The stairs went up the side of the tomb, invisible unless one stumbled right into the narrow cut. Che Lu wondered why it had been made. She assumed it was for the warriors who guarded the emperor’s tomb so many centuries ago to be able to move across the mountain from one side to the other without being seen.
Whatever the reason, the steps took them up the mountain to within twenty meters of the hole that Turcotte had blown at the end of the exit to the Airlia storeroom.
By the time they got there, Che Lu could hear men moving in the darkness, commands shouted in foreign tongues, some of which she recognized.
“What is going on?” she asked Lo Fa, who was peeking over the edge of the trench toward the opening.
“I think someone else wants to get into the tomb.” Lo Fa slithered over the edge of the trench, then reached back. “Let us hurry!”
Che Lu took his hand, and he lifted her out. Together they hustled through the dark. Che Lu could see bodies lying about — the soldiers who had been guarding the entrance.
Lo Fa reached the small opening that had been blasted. “Come on, old woman!” Che Lu put her foot into the hole, and Lo Fa hissed. “Don’t move.”
“What?”
Lo Fa was turning, his hands raised. “Look at your chest,” he said.
Che Lu looked down and saw three bright red dots of light on her khaki shirt. “What is it?”
“Laser sights.”
Che Lu put her hands up also as men loomed out of the night and surrounded them.
Turcotte looked down at the body. The walk had taken twenty minutes. He had made sure to control his breathing the entire time, trying to keep the suit’s mask from fogging up. His clothes under the suit were soaked with sweat. The dirt lanes between the buildings had been empty. Turcotte tried to imagine the streets of New York looking like this once the Black Death spread.
Norward was next to him, walking very slowly. They’d left Kenyon trying to get hold of his headquarters at Fort Meade — to no apparent avail. Turcotte knew Kenyon’s scientific methods weren’t going to work. One look at the empty streets told Turcotte this was out of control. The one thing that Kenyon had said that Turcotte did think was valid was that they had to find out how the Black Death had originated.
The river appeared. Several docks stuck out into the brown, murky water. Turcotte recognized the boat from the video.
“That one.” He pointed with a blue arm at a flat-bottomed boat tied up at one of the docks. They made their way out on the shaky wooden pier and onto the boat.
There were two bodies. One was covered with a poncho. The other was slumped, half sitting with its back against the front of the bridge shield.
Harrison had not waited for the Black Death to take him down. Very carefully, Turcotte knelt down. He nudged the pistol in the man’s hand and pushed it away, along the deck. There was something around his neck. Turcotte pulled apart the shirt, ripping it off the open black welts. A thin metal chain. Whatever was on it had slid into Harrison’s left armpit. Turcotte pushed the arm out.
The chain passed through a ring. Harrison must have taken it off recently, as his body began to swell with the infection and his finger wouldn’t take the ring. Turcotte lifted the ring up and looked at it. The face was almost half an inch diameter, slightly bulging. Turcotte was looking at it for several seconds before he realized what the design was — an eye, pupil inside of iris inside of eye. It was the same design as the one that had left the mark on the tree near Duncan’s house in Colorado. Turcotte looked around. There was the smallest of indentations in the forward wood of the bridge. Turcotte checked the ring against it. It fit exactly.
He ripped the ring off the chain and stuck it in his waist pack. He went onto the bridge. There was a leather-bound binder. Turcotte opened it. A map was inside, covered with acetate. Blue marking traced a route from Gurupa near the mouth of the Amazon, upriver thousands of miles.
It passed by Vilhena and continued to the foothills near the border with Bolivia, where it ended. Farther to the west there was a small circle of yellow highlight off the south tip of a lake in Bolivia. Turcotte read the labeclass="underline" Tiahuanaco.
He tucked the binder under his arm. “Let’s go,” he ordered Norward. “Back to the habitat.”
“What is that?” Duncan was staring at a large black helmet that had no mask or eyepieces. She remembered the photos Turcotte had brought back from Scorpion Base. She was trying to concentrate, to make sense of everything, but events hard outpaced her ability to keep track.
“That’s our helmet,” Osebold said.
“How do you see?”
“It’s something that’s come out of the Air Force’s Pilot 2010 Program.” Kopina had walked up and heard the question.
“So what’s this 2010 program thing?”
Osebold answered. “The Air Force knows that their equipment, specifically their jet fighters, are outstripping the men who fly them. Most modern jets are capable of maneuvers that the pilot’s body can’t take. What good does it do to have a jet capable of making a twenty-g turn if the pilot can only handle half that before passing out?”
Duncan thought of the pilots of the bouncers and how that alien craft was far beyond anything the Air Force could develop. How come Area 51 had not had access to this technology was the unspoken question that crossed her mind. Or had it had access to it?
“Also,” Osebold continued, “another big problem is the time lapse between the brain receiving information, processing it, and then executing a response through the nervous system.”
“You’re talking reaction time,” Duncan said.
“Correct. Like the time it takes you to see someone jump out in front of your car to the time your foot is on the brake. In a jet going at several thousand miles an hour, even a tenth of second lapse can lead to a pilot missing a target by dozens of miles.
“Pilot 2010,” he said, “is a program where the Air Force worked on both problems. The TASC-suit utilizes everything they’ve managed to develop, including the SARA link.”
“SARA link?”
“The SARA link is a direct link into the brain. It—”
“Wait a second!” Duncan said. “How does it do that?”
Kopina leaned over the helmet and pointed. “See here?” She was pointing to the interior. There was a black band. She pointed down. There was one around the back part of the head portion. “You can’t see it, but there are very small holes in that black band. Very small,” she repeated.
“The SARA probes come through those holes. They are extremely thin wires that go directly into the brain and—”
“Hold it.” Duncan held up her hand. “Directly into the brain?”
“It’s perfectly safe,” Osebold said. “Scientists have been using thermocouples — which are very similar to the SARA links — for years to study the brain. We’re just taking them to a higher level of use. The wire goes into a specific part of the brain. It’s a two-way feed.”
“Feed of what?”
“Electrical current. That’s how the brain works. The SARA link can send coherent current in and can also read activity in the brain. It’s an extremely sophisticated device, built at almost microscopic levels.”
“You’re putting electric current into the brain?” Duncan thought of the EDM — electrical dissolution of memory — research that they knew for sure had been done at Dulce on the second-to-last level — which had been done to Kelly Reynolds’s friend Johnny Simmons and led to his “suicide.”