Fearful Symmetry: A Thriller Read online

  Runoff channeled through the lotus flowers, making the ground so slippery he could barely brace his elbows to haul himself out. He stood on the exposed precipice, the wind snapping his drenched clothes, and shouted for their guide.

  The storm swallowed his words.

  He was about to try again when lightning flared and something caught his eye. A reflection. On the ground, in the bushes to his right.

  He leaned over and scrutinized it as he walked toward where he’d seen the reflected lightning. He brushed aside the leaves of the fleece flower Julian had identified earlier and saw what had caught his eye. He pinched it between his fingers and held it up so he could better see it.

  “It’s a Tokarev cartridge,” Adrianne said. “You can tell by the steel casing and the distinct bottleneck shape. Not to mention the fact that it’s significantly smaller than the nine-millimeter rounds used by nearly all other modern semiautomatic weapons. The kind you would use in a Chinese-issue Type 54 semiautomatic pistol.” She shrugged. “Trust me. I know these things.”

  Brooks sniffed the open end and smelled the sulfurous residue of gunpowder. He passed it to Adrianne, who confirmed his suspicions with a nod.

  “I knew I heard gunfire,” Julian said. “How come no one ever believes—?”

  “Shh!”

  Adrianne silenced him and sifted through the lotus flowers until she found another casing, and another still. She faced the tree line at the top of the hill and turned slowly from one side to the other before returning to a spot where a dense thicket of birch trees was almost indistinguishable from the darkness, were it not for the way its leaves shimmered like the scales of a trout.

  “He stood here and fired toward those trees.”

  She trudged uphill through the flowers, her arms out to her sides for balance on the slick slope. About halfway to the thicket, she crouched and collected three more steel casings, these ones more closely arranged.

  Brooks caught up with her and walked at her side as they neared the trees. The rain had beaten a carpet of leaves from the canopy, concealing whatever tracks the water hadn’t washed away. He wanted to shout for Zhang, but something prevented him from doing so. Maybe it was how the shadows near the ground appeared almost sentient, as though lying in wait for them. Or perhaps it was the fact that Adrianne, who mere minutes ago had refused to walk away from their findings, pulled up short and stopped altogether.

  He glanced back at her and saw it in her face. She felt it, too. And if there was one thing Brooks knew, it was that no species evolved without developing a highly sophisticated set of survival instincts. Right now, his were screaming for him not to take another step.

  “Do you think he abandoned us?” Warren asked in a voice barely audible over the rain.

  Brooks shook his head. That’s not at all what he thought. True, there was no way of knowing if Zhang was shooting as he advanced up the mountain or as he fell back toward the valley, but that didn’t change the fact that Zhang had been firing toward the thicket, where he surely must have seen something more menacing than the shadows.

  Brooks took a step closer and shined his light into the trees. The branches bounced up and down and swayed violently from one side to the other. The bushes surrounding their trunks positively shook.

  He eased closer and closer until he was mere feet away and his light cast wildly shifting shadows into the depths of the thicket. He braced a leafy branch on his left forearm and ducked out of the worst of the storm. The trees attenuated the brunt of the wind and rain. A mat of moldering leaves covered the ground. Several steps ahead was another steel casing, this one all by itself.

  He knelt and shined his light across the detritus. Zhang’s footprints were distinguishable by the faint impressions and the way the leaves around the outside edges stood slightly upward in the mud.

  Brooks stood once more and shined his beam ahead of him. The trees grew so closely together that he couldn’t even see the shadows behind them. Zhang wouldn’t have had a clear shot at much of anything more than a few feet away, if then. So what had he been shooting at?

  And then it hit him.

  Brooks slowly raised his light up into the canopy overhead. A branch as thick as his arm ran nearly directly above him, its papery bark torn where claws had bitten into the pulp. Fresh sap glistened in his beam near what looked like the point of impact from a bullet. The trunk was riddled with punctures and scratches from which amber oozed toward a deep crimson spatter. The rainwater had eroded clear white lines through it on its way toward the ground, where a semiautomatic pistol was partially buried beneath the mud and leaves.

  Twenty-nine

  Excerpt from the journal of

  Hermann G. Wolff

  Courtesy of Johann Brandt, Private Collection

  Chicago, Illinois

  (Translated from original handwritten German text)

  February 1939

  The others slept restlessly. Eberhardt remained vigilant until his exhaustion became too great and claimed him in the mouth of the cave, where he awaited his friend’s return. He had faith that since Metzger had been raised in the Bavarian Alps he had at least learned rudimentary survival skills. He said we should not prematurely concern ourselves, although the expression on his face even as he spoke the words suggested they rang hollow in his own ears.

  Brandt was febrile, his skin beaded with sweat. The aspirin diminished his fever, but never entirely eased it, and he was burning through our limited supply at an alarming rate. I fear it will be gone by the time the rest of us need it, should his malady be catching.

  My curiosity got the better of me while I was forced to wait out the sunset and the gloaming. As he was in no position to deny my request, I seized the opportunity to page through his notebooks. I read them with abject fascination as I covertly watched König, who again perched on his rock, surveying the night without appearing to so much as breathe.

  I find Brandt’s work revelatory. Never have I imagined the complexities of the anatomical arts. His theories regarding the relationship between the size of the cranium and intelligence strikes me as brilliant in its simplicity. Not to mention the categorical differences between races. There is nary a blue-eyed Tibetan among the hundreds he has studied, nor does a single man among them have blond hair. He has even gathered detailed statistics regarding how nearly every aspect of their anatomy differs from our own. The width of their noses and cheekbones, the proportional lengths of their appendages, the size and shape of their teeth, even the way they walk differs greatly from those of us of decidedly Nordic descent.

  While his science is largely observational—and thus, arguably, not a science at all—I can see exactly which conclusions he intends to draw. The differences between races are much more significant than mere skin color alone. A case can and rightly should be made for separate sub-species classification, for his subjects are as alike one another as they are unlike us. If this can be proven—and I suspect it will take more detailed anatomic investigation than can be accomplished with mere calipers and eye charts—then can not a case be made that we have indeed evolved from disparate lineages? Can the same theory be applied to other races beside the Tibetans? Will it hold up to scrutiny when applied to Africans and Orientals? Or even Arabs and Jews? Are we not a single species of man, but rather many species of unrelated ancestry isolated by nature and geography, like so many dogs? And if this is indeed true, then is it possible that Himmler is in fact right and we are truly the descendants of a superior race?

  My mind reels with the possibilities. Mere days ago I laughed at the notion of finding proof of the existence of an Aryan race. And now…I am no longer convinced of anything beyond my lack of knowledge. I feel like a newborn opening his eyes to see the world around him for the first time. I am simultaneously terrified and exhilarated. Why could I not have learned such things while I was still at university?

  I replaced the notebooks in Brandt’s trunk and pretended to sleep. There was even a time when I might have
dozed, and yet upon opening my eyes found König only then descending from his perch as silently as a shadow. I knew he would not be able to see me beyond the dying embers of the fire and watched him gather several boxes of ammunition, rub dirt into the skin of his face and hands, and dart off into the trees with his rifle. I wasted no more time on false pretense. Had I not moved as quickly as I did, he would have been lost to me.

  The night was cold; however, no rain fell, nor did the wind blow. To my own ears I made the ruckus of a yak thrashing through the forest and surprisingly did not give myself away. Neither did I prove especially adept at tracking our master hunter in the dark, though. He made no sound, at least none that I could hear, and left barely the occasional track to point me in the right direction.

  The first of his traps I encountered stood untouched. The monkey staked to it had drawn an audience of flies, but little else beyond the smell of rot. I wondered at König’s use of bait, for was not the definition of a predator its instinct to hunt? Would a beast as noble and ferocious as a tiger be so easily fooled?

  It was these thoughts upon which I dwelled when I heard the clanking of a tin can from the distance. It was a sound that reminded me of my utter lack of a long-range weapon of any kind. My knife would serve me well in close quarters, but nowhere near well enough to slow the beating of my heart or the trembling of my hands.

  I found the next stake on the ground near the severed twine and the can to which it had been tied. The animal’s carcass was nowhere to be seen. Only the flies remained, drifting through the clearing with no clear scent to follow. The tracks were more distinct here, if no more defined. I could at least tell they did not belong to König, for they more closely resembled the print I had filmed earlier and that I believed our fearless leader had been tracking for several days prior to that. It struck me that perhaps it was not we who were the hunters, but rather those being hunted.

  I heard another sharp clang and the snap of a stick. I moved more cautiously this time, remaining close to the trunks of the trees to hide my silhouette and scampering from one to the next to minimize my exposure. I was nearly upon the source of the sound when a hand closed over my mouth and I was dragged unceremoniously into the underbrush.

  A voice whispered into my ear to hold still and remain silent. König’s eyes were wild and stood apart from his face when he released me and crawled past where I lay to better view his trap. I heard the softest of crunching sounds, like those made by a man walking across kindling. As I focused on them, however, the sounds resolved and I heard them for what they truly were. They were the sounds of an animal chewing, of bones breaking between powerful jaws.

  I risked a peek over the top of the bushes and König shot me a glance of warning.

  The chewing abruptly ceased and I heard a sound that will haunt me until my dying days, assuming my days are not already numbered. It was a long, deep inhalation as whatever was out there tested the air for our scents. It was not a sniff, as one would expect from an animal, but an inhalation of the type one could only ascribe to a human being.

  In the silence that followed, I did not move so much as a single muscle, for I knew the slightest noise would betray me. I held my breath until it grew stale in my chest, my ribs ached, and I started to swoon. I could barely see König as he seated his rifle against his shoulder and sighted the clearing through his scope. I do not know what he saw, only that what he did caused him to turn to me and utter a single word.

  Run.

  Which is exactly what I did. I sprinted blindly through the forest without any regard for direction, my arms in front of my face to shield them from the branches that cut my skin and sought to blind me. I listened for the sounds of pursuit behind me, but could hear nothing over the ruckus of my own creation. I could not even tell if König was at my heels. For all I knew, he had used me once more as bait to draw out our attacker and I had proved an eager accomplice. And still I could not bring myself to turn around. For all my misgivings, I had seen the expression of genuine mortification on his face, an expression I once believed to be outside of his range of emotion.

  I ran until I was on the verge of collapse, my exertions burning in my chest. Every thicket was identical to the last and I could no more tell where I was than see where I was going. In retrospect, I should have used the position of the moon to guide me or, failing at that, utilized my other senses. I should have heard the monotonous buzz of the flies or smelled the carnage that had summoned them. Maybe then I would not have run headlong into that clearing and seen the condition of the remains.

  Where the moonlight touched the ground the vegetation was black with blood. The bones were heaped in no discernible formation, as though merely cast aside. I could at first not identify which species of animal they had once assembled and might never have had I not seen the shape of the skull and what little the animals had left of Metzger’s face.

  I made no conscious decision to stop, and yet I found myself staring down at what had only a day prior been a man with whom I had shared every moment of the last four months. The buzzing stillness was unmarred by so much as the wind rustling through the trees.

  It was at that precise moment that I reached the decision to leave this godforsaken land. It was not so much the death of a colleague—for such things are not unknown on expeditions like ours—as much as the manner of his death. This was not the work of animals, at least not any I have ever encountered. Even the feared tiger, for all its ferocity, was incapable of such utter destruction. Metzger had been rent limb from limb in a fashion that defied the natural order and expressed an inherent brutality beyond the capacity of mere animals, which would not have left so much meat for the scavengers.

  Despite absorbing these details in a matter of heartbeats, the scene is still fresh in my mind, as though in some way a part of me is still standing there, regardless of how many days and kilometers have passed in the interim. If I survive to return to the Fatherland, I swear I will take the secrets of this vile land with me to the grave, for if what I have seen is indeed our Master Race, then I have no doubt we are all damned.

  Thirty

  Yarlung Tsangpo River Basin

  Motuo County

  Tibet Autonomous Region

  People’s Republic of China

  October 16th

  Yesterday

  “If he’s still alive, he’ll know where to find us,” Brooks said.

  “And if he’s not?” Warren said.

  “We can’t just leave him,” Adrianne said. “What if he’s hurt and needs our help?”

  “You were there. We didn’t see a single footprint leading away from there in any direction.”

  “We barely searched for half an hour.”

  “Which was more than long enough to learn we weren’t going to find anything, no matter how long we looked.”

  They emerged from the winding path through the forest and struck off across the wet plain. The cliff was barely visible to the right through the driving rain. They’d left nearly all of their equipment in the tombs, but at this point it didn’t matter. They could come back for it. Right now, the only thing that mattered was getting as far away from this place as possible.

  “Besides,” Warren said, “how can we be sure he didn’t stage that whole scene so he could abandon us?”

  “Because he doesn’t get the remaining three-quarters of his fee until we arrive safely back in Gangtok,” Brooks said.

  “Even what he’s made so far is surely a small fortune for people up here. Maybe the Chinese are paying him even more to turn us in. Lord only knows what would happen if they leaked word they caught four Americans in a restricted area. Our own embassy wouldn’t even acknowledge us.”

  “He wouldn’t have left his pistol,” Adrianne said. “You can tell how much he loves it by how well maintained it is.”

  She’d commandeered the weapon and cleaned off the mud to reveal the Chinese factory markings and the distinctive star of the PLA engraved in the grip. She’d expertly
ejected the empty eight-round magazine and jacked the breech to show them the solitary bullet left in the chamber. If any of them objected to her taking charge of the pistol, no one said a word. Brooks had experience with firearms in general, but none with handguns of the semiautomatic variety, although firing a single shot wouldn’t require an extensive amount of training.

  The earth was slick with mud, the bushes and flowers beaten to the ground. The path that had been so evident earlier in the day was now invisible. Brooks trusted his sense of direction and prayed it held true. They needed to take the fastest and most direct route back to their camp if they intended to distance themselves from whatever took Zhang. The last thing they could afford was to be outflanked and cut off from their supplies. They had no chance of surviving the frigid Himalayas dressed as they were now.

  The logical part of him insisted they were overreacting. So far all they had seen was a smear of blood where Zhang’s trail ended and the remains of the deer and the tiger. There was more to it than that, though. He recalled the white fur Zhang had collected and how it had more closely resembled hair, how it had smelled when he incinerated it over the flames. More importantly, he remembered the expression on the trail boss’ face when he did so. He’d known that something was wrong in this valley, but he’d said nothing. Was it because of the money he’d been promised or some other reason only he would ever know?

  And then there were the mutated bodies in the coffins. The sharp teeth forcing their way down through the trabeculum and the claw-like nails that had fallen from the decomposed fingers.

  Brooks could sort through it all later. His only objective now was to get them all clear to safety. Later they could share a laugh at how easily they’d been frightened off, but Brooks’s gut was telling him they’d never get the chance if they stayed here a moment longer than they absolutely had to.