Kronos

41

The Titan

“That’s a real shocker,” Andrea said with a snort. “You’re no more a priest than I’m Mother Teresa.”

O’Shea smiled as he sat in the black-leather swivel chair. He put his hands behind his head and leaned back. “And yet here I am, taking confession from one of the world’s most sinful men.”

Though impressed with O’Shea’s subterfuge, Atticus masked his face to show no surprise. He’d bought O’Shea’s priest routine hook, line, and sinker, believing him to be an eccentric priest rather than a phony. He just didn’t want anyone else to know he’d been so gullible. What other lies had he believed while blinded by his thirst for vengeance? “Why tell us?”

“Two reasons,” O’Shea said. “First, I need your help getting off the Titan. It’s becoming too dangerous. Trevor’s at a dangerous level of Cold War paranoia, and it’s only a matter of time before I’m found out. I may be in Trevor’s good graces now, but if that were to change, Remus would most likely have his way with me, and I’d just become another afternoon snack for Laurel.”

O’Shea sat back again, his smile fading. After chewing on his lip for a moment, he said, “You may find this hard to believe. Hell, I find it hard to believe. I’m a con man…was a con man. I’ve taken Trevor for millions of dollars while pretending to save his soul from damnation. And while most people would congratulate me for stealing from a man like Trevor…”

Andrea raised her hand and nodded.

“I can’t do it anymore. I’d like to say that after all this time pretending to be a priest that I’ve developed an inconvenient sense of morality. Hell, I’ve studied the Bible enough. It seems to have rubbed off, and besides…I just don’t feel safe here anymore. Sooner or later, whether or not he believes I’m helping save his eternal soul, he’s going to see me as a liability. I do not want to be on board when that happens.”

Atticus smiled. He was sure that it had taken equal parts brains and guts to pull off what O’Shea had. Trevor had the best security his money could buy, and yet a single man masquerading as a priest had taken him for millions. He wouldn’t have cared if O’Shea had stolen a billion dollars from Trevor. The Titan was a treasure trove of stolen artifacts. What comes around goes around.

“I’ll get you off the Titan, ” Atticus said.

O’Shea’s smile returned.

“But I’m going to need your help first.”

O’Shea nodded as though he knew an exchange would be necessary. “I’ve already started.”

Atticus furrowed his brow. He wasn’t sure what O’Shea could do to help, even though he had proved himself cunning and was still in Trevor’s good graces. But O’Shea seemed to have his own ideas.

The erstwhile “priest” swiveled around in his chair and rolled up to the desk. He used all three touch pads and the seventeen-inch screens came to life. On them, Atticus saw many of the same articles about the “New England Sea Serpent” that he had already read. Andrea leaned in close, looking at one particularly detailed sketch. “Oh my…That’s it.”

O’Shea nodded.

“How many people have seen this thing?” Andrea asked.

“Over two hundred reported sightings in the Gulf of Maine sine the 1600s,” O’Shea answered. “Most sightings have the general description correct. The way it swims with a vertical undulation. The shape of its head. The dark top and light underbelly. But details around the finer points, like the eyes, fins, and teeth have varied some. I would imagine anyone sighting it would have a hard time recollecting the details because adrenaline can affect the memory.”

“You got that right,” Atticus said, recalling his own faded memories of his first encounter with Kronos.

“The size has also come into question, with reports ranging from 50 to 150 feet in length. This is most likely because Kronos keeps a large portion of his body submerged while moving across the surface. In fact, given the way he swims, it’s impossible to see him all at once from the surface. At first I thought it was a new species-”

“There’s no way Kronos is the first of his kind, and I doubt he’s the last,” Atticus said. “The Gulf of Maine is probably the species’ spawning ground. That would account for the high frequency of sightings, especially if the species reproduces on a multiple-year cycle, rather than yearly.”

“That’s what I thought at first, too,” O’Shea said. “But if there were a population of these things, let’s say one thousand of them-enough to keep the species alive-we’d be seeing them all the time. Creatures as big as Kronos, especially those that breathe air, are impossible to hide.”

Atticus was about to ask O’Shea how he knew Kronos breathed air, but stopped when he realized that the con man was right. Kronos didn’t have gills. Unless the creature had some other way of extracting oxygen from the water, it breathed air like a whale. He kicked himself for not thinking of that before. There he was, an oceanographer, yet distracted enough to miss the obvious.

“But I have a new theory,” O’Shea said. “What if Kronos were one of a kind?”

“Impossible,” Atticus said. “Complex creatures don’t simply form out of nothing, and Kronos is more complex than most.”

“I’ll grant you that,” O’Shea said, “but I’d have to disagree on the point of forming something out of nothing. The whole universe, whether you believe in God or the Big Bang, is something from nothing. At one point before there was time, there was nothing-then poof, there was everything.”

“And then, poof, there was a 150-foot sea serpent,” Andrea said with a laugh. “I’m no oceanographer or quantum physicist, but I know that’s not possible. Didn’t it take millions of years for the first single-celled organisms to appear on earth?”

“Hundreds of millions,” Atticus added.

“I’m not suggesting that Kronos emerged out of some primordial ooze at the bottom of the ocean. But I think nature can play the genetic scientist when it wants to…when a niche needs to be filled.”

Atticus raised a single disbelieving eyebrow.

O’Shea held up his hands. “I know. I know. This is your area of expertise. Just hear me out.” O’Shea pulled up a picture of a platypus on one of the laptops. “Take the platypus. It’s a mammal that lays eggs. It has an elongated snout that looks like a duck’s bill. It uses electroreception to track its prey. It’s venomous like a snake, though it uses a spur to deliver its venom, not fangs. And you don’t even want to hear what the thing has for sex chromosomes. It’s related to only one other creature on earth, the echidna, but only the platypus feeds underwater, has webbed feet and a bill. The point is, the platypus is one of a kind in the animal kingdom. Even its closest relative looks, feeds, and behaves nothing like it. While it has a population that sustains it from generation to generation, it is certainly a genetic aberration.”

Atticus crossed his arms. “And this unique species, this one-of-a-kind mutation of something previous, say an actual Kronosaurus, has lived for how long?”

Though O’Shea could clearly see Atticus wasn’t buying a word of it, he took the question seriously and ran with it. “Let’s assume you’re right, that Kronos started as a Kronosaurus…but lived long enough to adapt and mutate to a new world. Kronosaurus was supposed to have gone extinct during the Cretaceous period, which ended 65 million years ago. But we already know that several species thought to have gone extinct, like the coelacanth, which we believed went extinct 60 million years ago, still thrive today. I’m not saying Kronos is 65 million years old, but it’s not unreasonable to say the Kronosaurus went extinct as little as, say, four thousand years ago.

“Before you state the obvious-that no creature could live the four thousand years between then and now, let’s first keep in mind that we’re talking about a total genetic aberration. I won’t pretend to be a geneticist, so forgive the simple explanation. All living things have these things called telomeres. Their length determines the length of a life, barring any kind of accident or terminal disease. It’s been shown that lengthening telomeres can prolong life. The pharmaceutical company Gernetrix is developing two drugs that trigger telomere lengthening even now.”

“Where have I heard of that company before?” Andrea asked.

“It’s one of Trevor’s. And let me tell you, he puts a lot of stock in the technology. The man plans on becoming as immortal as the ancient gods he admires so much. My point is, if something radical happened to Kronos’s genes, right down to the DNA, there is no reason he couldn’t have either extremely long telomeres…or they simply aren’t shortening with age as they do with every other living creature on the planet. It’s not completely impossible that Kronos is a one-of-a-kind creature with an incredibly long life span. In fact, I’m positive he’s at least thirty-five-hundred years old.”

Atticus squinted. “What are you getting at?”

O’Shea sighed. He was just a con man after all. Though Atticus had to admit, he was the smartest con man he’d ever met-not that he’d met many- but he imagined most didn’t have minds like O’Shea’s. “Sightings of Kronos were passed down in oral tradition through generations. The first recorded sighting was put to page in 1400 B.C.”

O’Shea turned to his desk and reached beyond one of the laptops. He picked up an old leather Bible.

“You think Kronos is in the Bible?” Atticus asked.

O’Shea nodded and flipped through the pages. “At first I thought Kronos might be the creature, Leviathan, which in Hebrew means, ‘twisted’ or ‘coiled.’” O’Shea stopped turning pages, worked the laptop’s touch pad for a moment, and brought up an image of Leviathan.

A dark, brooding engraving filled the screen. Atop peaks of black waves sat a twisting serpentine creature that looked to be a cross between a snake and a dragon. In the sky above the creature flew a sword-wielding angel. Atticus read the title: Destruction of Leviathan by Gustave Dore. The similarities between the creature in the engraving and Kronos were striking, but not quite right.

O’Shea resumed turning pages. “If Kronos had been Leviathan, we’d all be in a heap of trouble. Some rabbinical writings say that God destroyed the female Leviathan shortly after creating it, so that the species could not multiply. If the Leviathans had been allowed to procreate the world could not have stood before them. And the Bible is very detailed about how impervious to attack Leviathan is. It all lines up with my theories on Kronos.”

“But, Kronos isn’t Leviathan?” Atticus asked.

O’Shea stopped turning pages. “I didn’t start figuring things out until the moment you, and the rest of us, saw your daughter alive in the belly of that thing.” O’Shea placed his finger on a verse in the bible. “Listen…‘Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.’”

Atticus’s eyes grew wide. “Jonah? You think that thing out there was created by God, somehow survived all this time, and swallowed my daughter?”

“I’m not saying I believe any of this. I’m just asking, ‘What if?’ and keeping an open mind. If I’m going to consider that Kronos is a genetic aberration in the extreme, it seems only fair to consider the idea that God created Kronos. The majority of people on this planet believe that God created everything there is. What’s one more creature?”

“But wasn’t Jonah swallowed by a whale or a fish or something?” Andrea asked. Her demeanor didn’t strike him as being incredulous, but more interested. Atticus realized he still knew so little about who she had become. He had no idea what her religious beliefs were and decided to tone his reactions down…just in case.

“Most people think so,” O’Shea said with a nod. “But if Jonah’s ‘whale’ already existed, then it’s something that went extinct in the last few thousand years and has yet to be uncovered. Studies have been done on great whites, whale sharks, and every species of whale large enough to swallow someone whole, which is very few, mind you. It’s simply impossible that someone could sit inside the belly of say, a blue whale, and survive.

“But the verse mentioning the creature reveals more than is normally considered. Read the verse slowly. What stands out?”

Atticus barely contained his urge to fling the Bible out the window and curse O’Shea’s absurd theories, but when Andrea stood next to him and began reading, he calmed down. She seemed to take O’Shea seriously. He read the verse. Then again. On the third pass, a single word struck him.

“Prepared,” Andrea said. She’d seen it too. “The Lord prepared a great fish.”

“Exactly!” O’Shea said, thrusting a victorious finger in the air. “God created something specifically for the task of swallowing a human being whole and keeping the person alive for days on end. Now we know from the rest of the passage that Jonah was in no way comfortable inside the belly of the beast, but we do know he survived. I can’t explain how Kronos is able to sustain a human inside him as he does, but what if God designed him that way?

“Look, at the very least, I’m saying that Kronos has been around for thousands of years, and whether he is the inspiration for a Jonah myth or was in fact created by God, the beast has an M.O.”

Andrea smiled. “He spits people back out.”

“Precisely,” O’Shea said with a smile.

“Kronos eating and spitting out one person thousands of years ago doesn’t mean he’ll do it again.” Atticus felt ready to explode.

O’Shea held up his hands defensively. “I don’t think Giona’s the first since Jonah. I think Kronos has repeated this behavior several times over the past several thousand years, and acting as a bastion of God or not, has altered people’s lives, redirecting them on new paths.

“Throughout history, but not widely reported, there are stories of people disappearing at sea only to be found washed up on a beach, days later. What isn’t noticed at the time, but can be seen in hindsight, is that the direction of each of these people’s lives is dramatically altered by the event, usually in some spiritual way. Some people would write the whole thing off as stress-induced hallucinations, but I think most would see it as a type of miraculous event that, for most people, could only originate from God.

“For example…” O’Shea worked two different laptops, one with each hand-a regular ambidextrous computer geek. “In 1638, a preacher by the name of John Wheelwright went missing as he rowed a boat to an awaiting galleon. He was believed to be drowned. But two days later he washed up on a beach in New Hampshire. Shortly after, rather than returning to England, as he had planned, he founded the town of Exeter.”

Atticus glanced at Andrea and noticed her face had paled. “You okay?” he whispered.

“Huh? Yeah, fine.” Andrea offered a feeble smile, then looked back to the computer screen. On the first screen there was a text document titled, “Agreement of the Settlers at Exeter, New Hampshire, 1639.” One year after he’d gone missing at sea.

O’Shea brought up a separate image on the second laptop. The screen displayed a photo of an old, handwritten journal page. It was nearly illegible, but O’Shea already knew what it said. “This is the account of John Josselyn. He recorded the first modern sighting of Kronos. The sighting took place in Cape Ann, which you probably know as Gloucester and Rockport, Massachusetts, just north of Boston. What’s most important is that this sighting took place in 1638, the same year Wheelwright went missing, and to reach the coast of New Hampshire from Boston Harbor, you have to pass right by Cape Ann.”

Atticus shook his head. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He wanted to, but it defied logic.

O’Shea beamed. “Atticus, listen. Don’t you see what this means? I don’t think your daughter is going to die, not from Kronos anyway. This creature, for whatever reason, maybe some kind of temporary symbiotic need, eats people, keeps them alive, and spits them back out like a hairball.”

Atticus’s defenses crumbled, and he began to feel hopeful. The fact was, Giona still lived inside Kronos, and that alone gave him reason to consider the impossible. Relief assaulted his anxiety and fear, threatening to overtake his rational mind, but then he recalled O’Shea’s final words. “What do you mean, ‘not from Kronos anyway.’ You’re implying she’s still going to die.”

O’Shea’s smile disappeared. “I suppose that depends on us.” O’Shea met Atticus’s eyes. “Please understand, I know nothing except the ways of Trevor Manfred. There is no way he will stop in his quest to kill Kronos. When the man starts something, he finishes it. He will kill Kronos, and I doubt he has any intention of first trying to retrieve your daughter.”

“We’ll explain this to him,” Andrea said. “He’ll listen to us. He has to.”

O’Shea shrugged. “Have it your way.”

Atticus fixed his eyes on the digital image of the Leviathan, his mind focused on how to save Giona. He’d been an unstoppable force when seeking vengeance, but not even God could stop him from saving her. And if O’Shea’s Jonah theory held true, then God would be on his side.