Changeling

ONE

“Aliens!”

The familiar refrain echoed across the open stretch of sand, setting Jade Ihara’s teeth on edge. “I swear to God,” she muttered, “if he says that one more time, I’m going to personally start an intergalactic war.”

Beside her, Pete “Professor” Chapman chuckled. “Careful, now. Don’t get caught on camera biting the hand that feeds.”

“Easy for you to say,” Jade retorted. “You’re not the one watching your career slowly circling the drain. I can’t believe I ever thought this was a good idea.”

Nevertheless, she stopped and glanced around to make sure that their conversation was not being captured on video. They were already a hundred yards away from the squat museum complex — Jade thought it looked more like a police station or a military base than a repository of ancient culture — which seemed to be the focus of attention for the camera crew, but she knew Professor’s admonition was warranted. With modern technology, it was sometimes hard to tell when the cameras were rolling. While the crew of Alien Explorers—a cable television documentary program with a penchant for making elaborate connections between ancient civilizations and little green men — did most of their work with state-of-art video and audio production equipment, she knew they also liked to sometimes fold in candid footage shot with handheld digital video cameras and even smart phones, which in the final edit, gave the finished product a sort of gritty verisimilitude.

The arrival of the video crew still rankled her. Jade realized now that that deal with the production company had probably been in place long before she was hired and there was little doubt in her mind that her sex and physical appearance — the daughter of Japanese and Hawaiian parents, she had been called an ‘exotic’ so many times, the line made her want to throw up — had played a more important part in her selection for the archaeological crew than had her expertise. Her employer — or more accurately, an attorney from the legal department of the foundation that was sponsoring the dig — had made it clear that she was to give full cooperation and support to the cable television producers who had taken over the site.

Camera-friendly good looks notwithstanding, after two days of watching her carefully excavate tomb shafts, the crew had mostly lost interest in her. The on-site interview with Jeremiah Stillman, publisher of the fringe magazine Alien Legends, and esteemed “extraterrestrial astronaut theorist” who had arrived late the previous evening, was much more engaging than watching Jade removing dirt by the teaspoonful. Still, a viral video outing her as a skeptic would definitely not be a good thing.

Aside from Professor, the only other person to hear her was an intern, Rafi Massoud, and he was part of her team, not the production crew.

“You’re not going to rat me out, are you Rafi?”

The young man, a second-generation Arab-American and a student at UCLA, raised his hands in an exaggerated display of innocence. “I’m with you, Dr. Ihara. That guy’s a kook. No way am I putting any of this on my CV.”

“Oh, don’t be so Old School,” said Professor. He cocked his felt Explorer fedora forward in a near perfect imitation of Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones. “Everyone craves the spotlight, even the Ivy League guys. Trust me, no one is going to think less of you — academically speaking — for doing your job on camera, even if they edit it to make it look like you’re saying something you aren’t.”

“I know,” Jade sighed. “But…” She nodded toward the front of the museum where Stillman was holding up an unusually shaped human skull, which he claimed to have found while roaming the dunes, and gesticulating emphatically. In her best approximation of his voice, she said: “Aliens!”

Professor grinned. “It sells. Better, it gets the kids interested. Admit it, you’re secretly hoping that we do find something not of this world. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have taken the job.”

“Not true. I took the job for the money. That’s why it’s called a job.”

He was not completely wrong, though. While she had spent the last eight months doing very little that could be described as archaeology — long distance guest lecturing via telepresence and researching possible future projects — Jade had passed up several opportunities to get back in the field simply because the invitations were even less interesting than being cooped up in a library with a stack of dusty old books.

There were other reasons for her professional hiatus, however. To borrow a cliché from criminal parlance, Jade Ihara had been laying low.

Several years earlier, her search for the legendary pre-Columbian city of Cibola had put her in the cross-hairs of the notorious international quasi-religious criminal conspiracy known as the Dominion. She had subsequently tangled with them on numerous occasions, and in so doing, had painted a target on her back. The Dominion, in all its many forms, was obsessed with ancient symbols of power — artifacts that might be used to solidify their grip on the world, and which might, as she had seen more than once, actually possess supernatural attributes. As even more recent events had demonstrated, the Dominion was not the only enemy who might want to do her harm, which was how Professor had come to be her constant companion.

A former Navy SEAL and a genius in his own right — he came by his nickname honestly, with two post-graduate degrees — Professor was now working, in a semi-official capacity, for a division of the Central Intelligence Agency, acting as both a bodyguard for Jade and a sort of watchman, on the lookout for anything that might hint at some new threat, while at the same time, using his own not inconsiderable body of knowledge to buttress his cover as her research assistant. It was not the cush assignment that some of his peers might have imagined. The threats Jade faced were real, and all the more ominous since there was no way of knowing from where the next attack would come. And, if she was honest with herself, Jade knew that she could be a bit… prickly.

She liked Professor, liked him enough to entertain the possibility that their relationship might someday extend beyond the professional, beyond friendship, but she also knew that was a bad idea. He was now her closest friend and confidant, and if they took things to the next level and it went horribly wrong — something that seemed to happen whenever she led with her heart — it would ruin the perfectly acceptable status quo.

On Professor’s advice, she had spent the last eight months on what could only be charitably termed as a ‘sabbatical.’ She had spent a lot of time in the water, snorkeling in Waimea Bay and surfing the North Shore of Oahu waiting for Professor to give her the signal that it was safe to go back to her old life. After six months, the tedium had become unbearable and over his objections — truth be told, he was a bit overprotective — she had started looking for work again, whereupon she had quickly been reacquainted with the reality of just how boring, not to mention political, archaeology could sometimes be.

The offer to work at Wari Kayan, the ancient necropolis of the Paracas culture on the slopes of Cerro Colorado in Peru however had been too intriguing to pass up, partly because the expedition was being underwritten by a not-for-profit foundation with very deep pockets — a welcome change from the miserliness of academia — but mostly because it was a chance to lay her hands on one of the most sensational discoveries in modern archaeology: the Paracas skulls.

The Paracas culture had inhabited the western slopes of the Andes mountain range from 1200 BCE until their eventual assimilation into the Nazca culture which endured until about 750 CE before fading almost completely from history. Although the Paracas produced astonishingly beautiful polychrome ceramic ware and intricately patterned textiles, their greatest claim to notoriety stemmed from the relatively recent discovery of unusual elongated human skulls in Paracas burial shafts.

There was no great mystery to the skulls. The Paracas, like many other ancient cultures throughout North America and indeed, the rest of the world, had practiced a form of body modification known as “artificial cranial deformation.” In early infancy, Paracas children would have their heads bound tightly with blankets and sometimes wood planks, which had the effect of distorting the natural shape of the skull as it grew and hardened. The practice had been observed in several extant societies well into the 20th century and was in fact still done in some remote Pacific island cultures. It was generally believed that the reason for the custom was primarily aesthetic; ordinary round skulls evidently weren’t considered sexy enough.

The discovery of deformed skulls on the Paracas peninsula would have been simply another footnote, but for the close proximity of another intriguing archaeological mystery. A hundred miles away in the remote Nazca desert, an ancient civilization had created hundreds of enormous geoglyphs — shapes of animals and other elaborate geometric patterns — which were so large that the only way to identify them was looking down from altitude. Some scholars even speculated that it would have been necessary to have an aerial perspective in order to execute the patterns. In the latter half of the 20th century, the so-called Nazca Lines had provided fodder for alien astronaut theorists like Erich Von Daniken, who cobbled together a patchwork hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitors posing as gods, influencing ancient cultures and facilitating the creation of everything from the pyramids of Egypt to the moai statues of Easter Island, with little regard for the fact that most of the cherry-picked “evidence” to support the idea was easily explained without the influence of visiting alien astronauts.

Jeremiah Stillman was not the first UFO enthusiast to connect the deformed skulls found at Paracas, which did sort of look like Hollywood’s vision of an extraterrestrial creature, to the nearby Nazca lines, but he had been fortunate enough to live in the Information Age, where cable television and the Internet provided a platform for conspiracy theorists and fringe scientists to publicize their ideas without any meaningful scrutiny. Stillman had been quick to glom onto a persistent, and completely fraudulent, claim that genetic testing conducted on the Paracas skulls had yielded alien DNA. When confronted with the evidence, the “expert” had defended his position by alleging a government conspiracy to suppress the truth, a common and completely unassailable strategy for the true believers.

Yet, despite the fact that Jade found Stillman both professionally and personally distasteful, she could not completely discount the possibility that he and other alien astronaut theorists might be onto something. The Nazca Lines, which incorporated Paracas motifs, were unusual, and while much of what was generally believed about them was exaggerated — you didn’t need to be in orbit to see them — there was no good explanation for why they had been made. Similarly, while artificial cranial deformation was well-understood, it was reasonable to ask why, throughout a thousand years of history and prehistory, people all over the world had made a conscious decision to change the shape of their children’s skulls. Was it possible that they were trying to make themselves look more like their “gods”?

Jade knew from personal experience that almost anything was possible. She had seen too many strange things in her travels to dismiss anything out of hand.

It was unlikely in the extreme that she would find anything remotely resembling proof — one way or the other — in her excavation at the Wari Kayan necropolis, located on the Paracas Peninsula of Peru. It was virtually impossible to prove a negative hypothesis — the non-existence of aliens or absence of alien involvement with the Paracas culture — and even if she found something that refuted the popular theories of men like Stillman, such evidence would do little to shake the faith of the true believers. Such was not her intention however. She wasn’t looking for proof any more than she was looking for fortune and glory. She was a digger, interested only in finding things that had been lost to the ages.

They made the short trek across the virtually barren sand dunes to the foot of the rocky rise known as the Cerro Colorado ridge, where the ancient Paracas had laid their dead to rest in vertical shafts cut into the summit. Several of these had been found, most pillaged by grave robbers, but several more remained unexcavated.

Jade picked her way up the sixty-foot slope, following a well-trod but unmarked route used by both archaeologists and tourists, and made her way to one of the target sites they had identified during the initial survey a week earlier. She shrugged out of her backpack, removing from it the tools of her trade — a small plastic trowel, an icepick, and a stiff bristled brush — and then squatted down beside the sand-filled shaft to commence digging into the past. Professor and Rafi moved to different sites and did the same.

She worked methodically, spooning out sand quickly without screening it. Unlike a habitation site — a former village or city ruin — there was little chance of discovering artifacts in the upper layers of fill, and in the unlikely event that she did, the plastic blade of the trowel would do little if any damage. The work proceeded quickly as she fell into a familiar rhythm, and soon she had cleared a knee-deep pit nearly five feet across. She was just about to lower herself into the hole when Rafi called out to her. She rose slowly to avoid a head-rush, and then hiked over to see what the student had discovered.

Rafi had made faster progress than she, removing several cubic feet of dirt from a shaft. He now stood in the shoulder-deep pit shining a small flashlight down at the sand underfoot. Centered in the cone of illumination was a brown-gray protrusion that she immediately recognized as the top of an elongated skull.

“Good work,” she said, approvingly. “Is it human or…” She arched her eyebrows in an approximation of Stillman’s trademarked enthusiasm. “Alien!”

Rafi laughed with her, then bent down and tried to wiggle the skull loose. “I’ll tell you in a—”

The skull came free easier than expected, and then, as if he had pulled the plug from a drain, the sand beneath Rafi began to move, sliding into the void the removal had created. He let out a yelp of surprise, and then dropped several inches into a swirling vortex of sand.

Jade threw herself flat on the ground at the edge of the pit and thrust a hand down at the imperiled Rafi. She caught hold of his wrist, but in the instant that she did, the ground beneath his feet gave way completely. He only outweighed her by about twenty pounds, but with no time to brace herself, Jade was yanked headfirst into the pit. She scraped past the rocky edge of the excavation so quickly that she did not even have time to think about letting go of Rafi’s arm, and then she was falling headfirst into the yawning blackness.

TWO

The fall lasted only a moment or two and ended with a plunge into chilly brackish water, which was, Jade supposed, preferable to slamming face first into solid rock. An instant after the splashdown, a thrashing Rafi struck her with enough force to knock the wind out of her. For a few seconds thereafter, she struggled to right herself while fighting back the panic of being unable to breathe while enveloped in near-total darkness. She groped for something to hang onto, noticed a spot of light high overhead and oriented toward it like a beacon.

“Dr. Ihara!” Rafi called from somewhere nearby. “Are you all right?”

She tried to answer but no sound came out. Then, with a gasp, she caught her breath. “Okay,” she managed. “I’m okay. What the hell just happened?”

It was a rhetorical question, she knew what had happened, but Rafi answered anyway. “The shaft must have been dug right over a cave or a sinkhole. It collapsed. A cave-in.”

Jade took several breaths to steady herself, and then stared up at the opening overhead. Judging by its size, she estimated it to be a good fifty feet above them. Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness, but aside from Rafi treading water nearby, there was nothing to see. The walls and ceiling of the cave remained beyond the limit of her vision.

She tilted her head toward the opening. “Professor!”

Her shout rebounded from the unseen walls with a harshness that set her teeth on edge, but a moment later, the light from the opening dimmed, partially eclipsed by Professor’s silhouette. “Jade! What happened?”

Rafi started to answer but Jade cut him off. “Tell you all about it later.” She grimaced as her voice echoed back, almost painfully loud. “Right now, we could use some rope.”

“On it,” Professor replied. “Don’t run off.”

“Haha. Funny guy.” The light grew noticeably brighter as Professor moved away, and Jade realized that her night-vision was continuing to improve, though that was about the only bright spot, literal or otherwise, about the situation. She faced Rafi again. “I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of swimming. Let’s try to find somewhere high and dry.”

Rafi nodded, then jerked abruptly as if he’d been stung. He whipped his head to the right and peered into the darkness. “What was that?”

Jade was instantly on guard, searching the unplumbed depths of the cave. “What? What did you see?”

Rafi did not answer immediately, but kept turning his head in fits and starts. “I… I’m not sure. I saw some… thing… moving in the corner of my eye.”

“Something? Can you be a little more specific? Something bigger than a breadbox? Something with teeth and claws?”

The intern shrugged helplessly. “A shape. I thought it was a… It looked like a person, but—” He jolted again, spinning nearly halfway around. “There. Did you see it?”

Jade frowned. She had not seen anything and she was fairly certain that there was not actually anything to see, which meant that Rafi was either messing with her — unlikely, since he had not demonstrated the least inclination toward playfulness, and still insisted on calling her “Dr. Ihara”—or he was hallucinating.

Hypothermia?

The water was cold but she didn’t think it was cold enough for that. Regardless, immersion was not doing their health any favors. There was a tingling in her scalp and pressure building behind her eye sockets like the beginning of a sinus headache. The sensation had been there all along, probably the result of the impact with Rafi, but it seemed to be growing in intensity. “There’s nothing there, Rafi,” she insisted. “Come on. Let’s try to get out of the water.”

He returned a tentative nod and then began dog-paddling toward her. She rolled over was about to head out in a random direction when she caught a glimpse of someone floating beside her. She snapped her head sideways but there was nobody there.

“You saw it, didn’t you?” Rafi said, his tone verging toward hysteria. “There’s something here. We’re not alone.”

“There’s nothing there, Rafi. We’re jumping at shadows.” Even as she said it, Jade glimpsed movement again. Damn. Now he’s got me doing it.

“They aren’t shadows,” Rafi insisted. “Think about where we are. This was their burial place.”

“Ghosts, Rafi? Seriously?” She tried to inject an appropriate level of disdain into her voice but the chilly water and the throbbing behind her eyeballs was taking its toll. The best she could manage was a nervous quaver. “You don’t believe in that stuff anymore than I do. You’re just psyching yourself out.”

She actually did not know what his personal beliefs on the subject of the afterlife were. Religion was a topic they had never discussed. He was an Arab-American, which meant there was a better than average chance that he was Muslim — his cultural heritage had in fact recommended him for the job, since it was extremely unlikely that he would be a sleeper agent for the religious extremists with whom Jade had tangled in the past — but up to this point, Rafi had been very private about the practice of his faith.

“I don’t know what to believe. What if he’s right? Stillman, I mean. What if the Paracas were part alien or something?”

Jade’s first impulse was to scoff, but two things stopped her: the terror in the young man’s voice, and the presence of a very human-looking shape in the periphery of her vision. She resisted the urge to look directly at it, and to her astonishment, it remained there, hovering at the edge of her perceptions.

She didn’t know if it was a ghost, or an alien, or the ghost of an alien, but something was definitely there.

No, she told herself. There’s nothing there. You know better.

“Ignore them,” she told Rafi. “They haven’t done anything to hurt us. Maybe they don’t even know that we’re here. Maybe they’re just an echo of something that happened in the past.”

She felt foolish talking about the hallucinations — that was what they were, she decided, what they had to be — as if they were something real, but her subconscious mind refused to accept that they were not.

“Yes.” Rafi grasped at the explanation eagerly. “That makes sense.”

Jade did not think it made a lick of sense, but if it was enough to get her young companion moving, that was good enough. She began swimming again, paddling away from the scant light filtering down into the cave, and into its dark unknown depths. Despite the fact that everything else was shrouded in impenetrable murk, the shapes floating at the corner of her eye remained every bit as vivid, which meant that they were almost certainly some kind of optical illusion — not a true hallucination, but something else, like the visual aura from a migraine or phosphenes, the phenomenon more commonly known as “seeing stars.” The fact that both she and Rafi were seeing them, not to mention the sudden onset of her increasingly intense headache, might indicate an environmental factor — toxic gas or fungal spores in the air — which meant it was imperative that they find a way out as soon as possible.

“Ignore them,” she said again. “Swim.”

She struck out again, stroking and kicking into the shadowed unknown. The ghost images remained with her, but she did her best to put what she was seeing out of her mind. She succeeded only when one outstretched hand brushed against a slick wet but very solid wall of stone.

“Found something!”

Rafi did not answer but she could hear the splash of his strokes, still several feet behind her. She could not see him but the ghosts were still there, haunting the edge of her vision.

She explored the wall with both hands. It was unnaturally smooth, almost certainly the product of human artifice. This was no sinkhole, but a man-made underground chamber, probably a burial crypt used by the Paracas.

Despite the dire circumstances, Jade felt a surge of excitement at the unexpected discovery. She had not dared to hope to find anything like this.

“A way out?” gasped Rafi coming alongside her.

“No. Not yet, at least.” She moved along the wall and as she did, her knees bumped against it. The wall was not a sheer vertical surface, but curved toward her like the inside of a bowl.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice might say, she thought. But the only thing that mattered now was getting out.

“This is salt water,” Rafi said. “This cave must connect to the ocean.”

Jade had already come to a similar conclusion, but they were at least half a mile from shore. If there was a tunnel or passage, and if by some miracle it was big enough to accommodate them, it would almost certainly be completely inundated.

One ‘if’ at a time.

She filled her lungs with air and then ducked her head under the water, sliding along the convex wall. Just a few feet below the surface, she encountered loose debris — pieces of rock, possibly dislodged in the collapse that had deposited her and Rafi in the chamber.

Something flashed just at the limit of her field of vision. Her first thought was that the ghosts had followed her underwater, except that this time when she involuntarily turned her head to look the specter did not disappear. A faint yellow glow was emanating from the floor of the chamber.

It was Rafi’s flashlight, still shining despite being immersed in sea water and half-buried under the rock fall. She grasped hold of it and was rewarded with a bright shaft of yellow illumination that revealed the true dimensions of the chamber.

And something else. An opening, as smooth and round as the chamber walls. She kicked toward it and thrust the hand with the flashlight into its depths. The light revealed a smooth borehole that went on well beyond the reach of her eyes.

A long swim, she thought.

Maybe too long. Professor would be back with a rope. The smart thing to do was stay put and wait to be rescued.

She ducked her head inside and swam forward.

Just a little ways, she promised herself. As far as she could go before her lungs demanded she head back to take another breath.

The distinctive sound of a splash reached her ears. There was an air pocket above her. She surfaced, letting her breath out slowly while allowing the unfamiliar atmosphere to waft into her nostrils. It smelled like the ocean.

As she breathed in, cautiously at first, then eagerly, she surveyed her new environment. The air pocket was not an isolated bubble but occupied the ceiling of the passage, stretching out as far as she could see.

Better, she thought. There was no guarantee that this route would not lead to an impassable dead end but there was air to breathe and turning back was always an option.

She filled her lungs again, and dove beneath the surface, kicking hard to reach the chamber where Rafi waited. She broke the surface and found the shivering student ducking away from an invisible assault.

The ghosts.

She had almost forgotten about them, but almost from the moment her head broke the water they were there again, lurking just out of view. Worse, the pain behind her eyes, which she now realized had abated somewhat during her initial exploration of the passage, returned with a vengeance.

It’s definitely something about this chamber, she thought. And whatever it is, I don’t want to spend another second here.

“Rafi! Come on. This way. We’re getting out of here.” She seized hold of his arm and pointed down, signaling for him to follow.

A few seconds later, they were both in the air pocket. The pain in her skull immediately relented and the hallucinations ceased as well. Jade did not pause to offer an explanation. Instead, she began immediately paddling down the length of the tunnel. Rafi followed along without question but it was plainly obvious that the change of scenery had energized him.

She swam the length of the passage, more than a hundred yards, noticing all the while that the ceiling overhead was getting closer. Her first thought was the passage was sloping down, but when there was just six-inches of air above her, she realized what was actually happening. The water level was rising with the tide. In a few more minutes, the tunnel would be completely filled and the precious air pocket would be gone.

Crap.

“Rafi! Big breaths!” She gulped in air, filling her lungs to their full and rarely used capacity. Her body rose until she was nearly horizontal, her back scraping against the smooth ceiling. “Stay close,” she called, letting the breath out and immediately sinking back. “And whatever you do, don’t stop swimming.”

She took another deep inhalation and then plunged downward, paddling and stroking furiously.

The flashlight revealed the long, smooth-bore tunnel, as straight and perfect as a length of steel pipe, seemingly without end. Her strokes felt sluggish, the effect of the incoming tide pushing against her like a current, but she did not relent.

A faint spasm in her diaphragm reminded her of the need to breathe. She ignored it but knew it was only the first of many to come. Before long, her lungs would begin to burn from the buildup of too much carbon dioxide, and while she knew that she was capable of pushing through even that discomfort, Rafi did not have her experience or training. If she was feeling it, then he was probably already starting to panic.

She did not look back. Salvation, if any existed at all, lay ahead. The exchange of tide water strongly suggested an outlet to the ocean, but how far away that outlet was and whether it would be large enough to let them through were variables beyond her control.

In the glow of the flashlight, she spotted something that gave her reason for hope. The floor and walls of the tunnel were dotted with sea life — anemones and mollusks — just a few here and there at first, but increasing into a veritable ecosystem, supplied with nutrients by the relentless ebb and flow of the tides.

The light suddenly revealed a barrier directly ahead, filling the tunnel from top to bottom. Before she could process what she was seeing, much less even think about slowing, Jade collided with the obstacle which was not a solid mass but rather a collection of fibrous stalks, like slimy ferns. Her momentum carried her through and she found herself abruptly enfolded in a literal sea of green. Daylight, almost intensely bright after the darkness of the submerged passage, filtered down through the water to reveal the blurry tidal zone.

Jade swam for the light, kicking furiously even as her lungs screamed for the fresh air that she knew lay just a few more feet above. The light grew brighter and the water warmer as she neared the surface which remained maddeningly out of reach for several seconds, and then, as if shot from an undersea cannon, she burst through.

For a moment, all she could think about was sucking in fresh air, but after the burning sensation in her chest began to abate, she began to orient herself. An incoming swell lifted her high enough to see the white water frothing on the golden beach and just beyond that, she could make out the museum, a few parked vehicles, and a small cluster of people gathered in front of the structure. Further away rose the rocky ridge of the Cerro Colorado, and somewhere up there, Professor was probably trying to figure out what had happened to them.

“Rafi!” She spun around in the water, calling out and searching for him, but there was no sign of the young intern.

She rotated forward and thrust her head once more beneath the water. Nothing moved in the blurry foreground. Rafi was still in the tunnel.

She kicked hard, clawing back into the depths. A brown smudge of disturbed silt marked the spot where she had broken through the kelp. Reaching it was a Sisyphusian struggle against buoyancy but she did not give up. After what seemed an eternity, she caught hold of the seaweed and pulled herself into the concealed opening.

Rafi floated motionless, fifty feet away. Jade did not hesitate to swim toward him. That he had drowned was plainly obvious, but that did not mean he was beyond resuscitation. Regardless, she was not going to leave him behind.

As soon as she reached him, she grasped his head in her hands and pulled his face close, pressing her lips to his, exhaling a breath into his mouth. She hoped that would be enough to bring him back, but the air simply bubbled back out, pooling on the ceiling of the tunnel like droplets of quicksilver.

She let go of his head and grabbed the back of his shirt collar instead, dragging him along as she began kicking back toward the mouth of the tunnel. His dead weight slowed her down and before she could reach that intermediate goal, the primal urge to breathe seized her once more, tearing at her lungs like a desperate animal caught in a snare. She fought back, using every trick she knew to fool her nervous system, blundered through the mass of kelp blocking the tunnel and clawed her way back to the surface.

As soon as she broke through, she exhaled another rescue breath into Rafi’s mouth, then rolled him over and commenced a one-handed backstroke toward shore. The incoming tide which had nearly killed her in the tunnel now worked in her favor, supplying added impetus to her efforts. Lazy swells propelled her ever closer, but in the sheltered bay on the eastern shore of the peninsula there were no breakers to carry them into shore. She kept swimming until, at long last, she felt the coarse sand bumping against her knees.

Her arrival went unnoticed by the crowd gathered in front of the museum more than five hundred yards away. She tried to call for help but her croaked supplication was barely loud enough for her to hear it over the low murmur of the sea, so she abandoned the effort and turned her full attention to Rafi, dragging him up above the tide line. As soon as there was relatively solid ground beneath her, she started chest compressions.

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.

“What about my safety?” she said, with more than a little sarcasm. Although Roche had surprised her by showing up without warning, she was not scared of him in the least.

“Like I said, I don’t think he wants trouble. He obviously knew where to find you. If he wanted to hurt you, he could have hired someone.”

“That’s not his style.” Jade recalled her first meeting with Roche, which had taken place in Roche’s London flat. He had invited her in like a spider welcoming a fly into its web. “He likes to play games.”

“You can always tell him to get lost.”

She sighed. “No. You’re right. I am curious. Besides, I beat him once. I can do it again.”

“Like I said. Predictable.”

There were no cameras waiting for them at the museum. In fact, there was only one car in the parking lot when they pulled up — a black Land Rover almost identical to the rented vehicle Jade and Professor were riding in — and no sign of the production company or anyone else outside the squat little concrete structure, save for a single burly man guarding the museum door. He wore a black suit, cut loose to accommodate his bulging biceps. Jade did not recognize the man, but it was safe to assume that he was Roche’s bodyguard.

“Guy looks like Randy Couture,” Professor observed as they strolled toward the entrance.

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

The man took a step forward as if to block their passage. “Just her.”

“Looks like Couture,” Professor amended, “but sounds like Statham. You’re like the whole cast of the Expendables all rolled into one.”

Jade flashed him a quizzical look then turned to the bodyguard. “I’m not going in there without him.”

The big man shook his head. “Mr. Roche’s orders.”

Jade stared up at him for a moment then shrugged and started to turn away, but Roche’s voice issued from beyond the door. “Let them in, Jonathan.”

“That’s right, Jonathan,” Professor taunted. “Let us in.”

The surly bodyguard moved out of the way without comment. As Jade stepped toward the door, she leaned close to Professor. “What the hell was that about? You channeling Bones or something?”

“Bones”—Uriah Bonebrake — was one of Professor’s former SEAL swim buddies, and had a terminal case of “no filter” syndrome. A hulking six-feet five-inches, Bones could say whatever he pleased — and frequently did. Professor may not have been as physically imposing as Bones, but he was no pushover. Generally speaking though, he kept a low profile. Testosterone-fueled posturing was definitely not his style.

“Just testing a hypothesis,” Professor whispered, throwing a faint nod in the direction of the bodyguard. “I pushed and he didn’t push back. The guy’s a pro.”

“Why does that matter?”

“I’m not sure yet, but if he’s hiring former military for protection, maybe your old pal Roche isn’t just paranoid after all.”

Roche was waiting for them inside.

“Where’d everyone go?” Jade asked him.

“I sent them away,” Roche said

“You sent them away? What, you just asked nicely?”

“I have a great deal of influence, both with the museum and the producers of Alien Explorers.”

Roche sounded almost apologetic. Jade searched his face for some hint of treachery but saw none of the arrogance she recalled from their first meeting. Roche looked truly frightened. He stared at Professor warily for a moment before turning to Jade. “Do you trust him?”

It was an odd question, but then Roche was nothing if not odd. “Of course,” she replied.

“How long have you known him?”

“A few years. Why?”

Roche scrutinized Professor’s face again. “Ask him a question, something about your first meeting that no one else would know.”

“Seriously?” Jade put her hands on her hips. “I don’t have time for this. Get to the point or I’m out of here.”

Roche made no effort to hide his irritation. “This is the point, Dr. Ihara. You have no idea what they are capable of. I need an assurance.”

“They?”

“The Changelings. They’re here. They’re everywhere. Do you think what happened to you this morning was a coincidence?”

“No. I think it was an accident.”

Roche laughed harshly. “There are no accidents, Dr. Ihara. No coincidences.”

“It’s okay, Jade” Professor said. “Now I’m curious. Ask me something.”

Jade shook her head. She was done playing Roche’s game. “I said, I trust him. Now, what do you want?”

Roche’s nostrils flared but then he made a dismissive gesture. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. They already know what I’m about to tell you.”

Instead of answering her question however, Roche turned and headed further into the museum, the tacit implication that she should follow. He made his way to a private office and settled wearily into the chair behind a desk cluttered with papers and a scattering of Paracas artifacts. An elongated skull rested on one corner, looking more like a cheap paperweight than the remains of a once-living human being. Roche drummed his fingers on the desktop as if trying to organize his thoughts, then looked up at Jade. “You found something today, didn’t you?”

“If you call a sinkhole and an underground tidal cave ‘something,’ then yes.”

“That’s all you found?”

Jade managed, with an effort, to keep her face a neutral mask.

He knows about the ghosts. Somehow, he knows.

She glanced over at Professor, wondering how much to reveal. “Pretty much. I haven’t had time to conduct a survey. There’s no evidence that the Paracas used the sinkhole or even knew about it.” She thought about the smooth walls of the chamber and the precision of the tunnel leading out into the bay, and knew that was not strictly true. “But even if they did, I would imagine that two thousand years of immersion in salt water would have destroyed anything they might have left.” She paused a beat. “What’s your interest? This doesn’t seem like your usual thing.”

“Everything is connected, Dr. Ihara. The Changelings have been among us longer than all of recorded history. However, I will confess to a particular interest in the Paracas and Nazca cultures.”

“Ah. Let me guess. The skulls aren’t aliens, they’re Changelings.”

Roche gave a patient smile. “I took the name ‘Changeling’ from faerie mythology. Are you familiar with it? According to the legend, the faeries would sometimes steal human infants from their cradle and leave a fae shape-shifter child behind in its place, like a sort of supernatural sleeper agent. How would you know if your child had been taken?”

He reached out and let his hand caress the oblong skull resting on the desk. “I believe the Paracas — and many other civilizations that practice extreme body modification techniques — did so as a way of ensuring the humanity of their children. The Changelings might be able to alter their appearance, but bone structure would be more of a challenge.”

He raised his eyes to Jade. “That’s my hypothesis in any case, but I’m no expert on American cultures. That’s why I hired you.”

“You hired me?”

“My foundation is sponsoring your work here.”

Jade shot Professor an accusing glance. “Is that true?” It had been his job to vet any potential employers to ensure that a job offer was not some kind of trap to lure her into the open. “How did you miss that?”

“My involvement in the foundation is a closely guarded secret,” Roche went on before Professor could respond. “For my own safety. If they knew…” He shook his head and left the ominous statement hanging. “I wanted you here, Dr. Ihara, because despite the unpleasantness of our previous encounter, I knew that you were the one person I could trust.”

“You’re not making any sense, though I suppose that’s par for the course with you. Oh, by the way, I quit.”

“Dr. Ihara, please hear me out.” The fear she had noticed earlier in his eyes was back. “The noose is tightening. I may not…” He took a deep breath. “I may not survive this. I have to tell someone.”

Professor laid a hand on her arm. “Jade, let’s hear what he has to say. What could it hurt?”

A dozen rejoinders popped into her head but she knew Professor was right. The curiosity that had brought her to this meeting remained unsatisfied. “Fine.” She stabbed an emphatic finger at Roche. “But I don’t trust you.”

Roche gave her a relieved smile as if distrust was her most compelling personality trait. He sat up straighter. “Have you ever heard of Phantom Time?”

Jade almost groaned aloud. “Phantom time?”

“Actually,” Professor said, almost before Jade had finished. “I have.”

She threw him a sidelong glance. “Why am I not surprised?”

Long before finishing his first PhD, Professor had earned his nickname with his almost encyclopedic knowledge of trivia.

But still…phantom time?

“Is it as bad as it sounds?” she asked. “Because it sounds like the name of a really bad science fiction movie.”

“Even worse,” he replied. “The Phantom Time hypothesis is a conspiracy theory first advanced by Herbert Illig and Hans-Ulirch Niemitz, which — in very broad terms — posits that during the early Middle Ages, the Church added an extra three hundred years to the calendar.”

Jade’s forehead creased in a frown. “What do you mean by ‘added’?”

“Four centuries after the conversion of Constantine to Christianity,” Roche explained, “and about seven centuries after Christ was thought to have walked the earth, the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II, along with Pope Sylvester II and the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII, made a pact to change the calendar system in such a way that their respective reigns would coincide with the end of the millennium.”

“Like a kid tearing out pages in a calendar in the belief that he can make Christmas come sooner,” Professor said.

“The deception endures to this day,” Roche went on. “You see, it is not actually the 21st century AD, but rather the 18th.”

Jade gaped at him. “People actually believe that?”

“Not nearly enough people,” Roche said, gravely. “Most have been completely hoodwinked by the great hoax.”

“Phantom Time is the hoax,” Professor countered. “The entire hypothesis rests on an alleged error during the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar in the year 1582.”

“Oh,” Jade said. “Well, that clears everything up.”

“According to the Julian system,” Professor continued, “the solar year was 365.25 days long.”

“That’s why we have a leap year every four years.”

“Right, but the solar year is actually 365.2425 days long. I know it sounds like a meaningless difference, and practically speaking, it is. About ten minutes a year. But over the course of a few hundred years, it adds up.”

“The Julian Calendar was introduced in the year 46 BC,” Roche said. “The error was known even then, but it was thought too insignificant to correct. Ordinary people lived by the turning of the seasons, not some arbitrary system of time-keeping. The Church however was very concerned with dates since it was necessary for Easter to coincide with the vernal equinox, so Pope Gregory instituted the calendar system we use today, which corrects the problem by skipping a leap year at the turn of each century, except in years divisible by 400.”

“Which is why we had a leap year in 2000,” Professor supplied.

“Instead of twenty-five leap years per century, there would be ninety-seven leap years in every four hundred year period. However, to adjust for errors in the preceding years, it was necessary to delete the days that had been inadvertently added over the course of the centuries, so Thursday, October 4, 1582 was followed by Friday October 15, 1582.”

“That part really happened,” Professor said. “It’s well documented in history. Unlike the so-called Phantom Time conspiracy.”

“The Gregorian calendar adjustment accounted for ten extra days,” Roche said, ignoring the barb as he closed in on the crux of his argument. “Counting forward from 46 BC, there should have been 394 leap years, but under the Julian calendar, there were 407. But if it was really the year 1582, the correction should have been thirteen days. Gregory knew this, and he knew what his predecessors had done. That’s why he only moved the calendar forward ten days. He knew it was really the year 1183.”

Roche delivered this pronouncement with such gravity that Jade almost felt guilty for not caring.

“See what I mean,” Professor said. “It’s pretty thin soup.”

“Look, this is really interesting,” Jade said, openly disingenuous. “But it seems like something that should be pretty easy to prove or disprove.”

“There is surprisingly little physical evidence against the hypothesis,” Roche said. “The Church was the accepted time-keeping authority in its day. The historical record relies heavily upon medieval chronicles, which were fabricated for the sole purpose of reinforcing the deception. Many of them, such as the so-called contemporary accounts of Charlemagne, are little more than romantic fiction, but scholars do not question their veracity. To do so would undermine everything we think we know.”

Asserting that all evidence refuting a viewpoint was manufactured and proof of a conspiracy was a common defensive tactic among the true believers, but as Roche spoke, it finally occurred to Jade that the man actually believed what he was telling her.

“Hold on,” she said. “You’re saying that everything that happened between 600 and 900 was just made up?”

“That’s what he’s saying,” Professor said. “Charlemagne, the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire, Muhammed and the rise of Islam, the Tang Dynasty in China—”

“Fiction,” Roche insisted. “Every bit of it. Tug a loose string and the web of lies unravels.”

Jade raised a hand. “Just for argument’s sake, let’s say you’re right. What difference does it make?” And why on earth, she did not add, do you think I would care?

“Don’t you see?” Roche stared at her as frustrated that she could not see something so obvious. “If those three hundred years never happened, then the foundation of our entire world is built on a lie.”

“So? A lot of people believe things that have been scientifically disproven.”

“And many of them are willing to kill to protect those beliefs,” Roche insisted.

Jade realized he was not talking about wars fought over religion but rather a much more immediate threat. “You think people are after you because of this?”

“Phantom Time is a fringe theory,” Professor added, “but it’s hardly a secret. The ‘truth’ if you want to call it that, is already out there.”

“There’s more going on than anyone suspects,” Roche insisted. “Illig may have uncovered the truth about the conspiracy, but he was wrong about the motive behind the Phantom Time adjustment. It wasn’t just to fool the world into thinking the millennium was at hand. There was a much darker purpose at work. It was my intention to explain everything in my next book, but there are powerful forces working to keep the truth from being revealed. They murdered my publisher to prevent the book from being released.”

“Murdered?” Jade asked. Paranoia was one thing, but if Roche’s publisher had actually been the victim of foul play, it might confirm everything he had just said. On the other hand, even a mysterious or unexpected death might turn out to be a coincidence. True believers like Roche were adept at turning such coincidences into proof of a conspiracy. “By the Changelings?”

Roche ducked his head as if the question had been a physical assault. “Possibly. Ultimately, I’m sure they are the puppet masters, pulling the strings of their unwitting agents.”

Professor leaned forward. “Why bring this to Jade? Are you looking for protection?”

“Protection?” Roche murmured. A sad smile touched his lips. “Truth is the only protection. But knowing the truth is not the same as proving it. That is where you can help.”

Jade made no attempt to hide her skepticism. “You think I can find proof that Phantom Time is real?”

“No. You can find—” A loud bang from outside the room cut him off in mid-sentence. It might have been a car backfiring or a firecracker thrown by a prankster, but Jade knew it was neither.

“That was a gun.” Professor instantly went on the defensive, seizing hold of Jade’s arm and pulling her down. She needed no further urging, scrambling around the end of the desk, seeking cover behind it with Professor right behind her, but while her body knew what to do, her mind was reeling.

This can’t be happening.

It was not the threat of danger that tripped her up. She had been shot at before. Rather, her denial stemmed from the fact that this apparent attack seemed to validate Roche’s paranoia, and by extension, his insane theories, and that was a big pill to swallow.

Roche reacted as if he had been rehearsing for just such a scenario. He slid from his chair, dropping to his knees behind the desk, and lowered his bulk so that only his eyes and the top of his head were visible above it, a small semi-automatic pistol gripped in his pudgy hand.

The door to the office swung open and Jade’s already overtaxed brain did a back-flip as she instantly recognized the man framed in the doorway.

“Rafi?”

Roche raised up just enough to stab his pistol in Rafi’s direction but he pulled the trigger prematurely. The gun barked, the small room amplifying the noise of the report, but the bullet plowed harmlessly into the wall two feet to the right of the intended target. Jade’s ears rang with the noise of the shot and her nostrils were filled with the sulfur smell of burnt gunpowder. Before Roche could correct his aim and loose another shot, Rafi raised the gun in his right hand, calmly took aim and fired.

FOUR

The bullet punched into Roche’s chest, knocking him back. Jade gave an involuntary — and inaudible — yelp, but Professor pushed her aside and dove for the pistol that had fallen from Roche’s grasp. Faster than Jade’s eyes could follow, he crawled around the end of the desk and returned fire.

Jade’s senses were assaulted by the roar of gunfire and the sound of bullets striking the wall behind her and the heavy wooden panels of the desk. Even though none of the shots found her, each impact reverberated through her like a punch to the gut. A haze of sulfur fumes and wood smoke curled in the air overhead, further obscuring her view of the gun battle, and a blizzard of splinters stung her face, forcing her to seek refuge behind Roche’s body. In the instant that she did, the tumult ceased. She looked up just in time to see a crouching Professor disappear around the end of the desk, taking off in pursuit of—

Rafi?

— the gunman.

“Wait!” She started after Professor, but a hand gripped her forearm, restraining her. It was Roche.

He was still alive, but only just. The shadow of death, a gray pallor, was on him and in his wild eyes, Jade could see that he knew it. His lips moved, a torrent of blood spilling out as he tried to form words.

“Fuuuuhhhh…” She could not hear what he said through the ringing in her ears, but the way his teeth and lips came together, she could only assume he was wasting his final breath on a curse. “Eeewww.”

His pupils, sharpened to pinpoints by pain, abruptly lost focus, and Jade knew he was gone.

Murdered.

Rafi, the young man she had saved from drowning earlier in the day, someone with whom she had broken bread and shared jokes, had just gunned down a man in cold blood, and tried to kill her as well.

Maybe I didn’t know him as well as I thought.

She pulled free of Roche’s deathgrip and scrambled after Professor. She caught up to him just as he was preparing to venture through the exit. His eyes met hers, just for a moment, but long enough for her to divine what he was thinking.

The killer had been in their midst, and Professor blamed himself. Despite all his precautions, a deadly assassin had insinuated himself into their circle, waiting for the moment to strike.

Yet, Rafi had killed Roche first, almost as if he had been lying in wait for the conspiracy theorist. But how could he have even known Roche would visit her? It didn’t add up, which she assumed was why Professor was giving chase. Who was Rafi working for? The Dominion? The Changelings?

A body — Jonathan, Roche’s hulking bodyguard — lay sprawled across the exit, blood leaking from the precise hole drilled into his forehead. Just beyond, a car — a silver sedan that had not been there when they had arrived — peeled out of the parking area in a cloud of dust,

“Stay here,” Professor growled, and then leapt over the corpse and sprinted toward their parked Land Rover.

“Like hell,” Jade muttered and bounded after him.

Professor shot her an irritated glance but knew better than to argue. As he opened the driver’s side door, Jade was right behind him. “Let me drive. You shoot.”

“Shoot what?” he retorted, displaying the pistol he had taken from Roche. The slide was locked back, an indication that Professor had already fired out every round in the magazine. He tossed it onto the passenger seat and then slid behind the wheel and slotted the key into the ignition.

Jade hastened around the front of the vehicle, more than a little worried that Professor would try to leave her behind. She climbed inside as the engine turned over, and barely had time to close the door before the Rover began to move. Professor stomped the gas pedal and the tires threw up a shower of sand and gravel. Though the fleeing car had a lead of only a few hundred yards, it had reached the paved highway and was pulling away. The Rover jounced down the dirt access road, but once the wheels reached pavement, it took off like a rocket. Jade stole a look at the speedometer and saw the needle creeping toward 150 Km/h — almost a hundred miles per hour.

She shifted to the side and wriggled the spent pistol out from under her. The metal was hot to the touch. “So what are we going to do if we catch him?”

“Bluff.” Without taking his eyes off the road, Professor reached over and worked the pistol’s slide release one-handed. The gun shuddered in Jade’s grip as the spring-loaded mechanism shot forward, giving the appearance that the weapon was ready to fire. “Judging by how many rounds he fired, he’s probably out, too.”

“And if he has more bullets?”

Professor shrugged. “He ran. If he had the ammo, he would have stayed to finish us.”

“You’re betting our lives on that.”

“I told you to stay behind.”

Jade could not argue with that so she changed the subject. “Rafi. Damn. Why do you think he did it?”

“First thing I’m going to ask him.”

Jade had questions of her own, and felt a burning need to ask them, if only to make sense of the insanity she had just witnessed, but before she could articulate her thoughts, the Rover began to shudder as Professor pegged the speedometer. She decided to let him focus all his attention of the task of driving. The town of Paracas was only two miles away along a lightly traveled road that curved gently as it followed the shoreline, but at their current speed, every bump in the pavement was amplified, every mistake potentially fatal. Jade was glad that Professor had refused to let her drive; his military experience had included training in tactical driving, and those lessons were paying off. They were starting to close the gap. Unfortunately, they were also approaching a populated area.

The fleeing car abruptly vanished into a smudge of brown as Rafi, without any warning and seemingly without reason veered off the highway and out onto the open sand.

“What the hell is he doing?” Professor let his foot off the accelerator, allowing engine compression to slow them down. Even so, they were still pushing ninety Km/h when they reached the edge of the dust cloud. Jade felt herself thrown forward as Professor applied the brakes, further reducing their speed, as he steered to the left in pursuit of the barely discernible dot trailing a plume of dust. Rafi seemed to be heading straight for the bay.

The pillar of dust seemed to stall at the water’s edge, momentarily eclipsing Jade’s view of their quarry, but she knew what had happened. Rafi had stopped the car. Professor put on the brakes and steered to the right, coming to a full stop fifty yards away.

There was a loud crack as something slammed into one of the Rover’s fenders. Jade did not have to hear the gun’s report to know that it had been a bullet.

“Down!” Professor shouted, leaning over the center console and forcing Jade’s head down below the dashboard. The noise sounded again and the driver’s side window went opaque as a round struck the safety glass, fracturing it into a thousand tiny beads.

“Out of ammo, yeah?” Jade said. She grimaced, as much a response to having unconsciously slipped into Pidgin, which made her sound remarkably like her mother, as to their current situation.

Professor ignored the accusation and reached past her, working the lever to open Jade’s door. “Stay here,” he said as he started to crawl over her. “I’m going to try to flank him.”

“Are you serious?” Jade pushed him back. “Just drive away.”

“We might not get another chance.”

“Another chance to what? Get killed?”

“I’d like to know who he’s—”

Before Professor could finish the sentence, something like the fist of God slammed into the Rover and Jade’s world dissolved into darkness.

FIVE

In the instant that he jolted back to consciousness, Professor knew what had happened. He had been in close proximity to enough explosions to recognize the signs even without raising his head. The overpressure wave had pulverized the Land Rover’s windows and sucked the air out of the interior, which more than anything had probably contributed to the black out.

“Jade?” He knew he was shouting, but all he could hear was a persistent ringing sound inside his head.

He could feel her beneath him, still breathing but not moving. Unconscious. Possibly concussed, but more than likely just stunned. He lifted up a little, brushing away particles of safety glass that looked like a shower of diamonds, and stared out at the still burning wreckage of the car they had been chasing. The sedan looked like it had been turned inside out.

Professor did a quick check in every direction to make sure that no one was creeping up from behind, and then turned his attention back to Jade. He shook her gently. “Jade. Wake up!”

She stirred and then came awake with a start. Her lips moved, a question. What just happened?

He faced her squarely so she would be able to read his lips. “Gas tank explosion.”

Her forehead creased in confusion. Rafi?

“Don’t know.” He laid a hand on her shoulder. “Stay here.”

He doubted that she would heed his admonition, but at least this way, if something happened, she would have only herself to blame. It was the kind of lesson that only experience could teach.

He twisted around and worked the door lever, but the door did not budge. He tried shouldering it open, but the explosion had mangled the door and the surrounding frame and nothing less than the Jaws of Life would get it open. Professor abandoned the effort and instead squirmed through the hole where the window had been.

Heat from the burning car buffeted his face, prompting him to raise a shielding hand to his eyes. There was little chance of a secondary explosion; as he had surmised, the gas tank had been the source of the explosion, though what had triggered the detonation was anyone’s guess. He had not fired a single round outside the museum which strongly suggested that Rafi himself had caused the explosion, probably by shooting into the tank. That explained the what, but not the why.

His first thought was that the killer might have been trying to use the exploding car as a diversion to cover his escape or possibly some kind of flanking attack, but if that had been Rafi’s plan, it had ended disastrously. A smoldering body lay twenty feet beyond the wreckage. His clothing had been almost completely burned away, and his skin had not fared much better, but there was enough left for Professor to recognize the corpse as the young intern that had worked alongside him only a few hours before.

He felt Jade’s hand on his arm, felt her shudder in horror as she glimpsed the burned remains. Whether by accident or intentionally, Rafi had killed himself with the explosion, and any answers that he might have given had gone with him into the afterlife.

“I have to know,” Jade insisted.

Professor smiled patiently. He had seen this confrontation coming almost from the moment the attack had occurred. “I understand that. And I agree with you. It’s imperative that we learn what’s really going on. But that doesn’t mean you can go off half-cocked. Let me do some digging.”

“Fine. You dig. I’m going to London.”

He sighed. Although they had been taken by ambulance to the hospital in Pisco — the same place Rafi had been treated after his near-drowning — the doctor had elected not to admit them for observation. Professor felt certain part of the reason for the clean bill of health was the fact that the hospital was now under intense scrutiny from the police who wanted to know how Rafi had slipped away from the hospital without anyone raising an alarm. That was fine with Professor. The hospital was too public, too exposed. Their current accommodations, a cabana at a resort in Paracas, were marginally safer, but Professor would not breathe easy until they were well away from Peru.

He and Jade had also been the focus of police scrutiny, initially at least, since there were no witnesses to corroborate their version of what had happened. Several members of the television crew confirmed that Roche had requested a private meeting with Jade but that did little to exonerate them, particularly when those same individuals reported that Jade’s reaction to Roche’s arrival had been “tense.” An investigation into Rafi’s background however had soon shifted the suspicion away from Jade and Professor.

A cursory examination of Rafi Massoud’s social media presence revealed a connection to the “Crescent Defense League,” a coalition of journalists and Muslim social activists dedicated to fighting Islamophobia. Given the level of anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States and Western Europe, which often took the form of outright racism, the mission of the CDL was laudable, but their tactics, more often than not, only added fuel to the fire. Overly generous application of terms like “Islamaphobe,” “racist” and “Nazi” had stifled meaningful discussion of what many believed was valid criticism of a religious belief system that seemed inextricably, and all too often unapologetically, linked to acts of violence, while inflaming extremists on the opposite side of the political equation who were only too happy to wear such titles as a badge of honor.

Some of their crusades had a polarizing effect on people who would otherwise have been sympathetic to the cause, such as the call to boycott a summer blockbuster film because one of the characters used the term “pachys,” an abbreviation of the polysyllabic name of a particular dinosaur species appearing in the movie, which to the ear of CDL social justice warriors sounded suspiciously like “Pakis,” a slur sometimes used in the United Kingdom to refer to citizens of Pakistani descent. What most regarded as a completely innocuous homophone instead became yet another subtle racially-charged attack. The resulting blowback, predictably, was further antipathy toward the so-called “politically correct” movement and an increase in anti-Muslim sentiment, which was, Professor suspected, what the CDL had intended all along.

There was nothing on the CDL’s carefully worded website that could be construed as advocating violent solutions, but the rhetoric was rife with subtext and dog-whistles, particularly in the section listing “Enemies of Islam.”

Gerald Roche had been on that list.

Rafi Massoud seemed to have merely been a passive supporter of the group — a Facebook follower, one of several hundred thousand worldwide — and not an activist, but it was a connection the Peruvian national police had no trouble making. Their working hypothesis was that the young archaeology student, seeing an opportunity to strike a blow against a hated enemy of his faith, had slipped away from the hospital, procured a rental car and a gun, and then gone after Roche, subsequently immolating himself in an explosion intended to take the lives of the only witnesses to his crime.

There was no denying that the narrative fit the facts of the situation, and Professor had seen Rafi pull the trigger on Roche with his own eyes. Nevertheless, something felt off about what had now become the official version of events. He knew Jade felt it, too.

For one thing, although the Crescent Defense League had put Roche on their hit list, there was very little in his conspiracy-theory fueled world-view that could be described as anti-Muslim. In fact, he was on record as being a supporter of Palestine and a vocal critic of the Israeli government, which on balance ought to have made him a hero to the CDL. His inclusion on the list seemed to derive solely from a chapter in one of his books where he described in great detail how religions — not just Islam, but all the world’s major faiths — were being used to advance the “Changeling hegemony.” Professor suspected that Roche, who was almost universally regarded as delusional, had been included to make the other people on the list seem equally deranged — insane by association.

Of greater concern to Professor however was the fact that Roche had specifically sought Jade out, and now he was dead. If the official version was correct, then the attack had been an impulsive action brought on by a coincidental encounter. But if the official version was wrong, there were a lot of missing pieces in the puzzle, and Professor needed to know what they were.

Jade wanted to know as well, and she had every right to feel that way, but in typical fashion, her response was to leap before looking, which in this instance meant traveling to London in order to figure out what Roche had been trying to tell her.

“Roche is the key,” she said, almost shouting, though whether this was because of lingering temporary deafness from the explosion or simply unrestrained ardor, it was impossible to say. “Rafi targeted him. Almost like he wanted to silence him. Roche was onto something.”

“You may be right,” Professor said, not for the first time. “All I’m saying is, take it slow. Before we do anything, we have to figure out who was behind this.”

Jade regarded him warily, as if sensing that he was trying to catch her in a logic trap. “So you agree that this whole Muslim extremist thing is a load of crap.”

“I don’t know what to believe. Something about it seems a little fishy. But what’s the alternative? Changelings? Aliens?” He waggled his hands like Jeremiah Stillman which had the desired effect of getting Jade to crack a smile. “Roche said he was being targeted because of what he had discovered about Phantom Time. I’ve got to say, that makes even less sense than the idea that Rafi was some kind of terrorist assassin, but that’s about the only lead we’ve got.”

Jade folded her arms. “Which is why I want to go to London. Roche said he wrote a book explaining everything. We need to see what’s in that book.”

“Roche also said that his publisher was murdered to keep the book from being released. That’s something we can verify with a phone call.”

“Fine. Make the call.”

“I will,” he replied, a little more sharply than intended. She stared back at him for several seconds and then they both burst into laughter.

With the tension finally broken, Professor set about making good on that statement. He took out his smart phone and entered the string “Gerald Roche publisher” into Google. The top result directed to Chameleon Press International, a British firm with a catalogue primarily composed of books written by Roche, but the search also returned an unusual news item.

The story, dating back three weeks, was actually quite familiar, though Professor did not immediately grasp the connection until he looked at the section of the article which had caught the attention of the automated search engine. “Oh, this is interesting.”

“What?” Jade moved closer so she could read over his shoulder.

“Roche was technically wrong when he said his publisher had been killed. Officially speaking at least, Ian Parrott, president and editor-in-chief of Chameleon Press International, is not dead. He’s missing, along with everyone else on Flight 815.”

“Wait, the Flight 815?”

Professor nodded. There was no need for further elaboration. Three weeks after the fact, the disappearance of Flight 815, Sydney to Los Angeles, was still the subject of water-cooler discussions across the globe.

The plane, a Boeing 777, had been proceeding along its designated trans-Pacific flight plan, the pilots making routine checks with international air traffic controllers, with no hint of trouble, until three hours into the flight, all communication ceased. The plane’s GPS locator and radar transponder failed to return any signals and an exhaustive — and still ongoing — search for the plane had not yielded even a scrap of physical evidence as to its fate. The only thing that could be said with any certainty was that Flight 815 had not crashed anywhere along its intended course.

The loss of the aircraft was eerily reminiscent of Malaysian Air Flight 370, which had gone missing more than a year earlier, which invariably led to the as yet impossible to refute belief that the two events were connected. The fact that some debris from Flight 370 had recently been discovered did little to silence the speculation. Were the disappearances the work of international terrorists who were hijacking planes in mid-flight in order to build a fleet of jets for a 9-11 style suicide raid? Or was the explanation something even more diabolical? Theories ranged from the improbably mundane to the unthinkably impossible.

“Roche’s publisher was on the Flight 815,” Jade said again. “Do you realize what that means?”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Professor said, a little more forcefully than he intended. “It’s a coincidence. The kind of thing men like Roche and Stillman use to spin their conspiracy webs. Nothing more.”

“Except now Roche is dead,” Jade countered.

Professor lowered his voice an octave, as if afraid that someone might overhear. “Jade, you don’t seriously think that some shadow conspiracy killed hundreds of people just to keep a crazy man from publishing his book. The world doesn’t work that way.”

Even as he said it, he knew better. The world did work that way, all the time.

“You know I don’t believe in Changelings or aliens or any crap like that,” Jade said, “but we both know that conspiracies and secret societies do exist. Maybe Roche stumbled on something in his research, something that they don’t want anyone knowing. Probably something that doesn’t have anything to do with Phantom Time. The answer will be in Roche’s book. There’s got to be a copy of the manuscript. Either at his place in London, or with the publisher. If you’re right, and this is all just a bizarre coincidence, then we won’t be in any more danger in London than we are right here. But if Roche was killed to keep this a secret, then whoever did it is going to come after us eventually. We need to know.”

“Even if you’re right, and there is some kind of conspiracy at work, why go to the trouble of taking out a whole plane just to kill one guy? They could have just popped him on a street corner, made it look like a mugging. Or simply walked up and shot him, like Rafi did. And for that matter, how did our intern get mixed up in this?”

“Maybe this Parrott guy wasn’t the only target on that plane. As for Rafi, I have no idea, but you’re right. It doesn’t make any sense. That’s why we have to go to London. We have to figure out what Roche’s big secret is.”

Professor sighed. “You’re insufferable when you’re right. You know that, don’t you?”

Jade just grinned.

SIX

Atash Shah opened his front door before the visitor could knock. “Gabrielle. Thank you for coming so quickly.”

“Of course. I was still at the office when I heard. I came straight away.” Gabrielle Greene gripped Shah’s hand, not shaking but clasping it in both of hers. Her dark eyes, framed by even darker hair, a stark contrast with her pale skin, probed the interior of the apartment.

“Raina is already in bed,” Shah said, answering the unasked question.

He thought he saw something like a smile flicker across her face. It was probably his imagination.

Wishful thinking.

Even now, facing this unprecedented crisis, he could scarcely contain his longing for her. Just being around her was intoxicating. Working with her day in and day out at the Crescent Defense League home office was enough to make him perpetually giddy, but having her here, in his home, with his wife sleeping so close…that made the forbidden fruit of their unconsummated love seem all the sweeter.

Gabrielle’s dark serious gaze fell squarely on him. “How bad is it?”

Shah allowed the fantasy to slip away, and looked around furtively. He had it on reliable authority that he was the subject of a secretly sworn and executed FISA warrant. His telephone calls and emails were being screened and he was certain that both his apartment and office were bugged.

Ordinarily, the watching eyes and listening ears did not concern him. He scrupulously avoided doing or saying anything that might even be faintly construed as illegal. As both a Muslim and a journalist who frequently exposed the government’s illegal excesses and abuses of power, there were many — both in government circles and in the mainstream news media — who considered him far more dangerous than any terrorist, and rightly so. The old saying was true after all; the pen was mightier than the sword. Tonight however, was a different matter. Tonight, the distinction between pen and sword had become very blurry indeed. He touched a finger to his lips and stepped out of the apartment, closing the door behind him. He led Gabrielle to the stairwell and up to the roof where, hopefully, they would be able to converse without being overheard by federally sanctioned eavesdroppers.

Gabrielle understood the need for discretion. Thought she was not a Muslim, her hard-hitting investigative reporting, which often made use of highly-placed informants — men and women who were legally and technically committing treason by sharing what they knew with a journalist — had put her on the government’s radar as well. The fact that she worked closely with Shah, co-founding the Crescent Defense League with him, as well as using him as a source for her freelance articles, surely had not improved her reputation, but that was the price both of them were willing to pay to see a world free from tyranny and intolerance.

It was their holy crusade. A jihad, not for Islam — Shah’s faith was a complicated thing, informed more by science than the words of the Prophet — but for the truth.

With more than 1.6 billion adherents — twenty-three percent of the global population — the world’s fastest growing religion was also arguably the world’s dominant religious belief system, regaining a status it had once held for more than four hundred years, from the 8th to 13th centuries. That time, still remembered as the Golden Age of Islam, had been a period of unparalleled scientific, intellectual and cultural achievements, made possible by the unifying power of the Prophet’s writings. Shah, like many modern thinkers who shared his culture and faith, was skeptical when it came to matters of divine revelation, but he was a believer in the power of a united purpose. A second Golden Age of Islam was possible, but only if Muslims everywhere recognized and lived up to their potential for greatness.

Shah’s mission in life was to make sure that happened. He would be the Mahdi, the last imam, who would reunite Sunni and Shia, and all the fractured sects of the faith and lead them to a greatness surpassing even the days of the Prophet. Truth was his weapon, a fire that burned through the endless storm of lies and prejudices. The articles he posted on the Crescent Defense League website not only exposed the agenda of Islam’s enemies, who sought always to characterize Islam as a violent faith, filled with radicals and terrorists, but dug deeper, revealing more subtle forms of intolerance, such as unflattering portrayals of Muslims in movies and television shows, which all too often conflated “Muslim” with “terrorists.”

Unfortunately, like fire, the truth was sometimes difficult to control, and letting it loose could have unpredictable consequences.

“Roche is dead,” Shah said.

Something like relief or satisfaction spread across Gabrielle’s countenance. “How?”

“That’s the problem.” He briefly related what his sources had told him about Rafi Massoud and the brutal murder the young student had committed. “They’re going to try to put this on us,” he continued. “They’ll say that I incited this young man to commit murder.”

Gabrielle made a cutting gesture with her hand. “Let them.”

Shah swallowed nervously. Gabrielle may have shared Shah’s mission, but her motives were more complex.

“This is what we do, Atash,” Gabrielle went on. “Turn their attacks against them. If you distance yourself from this, you’ll appear weak. Apologize and they win. You have to own this.”

“I don’t think that will work this time. They want to paint us as a religion of violent extremists and terrorists. You would have me admit they’re right?”

Gabrielle reached out and took his hand again. Shah felt an electric tingle at the touch. “This is how the world works now, Atash. A lunatic shoots a school full of children. What does the gun lobby do? Do they apologize for the behavior of one crazy person and admit that maybe some common sense regulations might be a good idea? Not a chance. They double down and turn the tables, blame the victims for not having guns of their own and paint everyone who says otherwise as the real extremists.”

Shah stared back dumbfounded. “You can’t be serious. We created the CDL to fight that kind of echo chamber mentality.”

“We created the CDL to defend Islam. Our enemies will try to use this against this. We have to make it work to our advantage.”

Her passion radiated through her hand into his, burning through his reflexive opposition. “How exactly do we do that? Do we say it’s Roche’s fault for not being Muslim?”

He said it half-jokingly but to his astonishment, Gabrielle nodded. “Just like we did after the Charlie Hebdo shootings. We’ll release a statement saying that, while we do not condone what happened, we strongly condemn the sort of blasphemy that prompted a young man to martyr himself.”

Shah’s forehead creased in a frown. “The cable news outlets will make hay out of rhetoric like that.”

“It doesn’t matter what they do with it.” She squeezed his hand again. “All that matters is that your people — our people — will recognize your strong and decisive leadership.

Shah felt his resistance crumbling. “You’re very persuasive.”

“Only because I’m right about this. Trust me. And don’t worry. We’ll run the statement past legal to make sure it’s airtight.” She paused a beat. “You said this happened in Peru? What was Roche doing down there?”

“I have no idea. He’s been hiding out ever since…that thing with his publisher.”

“The shooter, he was a student, right?” Gabrielle pressed. “An archaeologist? We need to know how he came to cross paths with Roche. The old crank might be dead, but he can still hurt us if he told someone what he knows or gave them his book.”

“I’m not sure there’s much we could do about it if he did.”

Gabrielle’s expression hardened abruptly, her dark eyes boring into him. “Atash, I don’t think you fully appreciate just how serious this situation is.”

Shah gaped at her. “How can you say that? I’ve been in damage control mode ever since I heard about the shooting.”

“I’m not talking about Roche’s death. I’m talking about his secret. It must stay buried. At all costs. If he’s shared this knowledge with anyone we have to find out. And we have to silence them.”

“Silence them?” The question came out much louder than Shah intended. He imagined the government surveillance team hastily sweeping his building with parabolic microphones, trying to reacquire him. In a more subdued voice, he continued. “We’re journalists, Gabrielle, not killers.”

Gabrielle regarded him with a cool gaze. “You’re right, Atash. We’re not killers. But this is a war and whether you intended to or not, you have built an army. There are a lot of young men like this Rafi Massoud out there just waiting for someone to tell them what to do. The only question is whether you have to courage to be their leader.”

Shah swallowed. He did not feel very courageous, but he knew he would never be able to say ‘no’ to her.