On the Fifth Day

“No problem,” said Matsuhashi. He seemed more relaxed, more assured since the Watanabe story had settled some. His colleagues, even the faculty who were directing his work, treated him with a certain deference, and though some of that was surely just the political caution of people who had already backed the wrong horse once, some of it was just as surely admiration. He had bucked the system in daring and dramatic fashion, and emerged not only unscathed, but looking like a rising star whose work was rivaled only by his ethics.

But if he was on the path to celebrity, Thomas found he was handling it quite differently from his former mentor. He was more confident, more content, than he had been, certainly, but there was none of Watanabe’s flash, his disingenuous self-deprecation, or his love of the media’s attention. He had matured, it seemed, and though the press clearly admired him and what he had done, they were losing interest in him as an icon. That, Thomas thought, was probably for the best.

Still, at the Yamanashi Archaeological Insititute, doors opened for Matsuhashi that would not have opened for other graduate students, and the red tape that would ordinarily have bound Thomas’s requests to see any computer records of what his brother had been working on during his stay were sharply cut. Japanese organizations could have endless protocols that would hamstring any unconventional inquiry, particularly if it inconvenienced or embarrassed other people, but with Matsuhashi in his corner it seemed there was nothing that he would not be granted.

“Apart from meals and a couple of meetings with Watanabe-san, he was here almost all the time. I should be able to pull up most of what he was looking at on the university’s satellite-dedicated system unless he purged the cache completely.”

“What makes you think he was using that?” said Thomas. “Couldn’t he just have been surfing the web or writing documents?”

“He could have done that,” said Matsuhashi, his fingers flashing over the keys with incredible speed, “but he got Watanabe-san to give him password clearance for accessing the satellite data.”

“The equipment was set up for topographical scanning and detection of burial mounds throughout the country.”

“Yes,” said Matsuhashi. “As with the site we eventually excavated, the visible part of the mound was only a fraction of the actual burial site. We were attempting to use synthetic aperture radar—SAR—to detect shapes under the earth.”

“Oh, yes. It is sensitive to linear and geometric features on the ground, particularly when different radar wavelengths and combinations of horizontal and vertical data are employed.”

“Sorry,” Matsuhashi said, looking up from his typing. “The point is, it works. SAR beams energy waves to the ground and records the energy reflected. It’s not even new technology now. In 1982 radar from the space shuttle revealed ancient water courses below the sand of the Sudanese desert. Airborne radar has been used to track prehistoric footpaths in Costa Rica.”

The student pulled up one image after another and his frown deepened. The pictures showed what looked like irregular crenulations of coastlines, white against a black background, with large areas of each picture awash in vivid colors, green edging into yellow, into orange, into red, magenta, and brown. Each image was marked with a date and time, and the file was labeled “SeaWiFS chlorophyll produce and wind field from SAR.”

The next set of images again seemed to show coastline marked in vivid green, blue water, and a scattering of iridescent magenta paling to white. The file was marked “AVHRR: visible, near and thermal infrared composite.” Then there were charts of numbers, graphs, and clusters of coordinates.

“This data seems largely surface focused,” he said. “It may penetrate a few feet down, but no more. And measuring caves wouldn’t necessitate these multiple passes. See? We have a series of images of the same locations taken over the space of several days. Caves don’t alter unless there is massive seismic activity, so why the repeat imaging? And this set of images seems to be taking into account wind direction, which wouldn’t be relevant for undersea structures.”

“Me neither,” said Matsuhashi, looking less sure of himself. “This is a long way from archaeology. Let me make a call. I’m very popular at NHK right now,” he added with a rueful smile.

They printed a selection of the images and drove over to the TV station. Thomas hung in the background as the staff fawned over their local hero, but drifted back into range as they sat down with the station’s chief meteorologist, a scholarly-looking man with salt-and-pepper hair and a neat mustache who, of all the people at the station, seemed ignorant of or unimpressed by Matsuhashi’s celebrity status. He was, Matsuhashi assured Thomas, an expert on satellite imaging, particularly if they involved weather as these pictures seemed to.

Thomas followed as best he could, but the man seemed to be complaining about what was on offer at his local restaurant.

“He’s saying that this is why he can’t get sushi-grade fish for the second time this year,” said Matsuhashi, simultaneously amused and bemused.

The meteorologist spoke quickly, Matsuhashi rushing his translation to keep up. “Little plants in the water,” he said, typing HABS into his computer search engine. “Dangerous. Poison all the fish.” The meteorologist indicated the computer screen. “Habzu,” he said again, with a told-you-so air.

The picture showed a sunlit beach, idyllic except for something strange that made the brain retreat and adjust, something that skewed reality, made it dreamlike. The sea had turned to blood.

It was as if turning the key he had been trying had not just worked, it had released a dozen other locks, and suddenly Thomas’s head was filled with the booming clang of a dozen doors swinging open.