Fearful Symmetry: A Thriller Read online

  He whirled and saw the weak glow emanating from inside one of the passages near the top brighten steadily until Julian’s face peeked out.

  “There you are.” His eyes were wide with excitement. “You won’t believe this. No, wait. I can’t describe it. You have to see it.”

  He ducked back into the hole, then appeared once more.

  “You guys coming or what?”

  A single ladder connected each level to the next. The ledges outside the rows of holes were maybe three feet wide, at the most, just wide enough to walk precariously from one hole to the next and to accommodate another ladder. With his Maglite shining sideways from the pocket of his jacket, he could barely see the rungs well enough to grab them. He ascended three different ledges, each roughly ten feet above the other. By the time he neared the fourth, he was glad he couldn’t see the bottom below him in the darkness. A single misstep or broken rung and he could easily break both legs. Or worse.

  The light intensified above him before Julian once again thrust his head from the hole directly above the top of the ladder. The ledge here was much narrower. Long sections had broken off, leaving no means of entering the crypts to the right, at least not from the inside.

  “What’s taking you so long?” He looked down and saw Brooks mere feet below him. “I could have built an elevator in the time it’s taken you to get here.”

  “We’re not all part monkey like you, Julian.”

  “If you really believe that, prof, you might want to think about changing professions.”

  He grinned and vanished back into the tunnel.

  Brooks smiled as he climbed up to the thin ledge, braced himself, and grabbed for the lip of the orifice. Despite his frequent bouts with idiocy, he was starting to genuinely like Julian. There was something simultaneously endearing and maddening about him that reminded Brooks that the grad student was far brighter than he wanted people to think he was. There was an inherent advantage in being routinely underestimated.

  And then there were times when Brooks wondered if he wasn’t way off base with that assessment and metaphorically ascribing human traits to a pet rock.

  “We can’t get through if you don’t move,” Brooks said, his face so close to Julian’s that he appeared to have a single eye.

  “Oh, yeah.” Julian shook his head as though to rattle his brain back into place. “Right. You got it, prof.”

  He wriggled backward and into the recess while Brooks slithered forward. The ground was damp from the rain blowing into the cave. Once he cleared the egress, he turned around and went back in, face-first. Adrianne was just peering over the edge from the inside, looking for the best place to get a grip to pull herself up. Since she was shorter than the rest of them, she couldn’t quite find purchase without transferring her weight out over the abyss.

  Brooks extended his hand and she gratefully took it, their eyes meeting in the faint light. Brooks felt a tingle in the pit of his stomach as he pulled her into the tunnel. As with Julian, their faces were only inches apart. He felt the warmth of her breath on his lips and the line he’d drawn momentarily grew blurry.

  She smiled as though she could read his mind and said, “I’m getting wet.”

  Brooks stared at her without the slightest idea how to respond.

  “The rain,” she said. Her hand made a soft splashing sound when she patted the ground in front of his face. “It’s getting my clothes wet.”

  Brooks’s cheeks flushed with heat.

  She winked playfully and tapped the tip of his nose with her wet finger.

  He smiled and wiped it on his shoulder, then scooted backward into the recess, where Warren and Julian had squeezed as far as they could to either side to make room for them. They both looked curiously at Brooks when he sat up.

  “What?” he asked.

  Warren rolled his eyes theatrically and shined his light into the coffin. There was barely room for all four of them in the tiny recess. As it was, they were forced to crouch on the lid of the coffin, which wobbled and made cracking sounds under their combined weight. The back of Brooks’s head grazed the low stone roof as he leaned over the body. He caught one whiff of the smell, covered his nose with his hand, and started breathing through his mouth.

  The remains were skeletal, the bones dark brown from absorbing the fluids of decomposition, which adhered to the bottom of the coffin in a thick black crust. The tatters of a robe partially covered its ribcage and pelvis, the straps of fabric black and crisp. The broad cheekbones, U-shaped jaw, and low, slanted frontal bone were definitively male. The circular orbital openings, rounded ridge and prominent nasal spine, and slight mandibular protrusion suggested he was of Asian descent. There were obvious fractures of his left humerus, anterior third through eighth ribs, and ilium. His joints demonstrated average wear and just the faintest hint of inflammatory remodeling, meaning he was probably somewhere in his mid to late thirties. He wore a mala necklace with plain brown beads and a single discolored tassel.

  “He was a monk,” Adrianne said.

  “That’s what I thought at first.” Warren shined his beam onto a tangle of desiccated dark hair maybe four inches long under the skull. “Until I saw all of that hair. Have you ever seen a monk who didn’t shave his head?”

  “Hair and nails continue to grow after death.”

  Warren smirked and abruptly turned his face away from the wind, which screamed through the vines and pelted them with rain. When it waned, he shined his light at the man’s skeletal hand.

  “That much though?”

  Resting near the disarticulated fingers were long, thick nails. They were yellowish-brown, deeply ridged, and tapered to ragged points.

  Brooks leaned in and picked one up. He recoiled from the stench and the repulsive sensation of the rain-dampened grunge on his fingertips. He turned the nail over and over, then aligned it with the nail on his index finger. The condition resembled onychogryposis, or “ram’s-horn nail,” which caused the nail to grow hard and thick and made it nearly impossible to cut, but it lacked the telltale curvature of its namesake. It looked more like the claw of an old world primate like a baboon, a more aggressive species known to prey upon other small mammals, like the chimpanzee from the hominin tree.

  He passed it to Adrianne and shielded his eyes from another assault of raindrops. A grumble of thunder rolled down from the high country like an avalanche. Beneath it he heard what sounded like a shrill cry that blended into the screaming wind.

  “And now for the pièce de résistance,” Warren said. He leaned over the side of the coffin and shined his light underneath the mandible and onto the roof of the dead monk’s mouth. At first Brooks didn’t see what had his colleague so excited, so he leaned nearly all the way down, until his ear nearly touched the corpse’s chest. There was no mistaking it from that angle. He should have noticed right away that the teeth projected slightly too far forward for a man of Asian origin. From the inside he could see that the tiniest bits of the roots were exposed, and between those prongs, which served to plug the teeth into the sockets, were calcifications that almost resembled bone, although human beings had no ancillary bones in their alveolar sockets.

  The truth hit him with another gust of freezing rain.

  He glanced at Warren, who offered his smuggest smile and held up one of his ice axes.

  “Do you know how hard it was waiting for you guys?” Julian said.

  “Would you care to do the honors, Jordan?” Warren said.

  Brooks’s hand felt weightless when he accepted the ice ax. He stared at the extended pick for several seconds while he set aside his reservations. An anthropologist was tasked with the preservation of his discoveries in the field. What he now contemplated was a violation of his core beliefs, but his curiosity was simply too great. He had to know if his speculations were correct. If so, what he was about to do would change the world forever.

  He aligned the pick with the left maxillary bone, beside the nose and below the rim of the orbit, raise
d it several inches, and struck the brittle bone with a loud crack. The pick made a small hole, from which the bone splintered away like cracks in an eggshell. He inserted the tip through the hole again and pried the broken fragments outward until he’d exposed the entirety of the maxillary sinus.

  Warren leaned closer and shined his light into the roughly trapezoidal space, which had once helped filter the air and equalize pressure changes inside the skull. Now sharp protrusions of bone jutted upward from the floor of the sinus.

  “They’re teeth,” Julian said.

  Brooks could only stare at them, his pulse thrumming in his ears.

  The bases of the teeth were barely visible and the roots were still in the early stages of development. The bulk of the tooth was deep inside the bone, pressing down on the monk’s permanent teeth from above, just as they had once forced out the baby teeth.

  Brooks had never seen anything like it in his entire life. He had discovered remains from time to time that CT scans revealed had additional teeth trapped above the permanent teeth, but this appeared to be nearly a full set, minus the central and lateral incisors. Everything from the canines to the molars. He was witnessing spontaneous odontogenesis, the formation of teeth where no teeth should exist.

  In normal children, the permanent teeth started to develop sometime between three months and two and a half years of age. They began as microscopic germ cells derived from the ectoderm of the first branchial arch and the ectomesenchyme of the neural crest, although the mechanism by which those germ cells were first stimulated to grow remained a mystery. Like any seed, the germ grew roots and an external projection, in this case composed of both inner and outer layers of enamel and odontoblasts, which formed the dentin. And thus, what started as a random aggregation of cells transformed into a highly specialized structure by means of a biological impetus beyond the limited understanding of science.

  The virus had activated whatever mechanism caused these germ cells to grow and proliferate.

  Brooks reached into the sinus in the monk’s face and pinched the roots of the tooth closest to the nose, presumably the canine, and gently applied upward traction. It didn’t budge. A little wiggle and more pressure produced a cracking sound. It came right out after that.

  He held it up for all to see. Warren shined his light on it. It was maybe an inch and a half long with the roots, making it somewhere between a quarter- and a half-inch longer than the incisors. It reminded Brooks of the canines of a chimpanzee, only with more exaggerated inward curvature.

  “How the hell did he grow that?” Julian asked.

  Brooks pressed the tip of the tooth against the pad of his thumb and winced at how sharp it was.

  He recalled his conversation with Brandt regarding the coevolution of hominins and their teeth and how each iteration of man served to bring humanity closer to the top of the food chain, closer to becoming the perfect predator.

  “We have to check the others,” Brooks said.

  In his mind he saw the plaster mask and experienced the revelation toward which Brandt had been guiding him from the very beginning. The species they were here to find wasn’t a historical offshoot of the human line, but an extant species only now beginning to evolve. Truly the next step in their own evolution. And if these physical mutations were the connection between all of the victims entombed here where someone hoped they would never be found, then Brandt had known König was infected by the virus and had potentially sent Andreessen to his death with full knowledge of what the primatologist would be exposed to.

  Just as he had dispatched Brooks’s team.

  He imagined the picture of Brandt with a smile on his face at Dachau and realized just how completely he’d fooled them all.

  Twenty-seven

  Johann Brandt Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

  Chicago, Illinois

  October 9th

  Eight Days Ago

  “I trust you’ve reviewed your itinerary and found all of the arrangements satisfactory,” Brandt said.

  “Everything appears to be in order.” Brooks leaned back in his chair and ran his fingers through his hair. They’d been discussing every detail of the expedition in Brandt’s office for nearly four hours and his head was positively spinning from trying to keep track of them all. He could hardly keep them straight in his own mind, let alone well enough to present them to his team. “There’s really only one variable that concerns me.”

  “Which one is that?”

  “The guide you hired to get us from Gangtok to Motuo. What do you know about him?”

  “He comes highly recommended by an old friend of mine, a man who doesn’t take such matters lightly. I trust his word implicitly.”

  “Surely you can appreciate my position, though. We’ll be four Americans traveling in China without having filed formal travel plans with the consulate. You know the Chinese can spin anything to their advantage. We could wind up being treated like an invading army and find ourselves in the middle of a political maelstrom.”

  “I’ve been assured your guide can get you safely through Sikkim and into Tibet without causing an international incident,” Brandt said with a smirk.

  “You mock me, but it won’t be your ass on the line if anything goes wrong. We’ll be in the middle of nowhere and hundreds of miles from anything resembling help. Not to mention the fact that—thanks to the non-disclosure clause in our contracts—no one other than you will even know we’re there.”

  “Your guide has performed his services admirably for my colleague, who has utilized him on numerous occasions to safely move liberated antiquities into India.”

  “Your friend’s a smuggler?”

  “Dear heavens, no.” Brandt chuckled. “He’s the director of the Modern Tibetan Studies program at Columbia.”

  “So where did he find this…what’s his name, Zhang?”

  “From what I understand, Mr. Zhang comes from a long line of merchants who’ve traveled these routes since the days of the Han Dynasty.”

  “Has he made the trek to Motuo before?”

  “I’ve been assured he can get you there.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “I worry less about your ability to navigate the trail through the Himalayas than I do you meeting with unsavory elements along the way. After all, were it not for our fearless leader and master hunter, we undoubtedly would have fallen prey to bandits on more than one occasion.”

  “So Zhang’s some sort of mercenary?”

  “You make it sound so sordid. He served in the PLA long enough to learn how to circumvent their patrols and how to handle a weapon. It’s not as though you’ll be able to get any of your own through customs. You’d be amazed how many permits needed to be filled out to get your ice axes through.”

  “They’re called ‘ice tools’ now.”

  “Perhaps that explains the sheer volume of paperwork.”

  “What kind of trouble do you expect us to get into?”

  “None you can’t handle, if I’ve made the proper arrangements.”

  Brooks sighed. Talking to Brandt was a maddening experience. No matter how he phrased his questions, he could never get a straight answer. So much of what the old man told him he had to accept on faith. At least, if nothing else, he trusted Brandt, and if Brandt trusted his friend’s recommendation of Zhang, then that was going to have to be good enough. Whatever the guide’s qualifications, at least he knew Zhang wouldn’t abandon them in the middle of the Himalayas, at least not with the bulk of his fee being paid upon their safe return to Gangtok.

  “What about the other members of the expedition?” Brooks asked. “I’ve been poring over their resumes and I have to admit I’m a little surprised by their selection, even considering how quickly we had to throw this together.”

  “Do go on.”

  “Let’s start with Adrianne Grayson. While I can see where her specialty could be beneficial, her contribution could be made entirely upon our return. You don’t
have to be physically in the environment to predict the population dynamics of an extinct organism.”

  “Who says the organism is extinct?” Brandt said, and raised his eyebrow.

  “You said the subject wasn’t alive when you cast it.”

  “Relax, my boy. You mustn’t take everything so seriously if you intend to live as long as I have.” He smiled indulgently. “Ms. Grayson is highly skilled in the lab and has experience working with the portable PCR, which, if I understand correctly, has a pretty steep learning curve, especially for someone, shall we say…set in his ways?”

  “I worry about the safety of an attractive female in the field.”

  “Attractive, you say?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “It says here that Ms. Grayson was raised in a military family. I find it hard to believe she could be entirely without the ability to protect herself. Besides, should you be so fortunate as to discover the theorized virus responsible for the mutations, would you not be best served to have one among you capable of establishing a formal range and pattern of population distribution? I can’t see you having much success randomly collecting environmental samples and testing them for the virus. If there’s a locus of exposure, you and I both know it won’t be easy to find. And believe me, you could stay there for the rest of your life and still not see the entirety of Motuo.”

  “What about Julian Armstead? Outside of his climbing ability, I really see no benefit to his inclusion.”

  “Answer me this, my boy…how much food can you carry?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “How about while also shouldering a pack full of heavy scientific equipment? You’ll be traveling light, with only what you can carry on your person. On my expedition, we led a train of more than thirty mules, and even then we were burdened by our own clothing and personal supplies. You’d be surprised how heavy even an empty pack can be when hauling it over the highest mountain range in the world. You’re going to need someone capable of distinguishing the edible plants from the poisonous ones, and, from what I understand, Mr. Armstead is something of a savant when it comes to the identification of different species of flora. And remember, not all viruses are transmitted by higher order life forms. You’re familiar, of course, with the transmission of the pepper mild mottle virus directly to human beings without an insect intermediary? Or perhaps the Bunyaviridae family of hemorrhagic viruses or the Rhabdoviridae family of pathogens, which can infect both plants and animals?”