“Just that. Instead of relying solely on the verifiable historical record, sometimes we pay attention to local folklore. We don’t necessarily take it at face value, but sometimes a pattern emerges, sort of like clues to a treasure map.” She resumed pacing the room. “Have you ever heard of the legendary lost graveyard of the elephants?”
“Sounds like something from a Tarzan movie,” King remarked.
Felice stopped for a moment, and faced him, her face completely serious. “There’s a reason for that. The elephant graveyard is one of those tall tales that has been circulating Africa for centuries, just like King Solomon’s Mines or the Kingdom of Prester John. Stories like that tend to take on a life of their own after a while.
“According to the myth, there’s a place where all the elephants go when they know they’re about to die. They’re drawn there, like it’s something in their collective subconscious. A lot of dead elephants in one place means a fortune in ivory, just lying there waiting for someone to collect.”
“But elephants don’t really do that,” King said. “I mean, we’d know if they did.”
She nodded. “Scientific advancements, both in the field of zoology and remote sensing, have verified that elephants don’t behave that way. But when you consider that today’s elephant population has been nearly wiped out by poachers and big game hunters, who’s to say that something like that wasn’t the case a few hundred years ago.
“Most of the stories about the elephant graveyard were easily enough disproven, but one lead was promising because of where it led us: the Great Rift Valley. We know that people have been living in the Rift for hundreds of thousands of years. It made sense that, if there were any truth to the story, then it would have originated there.”
“And why was Nexus interested in elephant bones?”
“As I said, the graveyard would be evidence of collective behavior that isn’t evident in modern elephants. Our goal was to compare DNA from elephants in the graveyard with that of modern elephants, and hopefully isolate the genetic markers associated with that behavior. If we could identify the section of the elephant genome associated with intelligence, it would go a long way toward understanding the evolution of human consciousness.”
King pondered her answer. He didn’t get the impression that she was being intentionally deceptive, but her explanation didn’t square with his knowledge of Manifold’s agenda, nor did it explain why they were willing to kill in order to get control of whatever had been discovered. Finally, he asked: “What about the ape skull that you brought back?”
She gave a helpless shrug, her expression indicating that she was even more bothered by that incongruity than he.
“You’ve got to remember something,” he persisted. “Why else would you be so insistent on returning?”
“That’s just it. I have to go back there to find what I lost.”
King considered her answer but he kept coming back to something else she had said. Drawn there… something in their collective subconscious.
Is that what’s happening to her?
And if what she had found in the cave had awakened some kind of link to a collective subconscious-one that could affect human behavior-what did Manifold have planned for it?
He knew he wasn’t going to get those answers from her, and he sensed he was nearing the point where her singular desire to return to the cave would make her less cooperative, more demanding. It was time to get moving.
King drove the lead vehicle, with Felice and Moses as passengers. Felice had not spoken more than a few words since their earlier discussion, and as they drove she simply stared out the window, as if hoping to catch a glimpse of their destination, despite the fact that it lay hundreds of miles to the north. Moses responded to King’s questions, but likewise showed little interest in conversation, leaving King alone with his thoughts, which given the uncertainty surrounding Sara’s fate, was not a good thing.
As he drove, King’s realized that he was scanning the road ahead for signs of an ambush or improvised explosive device placement, habits that had become second nature when he had driven in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ethiopia was no war zone, though there were reports of bandits in remote regions, and intel suggesting a burgeoning Al Qaida presence. After the events of the previous day, maybe a little paranoia was a good thing.
While Moses had been out gathering the supplies for the expedition, King had done some shopping as well. He had contacted a more-or-less trustworthy black-market arms dealer, and purchased a used but serviceable Dragunov SVD, equipped with a detachable PSO-1 scope. It wasn’t his first choice, but Russian weapons were more readily available. The sniper rifle’s accessories package included a bayonet, which he decided would make a decent substitute for his beloved KA-BAR knife. The dealer had delivered the rifle, along with 500 rounds of 7.62 mm and several boxes of 9 mm rounds for the MP-5. King felt a little better prepared than he had upon arriving in Addis Ababa, but knew that surviving possible future encounters would depend more on good luck and good judgment than on firepower alone. And he already felt like he’d used up a year’s worth of good luck.
The day passed uneventfully. They kept to the main highway, traveling north as far as the city of Komolcha, where they ate and refueled, and then traveled east to Semera, the new regional capital of the Afar district. Although there were several hours of daylight remaining, they found lodging and spent the night there. Beyond Semera, there would be little in the way of creature comforts.
Felice seemed to grow more anxious, and more solitary, with each mile traveled. King left her alone. He doubted there was anything more she could tell him, and if there were, it would have to wait until she was ready, until she satisfied the compulsion that was drawing her back to the mysterious cave in the Rift Valley. Moses similarly kept to himself, conversing with the other hired men only to the extent that his duties as translator and de facto expedition manager required him to do so. Like Felice, he also seemed to be in the grip of an external force, not a subconscious homing instinct, but something less specific-the gravity of personal destiny.
King had managed to get the young man to volunteer a little about himself. Moses was a college graduate, but mired in the same economic torpor that kept so many in Africa from rising above the circumstances of their birth. Perhaps, King surmised, he saw the success of this expedition, coming as it did on the heels of the failure of the first, as a way to break that cycle.
That evening, King checked in with Deep Blue, but the conversation was brief; there was nothing to report. No news on Manifold’s activities, and no word from Sara. As troubling as the uncertainty was, no news was good news.
They set out the next morning before sunrise, journeying a short distance east to the village of Serdo, then left the highway, heading north on a dirt track that bisected an otherwise empty landscape. It was like driving across the surface of an alien planet.
The Great Rift Valley was an area of intense volcanic and seismic activity. Stretching from Kenya to the Horn of Africa, a distance of thousands of miles, it was the only place on the planet where the earth’s tectonic plates moved apart on dry land; all other spreading rifts were submerged deep beneath the oceans. Indeed, the northernmost reaches of the spreading zone that had created the Rift had formed the Red Sea, and in time the valley itself would open up into the Gulf of Aden and be inundated, creating an inland sea. The separation of the plates was almost imperceptibly slow, only a few inches every year-with a few infrequent but extremely dynamic exceptions, such as the 2005 eruption of the Dabbahu volcano, which opened a 37 mile long fissure- but the inevitable process had been going on for millions of years, creating a vast field of featureless lava. Yet, it was not the geological activity which had made this part of the Rift unique, but rather a more recent event, relatively speaking. It was here that fossils of the earliest hominids had been found, the ancestors of modern humans. If prevailing theories were correct, human evolution had turned an important corner here.
King didn’t know how the mythic elephant graveyard figured into the tapestry of natural history, but he knew it was no coincidence that Felice Carter had brought back an ape skull.
They drove for hours, road conditions halving the speed they had been able to maintain on the highway, and then early in the afternoon, turned off the road and struck out cross country, their pace further reduced. The distance, according to Moses, was less than a hundred kilometers, but without roads, it would be nearly dusk before they reached their destination.
They saw no one at all; nothing lived or grew in the austere landscape. Nevertheless, King was now fully alert, constantly vigilant for signs of a hostile presence. It seemed likely that Manifold had gotten what it needed from the raid on the hospital, but there was every reason to believe that they might also want to control-or more likely destroy-the source of the genetic material Felice had brought back. He could only hope that, if such were the
