He preferred keeping the candles lit for the wanderers who came in for quiet reflection at odd hours. Right now, there were six people in the various pews. Each sitting as geographically far away from each other as was possible. He admired the desperate geometry of it.
The old woman closest to the front was a widow who had been in every three or four days since her husband of sixty-four years passed from cancer. She was one of the brokenhearted ones, because she’d outlived her husband, both daughters, and three grandchildren. She sat rocking in silence, and Father Steve knew that no words existed to offer comfort, and no advice—no psychology or scripture—could adequately explain to her why she survived while everyone else she loved died.
Then there was the guy who ran the NA meeting. Not using, earning his ten-year chip, and running a successful meeting was in no way a buffer against hearing the stories his fellow NA members told. He’d once admitted that he felt like he was carrying those stories around as surely as if they were tattooed on his skin.
The other four tonight were new, but there were always a lot of those.
Father Steve made just enough noise to ensure they all knew he was there in case they needed something more than the setting and the atmosphere.
Then he spotted a seventh visitor he hadn’t noticed before, seated in the shadows to the left of the basin of holy water, just outside the circle of yellow light cast by the flickering candles. Late thirties, he judged; well dressed but with a kind of disheveled air about him. As if the man was rumpled rather than his suit.
He needs his soul dry-cleaned, mused Father Steve, then chewed for a moment on that thought. It was accurate, but he could not pinpoint why it was right.
There was a sound and everyone in the church looked up as a bass growl filled the air. It was not very loud and not sharp. Not like an explosion, and not quite thunder. Then Father Steve felt the floor vibrate beneath his feet. For a moment he thought it was a subway train rocketing along beneath the ground, but the sound was wrong, and the vibration was too strong.
The guy from Narcotics Anonymous said it out loud, putting a name to it. “Earthquake.”
He was right and everyone knew it. They sat where they were. No one rushed for the protection of a doorway. The rumble was low, soft … and then it was gone.
“Thank God,” said the NA guy.
“Yes, indeed,” agreed Father Steve and, as all eyes were suddenly on him, he made the sign of the cross in the air and gave a blessing for the safety of one and all.
The others said amen.
Except the man in the shadows, who caved slowly forward, placed his face in his hands, and began to weep.
No one heard him whisper, “I’m sorry.”
Not even Father Steve.
CHAPTER THIRTY
CITADEL OF SALAH ED-DIN
SEVEN KILOMETERS EAST OF AL-HAFFAH, SYRIA
TWO DAYS AGO
Harry woke up slowly. It hurt. His body ached, and there was a feeling like a splinter driven into his mind. He sat up, gasping, drool hanging from his rubbery lips. Understanding coalesced with slow reluctance. The citadel in Syria. The tomb raiders. The hidden chamber and the green glow and the …
His head whipped around but the strange doorway was gone. It was all gone. Ghul and his people, those damned tentacles, the glimpse of some alien sky. All that was left was a trace of the green glow. A fragment of something that gleamed like glass, or crystal, lying on the stone floor near the base of a pillar. It pulsed like a heartbeat, the light waxing and waning very slowly.
Violin stood over it, and by that bizarre light Harry could see her expression, and it froze the heart in his chest. He had never before seen a look of such profound and personal horror. It twisted her lovely face into an ugly mask of disgust and hate and fear.
“V-Violin…?” he whispered, tripping over her name. His voice was hoarse and cracked.
She turned her head very slowly toward him. It was a strange movement that, in the strangeness of the moment, did not look at all human. It was more like a praying mantis swiveling its head. Her dark eyes looked like orbs of black onyx and he saw no warmth at all in them. However, the horror and fear slowly drained from her expression, like sand from a broken hourglass.
“Violin?” he asked again.
She blinked once. Slowly. Then again. And after a third blink there was a change. She was back.
“Harry?” Violin murmured in a voice stretched paper thin with tension. She took a step toward him, caught him under the arm, and jerked him to his feet with such shocking force that Harry went stumbling several paces forward. But he skidded to a stop when he realized that she’d accidently propelled him toward the piece of green crystal. Violin cried out, but Harry began backpedaling, pinwheeling his arms like a sloppy tightrope walker. Violin caught his shoulder and pulled him farther away. They stood for a moment, panting as if they’d run up ten flights of stairs, staring at the pulsing green object.
“What is that?” he asked in a church whisper.
Violin licked her lips. “Something that should not be here.”
“‘Here’ where? In this frigging tomb?”
“No,” said Violin. She shook her head as if trying to clear her thoughts, then pulled a compact satellite from a pouch on her belt. “No signal,” she said after a moment.
“Violin, what is that thing? It makes me feel weird.”
She turned and suddenly jerked to a stop, staring at him, her eyes wide but face wooden. “Harry,” she said in a slow, calm, controlled voice, “put that down.”
“Put what down?”
Then he felt the weight in his right hand and looked down to see, with total astonishment, that he was holding his pistol. “I … I…”
He had nowhere to go with that, because he hadn’t been aware of drawing the pistol. Or wanting to.
“Give me the gun, Harry,” said Violin.
“What?”
“Give it to me,” she said. “Do it now.”
“Oh … sure,” he said vaguely, and offered it to her.
Except that’s not what he did. His arm rose, but the barrel was pointing at a spot exactly between Violin’s breasts. He could feel his finger moving along the curve of the trigger guard.
“Harry … give me the…”
Violin’s voice melted into nothing. Into an absence of sound so profound that it was as if his ability to hear and perceive sound had been torn from him. As it happened, Harry felt totally detached from the motion of pointing the gun at her. In his head, it was as if a door every bit as strange and alien as the one they had seen a few moments ago had suddenly opened wide. He could not hear Violin’s voice. It was gone. All sound was gone, and in its place a silence as vast and deep as forever yawned like the mouth of some great, hungry thing.
Harry looked into it. Hearing nothing, but seeing so far. So deep. Into forever. He never saw Violin move. He did not feel his finger pull the trigger; never heard the shot. He did not hear the scream. Nor did he feel the ground beneath him begin to rumble and growl.
INTERLUDE TEN
THE GREEN CAVES
BELOW TUVALU, POLYNESIA
SIX YEARS AGO
They gathered around a dark blue Tyvek tarp Rig stretched out on the floor of the cavern. The guards stood at the exit, but even they craned their necks to see the green objects brought with great care from new pockets discovered in the walls.
“I can’t explain this,” said Svoboda uselessly. He’d said it so many times that it was now as much background noise as the dripping water.
“What is it?” asked Rig. The whole thing was so riveting that Valen noticed that Rig and Ari stood shoulder to shoulder despite everything that had happened. This was bigger than that. Bigger than anything.
“What it is,” said Marguerite, who knelt on the edge of the tarp, “is inarguably the greatest archaeological discovery in the history of the world. And I am not exaggerating. If the carbon and luminescence dating continues to come back with the n
umbers we’ve been seeing from the chips found in this cavern, then this will mean that history, as we know it, is wrong.”
They all looked at each other. It was what they’d all been thinking, but somehow hearing it aloud made it somehow more real. That’s how Valen took it, at least. More real.
He cleared his throat and knelt across from Marguerite. “First things first,” he said. “The dating is going to take some time, so we can’t let ourselves get caught up in wild speculations.”
“But—” began Marguerite, but he caught her eye and gave a tiny shake of his head and she fell silent.
“First, we need to determine what this thing is.”
They looked at the scattered pieces. Each one had been gently cleaned and placed on the tarp along with a small tag with a numerical code.
“It’s a machine,” said Rig. “What else can it be?”
There were more than three hundred pieces, ranging from some as large as a car battery to others that were clearly some kind of pin or fastener.
“What do we do, though?” asked Rig. His clothes were covered in rock dust and his eyes seemed to be filled with crazy lights. “I mean … can we put it back together?”
“No,” said Svoboda and a few of the others in a chorus of alarm.
“We don’t have a blueprint,” said Marguerite, trying to be a voice of reason.
“I can figure it out,” promised Rig. “I’m good at machines. My work-study job at MIT was repairing assistant engineer in the lab. I fixed everything from the processors on the electron microscope to the gears on that big industrial laser.”
“Kid’s telling the truth,” said Ari. “When the generator in the other cave blew, he fixed it like nothing.”
“Okay,” said Valen. “Kid, you just got a promotion. But every step gets documented. Marguerite will work with you on that. Pictures, video, complete notes. The works. Dot every i and cross every t.”
“History would never forgive us for making a mistake,” said Marguerite.
Valen nodded, though he was thinking of someone else who wouldn’t forgive him if there were any mistakes.
PART TWO
SHOCK WAVES
Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
—The Tempest
William Shakespeare
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
TORTILLA COAST RESTAURANT
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Linden Brierley looked like a man who wanted to be anywhere else and do anything else rather than be here to meet her. That made Aunt Sallie sad.
He saw her seated at a side table and angled her way, bent to kiss her offered cheek, and slid in across from her. He wore a medium gray suit and colorful Michael Kors tie, and Auntie figured that it was a deliberate attempt to look like anything else except a former Secret Service agent. It didn’t work, though. He had too much of the Fed look, which was a less human and more anal-retentive version of the cop look. Anyone who saw him would mark him as what he used to be. Old habits died very hard.
“You look like shit,” she said.
Brierley took off his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose, winced, sighed, put on the glasses again. “Thanks. Heaps.”
He looked down at her plate. “What in the hell is that?”
“Huevos rancheros. Four fried eggs topped with melted cheese and ranchero sauce, over crispy corn tortillas, rice, and black beans, served with breakfast potatoes.”
“Good Christ.” When the waitress came he ordered a decaf coffee, and gluten-free toast with a side of organic apple butter.
“Pussy,” sneered Aunt Sallie.
They were alone in their corner of the restaurant. In a confidential voice, Brierley said, “Listen, Auntie, about this thing with Ledger, I think you’re wasting your time coming down here. People talk about ‘executive whim’ as if it’s funny, but it’s not. It’s scary as hell. This president is unhinged and unfit for the job. I’ll take anyone of either party right now. Hell, I’ll take a sock puppet. Just give me someone who understands how Washington is supposed to work.”
“Corruption and all?”
“Corruption can be managed,” said Brierley, buttering his toast with so much aggression it bent the bread and scattered crumbs everywhere. “We’ve been working with corrupt politicians since the invention of special interests, so figure … about when they built Mesopotamia? Incompetence is dangerous.”
She toasted him with her Coke. Brierley frowned.
“Why are you drinking that? Especially this early in the morning. What happened to you being diabetic?”
“Everyone needs a day off.”
“Did you tell your diabetes that?”
Auntie snorted. “Stop being a sissy, Linden.”
They ate for a few moments in silence. Then Brierley pushed the plate of toast away. “Are you really planning on pushing this? No, don’t answer that. You wouldn’t have come all this way if you weren’t hopping mad. So, let me say this, and please listen to me, okay?”
She sipped her Coke and waited.
“If you push this, you won’t get anywhere. This isn’t the Washington you used to know. You can’t play cards with these people. You can’t call in old markers, because everyone is in a state of mildly controlled panic. Those who still have their heads screwed on right are staying out of the line of fire and making no waves at all until this passes. They’re afraid, and they’re right to be afraid. Careers are being ruined right now. Good people—Republicans and Democrats, even some Independents—are losing everything they’ve spent years building. When the smoke clears, none of us know what Washington is going to look like.”
“A nuclear wasteland…?” suggested Auntie. “Sorry, bad joke.”
Brierley leaned back and scowled. Not at her, but at everything. “I wish I could help you, Auntie. Hell, I wish I could actually advise you about how to profit from coming down here. But, if you’re here to make sense of this, or to get someone to claim actual responsibility, then, frankly, I think you’re wasting your time.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Do you really think this was just POTUS playing with his toys? That he didn’t mean anything, and that all he wanted to do was try and prove that he has power? Or, worse, that he simply doesn’t understand due process and people are afraid to explain it to him?”
“That’s what most people think here in the Beltway. Why? Don’t you?”
“No,” she said. “I think there’s more to it. And why do I think that? Because there’s always more to it. Every damn time.”
Brierley shook his head. “That’s old-world thinking, Auntie. The old rules don’t apply.”
Aunt Sallie sipped her Coke and said nothing.
INTERLUDE ELEVEN
THE GREEN CAVES
BELOW TUVALU, POLYNESIA
SIX YEARS AGO
Rig perched on a stool like the statue of The Thinker, chin resting on his fist, staring at the partially assembled machine.
“What’s the problem, kid?” asked Valen as he came into the tent set aside for the assembly of the crystal machine.
“Problem? Problem?” whined Rig, kicking a foot toward the worktable. “It doesn’t make sense, that’s the problem.”
“Then explain it to me. Walk me up to the edge of the problem.”
Rig took a breath and slid off the stool. He began pointing to the various pieces, which he had assigned new numbers to according to a hypothetical blueprint he’d made of how the device should look when assembled.
“See that rod there?” he said, pointing to a piece about two inches long. “That pretty much has to go into the holes at the end of the main housing. It holds this other piece, which I think is a lever, in place.”
“Okay. So…?”
Rig put on a pair of polyethylene gloves and handed the box of them to Valen. Then he picked up the rod and offered it. “Try to put it into the hole. See what happens.”
Valen shrugged and tried. The end of the rod fit through the opening with room to spare, but
then it simply stopped moving.
“That’s funny,” said Valen, and tried again. Once more the rod stopped about a millimeter inside the hole. “Something’s blocking it.”
“Is there?” Rig handed him a large magnifying glass. Valen bent low to examine the hole, then the rod. Then he took a ruler and measured the rod’s diameter and the hole’s width. “It doesn’t make sense. It’s almost like the machine doesn’t want to go back together.”
“Which is impossible,” said Valen.
“Tell that to the frigging machine, man. And, it’s crazy, because some of the parts went together pretty easily, and some are like this. And some didn’t want to go together until I put other pieces together first.” He paused for a breath. “There are three hundred forty-six, and that’s if we actually have all of them, which I can’t tell until I finish building it. But, man, it’s going to take forever to work out the order. And there’s something kind of weird about the pieces that do fit together. Here, let me show you. It’s kind of cool but also kind of freaky.”
He went around to the far side of the table and very carefully removed a flat plate that fit on the main housing. Rig looked at him, and when Valen didn’t react, he frowned.
“Didn’t you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Um … look, I don’t want to get fresh or anything, but maybe turn your hearing aid thingy up?”
Valen did.
“Okay,” said Rig, “I’m going to remove another piece. Listen close, because it’s not loud.”
As Rig removed a circular pad that was near where the plate had been, Valen thought he heard a faint hrooom sound when the piece came free. “Did you hear it?”
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