Black Mountain (15 page)

‘Wonder what that was about?’ Charles said.

Matt shrugged. ‘Forget about it. C’mon.’ But he couldn’t forget about it. He’d felt as if the old man’s stare had held recognition and a hint of . . . suspicion.

*

Matt looked around the campus to get his bearings. He felt better being back at the university. ‘I figure we need a high-power microscope, access to a computer and the internet, and possibly a fully functioning biology lab. Oh yeah, and an assistant or two.’

Charles looked surprised. ‘I’m impressed, you must really have some pull here.’

Matt sucked in a cheek and shook his head. ‘Unfortunately, not. I said we needed that stuff; I didn’t say we’d get it. Still, I expect to be on staff here soon so that’s got to count for something. Let’s try the nice approach first, and if that fails I’ll invoke the name of the terrifying Chief Logan.’

Charles grinned. ‘Sounds like a plan.’

Matt nodded towards an enormous mustard-yellow building on the other side of the quadrangle that towered four storeys above its neighbours either side. ‘Zeis Hall.’

‘Wow, nice facilities. This is no backwoods place of learning, is it?’ Charles seemed amazed at the amount of infrastructure for a relatively small town.

‘Nice facilities indeed – these guys were teaching molecular biology and robotics fifteen years ago. They’ll have what we need, we’ve just got to get access to it. Come on.’

They moved quickly down a corridor with so highly a polished floor that they experienced the odd sensation of walking on their own reflections. The rooms on either side held banks of computer monitors, electronics equipment, whiteboards sporting literary quotations.

Charles jerked to a stop as if reaching the end of a leash. ‘Wow! I mean really,
wow
!’

‘What is it?’ Matt backed up.

Charles stepped into the unoccupied room. ‘What it is, Professor Matthew Kearns, is an FLX genome sequencer – top of the line, one billion runs with a gene-read length of 1000 base pairs per run. Hell, I’ve been trying to get one of these babies at Harvard for two years. You know, you could decode an entire
E. coli
bacterium’s DNA in a single day with this.’

Matt pulled a face. ‘Holy shit –
E. coli
? Did anyone else just get a hot flush? Let’s go.’ He turned to leave.

Charles grabbed at his arm. ‘No, really, it’s important. We can use it to map our sample’s DNA back along its maternal line to analyse its comparative evolution – see what it is, and where it came from.’

Matt looked from the machine to his friend’s serious face, then nodded. He turned to check the name on the room’s door –
Professor S. Sommer
. ‘This must be the guy we need to talk to.’

The next room was a large biology lab, filled with long benches, each with a heating element and waste sink every six feet. Peering through the glass of the door, Matt could see the room was ringed by shelves holding all manner of beakers and tubes, and, most importantly, computers that were double-cabled into walls – power
and
internet access. A woman was typing at one of the computers, her back to them. At the front of the room, writing on a whiteboard, was a tall man with longish silver hair. With his perfectly trimmed beard, half-glasses, neat jacket and corduroy vest, he looked like a Central Casting version of a professor.

‘Great, and Dumbledore’s home as well,’ Matt whispered to Charles. He pushed open the door and cleared his throat. ‘Professor Sommer, I presume?’

The man turned and looked at them over the top of his glasses, then, without a word, let his eyes slide slowly past them to the rear of the room. Matt followed his gaze to where the woman who’d been working on the computer now sat with her arms folded, watching him.

‘For a scientist, you make a lot of assumptions, Matthew Kearns,’ she said. ‘But then again, you always did.’ She started to thread her way through the tables towards them, pulling off a pair of small glasses as she came, a half-smile at the corner of her mouth. ‘I heard you were in town . . . and you might be joining us.’

Matt blinked and frowned for a moment, before recognition broke through his confusion. ‘What . . . Sarah Peterson? You’re Professor Sommer?’

‘Professor Sarah Sommer – Sommer’s my married name. And yes, I run the biology departments at AU, all three of them. This is my assistant, Roger Burrows.’

Matt turned back to the man, ready to apologise, but Burrows gave him an uninterested glance and went back to writing on the board.

‘And you are . . .?’ Sarah held out her hand to Charles.

Charles shot his hand out in response. ‘Excuse him; he’s not used to social contact. Professor Charles Schroder, Anthropology, Harvard. A pleasure to meet you, Professor Sommer.’

‘Sarah, please, and likewise.’ She tilted her head. ‘Tell me, you’re not the Professor Charles Schroder who wrote the paper on comparative analysis of early hominids using DNA markers, are you?’

Matt snorted.

Charles shrugged and stood a little taller. ‘Yes, yes, I am.’

Sarah smiled at him. ‘That analysis was brilliant work.’

Charles nodded a little too deeply, turning it into a half-bow. Matt groaned.

‘Follow me,’ Sarah said, motioning to the door. She started towards it, Charles in tow. He looked back over his shoulder at Matt and raised an eyebrow. Matt exhaled slowly and followed. As he left the room, he saw Roger Burrows looking at him over the top of his glasses. This time he was smiling.

*

Matt felt nervous; she made him nervous. He hadn’t seen her since his university days, and here he was trying to impress her all over again. He cleared his throat.

‘We believe what we have here is unique: a tissue sample of an extremely rare creature. We need to examine it at both cellular and genetic level to determine if we’re right. If we are, this could be the biggest news since . . . I don’t know, since Noah’s Ark.’

He groaned inwardly as the words came out of his mouth. They sounded bombastic even to his own ears, and he knew he was recklessly inflating something Charles had only hinted at.

Sarah folded her arms, one eyebrow raised slightly. ‘Noah’s Ark, you say?’

Charles cut in before Matt could respond. ‘We know that’s a little melodramatic. But we do have some indeterminate biological material, which leads us to suspect there may be some form of new, or very old, anthropoid species on the Black Mountain. We’d like to do some lower-level analysis on the sample just to see if we can identify it according to any of the known taxonomic branches.’

Matt got the drift: lower the expectations; go easy on the details for the moment. He put on his most businesslike expression. ‘Charles is right. It might be nothing more than an escaped chimpanzee, or some sort of weird-looking ground squirrel. But we promised the police chief we’d do our best to identify it.’

Sarah’s eyebrow went up another notch. ‘Uh-huh . . . and is this
ground squirrel
responsible for the recent thefts of cows and domestic pets, or potentially involved in the attacks on the farms recently?’

‘There’s also a lion loose from the circus,’ Matt spluttered. ‘That’s probably resp–’

Sarah leaned forward. ‘Lion’s dead – the police shot it.’

Matt slowly turned to Charles. Charles just shrugged and pointed to him with a flat, open hand –
over to you, you’re doin’ great
was the implication. Matt laughed. He shut his eyes for a moment, rubbed them with a thumb and finger, then leaned towards Sarah.

‘
Oookay
, we don’t really believe it’s a squirrel or fugitive chimp. We think there may be some form of early hominid running around on the mountain, and we’d like to try to determine if it’s one we know of or something completely new.’

‘Go on.’

Matt stared at her for several seconds, torn between telling her everything and wanting to hold back on some of their wilder suspicions until they could prove or disprove them.

Sarah stared back levelly, and the corner of her mouth turned up slightly. ‘Listen up, the pair of you. I’ve lived in this town for most of my life. I love the place, and anything that threatens it or its folk gets my full attention. And one more thing before you start bullshitting: I’m quite a well-respected professor of biology who’s pretty highly regarded in the international arena on matters of cellular biology, environmental gene mutations and a dozen other organic micro-matter subjects. Gentlemen, you have two choices. One: you can try and snow me, and you’ll be out that door in seconds. Or two: tell me everything, and I may be able to help.’ She turned from one to the other, looking them each in the eye. ‘Your call, boys.’

Matt looked again at Charles, who nodded slowly. ‘We need her,’ he said. ‘Her and her sequencer.’

Matt compressed his lips, then turned to Sarah. ‘Look, there’ve been stories about something in these mountains for hundreds if not thousands of years. Not just in these mountains, but all over the world.’ He sucked in a breath and let it out slowly, preparing for her ridicule. ‘We think we may have a tissue fragment from a mega-hominid . . . a
living
mega-hominid.’ He gritted his teeth, waiting for the mocking laughter.

Instead, she slid her chair across the floor to her computer and began to type. When she’d found what she was looking for, she half-turned the screen for Matt and Charles to see. ‘As I said, I’ve lived here for a long time, and I know every creature in these parts, big and small. But in the last few weeks . . . well, I’ve begun to suspect that there’s something else out there. Something that doesn’t fit.’ She started typing again. ‘For several years now, we’ve had microphones placed around the slopes to collect ornithological data for a number of the local societies. But recently we’ve picked up something else.’

She hit a key and adjusted the volume. The booming
whoops
and
grunts
were eerie in the small room.

Charles sat forward, his mouth open. When it stopped, he leaped out of his chair. ‘Play it again.’

She hit the replay, and folded her arms. ‘I’ve never heard anything like it . . . except it reminds me of something at the same time. I just can’t place it.’

Charles turned the computer around, then paused. ‘May I?’ He didn’t wait for a response, just started typing furiously. ‘Listen.’ From the computer came a series of hoots, whoops, snorts and grunts.

‘You see, you need a certain shaped larynx without vocal cords to create those sounds,’ he said to Sarah. ‘Also a heavy jaw, and a deep barrel-chest.’ He played the sounds again and swung the screen around for Matt to see. ‘God bless you, Dian Fossey.’

On the screen was an image of a black mountain gorilla. Its dark, human-like eyes stared out from under a rubber-thick brow ridge.

Sarah’s frown deepened. ‘You think it’s a gorilla up there?’

Charles smiled and shook his head slowly. ‘No, and not by a million years of evolution. But if it is what I think it is, an escaped lion would have been a lot simpler to deal with . . . and to explain.’

FOURTEEN

The boat glided in towards the beach and the fisherman leaped out to walk the bow up onto the sand. Adira and Alex picked up their small bags and jumped out, then Alex turned to help pull the boat clear of the water. It was quiet save for the tiny waves
shushing
onto the fine grains of sand. Adira watched as Alex lifted his chin and inhaled the scents of the ocean, before scanning the dark shoreline.

The little open boat had brought them from Eilat, the southernmost town in Israel, to Taba at the start of the Gulf of Aqaba in Egypt. It had taken only twenty minutes to cross the six miles of glass-like ocean, but the trip had cost 1000 US dollars – and there would be much more expense to come. They needed international travel documents, credit cards and new identities. Adira had a contact in Egypt who was one of the best in the Middle East. He, like the fisherman, was part of the large black-market network that operated under the noses of the Israeli and Egyptian authorities. Terrorists used them to get into Israel . . . and now she was using them to get out.

She turned to the waiting fisherman. ‘
Shukran
,’ she said, and held out the wad of American notes.

His weathered hand reached for it, but she held on tight, causing the old man to frown and look up into her eyes.

He grunted. ‘The car will come. It is my cousin, Bennu, I trust him. As arranged, he will take you as far as Sharm el-Sheikh at the Red Sea, and then . . .’ He shrugged and tugged again on the notes.

Adira still held fast, examining his eyes for any deception. She spoke in a low, even tone. ‘If he does not come, then the next time you see me, it will not only be the money I take from you.’

She let go, and the old man nodded, but Adira could see the hint of a smirk on his face.

Alex helped push the boat off the sand for its return trip. They both saw the small illumination across the dark water as the old man flipped open a mobile phone and started to talk. Adira’s stomach knotted – she couldn’t believe the risks she was taking. She always thought any plan through from both a strategic and tactical perspective – it was one of the reasons she had stayed alive so long in Mossad’s elite Metsada unit. But her decision to help Alex leave Israel had been made in a state of panic. She knew that in doing so, she was betraying her country, her uncle and everything she’d believed in her entire life. The truth was, the woman beneath the lethal exterior wanted a life with Alex Hunter, no matter how remote a fantasy that seemed. At the same time, she was continuing to betray him and his fragmented memory. He already knew she’d lied to him. What would happen if she were proved a liar again? What of her fantasy about a future together then?

It was impossible to know how this crazy plan would turn out. She had to believe that what she was doing was right. She could justify her actions to her country, to her uncle – after all, if she got the answers they wanted about the Arcadian project, then all would be forgiven. In her world, the end
always
justified the means. Today’s unorthodox actions were tomorrow’s textbook lessons . . . as long as they worked.