Adams held her gaze for a time, then turned away, embarrassed by his own perceived failings. They had survived, but he had hardly put in a faultless performance.
He looked up into her eyes again, and Lynn could see the earnestness, the honesty, in the man she once loved. ‘I’d do it again, any time you asked.’
She smiled, nodded her head, and wiped a tear from her eye. ‘I know,’ she whispered, holding his hand to her heart, ‘I know.’ She kissed his hand, looked up at him again. ‘You want to know my plan for getting to Peru? You. I have faith in you, Matt. I need you to get us there.’
13
‘How are things progressing?’
Jacobs heard the words loud and clear but did not have an immediate answer. What was he supposed to tell them? That he was currently pulling all the strings he could, using the full resources of the US government, just to hunt down two normal, everyday, inconsequential human beings? What would they think of him and his organization then?
But if he lied, would they know? And if they did know, what would their reaction be? Jacobs was not in fear for his physical safety but if they reneged on their promises as a result of the continued failure of the Alpha Brigade, it would be worse than torture and death to him.
But, he considered, their resources were necessarily diluted by distance, and as a result they needed him just as much as he needed them — perhaps even more so at this point in time.
And so Jacobs decided to give them the truth, although not a complete explanation.
‘The targets are still at large,’ he said finally. ‘We are close to reacquiring them, however, and there is no indication that the information has gone any further thus far. And even if details of the find are eventually revealed, we are confident we can downplay the evidence. There shouldn’t be a problem. Especially,’ Jacobs continued, building in confidence, ‘as the latest reports from CERN indicate that we are about to enter the testing phase for the device. Even if knowledge of your existence, and our involvement, was now made public, it would be too late to matter any more anyway.’
‘You are wrong,’ the voice countered immediately. ‘Anomalies always matter. Unknown variables can disrupt things beyond comprehension. Everything needs to be perfect. We thought you understood this.’
‘This is life,’ Jacobs shot back, trying to rein in his frustration. ‘Things are sometimes imperfect, you just have to deal with them the best way you can.’
‘This is not how one of us would handle things,’ came back the instant response. ‘We do not accept imperfection.’
The connection was terminated and Jacobs sat back in his leather chair and took a sip of water from the thick glass on the desk in front of him.
So they didn’t accept imperfection. Well, that was absolutely fine.
Neither did he.
‘Are you OK?’ Lynn asked Adams from the passenger seat of the small, twenty-year-old Fiat.
Adams was all too aware of how he must look. Sweat was rolling down his brow, he had a ghostly pallor, and he was shivering uncontrollably. The absence of sleep, combined with the adrenalin and excitement of the past few days, was becoming intolerable, and it was a lot harder than he had anticipated.
Since the incident in the desert all those years before, he had been unwilling to talk about his problems. He had at first refused to accept he even had a problem, and even when he had finally admitted it, he had never considered asking for help. He realized now that this was unrealistic bravado and for the first time in his life he wanted help. He wanted to just crawl up into a ball and cry for help. But he also knew this was never going to happen.
‘I think I’m coming down with a fever,’ he lied.
‘Do you want me to drive?’
Adams thought about it for a few moments. Concentrating on the road was hurting his head but at least it was giving him something to do. Sitting in the passenger seat, consumed by self-pity, would probably be worse.
‘No thanks,’ he replied, putting a bit more life into his voice. ‘I’ll be fine. Best I have something to do, you know?’
Lynn looked at him, as if really seeing him for the first time since their reunion the day before. ‘You’ve changed since we were together,’ she said finally.
If you only knew, Adams thought. ‘How do you mean?’ he asked instead.
Again, Lynn considered the matter. ‘I don’t know… Before, you seemed so full of life… Larger than life, really. Now you seem more… subdued.’ She smiled apologetically at him, sorry to be so negative but curious about the change in the man she had once loved so much.
‘Life does that to you eventually, I guess,’ Adams replied, knowing as he said it that it was such comments that had made Lynn notice the change in the first place. ‘But it’s probably just the fever getting me down, you know,’ he recovered quickly.
Seconds of silence passed into minutes as they continued along Interstate Five, through the vast expanse of the Chilean desert plains.
They had reached Copiapó late the previous night, and had paid cash for the local bus to Caldera on the coast. Once in the small town, they had asked around for a car to buy, and found a willing seller just minutes away. The car was no piece of art, had no air conditioning, and was barely roadworthy, but it seemed able to go from A to B. Which was all they could ask, considering the price they paid. It was also unlikely to be traced until they were long gone. Unless their pursuers tracked them to Caldera and then went door to door until they found someone who had recently sold a car, they figured they would be relatively safe.
They’d stocked up on food, drink and jerrycans of gasoline, unsure how regular gas stations were going to be, and then started the long trek north. The road bordered the Pacific Ocean for much of its length, and both Adams and Lynn were amazed by the beauty of the route. Eventually, the coastal mountains rose up, and the road started to turn north-east, into the vast wilderness of the Atacama Desert.
They were halfway to Nazca now, and just a hundred miles away from the Peruvian border.
Adams decided to forget about the previous conversation and get on to another topic. He was also starting to feel drowsy, and needed the conversation to keep him awake. ‘So tell me about the body.’
He had seen the photographs that Lynn and her colleague had secretly taken of the body when it was still half-entombed in ice, before the arrival of the military team. But he knew she must have seen more when the body had finally been extracted, and with everything that had been going on, they hadn’t really had a good chance to talk about it.
‘It was… strange, really,’ Lynn began. ‘From our initial discovery, it seemed that the body was a man just like modern man. He was in a depression at the bottom of a ridge, which meant that the ice hadn’t crushed the body but kept it perfectly preserved, we think for about forty thousand years.’
‘And he looked normal?’
‘As if he’d been buried there last year. That’s what makes it unique.’
‘So what do we think humans looked like forty thousand years ago?’
‘Well, that’s something else I’ve been researching since getting to Santiago. Apparently, in terms of body proportions, we probably looked almost exactly the same as we do today, we’ve changed very little since the first Homo sapiens came on the scene about two hundred thousand years ago.’
‘And facially?’
‘Our skulls were a little different, a mix of both human and Neanderthal elements. Frontal flattening, a larger jaw, very large upper molars. So, facially, we would have looked very different.’