Lincoln Child - The Third Gate

B ack in the Operations Center, Cory Landau obligingly scrolled through the video feeds from the divers’ transmissions until Tina Romero told him to stop.

“That one,” she said. “Who’s that?”

Landau peered at the screen. “Delta Bravo,” he said.

“Can you get me on radio to him?”

“Sure can.” Landau reached over, dialed a knob, then handed her a radio.

“Delta Bravo,” she said, speaking into it. “Delta Bravo, this is Dr. Romero. Do you read?”

“Five by five,” came the response.

“Can you approach the entrance, pan across?”

“Roger.”

They watched the video feed silently. The boulders had been either blasted or pulled away now, and Logan could just see beyond them into the cleft in the rock. In the divers’ powerful lights, it appeared to be tightly sealed by courses of stone, creating a solid vertical face, as if workers had created a wall within the natural cavity of the rock.

“Closer, please,” Romero almost whispered.

The video tightened in.

“My God,” she said. “That looks like granite. Until now, scholars thought that Netcherikhe was the first Egyptian king to have graduated from mud-brick walls.”

“Narmer must have wanted it to last for all eternity,” Logan replied.

Romero raised her radio again. “Delta Bravo, pan up, please.”

The image rose slowly up the stone face.

“There!” she cried. “Stop. Pan in.”

The muddy, grainy video feed tightened on something affixed to the granite and one side of the igneous rock: a lozenge-shaped disk imprinted with hieroglyphics.

“What is that?” Logan asked.

“It’s a necropolis seal,” Romero replied. “Amazing. Completely unheard-of on a tomb this old. And look-it’s unbroken. No desecration, no spoiling.”

She wiped her palms on her shirt, then took fresh hold of the radio. Logan noticed her hands were trembling slightly. “Delta Bravo. One more thing, please.”

“Shoot.”

“Pan down. Down toward the base of that wall.”

“Roger. There’s still some rock and debris we need to clear away.”

They waited as the image slowly traveled down the face of dressed stone. Clouds of silt and muck occasionally blocked their view, and Romero asked the diver to backtrack. Then, quite suddenly, she told him to stop again.

“Right there!” she said. “Hold it!”

“I’m at the base of the wall,” the diver replied.

“I know.”

Logan found himself staring at another unbroken seal, this one larger than the first. There were two hieroglyphs carved into it.

“What is that?” he asked quietly.

Romero nodded. “It’s a serekh. The earliest depiction of a royal name used in Egyptian iconography. Cartouches didn’t become common until the time of Sneferu, father of Khufu.”

“And the name in the serekh? Can you read the name?”

Romero licked her lips. “They’re the symbols for the catfish and the chisel. The phonetic representation of Narmer’s name.”

“How long will it last?” Logan asked Ethan Rush. It was evening, and they were traversing the near-deserted corridors of Maroon.

“The productive period, you mean?” Rush replied. “Five minutes, if we’re lucky. The lead-in period is much longer.”

He stopped beside a closed, unmarked door, then turned back to Logan. “There are a few ground rules. Keep your voice low. Speak slowly and calmly. Make no sudden movements. Don’t do anything to disturb or alter the ambient environment-no brightening or dimming lights, no moving chairs or equipment. Understand?”

“Perfectly.”

Rush nodded his satisfaction. “At the Center, we’ve learned that crossings are most successful if triggered by the environment of an NDE.”

“The environment? I’m not sure I understand.”

“Simulating the actual experience. This is done via a medically induced coma-very light, of course. Along with psychomantetical techniques. You’ll see what I mean.”

Logan nodded. He knew that psychomanteums were rooms or booths, frequently mirrored and very dark, constructed in such a way as to induce a trance or state of psychical openness in the occupant, thus helping enable a portal, or conduit, to the spirit world. Psychomanteums had been developed by the ancient Greeks, and several still operated in the present day in America and around the world, helping-many believed-people contact the spirits of those who had moved on. Logan had thought about the mirror he’d seen in the testing chamber that first day, with Jennifer and Ethan Rush. It had been one of the things that led to his deduction of why Jennifer Rush was at the Station.

“Do you induce the Ganzfeld effect?” he asked.

Rush looked at him curiously. “The meds make that unnecessary. Now, please observe everything closely. Keep your comments to a minimum until we speak afterward. The more you know, the better equipped you’ll be to-to help her.”

Logan nodded.

“One other thing. Don’t expect revelations. Don’t even expect what you hear to make sense. Sometimes we need to analyze a transcript for some time afterward before we understand-if we ever do.” With this, Rush opened the door and quietly stepped inside.

Logan followed. He recognized the room. There was the hospital bed, with its banks of medical and other instrumentation. There was the large mirror on the wall beyond the bed, polished to a brilliant gleam. The lighting was just as dim as it had been the first time he’d seen the room.

And, once again, Jennifer Rush lay on the bed, garbed in a hospital gown. EKG lines snaked away from her arms and chest; many more electroencephalograph leads were attached to her head. The red and gray stripes of the medical leads looked out of place against her cinnamon-colored hair. A peripheral IV line was fixed to the inside of one wrist. She glanced at Rush, glanced at Logan, smiled faintly. Her eyes had a vague look, as if she was sedated.

To Logan’s surprise, Stone was standing at the head of the bed, one hand on Jennifer’s shoulder. He gave it a reassuring pat, then stepped away. He nodded at Logan, turned to Rush.

“You’ll ask her?” he said in a low voice. “About the gate?”

“Yes,” Rush replied.

Stone looked at him a moment more, as if considering speaking further. Then he simply nodded his good-bye and quietly left the room.

Rush indicated for Logan to take a seat near the head of the bed. For perhaps five minutes Rush busied himself connecting various pieces of equipment, calibrating monitors, checking displays. Logan sat quietly, taking in everything. The room smelled faintly of sandalwood incense and myrrh.

At last, Rush approached the bed, hypodermic in hand. “Jen,” he said softly, “I’m going to administer the propofol now.”

There was no response. Rush inserted the needle into the connecting hub of the IV cannula. Jennifer went as still as death. Glancing at the instrumentation over the head of the bed, Logan saw her blood pressure dip, her respiration and pulse slow almost by half.

Rush carefully monitored her physical state from the devices at the foot of the bed. Neither man spoke a word. After several minutes, Jennifer stirred slightly; Rush immediately took two leads with cotton disks at their ends and affixed one to each of her temples.

Logan glanced at him in mute inquiry.

“Cortical stimulator,” Rush replied. “Encourages pineal activity.”

Logan nodded. He knew studies had demonstrated the pineal gland’s neurochemical effects on previsualization and psychic activity.

Rush returned to the forest of monitoring devices at the foot of the bed. For another minute or two he watched as his wife slowly drifted back into semiconsciousness. Then he came forward again and inserted a second needle into the IV’s connecting hub.