The Pandora Room: A Novel Page 5

  Her mouth went dry. Digging in, she put her weight into it. The doors were supposed to open smoothly, but someone had tried to force this one off balance. With a grunt, Sophie shoved, and the door turned on its balance point. She scraped her knuckles raw as she stumbled forward. Her boot tapped her flashlight, and it skittered through the opening. For a moment, her heart forgot to beat. The light spun, the beam flashing around the circumference of this new, small room. She thought it would go out, but it kept spinning as she inhaled the dust of long centuries. She started coughing, and for several seconds, she bent, rasping, trying to clear her throat.

  The flashlight slowed its spin. She heard the grit of small stones beneath the hard plastic and watched the flashlight beam come to rest. The room was much smaller than the one she’d just left, no more than eighteen feet wide, nothing more than a rectangular box. It felt like a crypt instead of any space for the living, and where the beam came to rest, it illuminated the base of another altar, again smaller than the one in the room above her.

  Sophie whistled in appreciation of the odd cuneiform writing that covered the altar. Tiny engraving, ancient lines close and tight, like some long-ago lunatic had scrawled them there. She bent to pick up the flashlight and raised it, noting for a single moment that the wall behind the altar had also been engraved with that tiny writing.

  Upon the altar rested a single object, a stone jar perhaps sixteen inches high, pale yellow and red, fat-bellied and with its cap tightly sealed. The writing on it seemed done in a clearer, less manic hand, and for the first time since entering the room, Sophie paused to try to translate a little of what she read there. Lamar had far more knowledge of ancient languages, but she’d studied enough in her time.

  “Oh, my God,” she said softly.

  Her hand wavered, and all the breath went out of her. A numbness spread through her. The excitement of discovery, the thrill of ancient secrets, had driven her until this moment, reminding her of the spark that had ignited her interest in archaeology when she’d been just a girl. Now all that adrenaline left her in a rush, for this wasn’t just a secret. This was a myth. This was impossible.

  “Holy shit.”

  The dust and shadows made no reply.

  Sophie sank to the floor, took a breath, and began trying to read what little of that writing she could make out. Upstairs, her team would be worried for her, working to free her, but in those moments—and for an hour or two more—she had forgotten that they, and the rest of the world, even existed.

  At first, she found what little she could translate very hard to believe.

  Slowly, she became filled with wonder.

  In time, that wonder turned to fear.

  FIVE

  Ben Walker thought the low hills stretched out before him would have been beautiful in the right light. The distant mountains were covered with ice, and the tundra of Greenland glistened with frost that coated miles of green-and-yellow scrub grass. Of course, to Walker, the right light would be in the middle of July, with the sun high in the sky, not this frigid early spring, with gray clouds slung low. The raw, almost primeval landscape looked as if it might have gone unchanged for thousands of years, when in reality it had folded and warped, heaved into mounds and caved in. The tundra was changing fast, and that change had the potential to unbalance the global ecosystem.

  Tony Shen stepped up beside him, hands buried deep inside the pockets of his Canada Goose parka. Shen had to have the best gear, always new, always absurdly expensive. Walker had no idea where he got the money—it certainly didn’t come from his government job.

  “It’s fucking cold,” Shen muttered.

  Walker sniffed. Not quite a laugh, but he rolled his eyes to make sure Shen got the point. “You’re in the Arctic, man. Get used to it.”

  “You telling me you’re used to it?”

  The question reminded Walker of the pain in his fused vertebrae and the ache around the pins in his right leg, old injuries he tried to ignore but of which the cold in this part of the world made constant reminders. He had scars that were visible evidence of difficult past missions, but the ones people couldn’t see brought him pain.

  The wind kicked up. Walker tugged his hat down farther over his ears and flipped up his collar. “You think this is bad? You should’ve been here in January.”

  “So … at least it’s getting warmer?”

  Walker shot him a dark look. “Is that meant to be a joke?”

  Shen didn’t waver. “You think I’m going to make a climate change joke? Here?”

  Walker glanced over at the stretch of ground where the research team had been digging this week. Over the course of months, they had moved from place to place and taken samples of the frozen soil. About three miles to the north—yellow flags flying high enough to be seen from this distance—a secondary team operated a drilling rig that dug deeper and deeper, taking samples from depths that stunned Walker. Other operations had measured carbon dioxide levels, but Walker’s team wasn’t interested in duplicating the work of those scientists. They were searching for killers.

  As recently as the 1980s, the temperature of the permafrost in this part of the world had averaged eighteen degrees Fahrenheit. The average had gone up ten degrees since then. The permafrost was already softening, releasing carbon dioxide that had been frozen in the earth for more than forty thousand years. By 2040, the Arctic Council expected at least 20 percent of the permafrost near the surface to melt, regurgitating massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

  Walker’s mission focused elsewhere.

  “You going to tell me where we stand?” Shen asked. “Or am I going to just hang out and freeze my balls off?”

  “It’s your first day. Sure you don’t want to ease in?”

  “I don’t even know what we’re doing here.”

  Walker smirked. He ran a thinly gloved hand over the dark beard he’d been growing in the months he’d been here. “David didn’t tell you?”

  Shen huffed. “Dr. Boudreau doesn’t tell me shit.”

  “Comes from being the new guy.”

  “I’ve been working for DARPA nine years,” Shen said.

  Walker nodded. “But you’ve only been working for the National Science Foundation since October.”

  The National Science Foundation barely existed as anything more than a name stenciled on a frosted glass door in the halls of a building in Washington, D.C., a decades-long façade for use when the U.S. Department of Defense didn’t want anyone to know that DARPA was involved with a research project or an unfolding crisis. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had a fancy name but a relatively simple job—look into emerging science and unexplained phenomena and make absolutely certain that if it was possible someone could make a weapon out of it, the United States would be the first to do so.

  Walker had never really liked working for DARPA—he didn’t appreciate weaponized science—but he had a lifelong fascination with mysteries both natural and unnatural, a thirst for explanation that would not be quenched. And when those things turned out to be potentially dangerous, he did prefer they be in his own government’s hands instead of someone else’s. Not that he trusted his superiors. It was simply a case of better-the-devil-you-know.

  There were members of the team from Greenland, as well as the Arctic Council and the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development. Walker had been point man for months, but when he had accepted the assignment, he had been emphatic about not staying away from home for too long. He had made promises to his son, Charlie, and he intended to keep them. Now Dr. Boudreau had sent Shen to replace him, and Walker wanted to cheer. Not that he minded the work, but he had spent the first eight years of Charlie’s life putting his son last, and he had made a private vow to change that.

  The Greenland Initiative wasn’t like any other project he’d been involved with. The National Science Foundation’s director, David Boudreau, had been persuaded to take an interest thanks to pressure from his s
uperiors in Defense and the deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Down in the permafrost, there were things other than carbon and the methane from plant life that had been frozen for so many thousands of years. But it wasn’t the poisoning of the atmosphere that worried them the most. People with more doctorates than Walker had were already working on technology to try to filter the poisons from the air or expel them somehow. They knew what they were working with, and toward.

  The microbes were another issue.

  “We’ve found eleven,” Walker said.

  Shen gave him a sidelong scowl, then walked half a dozen steps away from the camp. “All this time and you’ve classified eleven different microbes? It hardly seems worth all the time and money. There must be hundreds—”

  “Killers,” Walker interrupted. “Eleven previously unknown killer microbes. Eleven deadly diseases. Eleven new illnesses for which there is no cure.”

  Shen widened his eyes. “Well, fuck.”

  Walker nodded. “Yeah.”

  In his career, he had seen things that would have given anyone a lifetime’s worth of nightmares. He’d survived storms and terrors that had killed nearly everyone else around him, discovered the existence of creatures that the world’s governments pretended did not exist, and he had been in the presence of tangible evil. Breathed the same air as that evil, bled on the same patch of soil, and lived to tell of it.

  Or not to tell, because that was the job, after all. Face the kind of thing that would make any ordinary person shit themselves, find ways the United States could utilize those things for its benefit, make goddamn sure no enemy nation could do the same … and never tell a soul.

  His current mission held all the secrecy of past assignments, but this was new. This was different. And it scared the hell out of him.

  “You must be glad to be getting out of here, then,” Shen said.

  Walker shivered from the wind. “You can say that again, brother.”

  Shen tugged off a glove, stuffed it into his pocket, and reached inside his bulky coat to withdraw a cream-colored envelope. “From Boudreau. You know he likes the old-fashioned formalities.”

  “He gets it from his grandmother,” Walker said, taking the envelope. “Alena used to be the best investigator we had.”

  “His grandmother?”

  Walker ignored the question, lifting the envelope. “It’s not sealed.”

  “It wasn’t sealed when he gave it to me. I didn’t read it, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Shen smiled. “But he did mention you were headed to Iraq. I’m not sure which assignment is worse.”

  Walker frowned. “That’s not funny.”

  Shen looked genuinely confused, and Walker felt a twist in his gut.

  “You’re not joking.”

  “Why would I—”

  “Fuck!” Walker shouted, the word echoing out across the landscape. “I’m supposed to be going home.”

  “Man, I’m sorry,” Shen said. “I didn’t know.”

  Walker felt a tremor in his gut. Iraq sat nestled in a part of the world he had never wanted to visit again. The last time he’d been in the region, it had been in Turkey, but Iraq was close enough to make him shudder.

  He studied the envelope. “Boudreau didn’t say what the assignment was?”

  “I’m sure he spells it out for you.” Shen gestured to the envelope. “All he told me was that it was Iraq and it was weird shit, and that nobody’s better with the weird shit than you.”

  Walker laughed, but there was nothing funny. Dr. Boudreau apparently thought surviving so much horror, time and again, made him the perfect person to throw into another bizarre assignment. When this was over, he and Boudreau were going to need to have a talk.

  “All right,” he said, tucking the envelope into his pocket for later reading. “Let me introduce you to the team. If you don’t touch anything without asking, you probably won’t get a virus that’ll liquefy your bones and make your blood leak out every orifice.”

  “Oh,” Shen replied. “I love the Arctic already.”

  By then, Walker had tuned him out. He would make the introductions, then pack his gear as quickly as possible. Whatever might be waiting for him inside that envelope, it would be sensitive, dangerous, and the sort of thing the average person would dismiss as lunacy. For better or worse, that was the job.

  Iraq, he thought as he strode across the tundra.

  Shit.

  * * *

  A hand shook Walker awake. His right fist clenched, and he sucked in a breath, belly tightening, ready to fight. He’d been having a nightmare about almost drowning in Guatemala, and the things in the depths of that awful lake, the glow of their eyes and the sharpness of their teeth, and he had woken from that dream in the midst of defending himself.

  The corporal who had unknowingly risked a beating flinched backward, hands coming up to defend himself if necessary.

  Walker exhaled. Tried on a smile that didn’t really fit. “Sorry, soldier.”

  “No worries, Dr. Walker. Just wanted to let you know we’ll touch down in Mosul in about fifteen minutes.”

  “I’m surprised there’s anywhere to safely land in Mosul, based on some of the pictures I’ve seen.”

  The corporal did not smile. “Recovery is slow, but it’s happening. Our runway will be safe.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Walker replied, surprised the man had taken the comment personally. Much of Mosul had been reduced to rubble by ISIS and the battle to take the city back from them. Success there had been costly.

  The corporal made his way forward and strapped himself back into the jump seat he’d been slotted into throughout the flight from Germany. The small military jet would make a short stop in Mosul to let him off before reaching its final destination in Baghdad. It carried supplies meant for Iraqi military use—and one passenger who wouldn’t be listed on any manifest.

  Walker didn’t like traveling this way. If anyone attempted to track backward from his arrival, it would seem like he’d just magically appeared in the country. If David Boudreau and his DARPA taskmasters wanted the National Science Foundation to appear a benevolent civilian operation, it would have been better for Walker to travel on commercial flights instead of risk tipping their hand.

  Which told Walker exactly how troubled Boudreau and the rest were by whatever this archaeologist, Sophie Durand, had found in Kurdistan.

  He sat up, groaned quietly as his spine popped, and rotated his head to get the stiffness out of his neck. Walker had several doctorates and a set of skills he’d picked up through a much rarer sort of education, but the talent for which he felt most grateful was his ability to sleep anywhere, at any time. He had old injuries—acquired under circumstances that still gave him nightmares—and there were some very strong pills that went along with those injuries. But sleep … that was a drug he could administer to himself. A five-minute nap, or one lasting five hours, it restored him.

  His ex-wife, Amanda, had always envied that. And cursed his name when their boy, Charlie, had been born and he’d been able to sneak in enough sleep to avoid falling apart.

  Walker frowned. Charlie would be turning eleven this year, and Walker had promised to be home for his birthday, which was less than a month away.

  As long as you come home, Charlie had said the last time Walker had left, less worried about his birthday than he was about his father’s safety, which made it all the harder for Walker to contemplate disappointing him.

  The plane rumbled and then banked left. The pilot hit an air pocket that dropped them for a solid three count before the wind buoyed them up again. Once upon a time, it would have scared the crap out of Walker, but he had a different threshold for fear than he’d had as a younger man.

  When they were safely on the ground and the engine began to whine as it cooled down, Walker stood and grabbed his gear—a scuffed blue canvas duffel and a jacket that nearly matched—and then he exited the plane by way of metal steps that had been
rolled up to the door. The sun baked down on the back of his neck as he reached the tarmac, and he headed toward a U.S. Army sergeant who was trotting in his direction.

  “Dr. Walker?” the man said.

  “That’s right,” Walker said, shaking his hand.

  “Sergeant Peter Dunlap. Please come with me.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, just headed off in another direction and expected Walker to follow. Strong and tanned and too weathered for his age, the sergeant seemed like the hard-eyed sort of soldier the military thrived on finding young and forging into loyal fighters.

  Walker had never been to Mosul International Airport before, but he felt confident this wasn’t it. Iraqi military vehicles were parked in various defensive positions, and he could see a high fence in the distance, topped by barbed wire. Towers were spaced at intervals with guards on sentry duty. The United States had relinquished control of the country years ago, but there were American soldiers as well, working in cooperation with local forces. ISIS might have been driven out, but its scattered components still existed, dreaming of an ascendant and oppressive Islamic state. To Walker, it felt as if every person he saw was holding their breath, waiting for fresh violence to erupt.

  Dunlap marched him across the tarmac, where the helicopter sat waiting, one of its doors already open. The pilot turned to watch them, anonymous with his sunglasses and headgear, but only when Walker climbed into the chopper did he realize two other passengers were already on board. Both were women, and one was a friend. More than a friend.

  “Welcome to Mosul,” Kim Seong said as Walker stowed his duffel and slid into a seat. She smiled, and Walker couldn’t help but smiling in return.

  “It’s good to see you,” he said loudly as the helicopter’s rotors began to turn, the noise growing by the second. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”