Given all of the portents over the last few months—the dogs, the birds—Christ, last week there was talk of the animals fleeing Yellowstone and other woodland parks, heading for the high ground—all of it just made everyone even edgier. They were living day-to-day, expecting the worst, some of them even wanting it to happen, she was sure. She’d seen the doom patrol out there preaching their end-of-the-world gospel, bless their hearts.
Six hours.
A lot could happen in six hours.
She didn’t want to find out exactly what. Not yet.
For now she just wanted to immerse herself in the wonder that was scientific discovery. She had lost worlds to explore, digitally at least. It was a gift that put her on the autism spectrum, she knew, but like a lot of obsessives she could forget the world even existed when she wanted to, especially when confronted by the unknown.
It was more than mere intellectual curiosity, it was compulsive, like she needed to turn the lights out five times before leaving a room or knock on any closed door three times to announce her presence. She liked to think of it as a quirk, the kind of thing that made the Sheldons of this world adorable, but that need was what made her good at what she did.
She studied the latest geological tests.
The geophysics suggested that the entire area was made up of granite: close to twelve square miles of granite bedrock. That was several times the size of Central Park. It was difficult to adjust her thinking to account for something on that scale. If she was right, it meant they were talking about something on par with a city, not a couple of ruined buildings, which really was beyond her wildest dreams. And ever since that first image had come in she’d been dreaming big.
She was banking on that making her job easier as opposed to looking for the proverbial linguistic needle in this very wet haystack. She was more likely to encounter writings on a larger site, and the more samples she had, no matter how eroded or unclear, the easier it would be to run comparisons on them.
Her primary aim was to identify the language. Her secondary one, to build a lexicon.
Anything that could add to the greater knowledge pool of ancient languages, offering some new understanding, some new glimpse at the way things might have been back then, was better than gold, even if it was something as mundane as Jesus’ shopping list.
Not that any self-respecting messiah did his own shopping
, she thought, grinning as her train of thought derailed.
A lot of it was about joining the dots.
The raw data was out there just waiting for someone to interpret it. Sure, it wasn’t all ones and zeroes of strings of hex or whatever it was the guys in the computer labs were using today, but it was there, every bit as concrete—or in this case granite—as the mathematical strings they used when it came to examining the building blocks of the world.
There shouldn’t be any granite in the region, it was as simple as that. The sheet rock was anomalous. Cuba was mostly limestone, so the granite had to have been brought in by whoever built the city beneath the sea.
The exploratory team had only taken a few preliminary photos and videos of the find so there wasn’t a whole lot for her to look at yet, but it was obvious that time and tide had worked their damage, with entire levels of the pyramidal structures missing and whole sides of what may have been temples collapsed.
On the plus side, granite was a hard stone, capable of withstanding the battery of the elements, and even after all this time lost to the sea the granite had survived the worst of the erosion virtually unscathed. That meant the few symbols she could make out in the images were sharp. They’d been carved deep into the stone blocks, and even though the top layer of strata had worn—or broken—away, the remainder was still chisel-clean.
She had no difficulty transcribing the symbols. Pulling up a graphics package, Finn began the painstaking process of tracing the first one, saving it as a clean layer so that she could study it independent of its surroundings.
Peculiar
, she thought, and not for the first time. The pyramids suggested an Egyptian influence, that much was obvious, but the thinking was highly suspect. The Olmecs and Mayans had constructed pyramids, and theirs were often stair-stepped like the central one in this image.
But that presented its own set of time line problems: Olmecs hadn’t started erecting pyramids until circa 1200 BCE (Before Central Event, which was exactly the same as Before Christ for the non-Christians of the world); the Mayans were an even younger civilization, their pyramids built closer to 1000 BCE, only three thousand years ago—so neither of those fit her flood-basin time line. There were the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, they were old enough to correspond with the estimated age of their discovery, but that civilization was half a world away in the cradle of humanity, Iran and Iraq, and with no evidence of Mesopotamian society having ventured as far as Europe, never mind the Americas, and even if the Great Ziggurat of Ur dated back to the twenty-first century BCE, most of the ziggurats were actually from the same time period as the Olmecs and the Mayans.
She removed the overlay to study the first symbol. It definitely wasn’t an Egyptian hieroglyph. There was no denying the similarity, certainly: it appeared to be a flower, definitely representational rather than phonetic, showing something instead of sounding something out. But Egyptian markings were more finely crafted than this. The hieroglyph for
owl,
for example, was a likeness of an owl, complete with beak, talons, and feathers. This icon was cruder. In a lot of ways it was closer to an Olmec representation, though it didn’t exactly match their more stylized symbols.
The fact that she didn’t recognize the language right away was exciting. Had it simply been Egyptian or Olmec or some other known variant, her job would have been a simple case of translating a few symbols. If they’d just uncovered a lost language, possibly even the oldest extant example of a written language, her job was only just beginning. She’d be the first to study it, to document it, and to try her hand at translating it. That didn’t happen more than once in half a dozen lifetimes in her world. It was beyond being career-defining. It was life-changing.
She knew she was grinning like a lunatic. She didn’t care.
She saved the first symbol, eager to see what else the underwater world had to show her. Turning back to the original photo, she selected the next symbol, created a new layer, and began tracing it. It was going to take awhile to get through all of the symbols, but she wasn’t in a hurry to go outside. She had heat, light, and quiet in here, what else did she need? Power bars and Coke? Check. There was an ample supply of both in the vending machine across the hall. There were spare clothes in her office closet, along with a few blankets.
She had everything she needed in here to survive a mini-apocalypse.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FOR A MINUTE, AT LEAST, HE’D FORGOTTEN about Sophie’s enigmatic message.
That was something. But in the grand scheme of things, not a whole fuck of a lot, really.
Jake grabbed the messenger bike and hauled it up off the ground where he’d abandoned it. He didn’t get on it. Anger, frustration, impotence welled up inside him and he hurled it away, hard. The handlebars hit the asphalt, but the back wheel kept spinning after the bike slammed into the door of a nearby truck. People were staring at him. He didn’t care. He was so thoroughly pissed off he wanted to break more things. A pipe or bat would make a fine weapon, but even sans weapon he was happy to start bashing the fuck out of things with his bare fists and boots—windshields, headlights, and roofs, it didn’t matter. The only thing that would appease his anger right now was watching glass fly and hearing metal squeal like a pig.
But he wasn’t going to get any satisfaction. It didn’t matter how much he raged, how many things he hit, he couldn’t vent on the one guy who deserved it.
He’d blown it. He’d just let a guy get away with shooting a bunch of people dead while he watched. He could have made a difference, he could have done something. He should have, but he’d blown it.
Fuck. Shit. Fuck.
Jake stormed over to the battered messenger bike, lifted it up again, climbed on, and ignoring the people trying to help him, cranked the pedals hard, no particular destination in mind. He just wanted to be away from there.
He needed to think smart. The cops might be swamped, but they wouldn’t ignore a shooting, even if Joe Public couldn’t call it in on their cells. He wasn’t going to try to explain what the fuck was going on, mainly because he didn’t have a clue.
Yet.
That was a powerful word.
Yet.
It suggested he would have the answers at some point down the line.
He lived and died by that word. It meant there was a way to change things, even if he didn’t know what he was dealing with right now.
Angling down a side street, Jake swung over to the curb. In the shadow of tall trees, he pulled over, still straddling the bike, and pulled out his cell phone. He had two reasons to hope it would have survived the wipeout. One, he’d been underground—a long way down—when the blast hit, assuming it was a blast of some sort. The other, ever since mustering out of the service, he’d been paranoid about being cut off and paid good money for a satellite phone. As long as the hundreds of feet of bedrock shielded the phone’s electronics, it should still be able to receive a signal from one of several satellites in low earth orbit. He didn’t want to think about the fact that they had taken out the relay towers. He deserved a bit of luck.
He thumbed down the green call icon. There was no dial tone to tell him if it was alive or not. The only way he’d know if there was a connection to the satellite uplink was if it held the call.
He dialed quickly. It was a number he knew by heart. He hadn’t programmed it in—the guy he was calling was paranoid about people from the past catching up with him. Jake couldn’t blame him.
There were plenty of people lining up to do bad things to Ryan Johnson. Russian mafia, Serbian goons, Latvians, Lithuanians, all along the entire bloc. He wasn’t a popular man. Jake wasn’t exactly sure what he’d done, something related to computers and fire walls and making a lot of money for a lot of mean people and then upsetting them. Badly.
Ryan was also the only person Jake knew who was paranoid enough to shield his home electronics
and
carry a sat phone.
The phone rang twice before it was answered.
“Yo.” That was it, just the one syllable.
Jake grinned with relief. “Ryan. It’s Jake.”
“Jake?” There was a moment’s silence. “Long time.” The tone was a little less guarded, yet despite the words, Ryan was obviously
not
happy to hear from him. But that was Ryan. Jake didn’t even know his real name, despite the fact he’d known the guy most of his adult life. Some people liked to keep their secrets. He didn’t know what had gone down with Ryan, and he didn’t want to. Right now, Ryan was the only person he could think of who had the skill set to help.
Jake got right to it: “You busy?”
That earned a chuckle. Ryan had sworn he’d turned his life around when he’d returned to New York a few months back, done with freelancing, as he put it, done with chasing the big-money score and being some bastard’s puppet; now he was just looking to keep his head down.
Jake believed him, but unfortunately that wasn’t enough to stop him from saying, “I need a favor.”
“Everyone who calls does. So what do you think I can do you for?”
“To be honest, I’m not really sure.”
“My favorite kind of favor.”
“Okay, here’s what’s just happened . . . I just walked into the middle of a shit storm on Wall Street. A bunch of guys were messing around with the computers on the trading floor, and now they’re dead. I need to know what they were doing, and why.”
“One question before we get into this.”
“Shoot.”
“Did you do the killing?” There was no judgment in the question. Ryan had a history of violence. It was simply part of the world he’d grown up in.
“No. But I saw who did, and I couldn’t stop it from happening. That’s why I want to know what was worth their lives.”
“Yeah, all right, man, I can see that. Taking on the troubles of the world. I’m cool with that. The networks are fried since this whole sunfail thing, so I can’t do it from here, but I can bounce down there and work my magic. In and out before anyone notices.”
“Thanks, man. You know the drill: don’t leave any trace, and don’t get caught. I really don’t want to have to explain what I’ve got you involved in to Von.”
Ryan laughed. “Almost worth getting busted for that conversation. I’ll call when I’m done.”
“I owe you. And do me a second favor while you’re on it: give my love to that gorgeous cousin of mine.” Blood ran deep in this life. It didn’t matter if you’d taken the road from the projects into the military or into and out of gang life, blood was blood. You didn’t fuck with blood.
Yvonne, Ryan’s partner, was blood.
Jake knew that was the only reason he’d been the one they’d called when they hit town rather than just keeping their heads down. He’d read the stuff in the papers about Ryan’s crew out in Russia damn near triggering an international incident. They were private contractors. Mercenaries by another name. Ryan wasn’t muscle, he was the brains. There was a guy called Markham who was basically a grunt. Jake had heard stories: how he’d been suspected of rape and a bunch of other crimes against the locals, and turned up lynched by the same locals who’d had enough of his shit. The only reference in the press back home was to a businessman by the same name who had died while working out there—no mention of a memorial service or anything of the sort. But that was all parallel-world stuff for Jake. He’d been an enlisted man. There was a proper way of doing things, and you didn’t fuck with the locals, not when you were out there to keep the peace.
“Will do.” The connection dropped.
Jake tucked the phone back into his pocket. He felt a little better now—a problem shared and all that. He trusted Ryan. The guy had too much to lose to be a dick. And he knew computers better than anyone Jake had ever met. He could make them dance and sing. He’d come up with the goods.