The Last Oracle (26 page)

Rosauro circled around to the front. She already had a hand raised against his objections. “Okay, it’s not inconspicuous. I know. But I didn’t know where we were going
or
how fast we might need to get there.”

Kowalski grinned much too widely. “Or how many Hondas we might need to run over.”

“It’s got four-wheel drive, almost five hundred horses…and…and…” She shrugged. “I liked it.”

Kowalski passed her to inspect the car. “Oh, yeah, from now on, Rosauro picks out all our transportation!”

Gray sighed and stepped toward Dr. Masterson. “Where to now?”

The professor was studying the stack of papers and waved his cane toward the north, plainly irritated. Gray waited for more details, but got none.

Elizabeth’s warning echoed in his head.
Don’t press him…

Giving up, Gray pointed to the SUV. He had no time to argue. They’d been in one place too long already. He wanted to keep moving, even if he
didn’t know exactly where. If anyone had put a tracer on the University of Mumbai’s Web site, they could be zeroing in on them right now.

“Load up,” Gray ordered.

Kowalski cupped his hands for the keys.

Gray tossed them to Rosauro instead.

Kowalski glowered at him. “You are just plain evil.”

5:06 P.M.

Elizabeth could wait no longer. Going against her own advice, she turned to Dr. Masterson. “Hayden, enough of your games. What did you mean when you said my father
found
those people?”

“Just what I said, my dear.”

The professor sat in the center of the SUV’s middle row, flanked by Elizabeth and Gray. Pen in hand, Hayden had been sifting through the printouts for the past ten minutes. Rosauro glanced back at them from the driver’s seat. Kowalski sulked in the passenger seat with his arms stubbornly crossed.

Luca stirred behind them and leaned forward to listen.

Hayden explained, “Your father spent the past decade collecting and comparing DNA samples from the most promising yogis and mystics of India. He traveled far and wide, from north to south. He collated reams of data, cross-referenced genetic code. He ran a statistical model analyzing mental ability versus genetic variance.”

“He tested Luca’s people, too,” Elizabeth said.

The Gypsy made a noise of agreement.

“Because they rose from the Punjab region,” Hayden said.

“Why is that important?” Gray asked.

“Let me show you.” The professor searched the stack for half a minute, then pulled out one sheet. “Your father, Elizabeth, was a true genius, vastly underappreciated by his peers. He was able to pinpoint three genes that seemed to be common to those who showed the strongest traits. Like many scientific breakthroughs, such a discovery was equal parts brilliance and luck. He came upon these genes when he noted that many of
the most talented individuals seemed to show signs of autism in varying degrees.”

“Autism?” Elizabeth asked. “Why autism?”

“Because the debilitating mental condition, while compromising social functioning, can often produce some astounding savant abilities.” Hayden patted her knee. “Did you know that many of the key figures in history displayed autistic tendencies?”

Elizabeth shook her head.

He ticked names off, using his fingers. “In the arts, that included Michelangelo, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, along with Beethoven and Mozart. In science, you have Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Isaac Newton. In politics, Thomas Jefferson. Even Nostradamus was believed to be autistic to some degree.”

“Nostradamus?” Gray asked. “The French astrologer?”

Hayden nodded. “Such individuals have changed history, improved mankind, moved us forward. There’s a line Archibald loved to quote. From Dr. Temple Grandin, a bestselling writer with autism. ‘
If by some magic, autism had been eradicated from the face of the earth, then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave
.’ And I believe she was right.”

“And my father?”

“Most definitely. Your father came to believe that there was a direct connection between autism and his own studies into intuition and presentiment.”

“And he found this connection?” Gray said.

The professor sighed. “While we don’t know the exact cause for autism, most scientists agree that there are ten different genes that potentially contribute to the appearance of the condition. So Archibald ran these ten genes through his statistical model and discovered three of these genes were common among
all
those with high talent. It was the breakthrough he had been looking for. With these three genetic markers, he began to trace geographically the frequency of these markers in the general population. He came up with a map.”

The professor passed Elizabeth the sheet of paper on his lap. It was a map of India. Across the breadth of it were hundreds of small dots.

Elizabeth studied it, then handed it to Gray.

Hayden explained, “Each dot represents an individual bearing the genetic marker. But if you look closely, you’ll see how many dots appear around major cities, like Delhi and Mumbai. Which only makes sense, since there are many people living in those cities.”

“But what about up here?” Gray asked and pointed toward the north.

Elizabeth knew what Gray was asking about. A large number of dots—
more than anywhere else
—clustered to the north, where no major city was marked.

“Exactly. Archibald wondered the same.” Hayden took the map back and tapped the cluster to the north. “He concentrated the last three years of his life in that area. He sought to discover why this dense cluster appears up there.”

“What’s there?” she asked.

“The Punjab.” The answer came from behind Elizabeth. From Luca Hearn. “The original homeland of the Romani.”

“Indeed. It is why Archibald contacted the Gypsy clans in Europe and the United States. He found it rather coincidental that such a rich history of prophecy and fortune-telling would arise from the same spot and spread to Europe and beyond. He sought to see if his genetic marker could be found among the Gypsies.”

“Was it?” Elizabeth posed the question to both Hayden and Luca.

Hayden answered, “Yes, but not in the concentrations he was suspecting. It disappointed your father.”

Luca made a noncommittal noise.

She turned to him. “What?”

“There was a reason,” Luca said.

Gray twisted around. “What do you mean?”

“It was why we hired Dr. Polk.”

Elizabeth remembered that the Gypsy clan leader had never fully elaborated on the matter. He’d started to explain on the airplane, but they had been interrupted.

“As I told you before, Dr. Polk sought to collect blood samples from our most gifted
chovihanis
. Not fakers, but real seers. But there were few among us who still met this criteria.”

“Why?”

“Because the heart of our people was stolen from us.”

Slowly and in a grim voice, Luca continued, telling a tale of a deep secret among his clans, one that went back centuries. The secret concerned one clan among all the others, one that was most cherished. It was forbidden even to speak of them to
gadje,
to outsiders. The clan was kept separate, hidden, protected by the other clans. It was the true source of the Gypsies’ heritage of prophecy. On rare occasions, some of these
chovihanis
would move and live among the other clans, sharing their talents, taking husbands or wives. But mostly they remained insular and apart. Then nearly fifty years ago, the clan was discovered. Every man and woman was slaughtered, butchered, and buried in a shallow, frozen grave.

Luca’s words grew especially bitter. “Only in that mass grave, there were no bones of any children.”

Elizabeth understood the impact. “Someone took them.”

“We never discovered who…but we never stopped looking. We had hoped that Dr. Polk with his new way of tracking—by DNA—might find a trail that had long gone cold.”

“Was he successful?” Elizabeth asked.

Luca shook his head. “Not that he ever revealed. He did send one odd query a few months ago. He wanted to know more about our status as
untouchables,
the casteless of India.”

Elizabeth didn’t know what that meant. She glanced to Hayden, but the professor shrugged. Still, she noted something in his expression, a narrowing of his eyes. He knew something.

But instead of explaining, he marked a small
x
on the map with his pen.

“What’s that?” Elizabeth asked, noting how it lay in the middle of the cluster of dots in the Punjab region.

“It’s where we must go next if we want answers.”

“And where’s that?” Gray pressed.

“To the place where Archibald vanished.”

11

September 6, 5:38 P.M.
Pripyat, Ukraine

Nicolas crossed through the ghost town’s amusement park.

Old yellow bumper cars sat in pools of stagnant green water, amid waist-high weeds. The roof of the ride had long since collapsed, leaving a frame of red corrosion arched over it. Ahead, the park’s giant Ferris wheel—the Big Dipper—rose into the late-afternoon sky, limned against the low sun. Its yellow umbrella chairs hung idle from the rusted skeleton. A symbol and monument to the ruin left behind in the wake of Chernobyl.

Nicolas continued on.

The park had been built in anticipation of the celebrations of May Day back in 1986. Instead, a week prior to the celebration, the city of Pripyat, home to forty-eight thousand workers and their families, was killed, smothered under a veil of radiation. The city, built in the 1970s, had been a shining example of Soviet architecture and urban living: the Energetic Theater, the palatial Polissia Hotel, a state-of-the-art hospital, scores of schools.

The theater lay now in ruins. The hotel had birch trees growing out of its roof. The schools had become crumbled shells, piled with moldy textbooks, old dolls, and wooden toy blocks. In one room, Nicolas had seen piles of discarded gas masks, lying in limp heaps like the scalped faces of the dead. The once vibrant city had been reduced to broken windows, collapsed walls, old bed frames, and peeling paint. Weeds and trees grew wild
everywhere, cracking apart what man had built. Now only tours came here, four hundred dollars a head to explore the haunted place.

And the cause of it all…

Nicolas shaded his eyes and stared. He could just make out on the horizon a hazy bump, two miles off.

The Chernobyl power plant.

The explosion of reactor number four had cast a plume that wrapped the world. Yet here, the evacuation order was delayed for thirty hours. The forest around the city turned red with radioactive dust. Townspeople swept their porches and balconies to keep them clean while plutonium fires burned two miles away.

Nicolas shook his head, mostly because he knew a news crew followed him, rolling B-roll footage for the evening news. Nicolas strode through the amusement park. He had been warned to stay on the fresh asphalt strip that crossed the ruins of the abandoned town. The radiation levels spiked higher if you tread out into the mossy stretches of the urban wasteland. The worst zones were marked off with triangular yellow signs. The new asphalt path had been laid to accommodate the flood of dignitaries, officials, and newspeople that were descending on Chernobyl in anticipation of the installation of the new steel Sarcophagus over its decaying concrete shell.

By this evening, the showplace Polissia Hotel would return to a tarnished bit of its former glory. The hotel’s ballroom had been hastily renovated, cleared, and cleaned to host a formal black-tie party tonight. Even the birch trees growing out of the roof had been cut down for the event.

Nothing but the best for their international guests. There would be representatives from almost every nation, even a handful of stars from Hollywood. Pripyat would shine for this one night, a bright gala in the center of a radiological ruin.

Both the Russian president and prime minister would be in attendance, along with many members from the upper and lower house of Federal Assembly. Many were already here, making halfhearted assertions of
change and reform, attempting to churn political currency from this momentous event.