Ethan didn’t reply as he stepped inside the hospital. The interior was hushed, the building home to only a small number of wards and rooms for elderly patients and a general practice. Ethan asked at the reception desk and was directed to one of the private rooms down the hall.
Ethan had decided not to take Jarvis’s offer of a ride back to Chicago when they had finally landed in Argentina aboard Arnie’s Catalina, an aircraft which had flown a considerable number of miles since they had first encountered its grumpy captain in the Phillipines. Instead, wary of any repercussions from the intelligence community, he had bought various tickets to different destinations before heading for the United Kingdom.
Lucy Morgan had met him three weeks later in London and they had then travelled quietly up to Scotland, with Lopez in tow.
The private hospital room was small, a tinted observation window affording a glimpse inside. There was a single bed within the room and sitting on it was Bethany O’Learey, who was smiling and talking to a man and a woman whom Ethan assumed were her parents. Beside them sat Lucy Morgan. Bethany’s head was no longer encased in its scaffolding, and her features were already looking more even than they had, her skull cap having receded in size.
Lopez stared at Bethany for a long moment. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘It worked,’ Ethan replied simply.
‘I can see that!’ Lopez uttered in amazement. ‘What I can’t see is how it can have worked? They took the mummy away from us!’
Inside the room, Lucy Morgan spotted them and smiled. She got up from her seat beside Bethany’s bed and joined them in the corridor outside, closing the door behind her.
‘You should come in,’ she urged Ethan and Lopez after hugging them both. ‘Bethany’s doing great.’
‘The less she knows about us the better,’ Ethan replied. ‘You know how trouble follows us around.’
‘Don’t I just?’
‘Where are the remains?’ Ethan asked.
‘In my jacket,’ Lucy replied. ‘It’s so much easier to just carry them around with me now that we’re in the clear.’
‘What remains?’ Lopez asked in exasperation.
Ethan watched as Lucy reached beneath her jacket and revealed a clear cylinder some nine inches long, concealed in a custom-made pocket in the lining of her jacket. Vacuum-sealed and filled with a faint grey mist from the chill generated by the ice packed around the contents.
‘Oh my God,’ Lopez gasped as a hand flew to her lips and she stared at the cylinder’s contents.
Ethan could see within the shocking form of a foetal creature, humanoid but with a tall, conical skull and elongated black eyes like giant tear-drops. In the last moments before Lopez had returned to the truck in Argentina to retrieve the mummy and hand it over to Majestic Twelve’s soldiers and their mysterious leader, Lucy had performed an impromptu caesarean section on the mummy and extracted the unborn foetus she had believed resided within.
‘I was telling the truth to Yuri Polkov when I said that the mummy was worthless,’ Lucy explained to Lopez. ‘It was the foetus that held the true value. It was why a young girl with ritualistic skull deformation was treated with such respect — she carried in her womb a true hybrid child.’
Working alone, Lucy had sequenced the DNA from the remains and then extracted stem-cells. That she had deceived an entire department of the United States Government, covert or not, amazed and impressed Ethan, but the work she had done since completely bowled him over.
‘It’s not the first time something like this has happened,’ Lucy explained. ‘In 1930 the skeletal remains of a foetus were found in a mine tunnel a hundred miles southwest of Chihuahua in Mexico. Dubbed the Star Child because of its alien appearance, modern scientists believe it to have been suffering from congenital Hydrocephalus, a condition in which excess fluid in the brain causes the skull to enlarge. It’s not dissimilar to Bethany’s illness in many ways. The big deal was that the skull’s volume was larger than the average adult human brain, the orbits were shallow, there were no frontal sinuses and the optic nerve canal was situated much closer to the bottom of the orbit than the back, a highly unusual series of adaptions not common to human beings.’
‘Why did they kill her if she was pregnant?’ Ethan asked. ‘Surely they would have wanted to keep her alive until the baby was delivered?’
Lucy closed her jacket around the cylinder. ‘I carbon-dated the remains and they were almost exactly five hundred years old, give or take a decade. The Incan Empire had been overrun by the Spanish conquistadores and their people slaughtered wholesale in conflict or by diseases for which they had no natural defense. Their civilization was doomed, and they likely had no option but to flee and to sacrifice their most revered people in the hope that their gods would intervene. They didn’t, of course. I suppose in that respect Yuri Polkov was right — great sacrifice in the name of nothing but faith is a fool’s errand.’
‘What are you going to do with it?’ Lopez asked. ‘Blow the whole thing wide open?’
Lucy sighed and shook her head. ‘I don’t know, but what I do know is that this thing is staying under lock and key. I’m not letting the government of any of our countries take this away from me until it’s been properly studied.’
Lucy took one last look at Bethany on her bed.
‘It was worth it,’ she said finally, ‘even if it meant getting shot at by lunatics and travelling half way around the world. You two should get back together. You’re better that way.’
Lucy walked back into Bethany’s room and closed the door behind her as Ethan turned and looked at Lopez.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ Lopez warned him as she started walking.
‘Think about what?’ Ethan pleaded ignorance as he followed her.
‘I’m doing fine on my own. I don’t want you coming in and blowing everything up again.’
They walked outside toward the car. ‘Is that why you followed us to Cambodia and sold out to the government, helped them to track us down?’
Lopez stared straight ahead as they walked. ‘How do you figure that?’
Ethan stopped at their car. ‘When we faced off against the STS team on the mountain, you said you’d want to take at least one of them with you, preferably Devlin. How would you have known his name if you weren’t in contact with them?’
Lopez sighed and glanced at the distant, rugged landscape around them. ‘They picked me up in Chicago, did me a solid when I got overrun by vagrants out on Englewood. I turned them down, but then Lucy visited my house and Devlin must have been watching still. He kind of had me over a barrel.’
Ethan frowned. ‘And Cambodia? They were shooting at you too.’
‘It was supposed to be a set-up,’ Lopez replied. ‘I’d figure out what Lucy was up to, then report back in from time to time. Then Devlin’s STS team showed up and I realized they had no intention of honouring any agreement with me, that his men would likely shoot us dead there and then. I figured that meant all bets were off the table.’
‘That’s not the first time you’ve sold out on me,’ Ethan said.
Lopez turned and jabbed a finger into his chest. ‘I needed the money because you walked away from the business, asshole!’
‘I needed a break!’
‘So did I, and you know what? It’s worked out just fine! Why don’t you head back to your cave in the highlands so I can get back to a real life?’
‘Fine!’ Ethan snapped. ‘I take it you won’t show up again next time things get a little bit too difficult for you to handle all on your own?’
‘Rest assured,’ Lopez shot back.
‘And you won’t want any part of the deal that Jarvis is offering us?’