The Nemesis Origin

XI

The apartment suite in which Yuri Polkov sat overlooked the broad green glittering waters of the Thames River, the Houses of Parliament and London Bridge visible to the right from the exclusive St Katharine’s Docks. Two stories below, a private marina housed exotic yachts tucked away from prying eyes.

Yuri’s old eyes scanned the cityscape before him, rooftops shining in the sunlight and reminding him of the glittering lights of the oilfields stretched across the Siberian wastes that had once been his home.

‘The files you requested.’

Vladimir Polkov set a thick file of paperwork atop the polished mahogany desk behind which Yuri sat and then backed away respectfully. The old man continued to stare out across London before he seemed to break out of his reverie and looked down at the file.

‘I requested the woman,’ Yuri replied, his accent still heavily influenced by his upbringing, pride in his heritage preventing him from losing his Russian accent.

‘She escaped,’ Vladimir admitted. ‘She had help from an American.’

Yuri continued to look down at the file as he replied. ‘I have mountains of paperwork. I have libraries filled with thousands of books. I do not need files, for they are nothing without the person who collated them.’

‘They have value,’ Vladimir insisted. ‘Do not dismiss them so easily.’

Yuri glared at his son and waved him away with an angry flourish of one veined hand. Vladimir turned without further protest and marched out of the office, closing the door quietly behind him.

Yuri looked down at the folder and reluctantly opened it to see within a dense stack of paperwork hurriedly filed by Dr Lucy Morgan. Yuri did not read the paperwork, instead placing his hand atop the files as though by doing so he could somehow communicate with their creator.

Yuri Polkov had followed the work of Dr Lucy Morgan for almost six years and found himself thoroughly fascinated by what she had achieved, despite the intervention of a crazed US pastor and the United States intelligence service. That they had, as far as his sources could reveal, confiscated one of the most amazing finds any scientist could ever hope to have made in their career and prevented her from even studying it was a tragedy for which he had great sympathy. Lucy Morgan should by now have been a household name, not a low-grade researcher buried somewhere inside Chicago’s Field Museum.

‘You deserve this,’ Yuri whispered to himself and in a moment of wistfulness hoped that Lucy Morgan could hear his words. ‘You will not be forgotten.’

Yuri removed his hand from the folder and then began to read, all the while aware that his theft of her files was a crime. He had wanted the woman, not the work, for from her he could learn of the greatest secret ever concealed from mankind and reveal it to the world.

Yuri Polkov had been born the only son of a farmer who had scratched a meagre existence from the unyielding permafrost of Siberia’s bleak plains. His parents had struggled their entire lives to provide what they could for him and to his eternal gratitude that had included a solid education in a local school largely funded by the oil refineries that provided accommodation and education for the children of workers based out on the lonely ice fields. Yuri’s parents had invested what they could to ensure that Yuri also benefited from this unique opportunity and he had learned to read at an early age.

As Yuri had grown older so his parents had grown weaker, their constant toiling in the fields and the bitter winters wearing them down until it had fallen to Yuri to support them as they had once supported him. But working alone, unable to afford to hire helping hands and witness to his parents terminal decline in health, a rage had been born in him that he had been unable to quell. Unable to provide for them via honest means, Yuri had been forced to turn to his wits and guile in order to improve their terrible circumstances.

In the event, it had not even really been crime that had saved them, not in the truest sense anyway. Yuri’s early reading had fostered a fascination with fossils and dinosaurs, and that fascination had grown into personal study of geology, geography, palaeontology and other disciplines of science. Unable to afford a place at university, Yuri had whiled away countless cold nights reading any book he could get his hands on, and as his knowledge of palaeontology had grown so too had his awareness of the black market in fossils that thrived behind the scenes across the globe.

Yuri had originally intended to pursue an honest trade in fossils and the remains of species that he found in the Motherland, however the government of the time lay claim to anything found on Russian soil as being the property of the Politburo. To claim remains of any kind for oneself, or indeed to profit from them in any way, was punishable by the severest means. Nonetheless, as Yuri began to employ his knowledge of palaeontology in the pursuit of rare fossils, so the temptation to sell them for profit became too great to bear.

At the age of twenty three, while working in the permafrost of Siberia in early spring, Yuri made the discovery of a lifetime. There, suspended in ice before him around the edge of what had once been a Siberian tar pit, were the remains of a perfectly preserved juvenile mammoth. The freezing temperatures had preserved the animal to an astounding degree: the fur seemed as alive as the day the animal had died, the tusks in perfect condition, even the eye sockets not desiccated as with so many similar specimens. Yuri guessed that the animal must have died in a snowstorm and been frozen within hours of its demise before any predators or insects could gain access to the body. Over thousands of years more ice and snow piled over the remains, partly crushing them but otherwise preserving the body intact.

Yuri had immediately been faced with a dilemma. He was not a scientist or official with any significant connections, so he knew that if he reported the mammoth they would be whisked away to Moscow and established scientists would lay claim to the fame associated with the remains. Yuri Polkov of would merely be a small name attached to the find but would benefit from none of the excitement that would surround such a magnificent specimen. Yet, if he embarked upon the uncertain course of smuggling the remains out of Russia for sale in some other country, he ran the risk of arrest and imprisonment in one of Siberia’s notorious jails.

In the end Yuri had decided to excavate the remains himself, a task made easier by his access to large farm machinery belonging to his father. He had managed to excavate the mammoth and place it upon a trailer which he towed behind a tractor into one of the barns. He had then prepared a permanent container for the remains, which he had filled with densely packed snow before placing the mammoth in the container and packing it in with it more snow and ice before sealing the lid shut.

With the mammoth sealed inside the container and preserved by the ice, which was in no danger of melting due to the intensely low temperatures of even a Siberian spring, Yuri had placed his parents into the care of friends as he prepared for what would become the longest journey of his life. With four trusted associates in whom he confided his astonishing find and with their shared intimate knowledge of the Siberian tundra, they had travelled out into the wilderness and spent two days photographing and documenting the remains before resealing the container and burying the mammoth once again in the ice. With the evidence of his find established, his four associates returned home while Yuri travelled south and escaped the Soviet Union via a container ship bound for Europe.

It had taken Yuri three months to establish a sale to a collector based in Montreal who had both the means and the funds to help Yuri smuggle the mammoth out of Russia. The deal was simple: Yuri would give up the remains of the mammoth for precisely half of its value on the black market, in return for the dealer ensuring that both he and his parents were spirited out of Russia and provided with the cash from the illegitimate deal with which to begin a new life in the United States.

Two months later Yuri and his parents had landed safely in Canada, while the remains of the mammoth had been successfully transported across the Bering Sea and into the collector’s hands without the Russian government’s knowledge. As far as Yuri was aware, they still did not know that a crime taken place out on the lonely Siberian wastes.

The value of the illegal sale and the assistance of the Montreal collector’s less savoury friends had provided Yuri and his family with a new home, documents and all of the legal paraphernalia required to begin their new life. In a time when it was still possible to move unnoticed and establish new lives, before computers, before the intensive surveillance of governments, Yuri had been able to provide for his parents until their deaths a few years later, their passing following a period of great happiness rather than the suffering they had endured for so many years previously.

Yuri success prompted him to continue on his path and over the next few years he had successfully smuggled numerous fossils from sites as diverse as Alberta, Montana, China and even Mongolia. Each sale that he achieved to private collectors swelled his bank accounts, and the contacts he made in the underworld laundered the money that passed through them. By the time Yuri was thirty five years old he was a millionaire with properties scattered across the United States, his fossil smuggling business carefully concealed behind the facade of a real estate company operating out of New York City.

Somewhere between his arrival in America and his retirement from the business of smuggling fossils, Yuri had become fascinated with the concept of out of place artefacts, a generic term given to objects that were found in archaeological digs that had no right to be there. The most famous example of such an artefact was the Antikithera Mechanism, an extraordinarily complex solar calendar that has been constructed by the Greeks two thousand years before. Remarkable in its complexity and accuracy, the device had once been believed to be constructed by aliens and handed to the Greeks as the catalyst for their sudden technological advancement.

Although that hypothesis had rapidly been dispelled by the hard work of archaeologists on the mechanism, the potential and possibility that extra-terrestrial intelligences had influenced the advancement of mankind had become an obsession for Yuri. He had spent years searching for evidence to support the hypothesis, and his efforts had not been without fruit. Virtually every single society and civilization in known history bore legends that had traditionally been interpreted as creation stories, or myths of dragons flying through the air or imagined gods created to explain the origin of mankind on the Earth. Yuri, like many others, have come to believe that these legends and myths had some basis in reality, their apparently supernatural flavour merely a consequence of witnesses’ inability to construct a suitable explanation for the things that they had experienced.

Yuri looked down at the folder before him as he recalled so many examples of ancient gods that could in fact have been ordinary people witnessing extraordinary technology at a time in human history when such an experience would have been indistinguishable from magic. He felt certain that Dr Lucy Morgan did not share his beliefs, for he had attempted to contact her on numerous occasions regarding her work in Israel and had received no reply. Likewise, her work in other fields revealed no evidence of interest in out of place artefacts or indeed the alien intervention hypothesis.

Yuri opened the file and sifted through the papers, and instantly his eye was caught by a secondary file that contained images of a number of archaeological sites around the globe. What struck him immediately about the sites was their location, far from the places where people, even archaeologists, would normally spend time searching for evidence of ancient historical artefacts. Perhaps, he mused, Vladimir been right after all.

Yuri reached out with one hand and pressed a communication button on his desk. Instantly a speaker came to life and his son’s voice reached him from elsewhere in the house.

‘Yes, papa?’

Yuri picked up a single sheet from the secondary folder and examined the image upon it as he spoke softly down the phone, an undersea wilderness dominated by huge stone structures and an unusual icon embedded beneath swaying sea moss.

‘Prepare the jet,’ he instructed his son. ‘We leave this afternoon.’

‘Where are we going, father?’

Yuri set the piece of paper down and looked out of the windows once more at the London skyline.

‘Japan.’