by Nick Thacker
Something isn’t right.
He threw the man’s torso off of him and the driver scrambled away, trying to recover in case Reggie attacked once again. But Reggie had felt the turn in the fight. He knew he wasn’t going to be attacking.
He got to his knees, then slowly turned around fully, facing Sarah.
She was staring straight ahead, away from him.
Staring at the trees.
17
Ben
Mrs. E had gone to the CSO facility headquarters to converse with her husband. The team was preparing a plan, and though that plan was far from solidified, they were beginning to understand what they needed to.
Ben and Julie were still in the cabin, on a conference call with Archibald Quinones. The Jesuit priest lived in Brazil, five time zones ahead of them in Alaska, and answered the phone on the second ring. They had met in Brazil, when Reggie introduced them, and the professor’s help in tracking down the history of a strange genetic trait in an ancient Amazonian tribe had been crucial.
They remained friends, checking in with one another as often as they could, but none of them had seen the man in person in over a year. He assured them he was well, still living in Brazil, and still teaching history part-time at the local university.
He was ecstatic to hear from them once again, but his attitude quickly turned when he’d heard about Sarah and Reggie.
“So, where do you think Garza will take them?” Quinones asked.
“It’s impossible to say,” Julie replied. “They headed south on the highway, but…”
“But you’re in Alaska. So that means literally anywhere in the United States,” Quinones said, chuckling.
“Right,” Ben said. “But this is Vicente Garza we’re talking about. He’s well-connected and well-funded. We’re assuming he’s got a chopper or plane lifting them off and taking them farther away. So they could be anywhere by tomorrow.”
“I see. And if they do take a flight — can you somehow track it?”
“Mrs. E is working on that,” Julie said. “She will check with her husband to see if he can tap into the flight path data. Everything’s private, but it’s all there. The question is if he can gain access.”
“Of course. And you said he wants the Book of Bones? This is the same book you were tracking down in Egypt, no?”
“It is. But we weren’t looking for it as much as we were just curious about it. We wanted to know what the big deal was — a lost book of Plato would carry some weight in the antiquities and history crowds, but it seems there’s more to the book than what any of us thought. Apparently it’s important enough to Garza — or whoever’s paying him — that he’s willing to kidnap and kill for it.”
“Any idea what is in the book?” Quinones asked, his voice nearly a whisper, the weariness of his years sneaking through the phone line.
“Not really,” Ben said. “Rachel Rascher was doing Nazi-era experiments in Giza, with Die Glocke. Her great-grandfather’s journal said they were trying to work out problems with the human physique, but that’s too vague to go off of.”
“But last time we called you,” Julie said, “we had the theory that it involved the Catholic Church somehow. Either a benefactor, or a silent partner, or both.”
“You think they are now involved with Garza?”
“We can’t know for sure yet, but yes. There just isn’t any information about the Book of Bones, so the fact that Garza now knows about what Rachel Rascher was working on makes us think there’s a common thread.”
“But we were not sure the Catholic Church was involved with Rascher before,” Quinones pointed out.
“Right,” Ben said. “But I think there are enough signs that point to it being possible. The car that took Sarah in Santorini was registered to a local priest. Might mean nothing, but then consider that they — whoever was helping Rascher — had the funding to support a massive extraction effort, her research, and stay out of the way of the entire Egyptian government, who we know is not very keen on outside interaction and has entire ministries to prevent snooping and sneaking around.
“Whoever was helping her, and whoever might be helping Garza now, has the assets to pull it off. It’s a carte blanche operation — they don’t know how much it will cost, or how much time it will take. It could be a fruitless endeavor, too. Who’s to say the Book of Bones is even out there?”
“Which brings me to my question,” Quinones said through the bluetooth speaker on the coffee table. “Why try to access the archives? If the Church is, in fact, involved, don’t you think they would waste time and money telling Garza to find the Book of Bones if they knew it was already in their possession?”
Ben nodded, knowing Quinones couldn’t see him. This was something he and Julie had already discussed. “Well, for one, we’re still not entirely sure it involves the Church. And if it is, we’re not sure it’s the whole church. There have been factions of the Church throughout history, operating on their own terms, away from Papal governance.”
“Absolutely.”
“And second, we’re not sure they know they have it. From what we’ve read the Vatican Archives gives such limited access to even its own hierarchy, it could be that whatever faction within the Church that’s trying to find it either can’t or won’t try to access the Archives. Or they don’t know it’s there. We don’t know it’s there, but…”
“But we need to start somewhere,” Julie said.
“And breaking into the Vatican Archives to find a lost document that may or may not exist, and may or may not exist there is your best plan.”
“Well, when you put it like that, I guess we should clarify that we are still entertaining other ideas.”
18
Reggie
No. Not at the trees.
She was staring at a man. Or, at least, that’s what Reggie thought it was.
But it was no normal man. This man was nearly twice the size of Reggie, who was tall to begin with.
My eyes are playing tricks on me, he thought. But then why did she stop, too?
He knew that what he was seeing had to be real. Somehow.
The “man” was holding a rifle, the object nearly miniature in his massive hands. His arms were tree trunks, his legs spindles of rock, the sheer musculature on him unlike anything Reggie had ever seen.
What the —
“Red,” he heard a voice say. Garza. “Please do not waste my time. I have a lot of work to do, and as I’m sure you can see, our research is not quite ready for mainstream release.”
Garza had walked up to him while he and the driver had been fighting and was now standing directly behind him.
“We’ve been here before, haven’t we, Red?” Garza asked. “You, appalled and amazed that I am continually one step ahead of you?”
“I’m not —”
“Save it, Red. I’m not interested in games. And I’m not interested in whatever witty banter you’ve been able to cook up over the last hour. We have an appointment, and I expect to keep it.”
As he spoke, Reggie watched the tree line in front of him. The shimmering sensation he’d noticed before wasn’t a hallucination. There was something in the trees, waiting just out of sight behind the pine trees and boulders.
They stepped out from behind their hiding spots, two of them to his right, and one to his and Sarah’s left, and walked forward. He thought he could feel their steps as they reverberated through the earth.
Before, as he’d been observing and analyzing his surroundings upon exiting the jeep, his eyes had expected to see normal-sized men, soldiers, enemies. He’d expected, as he’d been trained to expect, to see humans.
But what he was seeing now defied all reality. Never in his life had he known such a thing could exist.
And that was when he noticed their faces. These “men” were not men at all, or if they were, they were the most deformed, disfigured faces he could ever imagine. Literal monsters. Their skin hung off limp cartilage that clung to a rock-solid
bone structure that somehow kept it all from melting to the ground. Eyes, drifting in hollowed-out sockets, seemed darker than normal. Their mouths were a twisted cacophony of evil, lips unable to pull together to hide hideous teeth that seemed more random than purposeful.
They looked down on him, both staring and noticing and seeing right through him, and he wondered if they were thinking anything at all. Could they talk? Imagine? Articulate emotion?
He shook his head. No, there’s no way this can be real. He twisted around and faced Garza, but instead of seeing the man — his long-time enemy — he saw more creatures.
Three more of the beasts.
Brutes in every sense of the word, three more of them, stood over Garza and behind the jeep. The driver was cackling, blood pouring out of a wound near his eye, but he too was just watching Reggie.
“This — this isn’t real,” Reggie said.
Garza smiled. “I’m afraid it is, Red. This is very real, and it has been the culmination of research that began shortly after you and I last saw one another. There’s more I would love to tell you, but I need your cooperation.”
Reggie shook his head. “I — I can’t… there’s no…” he took a breath and looked Garza directly. “There’s no way in hell I’m cooperating with you. This is madness.”
“This is science, Gareth,” Garza said. “And I’m almost out of time.”
He snapped his finger, and three of the giants walked toward him. He turned to Sarah, who was watching the exchange between him and Garza, her eyes wide. She, too, was taking it in, and Reggie could see on her face that she was not handling it well.
“What do you need us for?” Reggie asked.
Garza walked up beside him, facing the tree line and Sarah once again. “I don’t, Gareth,” he said, his voice low. “I need you.”
As he said the words, the giant who had tumbled out of the forest in front of Sarah aimed his rifle downward, directly at the space between her shoulder blades.
“Do it,” Garza said.
The giant pulled the trigger.
19
Ben
“That’s Mrs. E,” Julie said, looking at the front door of the cabin. They were still on the call with Archibald Quinones, and they had been discussing some of the research Archie had been doing lately.
“Go ahead,” Ben told her. “Archie, Julie’s going to grab Mrs. E. She’s got information from her husband that might help us out.”
“Very good,” Quinones said.
“Hello, Archibald,” Mrs. E said. She rarely used their shortened names, a formality her husband shared with her. Her Russian accent was still only barely concealed by the years she’d spent in the States. “I trust you have been well.”
“I have, thank you,” he said. “I am sorry to hear about Reggie and Sarah. I want you to know I will do whatever it takes to help you get them back.”
“Thank you,” Mrs. E said. She turned to Ben and Julie before speaking again, but she kept her voice loud enough so that Quinones could hear. “My husband just got off the phone with a man who can access the flight registry data.”
“Anything useful?” Ben asked.
“Yes, perhaps,” she said. “He did, it seems, have a helicopter waiting. And as you might have suspected, Garza did not log his entire plan with the authorities. It is not required unless the aircraft is flying under Instrument Flight Rules, or IFR. And IFR is only necessary for commercial flights or when expecting to fly through cloud coverage, storms, that sort of thing.”
“You said he didn’t log his entire plan?”
“Yes,” Mrs. E said. “He most likely decided that flying manually, without the use of IFR, would be a better way to stay out of sight. But he also decided not to invoke the wrath of the government. Anchorage has the only Class C controlled airspace in the state, and there is a storm picking up south of there, likely right where they were flying from. The man my husband contacted was able to confirm that there was a small flight logged — most likely just a first leg — in a helicopter, lifting off from a field in unmarked territory and landing 45 minutes later southeast of there, outside Whittier.”
“That’s great news,” Julie said. “Can we get there —”
“We cannot get there in time,” Mrs. E said, cutting her off. “Unfortunately, it would take that long just to get a flight ready in time.”
“And you think this is just the first leg of their journey?” Quinones asked.
“We do. They are heading south, and we now have an identifier that will hopefully turn up again, but other than that we do not know where to look. You can imagine how hard it is to find a single aircraft, out of tens of thousands, flying somewhere over the continental United States, not to mention Canada.”
“Right,” Ben said. “So we’re hosed?”
“Unless the identifier turns up again. But there is a good chance it will. The problem then is that we cannot be certain Garza did not change aircraft somewhere, as a way to stay ahead of us.”
“Great,” Julie said.
“It is what we have to work with,” Quinones said. “So that is what we will work with. We will watch the skies and see where this chopper ends up, and we will go there.”
Ben was more than happy to have Quinones’ support, but he didn’t share the man’s optimism. He’d been in far too many scrapes like this to think they’d have such luck. “Can we get a head start?” Ben asked.
“We can move south,” Mrs. E said. “But we cannot know for sure they will keep going in that direction forever. Best case, we move down the coast to the Pacific Northwest and then see where they are.”
“Best case,” Julie said, “is that we figure out where the Book of Bones might be. Or where he thinks it might be.”
“This is true,” Quinones said. “He will still focus on his priority — finding the book. Taking Reggie and Sarah was collateral to get you involved, but it is secondary to his larger goal.”
Ben nodded. It’s all too much to process, he thought. So, take things one step at a time. He knew their first — and therefore, only — priority was to rescue Reggie and Sarah. That meant tracking Garza and his men, and if the only way to track them was to find the Book of Bones and bring it to him, that was what they’d do.
“We have to find the book,” Ben said. “Julie and I can travel south. Mrs. E, it’s probably best if you stay here and keep a watch on things.”
She nodded. “Of course.”
“And that means you’ll be able to keep us abreast of any changes, or any new information.”
Again she nodded.
“We’ll head to Seattle. At least we’ll be in the continental United States, and from there we can catch a plane to anywhere. Can your husband —”
“He will have a private jet ready in Seattle for you,” Mrs. E said.
“Perfect.” Ben looked at Julie. “Does that work?”
She forced a smile. “It has to. Archie can work on how we’re going to get into the Vatican, and then how we might access the Archives. It might be that we can ‘borrow’ some clearance from someone he knows.”
“Yes,” Quinones said. “I will get started immediately. Expect an update by the time you reach Seattle. It is the middle of the night in Italy, but I have a few contacts who are closer to home, and even more only a phone call away. And there is still plenty of research I will need to do to understand fully what we are up against.”
Ben looked around at the team — the remaining team — of the Civilian Special Operations. Since they had formed the group, they had sought answers to questions their own government couldn’t, wouldn’t, or shouldn’t ask, and they had mostly succeeded. They’d found trouble after just about every turn, but they were better for it.
This time, however, the trouble had found them.
20
Julie
The flight to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport had gone smoothly, and both she and Ben had gotten a little rest. Julie knew Ben hated flying, but whatever phobia he ha
d about it had been mostly quelled, thanks the to sheer amount of flying the CSO team was expected to do.
She watched him wake up from her window seat on the small commercial airliner. He had chosen an aisle seat, but then switched with a passenger when he’d found out that they had booked the seat between his and Julie’s. Now the bear of a man was crushed between two smaller women — Julie on one side, and a tiny old lady on the other.
He snorted, then sat up. “We almost there?” he asked.
“We already landed, Ben,” Julie said, laughing. “How many of those rum and cokes did you drink?”
Ben looked like he’d just been caught stealing. “What? They give you these tiny little bottles and like a half-pour of soda in a flimsy plastic cup, and I’m supposed to be satisfied with that?”
“Each one is like eight bucks, too.”
Ben shrugged. “It’s on the company dime,” he said. “Besides, they were weak.”
“You were passed out from about half an hour into the flight until now.”
“Short flight.”
Julie laughed again. “Whatever. We need to get to the cargo and shipping terminal on the other side of the airport where Mr. E’s plane will be.”
“And maybe Quinones will have news for us then.”
“Maybe,” she mumbled. She knew Archie would call, but she wasn’t optimistic he would have anything much to say. Gaining access to the Vatican Archives — legally or not — was no small feat. They had already discussed as much after they’d returned from Egypt, and in their brief discussions about it since then, they’d written it off as an impossibility.
Still, there was hope. If the Catholic Church was involved, in any capacity, with whatever Rachel Rascher had been working on, there was a possibility that they might find a clue in the Archives.
If not… she didn’t know what to think. She hoped Ben had a plan he was still working on, something that might still allow them to find the Book of Bones and get their friends back.