Covenant (31 page)

Ethan grasped where Hassim was going just before Rachel did.

“All life might be very similar in a fundamental way,” he said.

“Yes,” Hassim agreed, and tapped his own chest. “The chemical reactions that support metabolism in all of our bodies involve just eleven small carbon molecules such as acetic and citric acids. These eleven molecules would have been sufficient to produce chemical reactions that led to the development of biomolecules such as amino acids, lipids, sugars, and eventually early genetic molecules like RNA on Earth. Metabolism came first, the fuel for life, before cells or replication or anything else. Life then followed as a natural result of chemical metabolism. If it happened here on Earth, then it could happen anywhere on suitable planets harboring liquid water, and life might follow a similar path of evolutionary development that leads eventually to intelligence.”

Rachel caught on quickly.

“And if an intelligent species evolved on a planet reasonably close by, and was only ten thousand years more advanced than us …”

“Even a thousand years more advanced might do it,” Hassim said. “In two hundred years mankind has gone from wooden sailing ships and witchcraft to landing on the moon and nuclear power. Think what we could be like in another thousand years.”

“It would look like magic,” Ethan said, remembering Arthur C. Clarke’s
Third Law.
“Or God. But could they be that much more advanced than us?”

“The universe has been producing stars for over thirteen billion years,” Hassim explained, “and the elements required for life have been in place within galaxies for at least eight billion years. By our planet’s timeline of evolution, it’s quite possible that advanced, intelligent life has existed in our universe for the past four billion years or so. The technology of such civilizations could be advanced on a scale completely unimaginable to us.”

“If so,” Ethan challenged, “then why would they bother with us at all?”

“We can only speculate,” Hassim admitted, “but such civilizations may well have been forced to travel through space as their parent stars aged and became unstable: the window in which our own Earth can support complex life is surprisingly short in cosmological terms, ending as the sun grows hotter and Earth is no longer able to harbor liquid water. However, although life may be common in the universe, intelligent life will be much rarer, and if you were an advanced race traveling the stars and found early humans struggling to survive after a climatic disaster, wouldn’t you be tempted to stop and help them or at least investigate?”

Rachel stood up, pacing again as she struggled with the consequences of her newfound knowledge.

“But if this actually happened, surely our ancestors with their newly acquired skills might have recorded it better, in more detail?”

“Perhaps they did,” Hassim said. “But we haven’t learned to recognize the signs for what they are yet.”

“How do you mean?” Ethan asked.

“Imagine,” Hassim suggested, “that you’re living in ancient Egypt, before the pyramids or technology, and down from the skies come beings that reveal great knowledge to you and then vanish again. As you struggle to capitalize upon this new knowledge, would you not be tempted to beg them for help, to make contact again?”

“I guess so,” Ethan agreed.

“And how would you do that?” Hassim asked.

“I’d make a sign,” Ethan said cautiously, “in the ground or something.” Then he got it. “A big sign, big enough to see from the air.”

“Exactly,” Hassimm nodded. “You’d create megastructures, hoping that your mysterious flying benefactors would see them and return.”

Rachel seemed bemused.

“You’re talking about the pyramids, aren’t you?”

“Not just the pyramids,” Hassim replied. “Almost every major ancient megastructure, and I can prove it too. Have either of you heard of something called a cargo cult?”

Rachel was about to answer, but Mahmoud got up from the crate upon which he had been sitting and looked at her.

“Whatever your daughter was dabbling in, it is better left alone. There are some things we weren’t meant to see,” he warned before looking at Yossaf. “Time to check the tunnels.”

Ethan watched as the two Palestinians went in opposite directions.

“Why would MACE abduct Lucy when they could just have taken the remains and left her there?” he asked Hassim.

“The reason for that, my friend,” Hassim said, “is almost too horrific to speak of.”

R
afael crouched at the bottom of the ladder, enveloped in near pitch-blackness but for the glow of a low-watt lightbulb flaring some ten meters down the narrow, craggy walls of the tunnel.

He crept away from the ladder, careful to avoid the electrical cables secured with lengths of string that ran along the upper-left corner of the tunnel. The smuggling tunnels were periodically bombed by Israel, and as a result the Palestinians bothered little with such trivial concerns as electrical insulation.

The heat clung like a blanket to Rafael’s skin as he edged forward, holding his knife in a loose grip. He had no idea how many men might be hiding down in the tunnels, nor how they were armed. If he encountered anyone, they would have to be dispatched quickly and silently.

The harsh light of the bulb ahead obscured the tunnel beyond, preventing Rafael from seeing more distant threats. A small fly buzzed lazily around the light, entrapped beneath the earth. Rafael kept his gaze downward, sensing for movement ahead on the upper periphery of his vision as he ducked beneath the bulb. He crouched to avoid casting long shadows down the tunnel, and then peered ahead into the gloom.

Perhaps five meters or so ahead the tunnel turned right, to where a faint patch of light glowed from some unseen source. Rafael observed a particularly large cable entombed in the wall of the tunnel and guessed he was beneath the streetlight he had seen, the tunnel’s electrical supply spliced into the mains. That would mean that the tunnel indeed terminated beneath the houses at the opposite end of the street. He recalled that several were abandoned buildings, the skeletal remains of Palestinian homes and businesses pounded into oblivion by Israel.

He crept toward the curve in the tunnel and was halfway there when a flicker of a shadow drifted across the patch of light. Rafael froze and crouched down again.

The shadow began moving toward him.

Then he heard the footfalls. Urgent synapses fired across his brain, thoughts too rapid to process yet crystalline in their clarity.
The shadow moved toward me. Footsteps, heavy, male. Moving slowly.

A chunky figure with broad shoulders and a thick neck appeared in the tunnel, the unmistakable shape of an AK-47 rifle cradled loosely in his grip. Rafael crouched down, concealed in the darkness between the two light sources.
Don’t move. Movement is much more dangerous than staying still.

The figure lumbered closer, the footfalls growing louder and heavier, thumping rhythmically with the rolling beats of Rafael’s heart.
Move without fear, without tension, without compromise. Breathe.
The body now blocked the light from beyond completely, looming to fill Rafael’s field of view.

He relaxed his body and mind, exhaling a ghost’s breath as he did so.

Rafael lunged upward and forward even as the man’s eyes registered the form crouched in the tunnel before him. Rafael’s blade flickered in the weak light and plunged into the man’s throat with a quiet, crisp rasp.

The man’s cry gargled somewhere below his thorax, lost forever as the blade crossed his windpipe and severed his spinal column just above the third vertebra. Rafael caught the man as he fell, his body crumpling onto the ground in the center of the tunnel. He quickly slammed his hand over the man’s bearded mouth, slipping the blade out of his throat as he yanked the head to one side and jabbed the steel upward into his skull. A faint crackling of splintered bone just behind and below the ear, and the body jerked with a series of diminishing spasms before falling still. The undignified odor of spilled feces tainted the hot, stale air as Rafael slipped the blade out of the lifeless skull.

He stood quickly and forged ahead through the tunnel. There was nowhere to hide the body, and it could be discovered at any moment. Time was of the essence.

Ahead, somewhere beyond the turn in the tunnel, the sound of voices reached his ears.

W
hat do you mean horrific?” Rachel asked, concern stretching her skin tightly across her features.

Hassim Khan massaged his temples. “You say that you went to Lucy’s dig site?”

“That was where I got the images on my camera.” Ethan nodded.

“I saw them,” Hassim said. “And the specimen that Lucy discovered was in a crate.”

“Yes, but it hadn’t been sealed yet.”

Rachel looked at Hassim. “What are you thinking?”

“We know that the remains alone are not reason enough for your daughter’s abduction: as you said, they could have left her there.”

“What about money?” Rachel said. “A ransom.”

Hassim shook his head.

“A sale of such remains would be almost impossible to coordinate without being detected by enforcement agencies, and a ransom would come with demands that we haven’t had.”

Ethan leaned back against the wall. “Bill Griffiths is a fossil hunter and he holds the only key to exposing this abduction for what it really is: a theft. He walked away from me when I offered him five million dollars.”

“What then, if not money?” Rachel asked Hassim, her fists clenched by her side.

Hassim stood, pacing as he spoke.

“Your daughter was one of several people to have vanished from that area of the Negev Desert. No remains have ever been found. All of those disappearances have occurred since MACE began working out here in Israel under the AEA’s control.”

“You think that the church is really behind it all?” Ethan asked.

“Their leader, a powerful pastor named Kelvin Patterson, has been a vocal proponent of using science to prove the existence of God, using his television and radio stations to promote his views. He believes that faith has proven itself impotent without knowledge, and is known to have conducted various experiments in the past with volunteers from his church in an attempt to discover the nature of the divine.”

“Experiments?” Rachel asked nervously. “What kind of experiments?”

Hassim’s voice was low, as though he regretted having to speak at all.

“The kind that require live volunteers. But if there are other experiments he wishes to conduct that are illegal, and he requires live bodies, then there are ways to acquire them.”

Rachel seemed to Ethan to be having difficulty breathing as she spoke.

“What might they do to Lucy?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But after what has happened to you both they’ll be keen to get the remains out of Israel before you can inform the authorities. Even a fossil hunter as well connected as Bill Griffiths will have difficulty in achieving that without some kind of specialist help.”

Ethan nodded. “He’ll need a company trusted by the Israeli government, just like MACE. I need to make a phone call.”

Hassim looked at Mahmoud as he emerged from one of the tunnels. The Palestinian shook his head.

“You can’t make a call from down here; we’re too deep for a signal and we can’t risk moving at night. We can get you to the Erez crossing at dawn.”

“What time is it?” Ethan asked.

“Two-thirty in the morning,” Hassim said, glancing at his watch.

“That makes it the middle of the afternoon in Chicago. If I can make a call, I can smooth the way for us.”

A look of displeasure creased Mahmoud’s features. “We should wait until Yossaf returns from checking the building.”

“As long as Yossaf is between us and the other exit, we have nothing to fear.”

Mahmoud glanced at Hassim, then sighed and nodded.

“We can use the opposite end of the tunnel and make the call from there. It leads to a building on the far side of the street.”

Rafael, crouched in the darkness, listened intently.

He did not need to see the faces of the people talking a few meters away, hidden from sight by the curving tunnel walls and the shadows. Arabic and American voices left him in no doubt that he was in the right place. The name of a man, Bill Griffiths, drifted to within earshot of his position, and he thought of the fossil hunter employed by Byron Stone and Spencer Malik.