The Orion Protocol (17 page)

32

The University of Colorado at Boulder

As she entered the UC–Boulder parking lot nearest to Jake’s lecture hall, Angela was not particularly aware of the fresh-faced young man in the ten-year-old Subaru beater who had followed her Avis Cavalier from the Denver airport.

Having sat on the tarmac in D.C. for an hour and a half—God only knew why—she was late for Deaver’s class and oblivious to Subaru Boy falling casually in behind her as she hurried across the campus set down in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

Finding the right building, Angela slipped into the back of a packed amphitheater-style hall and let her eyes adjust to the low lighting. Down front, at a lectern defined by a tiny desk light, Jake was well into his talk, showing museum-quality transparencies of Mayan and Egyptian hieroglyphs on a theater-sized screen behind him.

“Damn.”

Angela shucked off her parka and looked around, but every spot in the five-hundred-seat auditorium seemed taken.

“So, we have a mystery, don’t we?” Jake was saying, stacking his notecards and indicating the projected hieroglyphs. “Two highly evolved cultures with remarkable similarities on two different continents, separated by thousands of years and an ocean that ostensibly would not be crossed until the Vikings.”

Behind Angela, Subaru Boy made an entrance wearing an artfully sheepish expression. He then moved off, looking for a seat, like just
another undergraduate late for class. Angela stayed standing, intrigued more by Jake Deaver himself than by the images of Olmec stelae and pharaonic carvings that illustrated his lecture.

“Let’s look again at what the Mayans and Egyptians had in common: pyramid-shaped monuments oriented to the cardinal points, the solstices, et cetera. A similar and extremely sophisticated mastery of geometry, astronomy, engineering skills, art, and architecture. Shared elements of architectural style, decorative symbology, and pictographic language, not to mention similar origin myths about where all this knowledge had come from. Can we have the lights, please?”

As the students applauded, Jake looked out and recognized
Science Horizon
’s Ms. Angela Browning at the back of the room. She gave him a sorry-I’m-late smile and a quick wave. He smiled back, deciding she was even more attractive in person than she was on television, which made him a little nervous.

“Now, the question is,” Jake continued, “do all these cumulative little coincidences suggest contact? Some kind of a link between seventh-century Mayan civilization in the Americas and Egyptian culture in North Africa thousands of years earlier? I’m inclined to argue that they do, and what the nature of that contact or connection might be, we’ll be going into after you’ve read West, Hancock, and Bauval . . .”

Outside the auditorium the two Fibbies, Stottlemeyer and Markgrin, had already made a perfunctory sweep inside the hall, missing Subaru Boy (though he easily made them) but noticing Angela. At least Markgrin did.

“Yeah,
Science Horizon
. Wonder why she’s here. You watch PBS?”

“Fuck no.” Stottlemeyer pulled his collar up and sucked down smoke from the last of an unapologetic Marlboro pinched like a hot-running reefer between his thumb and index finger. Markgrin wouldn’t let him smoke in the car.

“Man, there’s this jazz series with Wynton Marsalis,” Markgrin said, leaning upwind of his partner’s smoke and checking the time on his
Kenneth Cole watch. “ ‘Sax Giants of Jazz’ or something. All this early film on bop and bebop, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Wayne Shorter . . .”

“Aw, that stuff sounds like somebody squeezing a cat.”

Stottlemeyer spat a plume of smoke out of the side of his mouth and then got ready to roll as kids began pushing their way out of the lecture hall.

“Gimme Bird playing straight ahead. Hell, gimme Clarence and ‘The E Street Shuffle’ . . .”

33

Dunsinane, Antarctica

“I think I see something.” An Army engineer wearing bio-iso gear pointed at a blurry shadow in the wall of shadows that was the glacier-entombed forest.

The prehistoric caribou they had already liberated was wrapped in a space blanket and carefully tied to a sled. The Science Foundation team had then moved on to a deep translucent blue seam in the ice that proved to be a window on the rest of the ungulant herd standing poised in suspended animation, as if waiting for time to start again.

But that’s not what the engineer was looking at.

“Can we have the laser over here?”

White light thrown into the glacier just increased the whiteness that was reflected back, sort of like driving with high beams in a heavy fog. But a ruby laser light had proven very effective.

A paleoglaciologist heading the science team obliged.

“Show me where.”

He painted the area with the red laser. They could just make it out, protruding from behind a boulder: a dark, sharply pointed object about six inches in length connected to a longer shaft.

“Holy shit. Everybody, come over here.”

Tuning the laser to the warm end of the spectrum, they saw a chipped stone blade connected to the shaft of a spear. The shaft itself
was etched with colored markings and disappeared behind a rock. All the way back to whoever had been out hunting caribou in this inexplicably temperate region of the Earth circa 10,000
B.C.E.
, now located only a short walk from the South Pole: Dunsinane Man.

34

“So, tell me,” Angela said, cradling a second glass of Pinot Grigio in the kitchen of Jake Deaver’s A-frame cabin outside Boulder. “Is it true?”

“Probably.” Jake made a mock-wary face. “Can you be more specific?”

Deaver had cleared what was left of the reheated meatless lasagna and goat-cheese salad, bused their dishes, and set coffee brewing on the kitchen counter. Beeswax candles made a flattering light, bouncing off the skylights and the warm wood walls.

Angela grinned at him, enjoying both Jake and his impromptu dinner.

“Did you really get arrested in a cow pasture doing mushrooms with a bunch of college kids?”

Her reporter’s chops were showing, but it was amusing what a little digging could uncover.

“We were cited by a sheriff for trespassing,” Jake confessed, drying his hands on a kitchen towel and rejoining her at the table. “But I talked the owner into dropping it. As far as the mushrooms, they couldn’t technically charge us.”

“ ’Cause you’d eaten the evidence.”

“
Gate, gate, parasam gate
. . . gone, gone, all gone.”

He mimed the gestures of a Tibetan
tulku
blessing. It was simple, well observed, and Angela laughed out loud: she was finding former Apollo Commander Jake Deaver rather charming and interesting company. He didn’t seem to be working at it too hard, though she could feel he was attracted to her.

Before she left Washington, Miriam had teased her, offering the opinion that there had to be something irresistibly sexy about any man
who’d walked on the Moon. Angela had felt obliged to point out the age difference, among other things. However, sitting in his kitchen, she was conscious of something about Deaver that she’d been trying to put her finger on all evening, something besides Right Stuff glam, academic smarts, and a self-deprecating style. He had a brooding quality at moments, as if he’d been deeply wounded in a way that had yet to heal, but that was not it.

Masculine grace
, she decided, sipping his Italian table wine.
That’s what it is. Masculine grace.

She felt unexpectedly at ease with him and wondered why that was such a rare thing, at least judging from the men she’d been involved with. Maybe it just had to do with experience and confidence or just having nothing more to prove. The ambitious young professionals she dated, whether in journalism, science, or politics, often came to resent how she put her work and her career first in the same way they did; some were even uncomfortable with Angela’s more visible success. Jake, though, seemed beyond the pain of all that Sturm und Drang, which was refreshing.

For his part, Deaver saw Angela as flat-out beautiful and a born flirt, who just might have the smartest green eyes he’d ever seen. He chastened himself not to mistake her teasing for mutual interest, but he liked how she laughed from way down in her stomach and seemed to have a sense of humor about herself, too.

“Don’t tell me you never got high,” he said, turning the tables.

“In college! That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.”

“What? Weed? Ecstasy? Beer?”

“Oh, yeah. Par-tee! And diet pills during finals, like everybody else. I was curious about ‘shrooms, actually, but I guess I was never in the right situation or with the right person to want to do it.”

“But you didn’t come all the way out to Boulder to score mushrooms.”

Deaver had naturally been curious ever since Angela had declined to say exactly
what
it was she wanted to see him about over the phone.

“Nope,” she said. “That’s not why I came to Boulder.”

Angela searched Jake’s eyes in the live light, as if needing a last sign.

“All right, here’s the deal,” she said, taking the leap. “I want to show you some photographs that may or may not be classified documents.”

Deaver felt his own guard going up, but his voice stayed neutral and open.

“Photographs of what?”

“In a sec. If you agree to look at them, I’ll tell you how we got them and what we’ve done so far in terms of authentication. What I’d like from you is your take on what it is you see, and any ideas you might have about where these pictures might have come from, et cetera. But whether you look at them or not, I need to be able to count on your discretion.”

Deaver was glad he hadn’t had much more wine with dinner.

“What kind of classified?”

“CIA, NSA, DOD, I don’t know. Top secret.”

“Are they stamped ‘top secret’?”

“No, but the lawyers at PBS say we should behave as if they were.”

“What else can you tell me without going into the classified part?”

“One picture is of Mars and one is of the Moon.”

Jake felt a quickening, like the adrenaline spike from a small freshet of fear. He could stop it here, right here and now. He could protect himself completely by just saying no. Of course, he knew he would feel like shit, but it wasn’t the first time that had ever happened, and why should he trust this woman? Just because he was attracted to her? That would be pretty stupid.

Moon Man
. . .

Remembering the voice of the Kharmapa whispering hoarsely in his ear, he relaxed a little and almost laughed out loud.

Moon Man, time to take another walk.

Deaver studied Angela’s face for a moment, like a condemned man unsure whether he beheld a messenger of deliverance or an escort to the Tower. Or both in one. He was not a hundred percent sure where this was going or what it would lead to, but the sense of danger was real enough. Even so, the impulse to turn away this earnest beauty felt suddenly like a betrayal. Not a betrayal of Angela but of his most essential self. Or at least what he thought he liked most about himself. And whether he was trusting Angela too quickly or not, he trusted that feeling.

“Okay, let’s see them,” Jake heard himself say.

“Great.” Angela offered her hand on the bargain. “You run Macintosh?”