The Bone Labyrinth (28 page)

She closed her eyes, unable to deny the truth any longer. Like it or not, the world was in the midst of an escalating
biotechnological
arms race. And she and Lena were a part of it.

But who were we truly working for?
She pictured Amy Wu’s smiling face.
Was it China or the United States?

She breathed harder, realizing now she would have no choice in the matter going forward, not if she wanted to live. She remembered the lesson in the brutal execution of Professor Wrightson.

Be useful . . . or be dead
.

She stared toward the exit, knowing the one person who would decide her fate.

As if responding to her summons, the door opened and a figure entered, followed by an armed Chinese soldier. But the newcomer wasn’t the one whom Maria had been expecting.

Kowalski lumbered into the room. He cast a scowl back at the man with the pistol—it was that bastard Gao—then turned to Maria. His left cheek looked freshly bandaged, and he was wearing a new set of gray coveralls.

“There you are,” he grumbled.

“What happened?” She studied his face. “Is Baako—”

Kowalski fingered his bandage. “He freaked out. Attacked me.”

Maria felt her heart skip a beat, but then Kowalski flattened his fingers and scooped them under his chin, signing to her.

[
I’m lying
]

He stared pointedly at her. “We should both go down there and try to calm him.”

Before she could respond, Gao prodded Kowalski deeper into the room. “The major general says for you all to wait here.”

Kowalski’s jaw tightened with frustration.

Seems we’re not going anywhere yet.

With no more explanation, Gao swung away and stormed out of the room. Clearly something had the Chinese soldier agitated.

“What was that all about?” Maria asked Kowalski.

Kowalski looked grim and kept his voice to a whisper. “I think they may be onto us.”

6:05
P
.
M
.

“
I’m certain my brother left no trail for the Americans to follow,” Chang Sun insisted. The lieutenant colonel stood at stiff attention, but his eyes blazed with anger. “I would stake my life on it.”

And I will hold you to that
, Jiaying thought.

She stood inside the complex’s security office. Earlier she had received a warning from the Ministry of State Security, which oversaw intelligence operations for the People’s Republic of China. From rumblings within the U.S. intelligence services, it seemed the Americans suspected who was behind the attack on the primate center. And if so, she had to assume the Americans might be sending assets to investigate.

If they aren’t already here . . .

To ramp up the facility’s security, she had personally come down to this office, into the heart of the section run by Chang. It was a purposeful trespass to demonstrate her fury, a sign that she lacked confidence in the lieutenant colonel’s ability.

She swept her gaze across the bank of monitors covering the three walls. Technicians were normally seated at the U-shaped desk below those monitors, observing the feed from the various cameras positioned throughout the underground complex and the zoo above. She had ordered everyone out to have this private conversation with Chang.

She let the man stew upon her rebuke, staring instead at the monitor that showed Dr. Crandall’s gorilla seated sullenly in his pen. “And you had that beast’s body and cage thoroughly scanned for any hidden electronics.”

“Gao saw to it personally just now. After he strip-searched and did the same to the zookeeper. There’s nothing. Like I said, there was no failure on my brother’s part that could have led the Americans to look toward our shores.”

“But according to the Ministry of State Security, they are doing exactly that.”

“Then it must have been something the Americans learned from that mole in the White House’s science division. Who knows what Dr. Wu told them before she died or what the Americans learned afterward?”

Jiaying recognized this was a likely scenario. Thankfully, Dr. Wu knew no details about these labs. Still, Jiaying refused to loosen the noose from around Chang’s neck or his younger brother’s. Not until she was fully satisfied that the Americans knew nothing about this facility.

“What about Dr. Crandall?” Chang asked.

Jiaying shifted her attention to another monitor, one showing an overhead view of the room holding the American geneticist and the French paleontologist. They had just been joined by the tall zookeeper, led there by Gao.

“I will bring a technician with me when I rejoin her and scan her there,” she said. “I still have much to discuss with her.”

“Do you believe she’ll cooperate?”

“That will depend to a large extent on whether you are able to secure her sister. How are matters proceeding in Italy?”

Jiaying took pleasure in pointing out another of Chang’s failures. Apparently Lena Crandall had survived the caves of Croatia and was on the run with a small group whose identities and loyalties remained obscure. Jiaying was still mystified by the strange path that Lena and these others had taken in Italy.

It made no sense.

Why had they gone to that remote Catholic sanctuary?

Chang spoke stiffly, “All should be resolved within the hour.”

“Let’s hope in a satisfactory manner. I suggest you concentrate on that and leave the matter of Maria Crandall’s cooperation to me.”

Jiaying glanced over to another screen. The monitor was dark. It required a special key to access that feed, a key only she and Chang possessed. When activated, it offered a view down into the Ark. With the two sisters in hand, the problems facing the facility could be resolved more quickly.

Then again, if need be, Jiaying could manage with only
one
of the sisters.

She turned to Chang and fixed him with a cold stare. “See that our perimeters are continually monitored, especially for any foreigners.”

“And my brother?”

She turned and headed toward the door. “An agent from the ministry will be here shortly to interrogate Gao. Once finished, have your brother dismissed from the premises until we fully grasp the breadth of his failure.”

“But—”

“Are you questioning my orders,
Zhōngxiào
Sun?”

She felt the other’s gaze burning a hole into her back. She preferred to keep those two brothers apart, to keep Chang isolated from any support. The lieutenant colonel would tread more carefully and respectfully, knowing his brother’s career could be in jeopardy.

“
Bù, Shàojiàng
Lau,” he said.

She smiled, hearing the obeisance in Chang’s voice.

That’s more like it
.

She headed out, determined to bend another just as firmly to her will.

6:18
P
.
M
.

Maria stood with her arms outstretched to her sides as an electronic wand was passed over her body by a technician in a white lab jacket. Major General Jiaying Lau stood to one side with her arms crossed. The woman had asked her to submit to this search but had never explained why.

Not that I can’t guess
.

The Chinese must have caught wind of the possible presence of the GPS tracker, but the haphazard search suggested they were unsure. It felt more like they were covering their bases. She glanced over the top of the technician’s head toward Kowalski. He looked unperturbed. Surely the guards had already searched him and likely used the wand on Baako, too.

The technician said something in Mandarin to Jiaying, bowing his head slightly and stepping away. She could guess what he was telling his superior:
All clear
. So what had happened to the tracker? Had Kowalski found a way to hide it in Baako’s cell? Or had Baako swallowed it?

She had so many questions, but Jiaying had returned before she could get anything further from Kowalski.

The major general stepped forward. “With that matter settled, Dr. Crandall, let us continue our earlier conversation regarding the research being conducted here. I believe that once you fully appreciate what we’re trying to accomplish, you’ll want to be part of it.”

Like hell I will,
she thought, but she turned and looked about the octagon-shaped room full of fossils, specimens, and relics.

“If I had to hazard a guess,” Maria said, “your project must involve building a stronger soldier through genetics.”

Jiaying showed no reaction, beyond the slightest bow of her head. “Perhaps on the surface that is our goal. But the biggest advances in science have always been driven by the baser needs of the world.”

“In other words, necessity is the mother of invention,” Maria quoted.

“Such has been true since the beginning of time. But all too often what the military funds in secret eventually reaches the larger world. Look at the global Internet. It started as a small U.S. military information web, but soon expanded to change the world. Similarly, the hurdles we leap here today will alter the path of humankind tomorrow.”

“But you’re talking about seeking ways to permanently alter the human genome. Who knows what detrimental effects that could have in the long run?”

Jiaying sighed. “You’re not thinking rationally. Human activity has
already
been altering our genome. Smoking tobacco causes mutations in human sperm. Older men who father children have a higher likelihood of passing on similar mutations. The only difference is that those mutations are
random
. Why not take control of such damaging consequences to our genome?”

“That’s the key word.
Control
. What you’re talking about is a slippery road toward eugenics, where human life will be engineered, where babies will be designed, and where the weak will be weeded out or reduced to a second-class level of humanity. No good can come from it.”

“No good? We could erase inheritable diseases, cure cancers, prolong life, and yes, we could even improve on nature. Since when is nature infallible? Why is it so horrible to imagine humanity taking the reins of its own evolutionary future? Even your own country has not officially banned the investigation of such pursuits.”

Maria knew that all too well. Her own research could be construed as a step in that direction. What was the ethical difference between creating Baako in a lab and doing the same with a human life?

Into the silence that followed, Dayne Arnaud spoke up. “But, Major General Lau, you discovered something that set you on this path. Something significant enough to risk building this complex in secret. May I ask what it was?”

“Thank you, Dr. Arnaud, for reminding me. That was why I brought you both down here.” She walked toward the wall opposite the exit. “Are you familiar with Mount Kailash in southern Tibet?”

“
Non,
” he said. “I am not.”

“It’s a holy mountain in the Himalayas, a site of worship for both the Hindu and Buddhist faiths. It is upon that peak that the god, Lord Shiva, is said to reside in perpetual meditation. Pilgrims have been venturing there for centuries. Then eight years ago, a Tibetan herdsman who was looking for a lost sheep discovered a group of caves upon its slopes and brought a local anthropologist to examine what he found.”

Maria searched around the room. “And that is where you collected all of this?”

“Those caves and some others found in neighboring peaks.” Jiaying reached the wall and placed her hand on a nondescript patch. A square glowed to life, revealing a hidden electronic palm reader. “But it was in that first cave, the one discovered by the herdsman, that we found this.”

From the wall, a secret drawer slowly slid open. It was wide and deep, like a large coffin. Its interior flickered to life, steadying into a soft illumination.

“The herdsman believed he was taking the anthropologist to the cave of a yeti,” Jiaying explained. “And maybe he was not entirely wrong. Perhaps the bones we found have some bearing on the myths of such a creature roaming the snowy highlands. Or maybe even such caves gave birth to the legends of a slumbering god residing within that mountain. But in the end, the truth was far more exciting and illuminating.”

Jiaying stepped aside so Maria and Arnaud could examine what was found. Kowalski even shouldered forward to take a look. A gasp immediately rose from the French paleontologist. Maria lifted a hand to her throat, strangling back her own surprise.

Within the drawer rested the complete skeleton of an anthropoid figure. The conformations of the skull were remarkably similar to modern humans, only with larger brows and a double sagittal crest crowning its cranium. But what truly garnered such shock was the skeleton’s sheer
size
. The frame stretched over eight feet long, topped by a skull twice as large as a typical human’s.

It was the bones of a veritable giant.

Kowalski scoffed, “That can’t be real.”

“It is,” Arnaud said in a hushed, awed voice. “I’ve seen cranial fragments of this hominin before, but nothing this complete. The older nomenclature classified such remains as
Meganthropus,
or Large Man.”

“Well, that pretty much fits this guy,” Kowalski muttered.

Arnaud continued, “Most paleoanthropologists have now settled on the name
Homo erectus palaeojavanicus
, believing the hominin to be an offshoot of our older relative. Remains of these particularly large descendants of
Homo erectus
have been found throughout Southeast Asia.”

“How much did this specimen weigh when he was alive?” Maria asked.

Jiaying answered, “From the density of the long bones and the size of the skull, we estimate he weighed somewhere between three hundred and three hundred fifty kilos.”

Kowalski looked questioningly at her.

“That’s six to eight hundred pounds,” Maria explained.

Twice that of a typical gorilla
.