The Doomsday Key and The Last Oracle with Bonus Excerpts Page 18

  The team had spent two hours out in the cold, taking pictures and measurements, recording everything here. But to what end?

  Rachel stared across the table at Gray. As they had worked, Gray had grown more introspective. She knew him well enough to recognize when he was troubled, when he sensed he was missing something. She could read the calculations going on in his head, knew the primary question plaguing him.

  What was so important about this site?

  Seichan sat next to Gray. She had contributed little to the day’s work, as if she were leaving it up to them to solve this puzzle. Now they all waited for the professor’s assessment. A pair of bunkbeds filled the back half of the space. Kowalski lay sprawled on one of the bunks with an arm over his eyes, shielding them against the lamplight. Since his snores weren’t rattling the tent fabric, he must still be awake.

  “I don’t know what to make of it,” Wallace finally said with a shake of his head. He held the leather satchel. He’d already examined the mummified finger. “I don’t know where Marco found this, nor why anyone would kill for it.”

  “Then let’s go back to the beginning,” Gray said. “Why Father Giovanni first came here. What he hoped to gain from visiting this site.”

  “It was the bodies,” Wallace mumbled, still fingering the satchel.

  Rachel sat straighter. “Bodies? What bodies?”

  Wallace finally placed the satchel down and leaned back in his chair. “What you have to understand is that for ages, peat bogs were revered by the ancient Celts and their Druids. They would bury or sink objects of worship into the bogs. Such places have proved to be archaeological treasure troves. Swords, crowns, jewels, pottery, even entire chariots. But human remains were also found here.”

  The professor let that sink in as he stood and stepped over to a small camp stove, where he warmed his hands over a burning briquette of peat. He nodded down at the stove. “Peat was the source of life, so it had to be honored. And that honoring often came in the form of human sacrifice. The Celts would kill their victims and toss their bodies into the peat bogs to appease the gods.” He turned to face the table again. “And what goes into the peat ends up being preserved for the ages.”

  “I don’t understand,” Rachel said.

  Gray explained. “The acidic nature and lack of oxygen in the peat keep things from rotting.”

  “Aye. Pots of butter have been found in bogs, a hundred years old. And the butter is still fresh and edible.”

  Kowalski groaned in disgust and rolled to his side. “Remind me not to have toast at your house.”

  Wallace ignored him. “In the same way, those sacrificed bodies were preserved. They’re known as ‘bog mummies.’ The most famous being Tollund Man, found in Denmark. He’s so well preserved that he looks as if he fell into the bog yesterday. Intact skin, organs, hair, eyelashes. Even his fingerprints can still be discerned. Examination revealed that he’d been ritually garroted. The knotted rope was still around his neck. And we know it was the Druids who killed him, as the man’s stomach was filled with mistletoe, a plant sacred to the Celtic priests.”

  “And you found a bog mummy here?” Gray asked.

  “Two, actually. A woman and a child. We discovered them as we were excavating the stone ring. They were found in the center, curled together in death.”

  Seichan asked her first question. Her eyes flickered to Rachel, then away again. “Were they sacrificed?”

  Wallace perked up at her question. “That’s exactly what we wondered. It’s now well accepted that stone rings were solar calendars, but they also served as burial sites. And this site here must have been especially holy. A stone ring within a sacred bog. We had to know if this was a natural burial or a murder.”

  This last was said with a twinge of guilt.

  “We were under instructions to leave the bodies intact, to send them to the university whole, but we had to know. There was no rope around the necks of the bodies, but there was another way to discover if this was a ritual sacrifice.”

  Rachel understood. “Mistletoe in the stomach.”

  Wallace nodded. “We performed a small examination. Well documented, I might add.” He moved to his pack, undid the ties, and removed a file. He shrugged as he returned to the table. “I wasn’t supposed to keep a hard copy.”

  He sifted through the file and pulled out a set of photos. One showed the woman and child curled in black soil. The woman cradled the child in her arms. They were tucked together as if asleep. The bodies were gaunt and emaciated, but the woman’s black hair still draped her face. The next photo showed the woman naked on the table. A hand was in view, holding a dissecting scalpel.

  “Before we sent the body on to the university, we wanted to see if there was any mistletoe pollen in her stomach. It was a minor violation.”

  “Did you find any?” Rachel asked, suddenly not feeling so well.

  “No. But we found something else rather disturbing. If you have a weak stomach, you might want to turn away.”

  Rachel forced herself to keep looking.

  The next photo showed a Y-shaped incision across the abdomen. The belly was peeled open, revealing the mass of internal organs. But something was clearly wrong. Wallace flipped to another photo, showing a close-up of a yellow liver. Growths protruded from its surface, covering it like a grisly field.

  Wallace explained. “We found them growing throughout her abdominal cavity.”

  Rachel covered her mouth. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Wallace nodded. “They’re mushrooms.”

  Shocked and disgusted, Gray sat back. He struggled to understand what was going on, what had been discovered here. He needed someplace to ground his inquiry, so he returned to where he first started.

  “Back to Father Giovanni,” Gray said. “You said the bodies drew him here.”

  “Aye.” Wallace returned to his seat and straddled his chair. “Marco heard about our discovery. In a place where Christianity and the pagan ways were still in conflict.”

  “Still, that conflict didn’t truly draw him,” Gray said and stared down at the first photo of the woman with the child. There was no mistaking that tableau. Like a Madonna and child. And not just any Madonna. The tannins from the peat had dyed the woman’s skin a deep brownish-black.

  “I sent him a photo of the mummies. He came the next day. He was interested in any manifestation or reference to his Black Madonna. To find such a set of bodies in a sacred pagan burial site, in a land where Christianity and ancient ways still mixed, he had to discover for himself if there was any connection to the mythology of his dark goddess.”

  “And was there?” Rachel asked.

  “That’s what Marco spent the past years investigating. It had him shuffling all over the British Isles. In the last month, though, I could tell that something had him especially agitated. He would never say what it was.”

  “And what’s your take on the mummies?” Gray asked.

  “Like I said, we didn’t find any mistletoe. I think the bodies were dead when they were buried in the bog. But who buried them and why? And why did Martin Borr mark his book with this pagan symbol? That’s what I wanted to know.”

  “And?” Gray pressed the man. He was annoyingly oblique with his answers, teasing them out for greater effect.

  “I have my own hypothesis,” Wallace admitted. “It goes back to where I started my investigation. The Domesday Book. Something laid waste to the nearby village or town. Something horrible enough to raze the place to the ground, to wipe all records off the maps. All records, that is, except for the cryptic reference in the great book and the mention in Martin Borr’s diary. So what happened to warrant such a reaction? I would wager it was some sort of plague or disease. Not wanting it to spread, to keep it secret, the place was destroyed.”

  “But what about the bodies here?” Rachel nodded down to the photos.

  “Just close your eyes and put yourself back in that town. A place isolated and under siege by some g
reat illness. A town mixed between devout Christians and those who practiced the ancient ways in secret, who certainly must have known about this stone ring near their town, who perhaps still worshiped here. Once doom fell upon this valley, each side most likely beseeched their gods for salvation. And some probably hedged their bets, mixing the two faiths. They took a mother and a baby boy, representative of the Madonna and her child, and buried them in this ancient pagan site. I believe these two are the only bodies that escaped the fiery purge, the only two left from that old plague.”

  Wallace touched the dissection photo with a finger. “Whatever struck that village was strange indeed. I don’t know of anything like this that has ever been reported in the annals of medicine or forensics. The bodies are still under investigation, and that’s being kept a guarded secret. They won’t even tell me what they found.”

  “But shouldn’t you be kept informed?” Gray asked. “Aren’t you a tenured professor at the University of Edinburgh?”

  Wallace’s brow crinkled in confusion, then relaxed. “Oh, no, you misunderstood me. When I said the university took the bodies, I didn’t mean Edinburgh. My grant came from abroad. It’s not an uncommon practice. For field studies, you take funds wherever you can find them.”

  “So who took the bodies?”

  “They were sent to the University of Oslo for initial examination.”

  Gray felt kicked in the gut. It took him an extra moment to respond. Oslo. Here was the first solid connection between events here and what Painter Crowe was investigating in Norway.

  While Gray grappled with the implications, Wallace continued. “I guess ultimately it all goes back to extremophiles.”

  The oddity of the non sequitur snapped Gray’s focus back. “What are you talking about?”

  “My funding,” Wallace said in a tone that made it sound as if it should be obvious. “Like I said. In this business, you get money where you can.”

  “And how do extremophiles fit in with all that?”

  Gray was well aware of the term. Extremophiles were organisms that lived under extreme conditions, ones that were considered too harsh to support life. They were mostly bacteria, found living in toxic environments like boiling deep-sea rifts or volcanic craters. Such unique organisms offered potential new compounds to the world.

  And the world’s industries had certainly taken note, generating a new business called bioprospecting. But instead of prospecting for gold, they were after something just as valuable: new patents. And it turned out to be a booming business. Already extremophiles were being used to patent new industrial-strength detergents, cleansers, medicines, even an enzyme used widely by crime labs for DNA fingerprinting.

  But what did all that have to do with bog mummies in England?

  Wallace tried to explain. “It goes back to my initial hypothesis, one I pitched to my potential sponsors. A hypothesis about the Doomsday Book.”

  Gray noted that he called it Doomsday, rather than Domesday, this time. He imagined that the professor, with his usual flair for the dramatic, had sought funding using the book’s more colorful name.

  “As I mentioned, those few places in the book marked in Latin as ‘wasted,’ seemed to have been wiped off the map—literally and figuratively. What would make those old census takers do that unless something dangerous had struck these towns?”

  “Like a disease or plague,” Gray said.

  Wallace nodded. “And potentially it was something never seen before. These were isolated places. Who knew what might have risen out of the bogs? Peat bogs are soups of strange organisms. Bacteria, fungi, slime molds.”

  “So they hired you as both an archaeologist and a bioprospector.”

  Wallace shrugged. “I’m not the only one. Major industries are turning to field archaeologists. We’re delving into ancient places, sites long closed up. Just this past year, a major U.S. chemical company discovered an extremophile in a newly opened Egyptian tomb. It’s all the rage, you see.”

  “And for this dig, the University of Oslo funded you.”

  “No. Oslo is just as strapped as any university. Nowadays most grants are generated from corporate sponsors.”

  “And which corporation hired you?”

  “A biotech company, one working with genetically modified organisms. Crops and whatnot.”

  Gray gripped the table’s edge. Of course. Biotechnology companies were major players in the hunt for extremophiles. Bioprospecting was their life’s blood. They cast feelers out in all directions, across all fields of study. Including, it seemed, archaeology.

  Gray had no doubt who sponsored Wallace’s research.

  He spoke that name aloud. “Viatus.”

  Wallace’s eyes grew larger. “How did you know?”

  11:44 P.M.

  Seichan stood outside her cabin. She held a cigarette in her hand, unlit and forgotten. The stars were as crisp as cut glass in the night sky. Streams of icy fog crept through the trees. She inhaled a deep breath, smelling the peat smoke, both from their camp stoves and from the smoldering fires underground.

  The ring of stones, rimed in ice, looked like chunks of silver.

  She pictured the two bodies buried in the center. For some reason, she thought back to the curator she had slain in Venice—or rather, to his wife and child. She pictured the two of them buried here instead. Knowing it was born out of guilt, she shook her head against such foolish sentimentality. She had a mission to complete.

  But tonight her guilt had sharpened to an uncomfortable edge.

  She stared down at her other hand. She held a steel thermos. It had kept her tea warm. The warmth also kept her biotoxin incubated. The group had talked at length about extremophiles after the revelation about the source of Dr. Boyle’s funding. The source of the toxin supplied to her was a bacteria discovered in a volcanic vent in Chile. Frost sensitive, it had to be kept warm.

  No one noticed that only Rachel drank the tea.

  Seichan only pretended to sip at it.

  Pocketing her cigarette, she crossed to a windblown bank of snow and set about filling the thermos with handfuls of snow. The cold would sterilize the thermos, killing any remaining bacteria. Once it was packed full, she screwed the top back on. Her fingers trembled. She wanted to blame it on the cold. She threaded the top on wrong, and it jammed. She fought it for a breath as anger flared hotly through her. Frustrated, she yanked her arm back and hurled the thermos into the forest.

  For half a minute, she breathed heavily, steaming the air.

  She didn’t cry—and for some reason that helped center her.

  A door cracked open in the other cabin. She shared her cabin with Rachel; the men shared the other. She stepped into the open to see who else was still up.

  The large frame and lumbering gait identified the man readily enough. Kowalski spotted her and lifted an arm. He pointed a thumb toward the paddock.

  “Going to see a man about a horse,” he said and disappeared around the corner.

  It took her a moment to realize he wasn’t actually meeting someone by the ponies. She was that out of sorts. She heard him whistling back there as he relieved himself.

  She checked her watch. It was a few minutes before midnight. The timetable was set. There was no going back. They’d had sufficient time to examine the site. The Guild would only allow so much latitude for Gray’s team to track Father Giovanni’s path, to discover the key before anyone else. She had argued for more time but had been slapped down. So be it. They would have to keep moving.

  She glanced toward the other cabin. Kowalski had better not be too long. He wasn’t. After a minute, he came lumbering back, still whistling under his breath.

  “Can’t sleep?” he asked as he joined her.

  She fingered her cigarette out and lifted it as explanation enough.

  “Those things’ll kill you.” He reached into a pocket, pulled out a stub of a cigar, and matched her gesture. “So you might as well get it over with quickly.”

  He cle
nched the chewed end between his molars, pulled out an old-fashioned box of wooden matchsticks, and deftly scratched two sticks across the fabric of the tent. Twin flames lit up. He passed one to her. He’d plainly done this before.

  He spoke around the end of his cigar. “Gray just hit the sack. Spent like two hours trying to get more out of that old professor. I had to get the hell out of there, get some fresh air. That dog kept stinking up the place. And no wonder. Did you see what he feeds that damn mutt? Sausages and onions. What sort of dog chow is that?”

  Seichan lit her cigarette. She let the guy ramble, grateful for the mindless chatter. Unfortunately, his chatter was apparently leading up to something—and not all that smoothly.

  “So,” he said, “what’s up with you and Gray?”

  Seichan choked as she inhaled.

  “I mean, he’s always eyeballing you. And you just stare right through him as if he were a ghost. Like two schoolkids with the hots for each other.”

  Seichan balked at the innuendo, ready to deny, uncomfortable with how close the man was to the truth. Luckily she was saved from responding.

  As midnight struck, the valley exploded.

  Throughout the forest, geysers of flame shot skyward, one after the other. They were accompanied by soft concussions, easy to miss unless you were listening for them. The incendiary charges, coupled with a rubidium thermal catalyst that turned water into an accelerant, had been planted deep into wet peat, timed to blow at midnight. The entire valley was meant to burn.

  Closer at hand, three more explosions erupted from the center of the ring of stones. Fiery spirals twisted high into the sky.

  Even across the distance, the heat burned her face.

  People came running out of the cabins behind them. Kowalski cursed hotly next to her.

  She didn’t turn, hypnotized by the flames. Her heart pounded. The conflagration began to spread outward—quickly, too quickly—both here and out in the forest. The ignited charges were only supposed to chase Gray’s team off—to light a fire under them literally and figuratively—while destroying all evidence in their wake.