Ethan held up his hands. “I’m on the fence, doesn’t interest me much.”
Rachel looked away, but he saw a ghost of a smile touch her lips. “You’d have liked Robert then. He was a humanist.”
Ethan blinked.
“A humanist, a theologian, and a scientist? Family dinners must have literally been a riot.”
Rachel smiled again and Ethan watched as her green eyes blossomed briefly with light, but the moment vanished as quickly as it had come and the smile melted away.
“How on earth did you and Robert meet?”
“He was a friend of a friend. We met at a barbeque, and he bet me ten bucks that I couldn’t convert him from his humanism over a dinner date.”
“Nice move,” Ethan said.
“It was.”
Rachel’s features were no longer strained, and though she continued to stare straight ahead Ethan could see that her mind was wandering among the phantasms of the past. She barely noticed the mechanical grind of the aircraft’s undercarriage coming down somewhere beneath them. Ethan glanced briefly out of the window at the fields and palm groves sweeping past beneath the Boeing’s flexing wing tips.
“How did Lucy end up in Israel?”
“She had been doing field research in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley near Nairobi, before moving to the Hebrew University under a new posting. She’d been awarded a grant for new research into early human evolution and was being mentored by someone called Hans Karowitz, a Belgian scientist, and a cosmologist called Hassim Khan.”
Ethan made a mental note of the names.
“Okay, so why don’t you tell me what was so important about what she found out there?”
“It was an unknown species of human,” Rachel began, “that hasn’t yet been classified by science and—”
“That the Defense Intelligence Agency for some reason wants to recover?” Ethan challenged. “I need to know everything, or this is all for nothing.”
Rachel sighed.
“They asked me not to reveal it to you unless it was absolutely necessary.”
“Is finding your daughter alive absolutely necessary?” Ethan asked.
Rachel closed her eyes and nodded before speaking softly.
“The remains that Lucy found were in a tomb estimated to have been about seven thousand years old,” she said. “But the remains were not human.”
“Not human?” Ethan echoed. “They said that the bones were humanoid.”
“Yes, they were.”
The aircraft around Ethan seemed to recede as he tried to grasp what Rachel was saying.
“So it was some kind of ape?”
“It was a species that did not originate or evolve on this planet,” Rachel said.
Ethan dragged a hand down his face, trying to conceal his disbelief.
“An alien,” he said finally. “That’s why they’re sending the DIA after Lucy, because they think she found E.T. camping in Israel and they want possession of the remains.”
“It’s the only reason they’re willing to take an interest in this case at all,” she said sadly. “If it weren’t for what Lucy found, do you think the DIA would invest in a search for her? They wouldn’t give a damn. This is about the remains, not Lucy.”
Ethan leaned his head back against his seat and chuckled in disbelief.
“I’m being sent halfway across the world to dig up some bones for the DIA,” he murmured, “that’ll probably turn out to have belonged to a frickin’ rhinocerous or something.”
Rachel shot him a toxic look.
“My daughter is still missing out there, whatever you think about this, and she’s smart enough to be able to tell a rhino from a human.”
Ethan shook himself from his torpor of disbelief.
“Okay, indulge me. Why would she have found something like that out there?”
“There’s a big problem in human history that nobody has been able to explain,” Rachel said. “The ancestors of modern humans, people essentially identical to us in every way, had existed in a hunter-gatherer state for at least sixty thousand years. But suddenly, out of nowhere, mankind began building cities, forming agriculture and producing advanced technologies. And that growth blossomed simultaneously in vastly separated geographical areas, from the Indus Valley to the Levant to the Americas.”
Ethan leaned back in his seat.
“Surely that’s just natural growth after the end of the Ice Ages?”
Rachel shook her head.
“There had been some developments, of course: simple dwellings, domestication of animals, and rudimentary agriculture. But then the people of the Indus Valley in today’s Pakistan began the construction of major cities around five thousand years ago. At the same time the Sumerians began to build cities in Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. The point is that there is no record of gradual development or progression—the cities sprang up almost instantaneously. Both civilizations supposedly independently