The Nemesis Origin

VIII

Ethan crept around the side of the cottage as the vehicle pulled up outside and he heard the engine switch off. He crouched against the cold stone wall and listened as the door opened, then shut with a clunk. Clean, crisp, a new vehicle — not one of the old farmer’s jeeps that rattled around the hillsides in search of lost sheep. Footsteps, not heavy, cautious and hesitant as they approached the front door. The sound of a knock, not generally the actions of an insane assassin bearing down upon him.

Ethan peeked around the corner of the cottage and saw a woman standing at his front door, her hood up but wisps of blonde hair twisted this way and that by the blustering wind. Jeans, hiking boots, a bag over her shoulder.

To his surprise she seemed to notice she was being watched and turned to look straight at him. Ethan stepped out as he recognised the face and for a moment he didn’t know what to say. Words finally reached him as though of their own accord.

‘I wasn’t ready for that.’

Lucy Morgan raised an eyebrow as she stared at Ethan and then at the gun in his hand.

‘My God, do you people walk around with weapons all the time?’

Ethan tucked the pistol into the small of his back and managed an apologetic smile. ‘You learn to be cautious,’ he said by way of an explanation as he walked towards her. ‘What on earth are you doing all the way out here, and how did you find me?’

‘I had some help from a mutual friend,’ Lucy Morgan replied. ‘She told me to send you her best regards.’

An image of what passed for Nicola Lopez’s best regards flashed briefly through Ethan’s mind, an image of his burning motorcycle and aching jaw when he had left Chicago, and he could not help the wry smile that curled from one corner of his lips.

‘I’ll bet she did. But even Nicola didn’t know I was out here.’

‘Well, it only took her three days to track you down for me, so I guess she knows you better than you think.’

Ethan felt an odd sensation of melancholy flashed through him as he realized that Lucy was probably right. Not many people had gotten as close to Ethan as Lopez had, and they had worked together for many years before circumstances came between them. Lopez had saved his life on more than one occasion and he had returned the favour more times than either of them cared to remember. But that was the past.

‘You’d better come in,’ Ethan said as he gestured for Lucy to follow him around to the rear of the cottage.

During the course of his investigations for the DIA, Ethan had come into contact with a number of civilians with whom he had kept in touch sporadically over the years. Lucy Morgan was one of those people. A brilliant palaeontologist and researcher, Lucy had made her name discovering the remains of some of mankind’s oldest ancestors on the blistering plains of Africa’s Rift Valley. Ethan’s own natural interest in such things had meant that from time to time they corresponded, but since Ethan’s change of career he had not maintained contact and so now he found himself quite concerned as to why Lucy would have travelled halfway round the world to see him.

Ethan busied himself making coffee for them both and lighting the fire, thick logs spitting orange flame as warmth spilled from the hearth and filled the cottage with heat, light and a comforting scent of wood smoke.

‘You’ve really managed to find a forgotten corner of the world out here,’ Lucy said as Ethan handed her a chipped mug of steaming coffee.

‘I found myself gripped by the need to be forgotten,’ Ethan shrugged as he sat down opposite her in his favourite rocking chair, a big soft one in which he had spent many happy hours reading.

‘Was life really that bad?’

‘It wasn’t bad, I just needed a change. Why are you here, Lucy?’

Ethan watched as Lucy Morgan reached down for the bag she had bought with her, and then lifted out a plastic cylinder which contained a bone. Ethan recognised the bone immediately as the one that he had liberated from the remains Lucy had excavated in Israel. With the DIA in control of the remains which had been spirited away to some top secret hiding place, the bone that Ethan had liberated had for him been the ideal gift for Lucy when she had been rescued from Israel.

‘So, you studied it then,’ Ethan said as he looked at the bone.

‘I’ve spent every spare moment of the past few years studying it,’ Lucy confirmed. ‘I couldn’t do it through the University or the museum without raising suspicions and I’ve always believed that somebody has been watching me ever since what happened in Israel.’

‘It’s not impossible,’ Ethan replied. ‘The US government’s black budget runs into tens of billions of dollars: small change for them to assign an agent or two to keep an eye on what you’re doing.’

Lucy nodded as she stared down at the bone in the cylinder.

‘I ensured that I did my research out of hours at home, or in my lunch break or my days off, times when it would not raise suspicion and I could work without interruption.’

‘And what have you found out?’

The discovery of a seven thousand year old tomb with alien remains inside had raised all kinds of questions in Ethan’s mind, as it had done so many others. Solid, irrefutable evidence of the presence of an extra-terrestrial species not just on Earth but at the very dawn of human civilization raised all sorts of doubts and questions over the origin of human beliefs and religions worldwide.

‘I started out by confirming the age of the specimen,’ Lucy explained. ‘Finding the remains in a seven millennia old tomb did not necessarily mean that the bones themselves were of the same age. They could have been interred later, perhaps even recently, so it was essential to match the remains to the tomb itself. I extracted material from within the interior of the bone that could not have been contaminated either by handling or other external influences, and radiocarbon dating confirmed that age of seven thousand years.’

Ethan rubbed his jaw as he looked at the specimen, his coffee forgotten as he considered the magnitude of what Lucy was revealing.

‘You know why the DIA kept this find under wraps, don’t you?’

‘They think a public announcement of the find would cause chaos,’ Lucy sighed. ‘They think that the inevitable collapse of religion, especially in the Western world where it’s already in rapid decline, would create a crisis of identity for the human race.’

‘And you think differently,’ Ethan guessed.

‘I think that the revealing of this evidence of its implications would be the beginning of a new enlightenment. Those who simply believe in religions, regardless of evidence to the contrary, would be forced to face up to the fact that we are not special, not the product of a god. We are in fact likely inferior to many other species out there, especially those that have mastered the art of spacefaring. It could herald the beginning of a new age of reason and logic that has suffered so much in the face of rising religious extremism over the past few decades.’

Ethan shrugged uncertainly. ‘That’s a hell of a gamble to make with seven billion lives. Nobody really knows quite what would happen if this became public. Is that why you’re here? Are you intending to do something about it?’

‘No,’ Lucy admitted. ‘I’m here because I think other people are intending to either obtain these remains from me or from the US government.’

‘What other people?’

‘The Russians,’ Lucy replied. ‘I was approached in Chicago a few days ago by a representative, somebody claiming to be working for a collector in Russia. They wanted to know about the remains that were found in Israel and whether I had any access to them. I played dumb, naturally, but I don’t think they bought it. I’m pretty sure I’ve been followed ever since.’

Ethan’s eyes flicked to the cottage front door but Lucy waved him down.

‘Not here,’ Lucy assured him. ‘Nicola helped me vanish from Illinois, she was really very clever. She employed a double, booked flights on my behalf so they could not be tracked to me and then booked two further decoy flights under my name before sending me off. She told me what to do when I landed at Gatwick Airport near London, to take different trains, stay in hotels and halfway houses, pay cash only. I’m confident that nobody but Lopez knows I’m here.’

Ethan nodded. Lopez was every bit as much of an expert at vanishing as Ethan was. Once, after a lengthy investigation in the forests of Idaho, they had been forced to go underground for more than six months, moving from city to city, wearing disguises and essentially vanishing from the system in order to evade rogue CIA agents intent on hunting them down.

‘Fine,’ he said eventually. ‘Why would they have suddenly taken such an interest in things that happened years ago?’

‘I can’t be sure, but it may have something to do with what Pastor Kelvin Patterson was doing with the DNA that he managed to extract from the finds that I made in Israel.’

Kelvin Patterson, a Baptist minister on an apocalyptic mission for the supposed benefit of mankind in Washington DC, had been convinced that the remains Lucy had found in Israel were not the remains of alien beings but in fact those of angels. Intent on converting human beings into angels by injecting them with genetic material from the remains, specifically US Senators who could lobby on his behalf, he had murdered many innocent individuals.

‘Have you managed to extract DNA from that bone?’

‘I got a full profile, everything that Patterson was looking for. But unlike him I spent the last three years analysing the strands, and it’s what I found that I believe the Russians are hunting for and I’m pretty sure they’re not alone.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I think you’d find it hard to comprehend, or even to believe.’

‘You can let me be the judge of that,’ Ethan insisted. ‘You’ve come here for help, I’m assuming, and like your mother before you I can’t help you unless you tell me everything.’

Lucy sighed, and as the fire crackled behind her she replied.

‘The DNA contains…’

The fire spat a particularly loud crack just as the window to the cottage shattered and a spray of glass flew through the air. Ethan turned his head away at the same time as Lucy as a sudden deafening chatter of automatic gunfire hammered the wall of the cottage.