable to instill in her.

Mordcai wasn’t troubled by that, though. It was a known fact that different people,
khai
or
ahkwila,
had different talents. While Lisafina would be a wayfinder, Adma could very well become a master of the star paths. The world had need of both.

His calculation complete, Mordcai rose from his kneeling position and crossed the floor to the far wall, to count off the hexagonal cells spanning the distance from the Nan Noa quarries to Nan Moar. As he did so, Lisafina held the oil lamp close as Adma used a bone awl to etch a knotpoint into the plaster of the wall, precisely where Mordcai indicated. This close to the cool plaster, its damp sour smell overwhelmed the almost sweet scent of the whale oil burning in the shell.