Extinction Countdown (Ancient Origins Series Book 2) Read online

  She took her daughter’s tiny hand and squeezed before staring down. Zoey’s fingers looked thicker than she remembered. Kids grew by leaps and bounds, she knew that, but this wasn’t normal growth, especially from a young girl who’d been eating through a tube. Normally, the body tended to become thinner, in some cases emaciated. The extremities were the first to reveal the tell-tale signs the body wasn’t getting everything it needed. But more than food, exercise was what kept a child lean and muscular. And as with the three hundred and forty days astronaut Mark Kelly had spent aboard the International Space Station, time spent in a zero-G environment would result in a loss of muscle and bone mass. To a greater or lesser degree, patients in a coma or a wheelchair experienced the same thing. Newton’s laws of motion were quite clear—use it or lose it.

  Mia stood and yanked back the covers.

  The move alarmed Paul. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Zoey’s arms and legs,” she replied. “They look thicker than normal.”

  “Of course, we’re taking excellent care of her.”

  “I’m sure you are, but this doesn’t look normal, Paul. I need to take a blood sample.”

  “Our daughter may be dying and you’re worried about her weight?” Paul’s hands were clasped together, his face a mask of incredulity.

  “Stop being ridiculous,” she shouted. “I don’t give a damn about her looks. But people in her situation don’t bulk up like this.” Mia gently squeezed the length of her daughter’s leg. That was when an image of Grant flashed before Mia’s eyes. The robust way he had looked when he showed up at Andrews, when days earlier he had been suffering from a catastrophic hip fracture.

  Mia turned to one of the FBI agents. “I need your phone.”

  •••

  “Dr. Merel Jansson?” Mia asked the receptionist at the Amsterdam Genomics Laboratory.

  “I’m sorry, but Dr. Jansson isn’t available right now.”

  “Tell her it’s Dr. Mia Ward and that it’s an emergency.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Dr. Jansson is out of the country.”

  Mia’s heart sank. The receptionist started to say something about her returning in a week or two.

  “Where did she go?”

  “I’m not sure I’m at liberty…”

  “Lady, very sick people are going to die if you don’t start getting with the program here. Now where is she?”

  “India,” the receptionist said, defeated. “She’s at the Kolkata Medical Research Institute.”

  “Good, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Mia said before disconnecting. She then used Agent Ramirez’s phone to search the hospital’s phone number and place the call. The runaround this time was more challenging as Mia struggled with the thick Bengali accent. Finally, Dr. Jansson came on the line.

  “Mia?”

  “Listen, Merel, I don’t have much time. Salzburg is morphing. The 47th chromatid we found is about to get some company.”

  Mia told her about Anna’s work decoding the blast wave and the binary code hidden deep inside of it. It was no surprise that the human genome was composed of 23 pairs of chromosomes (46 chromatids). When Salzburg showed up as the 47th, it was easy to pass it off as a rare genetic anomaly. But that was before the alien ship in the Gulf began somehow spreading it to millions of people around the world. The genes present in that first chromatid had been harmful enough—sensitivity to the sun, weak bones, degraded DNA and in some, like her Zoey, cognitive deterioration followed by the inability to communicate. In other words, it was now starting to look as though the human genome was being altered in ways that would quickly lead to the disappearance of our species. Were these advanced beings clearing out the trash in order to make way for themselves or perhaps a more advanced species of their own creation? It was hard not to think so. And with the cracking of the blast wave’s binary signal and the emergence of brand-new symptoms, Mia was growing more and more certain an even deadlier phase of the mutations was about to begin.

  “It’s strange you should mention that,” Jansson said, her crisp Dutch accent shining through. “A handful of our subjects here in India are also showing signs of increased bone density. The treatment of Salzburg has become the research institute’s top priority. Since arriving, we’ve pursued a much more aggressive version of the gene therapy you pioneered back in Amsterdam, given that it showed so much promise before. Still, we wondered whether these new symptoms were a sign we had pushed too fast and too hard. Whether the patient’s body was somehow rejecting our attempts at silencing those four genes within Salzburg.”

  Mia moved the phone to her other ear as Paul and the FBI agents stood watching with puzzled curiosity. “If we can figure out how Salzburg was introduced into our genome in the first place and how the ship was able to mutate the chromatid remotely, we might learn how to cut it off at the source.”

  There was more she wanted to tell Jansson. How they needed to figure this out quickly in case the Greenland ice sheet was hiding yet another ship. Not to mention the two-week countdown before a devastating impact sent the human species into the evolutionary dustbin.

  “You said ‘we,’” Jansson replied, confused.

  “I’ll be on the next flight,” Mia replied, watching the two FBI agents shaking their heads and waving their hands in front of them. But she wasn’t worried about them. Informing Jack she wasn’t going to be joining them, that was the part she wasn’t looking forward to.

  Chapter 8

  It was 8:50 P.M. and Kay was parked near the Peace Monument on what felt a hell of a lot like a stakeout. She had pulled over in a roundabout and sat eyeing the nearly forty-foot-tall statue as though it might spring a pair of legs and run away. A handful of tourists, mostly Japanese and Eastern European, stood taking pictures of themselves from selfie sticks. Fading hints of late evening light kissed the sky, silhouetting the Capitol Building in the distance. It would be dark soon and the thought of waiting here after sundown sent shivers up her arms.

  She had made up her mind earlier to ignore the Laydeezman’s instructions, that much was true. But then the memory of Rod Lewis’ smoke-charmed voice had echoed in her ear, promising a spot in the newsroom if she could land herself a scoop worthy of the honor. Normally that meant pounding the pavement and beating the proverbial bushes. But the years she’d spent working the lifestyle beat hadn’t exactly gotten her much in the way of inside sources. The closest to that was Vincente Ramirez, a former roommate’s ex-boyfriend who had gone on to work for the FBI. Not a particularly solid connection, she knew, which explained her presence here, parked near the Peace Monument, waiting for nine o’clock to roll around.

  She got out of her car, waiting for a gap in the traffic to cross. That group of tourists was gone. Only she and a young couple remained. They were sitting at the far end, sharing a smooch and a case of the giggles.

  Kay removed the printout of her conversation with the Laydeezman and scanned over it.

  Grief weeps on history’s shoulder.

  Two marble figures stood atop the monument’s pedestal, both of them women. One covered her face, weeping. The other held a stylus and stared into the corner of the fountain. If the crier was grief, then the other must be history.

  Follow history’s gaze.

  Kay did so and saw little more than the fountain’s rippling water. She drew closer, eyeing the area more carefully. That was when she saw the odd shape of something stuck against the fountain’s inner wall, half submerged. Taking one final glance to ensure no one was closing in on her from behind, Kay went over and took a closer look. Sure enough, stuck against that inner wall was a ziplocked bag protecting a light-colored envelope. Her pulse kicked up, drumming a furious beat in her chest as she removed it and hurried back to her car.

  She opened the ziplock and removed the envelope. It didn’t weigh much more than a few ounces. She tore it open and found a photograph inside. Removing it, Kay switched on the console light and stared for several
minutes.

  A knock at her window nearly gave her a heart attack. The picture tumbled to her lap as she turned to see who was bearing down on her. The cop outside looked surprised himself.

  “You can’t park here, lady. You’re gonna have to move it along or I’m gonna give you a ticket.”

  Kay nodded, still clutching her chest. She then started the vehicle and pulled away. It was only after she arrived home to her apartment in Adams Morgan twenty minutes later that she punched the steering wheel, bruising the knuckles on her right hand.

  Six months ago she wouldn’t have thought twice about heading out after dark, nor would she have been spooked by a cop knocking on her window, but the attack had changed all that. Leaving the paper late one night six months ago, she’d pulled up to a red light when two men got out of the car in front of her waving a gun. She didn’t remember much of anything after that, other than she’d woken up the next morning in a park. Her clothes were dirty, as though she’d been dragged through a dusty barn, but she didn’t appear to be hurt. To everyone who asked, Kay swore up and down that she was fine. Her car, a beat-up Honda Fit, was never seen again, but the insurance company had acted quickly and gotten her a rental while they worked out the details on a replacement. Carjackings happened more often in the nation’s capital than the cops were willing to admit. Which begged the question, if you couldn’t prevent violent crimes in D.C., what chance did the rest of the country have?

  But it wasn’t the loss of her car Kay cared about most, it was the loss of her personal freedom. Since then, any time she pulled up to a red light, her palms started to sweat profusely. She even found herself keeping a few extra feet from the vehicle in front of her in case she needed to swing around for a quick escape.

  Still, a life spent preparing for the worst wasn’t much of a life at all. Gradually, Kay had found herself inching closer at stop lights. Her parents had taught her from an early age that when you fall down, dust yourself off and keep going. Showing up to the statue had been one more way of proving to herself that she wasn’t going to let the criminals control when and how she lived her life. Hell, no. And yet, the second that cop had knocked on her window, all that progress had vaporized like a puff of smoke from the pipe her father used to smoke. She used to love watching him, the two of them seated on the back step of their humble home, her father letting tendrils waft up past his nostrils before they vanished.

  Kay stared down at the slightly swollen knuckle on her right hand and realized that as much progress as she’d made over the last few weeks, there was still a ways to go.

  Her nerves a little steadier, Kay fished out the picture she’d retrieved from the fountain and studied what looked like a black image with splotches of light. Soon she began to see this was a picture of outer space and those dots were planets and stars. Then she caught sight of a metallic-looking object near the center of the frame. It was blurry, but clearly triangular. If she didn’t know any better, she would swear it looked a lot like the images of that spaceship the Navy found at the bottom of the ocean.

  One by one, the pieces began falling into place. The military had told the world the alien craft had fallen into a pocket of subterranean lava and been destroyed. If that was true, then this picture meant they had either lied, or there was another flying around out in space.

  Kay pulled out her phone and opened the Facebook app. Laydeezman was online.

  “Where did you get this?” she asked.

  The picture was taken five days ago by Voyager One.

  “Are you saying there’s another one of these things heading for earth?”

  Yes.

  Kay felt a tingle at the base of her spine. “And the government is keeping it a secret? But why?”

  Panic.

  “Are we in danger?”

  Yes.

  This wasn’t a joke anymore and Kay could feel beads of sweat now forming along her brow. Then another message arrived.

  What I’ve shown you is but the tip of something much, much bigger.

  Kay paused, allowing the magnitude of what he was saying to settle in. “How big?”

  Pulitzer big. Something terrible is about to happen and only a handful of people on the planet know.

  “What’s going to happen? Can you tell me anything?”

  Keep the photos to yourself. Whatever happens, do not leak or try to publish them. If you do, then I will know you cannot be trusted. Soon enough, you will see that I am telling you the truth. Prove to me you are a woman of your word and I will lead you down the rabbit hole.

  After that, the messages stopped.

  The pain in Kay’s hand was all but gone and for the first time in her life, she was stunned into silence.

  Chapter 9

  Dag charged into the computer room at Joint Base Andrews wearing his biosuit, a rock-climbing harness fitted over his waist. In his hands were a pair of dangerous-looking ice cleats.

  “Get a load of these babies,” he said in awe. He slid his hand inside one of them and straight-armed the air before him.

  Jack switched the phone to his other ear and stepped away. “What do you mean you’re on a plane to Kolkata? We leave for Greenland in an hour.” The mix of confusion and stinging disappointment was obvious in Jack’s voice.

  “There’s something I need you to tell Stark or whoever’s in charge over there. NASA needs to start beaming signals at the incoming ship. Radio signals, lasers, I have no idea how or what it’ll say, but there’s a chance the Ateans might not allow their ship to destroy us if they know the planet is populated by an intelligent race.”

  “All right, I’ll tell him.”

  “Anna knows part of their language. She might be able to help craft something.”

  “I doubt it,” Jack said. “She’s coming with us. And I wish you were too.”

  There was a long pause. “When Anna showed us a whole new Salzburg chromatid was about to appear, it left me sickened. Then seeing the changes in Grant and in my daughter, I knew it was already happening.”

  “You thinking that Grant and Zoey have the new chromatid?”

  “It’s too early to confirm anything at the moment,” she cautioned, “but increased bone and muscle density may very well be part of it. I spoke with Dr. Jansson. She’s in India doing her own research on Salzburg and several of her patients there are showing similar symptoms. When I heard that, I knew that was where I needed to be.”

  Jack sighed. “And what about Greenland? I’d like to have your expertise on whatever we find there.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “How certain are you that anything’s really there?”

  “You heard the president. They’ve already sent a team to set up a habitat and cut a hole through the ice.”

  “Listen, Jack, I’m not being a naysayer, but shouldn’t we cover every available base?”

  Jack rubbed the side of his head, an unconscious attempt perhaps to ward away the pain forming at his temples. “Please tell me you aren’t on some mission to save your daughter.”

  “I can’t believe you would say that.”

  “I’m sorry, that wasn’t how I meant it. I get you’re in a tough spot, just know that each of us has someone suffering from the effects of Salzburg. Consider the billions of other people who need you. I spoke to Gord earlier, the guy who’s looking after my rescue farm. Turns out he fell off a ladder and broke his right arm and two ribs. No clue yet if he had weakened bones like Grant, but he’s out of action and having to brave long lines at the hospital to get medical care. The whole world’s in a big mess that keeps getting worse.”

  “Jack, in two weeks that ship will reach us. Every moment is precious. I could have thrown my hands up and opted to spend that time with my daughter instead, hugging her until the fiery end. But I’m not. I’m on a plane to a city I don’t know, following the best chance I see of getting us out of this.”

  Now it was Jack’s turn to be quiet. “Maybe you’re right. We can’t be a hundred percent ce
rtain what’s waiting for us in Greenland. Maybe nothing’s there but shadows and distortions fooling the equipment.” He held up a printout from the latest scan the advanced team in Greenland had performed less than an hour ago. Within the mess of wavy lines and empty pockets was a single recognizable form nestled beneath the ice. Only the top half was visible, but it looked to Jack a hell of a lot like a triangle. “Every time a new one of these comes in, our confidence gets a little stronger that something is down there. Satellites have already triangulated the blast wave five days ago. It came from that general area.”

  “There’s something else you haven’t considered, Jack. If I can find a subject somewhere with the full Salzburg chromosome, and by that I mean all eight genes, then we can sequence them and get that genetic information to Anna. We found a hidden message inside that blast wave. You can be sure there’s one inside Salzburg as well. Haven’t you considered that maybe we could use that information to stop that ship from killing everyone on earth? You may think it’s a long shot, but it’s no longer a shot than where you’re heading. And in regards to choosing between saving my daughter versus the rest of the planet, my question to you is, can’t I do both?”

  “I’m sure if anyone can, it’s you,” Jack told her, meaning every word of it. “Stay safe.”

  Mia’s final words were still ringing in his ears when Admiral Stark appeared, this time sporting a white Navy uniform. Stark was a handsome man somewhere in his mid-fifties, with tightly cropped blond hair and dimples whenever he smiled. He came from a long line of Navy men, going all the way back to the Civil War. That kind of family tree had thick branches and a thicker trunk. The weight of expectation was tremendous and at times nearly crushing. But Stark bore the burden with pride, showing only the slightest signs of strain when he was called on to do anything that might tarnish his long and proud heritage.