“Father Reese was convinced you were taking over Bishop Sabartes’s position.”
“Is that what he said?”
“He speculated.”
“Well, that does bring me to the reason I asked you to come see me. Padre, I have an important matter to discuss. Something I cannot speak about with anyone else and something that requires the utmost discretion.”
“Certainly, Padre.”
“Father McCord, do you remember last year when you located the nine hundred euros that had been missing from the sacrament fund?”
“Yes.”
“You found it in a cupboard in the rectory kitchenette, if I recall. Is that right?”
Father McCord nodded. He didn’t like where this was going.
“Well, I’m not going to question the likelihood of that money being discovered by you of all people. Especially because from what I gather, your blindness has never represented any kind of impediment. But it might not surprise you if I said I’ve always known you didn’t just stumble upon it. I’m not certain how you did retrieve it, but I have a fairly good idea of how it went missing. You’re a fine friend to Father Reese, and I’m sure you do what you can to protect him, but his gambling problems and the occasional thievery that accompanies them predate your arrival here by several years. Random items of value have been going missing since he first arrived from Seminario de Málaga. I’m certain there are parish priests who would have sent him packing long ago, perhaps even reported him to the authorities, but I have always chosen to overlook such things, provided they’re kept under relative control. Unfortunately, I now have some reason to believe that Father Reese’s problems may run deeper than mere vice.”
Father McCord was silent for a few moments, unsure how to respond. “What do you mean?” he finally asked.
“There is a good chance I’m wrong. But in the meantime, I need for you to be entirely open and up front with me, even more so than I can be with you. There is much at stake here, Padre. For everyone and especially Father Reese. I need you to not hold back, and as I said, I need to be certain that anything I say to you will be kept in confidence. Your friendship and proven loyalty to Father Reese make you the last person I should be speaking to about this, but they also make you the first. I believe I can trust you, but it would be very reassuring to hear you concur.”
“Of course, Padre. I won’t repeat a word.”
“Good, Padre.” Father Arroyo leaned forward and spoke in a low voice. “I have reason to suspect that Father Reese may not be who he claims to be.”
“What? Who might he be?”
“That I can’t discuss at this time. Meanwhile, is there anything you can tell me about his past, from before his arrival in Spain?”
“Past?”
“Yes.”
Father McCord took a moment to think. “Not really. I know about as much as anyone else, I suppose. Worked as a schoolteacher in Michigan. Decided to become a priest sometime thereafter or maybe at the time. He’s not generally forthcoming about his past, as you already know.”
“Do you think there’s any potential you could possibly find out more?”
“Well, I can try.”
“I’ll be leaving to Burgos for several days. Preliminary discussions with the search committee for my replacement. While I’m gone, if there is any way you can try to gather any kind of information that might be pertinent, even if you suspect it could be false, it would be most helpful.”
“Yes, I’ll certainly try.”
“Try hard, but not too hard, if you gather my meaning. It is crucial you don’t arouse suspicion. Not only would that undermine things, it could potentially put you in danger.”
“I don’t fear harm from his hand.”
“Padre, if the suspicions about Father Reese are correct, then we don’t really know him at all. You must play this very carefully, do you understand?”
Father McCord nodded.
“Good. And please don’t misunderstand, Padre. I am not trying to determine that there is anything sordid in his past. On the contrary, I am trying to determine that there isn’t.”
“Yes, Padre.”
“I thank you for your help.”
Father McCord left Father Arroyo’s office and made his way to the library. He had but twenty pages left of The Dialogue of Saint Catherine of Siena and wanted to finish it. He understood now, after his discussion with Father Arroyo, that there were far more pressing matters at hand, but he was nevertheless determined to finish.
He removed the book from his special section of the shelf and sat down with it at the small reading table where he’d spent countless hours over the past two years running his fingers through ancient and modern writings late into the night. He had only gotten a few pages in when his mind began to wander. Not to his discussion with Father Arroyo but to his dream from the previous night. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small black leather pouch, from which he removed a jewel about the size of a large strawberry. Though it resembled a ruby, its color was closer to crimson than blood, and its surface was far softer than a ruby’s, more like talc or gypsum. He rubbed his fingers along its side, his mind drifting further and further away from Saint Catherine’s writings, when he sensed a sudden presence in the doorway.
“Good evening, Father Reese,” he said.
Reese smiled and walked into the room.
“Good evening, Father McCord,” he replied, pulling up a chair and taking a seat across from him. “I was looking for you earlier. I wanted to go over some notes for my confirmation class, but Josep informed me you were in some sort of meeting with the padre?”
“That’s correct.”
“Special occasion?”
“Just a general progress evaluation.”
“Really! I wonder why he hasn’t asked to meet with me, too. The padre and I haven’t had a real heart-to-heart since February.”
Father McCord shrugged and tried to return his attention to his book while Father Reese sat there in silence.
“All right, Father McCord,” he said finally. “You don’t need to share with your good friend the true nature of your conversation with the padre. I already know everything.”
“You do?”
“Indeed I do. And if the padre considers you a worthy replacement upon his leave for Valencia, who am I to disagree?”
“I’m sure if I could see your face,” McCord replied, “I would see your smile and know you were kidding. As is, I can only hope.”
“It makes sense, I guess,” Reese continued. “Or not really, but at least on the surface. You’d been an assistant police chaplain in Dublin, not exactly shepherding a great flock, but I have virtually nothing that could make me remotely suitable.”
“You don’t think being a schoolteacher has certain things in common?”
Father Reese laughed. “Well, perhaps in some ways.”
“Where was that, in Michigan?”
“Yes.”
“And what about before that?”
“Before what?”
“Before you were a teacher.”
“You mean, what was I doing before I was a teacher?”
“Yes.”
Father Reese paused, looked at Father McCord. McCord was sitting still, his chin raised, his right index finger resting on a page in his book.
“Different things, Padre.”
“Very specific answer.”
“My history is my concern, Father McCord, just as your history is your concern. You know me by now. I don’t inquire into your doings in Ireland, nor should I. I don’t ask you about why you left or about the one you left behind, either, the one whose name you dare not speak or, dear Lord, the heavens will come crashing down on Chicken Little. The one who I assume gave you that beautiful little gem you’re always carrying around. You know, I’ve never really gotten a good look at it like this. It’s quite spectacular to behold.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“It has a beautiful red color, and t
he surface looks almost silky. Forgive me, I realize I may as well be speaking Greek. But it’s really something else. If you’re ever hard up and feeling unsentimental, I’m sure it could fetch you a nice sum in Plaza de la Santa Faz!”
Father McCord instinctively returned the jewel to its pouch and the pouch to his pocket.
Father Reese sat there for several more moments in silence, then sighed wearily.
“Well, the matter is surely not up to either of us, but if you do wind up being handed the keys to the kingdom, please remember that I always thought you were a very handsome priest.”
“May I return to my reading,” Father McCord asked, “or are you planning to keep up this nonsense all night?”
Father Reese rose from his seat.
“Buenas noches, Padre.”
“Good night, Father Reese.”
The American priest took several steps toward the door, then paused.
“Oh, I nearly forgot. I’ve finished my work on the old greenhouse, if you can believe it. Perhaps you’d like to visit sometime tomorrow afternoon. I’d love to show you around. So to speak.”
“I’m not entirely sure what the point would be, but I suppose it would be my pleasure nonetheless.”
“Terrific! Ciao.”
Father Reese left the room, and Father McCord sat there for another hour or so, reading Saint Catherine’s Dialogue, but not really. From the time he had taught himself Braille, he couldn’t imagine wanting to read any other way. Physical books were sensual experiences to begin with, but absorbing the words and ideas through the medium of touch made them so much more so.
Tonight, however, his mind kept drifting, and the wind whistling through the church’s spires didn’t help matters any. The church was over three hundred years old, and with that kind of age came a symphony of various noises, which, in this case, peaked in the cool early hours of the morning. There was a legend, often repeated by children who grew up in the parish, that if you listened hard enough, you could sometimes hear the shrill cries of the worshipers and priests who had burned alive in the fire of 1849.
Why? Father McCord asked himself. Why was she still haunting him like this? Why was she entering his dreams at night and refusing to leave even after he’d awoken? Why couldn’t he just forget?
CHAPTER 8
It was 4:00 P.M., and Shawn’s eyes were hurting badly. The only source of light in the old library was the sun streaming through the small Victorian windows and a pocket flashlight that Ravi had lent him. The words in the dictionary-sized tome he’d been crouching over since ten, the first in a three-volume set called Textures of Hyperspace and the last in human history not available digitally, appeared to have been printed in an eight-point font. But the pain wouldn’t matter soon because if Shawn continued to inhale that musky air any longer, he’d pass out, anyway. He was allergic to dust, and the building seemed to have been built from it.
Shawn finally closed the book and left it there on the table. This was a ghost library, and books didn’t need to be put away. The entire campus, in fact, was a ghost campus, and as Shawn exited the building and proceeded down the gravel path leading to the student center, he felt like he’d entered one of those recurring dreams where you’re suddenly back in college except everything feels somehow off.
In this case, Minnesota’s former Dellwood College, years after shutting down, had been repurposed as an Ambius satellite facility, operating largely out of the former student center and physics buildings, which were several of the only ones on campus still functioning. There were other satellite bases, Shawn suspected, though no one had confirmed this for him, nor had he been told anything about the location of Ambius’s main headquarters, assuming a main headquarters even existed.
In fact, in the six weeks since Shawn had been initiated into the Dellwood operation, dedicated exclusively to warding off the aliens’ impending attack, there was very little that he had learned about Ambius’s wider operations or the larger universe it had discovered. How many countries were members of Ambius, and who were they? With how many different planets was Earth in contact? Did Ambius train astronauts like NASA, and if yes, had they been to other planets, and if yes, how many? What were aliens (any of them) really like? Everything was a mystery.
The team at Dellwood operated with laserlike focus on its specific scientific goals, much like a special forces unit that knows details of its own mission but is totally in the dark about that mission’s larger significance. However, Rachel, who was team leader and several levels higher than the rest on the Ambius food chain, clearly knew much more than she was willing to disclose, and Shawn sensed that this was to a lesser degree true of the dozen or so other scientists living on the campus, as well.
As the superstar prodigy among the group, Shawn received lots of attention, and the other scientists would often pepper him with questions, quizzing him about string theory over beers for shits and giggles, but his own questions to them would go unanswered. If he asked who within the U.S. government knew about Ambius—the president? Congress?—or what was the name of the alien race that had kidnapped Leland and was currently threatening them, they would respond evasively, insisting they had no idea, that such information was classified and off limits to anyone, and so on. He never believed them.
On some level, he could understand. Ambius’s entire existence was top secret, and all the other recruits had been involved in it for years, while Shawn had joined the project only weeks ago. How could he expect to be at the same level of clearance as the rest of them? Why should they trust him? He would need to prove himself, he figured. But understanding that didn’t make him feel any less isolated.
Still sneezing sporadically from the dust of thousands of neglected books, Shawn entered the dining hall, where Pat, the in-house cook, had whipped up an Italian dinner. He joined Ravi and his wife, Megan, at a table in the corner.
“Make any headway with Textures?” asked Ravi, shoving a forkful of pasta into his mouth. Ravi was a few years older than Shawn and had emigrated from Bangalore when he was nine. He’d met Megan at Dartmouth, where they’d been graduate students in geophysics and astrophysics, respectively.
“Sort of,” answered Shawn. “Really just slogging through right now. I’m guessing he’ll get to the juicier stuff in volume three, but I’ll be lost if I don’t go through all the other crap first.”
“You do know Rosen has it all on his Kindle, right? Scanned that whole motherfucker last year.”
Shawn stared at him. “You’re shitting me.”
Ravi shook his head.
“So you knew I was trekking to the library and marinating in mothballs every day, while all this was already on Rosen’s Kindle.”
Ravi shrugged. “Hey, man, I thought you enjoyed the scenery!”
Megan, who was cool and liked to dress like she wasn’t (she seemed to model her personal style on Velma from Scooby Doo) laughed hard. Shawn laughed, too, in spite of himself.
Ravi and Megan had been near the end of their programs at Dartmouth when Ambius recruited them. Rachel had shown up unannounced at their offices one day and invited them to a conference at nearby Colby-Sawyer. However, when the car that was supposed to take them arrived, it took them to Minnesota instead.
(Had they not been drugged, they may have objected to this sudden change of plans.)
If that seemed unorthodox, it was nowhere near as extreme or elaborate as the operation behind Shawn’s own recruitment. Shawn still didn’t know the full details, but apparently the faked correspondence with Leland had been a vetting process, a way for Ambius to test not only Shawn’s knowledge but his critical-thinking skills, his modes of problem solving, and, crucially, his ability to workshop ideas with others. But when Shawn suggested a face-to-face meeting, the Ambius scientists became concerned he might be onto them. They decided to wait and see what would happen next. When he finally showed up in Emington looking for Leland, they seized the moment and seized him.
It was Rachel who had a
ctually composed most of the letters, and it was she who had championed Shawn to her mysterious higher-ups, she who had believed that he may hold the key to completing the gaps in Leland’s published research and could potentially take Leland’s theories on warp drive from the realm of the theoretical to the practical.
After dinner with Ravi and Megan, Shawn made his way over to Laboratory B in the lower level of the old physics building, where he gave Rachel and Lyle, a lean, fortysomething astrophysicist from Oklahoma, a rundown of his findings from the previous night. After several minutes of explication using a marker and whiteboard, Shawn stepped to the side and let Rachel and Lyle study his calculations and figures.
After a few moments, Lyle shook his head. “It’s dead in the water.”
Shawn looked at him. “Excuse me?”
“Well, maybe. You’re building this whole thing on the foundation that tachyons are real things. But if they turn out not to be, we’ll be shit out of luck.”
“It’s not dependent on tachyons.”
“Sure it is.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Lyle laughed like he expected this kind of resistance. “Look at the sign of the mass terms!”
“You look at them!”
“It’s not dependent on tachyons,” Rachel said softly, her eyes fixed on the board. “They’re required where space-time is flat from the outset, but in Shawn’s model, or at least how it’s formulated here, it doesn’t have to be.”
“Exactly!” Shawn exclaimed, glaring at Lyle. “I actually thought you might object on naked singularity grounds. Guess you’re not familiar with that argument.”
Lyle glared back at him. “All right, Professor. So if your space-time can be flat, then there’s no problem with Leland’s original synthesis proposal in the first place, and we’re just wasting our time studying discrepancies that aren’t discrepancies.”
“Yes,” Shawn replied, “if you misinterpret the whole paradigm, sure, that’s a reasonable conclusion. But for the rest of us, how he jumps from parallels to synthesis is a pretty big fucking mystery.”
Lyle stood there in silence for a moment. Finally, he smiled. “Well, good luck with that, Sherlock. I’m hitting the sack. You two have a blast.”
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