The Bone Labyrinth (27 page)

“That’s right,” Kowalski said, realizing he must be talking about Maria.

The kid’s actually pretty damned smart. Maybe this will work.

Kowalski stepped closer, tilting his chin slightly. Baako met his gaze. Kowalski nodded.

Now or never, little guy.

Baako swung his arm high, then whipped it back around, striking Kowalski across the face. Nails gouged his cheek. The blow was harder than Kowalski had expected. He went toppling backward, wondering if his head was still on his neck.

Baako cringed, cowering down slightly.

Kowalski rolled to a seat and scooted on his butt away from Baako while gesturing low. [
I’m all right
] He then curled his fingers at Baako, motioning for him to come again.

Baako charged. Kowalski didn’t have to fake looking scared as he hastily retreated. The gorilla was a lot stronger than he looked. Baako barreled into him, striking a shoulder into Kowalski’s chest and slamming him against the bars.

Kowalski gasped to loosen his lungs from the impact, then hollered as loudly as he could. “Hey! Someone help! Get me out of here!”

A moment later, the door at the end of the block of pens crashed open. A glance over his shoulder revealed two uniformed men rushing toward him. One carried an electric prod, the other a rifle.

He bit back a groan. He had hoped only
one
guard would come, someone he could overpower, allowing them both to escape.

So that meant going to plan B
.

Before the guards reached him, Kowalski lifted both arms to his chest and jiggled his arms. While the motion might look like he was guarding himself in fear, it was actually a simple sign.

[
Be aggressive
]

Baako needed no coaxing to appear angry. His eyes flashed with fury at the sight of the soldiers, at the crackle of the electric prod. He took a firm stand two yards away. Leaning on the knuckles of one arm, he pounded his chest with the other fist. He also bared his teeth in a fearsome display.

“Let me out of here!” Kowalski yelled.

The guard with the cattle prod fumbled a set of keys into the lock and yanked the door open. In his other hand, he brandished the sparking end of his electric weapon at Baako. It allowed Kowalski a chance to roll out of the cage. He grappled with the man in his haste to escape until he was shoved away.

The other soldier stood well back, his assault rifle held at his shoulder, swinging his aim from Baako to Kowalski and back again.

Kowalski gestured surreptitiously to Baako, lowering a palm.

[
Back down
]

Baako huffed loudly, looking irritated, but he swung away and retreated on all fours to the back of the pen.

The guard shut the door with a loud clang and relocked it.

Kowalski fingered the deep scratches on his face, rubbing the blood around to make it look even worse. “Thought he was going to kill me.”

The two soldiers spoke rapidly to each other in Mandarin. Only now did Kowalski recognize the guard with the cattle prod. It was that jackass, Gao, the head of the group who had kidnapped them all. The bastard must have returned from wherever he had taken Maria and come to check up on his other prisoners.

Gao spat through the bars at Baako, then waved Kowalski forward, threatening him with the prod. The guard with the rifle flanked his other side.

Kowalski kept his arms half raised, doing his best to look sheepish. “Take me to Dr. Crandall. She should know about all of this.”

He got no acknowledgment, so he simply let himself be marched out of the cellblock. Before the door closed, he glanced back at Baako, feeling guilty about abandoning the little guy. He clenched both of his raised fists and clutched them to his chest.

[
Be brave
]

5:22
P
.
M
.

Baako watches the big man leave, sees the door close. He remembers the man’s last words, but he finds nothing but fear inside him. It does not help that his sharp nose catches the scent of blood under his fingernails. His breathing comes harder, forcing him to drop to the ground.

He hugs his knees, wishing it was Mama he hugged.

He looks slowly around the room. There are no toys, no drawing board, no ropes. He stares toward the food in the bucket, but he has no hunger.

Only fear.

He keeps his back to the far corner, turned away from the stinking pile, where the man made him go. There is no toilet here like back home. He feels shame—not only because he was taught not to go on the floor, but because he knows what is hidden in there, put there by the man.

He huffs his confusion, his frustration.

He thumbs his chin, rocking in place.

[Mama, Mama, Mama…]

Then a loud noise erupts—a roaring, a fierce bellowing. It comes from the big shiny door at the other end of the room. Red letters shine on a sign above it, angry like a warning. Something bangs heavily against that door.

Baako goes still, afraid to move, fearful of attracting whatever screamed like that. His tiny hairs quiver with warning. He hears blood in that roaring, as surely as he smells it from his fingertips. His two mothers told him stories at night, often with pictures. Some had monsters in them: shadows lurking under a bed or trolls hiding under bridges.

Trolls eat goats
, he remembers Mama telling him.

He does not know what made that bellow. It goes silent again, but Baako fears he might be a goat in this story.

He turns from that shiny door and toward the double doors at the other end of the room, where the big man vanished, but he thinks of another.

Mama, where are you?

5:42
P
.
M
.

Maria paced the length of the octagon-shaped room. The floors were polished concrete, the walls a featureless white plaster. All around, glass-enclosed alcoves held ancient artifacts and tools, their antiquity in direct contrast to the modern sterility of the place.

Dr. Dayne Arnaud stood before one of the cases, slightly bent at the waist, his hands clasped behind him. The paleontologist studied a fist-size stone, chipped into a prehistoric hand ax. But from the haunted expression on his face, he likely had little interest in what he was looking at and sought only to distract himself from the situation at hand.

She understood. The brutal and sudden execution of Professor Wrightson weighed upon them both.

She glanced to a pair of armed guards flanking the exit. Jiaying Lau had escorted her and Dr. Arnaud down into the subterranean complex beneath the zoo and abandoned them in this museum room, promising to return shortly.

That was over an hour ago. By now Maria’s nerves were stretched as tautly as piano wire. She finally stopped next to the French paleontologist.

Maybe if we compared notes . . .

“Dr. Arnaud,” she said, drawing his attention. “Do you have any thoughts or theories about what might be going on here?”

He glanced to the exit and gave a small shake of his head.

She sighed, trying to sort things out. “Clearly this must be some sort of covert genomics project, one tied to ancient DNA, but there’s something else going on here, something the Chinese are still keeping under wraps. After they kidnapped you and Professor Wrightson, were you able to overhear anything?”

“
Hélas
,
Docteur Crandall,”
Arnaud started, then firmed his lips and switched to English. “I’m sorry. But unfortunately I know no Mandarin, so the little that I overheard was meaningless to me.”

She was in the same boat.

“But,” he said, sweeping an arm, “from the collection gathered here, I can make some suppositions.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let me show you.”

He marched her over to one of the larger alcoves. On a shelf, illuminated from panels at the back, rested a massive skull, far larger than any human’s, but with similar conformations.

Something in the ape family,
she guessed.

When Arnaud spoke, she heard the envy in his voice. “Nothing like this skull has ever been found. At least not this intact.”

“What is it?”

“An extinct species of gorilla.
Gigantopithecus blacki
. Such beasts roamed the highlands of southern China and Vietnam until they died off a hundred thousand years ago.”

She eyed the size of the skull. “It must’ve been massive.”

“
En effet,”
he agreed. “It stood three meters tall and weighed as much as five hundred kilograms.”

She tried to imagine such a half-ton beast.

“All we know about the species,” Arnaud continued, “comes from a handful of molars and a few fragments of jaw. The first teeth were found back in 1935 at an apothecary shop in Hong Kong.”

“As in a drugstore? What were the teeth doing there?”

“In Chinese medicine, fossilized bones were often pulverized into a powder to formulate elixirs.”

“But what’s all of this have to do with what’s going on here?”

He stared around at the collection. “From this specimen and several others, I would wager someone has made a discovery of astounding importance, a cache of fossils and relics that could potentially rewrite what we understand about our early history.”

She frowned at the gorilla skull. “What do you mean,
our
history?”

“Like I said,
Gigantopithecus
went extinct only a hundred thousand years ago, making it a contemporary of early man in this region.” He moved to another alcove. “And look at all of the bone, antler, and stone tools on display here. From my estimate, they all date to the Upper Paleolithic.”

She slowly nodded. She knew that period well from her own research. It was when Neanderthals coexisted with humans, along with a handful of other hominin tribes still in existence: the Denisovans, the hobbit-like
Homo floresiensis
, even a few surviving
Homo erectus
relatives.

It was a pivotal moment in human history.

Arnaud directed her next to a stone figure. It was a crude depiction of a gravid woman squatted around her large belly. “Such Venus figures began appearing in the Upper Paleolithic. The Venus of Willendorf, the Venus of Laussel, et cetera. If you look closely, you can see traces of red ocher painted on this figurine, a clear sign of ritualistic behavior.”

“So you believe this entire collection all came from a relatively narrow sliver of history?”

“Not only that, but also the same
place
. From the presence of that intact
Gigantopithecus
skull, I’d say these artifacts all came from southern China, maybe up in the Himalayas. Which brings us to this unusual item.” He shifted her over to another case, to another skull, this one much smaller. “Notice the blend of archaic features and modern anatomy found in this specimen. The flat face, the thick skull bones, the broad nose.”

“It looks human.”

“But not quite.” He glanced over to her. “This skull belongs to a cave-dwelling people, a tribe who were only recently discovered in the southern provinces of China. They’re called the Red Deer Cave people, and their existence still baffles paleontologists and archaeologists.”

“Why?”

“Because they shouldn’t exist. For the longest time, it was accepted that Neanderthals were the last of our closest relatives to survive, dying off some thirty to forty thousand years ago. But the bones of the Red Deer Cave people date back only eleven thousand years.”

Her eyes widened. That was a mere blip in geological time.

“Most paleontologists believe they’re a subspecies of human, a crossbreed of
Homo sapiens
and a more ancient hominin tribe, the Denisovans, further proving our ancestry is much more blended than previously suspected.”

She already knew this to be true. It was well documented that humans carried the genes from both Neanderthals and Denisovans, the percentages of which varied by regions. But much still remained a mystery, like the fact that a recent comprehensive study suggested our genetic ancestry owed a debt to a
third
archaic group, one as yet unknown.

The possibilities intrigued her.

If that puzzle could be solved, what might be learned about our true past?

“Do you think that’s what the Chinese are exploring here?” she asked. “Trying to piece together the genetic root of what makes us human?”

“I don’t know.” He swept his gaze across the room. “But from the pristine condition of these fossils and relics—all marking such a significant moment in time—the Chinese discovered something important, something they judged valuable enough to keep hidden from the rest of the scientific world.”

She considered the cost involved in the construction of this buried laboratory complex. It must have been substantial, on a par with the Manhattan Project. But even more disconcerting was
who
was running it all.

She glanced to the uniformed guards. “If you’re right about this discovery, why is it being run by a division of the Chinese military?”

Arnaud furrowed his brow. “Perhaps they are seeking a way to weaponize what they found.”

Maria took in a deep breath, horrified at what that might mean.

“Then again, Dr. Crandall, was not your own research funded by DARPA, the U.S.’s military science division?”

That was certainly true.

Are my hands any cleaner?

Her funding came from a division of DARPA called the Biological Technologies Office, whose mission statement was to explore the boundary between the biological and the physical sciences. Before accepting DARPA’s grant money, she had read up on other BTO projects, many of which involved enhancing soldiers in various ways: from advanced prosthetics to cortical implants. But one of the projects also sought ways to increase human intelligence through genetic manipulation. She suspected her and Lena’s research with Baako was linked to that long-term goal.