James Rollins - Altar Of Eden

To hide their beach landing, Randy and the others would limp their charter boat into the villa’s cove on the other side of the island, to draw attention away from Jack’s team. The Thibodeauxs had a cache of weapons, including rocket-propelled grenade launchers, loaded aboard the boat.

Jack hadn’t bothered to ask how the Thibodeauxs had acquired such a mass of weaponry. He knew better than to inquire. The Thibodeaux family claimed roots that reached back to the eighteenth century, to a bloodline of Caribbean pirates that plagued the islands. And according to some stories, the Thibodeaux clan hadn’t entirely shed their notorious past.

So Jack didn’t care how the brothers obtained this cache of firepower, but he was glad they had. The charter boat would stand by out in the cove, feigning a blown engine, smoke pouring from the engine compartment, ready to come in guns blazing to aid in Jack’s assault if necessary.

But one detail remained unknown.

Was Lorna still alive?

With all the flurry of preparations, Jack had kept himself distracted from his fears for her. But on the ride here, with nothing to divert his attention, a fire built in his gut. While it had only been a day since they first met at the trawler, she had found a place in his heart. Maybe it was their shared past, but it felt like more than that.

He pictured her sea blue eyes, her sandy blond hair, bleached white by the sun at the tips. He recalled the way she chewed her lower lip when concentrating. The rare smile that broke through her serious demeanor like a flash of sunlight on a cloudy day. These memories and others popped like flashbulbs in his head. But he also remembered her from another lifetime: across a dark parking lot, on her back, shadows falling on her amid harsh laughter.

He had saved her back then-but he’d also failed her just as much.

With that last memory, a sudden fierceness choked through him, blinding him and pushing back the nausea. It was a ferocity that he’d never felt before in his life. He’d experienced fierce firefights and bloody ambushes in Iraq, but as he pictured Lorna a deep and primal well of savagery burned through him. He wanted to gnash things with his teeth, to grind bone, to rip things with his bare hands.

All to protect her-not as a boy any longer, but as a man.

Blind to all else, he jumped as the skids of the chopper struck the rig’s helipad. He hadn’t even noted their descent. Doors popped open, and the others piled out.

Jack remained a moment in his seat. He let the blood flow through him, felt it crest, then recede. He finally shouldered open the door and joined the others.

He didn’t dismiss what he had felt, but he also would not let it rule him. He had a job to do. But a part of him also shied away from looking too intimately at the source behind that rage, to the tender emotion buried deep that had ignited it.

Now was not the time.

Not until she was safe.

Lorna stood with Dr. Malik before one of the wall monitors. On the screen rotated a three-dimensional scan of a brain. It reminded her of the MRI done on Igor’s brain. After all the bloodshed and fire, that seemed a lifetime ago. She tried to concentrate on Malik’s explanation, but a pall of grief and defeat weighed her down. The doctor’s words sounded hollow and distant.

“Here is the best image we could muster of the brain anomaly found in the test subjects.”

Malik pointed a finger at the five nodes on the screen, colored a distinct blue to distinguish them from the surrounding gray cerebral tissue. The number and pattern of the nodes were identical to those discovered during Igor’s MRI back at her lab. But Malik’s scan had much better resolution. Not only did the nodes stand out crisply, but so did the fine branching of magnetite crystals that connected the nodes together.

As it rotated, the pattern looked to have the same crystalline structure and shape as a snowflake.

“Are you familiar with fractal antennas?” Malik asked.

Lorna fought through her despair to answer. It took her an extra beat to croak out a “No.”

“Do you own a cell phone?”

The strange question pierced the fog in her head. Curiosity focused her sharper. “Of course.”

“Then you already own a fractal antenna. In the last decade, scientists have learned that antenna arrays patterned after fractals have an amazing ability to broadcast along a wider range of frequencies with a greater strength-to-size ratio. This breakthrough allowed manufacturers to shrink antennas down to microscopic sizes, yet still function like antennas a hundredfold larger. It’s revolutionized the industry. That’s the power hidden within fractals.”

Malik pointed to the screen. “And that’s what we’re looking at here. A fractal antenna grown from natural magnetite crystals in the brain.”

Lorna studied the snowflakelike pattern and remembered her own crude analogy to a satellite dish. She also recalled the strange synchronization of EEGs. “And it’s this fractal antenna that allows the animals to link up neurologically.”

“Exactly. The pattern of magnetic crystallization seen here is definitely fractal in nature. The entire neural matrix is made up of the repetition of the same basic crystal shape.”

“Like the triangle multiplying into a mountain.”

Malik nodded. “But this is only the tip of that mountain. Initially this scan was the best we could discern using standard techniques. Such methods only allowed us to look so far. Even zooming down with an electron microscope only revealed a crystal made up of hundreds of even tinier crystals. It was like with those Russian nesting dolls. Every time you thought you’d reached the smallest crystal, it would open up to reveal even smaller versions of itself inside. It went on and on- stretching beyond our ability to detect.”

Malik’s voice cracked with frustration. Lorna remembered the raw desire in the researcher’s eyes as he described his search for a fundamental fractal that was the root of all intelligence.

“No matter how hard we looked, the primary fractal kept retreating out of reach, growing smaller and smaller, eventually disappearing beyond where we could scan, down a spooky hole no one dared follow.”

Lorna pictured the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland bounding down his rabbit hole.

“And though we weren’t able to go down that hole, I could guess what was down there.”

Lorna’s interest piqued sharper. “What?”

“The strange world of quantum physics. Following fractals smaller and smaller, it eventually leads to the subatomic world. In fact, some physicists now believe that the science of fractals could explain away some of the spookiness of quantum theory. Such things like nonlocality and entanglement, how a subatomic particle can be at two places at once, how light behaves both like a wave and a particle. When you get that small, things get weird. But fractals may hold the answer to explaining it all.”

Lorna didn’t see where this was going. Her impatience must have been plain to read.

“So let me show you what I learned myself from that research. Something practical, yet amazing. I scanned this same brain again, but this time, not looking for crystals, but for the magnetic energy produced by those crystals. Though I might not be able to see the physical crystals, I could still measure the electromagnetic signature from those invisible crystals.”

“Like the light from distant stars,” Lorna said.

Malik’s eyes widened, caught by surprise. “Yes, a perfect analogy. Though we can’t see a sun or a planet, we can detect the light that reaches us.”

“So you repeated the scan looking for energy instead of crystals.”