Sole Survivor (33 page)

“Whatever. We don’t do it for profit. We don’t economically exploit the information we acquire. It’s simply our mission, the search we were created to undertake.”

Joe was surprised by his own patience. Although he was learning things by listening to them talk, the basic mystery only grew deeper. Yet he was prepared to wait for answers. The bizarre experience with the Polaroid snapshot in the banquet room had left him shaken. Now that he’d had time to think about what had happened, the synesthesia seemed to be but prelude to some revelation that was going to be more shattering and humbling than he had previously imagined. He remained committed to learning the truth, but now instinct warned him that he should allow the revelations to wash over him in small waves instead of in one devastating tsunami.

Joshua had gone through the open gate and was standing along the Pacific Coast Highway.

Over the eastern hills, the swollen moon ascended yellow-orange, and the warm wind seemed to blow down out of it.

Mark said, “You were one of thousands of researchers whose work we followed—though you were of somewhat special interest because of the extreme secrecy at Project 99. Then, a year ago, you left Manassas with something from the project, and overnight you were the most wanted person in the country. Even after you supposedly died aboard that airliner in Colorado. Even then…people were looking for you, lots of people, expending considerable resources, searching frantically for a dead woman—which seemed pretty weird to us.”

Rose said nothing to encourage him. She seemed tired.

Joe took her hand. She was trembling, but she squeezed his hand as if to assure him that she was all right.

“Then we began to intercept reports from a certain clandestine police agency…reports that said you were alive and active in the L.A. area, that it involved families who’d lost loved ones on Flight 353. We set up some surveillance of our own. We’re pretty good at it. Some of us are ex-military. Anyway, you could say we watched the watchers who were keeping tab on people like Joe here. And now…I guess it’s a good thing we did.”

“Yes. Thank you,” she said. “But you don’t know what you’re getting into here. There’s not just glory…there’s terrible danger.”

“Dr. Tucker,” Mark persisted, “there are over nine thousand of us now, and we’ve committed our lives to what we do. We’re not afraid. And now we believe that you may have found the interface—and that it’s very different from anything we quite anticipated. If you’ve actually made that breakthrough…if humanity is at that pivot point in history when everything is going to change radically and forever…then
we
are your natural allies.”

“I think you are,” she agreed.

Gently but persistently selling her on this alliance, Mark said, “Doctor, we both have set ourselves against those forces of ignorance and fear and self-interest that want to keep the world in darkness.”

“Remember, I once worked for them.”

“But turned.”

A car swung off Pacific Coast Highway and paused to pick up Joshua. It was followed through the gate and along the driveway by a second car.

Rose, Mark, and Joe got to their feet as the two vehicles—a Ford trailed by a Mercedes—circled the fountain and stopped in front of them.

Joshua stepped from the passenger door of the Ford, and a young brunette woman got out from behind the steering wheel. The Mercedes was driven by an Asian man of about thirty.

They all gathered before Rose Tucker, and for a moment everyone stood in silence.

The steadily escalating wind no longer spoke merely through the rustling foliage of the trees, through the cricket-rasping branches of the shrubbery, and through the hollow flute-like music issuing from the eaves of the mansion, for now it also enjoyed a voice of its own: a haunted keening that curled chillingly in listening ears, akin to the muted but frightful ululant crying of coyote packs chasing down prey in some far canyon of the night.

In the landscape lights, the shuddering greenery cast nervous shadows, and the gradually paling moon gazed at itself in the shiny surfaces of the automobiles.

Watching these four people as they watched Rose, Joe realized that they regarded the scientist not solely with curiosity but with wonder, perhaps even with awe, as though they stood in the presence of someone transcendent. Someone holy.

“I’m surprised to see every one of you in mufti,” Rose said.

They smiled, and Joshua said, “Two years ago, when we first set out on this mission, we were reasonably quiet about it. Didn’t want to excite a lot of media interest…because we thought we’d largely be misunderstood. What we didn’t expect was that we’d have enemies. And enemies so violent.”

“So powerful,” Mark said.

“We thought everyone would want to know the answers we were seeking—if we ever found them. Now we know better.”

“Ignorance is a bliss that some people will kill for,” said the young woman.

“So a year ago,” Joshua continued, “we adopted the robes as a distraction. People understand us as a cult—or think they do. We’re more acceptable when we’re viewed as fanatics, neatly labeled and confined to a box. We don’t make people quite so nervous.”

Robes.

Astonished, Joe said, “You wear blue robes, shave your heads.”

Joshua said, “Some of us do, yes, as of a year ago—and those in the uniform pretend to be the entire membership. That’s what I meant when I said the robes are a distraction—the robes, the shaved heads, the earrings, the visible communal enclaves. The rest of us have gone underground, where we can do the work without being spied on, subjected to harassment, and easily infiltrated.”

“Come with us,” the young woman said to Rose. “We know you may have found the way, and we want to help you bring it to the world—without interference.”

Rose moved to her and put a hand against her cheek, much as she had touched Joe in the cemetery. “I might be with you soon, but not tonight. I need more time to think, to plan. And I’m in a hurry to see a young girl, a child, who is at the center of what is happening.”

Nina,
Joe thought, and his heart shuddered like the shadows of the wind-shaken trees.

Rose moved to the Asian man and touched him too. “I can tell you this much…we stand on the threshold you foresaw. We will go through that door, maybe not tomorrow or the day after tomorrow or next week, but in the years ahead.”

She went to Joshua. “Together we will see the world change forever, bring the light of knowledge into the great dark loneliness of human existence.
In our time.
”

And finally she approached Mark. “I assume you brought two cars because you were prepared to give one to Joe and me.”

“Yes. But we hoped—”

She put a hand on his arm. “Soon but not tonight. I’ve got urgent business, Mark. Everything we hope to achieve hangs in the balance right now, hangs so precariously—until I can reach the little girl I mentioned.”

“Wherever she is, we can take you to her.”

“No. Joe and I must do this alone—and quickly.”

“You can take the Ford.”

“Thank you.”

Mark withdrew a folded one-dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to Rose. “There are just eight digits in the serial number on this bill. Ignore the fourth digit, and the other seven are a phone number in the 310 area code.”

Rose tucked the bill into her jeans.

“When you’re ready to join us,” Mark said, “or if you’re ever in trouble you can’t get out of, ask for me at that number. We’ll come for you no matter where you are.”

She kissed him on the cheek. “We’ve got to go.” She turned to Joe. “Will you drive?”

“Yes.”

To Joshua, she said, “May I take your cell phone?”

He gave it to her.

Wings of furious wind beat around them as they got into the Ford. The keys were in the ignition.

As Rose pulled the car door shut, she said, “Oh, Jesus,” and leaned forward, gasping for breath.

“You
are
hurt.”

“Told you. I got knocked around.”

“Where’s it hurt?”

“We’ve got to get across the city,” Rose said, “but I don’t want to go back past Mahalia’s.”

“You could have a broken rib or two.”

Ignoring him, she sat up straight, and her breathing improved as she said, “The creeps won’t want to risk setting up a roadblock and a traffic check without cooperation from the local authorities, and they don’t have time to get that. But you can bet your ass they’ll be watching passing cars.”

“If you’ve got a broken rib, it could puncture a lung.”

“Joe, damn it, we don’t have
time.
We’ve got to move if we’re going to keep our girl alive.”

He stared at her. “Nina?”

She met his eyes. She said, “Nina,” but then a fearful look came into her face, and she turned from him.

“We can head north from here on PCH,” he said, “then inland on Kanan-Dume Road. That’s a county route up to Augora Hills. There we can get the 101 east to the 210.”

“Go for it.”

Faces powdered by moonlight, hair wind-tossed, the four who would leave in the Mercedes stood watching, backdropped by leaping stone dolphins and thrashing trees.

This tableau struck Joe as both exhilarating and ominous—and he could not identify the basis of either perception, other than to admit that the night was charged with an uncanny power that was beyond his understanding. Everything his gaze fell upon seemed to have monumental significance, as if he were in a state of heightened consciousness, and even the moon appeared different from any moon that he had ever seen before.

As Joe put the Ford in gear and began to pull away from the fountain, the young woman came forward to place her hand against the window beside Rose Tucker’s face. On this side of the glass, Rose matched her palm to the other. The young woman was crying, her lovely face glimmering with moon-bright tears, and she moved with the car along the driveway, hurrying as it picked up speed, matching her hand to Rose’s all the way to the gate before at last pulling back.

Joe felt almost as if somewhere earlier in the night he had stood before a mirror of madness and, closing his eyes, had passed through his own reflection into lunacy. Yet he did not want to return through the silvered surface to that old gray world. This was a lunacy that he found increasingly agreeable, perhaps because it offered him the one thing he desired most and could find only on this side of the looking glass—hope.

Slumped in the passenger seat beside him, Rose Tucker said, “Maybe all this is more than I can handle, Joe. I’m so tired—and so scared. I’m nobody special enough to do what needs doing, not nearly special enough to carry a weight like this.”

“You seem pretty special to me,” he said.

“I’m going to screw it up,” she said as she entered a phone number on the keypad of the cellular phone. “I’m scared shitless that I’m not going to be strong enough to open that door and take us all through it.” She pushed the Send button.

“Show me the door, tell me where it goes, and I’ll help you,” he said, wishing she would stop speaking in metaphors and give him the hard facts. “Why is Nina so important to whatever’s happening? Where is she, Rose?”

Someone answered the cellular call, and Rose said, “It’s me. Move Nina. Move her now.”

Nina.

Rose listened for a moment but then said firmly, “No, now, move her right now, in the next five minutes, even sooner if you can. They linked Mahalia to me…yeah, and in spite of all the precautions we’d taken. It’s only a matter of time now—and not very much time—until they make the connection to you.”

Nina.

Joe turned off the Pacific Coast Highway onto the county road to Augora Hills, driving up through a rumpled bed of dark land from which the Santa Ana wind flung sheets of pale dust.

“Take her to Big Bear,” Rose told the person on the phone.

Big Bear. Since Joe had talked to Mercy Ealing in Colorado—could it be less than nine hours ago?—Nina had been back in the world, miraculously returned, but in some corner where he could not find her. Soon, however, she would be in the town of Big Bear on the shores of Big Bear Lake, a resort in the nearby San Bernardino Mountains, a place he knew well. Her return was more real to him now that she was in a place that he could
name,
the byways of which he had walked, and he was flooded with such sweet anticipation that he wanted to shout to relieve the pressure of it. He kept his silence, however, and he rolled the name between the fingers of his mind, rolled it over and over as if it were a shiny coin:
Big Bear.

Rose spoke into the phone: “If I can…I’m going to be there in a couple of hours. I love you. Go. Go
now
.”

She terminated the call, put the phone on the seat between her legs, closed her eyes, and leaned against the door.

Joe realized that she was not making much use of her left hand. It was curled in her lap. Even in the dim light from the instrument panel, he could see that her hand was shaking uncontrollably.

“What’s wrong with your arm?”

“Give it a rest, Joe. It’s sweet of you to be concerned, but you’re getting to be a nag. I’ll be fine once we get to Nina.”

He was silent for half a mile. Then: “Tell me everything. I deserve to know.”

“You do, yes. It’s not a long story…but where do I begin?”

16

Great bristling balls of tumbleweed, robbed of their green by the merciless Western sun, cracked from their roots by the withering dryness of the California summer, torn from their homes in the earth by the shrieking Santa Ana wind, now bounded out of the steep canyons and across the narrow highway, silver-gray in the headlights, a curiously melancholy sight, families of thistled skeletons like starved and harried refugees fleeing worse torment.

Joe said, “Start with those people back there. What kind of cult are they?”

She spelled it for him:
Infiniface.

“It’s a made word,” she said, “shorthand for ‘Interface with the Infinite.’ And they’re not a cult, not in any sense you mean it.”

“Then what are they?”

Instead of answering immediately, she shifted in her seat, trying to get more comfortable.

Checking her wristwatch, she said, “Can you drive faster?”

“Not on this road. In fact, better put on your safety belt.”

“Not with my left side feeling like it does.” Having adjusted her position, she said, “Do you know the name Loren Pollack?”

“The software genius. The poor man’s Bill Gates.”

“That’s what the press sometimes calls him, yes. But I don’t think the word
poor
should be associated with someone who started from scratch and made seven billion dollars by the age of forty-two.”

“Maybe not.”

She closed her eyes and slumped against the door, supporting her weight on her right side. Sweat beaded her brow, but her voice was strong. “Two years ago, Loren Pollack used a billion dollars of his money to form a charitable trust. Named it Infiniface. He believes many of the sciences, through research facilitated by new generations of superfast computers, are approaching discoveries that will bring us face-to-face with the reality of a Creator.”

“Sounds like a cult to me.”

“Oh, plenty of people think Pollack is a flake. But he’s got a singular ability to grasp complex research from a wide variety of sciences—and he has vision. You know, there’s a whole movement of modern physics that sees evidence of a created universe.”

Frowning, Joe said, “What about chaos theory? I thought that was the big thing.”

“Chaos theory doesn’t say the universe is random and chaotic. It’s an extremely broad theory that among many other things notes strangely complex relationships in
apparently
chaotic systems—like the weather. Look deeply enough in any chaos, and you find hidden regularities.”

“Actually,” he admitted, “I don’t know a damn thing about it—just the way they use the term in the movies.”

“Most movies are stupidity machines—like politicians. So…if Pollack was here, he’d tell you that just eighty years ago, science mocked religion’s assertion that the universe was created
ex nihilo,
out of nothing. Everyone
knew
something couldn’t be created from nothing—a violation of all the laws of physics. Now we understand more about molecular structure—and particle physicists create matter
ex nihilo
all the time.” Inhaling with a hiss through clenched teeth, she leaned forward, popped open the glove box, and rummaged through its contents. “I was hoping for aspirin or Excedrin. I’d chew them dry.”

“We could stop somewhere—”

“No. Drive. Just drive. Big Bear’s so far…” She closed the glove box but remained sitting forward, as though that position gave her relief. “Anyway, physics and biology are the disciplines that most fascinate Pollack—especially molecular biology.”

“Why molecular biology?”

“Because the more we understand living things on a molecular level, the clearer it becomes that everything is intelligently designed. You, me, mammals, fish, insects, plants, everything.”

“Wait a second. Are you tossing away evolution here?”

“Not entirely. Wherever molecular biology takes us, there might still be a place for Darwin’s theory of evolution—in some form.”

“You’re not one of those strict fundamentalists who believe we were created exactly five thousand years ago in the Garden of Eden.”

“Hardly. But Darwin’s theory was put forth in 1859, before we had any knowledge of atomic structure. He thought the smallest unit of a living creature was the cell—which he saw as just a lump of adaptable albumen.”

“Albumen? You’re losing me.”

“The origin of this basic living matter, he thought, was most likely an accident of chemistry—and the origin of all species was explained through evolution. But we now know cells are enormously complex structures of such clockwork design that it’s impossible to believe they are accidental in nature.”

“We do? I guess I’ve been out of school a long time.”

“Even in the matter of the species…Well, the two axioms of Darwinian theory—the continuity of nature and adaptable design—have never been validated by a single empirical discovery in nearly a hundred and fifty years.”

“Now you
have
lost me.”

“Let me put it another way.” She still leaned forward, staring out at the dark hills and the steadily rising glow of the sprawling suburbs beyond. “Do you know who Francis Crick is?”

“No.”

“He’s a molecular biologist. In 1962, he shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine with Maurice Wilkins and James Watson for discovering the three-dimensional molecular structure of DNA—the double helix. Every advancement in genetics since then—and the countless revolutionary cures for diseases we’re going to see over the next twenty years—spring directly from the work of Francis Crick and his colleagues. Crick is a scientist’s scientist, Joe, to no degree a spiritualist or mystic. But do you know what he suggested a few years ago? That life on earth may well have been designed by an extraterrestrial intelligence.”

“Even highbrows read the
National Enquirer,
huh?”

“The point is—Crick was unable to square what we now know of molecular biology’s complexity with the theory of natural selection, but he was unwilling to suggest a Creator in any spiritual sense.”

“So…enter the ever-popular god-like aliens.”

“But it totally begs the issue, you see? Even if every form of life on this planet was designed by extraterrestrials…who designed
them?
”

“It’s the chicken or the egg all over again.”

She laughed softly, but the laughter mutated into a cough that she couldn’t easily suppress. She eased back, leaning against the door once more—and glared at him when he tried to suggest that she needed medical attention.

When she regained her breath, she said, “Loren Pollack believes the purpose of human intellectual striving—the purpose of science—is to increase our understanding of the universe, not just to give us better physical control of our environment or to satisfy curiosity, but to solve the puzzle of existence God has put before us.”

“And by solving it to become like gods ourselves.”

She smiled through her pain. “Now you’re tuned to the Pollack frequency. Pollack thinks we’re living in the time when some key scientific breakthrough will prove there is a Creator. Something that is…an interface with the infinite. This will bring the soul back to science—lifting humanity out of its fear and doubt, healing our divisions and hatreds, finally uniting our species on one quest that’s both of the spirit and of the mind.”

“Like
Star Trek
.”

“Don’t make me laugh again, Joe. It hurts too much.”

Joe thought of Gem Fittich, the used-car dealer. Both Pollack and Fittich sensed an approaching end to the world as they knew it, but the oncoming tidal wave that Fittich perceived was dark and cold and obliterating, while Pollack foresaw a wave of purest light.

“So Pollack,” she said, “founded Infiniface to facilitate this quest, to track research worldwide with an eye toward projects with…well, with metaphysical aspects that the scientists themselves might not recognize. To ensure that key discoveries were shared among researchers. To encourage specific projects that seemed to be leading to a breakthrough of the sort Pollack predicts.”

“Infiniface isn’t a religion at all.”

“No. Pollack thinks all religions are valid to the extent that they recognize the existence of a created universe and a Creator—but that then they bog down in elaborate interpretations of what God expects of us. What’s wanted of us, in Pollack’s view, is to work together to learn, to understand, to peel the layers of the universe, to find God…and in the process to become His equals.”

By now they were out of the dark hills and into suburbs again. Ahead was the entrance to the freeway that would take them east across the city.

As he drove up the ramp, heading toward Glendale and Pasadena, Joe said, “I don’t believe in anything.”

“I know.”

“No loving god would allow such suffering.”

“Pollack would say that the fallacy of your thinking lies in its narrow human perspective.”

“Maybe Pollack is full of shit.”

Whether Rose began to laugh again or fell directly victim to the cough, Joe couldn’t tell, but she needed even longer than before to regain control of herself.

“You need to see a doctor,” he insisted.

She was adamantly opposed. “Any delay…and Nina’s dead.”

“Don’t make me choose between—”

“There
is
no choice. That’s my point. If it’s me or Nina…then she comes first. Because she’s the future. She’s the hope.”

Orange-faced on first appearance, the moon had lost its blush and, stage fright behind it, had put on the stark white face of a smugly amused mime.

Sunday night traffic on the moon-mocked freeway was heavy as Angelenos returned from Vegas and other points in the desert, while desert dwellers streamed in the opposite direction, returning from the city and its beaches: ceaselessly restless, these multitudes, always seeking a greater happiness—and often finding it, but only for a weekend or an afternoon.

Joe drove as fast and as recklessly as he dared, weaving from lane to lane, but keeping in mind that they could not risk being stopped by the highway patrol. The car wasn’t registered in either his name or Rose’s. Even if they could prove it had been loaned to them, they would lose valuable time in the process.

“What is Project 99?” he asked her. “What the hell are they doing in that subterranean facility outside Manassas?”

“You’ve heard about the Human Genome Project.”

“Yeah. Cover of
Newsweek
. As I understand it, they’re figuring out what each human gene controls.”

“The greatest scientific undertaking of our age,” Rose said. “Mapping all one hundred thousand human genes and detailing the DNA alphabet of each. And they’re making incredibly fast progress.”

“Find out how to cure muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis—”

“Cancer, everything—given time.”

“You’re part of that?”

“No. Not directly. At Project 99…we have a more exotic assignment. We’re looking for those genes that seem to be associated with unusual talents.”

“What—like Mozart or Rembrandt or Michael Jordan?”

“No. Not creative or athletic talents. Paranormal talents. Telepathy. Telekinesis. Pyrokinesis. It’s a long strange list.”

His immediate reaction was that of a crime reporter, not of a man who had recently seen the fantastic in action: “But there aren’t such talents. That’s science fiction.”

“There are people who score far higher than chance on a variety of tests designed to disclose psychic abilities. Card prediction. Calling coin tosses. Thought-image transmission.”

“That stuff they used to do at Duke University.”

“That and more. When we find people who perform exceptionally well in these tests, we take blood samples from them. We study their genetic structure. Or children in poltergeist situations.”

“Poltergeists?”

“Poltergeist phenomena—weeding out the hoaxes—aren’t really ghosts. There’s always one or more children in houses where this happens. We think the objects flying around the room and the ectoplasmic apparitions are caused by these children, by their unconscious exercise of powers they don’t even know they have. We take samples from these kids when we can find them. We’re building a library of unusual genetic profiles, looking for common patterns among people who have had all manner of paranormal experiences.”

“And have you found something?”

She was silent, perhaps waiting for another spasm of pain to pass, though her face revealed more mental anguish than physical suffering. At last she said, “Quite a lot, yes.”

If there had been enough light for Joe to see his reflection in the rearview mirror, he knew that he could have watched as his tan faded and his face turned as white as the moon, for he suddenly knew the essence of what Project 99 was all about. “You haven’t just
studied
this.”

“Not just. No.”

“You’ve applied the research.”

“Yes.”

“How many work on Project 99?”

“Over two hundred of us.”

“Making monsters,” he said numbly.

“People,” she said. “Making people in a lab.”

“They may look like people, but some of them are monsters.”

She was silent for perhaps a mile. Then she said, “Yes.” And after another silence: “Though the true monsters are those of us who made them.”