Covenant by Dean Crawford Read Free Book Online Page B

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 invented the wheel and a script called cuneiform. The Indus Valley script, known as Dravidian, hasn’t been fully deciphered even today.”
    “How big were these cities?” Ethan asked.
    He was surprised by her answer, never having known that such ancient cities could harbor populations of up to forty thousand people. Nor had he known of the complexity of their