The Genesis Conspiracy Page 5

  “I shot a man,” he said bluntly.

  A look of surprise came across Sam’s face. “Whoa.”

  “I also slashed another with a machete.”

  “Are you OK… I mean,” his brother stammered, “this is serious stuff. Even with all your misadventures, you’ve never run into a problem of this magnitude before.”

  “I’m OK,” Jake nodded as he patted his brother on the back. “Thanks for coming to get me.”

  “Feel up to a little field trip?” Sam motioned to the door on their right that opened into the central hallway.

  “Can we can stop long enough to grab a bottle of aspirin from the first aid kit?”

  “I’ve got some in my lab and I’ll get you a bottle of water from the fridge. There’s something I want to show you in there.”

  After traveling past a long corridor of interior doors, Sam turned into a room which had a row of windows that faced out onto the aft deck. Through them, Jake observed a crew of workers who appeared to be assembling a crate.

  “What are they doing?” he asked.

  “Give me a second,” Sam replied, “and I’ll explain. First,” he picked up a long object from the table in front of them and handed it to Jake. “We found this beside you.”

  “The machete!” Jake reacted with excitement.

  “It’s a lot more than just a machete,” Sam replied. “According to a couple of articles I found on the Internet, there were only a handful of these made for NASA by Case and Sons Cutlery back in the 60s. One flew on every mission from the beginning of Gemini to the end of Apollo. Since this flight was unmanned, it must have been placed in there as a fit check. Kind of makes you think there were plans to recover that capsule all along. And speaking of that, we brought you a big gift back from the desert.”

  “You got it!” Jake said excitedly.

  “That’s what the crate’s for,” Sam said with a smile. “After you started blabbing about some girl, we went on a scouting expedition. We found your UAZ in about a zillion pieces and your, shall we say, ‘extraterrestrial object.’ Come with me.”

  As Jake followed his brother out onto the deck, he was greeted with friendly smiles and well wishes from the ship’s crew.

  “Where are we by the way?” Jake asked as he peered at the barely visible land mass off the starboard rail.

  “We’re an hour outside of Taipei. We took you aboard last night, and Doc decided to get you stabilized before transferring you to the hospital there. Dan’s waiting to fly you out.”

  “I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” he replied, checking the bandage wrapped around this thigh. “Other than a throbbing leg and head, I feel fine.”

  “He was mostly concerned about the blood loss to your brain. I told him any additional damage would hardly be noticeable.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Jake smiled and smacked his brother in the back of the head.

  As they turned the corner past the starboard hoist, Sam announced, “And now for your viewing pleasure.”

  Before them, resting on a makeshift wooden stand, was the spacecraft from the desert. The two hatches that Jake had noted earlier were both standing open, and the parachute lines and remaining fabric were folded beneath it.

  “It’s a Gemini capsule,” Jake said, confirming his original deduction. He stepped forward and looked into one of the hatches. “Was the body still aboard?”

  “You mean the plain clothes astronaut?” Sam replied jokingly. “He’s in Cindy’s lab.”

  “He was certainly no astronaut,” Jake asserted, “at least not on this flight.” He examined the instruments bolted to the mounts where the crew ejection seats would normally have been installed. “This was obviously an unmanned mission. I don’t know that much about the early space program, but I’m pretty sure they never reported a missing capsule.”

  “I’ve been doing some digging on the Internet,” Sam said. “NASA launched a total of twelve Geminis. The first two were unmanned. All of the capsules were recovered except for the first one. It supposedly burned up in the atmosphere after a few orbits. There was never a plan to recover it, at least not officially.”

  Jake shrugged. “But someone knew where to look for it. Make that two, if you count the girl.”

  “Based on the remains of the guy onboard, I’d say there were quite a few years between the two discoveries.”

  “Did he have any identification?”

  “Nothing,” Sam shook his head. “If the capsule is from the first Gemini flight, it’s been out there since 1964. Cindy took a quick look online to see if she could match his clothes with a certain period. She found a scanned Sears catalog from the early 60s. The guy could have been a fashion model for them. Based on the clothes and his mummified state, she thinks he was killed not long after the capsule landed.”

  “Killed?” Jake gave his brother a puzzled look.

  Sam pointed his right index finger and dropped his thumb. “Single shot to the back of his head.”

  “Lovely,” Jake grumbled as he turned his attention back to the instrumentation onboard the craft. On the starboard side, there was a large metal box with a convex glass disk mounted in the center. He looked up at the window in the corresponding hatch door and saw that the two were aligned.

  “A camera?” he questioned.

  “Yep,” Sam nodded, “with a missing film canister. Our dead guy was apparently trying to remove it when he was killed. We found tools that he’d dropped including a set of Allen wrenches that matched up with the screws holding the camera together.”

  “Whoever killed him took it?”

  “No. Take a look at the threads where the canister was mounted.” Sam reached into a toolbox beside the pallet and handed Jake a flashlight. “The inside metal is still bright, and you can see fresh lubricant around the hole. Someone recently removed it.”

  “What are you doing out of bed?” a stern female voice spoke from behind them. The men turned to find Cindy Burgess, a tall woman in her late forties whose dark tan revealed her extended years at sea. Divorced, with no family connections back in the States, she preferred traveling the world as Chief Analytical Chemist aboard one of the most modern research vessels afloat. Also, because of her mother’s ancestry, she was fluent in Russian. On the excavation projects in Mongolia, she served as the primary translator.

  “Just doing a little sightseeing,” Jake answered.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked in a softer voice.

  “Alive,” he said smiling, “thankfully.”

  “You certainly look better than you did when they brought you in last night. You had us worried. It’s a good thing your brother was aboard to give you a transfusion. You both share a rare blood type.”

  “That explains why I feel like a slug this morning,” Jake smiled at Cindy and winked.

  “Funny,” his brother replied.

  “Sam tells me you’ve been doing a little CSI on the body of our mystery man,” Jake said. “Have you discovered anything beyond the cause of death?”

  “I’m afraid my knowledge of forensics is limited to one semester in graduate school. He was about five foot nine, muscular build. I’d put his age somewhere between 35 and 40. He had a few gray hairs.” She shrugged. “Like I said, one semester. The clothes were a telltale though.”

  “Yeah,” Jake nodded. “Sam was just telling me about that.”

  “What about the journal?” Sam asked.

  “I’ve made some progress,” Cindy said. “I haven’t used my Russian in a few years, and the writer didn’t have the best handwriting.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jake gave a puzzled look. “You found a journal?”

  Cindy reached into the pocket of her lab coat and handed Jake a tattered, leather-bound book. The binding was cracked across the entire surface and the pages were yellowed and dry. A musty smell filled his nostrils as he slowly opened it.

  “It’s written in Russian Cyrillic, the cursive form,” he noted as he looked up at his compani
ons. “Did this belong to the dead guy?”

  “I don’t think so,” Cindy answered. “We found this stuck between two pages.” She handed him a white receipt. The name at the top read Kino, SVO, Moscow.

  “SVO,” Jake thought aloud. “Sheremetyevo Airport?”

  “The receipt is from a cafe there,” she said. “According to the date, the purchase was made two weeks ago.”

  “It could have been the girl’s,” Sam offered. “She might have had the journal in her possession when she opened the capsule and dropped it in there by accident. It was pinched between the ejection seat mounts and the back cabin wall. We had to loosen a few bolts to retrieve it. We also found a torn bit of fabric, the sleeve of her jacket maybe.”

  “She was wearing a light blue parka,” Jake recalled.

  “That’s the color,” Sam nodded.

  “Were there any names in the journal?” Jake asked.

  “Dmitri Petrovich,” Cindy said. “It’s pretty clear that he was the diarist. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, he spent years as an expatriate across Asia following the communist takeover of Russia. There’s a short bio in the front, though not in his handwriting. I believe it was added some years later.”

  Jake thumbed carefully through the journal. “There are a lot of maps and columns of numbers in here. Was Dmitri a cartographer?”

  “Among other things. My scientific Russian is not the best, but I’d say his real passion was zoology. The maps correspond to animal migration patterns from Armenia to Eastern China. The interesting thing is, he wanted neither the Russians nor the Nazis to learn about his research.”

  “Why?” Jake asked.

  Cindy shook her head. “I have no idea.”

  “Nazis?” Sam said the word with an almost incredulous tone.

  “Dmitri was wary of some interesting folks,” Cindy responded. “The German Ahnenerbe Institute to be exact. Ever heard of them?”

  Jake and Sam looked at each other and shrugged.

  “That’s the Nazi connection. I looked it up on the Internet. In short, the Ahnenerbe were a group of deluded and evil men who called themselves scientists during the Nazi reign in Germany. They were founded by Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s closest ally and head of the SS. Himmler was the real driving force behind the neo-pagan occultism that was flooding through pre-war Germany. In the late thirties, Himmler sent a team of scientists into Tibet to find anthropological evidence of an Aryan super race, the supposed ancestors of the Germanic people.”

  “I’ve seen a documentary on that,” Sam said. “They took all kinds of measurements of the Tibetans—their height, head shape, and so forth.”

  “Exactly,” Cindy replied. “I’m not sure if they actually believed the foolishness or if they were simply trying to pacify Himmler.”

  “What dealings did Dmitri Petrovich have with them?” Jake asked.

  “As I said, Dmitri was a zoologist. He had spent a number of years doing research on the animals of Tibet and was there during the Ahnenerbe expedition. He doesn’t give any specific details about why he mistrusted the Nazi explorers, but he was afraid that they would learn of his work.”

  “What specifically was he working on?” Jake asked.

  “He claims to have discovered the true origin of species,” she said with a smile, knowing what effect it would have on Jake. His raised eyebrows told her that she’d found her mark. “Join me in the conference room. I want to show you something interesting.”

  8

  Kirk Hoffmeyer mouthed curses under his breath as he rushed past old friends and colleagues with only an apologetic “Catch up with you later!” or “Good to see you. I’ll be right back.” He couldn’t spare the time as he desperately sought out the old man with the bankroll. To be honest, that was how he had come to think of Walter Holtz, his benefactor and mentor. He was tired of jumping through hoops for him like some two-bit circus act every time the old man snapped his fingers. More than once he had entertained the idea of telling him off but had wisely chosen restraint.

  Hoffmeyer had first met Holtz as a graduate student doing field work for his dissertation in the badlands of South Dakota. Holtz, though not a paleontologist by training, was a fanatic on the subject and one of its chief financial supporters. The private property where they were excavating belonged to a subsidiary of Holtz Industries. This arrangement allowed its owner to either keep or sell the spoils to whomever he chose. In sales to private collections alone, Hoffmeyer guessed the old man had netted over $20 million. And no one in academic circles even batted an eye. Holtz was a shrewd businessman and kept donations to universities and museums flowing freely.

  Holtz’s ten thousand acre property was part of the Hell Creek Formation, a rich fossil bed that stretched across the central U.S. that had yielded hundreds of dinosaur and extinct mammal fossils. Because of his fascination with the fossils, the best and most unique ones ended up in Holtz’s private collection. It had become an obsession and now his overbearing demands were causing more problems.

  “Kirk,” Hoffmeyer heard a familiar voice behind him.

  “Walter,” he turned and extended his hand in greeting. “I’m glad you caught up with me. I was just coming down to find you.” Hoffmeyer turned his attention to the much younger woman beside Holtz. “Linda, you look lovely tonight.”

  “Thank you, Kirk,” Holtz’s fortyish companion replied furtively. Full-figured, platinum blond, and dressed in a designer pearl-colored gown with matching necklace and earrings, she was the perfect match for a man of Holtz’s position. She was also a woman who made men under her husband’s influence uncomfortable, especially Hoffmeyer. Linda was flirtatious in a controlling way. Strangely, Holtz almost seemed to enjoy it, like a kid dangling a trinket in front of his friends that only he could possess. Hoffmeyer truly hated dealing with Holtz and his wife.

  “We need to talk,” the older man said abruptly. “Why don’t we take a walk outside? Linda, go mingle. I’ll join you a few minutes.”

  Without a word she turned, but paused long enough to give Hoffmeyer the knowing look he had anticipated, and then walked enticingly down the red carpeted stairs to join the party below.

  “Outside,” Holtz ordered as he turned toward the doors that opened onto 45th Street. A black limousine was parked against the curb, forcing the bottlenecked traffic to merge to the inside lane. The driver, dressed in a traditional but dated chauffer’s uniform, stood almost at attention as he opened the rear door to allow the men to enter.

  “Just drive around,” Holtz said gruffly. “And keep off the intercom until I need you. We don’t want to be disturbed.”

  “Yes sir,” the driver replied crisply as he closed the door.

  “Kirk,” the older man inquired with a wild look of excitement in his eyes and restraint in his voice. “What can you tell me?”

  “I have a man on the way, the new excavation director we hired a couple of years ago. He’s been an employee of the museum for most of his academic life. Good guy.”

  “What assurance do you have that he is trustworthy? I hope you’re holding something of dire importance over his head.”

  “We own him,” Hoffmeyer smiled. “He’s up for tenure and he has a sordid, decisively non-academic, past.”

  “When is he due to arrive?”

  “Tomorrow morning. Someone from the museum is picking him up at the airport. I’ve given him instructions to carefully inspect your item to make certain it’s packaged properly before bringing it back here.”

  “What about customs?” Holtz asked. “The X-ray machines will ruin it.”

  “Baranov is handling the paperwork on their end. It will go through customs without being examined. I don’t foresee any problems.”

  Holtz started to laugh but suddenly the laugh turned into a coarse, unhealthy cough, causing him to grope for a bottle of water from the refrigerator beside his seat. “Don’t count on it,” he said after taking a long drink. “If there’s one thing I have learned, it’s that you can’t
trust the Russians, even when you pay them well. Especially not that idiot Baranov—I do not trust him.”

  “I don’t either,” Hoffmeyer admitted. “It was a good idea to have someone personally escort your package back here. I assume the Russians know what it is? Baranov certainly does.”

  “I’ve ordered him to keep it quiet. He knows why he got his latest promotion, and I made it clear that he can go higher if he cooperates and keeps his mouth shut.”

  Hoffmeyer nodded but paused for a moment as he thought through his next question. “What about the girl?” he asked hesitantly.

  The old man leaned his head against the leather rest and peered out the window. He played with the cap on his water bottle and finally said in a cold, detached voice, “You know she can’t live.”

  Hoffmeyer shut his eyes tightly as though he could wish away his predicament. There had always been rumors about Walter Holtz and his hidden connections beneath the surface of respectable business, possibly even organized crime. He had never pursued the rumors and had even scolded the ones who brought them to his attention. Truthfully, he didn’t want to know. In the exclusive world of paleontology where jobs and funding were scarce, he was not unlike Sergei Baranov, their Russian stooge. Without the support of Holtz and people like him, there was no job security. Now it was going to cost him. He was about to become an accessory to murder and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  “I knew her grandfather,” Holtz added, “an intelligent man with a simpleton’s view of life. He could have done great things, even amassed a fortune as I have, but he chose his religion over reality. I tried to warn him. He was a stubborn man and it cost him his life. I’ve been trying to get my hands on his work for years. I knew that putting her in that job would pay off someday. And now it has.”

  “Does she have to die?” As the words left his mouth, Hoffmeyer couldn’t believe he’d just asked such a pointed question. No one questioned Walter Holtz.