The Bone Labyrinth (33 page)

“Lots of activity going on over there,” Monk commented.

Over the past ten minutes, they had watched uniformed men come and go, mostly loading crates into the back of the helicopter. They seemed to be readying to take off. Fearing the Chinese might be moving the kidnapped party again, Monk kept close watch for any sign of an armed escort leading a group toward the aircraft.

“Wish I could get closer,” Monk mumbled. “To make sure they’re not already aboard.”

“And do what?” Kimberly asked. “That area is crawling with personnel. Until we get verification that the kidnapped party is still here, you’d only risk exposing yourself for no good reason.”

She was right, but he hated sitting idly, waiting for some sign.

A loud trundling sound drew his attention to the neighboring road. A large armored personnel carrier, emblazoned with a prominent red star, sped past them and skidded to a stop before the northern gate into the park. Soldiers offloaded out the back, while another popped up through a roof hatch to man a heavy artillery gun. The troops spread out before the gate. Shortly thereafter, two pairs of soldiers began to march off in either direction, clearly beginning to canvass the zoo’s perimeters.

Monk imagined the other gates of the park were being similarly bolstered and guarded.

He nudged Kimberly. “How’s that for a sign that our friends are still holed up somewhere on those grounds?”

She nodded. “But it may also be a sign that Chinese intelligence knows that we’re here. Or at least suspects something.”

She took his hand. He knew what she was silently telling him.

Time to go.

Monk stood up with her and began retreating through the riverside parkway as a pair of the soldiers strode toward their position. He kept close to Kimberly, playing the casual tourist. Hand in hand, they ambled along the river, heading away from the zoo grounds. Monk kept the collar of his jacket up and his face turned away from the soldiers. At any moment, he expected to hear a shout, an order to stop, but instead a roaring grew behind him, accompanied by the familiar bell-beat of heavy rotors.

“Don’t look,” Kimberly said, squeezing his hand.

Monk felt no need to glance over his shoulder. He could readily picture the helicopter rising from its concrete pad and climbing into the night sky. He didn’t know if Kowalski and Maria were aboard that aircraft, but he still felt a sinking sense of defeat in his gut.

With no other path open to them, Monk and Kimberly continued away from the zoo, driven off by the soldiers. Even if Kowalski and Maria were still on the premises, with the park being locked down now by the full force of the Chinese military, the prospect of rescuing them grew slimmer.

“What now?” Kimberly asked.

“We wait,” he said, not liking his answer. “We have to hope Kat and Director Crowe can get some new blip from that GPS tracker. Otherwise, we’re screwed.”

Earlier, he had fielded a call from Painter, who had informed him that the extraction team for this operation had landed in Beijing, arriving on different flights from various routes. The five commandos were slowly gathering at a rendezvous point, in anticipation of the go-ahead from Monk about a rescue mission.

He scowled.

Looks like we’ll all be waiting a bit longer
.

Once far enough away, Monk looked back toward the zoo.

What the hell is going on over there?

7:50
P
.
M
.

Maria struggled to understand what she was seeing.

It can’t be . . .

She stood with Kowalski and Arnaud before a curved set of windows that overlooked a habitat the size of a basketball arena. The space appeared to be dug out of the native rock, with the walls pocked by dark caves. But her focus remained fixed to the bottom of the pit.

Three stories below her, massive hairy beasts shambled or squatted amid faux leafless trees made of concrete, several of which looked to have been broken into pieces by the habitat’s occupants. Each figure appeared to tower eight to nine feet in height, likely massing out at half a ton each, easily twice the size of the typical mountain gorilla. Their legs looked as thick around as tree trunks, their arms only a little thinner. A few lumbered about by leaning on their knuckles, but the largest stood upright, exposing its full height and the silver hue to its coat. It stared up at them and bared its teeth in a silent roar, exposing yellowed fangs as long as an outstretched hand.

The silverback stood guard over a recent kill, clearly feeling threatened by the onlookers. The torn body at its feet still had bits of a shredded uniform, not unlike the coveralls of the workers she’d seen here.

Before she could look away, the upraised beast reached back, grabbed something, and flung it toward them. She fell back a step as it struck the window, both astounded at the display of strength and horrified at the sight of the severed arm slapping against the window and sliding down in a bloody smear across the glass.

The violent act broke through her shock.

“What . . . what is this?” she asked.

Major General Lau answered, “We call it the Ark, a crucible to observe our creations. It’s not unlike your classroom back at the primate center.”

Maria refused to accept such a comparison. She gave a small shake of her head, trying to clear her dismay. “They’re gorillas . . .”

“Hybrids,” Jiaying corrected needlessly.

Maria had already recognized that these were not ordinary apes. She remembered studying that massive skull of the prehistoric gorilla,
Gigantopithecus blacki
. These creatures were comparable in size and shape, but she knew what lurked below was not that monstrous species brought back to life.

Arnaud spoke up, allowing Maria a moment to get her bearings. “I can only imagine that to create these specimens, you must have spliced in DNA from that
Meganthropus
specimen you showed us earlier.”

Jiaying bowed her head in agreement. “To accomplish that, we used various techniques, refining them over the years through trial and error. We eventually employed protocols developed by the Crandalls, which accelerated our program. But whereas Maria and her sister extracted Neanderthal DNA to create their hybrid, we sequenced the genes from the bones of
Meganthropus
.” She waved to the window. “Still, like the Crandalls, we chose to use gorillas for our initial model. The results are as remarkable as we had hoped. Even the musculature of these specimens has proven to be extraordinarily powerful: easily
twice
that of a typical gorilla, and
ten
times that of an ordinary man.”

Maria’s breathing grew heavier with dismay and horror. The general’s cold words echoed in her head:
We even employed protocols developed by the Crandalls.

She stared down as the massive silverback bent over its kill and lifted what appeared to be a chunk of liver to its muzzle, gnashing into it.

What have Lena and I done?

“Of course before we move into human studies,” Jiaying continued, “we must iron out several key issues.”

Maria glanced to her. “What issues?”

“The beasts here have proven to be more savage than a typical gorilla, often killing each other unless we provide them with an ample food supply.”

Maria recalled the story of the
Meganthropus
tribes, how they had preyed upon neighboring clans, along with their own people. It seemed the geneticists here hadn’t just passed on that tribe’s genetic brawn to these hybrids, but also its cannibalistic ferocity.

Maybe the two even run hand in hand.

Jiaying fixed those cold eyes upon Maria. “That is why we need your help. To find a way to balance what we’ve accomplished here with the heightened intelligence you’ve instilled into your research subject.”

Maria pictured the gentle soul of Baako. She could not ever imagine finding a way to
balance
his sweetness with what crouched inside this bloody Ark.

She said as much aloud. “To accomplish what you’re asking, it would take filtering through hundreds of different variables, not to mention an untold number of epigenetic factors that could further complicate matters. It could take decades of trial and error to achieve such a goal, if it could even be done at all.”

“So we believed, too,” Jiaying admitted. “It was why we continued to fund you and your sister’s research through back channels.”

Facilitated by Amy Wu
, Maria thought bitterly.

Jiaying straightened her back. “Then we got word of Dr. Arnaud’s discovery in the mountains of Croatia.”

Arnaud looked equally offended that his research could be connected in any way to the horror show here. “What does my discovery have to do with all of this?”

“Because of the genetic possibility locked in those bones, the bones of a first-generation hybrid between early man and Neanderthals. If we could successfully harvest DNA from those remains, we would have a chance to search and isolate the specific genetic factors that heightened such a hybrid’s intelligence.”

Maria crossed her arms, realizing the woman was likely right. With access to such unique DNA, defining and extracting the specific code that lay at the core of mankind’s evolutionary Great Leap Forward could be possible.

Or at least vastly accelerated
.

Maria began to understand the scope of all of this. Whoever controlled this rare genetic repository would have a great advantage in the bioengineering arms race that was sweeping the globe. Those bones could prove to be the Holy Grail of the next stage of human evolution. And it wasn’t just the Chinese. Even DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office had set a goal to unlock the genetic code of human intelligence.

No wonder the Chinese had acted so quickly and so harshly. The endgame here was not about a single country’s dominance; it was about controlling the very reins of mankind’s future.

“And then there’s Baako,” Jiaying added, drawing back Maria’s full attention.

Kowalski also reacted, his face hardening. “What about him?”

Jiaying returned her attention to the window. “Besides the aggression issue, we ran into another difficulty, a reproductive problem. While the female hybrids are fertile, all the males are sterile.”

Maria knew this was not unusual. Hybrids between closely related species were often infertile, like the mating of a donkey and a horse, which produces a mule. Male mules are uniformly sterile, while the females are sometimes still fertile.

Arnaud brought up a detail even more relevant to the situation. “Most paleontologists believe the same might be true for Neanderthal hybrids. The males were probably sterile, whereas the females could still perhaps produce viable offspring.”

“If this is correct,” Maria added, “it would mean the Neanderthal genes we humans carry today had to come from those hybrid
females
, not the males.”

“And that’s why Baako is so important,” Jiaying said. “I understand that your research subject has been tested and found to be capable of reproducing.”

Maria held up her hand. “Not necessarily. So far,
genetically
it appears that is the case, but we can’t know with absolute certainty, since Baako is only three years old. He’s still sexually immature. It will take another three or four years before we can definitively judge his fertility.”

“Perhaps,” Jiaying countered, “but we’re not looking for Baako to mate physically. We only need to sequence that reproductive viability locked in his Y chromosome. Of course, even more important are those unique Neanderthal genes that have been shown to enhance his intelligence.”

Maria felt a sinking feeling in her gut.

Poor Baako . . .

“Then again,” Jiaying continued, “we could have gained all of that from a few cheek swabs and blood samples. And that’s exactly what we’ll do, along with bone marrow biopsies. But his true value lies in our being able to access the unique architecture of his brain. It could prove invaluable to have a living subject to study and analyze in regard to the expression of those unique genes.”

“You intend to study his brain?” She pictured the series of MRIs that had been performed on Baako since he was an infant. “To see how it develops further?”

“Correct. But you and your sister have been too conservative in your approach. We believe a more invasive study will bring us more comprehensive results.” Jiaying glanced back to the chimpanzee whose exposed brain was wired with electrodes. “We’ve found we can keep such specimens alive for up to two years. And in a larger subject, we believe we can extend that time frame by at least twofold.”

Maria realized they intended to perform the same surgery on Baako. “No,” she blurted out. “I won’t allow it.”

“It will happen whether you
allow
it or not. The veterinary surgeons are preparing everything as we speak.”

“When?” she asked weakly.

“He’ll be taken to surgery in the morning, after he’s had the night to rest from his travels.”

Desperate, Maria sought any way to stop this from happening. “If . . . if you do that, I won’t cooperate with any further work. You’ll have to shoot me.”

Jiaying flicked her gaze to Kowalski. “If it comes to that, you won’t be the first I shoot. And I’ll not be as merciful as I was with Professor Wrightson.”

Maria glanced to Kowalski.

He shrugged. “Let them do their worst.”

Despite his bravado, she saw the tip of his tongue lick his bottom lip, a nervous tic.

But Jiaying was not finished. She nodded to their armed escort and force-marched them back to the wall of cages. They stopped before the chimpanzee, which mewled in fear and distress. Jiaying reached to a piece of equipment hanging outside the cage and twisted a dial.

The chimpanzee jerked in its restraints, an ear-splitting screech bursting from its small chest. Its eyes were wide, protruding from its skull, likely blinded by pain.

“Stop it!” Maria yelled.