The next few minutes were a blur. Over the years, she had taken more first-aid and lifeguard classes than she could count but this was the first time she had ever put what she had been taught to use in a real world situation. She had no idea if she was doing it right. What was the ratio of rescue breaths to compressions? Was his airway clear?
She readjusted his head, tilting his chin up, and tried another breath. She felt it go in and then suddenly Rafi convulsed, vomiting a geyser of lukewarm water into her face. She flinched back in surprise and then sagged in relief as Rafi began coughing and retching, and most importantly, breathing again.
Exhaustion crashed over her but she knew her task was not yet finished. She knelt beside him and rolled him onto his side. “I’m going for help. You’re going to be okay.”
Though still coughing violently, Rafi nodded and she saw the gratitude in his eyes. She stood, fought through the momentary dizziness and lurched toward the museum, waving her arms and shouting as she ran.
Her efforts finally yielded the desired results. Someone noticed her, and then one by one, heads began to turn and the bubble burst. She recognized many of the faces rushing toward her, support crew for the dig, the production crew brandishing their cameras and equipment, but Professor was not among them.
Of course not. He’s up on the ridge trying to save me. Nevertheless, his absence left her feeling hollow inside. She desperately wanted him with her.
She froze in mid-step as she recognized another face, not someone from the dig, but someone from the past, someone she had hoped never to see again.
Running toward her, or more accurately waddling, red-faced and panting from the exertion, was the corpulent form of Gerald Roche.
Her mind immediately flashed back to her first and only encounter with the rotund British conspiracy theorist and occult enthusiast. Eight months earlier, when she had been tracking down a lead involving the famed Elizabethan era astrologer John Dee. She had thought to consult with Roche, a Dee expert and collector, but the situation had spiraled out of control, with Roche accusing Jade of trying to steal an object from his collection — Dee’s Shew Stone, a crystal ball used for divination — and subsequently trying to kill her. The fact that she actually had ended up stealing the Shew Stone probably didn’t help matters.
Damn it! How did he find me?
All thoughts of helping Rafi or seeing Professor slipped from her mind. She turned on her heel, looking for an escape route. Surely he wouldn’t try anything in front of a crowd, with cameras rolling.
But why else would he come here?
She was still debating the best escape route — seek refuge in the crowd or make a run for it — when Roche summoned up the breath to call out to her.
“Dr. Ihara! Please. It’s urgent that I speak with you!”
THREE
Several hours would pass before Roche got the opportunity to further elaborate. Jade’s first priority was ensuring that Rafi received medical attention which involved an ambulance ride to the nearby city of Pisco where the doctor credited her for saving the young man’s life and indicated that he would make a full recovery with no attendant brain damage. The news was welcome though not completely unexpected since Rafi had been completely lucid by the time she returned to him on the beach. The only reason she had insisted on taking him to the hospital was to put a little space between herself and her unexpected visitor.
In all the confusion, she almost completely forgot about the strange crypt under the Cerro Colorado and what she had seen and felt there.
Had any of it been real?
Aside from declaring the dig site a hazard area, due to the possibility of further collapse, she had revealed nothing about what had transpired in the spherical chamber. It definitely was not something she wanted the camera crew or Jeremiah Stillman to know about, but she had hoped to get Professor’s level-headed perspective on what had happened. Unfortunately, Roche’s unexpected arrival had him preoccupied as well.
It was for the best. Professor would just laugh at her and dismiss it as a hallucination, and that was probably all it was.
“I don’t think he’s here looking for trouble,” Professor announced as he joined her in the waiting room outside the hospital ward. He had spent the better part an hour working the phones, trying to trace Roche’s movements and divine his intentions.
“Well, what does he want?” The question came out more harshly than she had intended.
Professor shrugged and spread his hands. “I think the only way you’re going to figure that out is by talking to him.”
“Should I?”
He stared at her for a long time before answering. “Regardless of whether or not you should, I think you probably will. You’re too curious to just walk away.”
“Am I that predictable?”
“‘Predictable’ isn’t a word I would normally associate with you,” he replied with a grin. “But in this case, yes.”
“I really hate you sometimes.”
“Only sometimes?” The grin slipped away. “He’ll only meet with you at the Paracas Museum. He says it’s the only place he feels safe.”
“He feels safe?” She rolled her eyes.
“You don’t need me to tell you that he’s paranoid. There’s no record of him arriving in the country, which means he either bribed someone or used a forged passport. Probably both. He’s definitely trying to move under the radar.”
“It didn’t look to me like he was trying to be inconspicuous at the museum. There were cameras everywhere.”
Professor shrugged. “He’ll be long gone before any of the footage shot today airs. He might be paranoid, but he’s still a celebrity. He thrives on attention.”
Prior to the matter of the Shew Stone, Jade had never heard of Gerald Roche, but she had no difficulty learning all there was to know about the man. A former Minister of Parliament, Roche had achieved notoriety with his astonishing claim that all of reality was a holographic computer simulation, and that world leaders and celebrities were in fact inhuman creatures — he called them “Changelings”—manipulating global events and enslaving humanity. But for his already well-established wealth and influence, Roche would almost certainly have been institutionalized, but instead, he parlayed his bizarre worldview into a multi-media empire — with a radio talk-show and a series of books that delved deep into the changeling conspiracy.
In spite of the sheer lunacy of his ideas, he enjoyed widespread support from a cross-section of British society, even from some intellectuals who claimed that the Changelings were not meant to be taken literally, but were symbolic of the pervasive influence of banks and multi-national corporations in a climate of globalism. Some of his supporters cited recent discoveries in the field of physics as proof that Roche was not far off the mark in asserting that reality was deterministic in nature, playing out like an extraordinarily complex but utterly mathematical computer program.
Among people like Jeremiah Stillman and fans of the Alien Explorers television series, Gerald Roche was a true prophet — maybe even a god — so it was no surprise that he felt right at home surrounded by his acolytes at the museum. He was not, as far as Jade knew, an alien astronaut theorist — in his world, there were no aliens, just renegade computer programs — but the true believers tended to draw inspiration from all across the spectrum of possibilities, turning contradictions into connections with reckless abandon. The only constant in their world was the pervasive conspiracy to hide the truth and silence those who would reveal it.