Fearful Symmetry: A Thriller Read online

  He didn’t seem to hear our calls, nor did he acknowledge us until we were nearly upon him, and then only with a flinch. When he faced us, I could see it in his eyes. He had seen something, the kind of sight that could no more be repressed than it could be un-seen. His entire body was smeared with mud, from the top of his head to his once-polished boots. The rain had eroded stripes through the coating on his face. He appeared not to see us at first, and when recognition finally dawned, his initial expression was quickly replaced by a disarming smile. I had seen it, though. Even in that fleeting moment, I had seen not the face of the hunter, but that of the prey.

  The others denied they had seen anything amiss. Even König’s theory that Metzger had risen early to take his magnetic readings in hopes of rationalizing the unusual discrepancies made a certain amount of sense. The way he said it sounded rehearsed to my ear, though, as if he had been practicing just how he would present it to the rest of us. There was no proof to give lie to his words; however, I am near-certain I saw a patch of dried blood in the conch of his ear, where neither the mud nor the rain had been able to reach it. By the time I convinced Brandt to look, it was gone.

  I have no doubt that König knows more about Metzger’s disappearance than he claims. There is a sense of resignation in the way he searches, unlike Eberhardt and Brandt, who shout Otto’s name loud enough to startle the birds from their roosts and the wild hogs from the brush, as though he realizes that no matter how long or hard we search, we will not find him. God help me, I am beginning to believe that will be the case.

  I try not to think about the fact that if I was right and something had taken him from the cave in his sleeping bag, it had stood less than a meter from where I slept, blissfully oblivious. Had it stared down upon my slumbering form before ultimately deciding that Metzger would make a better meal? Had it savored the smell of us all in its nostrils before selecting its intended victim? Was it even now watching us from the shadows of the forest, its stripes a perfect match for the saplings growing in the wan light that perforated the canopy?

  I recall the footprints I first saw upon exiting the cave and how they melted in the rain as I watched. I could not distinguish König’s tracks from those of the Other, not by size or by gait. And that is what most troubles me. Should not the prints of a tiger be plainly distinct from those of a man? Should not their prints be grouped together in some fashion? Surely such a large cat’s stride could not be as evenly spaced as König’s. I have no doubt that not all of the tracks belong to our fearless leader. I do, however, believe that whatever else was out there had walked on two feet like a man. Or at least that is what the evidence suggests.

  I am unprepared to share that conclusion with the others. Not yet, anyway. Eberhardt is only now coming to grips with the fact that his friend might not return before sunset and Brandt is otherwise preoccupied, although with what is anyone’s guess. His face is flush and beaded with perspiration despite the cool breeze and I do not think I have seen him eat anything all day.

  It is König who worries me most, though. After spending the majority of the afternoon searching on his own, he returned with a sack full of macaques and weasels, which he meticulously skinned by the fire. He speared one of the monkeys on a spit and turned it over the flames. The pelts he tanned from the branches of the trees; the remaining carcasses he placed in a sack, although I saw him add no salt or preservatives. It was only by chance that I stumbled upon one of the weasels, bloody and stinking, staked to the ground on a post with a tin can tied to its ankle. I found another not far away, hidden among the bushes. I have not seen him set traps like these before. They are the kind meant to attract predators, although not to entice them into our midst as they had been the night before. Just close enough that König would hear the tinkle of a can rattling against a wooden post.

  There is something he is not telling us, something that does not make sense to me, no matter how hard I try. I cannot fathom how he let the Other get past him last night, or if indeed that was the case. It would have had to walk within mere meters of him, a range at which he could not have missed if he tried.

  There will be no rest for me this night, not if I intend to learn König’s secret.

  Twenty-five

  Yarlung Tsangpo River Basin

  Motuo County

  Tibet Autonomous Region

  People’s Republic of China

  October 16th

  Yesterday

  Brooks was exhausted, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to fall asleep, no matter how hard he tried. There were simply times when he couldn’t shut off his brain, and this was undoubtedly one of them. A part of him knew they would be better served regrouping and returning to Motuo when they were better prepared. It was obvious Brandt had lied to him about everything from start to finish, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why or what Brandt had to gain by doing so. And that problem would only be compounded upon their return. Even if they confronted him and demanded the truth, they wouldn’t be able to trust his answer. If they wanted to know what was going on, then they were going to have to find out for themselves, and Brooks could think of no better place to start than the coffins.

  Someone had gone to great lengths to hide the bodies and Brandt had done the same thing to ensure they were found. The question now wasn’t so much why, but what secrets did they contain and how were they supposed to unlock them.

  While Brooks questioned Brandt’s integrity, there was no denying the man’s brilliance. This team hadn’t been assembled by accident. Brandt had known exactly who he wanted and why he wanted them, and had made sure they were contracted. It would only be by utilizing their individual specialties that they would uncover the answers, and Brooks was more than ready to begin with his own.

  They had only brought what they could carry on the trip. They had none of the standard lighting arrays by which to work, only their flashlights and a single 15-watt solar-powered portable work light that wasn’t going to last much longer without a recharge. Brooks and Adrianne had to frequently rearrange their lights as there was so little space to work in the recess and their bodies constantly blocked the lights and cast shadows onto their subject.

  A cold wind rose from the east and howled across the opening.

  Adrianne helped Brooks catalogue their findings while preparing the primer-mediated standard Taq DNA polymerase solution they needed for PCR evaluation, the results of which would then be compared against the control samples. If there was anything even remotely out of the ordinary in the genetic assays of the dead men, they would be able to detect it.

  Brooks stared down at the broken body of Augustus König. This man had spent months traversing the unexplored Tibetan wilds with Brandt, leading his team on an adventure of historical proportions. What happened to him? How did Brandt survive to continue the work that brought him international acclaim, while this man now resided in an anonymous grave where likely no one would have ever found him were it not for Brandt, who in seventy-some years never mentioned the fate of his colleague or any of the details about what happened here. He had simply returned to Germany, where he was posted at Dachau and pursued his anthropological agenda on subjects of a much different nature. Had he gone to Dachau to disappear or was it an opportunity he couldn’t pass up?

  Brooks could only imagine that once someone participated in the perpetration of that kind of evil, it left an indelible mark on his soul that no amount of contrition could erase. Some had undoubtedly even embraced it. Perhaps Brandt’s status in the field and his accomplishments had blinded Brooks to the true nature of a man willing to do absolutely anything for the sake of knowledge. Worse still, Brooks feared they were more alike than he was willing to admit.

  “Are you ready to do this?” Adrianne asked.

  Brooks nodded and passed her the sample of bone he had collected from König’s humerus. She expertly added it to the solution and used a micropipette to transfer it into several different receiving containers, then loaded them
into a miniature centrifuge, which would spin them down and help the polymerase break apart the strands of DNA. The fragments would then be loaded into the PCR system, where a chain reaction of replication would occur.

  She’d already prepared the samples they had taken from the long bone in Andreessen’s arm while he was hacking into König’s for comparison.

  While the battery-powered centrifuge hummed, Brooks pondered what was capable of killing these men in such a manner and over such a significant length of time. No larger order of mammal had a lifespan exceeding a century, nor was there a predator capable of passing along to its offspring a predilection for slaughtering its prey without consuming it. There were too many contradictions in the nature of the beast, too many traits conflicting with the natural order. And why, if its existence was the sole reason Brandt had dispatched the expedition, had he sent two evolutionary anthropologists with such narrow specialties involving viruses?

  Pebbles rained past the opening and Warren cursed from above them. He and Julian were performing a cursory examination of the other remains, cataloguing the approximate age, race, nationality, stage of decomposition, and anything else they could think of in hopes of finding at least a superficial relationship between the bodies, one they could further exploit by comparing the genomes. There was something here; they just weren’t able to see it yet.

  “Which templates do you want me to load?”

  “Genomic, viral, and plasmid.”

  Adrianne placed the control samples into the slots in the Palm PCR instrument with the samples from Andreessen and König and closed the lid.

  “What do you expect to find?” she asked.

  “I really don’t know.”

  “Surely you have a theory.”

  “I believe we were sent here to find a virus, but I have no clue whatsoever how that relates to Brandt’s mask.”

  “Don’t you think that if a virus were responsible for its evolution we’d need the original subject in order to isolate the virus fossilized in its DNA and not just a random assortment of bodies we just happened to find entombed up here?”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t think we just happened to find them. Brandt knew what we’d find in these tombs when he sent us. We saw the evidence of that on the film. Wherever he found the body he cast, it wasn’t here and he knew it. He wanted us to find these bodies specifically.”

  “If he already knew what we were going to find, why send us in the first place?”

  “That’s the real question, isn’t it?”

  She removed the samples from the Palm PCR, placed them in a holder, and used a micropipette to transfer them, one by one and drop by drop, into a single row of wells in the portable gel electrophoresis machine. She closed the lid and turned on the battery pack, which sent a current through the agar. The negative electrical charge caused the DNA of the samples and the controls to separate by size and travel through the gelatinous medium.

  “That doesn’t change the fact that something’s out there. We all saw what it did to those deer and the tiger in the cave. Not to mention what it did to these guys. So I have to ask what we’re all thinking…is it possible the creature Dr. Brandt used to create the mask is still alive?”

  Brooks didn’t know how to answer her question. It was one he had so far refrained from analyzing too closely himself. The idea itself was positively fantastic, and yet what little evidence they had pointed to that conclusion. And if that were the case, then were they in serious danger of meeting with the same fate as these men? Wouldn’t the safest thing be to leave Motuo while they still could?

  Logically, he knew he was jumping at shadows. Other people frequented this area. They’d seen ample evidence of that in the form of the incense and the offerings in the grotto. Surely if they could travel safely through here, then Brooks and his team could, too. The flaw with that logic was the proof to the contrary in the open coffin right in front of him.

  Adrianne lifted the small sheet of gel from the machine and placed it on top of the lid. She turned on a handheld black light and Brooks killed the other lights. The sheet of gel glowed faintly purple, while several rows of horizontal lines fluoresced bright pink. Each of those lines corresponded with a discrete segment of DNA. The largest segments remained near the top of the lanes, while the smaller segments were propelled by the negative charge away from the wells and toward the positive anode.

  Dozens of parallel pink lines appeared in the lanes beneath the human control template in the first lane and the samples taken from Andreessen and König beside it. The fourth lane featured a viral template, beneath which there was only a fraction of the number of DNA segments, nearly all of them so small they ended up closer to the bottom of the agar. The fifth, an undigested plasmid containing a polyoma virus-like protein, or VLP, produced a mere three bands, the heaviest of which corresponded directly to the DNA of the virus itself.

  By comparing all five side-by-side, they would be able to see which segments of DNA matched in the same way a child’s DNA was compared against a potential father’s. Theoretically, Brooks was looking for the segments that varied from the human control sample, matched both Andreessen and König, and whether or not they correlated with any of the viral bands. He was looking for evidence of the presence of an unknown virus somehow incorporated into their very genetic codes.

  The physical comparison of the lines was painstaking and tedious. All of the larger segments matched the human template, as expected, with the exception of a single band with an approximate length of 2.5 kilobase pairs, which was more than large enough to produce the physical expression of the mutation, especially if you consider it takes only three base pairs to determine eye color.

  He glanced at the body and saw no overt manifestations of any anomalies, but mutations could come in any form and didn’t necessarily involve an external component. For all he knew, the men could have developed tumors that rotted away during the process of decomposition.

  The smaller bands were much harder to correlate, largely because most of them were fainter and packed much more closely together. Again, there was only one of the many lines where the samples of the two victims matched a viral segment not found on the standard human template. Not coincidentally, they also fell nearly in line with the polyomavirus plasmid. The difference between them couldn’t have been more than fifty base pairs. While that was essentially an insignificant alteration when compared to the three billion base pairs in the human genome, it represented an enormous mutation in a viral organism comprised of a mere five thousand.

  The bodies had been exposed to a mutated version of the polyomavirus all humans possessed to a varying degree, only this one contained one percent more DNA, which was responsible for the alteration of 2,500 base pairs in the two dead men, a mutation that had obviously been triggered by the exact same virus at a common site of infection. It had replicated itself into their genetic codes and spread like wildfire clear up until the moment of their deaths.

  Their DNA—the fundamental building blocks of their very existence—had been changing and Lord only knows how a mutation of such magnitude might have physically expressed itself given enough time to do so.

  Brooks looked up at Adrianne and saw the same comprehension dawn in her eyes.

  Considering humans shared 99.9% of their DNA, that meant individuals differed by a mere three million base pairs. A variation of 2,500 base pairs was not only statistically significant, it produced a genetic variation of 0.08% from the common human genome, the same genetic difference between modern Homo sapiens sapiens and its closest extinct ancestor, Homo neanderthalensis.

  “Do you know what this means?” Adrianne asked, her voice quivering with excitement.

  Brooks stared at the decomposed face of the dead man, a face that looked deceptively similar to his own.

  “It means these men are of a completely different species.”

  Part VI:

  Tooth and Nail

  Twenty-six

  Yarlung Ts
angpo River Basin

  Motuo County

  Tibet Autonomous Region

  People’s Republic of China

  October 17th

  Today

  The rain started to fall once more. What started as a sprinkle they heard spatter on the face of the cliff when the wind gusted quickly turned into a tempestuous deluge that flung the overhanging vegetation against the mouth of the hollow and pelted them with raindrops. Brooks and Adrianne hurriedly gathered their equipment and bundled it back into their packs before the water could ruin it. They scurried back through the tunnel and into the cavern, where the wind blowing through the honeycombed stone sounded like a hundred different voices chanting without pausing for breath.

  Brooks caught movement from the corner of his eye and looked up at the first ledge, where Zhang stood in the flickering glow of a handful of candles melted nearly to nubs on random outcroppings on the wall. A great gust howled through the mountain and extinguished them. He’d seen their trail boss’s face in that brief moment and recognized the expression on his face.

  Fear.

  The expression was as universal as it was unmistakable.

  Brooks set down his backpack and rummaged in the darkness until he found his flashlight and clicked it on. When he shined it up toward the ledge where Zhang had been, it illuminated nothing more than a faint haze of swirling smoke from the candles. He raised his light and opened his mouth to call for Zhang, but was cut off by a shout from behind and above him.