Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (9 page)

Ironwood waited for the steward to return to the kitchen. He kept his hands on the meteorite still sitting on his ample lap. “You remember the boy from the army lab?”

Merrit shrugged. “Weir, David. Sure.”

“I hired him.”

It took Merrit a few seconds to process that. Weir was already on the payroll, so to speak. He brought Ironwood information from military records, and Ironwood paid him. Or, at least, Merrit did, acting as go-between. He decided Ironwood could mean only one thing.

“Full-time?”

“Dave tells me he can use other genetic databases to get me what I need, and he can work faster if he’s not trying to squirrel into government computers.”

Merrit didn’t care what Weir could or couldn’t do, but he was concerned by what Ironwood had just implied. “He told you? You spoke to him in person?”

“Some reason I shouldn’t have?”

“Your security is what you hire me for. Weir’s a mark I found on the Internet. He’s not supposed to know you’re the end buyer of what he’s selling. You can’t trust him.”

“The boy’s come through for me. Besides, I looked him in the eye. He’s not a problem.”

Merrit persisted. “The
boy’s
breaking federal, state, and military law
stealing files from a military computer system. When the CID catch him at it, and they’re going to, they’ll offer him immunity
and
a huge reward if they think he can lead them to you.”

“Then it’s a good thing the
boy
isn’t working for the military anymore, isn’t it?”

Merrit glanced at the meteorite in Ironwood’s lap. “You also hired me to keep you isolated from anything anyone might call . . . illegal.”

Ironwood’s eyes narrowed. “You telling me you did something you shouldn’t have? Something to do with this?” He held up the meteorite.

Merrit was taken by surprise.
Where did
that
come from?
“I told you I didn’t have permits for the dig site. And, technically, I should’ve reported anything that I took from it to the French authorities. But none of that’s—”

“You know I don’t give a rat’s backside about paperwork. Especially
French
paperwork. I’m asking if you ran into any trouble out there that you didn’t bother to tell me about.”

Merrit told the truth as he knew it. “Not for me.”

Ironwood didn’t look convinced. “Didn’t cross paths with any MacCleirighs, say?”

“Way ahead of them.”

Ironwood appeared to think that over. “Okay,” he said at last. The rich scent of fresh coffee filled the lounge as the steward returned. “Enjoy your coffee.”

Merrit sat back as the steward pushed down the mesh disk in the pot of café filtre on the side table. A new concern slippped into his mind. The moment the steward retreated to the kitchen, he voiced it.

“When you spoke to Weir, did he sell you another set of files?”

“Sure did.”

“Did those files pinpoint a new site?”

“Not this time.”

Shit,
Merrit thought. The files were fakes. Exactly what he’d expect if the CID had flipped Weir to help snare Ironwood. There could be army investigators serving warrants on Ironwood’s offices across the country right now. And when Ironwood went down, Merrit knew, he wouldn’t go alone.

“Weir set you up. We need to get off the train.” Merrit got to his feet. Ironwood had long had a Plan B in case any of his ongoing battles with the government appeared to be leading to prison.

His employer waved his hand. “Sit down, sit down. I’m way ahead of you. It wasn’t a setup. The new files—the new genetic cluster—it was for Ganganagar. India. Ring a bell?”

The name was familiar. Merrit sat down. “That’s where we found the first outpost. Three years ago.”

Ironwood nodded, looking smug.

Merrit found the expression irritating. “What good is that? We’ve already been there.”

“But Weir didn’t know that, did he?”

“So?”

“So what it does is confirm his technique: Find a concentration of folks with alien DNA, and somewhere nearby there’ll be one of the outposts the aliens built. So my boy Dave is three for three, and now he’s going for four. Not bad.”

“And he’s not working at the army lab anymore?”

“No he is not. He’s mine.”

“Army CID can still nail him for what he did while he was working there, and then turn him against you.”

“He won’t turn against me.”

“He’s a crook selling what he steals. He’s a proven liar.”

“So? Everyone lies.
All
the time. Especially to me. Always telling me what they think I want to hear so maybe I’ll fart money on them or something.” Ironwood tapped a finger to his ear. “You know what else I hear?”

Merrit didn’t.

“That boy doesn’t like what he’s doing,” Ironwood said. “Stealing from Uncle Sam.”

“Right. He’s afraid of being caught.”

“Oh, it’s more than that. You see, as much as I want the genetic cluster information Dave can get me, Dave wants that same information even more. Something bad’s driving that boy.” Ironwood fingered the meteorite, which hadn’t left his possession all this time. “Me, now, I’m as safe as a crow in a gutter. If it comes down to a choice between lying to the Army CID or lying to me, that boy’s going to lie his pants off to the army, because I’m the only one who can give him what he wants.”

Another possibility occurred suddenly to Merrit. “Does Weir believe in . . .”

“Aliens?” Ironwood drained the last of his diet cola. “Not a chance. He’s one of those
Skeptical Inquirer
types. Wouldn’t believe in aliens if Predator bit him on the backside.”

“Then why’s he after the same genetic information you are?”

“About that, I admit, I do not have clue one. But I’m gonna find out.” Ironwood grinned a big predator grin of his own. “Interesting, isn’t it?”

Merrit understood what had to happen now.

Desperate men did desperate things, and if Weir was as driven as Ironwood believed, then Ironwood could not interact with him again.

The tech was a loaded gun, and Merrit was not about to take that bullet, not even for a billionaire.

Three days from the Barrens, in the backseat of a sound-silenced Maybach limousine, Jess MacClary turned her head to watch the streets of Zurich slip past the smoke-tinted window. Between school years in Boston, this ancient city had been where her real studies had taken place: her Family education. Every twist and turn, each transition from cobblestone to smooth pavement, was as familiar to her as the thoroughfares of earlier times had been to her ancestors. The Family’s presence here stretched back before the Romans to the Celts, when little more than muddy paths ran through a thatched-hut village.

As a child, she’d taken this route every summer, though never, as today, accompanied by helicopter-borne snipers, ready to protect her from any new attack.

Jess adjusted the Maybach’s reclining seat until its position was almost fully horizontal. She stretched back, weary from the long trip across the Atlantic, the turmoil of conflicting emotions. Here, in the financial capital of Europe, it was midafternoon, and the armored, bombproof limousine moved slowly along Bahnhofstrasse, now approaching Paradeplatz. Elsewhere in the city, shadowed by other helos, Jess had been told, two other armored Maybachs were following different routes to the same destination—decoys.

To either side of her vehicle, the city’s stone buildings now gave way to steel and glass monoliths, soaring upward to a cool gray sky. Seen through the car’s passenger skylight, those towers appeared to crest like dark waves in a storm-tossed sea, frozen in the instant before they could crash down on her.

Jess had never liked this part of Zurich. She missed the openness of the tundra. Vanished now, along with her separate life, into the past.

The past.

History was what defined the Family—the history it had witnessed, the history it preserved, and the history it would someday make. All children in the Family learned that each generation might be
the
generation: the one that would change all of history on the day when they’d be rewarded for their service through the ages.

Now it was her turn to share leadership of her generation. Her grandfather had been Defender of the Line MacClary, and Florian had been his first child. Her father, Florian’s only sibling, was his last. By right and tradition, Florian’s own first child, male or female, should have been next in line, but Florian had been childless when Jess’s parents had died so senselessly. So the aunt had taken in her orphaned niece, age twelve, and at age sixteen Jess had been formally acknowledged as the Line MacClary heir.

Fresh tears filled her eyes. She touched the control on the center console, to change the limousine’s skylight from clear to opaque. A few more minutes and the car would arrive at one of Zurich’s most modern structures and the home of humanity’s oldest secret. It still seemed unreal to her that within days, if not hours, she, like her aunt and grandfather before her, would be admitted to the highest level of the Family’s faith, and at last learn the Secret that its twelve defenders guarded.

That was the nature of succession by bloodline. The new advanced only when the old died.

There was no sign on the dark blue glass tower. Those who had dealings with the MacCleirigh Foundation knew where it was housed. Those who didn’t had no need to know.

Around the world, though, academics and scholars and even governments knew of the MacCleirigh Foundation and its work: in Italy, the laboriously computed tomography scans and virtual reconstructions of carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum so fragile they could never be unrolled; in Guatemala, the delicate work of stabilizing Mayan frescoes in ruins scattered deep throughout impenetrable rain forests; in South Africa, the Balkans, and New Mexico, programs to record and document ancient languages before the last of their speakers died.

The Foundation supported historical research and restoration projects on every continent but Antarctica, and had done so for centuries. It was so renowned for its efforts that researchers rarely questioned where the Foundation’s funds came from, or thought about who might have been the original MacCleirigh for whom it was named. To most historians and ethnologists and archaeologists who relied on its grants, the Foundation had always been there, always doing what it did to preserve and protect knowledge of humanity’s past. And they were right.

Compared to every other human institution on Earth, the MacCleirigh Foundation
had
always been there.

Always.

In a well-protected inner courtyard, Jess remained in the limousine until the armed chauffeur opened the passenger door for her. She got out and looked up to see what she knew would be there: rooftop spotters in position. Another sign of how her life had changed. She would never truly be alone again.

She headed directly for the massive glass doors that led into the main lobby. She wasted no thoughts on wondering how the Family would deal with the open attack on her in the Barrens, the deaths, Kurtz’s wounding, the destroyed helicopter, and her abrupt departure from the Haldron project site. She only knew they would.

The building’s pristine white entrance hall, seldom busy, was empty. Jess heard the main doors lock behind her, saw the security cameras automatically tracking her. She kept walking toward the only opening between the lobby and the bank of elevators: a metal-detector frame.

A man waited on the lobby’s other, secure side. He was old, frail, the worn collar of his expensively tailored white shirt two sizes too large for his wizened neck, his black-framed glasses thick.

Jess stepped through the metal detector. The old man bowed his head deferentially. “Jessica.” His accent was full German, and not the soft blend of German and Swiss that arose from the city’s unique
Zürichdeutsch
dialect. A frondlike wisp of white hair floated above his age-spotted scalp. “I am glad to see you well. Sad that you must be here.”

“Herr Reims,” Jess said formally, but her smile of greeting was affectionate. The old man had been her personal retainer at the Foundation since she was sixteen. She offered her hand to him. He did not take it.