Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (14 page)

“How deep is that?” Unconsciously, he held his breath as he waited for the answer.

“Twenty meters. Guess what it is yet?”

Ironwood thought quickly.
Twenty meters. It’s got to be thousands of years old. But the construction is so perfect. As if it were built recently and
—Then he had it. “It’s a bomb shelter.”

He regarded the buried structure with real interest, not regret. The data that Keisha had just used to flush it out was the reason why the security in this room was so tight. SARGE. Or, as the U.S. Air Force called it, the Synthetic Aperture Radar Global Environment database.

SARGE was his newly adopted $20-million child born of unprecedented air force remote-sensing technology, first tested on two space shuttle flights in the 1980s. After those flights, the technology had evolved in two forms—one public and the other very private.

Publicly, SARGE was being used in global scientific efforts to create topographic maps and monitor sea levels and earthquake movements from space. Privately, the massive database was being used by the United States to create a classified satellite surveillance network: EMPIRE, a network of free-flying constellations of multiparameter imaging-radar satellites. Those satellites could not only produce images of the Earth’s surface at night and through cloud cover at unprecedented resolutions but could also look past the surface for buried installations, or anything else that might be hidden a few meters underground—and many more meters beyond that, too, if the right techniques were used to mine the data.

SARGE was perhaps the greatest trove of intelligence information ever developed.

A version of it now belonged to him.

“Most likely from the fifties,” Ironwood said about the shelter, “built to protect local government in the event of atomic war.”

“Optimists,” Keisha said. “Anyway, here’s the 3-D model we assembled from ten-centimeter slices.”

Ironwood watched, fascinated, as the outline of the bomb shelter appeared to lift off from the screen and rotate, revealing a three-dimensional reconstruction that showed its curved roof, and even the blurred shapes of the bunks, desks, and room dividers inside.

It was a deceptively simple demonstration of capability that came with complex significance. Using the massive collection of information in the stolen SARGE database, it would be possible to create similar images of every hidden U.S. Navy sub base, every secret U.S. Air Force missile silo, every secure and undisclosed location built to protect elected officials and preserve the continuity of government in case of war or disaster. All it would take was someone—or some country—who could afford the computer system to go looking for them, and who also had access to the algorithm that allowed unprecedented detail to be extracted from what most analysts would call static or noise.

Ironwood wasn’t thinking of the legal and moral consequences of his acquisition, though. He knew the air force was aware a copy of the SARGE database had been illegally made, and he didn’t doubt there was a high-level investigation already under way. Nor did he have false hopes of evading that investigation forever.

He was in a race, and the only way he would avoid a life of exile or imprisonment was to find the proof that he’d need to discredit the government before the government found the proof they needed to arrest him.

How long that race would last, he didn’t know. For the moment, in the sanctuary of his Red Room with his team, he didn’t care. Instead, once again he dreamed.

Someday,
Ironwood told himself, he’d see to it the whole world could look through the government’s lies to the real truth they were concealing. After all, what was the good of great wealth if it couldn’t leave this world a better place? A world without secrets.

Four days later, Jess MacClary’s hands still hurt.

The palm of her right hand was shielded by a rubberized strip of bright green bandage. Five sutures. Her left hand was immobilized in thick white dressings from which only her thumb and fingertips emerged. Nine sutures. Even so, Jess’s real pain was spiritual, and she wasn’t sure how to deal with that.

She’d returned to the highest floor of the MacCleirigh Foundation building, the same secure level where ten defenders had welcomed her via satellite screen links. But there was little sign of such technology in the Foundation’s library.

As evidence, three computer terminals, concealed behind the rolltops of antique desks in one secluded alcove, provided the Family’s researchers with instant access to the digitized MacCleirigh archives in Australia. That concession to the twenty-first century was unobtrusive, though, as if computers were only a passing fancy.

For the rest of the library, double-height bookcases and cabinets that could be reached only by wheeled ladder were the order of the day. As were the antique brass lights with green glass shades, somber wall hangings, massive walnut reading tables, and high-back green leather chairs. Over all drifted the thick, musty scent of ancient paper and oiled wood. Without question, a place for scholarship, not relaxation.

Jess was not in the mood for either pursuit. She sat alone at a long table, a single book before her, as yet unopened.

As a defender, she now could access all locked shelves reserved only for the Twelve. Yet with centuries of journals and secret writings available to her, including her aunt’s archaeological field journals, the volume she’d taken from the shelves today was one she’d read before, when she was in her teens:
The Lost Constellations and Zodiacal Traditions of the Family, Their Lore and Meaning, by Percival Lowell, Director of the Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona; Non-resident Professor of Astronomy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Membre de la Société Astronomique de France; etc., etc.

Lowell’s efforts were legendary. Not only did the renowned American
astronomer further the scholarly goals of the MacCleirighs, he did so while diverting mainstream academics to safer pursuits not in conflict with the Family’s. At the turn of the last century, he’d been third in succession to be defender of his line but had never been called to serve. His scholarship, however, was such that he had been admitted to the 144 who knew the truth of the First Gods and their Promise to return.

“I see you’ve gone back to the classics.”

Her cousin stood beside her.

“May I?” Su-Lin gestured to the chair across the table, sitting only when Jess nodded her assent. “We’re all troubled at first, you know. It’s unsettling to discover the thing we’ve waited all our lives to defend doesn’t exist.”

“But it does.”

Su-Lin looked surprised. “Sorry?”

“The Secret existed once, didn’t it? The First Gods gave it to our ancestors, or at least put our ancestors in charge of defending it.”

“As it is our tradition.” Su-Lin’s reply was another meaningful phrase to those within the Family.

“So the only thing that’s happened is . . . we screwed up.
Lost
the Secret. But it’s still out there. Which means it can be found.”

Su-Lin regarded Jess like a wise parent who’s heard her offspring spin a foolish, wishful chain of logic. “We looked for thousands of years, Jessica. The Secret’s gone.”

Jess ran the fingers of her right hand over the worn leather of the Lowell book. It had been privately published, as all Family books and pamphlets were. This one in New York, 1908. A Tuareg cross was embossed upon the cover. “The temples were also lost to us for thousands of years.” She looked up at Su-Lin and caught her cousin in a frown that swiftly disappeared. “And
they
were found again.”

“To what end?” Su-Lin asked. “The temples in India and Peru were looted long before Ironwood’s arrival. Now that you’re at the table, I can tell you that Florian recovered a second sun map in the Polynesian temple, the engraving on it identical to the one in the Shrine. But that was all she found. Presumably Ironwood has it now. The one I showed you has been in our possession for as long as we’ve had written records.” Su-Lin’s expression was sympathetic but firm. “Whatever clues those ruins once held, they’re gone now. The Family must move on.”

“We’ve failed our sacred trust with the First Gods and we should just ‘move on?’ To
what
?”

“That’s something you have to decide for yourself. Reread our
Traditions
.” Su-Lin tapped the old book between them. “This one, too. There’re different ways to view what they say. Some of us believe the Secret the
First Gods gave us was not a goal but a process, a way of life. So we honor them by living that life as we were directed—in the pursuit and preservation of knowledge.” Su-Lin sat back, her expression expectant of compliance. “That’s how I’ve moved on.”

Jess still felt bewildered, even angered, but dutifully she opened Lowell’s book and flipped through to a page she knew well. On it, a simple silhouette, the symbol of her line: the Branch.

It was one of twelve symbols inlaid or painted on every round table in every modern reconstruction of a Chamber of Heaven. Jess had been taught since childhood that it represented a constellation—but after Su-Lin’s revelation in the Shrine of Turus, it seemed the Branch had no connection with the First Gods’ ancient skies. It was merely the
outline
of an object the gods of her faith had entrusted to the Family. To revere, protect, and
defend.

An object the MacCleirighs had lost.

The Branch itself was only one of twelve symbols—the twelve constellations in the Family zodiac. Jess at age three could recite them by heart, could draw them blindfolded.

Three were symbols from the Earth—those things that were inanimate: the Diamond, the River, and the Mountain. Three were symbols from the Green—those things that brought life from the Earth: the Seed, the Blossom, and the Branch. Three were symbols from the Hand—those things that humans made to give them power over the Green and the Earth: the Blade, the Archer’s Bow, and the Chain. The final three were symbols from the Blood—those things that gave movement to the Hand: the Skull, the Eye, and the Heart.

The lesson-stories of Jess’s childhood had taught her that the gods of her faith themselves had drawn these symbols’ shapes among the stars on their maps. They’d recorded them as constellations so the knowledge they contained would always be there, for all who looked to the sky. She now knew that those stories, the same ones Lowell the astronomer had secretly relayed, which had guided her education as an adult, were incomplete.

It wasn’t merely
knowledge
that had been given to her family—it was actual, physical artifacts. Twelve literal gifts from the gods that had fit within the hollows on the carved stone table.

Jess turned the page, to the symbol she knew as the Archer’s Bow. Its story had once made so much sense. The bow and arrow were a powerful piece of technology, extending the reach of hunters a dozen times. That made food-gathering faster, more efficient. When a small team of hunters could provide food for a village, other members of that village were freed
to pursue other specialties. To the Family, the bow and arrow marked the birth of scholarship.

Now she knew that the object that fit within the silhouette of the Archer’s Bow had nothing to do with hunting. It was a meteorite with an impossibly ancient map of the solar system.

Under her cousin’s watchful gaze, Jess turned page after delicate page of the old book, trying her best to look anew at each illustrated silhouette—the symbols of her faith. What object could possibly fit within the Branch? The Skull? The Blossom? What had been their purpose? And why had the dimensions of the Chamber of Heaven remained unchanged over millennia while the secret of its contents vanished?

Jess felt her heart pound. Her fingers pulsed painfully with the same urgent rhythm. What she believed and what she knew had never been in conflict before.

What if
everything
she’d been taught was a lie?

“What are you thinking?” Su-Lin asked.

Jess wasn’t ready to share the depth of her fears. Instead, she offered a question of her own. “Why keep this from the rest of the Family?”

“Jessica, really. You know the answer to that.”

“I don’t.”

Su-Lin replied as if she were stating the most self-evident truth. “Because the Family would fall apart. As defenders, we can’t permit that. The Secret is what unites us. Not just the Twelve. Not just the 144. All of us. We’ve almost a thousand in the direct lines. Without a unifying purpose, the Family would have no reason to continue. Nine thousand years of unbroken history would come to an end.”

Jess closed Lowell’s book, thinking of the locked cabinet in this library, filled with writings only a handful of people had ever read, even over millennia.

“Has any defender ever lost faith? When they’ve learned the truth?”

A momentary shadow seemed to cross Su-Lin’s calm face. “None that the
Traditions
record.”

“Then how can you say what the rest of the Family would do? If everyone knew what we’ve lost, I believe they’d work tirelessly to rediscover it. A thousand scholars can do considerably more work than just the twelve of us.”