Veil

by George C. Chesbro

  "Jonathan?" Sharon's voice was trembling. "What is all this talk about killing?"

  The Institute's director removed the cigar from his mouth and pointed it like a spear at Veil's chest. "It's still Mr. Kendry's show; let him direct it the way he wants."

  Veil felt the first stirrings of doubt, and he frowned slightly as he studied Pilgrim's face. "They really didn't know about your plans for me, did they?"

  Pilgrim grunted softly. "Now you've got it. I'm curious as to what it is you think you know. Do you believe that one of us is responsible for the attack on you? All of us?"

  "Make your point, Kendry," Ibber said in a voice still heavy with anger.

  Veil wheeled on the investigator. "Did you find anything in my background that you thought was particularly interesting?"

  "As a matter of fact, I did. I suspected that your military record had been doctored, and I included that in my report. Again, so what? Picking up on things like that is what I'm paid to do."

  "Did you tell anybody else?"

  "Why should I tell anybody else? What the hell makes you think you're so goddam important, Kendry? As far as I was concerned, you were just another subject for investigation."

  "You didn't know that your boss really wanted me here as part of near-death studies?"

  "I don't have anything to do with near-death studies, Kendry. This is the first time I've ever even set foot on this mountain. And I still don't know that what you say is true. All I hear is you talking."

  "It's true," Pilgrim said, his voice flat and slightly distant. "In fact, I have been running a game on Veil, and he has every right to be upset. His mistake is in thinking that there's some connection between that game and another problem he and I have to deal with. He's wrong, and I think he's beginning to see that. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to find him willing to let the two of you go on now about your own business."

  "I'd prefer to stay," Ibber announced as he abruptly sat down in his chair. "Kendry dragged me over here, and now I think I have the right to know what's going on."

  "Henry," Sharon said quietly, touching the investigator's arm, "I really think we should both go."

  "It's all right, Sharon," Pilgrim said casually. "Half my cat's hanging out of the bag, anyway, so we may as well all hear Veil drag out the rest of the beast. Assuming that's all right with him, of course."

  "Oh, Jonathan," Sharon breathed, "it's so personal."

  Ibber cleared his throat. "Jonathan, would you like us to leave?"

  "I told you that was up to Veil," Pilgrim replied distantly. "He's in charge."

  "Why did you want me for near-death studies, Jonathan?" Veil asked quietly, ignoring Ibber.

  Pilgrim motioned for Veil to sit down at the table, but Veil shook his head. "If there's a connection between why I wanted you and that other business, I'll be damned if I know what it is," Pilgrim said easily. "I told you that."

  "Why didn't you tell me you were a Lazarus Person?"

  "Nobody but Sharon knew. Now, of course, you and Henry also know. The reason for my keeping it a secret is very practical. A moment ago you referred to near-death studies as a spook show—"

  "I apologize for that remark," Veil said quickly, glancing at Sharon.

  "No need. That would be the reaction of most people. As I've indicated to you, for now much of the Institute's prestige is linked to my personal prestige and integrity. I can't afford to be linked with a 'spook show,' even if that 'spook show' is, in my opinion, probably the most important research in which we're involved."

  "Why did you feel that I had to be 'handled'? Why have you been lying to me all along?"

  "Because the discovery of what you are couldn't be rushed. The moment I saw the similarity between your work and Perry's, I understood the significance. But you had to be peeled like an onion; if you were aware of what I wanted to know, it could interfere with the process."

  "What is the significance?"

  "Don't you realize it yet?"

  "I've had a few other things on my mind, Jonathan. Also, frankly, I'm not sure I give a damn—not if it won't help answer the other questions I have. We've already decided that I'm not a Lazarus Person."

  "And that is precisely what makes you so important, Veil." Excitement was beginning to hum in Pilgrim's voice. "Despite the fact that you've never had a near-death experience, except as an infant, you display most of the characteristics of Lazarus People—including the rarest trait of all, soul-catching."

  Ibber started to say something, but Veil cut him off with a sharp wave of his hand. "Go ahead, Jonathan. Please."

  "In many ways you act like a Lazarus Person, even though you aren't. The close rapport you've felt with me from the beginning is typical; Lazarus People tend to recognize and like one another. My guess is that the brain damage you suffered as an infant did to you what the near-death experience does to Lazarus People as adults; it literally ripped apart some psychic barrier between your conscious and unconscious states of awareness. Your dreams take you to a special place, and you've painted pictures of it."

  "What about Perry Tompkins?"

  "A unique case, like you—but different from you. With Perry we're dealing with a giant, a man with artistic talent and sensitivity almost beyond words. That talent—goosed, if you will, by his approaching death—is his ticket to this special place. You both travel there, but by different routes."

  "What 'place,' Jonathan?"

  "It's the place beyond the gate, Veil. The paintings you and Perry produced—that's exactly what it looks like. I know, because I've been there. You and Perry keep poking your heads, your collective consciousness, into a land of the soul I could only reach by dying."

  Veil turned quickly toward Sharon when he heard her gasp.

  "Oh, yes," Pilgrim continued, also looking at the woman. "I've been through the gate, Sharon; just one more thing I've felt the need to lie about. I still don't understand quite how, but I did manage to wrench myself back through—back here. But I was there, on the astral plane. It's where Veil and Perry travel, in their own separate ways, on the vehicle of imagination, and it's where they will go when they die."

  Veil swallowed and found that his mouth was dry. "Astral plane, Jonathan?"

  "Oh, hell!" Pilgrim snapped with more impatience than Veil had ever seen him display. "And you, of all people, wonder why I keep secrets. Call it what you will. I use the term 'astral plane'; others would call it something else. There are a thousand different names for it, I'm sure, and it's been part of humankind's collective racial consciousness since we dropped out of the trees and crawled into caves. It spawned religion, feeds art, and was the midwife of science; insistence on the quaint idea that the place must have some kind of caretaker, and disagreement over how the caretaker mows the lawn, has broken our bones, spilled our blood, and pretended to offer hope at the same time as it crushed love and life. The fact of the matter, put as simply as I can manage, is that I needed you here so that I could try to prove that heaven exists."

  Chapter 16

  ______________________________

  Veil leapt into space, then spread his arms and arched his back to control the angle of his body in free-fall. As he plummeted, the thought flashed across his mind that he was diving off a hundred-fifty-foot cliff into unknown depths, had been forced to kill an American soldier who was a super-assassin as well as—probably—a double agent, was being hunted by Defense Intelligence Agency operatives, had fallen in love for the first time in his life, had discovered a bizarre personal link with one of the greatest artists who had ever lived, and was now on the first leg of a journey that could end in torture and death—all because of a likable madman's obsession and impossible quest. Nevertheless, his own quest had to continue; he could not walk away from the Institute and Jonathan Pilgrim's insanity without going into hiding, and he had rejected that alternative years before. He preferred to make his stand here, on his unknown enemy's ground.

  At the last moment he ducked his head, brought his
arms together, and clenched his fists to absorb the force of impact with the water. He sliced down into the cold, dark depths, reversed direction, and pulled easily toward the surface at an angle that would bring him to the surface behind the waterfall.

  He came up in roaring darkness and groped forward through swirling foam until his fingers touched stone. He hauled himself up on a ledge and unstrapped the belt that secured a rolled towel to his waist. He tore away the protective layers of plastic wrap, unrolled the towel, and searched through its contents until he found his flashlight, which he turned on.

  The mouth of the cave behind the falls was high but relatively shallow, an amphitheater of smooth stone from which radiated a number of smaller caves of various sizes going in different directions. There were two caves, each large enough for him to walk in, which appeared to head toward the east.

  Veil set the flashlight down beside him on the ledge and sorted through the rest of the things he had brought with him; jeans and a sweater, sneakers, a dozen extra batteries, chalk, his .38, and a makeshift compass he had fashioned from cardboard, thread, and a needle he had magnetized from the motor in the refrigerator in his chalet.

  He dried himself, stripped off his shorts, and dressed in the dry clothes. He rewrapped the other items in the towel, picked up the flashlight, and entered the first cave on his left.

  He had gone less than two hundred yards when the cave began to narrow, then abruptly became no more than a crevice that was too narrow for him to enter. He retraced his steps to the amphitheater and entered the second cave. Twenty-five yards in, the second cave suddenly branched off into three others.

  Veil stopped to take his compass and chalk from the towel, and as he put the flashlight in his armpit to free his hands the beam passed across something in the middle cave that flashed orange. Veil gripped the light and shone it down the cave, and in an instant knew that he would need neither compass nor chalk to continue his journey. He also knew that he would have to rethink his original assessment of the hospice and the people who stayed there.

  Someone at the hospice—Lazarus Person, patient, or staff member—was a spy. A route that could lead only to the Army compound had already been marked; there were orange blaze marks, spaced every fifteen yards, on the walls of the cave, and scuff marks in the dust on the floor.

  Veil took his .38 out of the towel and stuck it in his belt. Then he started off on the route marked by the bright orange crosses.

  It had taken enormous time and effort, involving much trial and error, to mark the route, Veil thought as he glanced at his watch and found that he was into his third hour underground. The route was not direct, but involved many twists and turns in a succession of radiating caves, many of which cut off initially to the north or south. Time was something neither Lazarus People nor the dying at the hospice had much of, since both groups were, for different reasons, transient. The hospice was essentially a closed society, and not even a permanent staff member could have spent the weeks it must have taken to blaze this route without being missed—unless there had been collusion by either Sharon Solow or Jonathan Pilgrim, or both.

  Or unless his original assumption had been wrong, Veil thought, and the longer he spent in the marked caves, the stronger became his conviction that this was the case. It was the Army spying on the hospice, not vice versa. Why? Death by natural causes and searching for heaven seemed unlikely topics of interest for the personnel in a top-secret military research facility.

  And always the problem remained of determining who had spotted him, and why it had been quickly decided that he should be killed. What else was Pilgrim hiding? Veil wondered. And was it hidden at the hospice?

  Twenty minutes later he felt fresh air gently wafting in his face as the cave widened and sloped sharply upward. Veil climbed up the rock slope and found himself at a fairly broad cave mouth that looked down into the valley and the rustic, wooden buildings of the military compound. The buildings were spaced in a horseshoe pattern, with a larger building set at the closed end, the open end facing inland. The enclosed area of the horseshoe was a grassy commons area crisscrossed by white gravel walks, and with a flagpole in the center. The American flag flapped in the wind blowing down the valley from the sea.

  Veil put his flashlight into the rolled towel, crouched down, and wedged the bundle beneath a ledge. As he straightened up, a soft chiming sound tolled in his mind.

  Danger.

  But from where? The chime sound had saved his life too many times in the past for him to doubt it now, but he also did not want to retreat after coming this far. He was silently crouched just inside the mouth of the cave, trying to decide what to do next, when his decision was made for him.

  "We know you're there, Kendry." The voice was deep and resonant, absolutely calm, firm with self-confidence. It came from somewhere above him, just outside the mouth of the cave; the man would be in an advantageous position, with the sun above and behind his back. "We've been waiting on you. You tripped a sensor when you entered the cave, another one when you were halfway through, and a third just now. We know what you can do, pal, and we're not going to fuck with you. If you come out of there holding anything but the air over your head, you'll be at least twenty pounds heavier by the time you hit the ground. Come on, now; step out slow and easy."

  Mambas.

  Veil snatched up the towel, cradled it in his belly to protect the flashlight, then dove headfirst down the sharp incline. He turned and rolled as he landed on his shoulder, then slid on his back to the bottom. There he rolled into a ball and hugged his knees as he waited for what he assumed would be a murderous hail of bullets ricocheting off the stone walls and ceiling.

  Instead there was a single, hollow phut. Something large, not a bullet, passed through the air over his head, smacked hard against a wall, and fell to the floor. Veil cursed aloud as the gas grenade exploded.

  Chapter 17

  ______________________________

  He awoke to find himself naked, in a cage that had been anchored to the ground in the commons area, near the flagpole. The cage, with a locked drop gate facing the open end of the horseshoe of buildings, was not large enough for him to stand or fully extend himself on the ground, and Veil had to shuffle on all fours in order to turn around. It was what, in Vietnam, had been called a tiger cage, or "cramper." The object of the exercise, of course, was to break down psychological defenses through steady debilitation, as well as humiliation, and a prisoner's own mind was depended upon to facilitate the process.

  From the position of the sun Veil guessed that it was early morning, which meant that he had been unconscious for almost twenty-four hours. He had a throbbing headache, and his mouth tasted green.

  There was a good deal of activity in the compound as Army personnel, some with white lab coats worn over their uniforms, passed from building to building. Veil counted three women. Out on a dirt field just beyond the open end of the horseshoe and twenty yards from the bank of the swift-running river, six men in baggy black jumpsuits practiced advanced, complex martial arts kata under the watchful eyes of two Japanese, one young and one old. The old man, dressed in a flaring crimson robe and a broad, crimson headband, stood in front of the exercising men, erect, as still and as silent as a stone pillar. Both hands were placed on a simple wooden staff he held at arm's length in front of him. The old master was practicing his own kata, Veil thought, a Zen-linked exercise; without so much as the blink of an eye, the old man was able to project an aura of raw, mind-harnessed energy powerful enough to make an observer half believe that, if he so desired, the old man could drive the staff to its hilt in the ground, or perhaps split the world with an overhead blow.

  With no apparent motions or words that Veil could hear, the old master was directing the kata of the six men moving in front of him. Fists flew, hands chopped, fingers poked, arms whirled, bodies spun. It was all done with blinding speed, a very special kind of beauty that tugged on a line between the mind, heart, and groin, and—like a deadly
line of male Rockettes in a surreal Radio City Music Hall of sky, earth, water, and stone—in perfect unison.

  Or almost perfect unison. Although Veil could not detect any mistakes, some were obviously made. On occasion the younger Japanese, a burly man dressed only in a loincloth, would abruptly step up behind one of the exercising Mambas and deliver a blow across the man's back or legs with a long flail of split bamboo; the force of each blow was such that the splat of bamboo striking flesh would echo down the valley, bouncing back and forth between the rock faces of the surrounding mountains. No struck Mamba flinched or slowed his pace; the ballet of violence, danced to the staccato, syncopated rhythm of beaten flesh, continued.

  The point, aside from punishing errors in form, was to teach that pain is an illusion.

  No one, researcher or Mamba, so much as glanced in Veil's direction. Veil turned around and leaned back against the bars. He brought his knees up to his chest, rested his head on his forearms, and waited.

  Around noon, Veil felt the hairs on the back of his neck begin to tingle. He turned his head and found himself looking up at three of the Mambas and their Japanese master. The Americans had showered and changed into fresh jumpsuits, and Veil sensed that the master had brought them here to engage in some kind of mental exercise—perhaps nothing more than to test their stealth against his sixth sense, for they had approached without making a sound. The expressions on the faces of the three Americans were intense; the green eyes of the Mamba on the right, a stocky man with brown hair and a pockmarked face, gleamed with a naked yearning to test himself against Veil.

  Although he stood as erect as the Americans, the Japanese now projected an aura of relaxation. His eyes were cast down—a gesture of respect.

  "Good day, gentlemen," Veil said easily. "Listen, as long as you're up, would one of you do me a favor? You can never find your waiter when you want him. I'd like somebody to tell the maitre d' that I'm ready to order. Also, I'd like some water."