“Who knows?” Edmund admitted. “You’ll have to ask him, if we ever find him. But Henry here has one last concern in regards to the problem at hand.”
“What’s that?” Lindahl asked.
Henry faced them. “I don’t think this virion is an artificial construct… at least not entirely.”
“Why do you think that?” Lisa asked.
“To date, no one’s been able to successfully construct a fully functional XNA organism. The number of variables to accomplish that is astronomical. It seems like too much of a scientific leap forward, even for Dr. Hess.”
Lindahl pointed to the monitor and the micrograph still on the screen. “But he succeeded. There’s the proof.”
Henry gave a small shake of his head. “Not necessarily. I think he made that leap by using a template. I think he found something exotic — a living XNA organism — and simply manipulated it into this current form, creating a hybrid of natural and synthetic biology.”
Lisa slowly nodded. “You could be right. Hess had a great interest in extremophiles. Searching the world for the unusual or the bizarre. Maybe he found something.”
Was that why he had been kidnapped?
“And if we could discover what that was,” Edmund added, “then maybe we’d know what that X stands for and could begin to turn the tide on this whole mess.”
Lisa’s radio crackled and Painter came onto her private channel. She was excited to talk to him, to share what she had just learned — both the grim and the hopeful.
“I think we may have another lead,” Painter said before she could speak. “Jenna suggested we take another look at Amy Serpry’s cell phone. It looks like someone went to great lengths and sophistication to erase their communication with Serpry, to clear the local usage details from her service provider. But not everything got washed away completely, not if you know where and how to look deeper.”
“What did you learn?” she asked, stepping away from the others.
Painter explained, “We were able to reconstruct enough of those records to know a call had been placed to her from South America. From the city of Boa Vista, the capital of the northern Brazilian state of Roraima.”
Lisa knelt by Nikko’s cage. The husky lifted his head, his eyes glassy as they rolled in her direction. He thumped his tail once.
That’s a good boy.
“Before that trail gets any colder,” Painter said, “I’m going to lead a team down there to investigate. I’ll keep in contact with Colonel Bozeman, who will be running the show here in my absence.”
Lisa wanted to go with him, to keep close to Painter’s side, but she met the husky’s pained gaze and knew her place was here. She also remembered Lindahl’s warning.
You can’t let sentimentality cloud your professional judgment.
She would not make that mistake again. Still, that didn’t keep her from worrying. As Painter signed off, a question weighed on her.
What or who would be waiting for Painter down in Brazil?
16
Dr. Kendall Hess ducked lower in his seat as another bolt of lightning shattered across the underbellies of the black clouds, lighting the dark forests far below. The thunderclap shook the helicopter, while rain slashed the window canopy of the small aircraft.
In front, the pilot swore in Spanish, fighting through the storm. Kendall’s hulking escort sat in the back cabin with him, looking unperturbed, staring out the window on his side.
Kendall swallowed back his terror and tried to do the same. He pressed his forehead against the window. The flash of lightning had revealed little but the endless expanse of green jungle below. They had been flying southwest over this rain forest for the better part of the day, landing once at a refueling dump, which had been hacked out of the forest and camouflaged with netting.
Wherever they’re taking me, it’s beyond remote.
He despaired at ever seeing the larger world again.
He knew he must be somewhere in South America, likely still north of the equator. But he knew little else. Last night, his kidnappers had landed their Cessna for a final time outside a small town. He was taken to a ramshackle house with a corrugated tin roof and no running water and was allowed to sleep on a mattress on the dirt floor. They’d kept him hooded as they ferried him from the plane so he got no chance to figure out the name of that town. He had heard voices, though, from the streets, speaking in Spanish, some English, but mostly Portuguese.
From that, he guessed he was in Brazil, likely one of its northern states. But they hadn’t stayed long enough for him to determine anything else. At dawn the next day, they transferred him to this small helicopter, which looked weathered and barely airworthy.
Still, it had gotten them this far.
Another burst of chain lightning crackled across the clouds. A dark silhouette appeared near the horizon, rising starkly from the forest, like a black battleship riding a green sea. Kendall shifted higher, trying to get a better view — especially as Mateo stirred, gathering a pack from the floor.
Was that their destination?
As the helicopter droned onward, the rain slowed but the rumbling thunder continued, accompanied by occasional bolts of brilliance, each one revealing more details of the mountain ahead.
And it was a mountain—rising from the forest floor in sheer cliffs, thousands of feet tall. Its flat summit, shrouded in heavy mists, pushed above the lowermost clouds.
Kendall recognized this unusual geological formation. It was unique to this region of South America. Towering blocks of ancient sandstone like this — called tepui — lay scattered across the rain forests and swamps of northern Brazil, extending into Venezuela and Guyana. They numbered over a hundred. The most famous was Mount Roraima, rising almost two miles above the forest floor, with its summit — a flat plateau — spread over ten square miles.
The tepui ahead was much smaller, maybe a quarter of that size.
But long ago, these hundreds of mesas had once been connected together into a single giant sandstone massif. As the continents broke apart and shifted, that ancient massif fragmented into pieces, where rain and wind eroded the broken blocks into this collection of scattered plateaus, lonely sentinels of another time.
Though Kendall had never visited any of these tepuis, he knew about them from his research into unusual forms of life. The tepuis were some of earth’s oldest formations, going back to Precambrian times, older than most fossils. These islands in the sky, isolated for ages, were home to species found only atop their summits, animals and plants unique unto themselves. Due to the remoteness of the region and the sheer cliffs, many of the plateaus had never been walked by man. They represented some of the least-explored areas on the planet, remaining unpolluted and pure.
The helicopter climbed higher, buffeted by stronger winds, and swept toward the mountain — which from a bird’s-eye view looked dark and forbidding, untouched by man.
As they crested the plateau, the surface of the tepui wasn’t as flat as it appeared from a distance. A large central pond dominated the summit, reflecting their navigation lights. Along its southern bank, storm-flooded waters spilled down to a lower section of the plateau, a shelf covered by a dense, stunted forest, a mockery of the rich life far below. North of the pond spread a labyrinth of rock, sculpted by wind and rain into chasms, caves, and a forest of unearthly pillars, all of it covered by a spongy dark-green moss or a gelatinous-looking algae. But between the cracks, he spotted flourishes of orchids and flowering bromeliads, a magical garden bathed by the mists.