Altar of Eden (15 page)

Duncan sat alone in a truck parked outside the entry road to ACRES. He had the window rolled down and listened to the nighttime chorus of frogs and crickets. Off to the left, the Mississippi River whispered muddily as it swept alongside the levee road. A soft wind stirred the thick humid air, making it almost breathable.

With his night-vision scope fixed to his face, he studied the facility on the far side of the levee. The place was dark, except for a few lighted windows on the first floor. His earpiece registered the call signs of his team as they reached their various positions around the building. While waiting, Duncan kept watch on the one road into and out of the facility.

He didn’t want any surprises.

His second-in-command finally reported the all-ready. “On your signal.”

“Have you confirmed the number and identity of the civilians?”

“Seven. One is a Border Patrol agent, and we should assume he’s armed.”

“Make him a high-priority target. Remember, we need one of the scientists to interrogate off-site.”

“Understood, sir.”

They needed to gauge how much the researchers had learned about the Babylon Project—and more important, if any word had spread. After that, the subject would be eliminated and the body disposed of. There were plenty of hungry sharks in the Caribbean.

Duncan studied the facility one last time. His team had the place surrounded and locked down. Incendiary charges would cover their tracks afterward. At first light, an animal rights terrorist group would e-mail and claim responsibility for the attack. Nothing would be traced back to Ironcreek Industries.

With everything ready, he lifted the radio to give the order to move in—when suddenly lights flared behind his truck. The flash stung through his night-vision scopes. He tore off the goggles and glanced to the rearview mirror.

A truck rumbled around a far bend in the river road. Its headlights swept around the corner and speared Duncan’s parked truck. He lowered his radio and waited.

Suspicion rankled through him.

At this hour and in these remote parts, he had not expected any traffic.

While he watched the vehicle approach he popped another Life Savers in his mouth. Pineapple. He grimaced at the flavor. Not his favorite. Still, he sucked on the candy. As he waited he judged the threat level and recalibrated his plans.

Once the truck was close enough, he saw that it appeared to be a beat-up Chevy, held together mostly with rust and old gray primer. It sidled toward his position.

Keep moving
he willed it.

As if obeying him, the Chevy swung wide, preparing to pass around, but a flare of crimson bloomed from the rear as the truck began to brake. The vehicle slowed and settled to a stop beside Duncan’s truck with a wheezy sigh of its engine. The driver leaned toward the open passenger window and pushed up the brim of a ball cap. He wore a hunting vest over a stained T-shirt.

“Need a hand, buddy?” he called out. His accent was thickly Cajun, just a swamp rat out late.

Duncan shifted the pistol on his lap and inwardly grimaced.

The jackass just had to stop . . .

Duncan tilted toward the window. The driver flinched at the sight of his scarred face, one not easy to forget. There could be no witnesses. He lifted his gun to the window—

—but a black-and-tan hound suddenly lunged up from the truck’s rear bed. It bayed loudly at him, like an angry bullhorn.

Startled, Duncan jerked back with a strangled gasp. Old terror crackled through his ribs. He flashed back to another time a beast had caught him by surprise.

The driver turned and hollered at the dog. “Burt, shut your piehole! I can hardly hear myself think.”

Duncan’s heart pounded in his throat.

Oblivious of his reaction, the driver swung back toward him. “Mister, you don’t happen to know if there’s some zoo place out here, do ya? My fool of a brother was heading over—”

Terror turned to fury. Angered at being caught off guard, Duncan yanked up his pistol and thrust it through the window. As he pulled the trigger the dog launched out of the truck straight at him.

He flinched as the gun went off. Blood splattered against the other windshield. The driver grabbed the side of his head, yelling a loud “
Fuck!,”
and dropped out of view.

Duncan swung toward the attacking dog, but the hound twisted in midair, struck the side of his truck, and fell between the two vehicles.

Across the way, the Chevy’s engine suddenly revved and gears popped. The truck bounced away, careening wildly back and forth as the driver drove blindly from his hiding place.

Duncan shoved the door open, leaped out into a shooter’s stance, and emptied his entire clip at the truck. The Chevy veered sharply to the left, not slowing down. It leaped off the levee road and went airborne over the steep edge.

He ran after it while ejecting the dead clip and slapping a fresh one into his pistol. He watched the truck’s front end hit the stony embankment below and flip upside down into the storm-swollen Mississippi River. The current spun the vehicle as it quickly sank.

Duncan kept watch, gun pointed. He waited a full two minutes. No body came thrashing to the surface.

Screw it.

With no time for a more thorough search, he swung away. Even if the man survived, Duncan’s team would be long gone before the bastard could alert anyone.

Red-faced, with his heart still thudding, he returned to his truck. He watched for any sign of the dog, but the hound must have high-tailed it away. At the truck, he grabbed his radio off the front seat. He was done here. He lifted the radio to his lips.

“All positions. Move in. Take this place down.”

“Igor, tell me what pi is,” Lorna said as she leaned by the birdcage, taking Kyle’s place. “What is pi?”

The others gathered behind her. The parrot stared at her with one eye, then the other. Following her brother’s gentle attention, Igor had straightened out of his sullen hunch. But there remained also a dullness to his gaze unlike his earlier verve.

Carlton stood at her elbow. “Lorna, what are you doing?”

“Testing something.” She waved her boss back. “Everybody clear away.”

As they retreated she moved closer, lowering her voice to a soft, soothing whisper. “C’mon, Igor . . .”

“
Igor,”
the bird mimicked tentatively.

“Good, Igor. Who’s a good bird?”

“
Igor!”
he squawked more brightly, and hopped from foot to foot on the perch.

“Good boy. Now tell me what pi is. You’ve done it before. Pi.”

On the computer nearby, Lorna had pulled up a full page of the mathematical constant: 3.141592653589793 . . .

The parrot bobbed his head. “
Three . . .”

“That’s right. Good, Igor.”

“
One . . . four . . .”

He was doing it again, but then things began to fall apart.

“
Eight . . . seven . . . round . . . triangle . . .”

Igor cocked his head almost upside down, eyes squinted to slits, as if struggling to remember.

“Lorna?” Carlton pressed. He glanced at his wristwatch, losing patience.

She turned. Instead of being disappointed by Igor’s poor performance, she grew more assured. Still, she wanted to confirm her hypothesis. “Zoë, would you mind running down and fetching Bagheera? And, Paul, can you bring up the capuchins?”

The two neurobiologists nodded and rushed off.

Lorna faced Carlton. “Earlier—both at the trawler and down in the ward—Igor was able to recite pi to hundreds of digits. Back then I didn’t have time to double-check his recitation, but the bird was correct to at least a dozen digits.”

“I remember that, too,” Jack said, supporting her.

Carlton shrugged. “I don’t understand. It’s simple mimicry, is it not? Nothing more. What are you trying to prove?”

“I think it’s more than mimicry. You posited the question
why
these animals seem to be synchronizing their brain waves. I think I might have the answer.”

She noted Jack staring at her. She took strength in the intensity of his interest and attention. But what if she was wrong?

A few moments later, Zoë and Paul returned with charges in hand. Zoë carried Bagheera like a baby in a blanket. The cat stared out at them with bright blue eyes. The two monkeys clutched to Paul’s lab coat with both hands and feet. He gently cradled them under an arm, while wearing a goofy smile, like a proud papa.

Lorna asked Carlton, “Once the animals were brought together, how long did it take for this synchronization to occur?”

“I’d say a matter of seconds. Half minute at most.”

Satisfied, Lorna turned back to the birdcage.
Let’s try this again.

“Igor, what is pi?”

The bird’s posture had gone straight again, fully attentive, his eyes brighter, staring hard at Lorna.

“What is pi?” she repeated.

Igor flashed his pupils at Lorna and began a recitation with that eerily human voice. This time there was no hesitation. “
Three, one, four, one, five, nine, two, six, five . . .”

Kyle, seated by the computer, followed on the screen. Her brother’s eyes got huge. “By golly, he’s right.”

As Igor continued to recite the numbers his eyes drifted closed— not with squinted concentration, but more like contentment. “ . . .
three, five, eight, nine, seven, nine, three . . .”

Everyone remained silent. Lorna’s boss drifted closer to Kyle and followed along on the screen.

Igor performed for a full three minutes, passing beyond the hundreds of numbers displayed on the screen.

Lorna watched Carlton’s face shift from skepticism to awe. He finally took off his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief. He shook his head. “I concede. His memory is amazing.”

“I’m not sure it is
memory,”
Lorna said as Igor continued. “I think he’s actively calculating it.”

Carlton looked ready again to scoff—then something seemed to dawn in his eyes. “You’re thinking
. . .
the synchronization . . . that it goes beyond physicality and into
functionality!”

She smiled and nodded.

“What’s that mean?” Kyle asked.

Zoë moved closer. She stared down at the cub in her arms. “Then they’re not just linking up to synchronize—”

Her husband finished her thought. “—they’re networking together at the functional level.”

Kyle shrugged heavily, still not understanding. Jack also moved closer to Lorna, wanting to know more.

She explained. “A brain is really an organic computer. And most of the time its vast network of neurons and synapses are inactive, a large resource of untapped computing power. I think the transmission dish—the one inside their heads—is functioning as a network router, linking the computing power in each animal’s brain. Each one has full access to tap into the dormant resources of the others’ organic computer. Basically these animals are forming a crude computer network, linked wirelessly.”

“But how can that be?” Jack asked.

Before anyone could answer, the buzz of a cell phone interrupted the discussion. Carlton gave an apologetic look and answered it. He listened for a moment, then said, “Thank you, Jon. We’ll be right down.”

Lorna’s boss closed his phone and faced Jack.

“It seems our resident pathologist might have an answer to your question, Agent Menard.”

JACK HAD EXPERIENCED
his share of dead bodies, but there was something particularly macabre about the pathology suite at ACRES. The windowless room was as large as a basketball court. Drains and floor traps crisscrossed an expanse of cement floor. Huge stainless-steel tables lined the center of the room lit by surgical lamps. Overhead ran a pulley-and-chain system for moving the carcasses of large animals into and out of the place. The air reeked of formaldehyde and an underlying hint of decay.

On the whole, the space had a feel of a giant slaughterhouse.

The promise of answers from the facility’s pathologist had drawn everyone down here.

Off to one side, the intact carcass of the female jaguar covered one table, but they all gathered by another. It held the dissected remains of the young cub. The tiny body was splayed out like a frog. Its cavities had been hollowed out. Parts floating in labeled jars: heart, kidney, spleen, liver. But the most gruesome sight was the cranial cavity: sawed open and empty.

The brain rested on an instrument tray at the head of the table. The organ’s gray surface glistened moistly under the halogen lamps.

Jack noted Lorna staring at the hollowed-out carcass. The violation and needless loss of life clearly troubled her, but the pathologist drew her attention.

Dr. Jon Greer waved everyone closer with a thumb forceps. “I thought you should see this in person.”

Jack did not necessarily appreciate this consideration, but he kept quiet.

Using the forceps and the edge of a scalpel, the pathologist peeled back the top layer of the brain and exposed a deeper layer of the cerebrum. The tissue looked much like the rest of the organ, except for what appeared to be four tiny black diamonds reflecting the light. The indentation for a fifth marked the firm flesh.

“I teased out one of the inclusion bodies and did a couple of quick tests. Let me show you.”

He moved to a neighboring table. On a plastic tray rested one of the black diamonds, only this one had been sectioned into four pieces. Greer used tweezers to pick up a shard. He moved it over to a pile of material that looked like coarse ground pepper.

“Iron filings,” the pathologist explained.

As the shard passed over the pile, a few metallic granules leaped and clung to the sliver.

Greer glanced to the others. “I believe what we’re dealing with— what’s lodged in these brains—are dense aggregates of magnetite crystals.”

“Magnetite?” Jack asked. No one else looked particularly surprised. Lorna’s brother merely looked ill and like he’d rather be anywhere but here. “Like magnets?”

“Sort of,” Lorna said.

Zoë explained. “All brain tissue, including our own, has magnetite crystals laced naturally throughout it. Crystal accumulations can be found in the cerebral cortex, the cerebellum, even the meningeal layers that cover the brain.”

Lorna nodded. “The magnetite levels in avian brains are even higher. It’s believed that these magnetic crystals are one of the ways that birds orient themselves to the earth’s magnetic field during migrations. It’s how they get to where they’re going each year without getting lost. It’s also found in bees, fish, bacteria, and other organisms that navigate by internal compass.”

“Then why do we have it in our brains?” Jack asked.

Lorna shrugged. “No one knows.”

“But there are theories,” Zoë interjected. “Newest research suggests that biomagnetism may be the foundation for life on this planet. That magnetism is the true bridge between energy and living matter. For example, piezoelectric matrices can be found in proteins, enzymes, even DNA. Basically
all
the building blocks of life.”

Lorna lifted an arm and cut her off. “Okay, now you’re losing even me.”

“Regardless of all that,” Greer interrupted, “we’ve never seen this level of magnetite in any animal. Nor such precise symmetry and pattern of deposition. I took the liberty of examining the inclusion under a dissecting microscope. The structure is composed of smaller and smaller crystals, breaking down into tinier and tinier identical parts.”

“Like fractals,” Kyle said.

“Exactly,” Greer said.

Jack had to refrain from scratching his head.
What were fractals?

The pathologist continued: “But those magnetic inclusions or nodes are only half the story.” He led them back to the exposed brain. He used the tip of his tweezers to draw lines from one magnetite inclusion to another. “Each node is linked by a microscopic web of crystals, from one to the other, forming an interconnected array. And wrapped throughout this webbing is a dense region of neurons.”

“As would be expected,” Dr. Carlton Metoyer said.

The others turned to the head of ACRES.

Carlton explained. “It’s been proven that magnetic stimulation of the brain results in the growth of neurons and new synaptic connections. If this magnetic array formed during embryonic development, the low-grade and constant magnetic stimulation would produce a richer region of neurons locally.”

Jack remembered the earlier discussion. “And this would make the animals smarter?”

“Individually . . . to some degree. But it also adds validity to Dr. Polk’s theory of some wireless interconnectivity. More neurons, more electrical stimulation locally. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say the transmission triggering the synchronization is electromagnetic. A weak EM pulse shared among the animals.”

Lorna shook her head, struggling through it all. “There’s still so much more we need to know.”

“Then I’ll let you all get back to your own research,” Greer said, “but there’s one last thing.”

“What?” Carlton asked.

The pathologist shifted to the other side of the table. Another tray rested there. A tiny object lay inside. It was clearly man-made. A plastic capsule the size of a pea. Through its clear surface tiny electronics were visible.

“I thought you’d like to see one of the microchips embedded in the animals.”

Lorna crinkled her brow. “Microchips? Are you saying they’re tagged?”

Greer turned to her. “MRI scans showed each animal had such chips implanted under the skin. We had thought they were ID chips used to mark each animal, like they do for dogs and cats. But I compared this one to the tags used here on our animals. This baby is much more sophisticated. It’s packed full of electronics.”

“Can I see it?” Jack asked.

The pathologist picked it up and passed it over. Jack studied it closer. Though he couldn’t tell much without further study, his internal radar buzzed a warning. From the complexity and degree of miniaturization, it looked military grade.

Maybe a transponder . . . or a GPS tracker . . .

As he thought that, the lights suddenly extinguished. The windowless room fell into pitch darkness. Everyone held their breath, waiting for the emergency generators to kick in.

Finally, Carlton snapped peevishly, “I thought we had the power glitch fixed.”

Jack tensed. His internal warning system went from a low buzz to a full Klaxon of alarm. He remembered his assessment a moment ago.

A tracker . . .

He pictured the explosion at the trawler. Someone had been attempting to cover their tracks. But not all of those tracks had been obliterated.

Some led here.

Certainty grew inside him. “It’s not a power outage,” Jack said coldly into the darkness. “We’re under attack.”