Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (50 page)

Kingsburgh was already at one of the keyboards, scrolling through lines of text. “Seems so.”

“Okay, then. I’m going to have to stand outside to make the call.”

Kingsburgh held up his phone. “I’ll be on this. Send in your better half.”

Lyle didn’t bother to ask who Kingsburgh meant by that. He tugged the garage door up, went back to the van he’d arrived in, and held out his hand. Roz gave him the satphone. He made the call.

“That you, Agent Lyle?”

“Yes, sir, it is.”

“You find it okay?”

“Right where you said.”

“Does Keisha say it’s all copacetic?”

“I hope you don’t mind we’re having our own people check it out first.”

“Just as long as you stick to the deal.”

The deal,
Lyle thought. He was still trying to comprehend the deal.

Twenty-four hours ago, two hours before the Air Commandos reached Vanuatu, Ironwood had called the Air Force Office of Special Investigations headquarters in Crystal City, Virginia, and asked to speak with Lyle. He was using his satphone, and AFOSI patched him through to Lyle at home within a minute.

Then Ironwood said he had another proposal to make, and Lyle said he was listening.

“Clemency as before. Treasury protection as before. And no UFO evidence demands.”

At the time, Lyle sincerely felt disappointment. He liked picturing Ironwood’s face as the Air Commandos burst into his home, bound, gagged, and cuffed him, and gave him a ride, military style, back to America. But the forces upstairs were willing to deal if it meant the billionaire revealed the location of the stolen database, so . . .

“I can make that work,” Lyle said.

“I haven’t finished, son. What I want is your guarantee, in writing, of the first two conditions, and one more.”

“Go ahead.” Lyle felt no pressure. He checked his watch. The Air Commandos were almost at Ironwood’s front door.

“I’ll tell you where I’m keeping SARGE, you take Keisha there, and you let her run one last search for me, just like that one in Cornwall. Shouldn’t take more than a day, then you send me the results and you can pack it all up and ship it to wherever you want. We’ll be done.”

As Lyle considered that, General DiFranza’s voice joined their conversation, momentarily surprising him, until he realized that, of course, some, if not all, of the twenty or so personnel who had been in the Pentagon for his first call to Ironwood would have been rounded up to listen in on this one.

“Mr. Ironwood, it’s General DiFranza. Don’t hang up.”

“No such intention.”

“If this search you’re requesting has anything to do with any sensitive location that could harm the United States or its allies—”

“Put a sock in it, General. You think I’m an idiot? I hope you do end up thinking there’s something sensitive about what this search turns up, because then you’ll just be confirming what I’ve been saying all along. So either way I’m a happy man. Now is that a deal, or is that a deal?”

“One search,”
the general said.

“Here’s my fax number. I want to see it all in writing.”

By the time the Air Commandos were in position, the deal had been signed, and Ironwood had told them where to go.

When Kingsburgh confirmed the entire database was online and operational, Ironwood read out a set of coordinates. General DiFranza, monitoring this unorthodox procedure from the NMCC, had the coordinates checked and, in under a minute, gave authorization for Lyle to pass the numbers to Captain Kingsburgh of U.S. Space Command, and on to Ironwood’s programmer in orange.

The numbers didn’t appear to have any military significance. They designated a site on the Palmer Peninsula, Antarctica.

Lyle had taken the coordinates in, personally. Roz had accompanied him without asking, and he’d allowed her to. It would have been cruel to cut her out of the end of the case that had consumed them both.

Kingsburgh was under strict orders not to let Harrill have any direct access to the database, so Ironwood’s lead programmer sat back from the metal table on a cheap rolling office chair and told the air force captain how to proceed.

First, he input the coordinates. Then, on the screen before him, an aerial photo appeared of . . . of white. That was all that Lyle could see. Next, Harrill told the captain to zoom in, and the white expanded to more white, and finally some random black shapes appeared. Black rocks partially covered by snow, Lyle decided.

“Toggle the false-color control, bottom left,” Harrill said. Kingsburgh used the mouse, and the screen switched from white with black to white and a garish purple-blue. “Now switch to SARGE. Bottom right.”

The white areas magically disappeared, replaced by a rainbow assortment of bright colors.

“Whoa,” Roz said to Lyle. “What happened?”

“I believe we’re looking through the snow to the actual terrain.”

“Cool.”

Then Harrill gave Kingsburgh a set of step-by-step instructions having to do with setting the initial depth and resolution of the slices they were going to examine.

At this point, Lyle stopped paying attention. He had had a long talk with Roz about the exchange he had seen between DiFranza and the civilian who had been identified as a psychiatrist. Roz accepted that the general’s story might be true—that a criminal who asks for something impossible in a negotiation isn’t really interested in closing the deal. However, she also agreed with his argument to DiFranza, that to someone like Ironwood, asking for evidence of UFOs to be released wasn’t an impossible demand—not if he truly believed such evidence existed.

Nor had she understood, as Lyle hadn’t, why the psychiatrist didn’t take that into account. “Unless,” she had added, “he wasn’t really a psychiatrist. Maybe
he’s
the guy with the key to the vault where they keep the alien babies.”

Lyle had looked Roz right in her mischievous eyes and asked her point-blank if she honestly,
truly,
believed the government was capable of keeping such an incredible secret for so long.

She had smiled and said, “Just because I don’t believe in government conspiracies doesn’t mean I can’t believe in—”

“Yes, it does,” he’d interrupted. Then, quite wisely he thought, they’d both decided to leave everything alien well enough alone.

On Kingsburgh’s computer screen, Lyle now saw that a schematic diagram was flashing on and off in all different orientations against a rough background of random smears of color.

“What now?” Kingsburgh asked.

“We keep the joint cool and we wait.” Keisha swiveled in her chair, to face Lyle and Roz. “With such precise coordinates, it shouldn’t take more than a few hours.” She held up her handcuffs. “Deal done?”

“Not yet,” Lyle said. Ironwood was still in Vanuatu, and still had to provide the names of everyone involved in getting him the database.

After that, the only mystery remaining to be answered was why the alien-loving billionaire was so interested in such a bleak, barren, snow-covered piece of rock.

In the end, Lyle decided, the answer to that mystery was unimportant.

He’d done his job. The case was closed or soon would be.

Nothing else mattered but returning to his ordinary life.

He sat back, closed his eyes, and thought again of Roz’s eyes, wondering for the first time how old was too old. How young, too young.

In the shade of an umbrella woven from palm fronds, David lay back on the white-canvas-covered deck chair on the wood veranda and tried not to think of dying. The wounds on his chest had been cleansed and dressed and no longer throbbed. There was an ice bucket beside him—polystyrene, with a printed plastic sleeve that was supposed to look like wood, perhaps the cheapest ice bucket on the planet. Still, it was filled with cans of Red Bull, and there was a cupboard in the elaborate kitchen stocked with a never-ending supply of Doritos. A year ago, he might have thought it was a good thing to live like a billionaire—even a frugal one—but ever since his inadvertent genetic discovery, everything that surrounded him was simply a distraction to mask the sound of ticking, the clock of his life running down much too quickly.

Jess was facing troubles of her own, and proximity to Ironwood was still a problem for her. David had heard the man explain to her that he had always imagined their rivalry as a chess game. That the stakes they had vigorously played for were high, but were never life-or-death. That Nathaniel Merrit had acted on his own, and that he, Ironwood, accepted full responsibility for not realizing what his own security chief was doing. That it had never been his intention for anyone to come to harm.

“My aunt’s still dead,” Jess had said. That had been the end of Ironwood’s first attempt at reconciliation.

In Australia, it hadn’t been difficult for David to persuade Jess they needed Ironwood to help them search for the White Island, if that’s where the coordinates led. Not after he’d pointed out that there were only three groups, as far as either of them knew, that had the required resources to help. Since the air force was only interested in arresting him for espionage, and her family wanted to “confine” her, at the very least, that left only Ironwood.

Besides, David had added, despite the long-standing animosity between the MacCleirigh Foundation and the billionaire, Ironwood
was
motivated to find the lost site and study it. If Su-Lin and Andrew, on the other hand, discovered it, there was no guarantee that they wouldn’t dispatch another demolition crew.

Jess had agreed.

It hadn’t been that difficult to reach Ironwood, either. Jess had called the CEO of Haldron Oil and given him a brief message for Ironwood. Haldron’s CEO had called his counterpart at Royal Sovereign Oil—wholly owned by Ironwood Industries. Royal Sovereign Oil headquarters were only four blocks away from Haldron’s in Aberdeen.

From there, the path taken by their message was unknown to David, but he knew studies had shown that any two people on earth could be linked by as few as seven intermediate connections between acquaintances. At the rarefied levels of connection Jess and Ironwood occupied, magnified by wealth and influence, he guessed it probably didn’t even take seven.

Their message had been brief and to the point.
I know where to find the oldest outpost with your help. Jessica MacClary.
Then the number for a disposable phone.

That phone had rung six hours later. Message received and answered.

Now, two days later, he and Jess were guests in Vanuatu, and they were waiting for Jack Lyle to report that a temple had been found at the coordinates taken from the star and sun maps. Maybe that would change the dynamic between Jess and Ironwood.

There wasn’t much chance it would change anything for him. Twenty-three days from now, he would reach the threshold age of twenty-six years, six months. Past that date, death would come at any moment. No one he’d yet found with his genetic anomalies had lived more than five and a half months past that. There was simply no more time left.

He felt numb, angry, frustrated. He burned with the desire to do something, anything—but he didn’t know what.