Marina sat on the edge of the bed, at the rickety table in MacNeil’s hotel room. Because the Best Western was booked, they’d resorted to taking rooms in the simple, worn, but clean Lake View Motel. Since the busiest season for motels in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan was not during the summer, but during hunting season, Boris was welcomed as well. He wasn’t the first hunting dog to stay in the log cabin inn; in fact, the front desk boasted a sign offering dog dishes upon request. The room smelled like Pine-Sol and smoked whitefish, and its solitary double bed was draped in red plaid flannel — even now, in the middle of summer.
The owners of the motel were so welcoming to Boris, in fact, that their pre-teen son had asked if he could take the dog for a walk along the lake. Marina agreed, knowing that Boris needed some time out of the small motel room.
On the low table in front of her rested the book they’d found in Dad’s hidden cellar. Marina turned the brittle pages and scanned each one, looking for something that she could translate.
The inscriptions were hand-written in some kind of brushed ink. The characters flowed with ornate curlicues and sweeping serifs on the first line of every page, but the rest of the text showed more restraint. The ink was a dark green color, and the fancy letters decorated with blue, red, yellow and violet were not unlike the scripts written by Christian monks in the middle ages of Europe.
How old was this manuscript? What did she hold in her hands? Something more important than the Lam Pao Archive?
The key to an entire world she hadn’t known about … or had forgotten?
Diagrams appeared throughout the text, often taking up a whole page. The same symbol of the Skaladeskas left on the paper in Marina’s office also littered the pages and diagrams.
Marina smoothed her hand over the crinkling, textured pages, staring at words and characters that she knew she’d seen before, struggling to read them, but managing only a word or phrase per page.
But it was there; they were there. Swimming at the edge of her consciousness, ready to burst forth. Sometime.
MacNeil sat on the bed behind her, long legs extended and ankles crossed. He was finishing the last piece from the pizza they’d shared for a late dinner and, she was sure, was waiting impatiently for her to translate the book while he flipped through the news channels. She couldn’t help that her attention kept wandering toward him instead of being focused on the pages in front of her. Gabe had seemed to warm considerably toward her since they’d left Ann Arbor.
Bergstrom had returned to Langley, leaving the two of them to spend another day at the ruins of her father’s house. If only Gabe would leave to get some air, instead of alternately glowering impatiently or checking her out when he thought she didn’t notice. It was the latter that befuddled her more than the impatience. His restlessness she could handle. But the other, the subtle awareness of her…well, that was unsettling.
Not necessarily in a bad way.
“Are you getting anywhere?” he finally asked. He walked over to the small wastebasket, already overflowing with the pizza box Bergstrom had tried to jam in there, and shoved in the wad of paper towels he’d been using as a plate. “I’d like to give Bergstrom something when I call.”
“I think I recognize a few words, articles and pronouns mostly. The word ‘Gaia’ appears quite often — the goddess of the earth.”
“Isn’t Gaia a Greek word?” MacNeil asked, surprising her.
“Yes. I always wondered about that; how a small tribe in Siberia used a Greek name for their goddess.”
Marina smoothed her hand over the rippled, translucent paper. “I wonder what this is made of, if it’s some kind of ancient text … or just the way they make books in Skala Land.”
“You can’t read anything else?”
“Not now. Maybe later it will come back to me. It’s … familiar, but I can’t read it now. I feel like I’m on the verge of the language flooding back into my memory ….”
Perhaps if she took a break; let her mind wander, it might shift into place. “You agreed to tell me what you know about this whole mess. Now would be a good time to tell me why you think a small tribe of earth-worshippers in Siberia are a threat to the US. Or my Dad. They are his people, after all.”
MacNeil sank onto the only chair in the room, which was next to the wastebasket. His blue eyes became sharp as he settled wide, tanned hands over his belt. “Do you remember the sarin gas attack on the Japanese subway in 1995?”
“Of course. It was conducted by a small religious cult. Oh, I see where you’re going with this ….”
“Aum Shinrikyo. Yes, they were a relatively unknown religious cult that had been overlooked by Japanese intelligence until their leader, Shoko Asahara, induced them to execute the attack. Five thousand people were injured, and the Japanese were taken completely by surprise. They knew practically nothing about the group — and certainly didn’t consider it any kind of threat — until it was much too late.”
“But Aum is a doomsday cult, and they conducted the attack because they believed it would help bring on the Apocalypse. There’s absolutely nothing to indicate that the Skaladeskas are violent, or preaching the end of the world as Aum was. They’re simply a small religious cult. Harmless.”
“The fact is, any religion can go bad. When there are fundamentalists of any faith or cult, we see it happen. They make absolute truth claims, require blind obedience from their followers … declare their version of a holy war. And it’s true that the Skaladeskas may be harmless, as you say. But Bergstrom and I aren’t going to be looking in the mirror at our guilty faces the day after the shit hits the fan if they aren’t. There will be no Aum Shinrikyo on my watch. No horrific surprises.”
“Does the CIA expend this much energy and expense to investigate every small, insignificant religious cult?” she asked.
“Since 9/11, since the sarin gas attack, since Kuala Pohr—remember them? — no one in national security is insane enough to take the chance on letting something slip by. Believe it or not, we’re serious about proactively saving lives.”
Marina looked at him. He’d become intense and irritated. She wondered if he and Bergstrom had been touched by the great ball-dropping between the CIA, the Feds, and the NSA that had resulted in 9/11.
“I see your point in that you have to keep an eye on things,” she conceded. After all, that was part of the reason she’d agreed to help. If something happened to Dad, it’d be on her conscience, along with all the other baggage he already represented. Like she needed anything else weighing her down.
“But I can’t believe Dad would be involved in something like that; and I can’t believe that a small band of earth-worshippers would pose a threat to the any of us. They probably live in caves or huts and live off the land. Harmless.”
“But if they subscribe to the Gaia Hypothesis, which says, according to you, that the earth moves to correct anything that threatens it … perhaps they might find a reason to correct something they perceive as a threat to their goddess. Think of the fundamentalist Muslims — part of the reason we don’t get along is because they believe we are controlled by money, capitalism. And in fact, there is an indication that the Skaladeskas might not be as harmless as you think.”
“Ah. Now we come to the crux of the matter,” Marina replied. “There is something you’ve held back. Why didn’t you tell me this from the beginning, instead of blathering on about Dad’s disappearance and the whole story you gave me about protecting him?”
“That’s Colin’s story. There are some things he hasn’t told me, and I haven’t pushed him because I know he has his reasons. But the fact is, the reason we’re looking for your father, is because there is a possibility that those earthquakes last Friday were man-made. Caused by the Skaladeskas.”