The Auriga Project Page 5

  Eliana took a mental inventory of herself. She still wore her black cocktail dress, but apart from a dry throat and cracked lips her mind felt clear and more lucid than it had since the demonstration. Sweat dripped down her brow, but that seemed to be a natural effect of the tropical environment rather than the cold fever-sweats she experienced before.

  The bitter taste of the concoction the woman fed her lingered in her mouth. Upon inspecting the clay mug, Eliana found it filled with a translucent liquid that smelled faintly of sulfur. She sipped it cautiously, and it had no taste except the minerals, like unfiltered spring water. She paused to wonder if the water had a lavender tint, but she couldn’t tell in the dim room. Some light filtered in around the edges of the wooden door, but there were no windows, no candles, no torches—certainly no sign of electricity.

  Screw it, she thought. She gulped the water down and sighed as it quenched her still-raw throat.

  Eliana stood, arching her arms overhead, slowly pulling out the soreness in her muscles by gripping one wrist with the other hand and leaning to each side in turn. She counted in her head as she pulled in long, slow breaths of thick air through her nose.

  After stretching, she paced around the room while she eyeballed the door. Testing it, she found it locked but forced herself to stay calm. Maybe they locked the door to keep her safe from whatever beasts stalked in the jungle. Or maybe it was simply to protect themselves from her. She was a stranger here, after all—better safe than sorry.

  Voices carried through the door, but they subsided. A short time later, a shuffling noise announced movement outside. The door cracked open, and a woman entered, closing the door behind her.

  Eliana retreated, bowing her head. She wasn’t sure how to look at the woman before her. Some cultures found a direct gaze to be an insult or a threat. She certainly did not want to insult her benefactor, but she couldn’t help making a quick study of the shapely figure. Apart from her normal jewelry, she wore a beige hand-woven dress that extended to her knees and flowed loosely. She also wore wooden sandals, which Eliana immediately envied. If she was ever to leave the room, she’d need some kind of practical shoes.

  The woman picked up the clay mug and checked that it had been emptied. Reaching out, she gripped Eliana’s chin in one strong hand and gazed deep into her eyes. Apparently satisfied with what she saw, the woman grunted and let her go. Then she sat on the straw and patted the floor, inviting Eliana to sit down.

  “Bix a k’aaba?” she said after Eliana had crossed her legs beneath her.

  Eliana cocked her head. She was no linguist, but foreign tongues had always come easy to her. Apart from German, she had a passing familiarity with Spanish and a smattering of Mayan she’d gathered on research trips to Guatemala and Belize. The words the woman spoke sounded strikingly similar to a variety of ancient Mesoamerican dialects, perhaps distantly related to the language of the Maya, Olmec, or Zoque peoples.

  Eliana shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand you.”

  “Ixchel in k’aaba,” the woman said, steepling her fingers against her own chest, then poking Eliana with one finger. “Bix a k’aaba?”

  A gear turned in Eliana’s mind, and she gasped. “Eliana,” she said. “My name is Eliana.”

  “Eliana in k’aaba,” the woman said. This time Eliana made out the hard glottal stop after the k and separated the word with an apostrophe in her mind.

  “Eliana in k’aaba,” she said, butchering the pronunciation.

  The woman nodded, satisfied. She mouthed Eliana’s name a few more times then made Eliana repeat her own name until she got the pronunciation right: Ixchel, pronounced eesh-chel, like the second half of sheesh and the first half of cello.

  An old memory flooded to the surface of Eliana’s mind from a class on ancient religions of Mesoamerican peoples, which she’d audited in grad school. She remembered the professor going through the pantheon of Mayan gods—they had hundreds of gods, thousands by some accounts. Ixchel, however, she remembered: it was the name of the goddess of childbirth and medicine.

  A deep voice bellowed outside. Ixchel started, and they both scrambled to their feet. The voice sounded again, closer this time, and the door swung open.

  A large figure appeared in the door frame. Ixchel rushed to the door as he squeezed his broad shoulders into the room. Her eyes adjusted slowly to the light pouring in around the man’s large frame. Every inch of his barrel chest and thick arms were covered with intricate tattoos. She corrected an earlier assumption: women and men both tattooed themselves.

  The man also sported elaborate shoulder pauldrons made of bone and wood. The bits of bone were carved with skulls, which grinned in neat little rows. A bone through the septum of his nose gave him a hungry expression like an enraged bull.

  He spoke to Ixchel in the guttural tongue—it seemed like he was berating her, but perhaps that was simply Eliana’s interpretation of the harsh, unfamiliar sound of the language. In any case, Ixchel seemed unperturbed. She pushed past him and left then returned a moment later with a new clay mug of water to replace the old one.

  Without another glance, they both left the room and closed the door behind them.

  Eliana heard the bolt slide back into place. She crept to the door and gazed through the crack around the edges into the daylight.

  Ixchel was nowhere to be seen. The big man’s broad back took up most of her view. He spoke, presumably to other people Eliana couldn’t see. Another man approached behind him, this one older and more elaborately clothed, with a great feathered headdress and plenty of jewelry—gems, stones, and bones—knocking together around his arms, wrists, and ankles. A long, white cloth was draped across his shoulders. Eliana could only guess, but based on his clothing he must have been some kind of shaman or priest.

  He spoke in a loud, intoning voice—overly theatrical, Eliana thought. The big man turned to face him and took the tongue lashing. His fists clenched and unclenched while he waited. When the shaman had stopped yelling, the big man said a few clipped words. The shaman responded by pointing at the sky with a finger then past the big man at the door behind which Eliana hid.

  The big man turned and pointed a finger at the door, too. He said a few words to whoever was standing out of view on either side then walked away.

  Someone’s face loomed into Eliana’s vision and peered through at her. She threw herself back and scurried into the far corner. When she worked up the courage to return to the door and gaze out again, everyone seemed to have gone. She saw trees and leaves, and heard the buzz of insects and breathed the dense air.

  With shaking hands, she picked up the new clay mug of water and downed that, too.

  A short time later, as Eliana sat in the darkness, her heart began to beat faster. Her throat went dry, and a sheet of metal lined her stomach.

  She clung tightly to her knees and rocked back and forth as the walls began to drip indigo like the broken moon in her nightmare.

  6

  Unknown Agents

  Amon bounded up the steps and pulled open the heavy front door of a Gothic building that housed their corporate offices.

  Lucas waited for him in the lobby. He matched Amon’s stride, and together they climbed the wooden stairs to the boardroom on the top floor.

  “What’s their mood like?” Amon asked.

  “Dour. What happened to your nose?”

  “Shit,” Amon said, stopping on a landing between flights of stairs.

  Lucas withdrew a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit, which Amon used to wipe away the dried blood around his nostrils.

  Lucas waited patiently. As usual, his suit was immaculately pressed. Amon looked down at his own rumpled attire, and swore when he realized he’d forgotten to change clothes as well. There was no time to go back for the change of clothes he kept in the lab, so he turned and continued up the stairs, breathing though his nose to get a handle on the frustration he felt.

  “Do you really think they’re
bluffing?” Lucas asked.

  “We’ll know soon enough.”

  Amon threw open the door to the boardroom. To his irritation, Wes McManis had started without them and was currently delivering a soliloquy to the assembled directors with his usual snake-oil salesman demeanor. Amon had to admit, allowing a sonofabitch like Wes to be appointed to the board had been useful at times. McManis had political and business connections that had been a boon for the company. He was loaded, too. But it was a damned clumsy mistake. Not for the first time, Amon wished he’d been less ambitious in his youth. His impatience to get ahead had caused him more than a few headaches over the years.

  “What our company needs,” Wes was saying, “is strong leadership in this moment of crisis.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Amon said from the doorway.

  “Ah,” Wes gestured expansively. “Hello, Amon. Glad you could make it.” Amon saw the ripple effect of his withering tone on the faces of the assembled board members. They seemed either amused or mildly irritated but didn’t call Wes’s flippant attitude into question.

  “Thanks for getting started,” Amon said. “I think I can take it from here.” Most of the assembled directors avoided his gaze. He supposed this estrangement was how people who were grieving must feel in a crowded room—isolated, nervous, worried. He clenched his jaw, refusing to give in to the flood of emotions. He forced himself to stay calm and rational.

  “The search continues,” Amon said. “We’re getting close to finding Eliana.”

  Wes grimaced, not even trying to hide his contempt. “You have my deepest condolences, Amon,” Wes said. “But is that really true?” At least he had the balls to say what was on everyone else’s mind.

  “We’re just getting started,” Amon insisted. “The Translocator team has been running diagnostic tests and simulations, piecing Eliana’s jump together. We haven’t narrowed down her exact coordinates, but we’ve tracked her vector, and we’re confident we’ll locate her very soon.”

  A few heads perked up. Amon glanced over to see Wes silently taking a poll of the room’s opinion.

  “Of course,” Wes said, switching gears. “That’s great news. Every second counts…which is even more reason to give you some time off. So you can focus on finding your poor wife.”

  “What do you mean?” he said, his fingers involuntarily curling into fists.

  “I’m suggesting that you step down from your post as CEO, of course.”

  What was astonishing was not Wes’s suggestion—that was to be expected, and Amon had fallen for the trick. What was amazing was that Amon couldn’t argue the logic of it. Taking some time off would be the smart thing to do, the responsible decision made in the best interests of the company. Despite the confidence he hoped he exuded, the thought of Eliana consumed him even now. Standing in this room, arguing with Wes, seemed like an incredible waste of time. Eliana was more important than the approval of the board, more important than the Lunar Station, more important than his company and everything he’d worked his whole life to build. She was his life.

  And yet if he couldn’t protect the Translocator from the Wes McManises of the world, he’d never be able to find Eliana.

  “Lucas could take over as interim CEO during the transition,” Wes suggested.

  Amon pursed his lips. He could never trust the company to Wes, even with Lucas at the helm. If Wes managed to remove him as CEO of the company, he would have no power to protect the Translocator. Amon had no choice but to dig his heels in now. For Eliana.

  “No,” Amon said, turning from Wes’s weasel face to look at the seated members of the board. “Lucas will continue in his current position, of course, and I’m more than grateful for the support from each of you in this trying time. But I’m not taking a leave of absence.”

  “Amon, please—” Wes began.

  “This is a temporary situation.”

  “It won’t look good,” said Miguel Ortiz, an old Mexican who had made his fortune shipping avocados into the United States. He’d been on the board of directors since the company’s infancy. “Wes is right. We need to show that we have the situation under control. Our investors will be worried if you don’t take a leave of absence, given the current situation.”

  “Showing our investors that we support Amon is all that matters,” Lucas said.

  “And who will be there to support you when Amon is…preoccupied?” Ortiz asked, intertwining the fingers of both hands. A gold ring on his pinky caught the morning light that slanted in through the windows.

  Amon felt his eyes widen, his nostrils flare and pull in air. When a phone rang and Lucas stepped from the room to take the call, Amon barely noticed.

  “Amon?” he heard Miguel say.

  Amon snapped his jaw closed. It was important to appear strong now. “Miguel, you’re right. And thank you for being honest with me. You’ve been a reliable and generous friend since the very beginning, and I appreciate your support. Whoever is leading this company, we need to present a united front. I’ll have no more division among the board. We’ll take a vote, and whatever the outcome, I’ll abide by it. If you vote to remove me, I’ll resign today.”

  Appealing to Ortiz’s loyalty and sticking to his guns had precisely the effect Amon had hoped for. He saw the old man’s brow line relax, his posture soften.

  Wes crossed his arms. “Fine,” he said. “All who would like Amon to stay on as CEO, raise your hand.”

  Amon raised his hand, never taking his gaze from Ortiz’s face. Slowly, the old Mexican raised his hand as well, followed by one, then three, then five more hands. Amon took a quick mental tally. With his 40 percent of the company, plus Ortiz’s faction voting with him, they made a majority.

  “There,” Amon said, watching a snarl of rage form on Wes’s face as he did the math for himself. “It’s settled.”

  He forgot to thank them all for coming, but that didn’t register until later. Amon pulled his phone from his pocket as he left the room and with shaky fingers dialed Reuben in the lab to share his wild theory.

  On his way to the lab, Lucas intercepted him. A man and a woman in dark suits followed in his wake. They each wore Fisk Industries guest passes on their lapels. The man wore glasses and had thin lips arranged in what seemed to be a permanent scowl. The woman’s hair was cropped short, almost military, and she carried a heavy duty file folder in her hands.

  “Mr. Fisk?” the woman said, holding out a stiff hand.

  “Yes?” Amon took her hand, felt her cool dry fingers in contrast to his own sweaty palms.

  “May we speak in private?”

  Reuben, anticipating Amon’s arrival, turned the corner a moment later. Before Amon could say anything else, Lucas spoke. “Reuben, would you mind showing our guests to the conference room please?”

  Reuben nodded, exchanged a glance with Amon, and led the two away.

  “We have a problem,” Lucas whispered.

  “I don’t have time for this right now.”

  “I held them off as long as I could, but it’s out of my control now.”

  Taking a deep breath, Amon followed them into the conference room. The woman spoke before he got the door closed. “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Fisk.”

  Amon closed the door. “What do you mean?”

  She blinked, saying nothing. The other man piped up instead, his voice rising to a nervous pitch. “For the death of your wife, Mr. Fisk.”

  “Eliana is alive and well,” Amon said. He managed to hold a smile while he swallowed the lump in his throat. After years of working on cutting-edge solar energy transformers and particle physics experiments, Amon knew that exuding confidence in the end result you desired was most vital when the outcome appeared bleak. That kind of brass-balls attitude had pulled him across the finish line more often than dumb luck or clever engineering ever had.

  “Ah…” the man stammered.

  “Please, sit down,” Amon said, gesturing vaguely to the chairs arranged around a long table as he
eased himself into a seat. “How can I help you?”

  “I’m sure you’ve got a lot on your mind,” the woman went on as she sat. “That’s why I’m hoping we can work together.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “I’m Libby Fowler, and this is George Montoya.”

  “I mean, who do you work for, Miss Fowler?”

  “The Federal Bureau of Investigation,” she said, pulling out a brass badge with the letters FBI stamped over the agency’s seal.

  “How can I help you?”

  “Our department handles…sensitive situations.”

  “What department is that?”

  “Rest assured, I have complete authority in this matter.”

  “And this matter is what, exactly?”

  “I hope we can count on your full cooperation, Mr. Fisk. We’ve taken the time to draft a statement for you. To give to the press.”

  His heart did a little pitter-patter at mention of the press. Journalists had continued to phone the company daily since the accident, requesting interviews and statements. He could keep his cool in the lab, but he feared his mask would crumble in front of the cameras. Reuben noticed his discomfort and placed a hand on his shoulder while Fowler reached into her folder and withdrew a piece of paper.

  Amon stuffed down the rage that threatened to boil over while he read it. Lucas and Reuben read over his shoulder.

  “Bullshit!” Lucas said, slamming his fist down on the table. “Shut down the Auriga Project, are you kidding me?”

  Amon held up a hand. “I’ll get the LTA Administrator on the phone right now,” he said. “There’s no way he authorized this.”

  “I’m afraid he has,” Fowler said. “This is a matter of public safety, Mr. Fisk.”

  “Over a hundred countries contributed funds to the Auriga Project. This is an international effort. The FBI can’t just shut it down.”