The Savior's Game (The Daniel Byrne Trilogy Book 3)

by Sean Chercover

  “Planning to cross the Atlantic?”

  “Can if I need to. Destination TBD. I hear Barbados is nice.” Pat unlocked the cabin and disappeared inside. He returned a minute later, wearing full-length jeans, a water bottle in one hand and a pack of Dunhills in the other. He sat and lit a smoke with a dented brass Zippo. “Gotta keep one vice.” He snapped the lighter shut. “Raoul called last night, briefed me. They knew you’d come, of course, and they knew I’d help you if it pleased them or not. Your business is your business, so I told Raoul I won’t be reporting back unless and until I think they need to be looped in, and only after arguing it out with you and either convincing you or reaching an impasse.”

  “Bet he loved that.”

  “He had a few choice words for both of us, reminded me to remind you that ‘the Foundation will offer no further assistance unless and until you agree to work together moving forward,’ end quote.”

  “I’m not looking for their assistance.”

  “Then we good.” Pat took a swig of water. “So you added another Lucien Drapeau to your fan club, client unknown. That about right?”

  “That’s exactly right.”

  Pat said, “He come at you ’cause you got AIT?”

  Daniel said nothing.

  Pat said, “Hey, I didn’t know about it till last night, and by that time you were already on your way.”

  Daniel said, “What, exactly, didn’t you know until last night?”

  “Raoul said there was a Foundation operative named Jay Eckinsburger, a while ago, worked the AIT desk. Then one day, he came down with AIT himself. Petit mal seizures. He’d just freeze for a minute and when he snapped out of it, he’d report weird dreams about a seaside town with some huge skyscraper, and sometimes those dreams foretold future events.”

  Daniel swallowed some cold beer and blamed it for the chill that ran through him. “Dreams about a seaside town. With a skyscraper.”

  “That’s what Raoul said. This Eckinsburger dude apparently went insane, became catatonic, and is currently drooling all over himself in some five-star loony bin on Long Island. But before he froze completely, he said you were coming, you had the power to save us, and you might be able to stop what he couldn’t.”

  “Who the hell is ‘us’ and what couldn’t he stop?”

  “Story goes: dude stopped talking right after that, never specified an ‘us.’ As for what he was trying to stop, Raoul said that information will be available only if you come in from the cold. And he won’t tell me, ’cause he knows I’d share.” Pat dragged on his cigarette. “’Course, he could be bluffing. Maybe this Eckinsburger dude never said what it was he couldn’t stop, before going all zombie.”

  Daniel thought about it. “Between us?”

  “Cone of silence.”

  “I have AIT.”

  Pat sucked air through his teeth. “Coulda opened with that, you know. How long?”

  “A few months. I’ve been studying it, keeping a journal, learning to exert at least some control over it. At its strongest, it comes on as a vision of a seaside town, so at least part of Raoul’s story is probably true.”

  “Wait just a second. You were in that same town?”

  “Yeah, I had the same vision, big skyscraper and everything.”

  “Damn, son.” Pat sat in silence for a moment. “That is freaky. How you coping?”

  Daniel hadn’t spoken about his AIT with anyone since Kara’s visit, and he hadn’t foreseen discussing it again until her next visit. He wouldn’t have come to Pat for this, not unless things became intolerable, but he was glad for it now.

  “I’m coping as well as can be expected, I guess. It gets pretty weird sometimes, but knowing about AIT’s existence in advance is an advantage. For starters, I don’t have to wonder if I’m going insane or if I have a chemical imbalance. And having seen it up close in Tim and Kara is huge. Even though I don’t know what’s behind it, I can study it as some kind of natural phenomenon. A thing that happens. But none of that makes it any less weird. The visions are way beyond dreams—more conscious. And the voice, when it comes, is . . . I don’t know, it’s everywhere.”

  Daniel took a swig of beer. “To hell with Raoul. Ames already gave me a lead to follow.” He showed Pat the thin file on Dana Cameron and explained that she was the voice in his head, the woman in his seaside vision. And he told of how the vision had provided warning, how recognizing Drapeau in the real world had given him precious seconds to make his escape.

  “Okay, that’s beyond freaky,” said Pat. “AIT is a serious mind-fuck. I don’t envy you.”

  “Raoul does,” said Daniel. “Said he’s jealous, wishes he had it.”

  “For such a smart guy, Raoul is sometimes an idiot,” said Pat. He toasted Daniel with his water. “Respect. Seems like you’re keeping your shit together like a champ.”

  “Seems being the operative word there. Truth is, sometimes I feel like I’m hanging on by my fingernails. I really need your help, Pat.”

  Pat dismissed it with a wave of his cigarette. “Don’t be silly. You pulled my ass outta the fire when I needed it. It’s what we do, brother. Hell, if you went after this guy alone, I might kill you myself just for being stupid.” He dragged on his smoke. “So what’s the play? We off to Barcelona?”

  Daniel nodded. “Answer to your earlier question: I do think Drapeau came at me because I’ve got AIT.” A swig of beer. “Thing is, he didn’t come to fill me with holes.” He shuddered at the memory. “Back of his van had a gurney with restraints and an ECT machine. He came to turn my brain to scrambled eggs.”

  “Well, shit. That’s right nasty.” Pat dragged on his smoke. “Electric lobotomy.”

  “That’ll be the name of my punk band,” said Daniel. He finished his beer and fished a new one out of the ice, and they sat in silence for a minute. He said, “Somehow, the weirdness is a little easier to accept now that the voice belongs to a real woman living in Spain. When it’s just a disembodied voice coming from everywhere . . . you start to imagine that maybe it’s . . . God, or the cosmic consciousness, or some other unproven thing—anything—just to define it, to solidify your reality. I mean, it’s fascinating to study, but being inside of it feels a whole lot like what I imagine going crazy feels like. Be for the best if I could continue to study it without looking over my shoulder. Scrambled brains is not on my bucket list.”

  Pat took a deep drag on his cigarette, blew out the smoke, and dropped the butt into one of the empty bottles.

  “We’ll get this guy,” he said. “I promise.”

  12

  Universitat de Barcelona—Spain

  The brass nameplate mounted on the old oak door read:

  DR. DANA CAMERON.

  Daniel knocked three times.

  Her voice came, not from everywhere at once, not from within his head, but simply from behind the door. “Come.”

  Daniel turned the knob, stepped inside the wood-paneled office, and closed the door. Cameron sat at a carved desk, flipping through a stack of printed pages, an uncapped green highlighter in her hand. She wore the same purple glasses that she had worn in Daniel’s vision, and under a tweed blazer she wore the same black T-shirt with Wake Up! in white brushstroke across the chest. At the edge of the desk was a hardcover book: The Truth (So Far) about Trinity, by Julia Rothman.

  “Gimme a minute,” she said, without looking up. “Grab a chair.”

  Daniel sat in a visitor’s chair, fighting to collect his thoughts. This was not like seeing Drapeau in Barbados after seeing him in a premonitory vision. Tim had seen Angelica Ory in a vision and Kara had seen the victims in Liberia, so Daniel had been prepared for that. But he’d never imagined that the all-encompassing voice living in his head, loosening his grip on reality, belonged to an actual person—and that this actual person would one day be sitting across from him. Seeing her photo had been a shock, but hearing her voice, sitting face-to-face . . .

  She flipped another two pages, stopped, and dragged th
e highlighter across a few lines of text near the bottom of the page.

  Then she did look up. The highlighter dropped from her hand and clattered on the desktop.

  “Crap,” she said. “What are you doing here? When I said come find me, I meant to cross—” She stopped abruptly, pushed her glasses up her nose. “Wait. How did you find me?”

  Daniel tried twice before getting the words out. “Excuse me, I’m . . . I’m processing a slight shift in reality and it’s causing some cognitive dissonance, and I’m trying—” He caught himself mid-ramble, stopped. “But you don’t seem—”

  “I’ve been navigating both sides for a while,” she said. “Not my first time. Yes, I have been in your head, and yes, I’m real. Take that as given, and explain how you found me here.”

  He said, “I couldn’t even tell you. I mean, why do I even have your voice in my head? Why are you wearing clothes I saw in a vision? I haven’t had this condition very long and I’m still trying to get my bearings. You said you could help me.”

  Cameron’s expression hardened. “Get the hell out of my office.” She nodded at the door. “Go on, take a hike.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “I saved your life. You think I’m risking my neck so you can walk in here and lie to my face? I don’t need this.”

  She was right. If she hadn’t brought Daniel out of the vision when she did, he’d still have been meditating when Drapeau arrived at his cottage. She really had saved his life.

  He held up his hands. “I’m sorry, you’re right. That was just a reflex. Trust has been in short supply lately. I apologize. How I found you: Lucien Drapeau came for me at home—”

  “Who?”

  “The man in the yellow suit, the man you saved me from.” Daniel thought back to the file Ames had given him. “You might know him as Larry Elias?”

  “Just Elias.” She nodded. “Go on.”

  “He came for me at home, and a security camera picked up his face. I know some people who have the ability to tap into the surveillance web, and they found him on the University of Barcelona’s security footage, signing in under the name Larry Elias. Signing in to see you. So the people I know pulled your driver’s license, and I recognized your photo. That’s the truth, that’s how I found you.”

  Cameron nodded. “Okay, better. And now you’re looking for him?”

  “He tried to kill me. Yes, I’m looking for him.”

  “Good. But you shouldn’t have come here. If he followed you, if he sees us together—”

  “He didn’t, and he won’t. I’ve got a man stationed outside, watching our backs. A security pro. The phone in my pocket will vibrate if we need to move.”

  “Put the phone on the desk where I can see it.”

  Daniel did. Cameron rolled her chair to the credenza, poured bourbon into a couple of rocks glasses, and rolled back. He took the offered glass with a nod of thanks.

  “In the vision you said Noah’s soldiers were all around, and Drapeau also said the name. Who is he, and why are you afraid of him?”

  Cameron gazed into her bourbon for a moment. Then she took a sip. “Doesn’t work that way, kiddo. I told you to cross over, but no, you had to put me at risk coming here instead. So you get to go first. Talk.”

  But where to begin? Daniel looked to the credenza, eyeing the little metal racehorse atop the bottle’s cork. “Blanton’s was my uncle’s go-to whiskey, as well.” He nodded to Julia’s book. “Tim Trinity was my uncle.” Cameron’s eyebrows rose, but she said nothing. Daniel said, “I didn’t have AIT until three months ago, but I was Julia’s original unnamed source, the one who brought Trinity’s condition to her attention when she was at the Times-Picayune. After Tim died, I joined . . . a very well-funded, covert investigation into AIT.”

  She leaned forward and rested her elbows on the desk. “What did you learn that’s not in the book?”

  “A lot. We know the phenomenon, whatever it is, waxes and wanes throughout history, like ribbons moving closer together and farther apart, sometimes going almost completely dormant for hundreds of years at a time. We know it reawakens during periods of disruptive change in the course of human affairs—the collapse and rise of empires, for example, or rapid depopulations by disease or world war. And we know AIT is on the march again, easily over one hundred thousand cases and spreading faster by the month.”

  “That’s all you know?”

  “Wish it were. There are groups of powerful people who know about AIT and are trying to harness it, control it, because they think the information it provides would give them ultimate control over the power structures of the world.”

  Cameron waved her hand. “They don’t matter.”

  “Uh, I think they do matter,” said Daniel. “I’ve seen what they’re capable of. They wiped out an entire village in Liberia. They were behind the terror attack in South Carolina. They’ve bioengineered a plague bacterium that causes AIT in two percent of its victims. There’s a truce in place keeping it on ice for now, but—”

  “Daniel, they don’t matter. They haven’t got a clue about what’s really happening. What else?”

  Daniel sipped his drink. “I met a couple of other people with AIT, before I got it. Like Tim, they had voices in their heads and they had visions. But their visions didn’t include the seaside town, and neither did my uncle’s. But you and I have the seaside town vision, and I’ve heard of another man named Jay Eckinsburger who had it before he went insane and became uncommunicative.”

  Cameron shook her head. “They’re two different things, Daniel. AIT is a mere shadow of what we have. AIT is a few grains of salt spilling from a shaker, while we’re drinking straight from the ocean. A tiny percentage of people with AIT cross over. More every day, but there are only a couple thousand of us. Everyone else is dreaming.”

  “No offense intended,” said Daniel, “but that sounds a bit crazy.”

  “It gets much crazier, I promise.” She sipped her drink. “This is why I told you to cross over. Words are . . . limiting. I need to show it to you.” With some edge, she added, “Which I’d have already done if you hadn’t resisted the last time I called you.”

  “Forgive me, Dr. Cameron, I do appreciate you saving my life—maybe I should’ve opened with that. But cut me a little slack. Living with your voice in my head, seeing you in a vision, and now seeing you here . . . actually, I don’t have a word for how deeply weird it is.”

  Cameron conceded the point with a nod. “Fair enough. But follow my lead next time, and come for the guided tour, okay?” She held her glass forward.

  Daniel clicked his against it. “Deal,” he said, and they drank to it. After a moment, he said, “Drapeau’s a high-end freelance assassin, with probably hundreds of clients. This Noah you’re afraid of, you think he could be the one who wants me dead?”

  “If he didn’t want you dead, Elias wouldn’t be after you. In fact, you’re the reason Elias came to see me here.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Just reminded me that I’m not to interact with you. Then went through his talking points about the need for structure and cohesion, and I nodded and assured him I understood. He didn’t have to threaten me—I already know they’ll stop at nothing.”

  “He’d warned you about me before?”

  “First time was about three months ago. Elias—Drapeau, to you—said you were coming, and not to have contact with you. They’d never warned me off a specific arrival before. I figured if they were worried about you, it was a good enough reason to help, so I tried to reach out to you. All I had to focus on was your name. You’re a little younger than I imagined, but otherwise my mental picture of you was pretty close.”

  “But you don’t have any idea why Noah’s taken an interest in—?”

  “I don’t have all the answers. You’ve got voices and visions? Guess what, so do I. And ever since I reached out to you, I’ve had this recurring dream—a premonition of a devastated city—”

  “—with a
thousand people dead, you told me.”

  “And you’re standing in the middle of it, and you feel . . .” She held his gaze, unblinking. “You feel awful, because you caused it to happen.”

  A chill ran through Daniel. He wanted to insist that he would never do such a thing, but he was all too familiar with the law of unintended consequences. “What city?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t recognize any landmarks. But unless something changes, I think it’s going to happen.”

  “So who the hell is Noah?”

  “I don’t even know what he is, ultimately, much less who. But he basically runs the place. And he’s not Elias’s client, more like . . .” She sipped her drink and thought for a moment. “You said Drapeau’s a freelance assassin. He may be, but that’s not the real him. Elias is the real him, and he’s no freelancer. He’s only got one mission in life.”

  “And that is?”

  “To please his master.”

  “Then let’s talk about his master.”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Daniel. We need to take this a step at a time.”

  “Okay, but you said Noah runs the place. I don’t understand that. How does someone run a vision in my head, or shared meditative visualization, or whatever the hell this is?”

  “See, that’s exactly what I mean—we have to get you situated first. It isn’t a vision. You have to stop thinking of it that way. It’s a place. You’ll just have to come with me and experience it for yourself to understand.”

  “A place?” said Daniel. “A place where dumpsters appear out of nowhere. A place where the sun doesn’t move in the sky. Where license plates and newspapers glow so bright you can’t look at them?”

  “Yes. But still a place. You’re thinking of it as a dream, as something that exists in your mind, when it’s the other way around. Your mind exists in it.”

  A place with a frozen sun, where some things just appear and other things glow when you look at them.