Black Mountain (16 page)

She reached out and gripped Alex’s upper arm and squeezed. ‘Come,’ she said. She was smart, she would work things out.

Alex smiled and put his hand on her shoulder and she felt its warmth on her skin.
What I’m doing is right
, she thought.
Sometimes logic doesn’t matter
.

*

General Meir Shavit watched the surveillance film of his niece and Alex Hunter buying tickets for the domestic flight from Tel Aviv to Eilat. They’d paid cash, and the available CCTV footage had lost them the moment they left the airport. Shavit knew that given Adira’s abilities, it was sheer luck that they had managed to catch her on film at all.

Sheer luck, or a deliberate tactic?
He tapped his chin with a cigarette lighter. Could she have doubled back into the airport and taken another domestic flight? Or were she and Hunter on an international flight to somewhere else in the Middle East, or even beyond? Or maybe they had sailed across into Egypt or Saudi Arabia?
Too many options
, he thought.

He rubbed a hand over his face and looked at the image of his niece.
What are you up to, Addy? You think you are in love? You think that because one young man shakes you up, everything you have stood for is now worth nothing? Prove me wrong, Addy, before the walls close in
, he thought.

He shook his head and watched the film loop over again. He stopped it and focused in on the young man with her, then gave a long, morose sigh. ‘Addy, if you were with anyone else, I might turn a blind eye and let you run . . .’

There was a soft knock on the door. The general’s assistant opened it, allowing a tall, dark-haired man to enter. The man saluted and stood at attention.

‘At ease, Salamon,’ Shavit said. He waved the man to a pair of heavy leather chairs, and retrieved a folder from his desk before taking the chair opposite Salamon’s. ‘You are well?’ he asked, smiling.

Salamon’s back was straight and he sat uncomfortably in the general’s presence. ‘Yes, sir.’

Shavit nodded and continued to smile. ‘Your Kidon team is available?’

Salamon shifted slightly, the bulge of muscles playing beneath his suit. ‘All finished up from previous assignments and ready for duty, sir.’

‘Good, good.’ Shavit lit a cigarette, sucked in a deep lungful of smoke and blew the plume towards the ceiling. His eyes returned to Salamon. ‘I have a small problem. Maybe only a personal one, but it needs urgent, incisive . . . and delicate action.’

Shavit handed across the folder and watched as the other man skimmed its contents, quickly and professionally. His hands, although large and with heavily callused knuckles, were nimble.

‘Captain Senesh might be having a breakdown,’ Shavit added softly. ‘I need you to retrieve her.’

Salamon’s head jerked up from the file. ‘Adira Senesh?’

‘Yes, your colleague in Metsada.’ Shavit motioned at a photograph of Alex Hunter in the file. ‘This man may have corrupted her. Bring her back.’

Salamon’s eyes narrowed as he examined the man in the photograph. ‘It will not be easy. If she does not want to come with us, she will fight.’

Shavit blew more smoke into the air. ‘Bring her back alive, Salamon.’

Salamon nodded and put the picture back into the file. ‘What of him . . . if he tries to interfere?’

Shavit looked at the young man sitting in front of him. Salamon Eitan, head of the Kidon squad, was his secret weapon; his unit the more brutal side of the secretive Mossad machine. ‘Bring him back . . . intact. Alive if possible, but his life is of secondary importance. Read the file in detail, Salamon; it will not be an easy mission. Take your squad, because he may also resist, and he
will
be a problem.’

‘Not for me,’ Salamon said, and bent his head to continue reading.

FIFTEEN

The beast threw the body to the ground, then crouched beside it and sniffed. A thousand rich scents filled its nostrils, almost overpowering its sensory system, which had been dulled by years of living and hunting in the dark. It lifted the small, broken creature, testing its weight and fragility. The limbs flopped and the head rolled on a now boneless neck. The creature held the head up and peered into the bloody face. The eyes had rolled back so only the whites showed, and the mouth hung open in a silent scream.

It reached out with one large, blunt finger, enormous against the prey’s small face, and pulled first one pupil down, then the next. It stare, transfixed, into the eyes of the kind that had supposedly driven its people deep into the mountain and imprisoned them there. It snorted. There was nothing to fear from this pitiful creature; the legends must be untrue.

The body was old and its meat would be stringy, but still ambrosia after countless years of living on blind fish, fat grub-like insects and branching lichens. It would make a fitting contribution to the feast to come.

*

‘Okay, what have we got?’ Matt asked.

Charles and Sarah were working on devices at opposite ends of the laboratory. Charles turned to give Matt an incredulous look, said, ‘Come back in a week,’ then immediately returned to keying in parameters for his analysis.

Matt raised his eyebrows. ‘An hour okay?’

‘Deal.’

Charles rushed over to a spinning centrifuge, switched it off so he could look at the separating residues, made a note on a pad, restarted it, then sped back to his computer. Matt grinned. He knew his friend was trying to do several weeks’ work in a few hours all by himself; he also knew he was loving every minute of it. Charles bounced over to the digital microscope that was feeding magnified images onto his screen, then quickly noted data from another computer screen about a slice of the tissue sample that had been fed into the mass spectrometer.

While Charles was a turbulent ocean of activity, Sarah, at the other end of the laboratory, was a pool of calm. She lifted her eyes from her own screen and acknowledged Matt with a slight tilt of her head.

Matt put his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and sauntered closer. ‘Can I help?’

She folded her arms, her eyes narrowing in suspicion. Then a small smile lifted the corners of her mouth. ‘I don’t know . . .
can
you help me?’ Her smile widened. ‘And how come you didn’t ask Charles if you could help him? He seems to be doing most of the work, and with a lot of unfamiliar equipment. I’m getting my software to do all mine for me.’

Matt looked briefly over his shoulder at Charles, then back to Sarah. He gave her a sheepish smile. ‘He’s more comfortable working by himself. Besides, by helping you, I’m also helping him. See, we’re all happy.’

She laughed, and pulled a disbelieving face. ‘Okay, sure. Come around here and I’ll show you what I’m doing. Wouldn’t hurt to have someone act as a sounding board.’

‘I’m your man.’

Matt moved behind her chair and looked at the split screen. Dense rows of figures rapidly scrolled up the left side, and every now and then a line of data was automatically extracted and placed in a table on the right side.

Sara pointed at the table data. ‘I’m performing a low-level analysis of the sample’s DNA, and looking at the differences
and
similarities between it and that of any other known hominids. At the very least, I’ll be able to tell you what
it isn’t
, and then maybe what it could be. The gene sampling program I’ve developed makes use of the mitochondrial DNA to track its descent back along its maternal line, and the new algorithms I’ve coded extend that lineage reach-back significantly.’

Matt bent closer to the screen but didn’t understand it any better. He could decipher hundreds of languages, some that hadn’t been spoken for millennia, but when it came to computer stuff, forget it. Nevertheless, he nodded sagely and asked the only question he could think of.

‘Yeah, Charles mentioned something about that. But,
um
, why not use both the maternal
and
paternal sources?’

Surprising him, she nodded. ‘Fair question, Matthew. Bottom line is, if you want staying power, stick with a woman.’ She kept a straight face for a few seconds, then laughed softly, showing a line of near perfect teeth. ‘Got ya, Kearns. Fact is, the paternal mitochondrial DNA is destroyed at fertilisation, so the offspring only inherits the mother’s mitochondrial DNA, creating an unbroken maternal link to the near and also long-distant past. We can easily track back hundreds of thousands of years, and now, with the new software and the computing power of my FLX, many more again. We’ve already found that a common ancestor of both modern man and the Neanderthals existed 500,000 years ago.’

Matt was impressed, and let it show.

Then he leaned a little closer to her screen, giving the impression of being more interested in it than her answer to his next question. ‘So, Sarah Marie Sommer née Peterson, how’s married life in particular and Asheville life in general?’

She snorted. ‘Married life is fantastic . . . the way it’s portrayed in the glossy magazines. In real life . . .
weeell
. Ever heard the saying,
Marriages are made in heaven
? No one ever adds the second part, which goes something like this:
Marriages are made in heaven but suffered on a more temporal plane.
Basically, once you come down from the heady heights of the champagne and lovemaking and have to deal with the daily routine, illness, fights and boredom . . . well, things aren’t quite so rosy.’ She looked at him and shrugged. ‘Karl was a fantastic guy, but one day we both woke up and looked at each other and realised we didn’t want to grow old together.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Sarah.’ Matt put his hand on her shoulder and tried hard to look sympathetic. Inside, he felt like giving her a high-five. ‘What was he like – Karl, I mean? Is he still around?’

‘No, his family are Swiss – known as the Basel Sommers, owners of the company that makes Sportsuhr wristwatches. Karl’s being groomed to take over one day. I met him at a party in New York – he really stood out: tall, blond, broad-shouldered . . . and rich. You know the type. He had a real magnetism about him.’

Matt snorted. ‘Sounds like a real loser.’ He regretted the petulant response the instant it left his lips and hurried to add, ‘I mean for letting you go.’

Sarah dismissed the flattery with a slight shake of her head. ‘Yeah well, turned out we did have one thing in common – we both loved Karl Sommer.’ She half-shrugged in an I-don’t-care gesture. ‘Anyway, I’ve been single four years now and I love it. I can do what I want when I want, date who I want . . .’ She lifted both her eyebrows at him and smiled, then glanced at Charles.

Matt followed the glance, then leaned in close. ‘I’m pretty sure he’s already involved, and pretty committed.’

She gave him a mock look of disappointment, then turned back to her computer as it pinged softly. She sat down, started typing, then pinched her lip and frowned as she read the presented data.

Charles joined them, a sheaf of printouts in his hands. ‘Okay, I’ve gone as far as I can,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid the results are either conclusive or inconclusive, depending on your perspective.’ He flipped through the pile. ‘Okay, some background and basics first. In most mammals and every hominid
except
mankind, the outer layer of every cell carries glycoproteins that contain one specific family of sugar molecules called sialic acid. It’s actually one of the first tests we run to determine a human/non-human category. Surprisingly, our sample is totally
without
sialic acid, indicating it came from a human biology.’

Charles paused to look up at them briefly. ‘
But
I think we’re pretty sure it’s not from a human.’ He raised his eyebrows, then continued reading from his notes.

‘Also, I detected switched-on markers for keratin-41 – that’s the primary gene for excessive hair growth. This genotype has been switched off in mankind for a quarter of a million years. So we’ve got a human, or something like a human, but hairy like an ape. Then there’s the muscle striation residue – six times longer than human muscle fibre, but shorter than a great ape’s. So our hairy, human-like creature would be six times stronger than a man, assuming it was the same size as a man.’ He looked at Matt. ‘But we know from its footprint that it’s a lot larger, so we’re talking one powerful being.

‘There were extremely high levels of pheomelanin and almost non-existent levels of eumelanin in the sample, which basically means we’ve got a fair-skinned redhead.’ Charles looked up from his notes with a slightly bemused expression. ‘The data analysis goes on like this – one result suggesting a human-based life form, another suggesting an ape-like morphology and biology. If I were asked to summarise the findings, I’d say we have a giant redhead with a biology similar to humans and also similar to great apes, but not identical to either . . . something in between.’

Matt could tell Charles was both puzzled by and excited at his results.

‘Snap!’ Sarah said, clicking her fingers. ‘I’ve found the same variance–similarity conundrum. We’ve got a 98 per cent genetic match to humans, but a 99.1 per cent match to the great apes – close, but no cigar. Data on the genetic structures gives me results similar to yours, Charles – it’s in the same family, but a different species. In fact, a whole different branch of hominids, I think. If
I
were asked to summarise, gentlemen, I’d say you’ve got a potential whole new line, or a very old one that we don’t have any living evidence of.’

Sarah walked over to a whiteboard, picked up a marker and waggled it in her fingers as she considered where to begin. She divided the board into three sections: Prosimians; Monkeys; Apes. Under the Apes heading, she divided again, this time into four: Orangutans; Gorillas; Chimpanzees; Man. She tapped the word
orangutans
and turned to Charles. ‘I’m betting that’s where your gene for red hair originated, Professor Schroder.’

More arrows and names went on the board, forming a detailed family tree divergence model, showing where the different species branched off from one another. Down the side, Sarah drew a timeline. ‘Chimps and mankind separated around seven million years ago.
That
root species and the gorillas separated about another two to three million years before that. Now . . .’ She picked up a different-coloured marker and drew a line between the gorillas, orangutans and man. ‘Okay, this is what I believe we have – a whole new species that sits somewhere here on the evolutionary line. Something that probably should have died out hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago.’ She put down the pen and turned to Matt and Charles. ‘Something that modern man hasn’t seen for a very, very long time . . . if ever.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Come on, guys, you’re holding something back. What exactly are we dealing with here?’