Eye of kane, p.1
Eye of Kāne, page 1
To my Ohana
1
San Francisco
California, USA
Michaela Adams put her bags down on the dark hardwood floor in her apartment. The knobs on the bottom clinked, scraping a little as it shifted from the mis-balanced weight of the laptop inside. She exhaled a long breath. It turned into a yawn. Her muscles protested, sharp pain pulling at the edges. A long flight would do that to you.
Michaela moved her shoulders, trying to dispel some of the tension in them. Bright light hit her when she turned the doorknob of the door leading from her hallway to the living area and kitchen. The sun flooded the room with the bright light of a beautiful midday.
Michaela frowned.
She walked to the windows to let the blinds down.
Dust glittered in the remaining streaks of sunlight now that the blinds shut out most of the light.
Something red blinked to her right. Michaela turned to face the light, showing someone tried calling her on her landline.
Who would try calling her on her landline?
Her friends and family knew she was away frequently, out of the country for her job. They would call her on her mobile phone, not on the stationary landline, that so few households had these days.
It hit her like cold water being poured over her: only a handful of people even had the number on her landline. All of them knew to call her on her mobile phone first, which she hadn’t checked since she had taken off for San Francisco. This was no ordinary message. This was urgent. Michaela bit her lower lip as she picked the phone up to play the message.
“Miss Adams, this is Iona.”
The familiar voice of Iona panted in the recorded message. He sounded concerned just from those five words. And if she was correct, he had reason to be concerned.
“You need to return. The site was disturbed.” Michaela had been with him just before returning to San Francisco. For him to call her to return like this gave her reason to worry. Iona wouldn’t have called her if the disturbance didn’t worry him.
After the message ended, Michaela immediately put the phone back down. She didn’t check for a second message.
Her entire body shook. Her heart raced. Michaela allowed herself one deep breath before turning back to the hallway, while reaching into her pocket to pull out her mobile phone, too.
Three missed messages. Iona had tried to call her on her mobile phone.
She fumbled with the laptop bag at the same time as she hit dial on Iona. Putting the phone between her ear and shoulder so she had her hands free, she tried to pull the bag open.
Her hands shook. With a soft thud, the empty bag fell back onto the floor just as the line connected. She held the laptop in her hands.
“Iona, what did the site look like?“
She set the laptop down on her desk and pressed the start button, before pulling her chair close to sit down on it.
“Like someone ransacked it, Miss Adams. Went through every drawer, every index.”
She caught the reflection of herself in a picture frame on the wall behind her desk. Wrinkles showed around the eyes of the frowning woman looking back at her. It was a stark contrast to the picture of herself and friends from her days at university in Boston.
Her hair was much shorter now. Back then, she had a long black mane of hair. Her best friend, Sarah, had short hair back then, usually a little curly. Now they were long. Just the other day, when they last talked on the phone, they joked about how they switched hairstyles.
“Is something missing?”
“No,” Iona said. “But they seemed to have been very interested in the stone tablet piece you found.” Her blood ran cold, as if it had been replaced by ice water.
She feared that if she was right about what Iona had found, a certain someone would be interested in her find. He could be interested. She hadn’t expected him to be on her tails that soon.
“Did you find anything out of place?” she asked. Michaela knew him. She had plenty of experiences with the only person who could be on her tail about this. He was the kind of person to leave a warning or mark the place to show he had been here in a show of power or what he perceived to be power. The archeologist shook her head, which turned into a full body shiver as Iona spoke:
“There was a card. With two interconnected rings and a skull between them.”
It was him. It was his mark, his signature. The very sign he liked to leave behind to taunt people.
“Thank you, Iona. I have to take care of something. I’ll... make sure someone in the office gets back to you.”
A noise alerted her to a car arriving in the building’s courtyard.
Michaela turned to the window. She peeked outside.
Two burly men got out of the car. One walked over to Michaela’s car, while the other looked around, searching for something. That one was familiar to her. She would recognize his tattooed neck anywhere, the angry art highlighting his hot-headed temper. He was dangerous.
Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she typed in the password. It was so well practiced, it was muscle memory now. Michaela attached a USB-Stick.
The stick contained one single file.
For a moment, her fingers hovered over the keyboard. She needed just one moment.
One simple but powerful little file could delete all her hard work, all traces of what she had been doing on her computer, all traces of her attachment to her company. It would close all channels to her company, make it hard to penetrate them from this computer.
It felt final, like a cut form which she couldn’t come back from. Knowledge about her excavation sites would be lost.
She let out a long, shaky exhale. With a sigh, she clicked the file, starting it.
A progress bar started. Pictures of files going up in smoke highlighted the erasure of her data.
Mona really had a wicked sense of humor animating something to highlight the loss of knowledge, she thought.
Michaela leaned back to watch as the program on the stick wiped her hard drive clean.
The screen went black as an animation of a door being shut appeared.
She exhaled a breath she didn’t know she was holding while watching the screen.
Now she just had to make sure someone would know what was happening. Her eyes fell to the picture again.
Sarah! Of course.
She pulled the stick out and shut the laptop.
Michaela got a pad of yellow post-it’s and a pen out and wrote:
·
Call Sarah 8595-4675-2001
·
Hands shaking, she placed the post-it on the picture behind her desk, only covering her own body with it, making Sarah the only one visible.
Heavy foot-steps thumped in the hallway.
With an audible crash, the chair fell backwards onto the hardwood floor as Michaela got up.
Hopefully, they didn’t hear that, she thought.
She ran into her bedroom. Looking left and right. She saw her dresser. It was perfect. She opened one of the drawers to slide the stick into it.
A loud knock vibrated through the apartment.
They were here!
Michaela knew they would do anything to get their hands on the tablet piece she had. Their boss had no regards to human life, certainly not of hers. She was just another human to him. A human that was entirely inconsequential. They would torture her for the location, if they had to.
She had to get out of here.
Fast.
“Miss Adams!” Someone outside her apartment door called in an almost sing-song.
It was the voice of the man with that tattoo on his neck.
Goosebumps formed on her arms. Michaela shook herself, trying to focus. She looked around again to take stock of what she could work with.
Her dresser was too small to hide someone in it. Her closet was too obvious. There was no space under her bed. She had no curtains. A beam of light fell through the window, painting a line over her bed, up to her dresser.
It was the only way.
Michaela turned to the window. She quickly pulled on the string attached to her blinds to pull them up.
Two panels got stuck together, but with a screech of plastic she pulled it far enough to be able to open the window.
Fresh air streamed in instantly. Sunlight fell onto her bed, Michaela raised her hand to shield herself from the sun for just a moment, before she grasped onto the windowsill to pull herself onto the fire escape and climb down. It creaked loudly as her feet hit the metal.
There was no way to go down the metal fire escape quietly. It was old, not stable, but it was her only chance. For something required to help save the inhabitants in case of a fire, the landlord surely neglected it. It would do for one person. She just needed to get down.
As soon as her legs hit the concrete, she heard the sounds of another person climbing down the fire escape. Michaela took off towards the more crowded street.
There was no time to look back. She knew what she would see behind her.
She would be safer on the street, surrounded by other people. They couldn’t just grab her or harm her surrounded by many people. Not without causing mayhem, panic, outcry.
Not without alerting the authorities.
Not without causing a major investigation. They wouldn’t want that.
Her feet thumped on the pavement. Her heart raced.
·
A shot echoed through the street. Glazed unseeing eyes stared at the white building next to her own as two men approached the body to search it.
2
Fort St. John, Canada Archeological excavation
“There’s another one!”
A jovial scream had Sarah Lewis look up from her task. She sat at a metal table, the kind that could be folded and put away into transporters without much hassle. The chair she sat on was similar, only with cloth at the back to support her back in the long hours of sitting around.
The surrounding site was a mobile excavation site, ready to be packed up and moved, leaving only a few traces of the excavation itself behind. Due to that none of the furniture was particularly comfortable - or healthy for that matter, but those were some the hazards of her job.
On a tray in front of her lay her tools and instruments and the object she worked on:
A long piece of petrified wood.
It was covered in sediment, which she carefully removed so she would only reveal the wood and gain knowledge from it. Damaging the object was the last thing Sarah wanted, but her young coworkers’ enthusiasm made for a bit of distraction that could easily cause her to do so accidentally. Her phone lay next to the tray, displaying the weather conditions, as eventually rain was announced and would stop their work for the day. She had to wrap the wood up securely before that happened.
Her screaming overenthusiastic coworker, a young student on his first excavation, held up a giant mammoth tusk in his thankfully gloved hands.
The tusk he found was larger than his own leg. It threw him off balance. With every find, this young man, a student really, was close to bouncing up and down - and sometimes he even shamelessly did so.
This area used to be a river during the ice age, so there were plenty of tusks, and yet the young man always showed the enthusiasm he displayed right now, jumping like an overexcited puppy.
It was all so new to him.
The wind picked up, shaking the long grass and fern that surrounded the site, carrying a little of the top layer of dust away, as well.
The young man apparently inhaled some of it, causing him to cough and lose his balance fully.
Roger, an older archeologist, usually hunched over, dove forward with uncharacteristic agility to catch the tusk.
The young man, Sven, if Sarah remembered his name correctly, fell face first into the dirt.
“Be careful with that thing! We can replace your teeth, but not that one,” Sarah called out as she shook her head, smiling to herself.
Roger fixed him with a death glare that could have rivaled the one of Sarah’s mother’s glares whenever her brother or her did something she disapproved of.
Sarah reached up to brush a strand of night black hair from her face that had come loose from her braid when the wind picked up.
She laughed when Sven sat up on his bum, brushing off his dust covered pale legs. He scrambled to his feet with a groan. The new tear in his jeans shorts displayed his blue underwear that was adorned with a comic duck.
“Nice underwear, Sven,” she called out.
The young man swiftly felt for the tear and bolted to the next toilet. Sarah shook her head.
Despite being one of the younger archaeologists, she already knew to wear functional clothing that would not easily rip and hold a few objects in their pockets. And her shirts were usually of a similar kind on digs: something simple, comfortable, something she wouldn’t mind patching up. Her beloved burgundy cotton coat she brought to colder excavations had more pockets than she knew what to do with - one of those particularly got her all excited when she bought it: A pocket was on her back, where she could easily slide a laptop in, if she needed it. With how those got thinner and smaller with technological progress that looked less and less out of place, too.
Sven didn’t even think about bringing boots. He was walking around in sandals, a trip hazard waiting to happen.
One of these days, he was going to damage an artifact. Sarah just knew it.
The blaring ring of her phone interrupted the sound of Sven’s colorful cursing. For a second, he even looked up at the rock tone coming from Sarah’s desk until a bit of wind blew the tear in his pants wide open again. With a yelp, he clutched the edges of fabric and pulled it back together to cover the ducks.
Sarah took a peek at the screen.
Mr. Adams. He was the father of her university roommate.
What did he want? She hadn’t spoken to him in several months, since his daughter Michaela left the country for a new excavation site in Japan. From there she had gone to New Zealand recently.
Sarah frowned. She hadn’t been in touch much. That was on her. She was busy most of the time on her own excavations and with her looming dissertation.
Maybe Michaela was back in San Francisco and the kind elderly man looked to reconnect with his daughter and her.
They used to love having barbecues in the spacious backyard of his empty house. With his wife dead and his daughter gone most of the time, he was likely a bit lonely.
She pulled the black glove off of her hand and picked up the phone to accept the call.
“Mr. Adams, hello!” She almost sang. It usually was good to hear from him.
“Sarah,” he breathed. His voice was gravely, deep, with a gravity to it that Sarah had only heard once before.
The memory of his tearful voice back when Michaela’s mother had died came to the forefront. He had tried to stay strong for his daughter. But there were cracks in his armor, cracks he had never been able to not hide from Michaela or Sarah.
“I - Oh Sarah, there is something I need to tell you,” he almost whispered now with a shaky voice that told Sarah tears were imminent again.
Sarah put her free hand over her ear, to focus only on the sound. A tingling spread in her chest, her stomach cramped, like someone had just landed a punch to it. Her heart beat felt heavy, slow, as if something invisible pressed on her chest, threatening to take her breath away for good, like one of the famous pressing ghosts her original culture had so many of.
“What is it?” She asked, hesitant.
She didn’t want to ask him, didn’t want to hear the answer. But she knew she had to. There was no way around it now, unless she hung up the phone.
It just didn’t change what he was about to tell her. Might as well rip the band-aid off.
“Michaela is dead.”
Sarah felt her heavy heartbeat in her throat. Her eyes burned. Her ears were ringing as her brain repeated that sentence a couple of times, turning it over, examining it to find the hole in the logic that would allow her to disprove it.
There was none.
“No.” She shook her head vehemently, fighting against the painful way her throat seemed to close up. “No, that’s impossible.”
Michaela Adams couldn’t be dead.
“She’s in New Zealand. She’s safe. She’s supposed to be safe!”
“She must have come back. I think she just wanted to check something at the company. I don’t know why or when.”
Neither did Sarah.
Sarah pinched the bridge of her nose as she closed her eyes, taking in a deep, though shaky, breath.
A tiny hiccup escaped her.
“I’m coming right away,” she said.
“You don’t have to,” Mr. Adams whispered.
The sigh she heard told her otherwise. He was relieved not to be facing that mountain of responsibilities and pain alone. It just reinforced her need to go to him and help him, however painful it would be.
“I want to.”
She waved to Roger to get him to come over. The older archaeologist did so, fixing her with a lopsided, confused glance. Sarah finished up the conversation with Joe Adams and hung up.
She pocketed her phone and reached for her coat.
“Family emergency, I have to go. Can you pack this away?” She asked her friend.
The man nodded instantly and reached for the protective covering. Sarah was already on her way out.
San Francisco, USA
Michaela’s Apartment
If someone asked Sarah how she got from Canada to the US, she wouldn’t have been able to tell. After she left, time lost its meaning. She lost track of how like much time had passed. Nothing mattered at all until she stood in front of the dark brown wooden door of Michaela’s apartment.
Her eyes focused on a view scratches around the locking mechanism of it, a clear sign of forced entry. Loose parts stuck out of the broken part of the door. It was clear someone forced it to open inward.
