by Glenn Cooper
“You never worked again after the Doomsday case?”
“I was close to my twenty years of government service. They pensioned me early to get me off the stage. Got pulled back into things a year or so later, went public with the Library as a survival mechanism, then settled into permanent retirement.”
She tapped her fingertips together pensively. “Can I ask you something? I’ve always wondered—and we even had a module on this at school—whether your personal motivations extended beyond the personal safety of you and your family. I mean, did you have a philosophical or moral viewpoint about the public’s right to know what an elite element of the government already knew?”
It was a question Will had publicly fielded over and again when he’d done his book tour years earlier. At the time, he’d articulated a high-minded position about the rights of an individual to know what their leaders knew, that people had the absolute right to the knowledge that their date of death was predetermined. He left it to wiser men than him to decide whether an individual ought to know his or her own death date. He said he was ultimately supportive of the decision of a presidential commission that stated that individuals and society as a whole would be best served if the dates remained closely held and subject to strict safeguards to protect individual rights.
Now he was a little drunk and as tired as he’d been in a long time. “You want to know why I blew the whistle on Area 51 and the watchers? You really want to know?”
She did.
“Because those fuckers really pissed me off.”
Back in his room, he stripped and collapsed on the bed. He was woozy but had the presence of mind to do his nightly heart check. He placed the HeartCheck cup on his chest and waited for it to issue an audible report.
Heart rate 74. Normal Sinus Rhythm. No action required.
He grunted, put the cup away, and shut off the light.
Tomorrow they’d repeat the exercise of handing out Phillip’s photo in the nearby towns of Appleby and Sedbergh. Then they’d hit up smaller villages. What else could they do?
Through the wall, he heard Annie getting ready for bed.
In the old days—
It was almost pitch-dark. The moon was out but it was shrouded in cloud, a diffuse ruddy disc high in the night sky. Without illumination all he could do was run and stumble, get up and run and stumble again.
Nothing in his life had prepared him for this. The fear was like curare, gradually paralyzing his legs; he had to struggle to keep the muscles pumping.
The terrain was uneven and treacherous. It had rained earlier, and the heavy grass was slick as ice, particularly on the slopes. He steered by gravity. Every time he found himself going uphill, he corrected course.
Level is good, he thought.
Uphill is bad.
The hills led to wilderness and isolation.
The flats were more likely to lead to a road.
He stopped to catch his breath and listen.
The wind whipped past his ears. Beside that, all he could hear was his own shivering. He wasn’t dressed for a February in these parts and he’d gotten thoroughly drenched from the wet grass. Otherwise, it was quiet. Completely quiet. He felt for his NetPen. It was still in his pocket despite multiple tumbles. He had no idea if it had a charge, no idea if he’d get a signal.
It had to work.
He trotted again, wanting desperately to make further progress before daring to stop to use the mobile. How long had he been running? A half hour? Longer?
Blinding pain!
He’d run into something hard and unyielding and it put him down. His knees hurt, and he tasted blood in his mouth.
He felt the obstacle with his hand. It was a low stone wall, and he’d rammed it hard enough to make his teeth hurt.
He picked himself up and carefully climbed over the waist-high structure.
Then he heard something behind him. A voice in the distance. He was sure of it.
He crouched behind the wall and looked over it from the direction he’d come. There was a distant streak of bluish light.
Then he saw dark shapes moving slowly toward him.
He wanted to get up and run again, but his knees hurt, he was exhausted and he was too scared.
The shapes got closer.
He closed his eyes.
Baaaaa.
From the blackness, a sheep emerged.
He put his hand out, unafraid of the comforting touch of woolly warmth, but the animal stopped dead in its tracks before being joined by more beasts. The sheep halted their advance and stared at him. Then the flock, as one, slowly and cautiously retreated.
On the other side of the wall there was another voice. Two men calling out to each other. “Th’t weh,” he heard in the distance. “Aye, th’t weh.”
He pulled the NetPen from his pants pocket and held his breath while he pushed the ON button. It glowed red: only seconds to minutes of battery life.
Unfurling would drain power.
“Send emergency beacon,” he whispered into the unfurled pen.
“Recipient?” the pen asked. He lowered the volume.
“Will Piper.”
“Attach a message?”
“Yes.”
“Dictate message,” the pen instructed.
The chime was light and melodic and wouldn’t have awakened Will if he’d been sleeping soundly. But the alien mattress, the stuffiness of the room, and his incipient jet lag contributed to fitful sleep.
He blinked awake and tried to pinpoint the source of the insistent tone.
His mobile phone.
It sounded like the tone from a text message but it didn’t extinguish: it kept chiming.
He reached for the device on his nightstand, touched the screen, and read the message:
Emergency Beacon Received from Phillip Piper.
Play attached message? Yes/No.
He sat upright, breathing hard, and touched yes.
It was four in the afternoon at Groom Lake. Roger Kenney was at his workstation six floors below the parched desert floor, getting ready for the afternoon exodus, the ritual known as the Strip ’n Scan, where every employee had to undergo a high-tech strip search to make sure the database never left the premises. Of course, that hadn’t stopped a genius like Mark Shackleton from beating the system back in 2009 with a plastic thumb drive up his rear end, but the scanning technology was foolproof now.
With an alert, a window opened on his wall screen.
The screen announced: Priority Alert. Significant activity on Surveillance File 189007, Will Piper.
Kenney looked up, mildly interested. He’d put up a routine data-collection matrix on Piper when he learned the FBI had requested MI5 liaison assistance about the disappearance of his son. He did it on the off chance it had something to do with Chinese Doomsday. “I’m a thorough son of a bitch,” he liked to tell his people. “You want to get ahead in this world: walk like I do, talk like I do, act like I do. I’m not arrogant, people, I’m just right.” Besides, there were few people on the planet Kenney hated more than Will Piper. He hadn’t pulled the trigger on Malcolm Frazier but he might as well have. Any legitimate excuse to spy on him was welcome. And you never knew. One thing might lead to another. The thought of a reckoning was more than appealing.
“Display file,” Kenney commanded.
Audio file. Sent 60 seconds ago from NetPen registered to Phillip Piper. Emergency Locator Beacon. Latitude = 54.4142, Longitude = –2.3323, Pinn, Cumbria, United Kingdom.
A sat-map came up of undulating green terrain devoid of man-made features except for a web of stone walls. The middle of nowhere.
“Play audio file.”
It was a boy’s voice, a tight, frightened voice in a half whisper.
Dad. It’s me. I’m in trouble! I escaped. The Librarians. They’re after me. Help me! I . . .
Five minutes later, Kenney was in Admiral Sage’s office, replaying the intercepted transmission.
“What does he mean by
the Librarians?” the admiral asked.
“No idea, sir. The term isn’t in our databases.”
“I don’t like it.”
“No, sir.”
“You did good by putting a screen on Piper. Good piece of lateral thinking. The history of Area 51 has taught us that with Will Piper, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Your reward is to get your ass over to the UK immediately to personally monitor developments and intervene as appropriate. I’m giving you full operational control. Take a team. If this has anything to do with Chinese Doomsday, it’s Groom Lake that’s going to break the case, not some minor-league outfit like FBI or MI5. Now pack your bags and get your wheels up.”
Chapter 9
Isle of Wight, Britain, 1296
It was the twenty-eighth day of December, three days after the Christmas Day feast of thanksgiving. Clarissa had been anticipating Christmas fervently, counting down the forty days of St. Martin by placing forty pebbles on her washstand. She began on the eleventh day of November and removed one pebble each day. When the great day finally arrived her sixteen-year-old heart leapt with joy. The Abbey of Vectis was a hard and dreary place for a young girl who hadn’t yet committed to a monastic life, and any day that offered sweetmeats, presents and a sense of community cheer appealed to her immensely.
But now that Christmas had come and gone she settled back into her monotonous routine. The bells for Lauds awakened her as they always did. It was dark in her small chamber and devilishly cold. Her single window rattled in the stiff, pulsing wind coming off the sea.
She instinctively reached under her cover to feel her belly. Against her palms it was smooth and tense. Only two months to go. She was told there’d be no kicking and there wasn’t.
But she knew her baby was alive and well. She was certain of it.
He was hers, the only thing in this world she possessed, and she loved him.
Having her own chamber was an unimaginable luxury. Growing up in the wild northern frontier of Cumberland as the sixth child of a Norman farmer, to the age of fourteen she’d shared a bed with four sisters and a single room with her entire family. She had come to Vectis Abbey a year earlier. Baldwin, the Abbott of Vectis, had stopped at the market town of Kirkby Stephen on his return from an arduous journey to Scotland seeking patronage for his order. Following the death of the abbey’s principal patron, the Countess Isabella de Fortibus, Baldwin had been forced to leave his island enclave and travel throughout the Kingdom of Wessex and far beyond, courting earls, lords, bishops and cardinals to support Vectis Abbey, a jewel in the Benedictine crown which possessed the finest cathedral in the land. Baldwin’s entourage had found itself in need of two fresh horses and in the market square the abbot met Clarissa’s father, who had horses on offer.
A deal arranged, Baldwin had a question for the farmer. He was also in need of obedient young virgins to populate the ranks of novices at his abbey. Had the man any daughters to spare? For a price?
Indeed he had. But the question which farmer was which one? His oldest had caught the fancy of the son of the local blacksmith and he was expecting good things from the union. The youngest was too young and the next youngest was his wife’s favorite; he didn’t fancy the slings and arrows coming his way if he dealt her off. That left the middle two. Both were good enough workers but Mary better met the abbot’s criterion for obedience. Clarissa, on the other hand, was strong-willed and feisty, questioning everything, a burr under his saddle. After he’d made up his mind, he’d showed his wife the coins and told the sobbing woman, “We’ll leave it to the church to tame her.”
Clarissa had left Yorkshire with a mixture of trepidation and wonder. She knew well the strife in store for her if she stayed on the farm. There was no allure to that life beyond the solace of her family’s bosom. She’d work the fields and herd the sheep till her bones ached—right up to the day her father married her off to some village oaf who’d snatch her away from her dear sisters anyway. And the only consolation of the union with that husband who undoubtedly would have bad teeth and onion breath would be a baby. How she longed to have and hold a baby one day! She’d seen her mother with her newborn youngest sister, and when she cuddled her to her milky breast, that haggard woman appeared happy for the only time Clarissa could recall.
And it was that thought that weighed on her during her monthlong journey to Vectis. If she were to marry Christ and not a man, she would never have that baby. How sad, how sad. But she was treated with solicitude by the abbot’s minions and was regaled with stories of the grandeur of the cathedral and the wonderful tranquillity and holiness of the abbey. So she thought about God and wondered if he materialized on earth what he would look like? A handsome young man with a beard as she had seen on crucifixes? An old man with a white beard in a long robe? And how would she feel as the bride of Christ?
She remembered well her first sight of the cathedral spire. She had pulled her new woolen cloak to her throat to counter the slicing wind. With her free hand, she gripped the ship’s rail hard enough to turn her knuckles white. The sea behaved like it was trying to prevent her from completing her journey. She’d never seen the ocean before, and it seemed like a dark, evil thing, spraying salt in her nostrils and sickening her stomach. But a kindly old monk who had been her protector of sorts during the expedition grasped her shoulders and told her she had nothing to fear. The boatman, he said, had the situation well in hand.
“Just keep your eyes on the spire, child. We’ll be there, soon enough.”
The spire, appearing black against the gray sky, was God’s outstretched hand pointing straight to heaven. Vectis would be her home, her sanctuary. She would devote herself to God, and if she were worthy, she would become a nun. The peacefulness that descended upon her at that moment was the loveliest feeling she’d ever experienced in her young life.
On arrival, she kissed the beach and walked the short distance to the abbey, trailing at the rear of Baldwin’s entourage. Entering through the heavy portcullis of the walled abbey she was amazed at how bustling it was. With a population of six hundred it was the second largest city on the Isle of Wight, and it seemed that all six hundred of them came rushing out at once to greet the returning abbot. Baldwin dropped to his knees on a grassy verge before the grand cathedral and gave loud thanks for his safe return.
Clarissa had been left drifting in the hubbub until a severe-looking nun approached and, without so much as a greeting, instructed her to follow. Sister Sabeline, the Mother Superior of the sisters of Vectis, was a dried-out husk of a woman, so bony and shriveled, it seemed that the weight of her heavy black habit was all that prevented her from being tossed into the wind. Wordlessly, she led Clarissa through the extensive grounds. Beside the grand cathedral there were some thirty stone buildings at Vectis including the chapter house, abbot house, kitchens, refectory, cellery, infirmary, buttery, hospicium, warming rooms, brewery, stables and dormitories. To Clarissa, it was unimaginably complex.
Clarissa’s destination was the sister’s dormitory, a low structure toward the rear of the abbey near the perimeter wall. Sister Sabeline placed her into the care of a plump, elderly nun named Sister Josephine who took her to an open dormitory lined with straw-stuffed wood-framed beds. On each bed was a neatly folded coverlet, and beside it, a chamber pot. On a low nightstand was a candle and a ceramic basin.
“Have you started your menses, girl?”
“Me what?”
“Oh heavens! Your flowers!”
“Oh, aye”—she flushed—“but not at t’ moment.”
“Lift up your skirt, girl,” the nun commanded.
Clarissa froze.
“You heard me!”
She slowly obeyed.
The nun had a good look at her nakedness and grunted her approval, but no explanation was forthcoming.
“All the girls are working,” Sister Josephine told her. “You’ll meet them after Vespers. This one will be you
r bed. Do you know how to pray, girl?”
“I know t’ Lord’s Prayer,” Clarissa said.
“Well, it’s a start, isn’t it? And do you know how to peel and chop vegetables?”
Clarissa nodded.
“Good. Let’s get you to the kitchen, so you can start earning your keep.”
“I want to be a nun, Sister. How do I do it?”
Sister Josephine snorted. “You start by peeling potatoes.”
Gradually, week by week and month by month, Clarissa realized her lot was different from most of the other girls in the dormitory. Although she attended prayer hours in the cathedral with the others she was never released from kitchen duty to participate in daily tuition of scriptures and hymns. One girl who seemed to be treated much like her was a big-boned lass with a turnip nose named Fay. But she had disappeared one day, never to be seen again.
The other girls called themselves novitiates, and when they had been at Vectis for a year, they were allowed to take simple vows. And those who had been at the abbey for four years had their heads shorn and took their solemn vows, receiving the ring of Christ. As sisters of Vectis they were given their own sleeping cells and time off chores for solitary prayer and meditation.
Adding to Clarissa’s sense of befuddlement and isolation, other girls shunned her and whispered behind her back. No one would tell her why she was different. She just knew she was.
When she had been at Vectis for six months, a new girl, younger than Clarissa, came to the dormitory. She was a fair-haired lass named Mary, deposited at the abbey by her father to serve at the pleasure of the abbot. The bed she was given was next to Clarissa’s and they shared a peeling and chopping station in the kitchen. Before long it was clear that Mary too was not being treated as a novitiate.
Mary was as shy as she was and the two girls hardly exchanged a word for the first few weeks. When they finally did, their accents and dialects were different enough to make communication difficult, but in time they came to understand one another.