Covenant

8

The woman stared at him from across the street, her hair in disarray, her wrists bound, guns wedged into her side as she was wrestled into a battered sedan by masked men. Ethan shouted at her, but his voice was muted. He ran toward her, but his legs refused to move, dragging like lead weights beneath him. He saw her scream in desperation, and he heard a strange whining noise assault his ears as the world shuddered beneath his feet.

Ethan’s eyes blinked open, the turbulence shuddering through the aircraft jolting him awake.

He stared out of his window as the Boeing 737 turned steeply over the sparkling azure Mediterranean. The coast of Israel drifted past five thousand feet below beneath a scattering of cloud, and to the north he could see the metallic sprawl of Tel Aviv glinting through the early-morning haze. His eyes ached, and he realized that he had drifted into sleep, the first time since taking off some seven hours previously.

Beside him Rachel Morgan sat in catatonic silence, as she had done for the past four hours. Ethan had spent half of his life crammed into aircraft flying from one godforsaken war zone to another, and had hated the narcissistic chatter of journalists from a dozen countries sharing their unwanted opinions on whatever crisis they were heading to document. Rachel’s silence had been initially a great relief. Now, he suspected that there was something more to it, emphasized by the empty seat between them.

“We’re descending,” he said in a vague attempt to provoke conversation.

“So it would seem.”

He tried again.

“You ever been to the Middle East before?”

“Only when family members go missing.”

“Is that some kind of joke?” Ethan snapped.

Rachel’s eyes swiveled to peer sideways at him. “No, I’m sorry. I’m just not in the mood for talking right now.”

“Is there some kind of problem here, with me?”

“Should there be?”

“You’ve barely spoken since we met, and if this trip is going to achieve anything at all, I need your help.” Ethan leaned across the empty seat between them. “If we can’t work together and start uncovering what happened to Lucy, you know what will happen?”

“What will happen?”

“Nothing at all.”

Rachel stared ahead for a few moments before replying. “I’m not comfortable with the idea of running around a foreign country with someone I don’t know anything about and who clearly has problems of his own.”

“You think I want to be cooped up on an airliner bound for the Middle East?” Ethan challenged. “I was perfectly happy where I was.”

“Is that so?” Rachel said. “You see, that’s my point. Even Doug admitted to me that you’re troubled, and whether that’s because of whatever happened to you out here or not is irrelevant. If you’re unable to help yourself, then what use are you to me or to Lucy?”

Ethan struggled to erect a harbor of dignity around his shame.

“Do you think Doug would have asked me here if he thought that?”

“By his own admission, there was nobody else he could ask.”

Ethan gave up and stared out of the window. “Glad I could help.”

For a long time Rachel sat staring into space, but eventually she glanced across at him.

“Look, I appreciate you being here.”

“Thanks,” Ethan said quietly. “As you’ve pointed out neither of us has much of a choice, so why don’t we just get on with it?”

Rachel stared at him for a long moment with an unconvinced expression. “Fine.”

“I need you to tell me everything you can about your daughter and what she was up to out here.”

“Lucy was born in 1981, but her father Robert died when she was fourteen.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“So were we,” Rachel said, her voice softening. “He died before his time. I’ve questioned a thousand times what would make God take someone from us, but I’ve never found an answer.”

“You’re Catholic,” Ethan guessed.

“I’m a theologian. You?”

Ethan held up his hands. “I’m on the fence, doesn’t interest me much.”

Rachel looked away, but he saw a ghost of a smile touch her lips. “You’d have liked Robert then. He was a humanist.”

Ethan blinked.

“A humanist, a theologian, and a scientist? Family dinners must have literally been a riot.”

Rachel smiled again and Ethan watched as her green eyes blossomed briefly with light, but the moment vanished as quickly as it had come and the smile melted away.

“How on earth did you and Robert meet?”

“He was a friend of a friend. We met at a barbeque, and he bet me ten bucks that I couldn’t convert him from his humanism over a dinner date.”

“Nice move,” Ethan said.

“It was.”

Rachel’s features were no longer strained, and though she continued to stare straight ahead Ethan could see that her mind was wandering among the phantasms of the past. She barely noticed the mechanical grind of the aircraft’s undercarriage coming down somewhere beneath them. Ethan glanced briefly out of the window at the fields and palm groves sweeping past beneath the Boeing’s flexing wing tips.

“How did Lucy end up in Israel?”

“She had been doing field research in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley near Nairobi, before moving to the Hebrew University under a new posting. She’d been awarded a grant for new research into early human evolution and was being mentored by someone called Hans Karowitz, a Belgian scientist, and a cosmologist called Hassim Khan.”

Ethan made a mental note of the names.

“Okay, so why don’t you tell me what was so important about what she found out there?”

“It was an unknown species of human,” Rachel began, “that hasn’t yet been classified by science and—”

“That the Defense Intelligence Agency for some reason wants to recover?” Ethan challenged. “I need to know everything, or this is all for nothing.”

Rachel sighed.

“They asked me not to reveal it to you unless it was absolutely necessary.”

“Is finding your daughter alive absolutely necessary?” Ethan asked.

Rachel closed her eyes and nodded before speaking softly.

“The remains that Lucy found were in a tomb estimated to have been about seven thousand years old,” she said. “But the remains were not human.”

“Not human?” Ethan echoed. “They said that the bones were humanoid.”

“Yes, they were.”

The aircraft around Ethan seemed to recede as he tried to grasp what Rachel was saying.

“So it was some kind of ape?”

“It was a species that did not originate or evolve on this planet,” Rachel said.

Ethan dragged a hand down his face, trying to conceal his disbelief.

“An alien,” he said finally. “That’s why they’re sending the DIA after Lucy, because they think she found E.T. camping in Israel and they want possession of the remains.”

“It’s the only reason they’re willing to take an interest in this case at all,” she said sadly. “If it weren’t for what Lucy found, do you think the DIA would invest in a search for her? They wouldn’t give a damn. This is about the remains, not Lucy.”

Ethan leaned his head back against his seat and chuckled in disbelief.

“I’m being sent halfway across the world to dig up some bones for the DIA,” he murmured, “that’ll probably turn out to have belonged to a frickin’ rhinocerous or something.”

Rachel shot him a toxic look.

“My daughter is still missing out there, whatever you think about this, and she’s smart enough to be able to tell a rhino from a human.”

Ethan shook himself from his torpor of disbelief.

“Okay, indulge me. Why would she have found something like that out there?”

“There’s a big problem in human history that nobody has been able to explain,” Rachel said. “The ancestors of modern humans, people essentially identical to us in every way, had existed in a hunter-gatherer state for at least sixty thousand years. But suddenly, out of nowhere, mankind began building cities, forming agriculture and producing advanced technologies. And that growth blossomed simultaneously in vastly separated geographical areas, from the Indus Valley to the Levant to the Americas.”

Ethan leaned back in his seat.

“Surely that’s just natural growth after the end of the Ice Ages?”

Rachel shook her head.

“There had been some developments, of course: simple dwellings, domestication of animals, and rudimentary agriculture. But then the people of the Indus Valley in today’s Pakistan began the construction of major cities around five thousand years ago. At the same time the Sumerians began to build cities in Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. The point is that there is no record of gradual development or progression — the cities sprang up almost instantaneously. Both civilizations supposedly independently invented the wheel and a script called cuneiform. The Indus Valley script, known as Dravidian, hasn’t been fully deciphered even today.”

“How big were these cities?” Ethan asked.

He was surprised by her answer, never having known that such ancient cities could harbor populations of up to forty thousand people. Nor had he known of the complexity of their technologies: that the Indus civilization had built domestic bathrooms, flushing toilets, and drains using burned and glazed bricks; or that it built public basins with two layers of bricks with gypsum mortar and sealed by a layer of bitumen, a remarkably astute method. The Mesopotamians had built docks and seaworthy vessels for trade, and had developed extensive irrigation comparable to modern agriculture.

“Okay,” Ethan said, “but so did the Egyptians, right, and they came later?”

“The Egyptians rose at about the same time,” Rachel said. “Egypt’s first king, Menes, ruled some five thousand years ago in its capital Memphis, but the kingdom was ancient even then and had already developed its hieroglyphic script, again apparently out of nowhere.”

Ethan frowned.

“And you don’t think that this could have happened naturally?”

“It’s possible,” Rachel conceded, “but it should have taken longer than it did, and it seems that the ancients suddenly acquired knowledge sufficiently advanced to still be used today.”

The Babylonians, Rachel explained, were descended from the Sumerians, and their mathematics was written using a sexagesimal numeral system: one which has as its base the number sixty. From this derived the modern-day usage of sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, and three hundred and sixty degrees in a circle.

“Which remains after almost eight thousand years,” Ethan said.

“Along with various customs and traditions,” Rachel agreed, “which are continued today in recognizable forms.”

“And Lucy thinks that another species,” Ethan guessed, “perhaps an extraterrestrial species, gave them knowledge, which they then passed down through time ever after?”

“If it seemed crazy before, it doesn’t now after what Lucy found,” Rachel said. “I’ve spent some time researching all of this since Lucy first mentioned it months ago, long before she disappeared. There have been many books written in the past that have attributed all manner of activities to alien visitors from distant planets, from the founding of Atlantis to building the pyramids. All of it was rubbish, of course.”

“So what’s the difference here?” Ethan asked.

“Real historical events that match the supposed myths of a thousand religions,” Rachel said. “We are familiar only with the religious histories that survive to this day, but they have existed in many differing forms for millennia. Oral tradition was the only way for ancient civilizations to record their past until scripts suddenly appeared simultaneously around the world: the Neolithic script, Indus script, Sumerian and Bronze Age phonetics all appeared around six thousand years ago. In all of their creation myths, these early civilizations almost identically describe Gods who came down from the skies and passed to them great knowledge.”

Ethan himself had read of the legends of the Sumerians, Egyptians, Amerindians, and Japanese, describing such visitors as traveling in fiery chariots, flaming dragons, or giant glowing birds that descended noisily from the sky.

A loud thump reverberated through the fuselage.

Ethan looked at the sun-baked runway flashing past outside. “So we don’t know who hired Lucy to go digging in the Negev for alien remains, but whoever it was must have known what they were looking for.”

“I doubt that she would have abandoned her original research on a whim.”

Ethan unbuckled his seat belt and turned to face her.

“I need to know everything you know about this,” he said. “When someone vanishes, the first forty-eight hours are the most critical and they’ve already passed. Knowledge is our only resource now because X never marks the spot.”

Although Ethan could still see doubt shadowing her expression, Rachel unbuckled her seat belt and looked at him expectantly.

“What do you want to know?”