With some cleaning and an application of Eugenol, she had only winced a few times during the procedure, staring to the skies and biting gently on her bottom lip. With the aid of Porter’s soothing words to her and his surgically-sharp scalpel I had managed to cut so clean that, after sliding and cajoling the cross from within her, I was able to fold the small incision of skin back and seal it without too much discomfort. I felt blessed that it was over so soon - less than ten minutes - and I breathed a heavy sigh of relief. I wasn’t convinced that she hadn’t as well and it gave me more hope. The end to all of this - whatever that end might be - really was getting mouth-wateringly close.
Reaching down to my feet, I scooped a fingertip of soft red clay and began to sing gently to myself. The songs that Rachael had played to me. “Dear Prudence...” I carefully pasted the clay into the letters I had just created. “Won’t you come out to play..?” Once they were full, I brushed the rest away from the surface, as though enamelling the letters. “Dear Prudence...” I took extra care with the dots under the letters, pushing the clay in as deep as it would go so that they would be visible and pronounced when the time came. “Greet the brand new day!” The clay would hold the shapes a little longer than normal and protect the wood behind them. In this way, they would not be ruined by hundreds of years of rain and the weight of mud which would build up down the well. Then I tilted my head to take a detailed look, checking every crevice against the light. “The sun is up, the sky is blue. It’s beautiful...”
I smiled to myself, admiring my handiwork. “...and so are you.”
When I was done, I lifted the string of beads from the stone to my right, beads which I had needed to coax very carefully from Rachael’s clenched hand, and carefully reattached them to the cross. Then I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to ready myself for the task before standing up.
I turned and leaned over the well, still singing to myself. It echoed down into the chamber below. The circular wall which surrounded the chasm was made of rough, moss-covered stones, crudely assembled and darkened by today’s rain, and was no more than three feet high. There was no wooden structure above and no bucket in sight, given that the well had been unused for at least three decades already. With a depth of approximately sixty-three feet, there was nothing to be seen at its base, not even the merest glint of light. By around twenty feet down there was not even a glint on the stones of the well itself and everything petered to a seemingly endless darkness. The kind of darkness into which a village might choose to throw its evil in the vain hope that it would never be uncovered again.
“You forgot something…” I said softly.
Dangling the cross from my fingers I held it over the hole for just a moment and then let it slip. It seemed to float down, slowly disappearing into the darkness. I heard the faintest thump and rattle echo forth as it reached the base.
I turned to walk away.
Then... I heard something else. A shuffling. It lasted just a few seconds before it got slightly louder. It was hard to hear against the rain but it sounded as though something, or someone, was squirming. Writhing. In amongst, I wasn’t convinced that I hadn’t heard something else as well. Something that sounded not dissimilar to frantic breaths.
Someone was alive down there.
I froze for just a moment, unsure. Whoever it was, and it might even have been Prudence herself (for she had felt no tug of a loved one) they had suffered the indignity a botched provincial hanging, followed by a cart-ride to a well and an unceremonious sixty-three foot drop. Possibly even head first. Broken bones were a given, and that would almost certainly include a serious neck or back injury. There was nothing that could be done for them now, and any attempt would merely prolong the most horrendous agony. They might be alive - just - but it would not last long. It would, however, feel like an eternity and, whatever they had or had not been up here in this world, they did not deserve to endure such anguish in death.
No-one did. Not even Prudence.
Which is not to say I wasn’t torn, because I was. Seriously torn. I rested my hands on the stone with fists clenched tight for a few moments, thinking. Ultimately, however, I had to accept that the person I had been before all this began was no killer. Just a scientist. This was temporary and all the things I had done were the things the Eli in me had needed to do, to save Rachael, not the things that I had wanted to do. To walk away now; to leave another human being to suffer, would be to accept that the old Strauss was gone forever. If that happened, then perhaps the old Rachael was gone forever too and I could not - would not - accept that. I wanted Rachael back fully and, in order to achieve that, I knew I had to bring myself back fully too.
Looking around the edge of the well, I located one of many ill-seated top-stones and, taking a breath, pushed. Hard. At first, my hands slid against the slimy moss but it did begin to move. With my full weight behind it, it gently slid toward the inside edge of the well and faltered. Ultimately, a universal force that would not be defined by science for another forty years took hold and it joined the cross on a slightly quicker, three second plummet into darkness. It hit the bottom with a sickening, echoed crunch.
Only silence remained.
I took a moment to listen intently, but there was nothing. Just the last of the rains and the cawing of birds in the distance. I felt relieved. Happy.
I turned to walk away and my song found voice again. Cheerier this time.
“It’s a brand new day.”
FIFTY-SIX
Wednesday, August 23, 2043. 9:00pm.
Portofino Hotel & Marina, California.
It had been a crap day and one in which Scalise’s ability to think on her feet had been tested to its absolute limits, but it seemed to have done the job. It wasn’t over yet, however. These things never were.
Grainger was dead, the two guards were dead and Milton Grady was dead. Only Strauss had escaped. For now. Plus, most of KRT’s building was destroyed which, in truth, was no bad thing. In addition, much of Klein’s internal information on all projects had been downloaded onto a secure server that few people indeed had access to, though she herself was one. The destruction of the building could almost be seen as an additional clean up for everyone, unexpected but welcome. Hell, she would have ordered its destruction herself if she had thought hard enough about it beforehand.
Which only left ‘The Tables’ and, with the information she now had in her possession, she was now fairly certain that they would be uncovered, probably quite literally, soon enough. Whilst waiting for more information during the chaos downtown and dodging more requests for interviews or soundbites from the journalists somehow concerned that, in total, twenty-three ‘collaterals’ in the area had been killed and another thirty or so seriously injured, she had managed to do a little research on her tablet regarding their purpose. Leaving aside any religious connotations or whether or not they had indeed been ‘written by the hand of God’, something she had no interest in whatsoever, the theory as it stood was that they were concerned with ‘Unified Fields’. It could be that they could be the answer to the final equation that even Einstein himself had been able to formulate - The Unified Field Theory.
Given her own prodigious mathematical abilities and her belief that felt that mathematics was one of the most important aspects of the world around us, a belief that had led her, in her earlier life, to a tenure as President of MIT, Scalise actually found it all fascinating. More than that, she actually understood it. Better still, she also understood its implications. Implications which could, quite literally, change the world. In the right hands it was undoubtedly the field in which power and money would grow most abundantly.
According to the current understanding of physics, forces were not transmitted directly between objects, but instead were described by four intermediary entities and interactions called ‘fields’. The interactions in question were: strong interaction: the interaction responsible for holding quarks together to form neutrons and protons as well as holding
neutrons and protons together to form nuclei. Next was electromagnetic interaction: the familiar interaction that acts on electrically charged particles with the photon as the exchange particle. Weak interaction was a repulsive short-range interaction responsible for some forms of radioactivity that acts on electrons, neutrinos, and quarks and then, finally, gravitational interaction was defined as a long-range attractive interaction that acts on all particles.
Modern unified field theory attempts, including Einstein’s own, had always aimed to bring these four interactions together into a single framework, but they had always been unsuccessful. What was needed a formula; the E=MC2 to supersede, override and hold the power over all other formulae.
But it was ever-elusive.
And yet that formula, according to Klein’s theories, was somehow contained within the text etched upon ancient stone tables. It was the law not just of this world but of the universe as a whole. Regardless of who may have carved it, it was said to be the answer to life itself: the ability to create chemicals, medicines, products and interactions hitherto only dreamed of. Like flight, space travel, radio waves and ultimately KRT’s own waveless technology it was the ability to turn wave after wave of science fiction into hard scientific fact in rapid succession. In Scalise’s eyes it was ridiculous to think that these tables had anything to do with religion and also highly unlikely that they were even old. Her theory was that they were actually extremely modern and that their existence probably had something to do with this whole ‘sequence’ project ever managing to work in the first place. As such, it was more than likely in her eyes that the tables had been sent back. They were not ‘ancient’ tables, she mused. They were the future of this world and, once she had found and decoded them, that was exactly where they would have been sent from.
Both siberium spheres had been pretty much undamaged, that had already been ascertained and they were securely cordoned. All that needed to happen now was to inform the Senate that they had been completely destroyed in the explosions - explosions which were clearly a sick and quite horrific failsafe implemented by the late Josef Klein just prior to his death. The spheres would then need to be moved under cover to one of KRTs many other locations and the process started again. With the massive amount of Scalise family investment in KRT, investment on which the company had been built and expanded - and with Klein himself gone - a swift reshuffle of the board would not present too much of a problem. Barbara was confident that she would have her grandson, William, elevated to CEO before the year was out. Together they would use the spheres, find the tables and control the corporate world for generations to come.
If that meant explaining away why the building had been destroyed and feigning sympathy for the families of the twenty-three, then so be it. It was a small price to pay for greatness she had craved her entire life.
It had indeed been a shit day, but things were most definitely looking up.
She checked the clock: a little after nine and the light was fading. She walked to a side table in the room and poured herself a glass of red into fine crystal, raising it to her nose and smelling it gently. Châteauneuf-du-Pape, recently drawn from some of the oldest sealed casks discovered in the region, each elaborately carved.
She took a sip. It had a slightly bitter taste from age, but she liked that. “2011,” she said, raising the glass to admire the wine’s rich red colour. “A very good year.”
Walking out to the balcony to admire the sunset she did her best to throw away thoughts of the myriad things she needed to attend to tomorrow to get the ball rolling on the things that needed to be done. They could wait until morning. It was time to hit the reset button and then, having been up most of the previous night, get some much needed sleep.
As she rested her left hand on the hand rail, the sun already half way through its final descent, she felt a buzzing in her trouser-suit pocket and she reached in to retrieve her phone. The number was marked as ‘unknown’ which, whist rare on a secure line, was not altogether unusual.
“Scalise,” she said. There was a pause. A long one.
“You got my message then?” the voice said eventually. It was female and not a young voice either.
“Who is this?” Scalise asked.
“This is the person who saved your ass this morning. You did get the message?” Another pause. “Yeah, you got the message.” Another pause, and then it seemed as though she was talking to someone. “Yeah, she got the message.”
“How did you get this number?”
“You killed my father,” the voice said coldly, deliberately ignoring the question. “A long time ago.”
“I find that unlikely,” Scalise replied, her voice unmoved. Unlikely, because Scalise did not her her hands dirty with issues such as that. ‘Arranged to have my father killed’, perhaps? There was a clear difference. “What was his name?”
“Lambert,” came the reply. “Detective Nick Lambert.”
Scalise pursed her lips and shook her head gently, still admiring the bright orange skies which surrounded the now setting sun. She had never heard that name before. “That name means nothing to me,” she said coldly. And she meant it.
“It does now.”
“So…” Scalise asked, clearly intrigued. “If you think I killed your father, incorrectly I might add, why would you then choose to save my life? Why not leave me in…” she thought for a moment. She had no idea who this was. A journalist? A political rival? “…why not just leave me where I was?”
Another pause. Longer this time. “So that you’d know, Senator.”
“Know what?”
“Why it is that I’m going to kill you myself.”
Scalise laughed. She was one of the most protected women in the U.S. and her security team was second to none. She often feared that she would lose power, money or indeed influence and it had been known to keep her awake some nights, but never once did she lose a moment’s sleep fearing that she would lose her life. “And how do you propose to do that,” she asked scornfully. “Are you going to hunt me down?”
Without a pause for breath, the voice said: “I don’t need to hunt you, Senator. You will come to me.”
Scalise smiled scornfully. “And how do you figure that?”
“Because you’re like the forest,” the voice said gently.
“Sorry..?”
“Like the forest. Like the streams. Like all the animals.”
“Sorry..?” Scalise said, sneering. She thought for a moment. Something in the woman’s tone. “Are you on some kind of medication?”
If not, she thought, she sure as hell should be.
There was another pause. Longer this time. “We’re all just creatures of routine.”
Scalise pondered the statement, but not for long. Though she was too far away to hear it for herself, just few seconds later there was a slight ‘phut’ sound from the bushes across a perfectly tended lawn which ran some 400 metres from the hotel itself. A split second later a red circle appeared on her thin-stretched forehead, about the size of an old nickel. Her head flicked backward slightly. At the same time, the back of her head burst away in chunks of red and grey. Scalise did not move. The wine glass fell from her right hand, descending fifteen floors in just a few swift seconds and shattering on the granite slabs below. A moment later the phone fell from her other hand, clattering on balcony tiles. The toughened glass easily survived the short fall and the device bounced and skittered by her feet - feet which now began to waver, as though she was drunk. Finally, her legs gave way and she fell forward, awkwardly. Her body tipped suddenly, bending across the chrome rail until her own centre of gravity was no longer working in her favour and she fell, catching other balconies on the way down and spinning limply and erratically to earth.
Eight seconds after the single shot, the only shot needed, Scalise’s blood-spattered and crumpled body was spread-eagle amongst the shards of glass on the smooth granite slabs which bordered the hotel’s quite exquisite garden entrance, blood and fine
wine mixing in an ever-expanding crimson pool.
Victoria rose to her feet and took a few moments to carefully place the rifle back into her long, thin shoulder bag, zipping it closed.
“All just creatures of routine,” she said without emotion, glancing swiftly at the sunset.
She shrugged, unfeeling, and walked away.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Tuesday, March 9, 1649.
West of Bull Run Peak, California.
So there you have it, kiddo. That’s your lot.
I hope that you, like Rachael and I, have the sun beating down on you right now. I hope it beats upon your face as you sit, your back as you work and your heart as you lift your head toward it and remember. I hope that, right at this moment, you are sitting in your place - in front of the cabin, or what might remain of it - and that you are looking across the same endless valley of trees as we are, simply admiring the beauty of nature untouched by man. Trees and beauty which will outlive us all many times over.
Our cabin here is a warm place, in every sense, but I am afraid it will have crumbled to nothing long before you come along, so I can only bequeath you the location. I apologise for not appreciating just how beautiful this place really was when I was there before. Or, indeed, after. And yes, I know that you say that I chose it and, chronologically, that might be true but this was always your place. For this reason, I have chosen to name it Victoria Ridge. When others arrive over the coming years, as I hope they do, that is the name I shall hand down. If you look on certain maps when you have a chance, I think you will still find that name in use. It’s a peaceful place and Rachael and I will be very happy here. I know it.
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