Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “I trust you’re pleased with it?” Retticker asked, as the bartender brought their drinks.

  “With the stone? Very pleased. I can see why your scientists should find it interesting. Defies current categorization schemes in a very big way. Most unusual. Pleased with my share of it, though? Never!

  Always too little.”

  Retticker had known Fremdkunst just long enough to realize that he was less than half serious. Still, he felt compelled to explain.

  “Miskulin’s expedition was close enough behind us that our tactical team was pressed for time. Those tepui people put up one helluva lot more fight than expected, too. Under different circumstances I’m sure we would have figured some way to haul their whole damned sacred stone out of there.”

  “Yes,” Fremdkunst said, swirling the scotch in its glass. “Too bad you didn’t. Miskulin’s involvement was unfortunate, too. Those news reports on the massacre—”

  “We had those squelched as quickly as possible.”

  “Yes. I was wondering how you did that.”

  “Spun it as conflict between new settlers in the savannah and indigenes in the hills. Very little, if anything, got out on their being meteorite cultists. We’ve got their national guard down there keeping any media people from flying or hiking to Caracamuni tepui—and there’s been little enough interest, thank God.

  Feuds between Indians and settlers are ordinary enough so as to attract little media attention.”

  Retticker took a large sip of his screwdriver. For the vitamin C, he reminded himself.

  “Once we’re certain interest has completely died down, I’m sure we’ll be able to go back in with an extraction team to pull the rest of the rock out of the cave. Then a heavy lift helo should be able to fly it out.”

  Fremdkunst nodded, shrugging his longish blond bangs from his eyes.

  “Good. While you’re at it, you might want to have your team see if there might still be some survivors.”

  “Vic, I already told you what the troops told me. None of those Mawari primitives were left alive. Our people found no survivors.”

  “I know, I know, but there’s always a chance someone was missed. Humor me. Next time your people are down there, ask them to look again. All that loss of life disturbs me—really, it does.”

  As Fremdkunst contemplated his drink, Retticker wondered if the man might actually be sincere. He’d always assumed Fremdkunst was in it for the money and prestige of cornering yet more of the meteorite market. Maybe that wasn’t enough to justify the massacre in his eyes, either.

  “If by chance your people found someone still alive,” he continued, “that might go some distance toward salving Doctor Vang’s angst, also. He’s obsessed with getting his hands on any living tepuians, you know.

  Even seems to think Yamada and Miskulin might have brought someone, or several someones, back with them.”

  Retticker nodded but said nothing, sure that Fremdkunst was fishing for info. Refusing to take the bait, he decided to change the subject.

  “What do you plan to do with your share of the tepui stone?”

  Fremdkunst put down his glass.

  “Some I’ll leave in its present state. The rest I intend to transform into art.”

  Retticker leaned forward, looking intently at Fremdkunst, trying to discern his real reasons for wanting a piece of that rock.

  “And how do you do that?”

  “You don’t expect me to reveal all my secrets, now do you, General? I can tell you I’ll microslice everything that’s to be worked. Cut it for the best angles on the Widmanstättens, for the areas that show them. Etch up the detail. Polish it so any olivines and pyroxenes have just the right sheen. Seal it and sell it to a few discerning and discreet connoisseurs, when the time is right. Such a unique stone to work with!

  It has the potential to be my best work yet.”

  Retticker finished his drink. He hadn’t much cared about such arcane rock art, but maybe he’d better develop a taste for it—or at least a knowledge of it—if he ever hoped to figure out Fremdkunst’s agenda.

  “Art for art’s sake?”

  “The money doesn’t hurt, either,” Fremdkunst said with a smile and a shrug.

  “Sounds like a challenge worthy of your mettle, Vic,” he said, slowly getting to his feet. “I’ll let you get to it. I need to be getting back to port.”

  “I understand,” Fremdkunst said, also getting to his feet. “Let me walk you up on deck.”

  The walk was short, but the sun topside was bright and the wind brisk enough to make Retticker squint.

  “Oh, by the way, Joe,” Fremdkunst said, pausing in his farewell handshake to blast him with that radioactive-cobalt gaze of his. “There is something you might like to know. Doctor Vang’s people inform me that someone by the name of Amaral has been looking into my doings in Israel and Saudi Arabia.”

  “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “Ah, but he may know you, or at least of you. This Amaral is an old war buddy of NSA Director Brescoll. I’m told Vang and this Brescoll fellow had a bit of a run-in during that intelligence community shakeup last year.”

  The general felt his brow furrowing, quite unhappily.

  “Let me get this straight. Are you telling me I should grab my ass and keep it tight when I’m around Brescoll?”

  “I think that sums it up quite succinctly. Be on your guard, at the very least.”

  “I’ll do that,” Retticker said, turning toward the ladder that led to where his troll-rigged powerboat was moored alongside. “In the meantime, you take care of yourself out there in the desert.”

  “Nobody gets to choose who they’ll share space with on the obituary page,” Fremdkunst said with a smile. “I’ve never liked that. Death the great leveler, and all. A bit too democratic. I intend to stay out of that part of the paper for as long as I can.”

  “Glad to hear it. I’ll do the same.”

  Before he could climb down the ladder and board his boat, however, a small but needle-sleek vessel pulled up alongside, farther toward the bow. A single passenger—a compact, square-jawed man with perfect alpha-male silver hair—bounded aboard Fremdkunst’s ketch while his driver waited below.

  Fremdkunst introduced the man as George Otis.

  “Hello, General,” Otis said, giving Retticker a firm but somehow perfunctory handshake. “I believe some of my companies are doing joint work with your people. Nice to meet you in the flesh.”

  “The same,” Retticker said, hoping his tone wasn’t so cool or his handshake so stiff that they might betray his dislike of the man. From having encountered them in various media over several years, he recognized Otis’s face and clipped Texan accent. One couldn’t really call it a drawl, since there was nothing drawn out about it.

  The accent, however, wasn’t what Retticker found offensive about the man. He wasn’t fond of Otis’s mix of religion and politics and especially disliked the way Otis had metaphorically dragged the corpse of his favorite nephew—one of the 9/11 dead—into the political arena in order to advance his own agenda and career.

  “I was just leaving,” he said, and bid farewell to Otis and Fremdkunst.

  Otis nodded absently and turned toward Fremdkunst as if Retticker were already gone. As he moved to unmoor his boat from Skyminer with the help of Fremdkunst’s crew, he overheard Otis say something to the effect that one of his associates, a Mister Fox, wanted to talk about some misgivings he had about a rock.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Retticker was surprised to see Fremdkunst respond to Otis’s seemingly offhand comment with a snap-to-it urgency. He wondered just what the relationship of the two men might be.

  The Fish ‘n’ Reaction‘s engines started with a deep thrum and he pulled away from Otis and Fremdkunst. As he left, however, only Fremdkunst’s crew was waving to him. Fremdkunst himself was talking on a satellite phone while Otis looked out over the estuary, as if pretending not to listen.

  His mind was in
a welter as he left them in his wake. This potential trouble with Brescoll was not something he had looked for. Not at all.

  Dammit, he thought. Vang had reeled him into this, by suggesting something from that tepui might be “a great leap forward” toward the grail of military materials science: namely, a source for an ultimate protective material, perfect for creating sensitively reactive armor—the kind of stuff that would make troops in Kevlar look like tin soldiers.

  That was why he was involved in this. And maybe Fremdkunst was in it for the art, or the money, or both. And maybe, just maybe, Vang was in it for some lingering Tetragrammaton “forcing” of human evolution. But what about Otis? Clout and cash and connections like Vang’s, yet otherwise those were two people with agendas about as different as could be. What could possibly have made them buddy-up?

  Motoring back toward the Potomac and his home berth, Retticker contemplated the list of people he should trust least. Brescoll might have the top spot for the moment, but Fremdkunst and Vang and even Otis were not far behind.

  SKYROCKS AND CAT’S PAWS

  Jim Brescoll entered the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History via the Constitution Avenue entrance. He checked in at the guard station, as he had been instructed. He showed one of the two guards his picture ID. Without comment, she swapped the ID for a behind-the-scenes identification badge that would give him access to areas of the museum not open to the public.

  He hoped this meeting would be worth it. He’d had to clear a sizable chunk of his schedule to get away long enough from headquarters to get together with these two.

  “You’ll be working with the Mineral Sciences unit, is that right?” asked the other guard, a man who looked to be in his fifties.

  “Yes, Department of Mineral Sciences,” Jim said, impressed by the unexpectedly rigorous security procedures. “United States National Meteorite Collection.”

  “Please sign the guest register of the host unit, here,” said the male guard, showing him a map and presenting a form to sign, as the female guard made a call. “Thank you.”

  “I’ll escort you to the first-floor rotunda,” said the young woman after she’d gotten off the phone. “The curator of the meteorite collection will meet us there.”

  They rode the escalator from the ground floor to the first-floor rotunda. The moving stairway deposited them in front of the African elephant that was the static centerpiece of the domed space. To Jim’s left stood the Mammals Hall, while to the right he could make out dinosaurs, fossils, and creatures of ancient seas in the Early Life Hall.

  “Jim Brescoll?” asked a boyish-looking, clean-shaven man in retro horn-rimmed AR glasses. Jim nodded.

  “Richard Phares,” said the young-looking man, shaking Jim’s hand. “I’m curator of the meteorite collection.”

  Phares nodded to the guard, who nodded back before returning to her station via the down escalator.

  Jim belatedly realized that he had been handed off to another employee escort.

  “Are you familiar with the collection?”

  “Can’t say that I am,” Jim said as they walked toward an elevator.

  “Ah, then you’re in for a treat, if you have a minute or two before your meeting.”

  Jim checked the time readout on the edge of his ARs.

  “I suppose I could spare a couple of minutes,” he said, as the elevator door closed.

  “Good,” Phares said. In a moment the elevator doors opened, and they were on the second floor. To the right stood the Hope Diamond, in the prime foot-traffic space of the Janet Annenberg Hooker Hall of Geology, Gems, and Minerals.

  “We have one of the finest and largest museum-based collections of meteorites in the world. Many of our best specimens are on exhibit here, in the Moon, Meteorites, and Solar System Gallery of Annenberg Hooker Hall.”

  Jim nodded, his eyes passing over the many exhibit spaces in the gallery. The myriad upright glass display cases, housing a rainbow of important and exotic gem and mineral specimens, hit him with a momentary wave of sensory overload.

  “Meteorites have been part of the Smithsonian from the beginning,” Phares said, smoothly shifting over into full museum-guide mode. “Given that he was a chemist and mineralogist, it’s not surprising that James Smithson included meteorites in his original collection. He donated those specimens to the Smithsonian, along with the funds to found the Institution.

  “Sadly, Smithson’s meteorites were lost in an early fire. Ironic, really, that they should have survived the scorching trip through the atmosphere from outer space, only to be destroyed by a fire in a place intended for their preservation.

  “I think we’ve more than made up for it, though. Since 1870, when the modern meteorite collection got under way, we’ve gathered more than seventeen thousand specimens of more than nine thousand distinct meteorites. The collection is strongest in iron meteorites like these you see here, but we have pieces of every type of space rock. We’re particularly proud that more than half of the known Martian meteorites are housed here.”

  “I always thought of meteorites as just blackened stones,” Brescoll said, as he gazed at a thin wafer of rock with several inclusions. It looked rather like a slice through a shiny amoeba of liquid mercury and amber, flash-frozen and mounted in glass. “These are beautiful.”

  “Yes, that’s a Willamette III AB iron. Thin sectioning allows us to study the rocks’ mineralogy and texture. The national collection houses over seven thousand polished thin sections. If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you more of those.”

  Phares ran his badge down a keycard slot beside a door labeled RESTRICTED ACCESS

  AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Jim sensed that they could speak more freely and directly, now that they were out of the museum’s public space.

  “Those thin sections,” he said to Phares as they walked down the hall. “That the sort of stuff Fremdkunst does?”

  “His work is much more spectacular. Our thin sectioning of iron meteorites is mainly for classification purposes. Neumann lines and Widmanstätten figures for the irons. Petrologic type—degree of chondrule metamorphosis—for the chondrites. What we do is knapping a flake off a stone, basically, to make sure it’s flint or chert or obsidian. What Fremdkunst does is more like working those stones to a perfectly finished spearpoint. The same basic processes but, in his case, carried many steps further and finer.”

  “He’s that good, eh?”

  “One of a kind, really. He has an incredible eye for seeing the beauties hidden in meteorites—and an even more impressive knack for bringing out those beauties in his finished pieces.”

  “Then why’s he so controversial among collectors?”

  Phares sighed as he opened the door to the Meteorite Verification Laboratory and signed in on yet another guest register.

  “As scrupulous as Victor Fremdkunst may be as a craftsman, he’s even more unscrupulous as a businessman and collector.”

  “Good at what he does,” Jim said, “but what he does ain’t good?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid his successes as an artist don’t make up for his failures as a human being.”

  Ahead of them, Jim saw a thirty-something couple examining some of those seven thousand polished meteoritic thin sections housed in the collection. Most of the sections they held up seemed to be encased in glass or some sort of clear thermoplastic resin. Watching the couple, it took Brescoll a moment to recognize them from the pictures he had already seen of the two.

  “I gather you haven’t met before,” Phares said. “James Brescoll, this is Susan Yamada and Michael Miskulin.”

  As Jim shook hands with them, Yamada seemed polite enough, but Miskulin struck him as a bit standoffish.

  “Michael and Susan were telling me about their visit to Castel Gandolfo, to investigate the meteorite thefts there. Very unfortunate losses. We’re lucky one of our security guards was on his toes and caught our would-be meteorite thieves before they could do any real damage here. We beefed up se
curity for our collection after the attempted theft.”

  “I noticed!” Brescoll said. “Too bad you’ll probably have to maintain that heightened level of caution.”

  “Given the rash of thefts from meteorite collections recently, we plan on it.”

  “Any word on the thieves your people caught, and their motives?”

  “From their arrest records I would guess they apprenticed in breaking and entering, then branched out into knocking over jewelry stores.”

  “Low-level hirelings, then?”

  Phares nodded.

  “Yes, unfortunately. They seem to have been recruited in a rather circuitous fashion, too. A labyrinth of ephemeral cell phone numbers, anonymous e-mail remailers, clandestine money drops—so much so that they can’t say who actually did employ them. I have the card of the police detective I’ve been getting updates from, if you’d like to find out more about the investigation.”

  “Thanks, I’d like that,” Brescoll said, then turned to Miskulin and Yamada. “What about the thieves who broke into the Vatican Observatory?”

  “They haven’t been caught yet,” Miskulin replied, in a terse and not particularly friendly manner, continuing to look at slices of meteorites.

  “But their profile might be similar to the thieves here,” Yamada said, as if obscurely embarrassed by her partner’s short answer. “The curator said his collection had medium-level security.”

  At the mention of security, Brescoll looked quickly around the room, then gave Phares a questioning glance. The curator got the point.

  “Well, I can see you three have a good deal to discuss,” said Phares. “No one will be using this lab for at least the next half hour, so you’ll have some privacy. If you have any questions, I’ll be down the hall in my office. You can stop by for the detective’s card when you’re through, Director Brescoll.”

  Jim thanked him and Phares left.

  “Thank you for agreeing to meet me here,” Jim said in as casual a tone as he could manage.