Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (3 page)

Nathaniel Merrit was a killer, and underwater he found it easy to practice his craft. His contoured silicone mask kept his vision focused only on what was directly ahead, no distractions. The rhythmic rush of each exhaled breath from the regulator in his mouth reminded him of his daily meditation. Each slow and deliberate kick of his fins made him think of the kata he performed every morning: a ritual ballet of unarmed combat. His arms floated loose at his sides. His knife was sheathed—but not for long.

On the fifth day of this expedition, his two-man crew had found what he searched for, exactly where they had been sent to look on the small southern comma of this barren atoll. Now it was his job to make the retrieval—if there was anything to retrieve.

The water was warm, crystal clear, visibility near sixty meters. Merrit had no trouble seeing Krause and Renault. Dappled by sunlight, marked by silver threads of air bubbles, they were holding their positions by the opening in the steep coral bed twenty meters down. Their scuba tanks were fluorescent yellow. Even their dive knives had bright yellow stripes, all for better visibility.

Merrit’s twin tanks were unpainted, bare aluminum alloy. His buoyancy compensator vest, weight belt, equipment, and titanium-thread wetsuit—all were black. For some of his assignments, visibility could be counterproductive.

At the ragged opening, Merrit first engaged his crew in a showing of their wrist dive computers. Krause and Renault had been down twice this morning to set the explosive charges and then check the results. They were good for at least another forty minutes at this depth, longer if Merrit could lower fresh tanks to them so they could take more time ascending to avoid the bends. Merrit gave them the okay sign to let them know they didn’t have to worry about their return to the surface today—he’d be taking care of them.

He next began his examination of the edges of the opening for structural integrity. The chunks of drab, dead coral that had been blasted free
had tumbled down the sloping bank of the atoll. Another twenty meters deeper, they lay amid the almost imperceptible mounds of stone blocks that once made up the rest of the structure built when this atoll was an island. As for who those builders were and when they had toiled here, Merrit had no opinion. The fewer questions he entertained, the simpler his work.

Satisfied the opening wouldn’t collapse in the next hour, Merrit unclipped the pistol-grip LED spotlight from his vest and shone it into the waiting darkness. The turbidity from the explosions had settled, and the water in the revealed passageway was clear.

Merrit swam in first, barely moving his fins to avoid kicking up the thick layer of silt that covered the passageway’s floor. After ten meters, the rough textures of coral and barnacles ran out to reveal the passageway’s bare walls and arched ceiling.

He checked over his shoulder. Krause and Renault swam after him, but clumsily. Behind them, billows of silt rose up in their wake to obscure the route back to the open sea and sunlight. The reduced visibility would make it easier to do what Merrit had planned.

He swam on, locating the chamber entrance at fifty meters, exactly where the coordinate map had placed it.

His employer’s briefing had described this particular section of the site as originally protected deep below the structure’s central core, and the open passageway he floated before as sealed by a pair of thick wooden doors bound by iron. Once the ocean had swallowed the island, either through a gradual rise in sea level or the violence of the volcanic explosion that had formed the atoll, the ocean’s woodborers had come and consumed the doors within decades. After another century or two, the ocean’s own oxygen had transformed the iron bands to rust, long since swept away.

Merrit signaled to his divers to wait in the entranceway, then swam ahead into what his employer called the treasure chamber. This was the third expedition on which he’d seen such rooms. The first had been three years ago in the Ghaggar-Hakra dry river valley of India. A second had been high in the Peruvian Andes just three months ago.

This chamber, like the others, was circular, with a diameter a little less than eight meters, and the height of the encircling wall just over two. Its curved ceiling was a perfect hemisphere.

In the Andean chamber, the wall and ceiling had still retained traces of a type of plaster on which markings of some kind had been made. Merrit’s employer had been disappointed that not enough plaster remained to permit reconstruction of what those markings might have been. Here, underwater,
Merrit saw no remnant of any wall covering that had survived the sea’s corrosive chemistry.

However, something else familiar had—a circular stone disk mounted on a central stone pedestal. Like those in the Indian and Andean sites, the structure resembled a round table about two and a half meters across and a meter high, though the buildup of sediment on the chamber floor made the pedestal’s height seem less.

Only the stone disk interested Merrit.

With Krause and Renault watching from the open entryway, Merrit drew his knife and delicately probed the disk’s surface layer of sediment as if searching for land mines. In a few weeks, his employer would dispatch a full archaeological team, and they would use vacuum hoses to meticulously expose the site and the other rooms it contained. But Merrit’s employer had made it clear that only Merrit was to retrieve the artifacts from the treasure chamber.

On his fifth attempt, his knife made contact with an object. Merrit waved in his crew to assist him with their lights. Then, using his free hand to scoop away the silt, he located the outer edges of the object. Recognizing it by touch, he didn’t reveal it further. Instead, he continued methodically probing the rest of the table-stone. If it was identical to the others, then on its surface would be twelve incised wedges radiating from the center. Each wedge would have a uniquely shaped, carved indentation designed to hold a different object. On his two previous expeditions, the treasure chambers had been looted sometime in the past. In only one—in the Andes—had one of the twelve artifacts been recovered. Merrit’s employer had hopes that this long-lost chamber would be different.

Again and again, Merrit slid his knife into the sediment, each time hitting only stone. When he was certain there were no other artifacts to recover, he paused and made a show of patting his buoyancy vest, looking for something not found. Then he signaled Krause and mimed using a camera, indicating the diver should retrieve one from the equipment cache netted against the coral slope outside.

Krause signaled “okay” and swam off.

Merrit waved for Renault to enter the room, then pointed to the top of the curved ceiling where a mercurial pool of light shimmered—the captured air from his regulator.

Directing his attention to the ceiling, where reflections from his dive light flashed rippling streaks of silver across the chamber’s walls, Renault was unaware of danger slipping into place behind him until he felt the tug as Merrit slashed his air hose.

Merrit watched from behind as Renault wasted a few of the last seconds of his life flailing blindly for the thrashing hose behind him. By the time Renault remembered to reach for the emergency air bottle on his vest, it was too late. Merrit had grabbed both of his forearms from behind and now held on as the diver kicked and writhed and sent them both on a twisting trajectory across the chamber. Merrit’s metal tanks clanged against the wall of stone.

Abruptly Renault went limp, but Merrit didn’t relax his hold. He and his victim had worked this site for five days, trading stories. Renault had enjoyed displaying the jagged crescent of scars on his thigh where a shark had pulled him under years ago—a shark he’d fought off with his knife and fists. Men like that don’t die easily. Merrit maintained his grip. He was in no hurry.

Ten seconds later, Renault jerked violently as he fought in vain to escape.

He failed. This time when the diver’s body sagged, it was due to loss of consciousness.

Merrit twisted the handwheel on Renault’s tank regulator to stop the flow of air, then unhooked the diver’s weight belt so he’d float faceup to the undulating bubble of silvery air, reuniting with his last breaths.

Merrit recovered Renault’s dive light, switched it off. He took a position above the entryway, extinguished his own light, and waited in the warm darkness of the still water for the second diver to return.

It took longer than anticipated.

Merrit was tempted to drop down and look back along the passageway. His eyes were dark-adapted now, and he was certain he’d be able to see Krause silhouetted against the faint blue glow of the opening, but to leave his position was to risk losing the advantage of surprise. So he stayed in place, breathing slowly, not once thinking of the body floating a few meters above him.

Until he felt a current flow past him, as of someone swimming in darkness.

Merrit instantly stopped breathing, listening for the sound of another regulator. Why would Krause swim back without using his dive light? Did he suspect what was planned for him?

Hearing nothing, Merrit consciously took another breath. Unconsciously, he looked up into the darkness above him. What if Renault had outwitted him, held his breath just a few seconds longer—enough for Merrit to release him, look away? Did the diver get to his emergency bottle of air?

Merrit felt the water move around him. There
was
someone else in the chamber. He reached for his knife.

Another hand was faster, ripping the quick-release sheath from his leg. Now
two
hands grabbed each of his forearms, dragged him down.

Merrit took a deep breath, bracing for his own air hose to be cut.

Instead he was blinded by a disorienting flash of light.

In the instant before his vision whited-out completely, Merrit saw two divers with sleek rebreathers that released no air, and impenetrable obsidian lenses that glinted on their full-face masks.

They’d used infrared to hunt him.

Their next move was unavoidable. It was what he’d do in their place.

Kill the enemy.

No one looked twice at David Weir as he entered the busy lobby of the Hay-Adams Hotel. Late on a Friday night, even speeding when he could, the drive from Rockville, Maryland, to the center of D.C. had taken him just over an hour, most of that spent bumper-to-bumper on the George Washington Memorial Parkway. He’d had no opportunity to change from the clothes he wore at work—jeans, Nikes, a creased white shirt with his one concession to the lab’s dress policy: a narrow black tie.

Tonight, a majority of the people in the dark-wood-paneled, amber-lit lobby were clad in Beltway power suits, the exception being a few women in dramatic evening wear. It was that kind of place. Still, since the historic old hotel was located directly across from the White House and attracted clientele from international diplomatic circles, a mix of dress and ethnicities was also to be expected. Neither he nor his jeans would cause notice. Politics ran this town, not fashion.

He stood in the doorway to the lobby bar, backpack in hand. With its small square tables, soft lights, high upholstered chairs, and a multitude of hushed discussions, it was called Off the Record for a reason. Its sound had a complex, layered ambience that on another occasion David would be recording for his collection.

He glanced around the room, looking for the contact he had met the last two times—a tall, blank-faced man with a shaved head. Instead, a different figure approached, built like a powerlifter, with a full head of bristling brown-black hair, spiked with gel. The hairstyle was ten years too young for the beefy face beneath it, and the dark banker’s suit with chalk white pinstripes was a good twenty years too old. The whole effect was of a bad disguise.

“Weir, right?”

David was very aware he was risking his freedom, and his life, by what he was prepared to do, and had done before. In these circumstances, he wasn’t about to talk to a stranger.

“I’m waiting for a friend.”

“Merrit’s not here. I’m taking the meeting.”

“Where is he?”

There was a faint trace of Texas in Pinstripe’s husky voice. “On that island you sent him to.”

David’s suspicion grew. “How’d he know which one to go to?” It had only been five weeks since he’d sold Merrit the second set of files outlining a possible common geographic origin for the nonhuman DNA he shared with a few unlucky others. “I only tracked the second cluster to Polynesia—that’s more than a hundred major islands.”

Pinstripe’s only response was to tap his suit jacket, where something in the inner pocket made a bulge. “I’ve got your money.”

David weighed the odds: his need to understand the bomb ticking in his own genetic structure against the risk of being entrapped. If Pinstripe was working for the FBI or Army Criminal Investigation Division, David knew he’d be arrested, guaranteeing he’d die in detention before he ever got to trial. On the other hand, if Pinstripe was a source of new information that could help him—

“Okay.”

Pinstripe led him to a corner table with two chairs. There was an empty glass and a Heineken bottle on the white linen cloth. All the cashews had been picked out of the bowl of nuts. Pinstripe had been waiting.

David sat down, backpack between his feet. A white-jacketed waiter arrived to take his drink order. David chose water. Pinstripe looked at his empty glass, clearly wanting another beer, but he ordered a club soda instead. His left foot thumped against his chair leg, restless.

The waiter left.

“Give me the files.”

David suddenly saw a chance to accelerate his search. Whoever Merrit and Pinstripe were working for, they had the capability—and the cash—to launch field expeditions halfway around the world on only a few weeks’ notice. Maybe they could help him more directly.

“I want to change our arrangement.”

Pinstripe leaned forward, threatening. “Ten grand. That’s it.”

“It’s not the money.”

Pinstripe hesitated, confused.

“You know how I’m getting my information. It’s risky.”