The young man cut off a sob, breathed, “Denny Whalen.”
“All right, Denny Whalen, you work for the CIA, of course. Ops?”
“Yes and no.”
“Give me the no part first.”
“We don’t do … nasty stuff. No covert operations. We’re organized under Operations, but we’re strictly research.”
“What’s your outfit called?”
“Department of Human Possibilities.”
“I make it my business to keep up with these things, and I’ve never heard of you. You need another spinal adjustment?”
“We used to be called the Bureau of Unusual Human Resources.”
“Ah yes,” Veil said, and sighed. “BUHR. The ‘chill shop.’ I thought the dwarf put you people out of business last year.”
“We’ve been … reorganized.”
“Right. Just what the world needs now: a reorganized ‘chill shop.’ If you’re not a field operative, what were you doing with eavesdropping equipment outside my building tonight?”
“It was an experiment. The woman was wired, and I would have heard anything you said to her. I had to see for myself if it was true that Lazarus People recognize each other and are capable of some degree of telepathic communication. I wanted to see if you’d come down—which you did. You two didn’t have a real conversation, but you did recognize what she was.”
“You’re a damn fool, Denny Whalen. How the hell did BUHR find out about Lazarus People? The Lazarus Project was a decade ago, and all the records were destroyed.”
“The Lazarus Project was mentioned in KGB files. A lot of their people are working for us now, and they brought a lot of their records with them.”
“If you’ve got reports on the Lazarus Project, then you should know it was a complete bust. You can’t get to where they wanted to go from here.”
“The files are incomplete and spotty. You killed the two KGB operatives who were at the institute and on the army base.”
“So I did. You’re holding Dr. Solow?”
Denny Whalen again swallowed hard, nodded.
“Kidnapping sounds like nasty business to me, Denny, and it was a very, very bad idea. Where have you got her?”
“A safe house on the Upper West Side. The address is—”
“I know where it is. Has she been harmed?”
“No.”
“How lucky for you. How is it that the director of Ops authorized a kidnapping by a bunch of research scientists?”
“Ops has given top priority to finding out exactly what happened with the Lazarus Project. You must have really rattled some cages in the past, because nobody wanted to mess with you. That’s why we approached Dr. Solow first. But she wouldn’t cooperate. We needed you. Then it was decided that the best way to get both of you to cooperate would be to take Dr. Solow into our, uh, temporary custody. The director gave us a field operative for that, and I was given permission to run my experiment before we contacted you.
“How many of you are there at the safe house?”
“Three. Two researchers and the field operative.”
“Where are you keeping Dr. Solow?”
“In a bedroom on the second floor, at the rear. We have an operations center set up in the basement. Look, why don’t you let me try to—?”
“Shut up,” Veil said, then bent over the other man and searched through his pockets. He found a cellular phone, smashed it. Then he dragged the helpless man into a corner of the foyer before opening the doors of the freight elevator and stepping in. “Your paralysis will wear off in about forty-five minutes, Denny,” he continued. “If I were you, I’d just stay put and wait it out. If it does occur to you to try to crawl out of here and look for help so that you can phone ahead, remember the neighborhood you’re in. The vultures around here would like nothing better than to find a nice, well-dressed young fellow like you helpless on the sidewalk. How are you on double negatives?”
“What?”
“I will not not be left alone. And I will not allow anyone to bother Dr. Solow. Tell that to your superiors at Langley. The director of Ops will know just how serious I am.”
“Yes, sir.”
Veil returned to his arsenal on the third floor. He selected a .45 automatic, which he placed in a small duffel bag along with lock-picking tools and a length of light but strong nylon rope. Then he went out and took a cab to the CIA’s safe house on the Upper West Side. He disarmed the security system from a circuit box on the side of the brownstone, then picked the lock on the back door and went in. He found the field operative, a bald, burly man dressed in matching green slacks, shirt, and sport jacket, in a room on the ground floor watching television and drinking beer. The man leaped to his feet and grabbed for the gun in his shoulder holster when Veil entered, and Veil whipped the barrel of his .45 against the side of the man’s head, knocking him unconscious. Veil tied up the operative with the nylon cord, then left the room and bounded almost soundlessly up the stairs to the second floor. At the opposite end of a corridor an older man with a withered left arm, dressed in a brown tweed suit and smoking a pipe, was sitting in a chair outside a closed door. When the man looked up, he saw Veil stalking down the corridor toward him, gun raised and aimed at his head. The pipe dropped from the man’s clenched teeth and the color drained from his face as he leaped to his feet and thrust his hands in the air.
“Open it,” Veil said quietly, nodding toward the door.
“It’s not locked,” the man with the withered arm replied in a choked whisper.
Veil turned the knob and opened the door. Then he grabbed the front of the man’s shirt and shoved him hard into the room. The man in tweed stumbled, spun around, landed on the bed, bounced, and fell on the floor on the other side. Dr. Sharon Solow, her long, wheat-colored hair tied back in a ponytail, was sitting under a bright light in an easy chair across the room. She looked up from the book she was reading, and her eyes, almost as blue as his own, went wide when she saw him. She dropped her book, leaped to her feet, and rushed into his arms.
Veil held the woman he loved tightly in his arms, caressing her hair, brushing his lips against her forehead and cheek.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.” Sharon kissed him hard on the mouth, then stepped back and frowned. “Veil, somehow they found out about the Lazarus Project. They came to me, wanted me to fill them in on the details. I told them I didn’t know what they were talking about. There wasn’t anything I could tell them that wouldn’t involve you. I don’t understand how—”
“They already knew about my involvement. They got hold of some old KGB files that presumably mention the two of us and what you were trying to do in that little mountaintop hospice at Pilgrim’s Institute.”
“Oh God. They must know just enough to get somebody killed.”
“It appears that way. I wonder how many people the Russians killed trying to get somebody through the Lazarus Gate and back again.”
“How did you find me?”
“They decided to use some Lazarus Person they’d found to run a little experiment on me before calling me to tell me they had you. The experiment didn’t quite turn out the way they’d expected.”
“Veil, we have to talk to them!”
“Talk to them?” Veil paused, glanced at the man in the tweed suit, who had gotten to his knees and was peering at Veil over the top of the bed. “I’ve been giving some thought to killing everybody in this house.”
“No, my love! You mustn’t do that! They’re just scientists, and they’re terribly curious.”
“These terribly curious scientists work for a particularly ugly little department in the CIA that was supposed to have been shut down last year.”
“But these people mean no harm—except for the man in green.”
“He’s sleeping this one out.”
“It’s what they’re trying to do that’s so dangerous, my love. We have to talk to them, tell them what will happen if they try to repeat those experiment
s.”
“I’ll talk to them. You go home.”
“No. I want to be with you.”
Veil turned to the man in the tweed suit, who had finally risen to his feet and was holding tightly to his withered arm, as if it were a frail captive that might slip away. “It looks like you’re finally going to find out what you want to know. Take us to your leader.”
The man cleared his throat, drew himself up straighter. “I, uh, I’m the leader. I’m Dr. Schaefer. What have you done with Dr. Whalen?”
“He’s taking some time out to rethink his approach to this whole matter, and maybe consider other career options. Who else is in the house, besides the Jolly Green Giant?”
“Just Dr. Leeds. She’s downstairs.”
“Is she armed?”
“Of course not. What do you think we—?”
“Let’s go.”
Veil and Sharon followed the man in the tweed suit down two flights of stairs to the basement, which was spacious and had been cleared to make room for a wooden table, a desk, chairs, two hospital gurneys, and an array of medical equipment that was now pushed back against the wall at the opposite end of the room. Half of the wall to their left was covered with a large mural comprised of dozens of separate, framed panels and illuminated by spotlights recessed in the ceiling. A big-boned, white-haired woman who was standing at the table and making notes on a pad looked up and started with alarm as they entered the room.
“Just stay calm, Gail,” the man in the tweed suit said quickly, walking across the room and touching the woman’s hand. “Dr. Solow and Mr. Kendry have agreed to cooperate with us.”
“Veil,” Sharon said in a voice just above a whisper as she turned to look at the multi-paneled mural. “That’s—”
“It certainly is,” Veil replied dryly as he stepped closer to the wall to examine his work.
The predominant color of the painting was a brilliant, electric blue surrounded on all sides by clouds of gold-specked black and gray. Brush techniques and alternating patches of thin and thick layers of pigment projected the illusion of movement, of flight toward a gray figure with outstretched arms silhouetted against a pool of brilliant, pure white light. In the space where the figure’s heart would be was an open rectangle where the brick wall behind the mural showed through. “I painted ‘The Lazarus Gate’ a long time ago,” Veil continued quietly, turning back to the two scientists. “The Company must have gone to considerable trouble and expense to find and put all these panels together. My work doesn’t come cheap.”
It was the white-haired woman who answered. “It took years. The individual panels were in museums, galleries, and private collections all over the world. But we never could find the last panel. Would you tell us what’s there?”
Veil’s response was to point to the strips of paper that were EKG printouts taped to the wall next to the mural. Each clearly showed the signature Lazarus Spike of someone who had been clinically dead and then brought back to life after having seen the Lazarus Gate. “Have you tried to send anybody there yet?”
“No,” the woman replied evenly. “We needed more information before we tried to conduct the experiment. That’s why we were so anxious to speak to you and Dr. Solow. Is it true that humans who approach the Lazarus Gate as they are dying become telepathic?”
“Where did you get these EKG printouts?”
“From the hospital records of Lazarus People, men and women who had a near-death experience naturally.”
“I assume you questioned all of them. What did they say when you asked them if they’d become telepathic when they were dying?”
The woman flushed slightly. “They just laughed. All of them.”
“Well, there you are.
“But there is something there. You painted a picture of it.”
“Of course there’s something there. Death. That’s why we say that people who’ve seen it and survived have had a near-death experience. It’s not complicated, Doctor. For some people, all they have to do to get there is to die. Things are going to become complicated when you start sending living people off to find this place and they don’t come back.” Veil paused as Denny Whalen, looking thoroughly shaken, walked through the door. Then he turned to Sharon. “Now that everybody’s here, tell them what they want to know.”
Sharon nodded, said, “I’m a physician, as you know. What you may not know is that I’m a thanatologist—a specialist in death and the dying. For years it has been known that a small percentage of people who ‘die,’ as it were—that is, their hearts stop beating and they are clinically dead—revive and tell a story about being in a corridor and seeing at the end of it a blinding white light and a shadowy figure beckoning to them. At this moment they report feeling completely at peace, with no fear of death. Every single one of them reports desperately wanting to fly into the arms of this figure and be washed in the white light. Those who don’t, who turn back at the last moment from the cusp of death and revive, uniformly do so because of some compelling personal reason, a sense of unfinished business which can be anything from a belief their family can’t survive without them to an unpaid utility bill. The experience has been reported by people from all cultures in societies all over the world, by those who are religious and others who are atheists. The vision is seen by about two percent of the people who’ve had a near-death experience, and we refer to them as Lazarus People. All report feeling remarkably changed, and all had an identical reading on their EKGs a moment or two before they revived. That’s what we call the Lazarus Spike, and we say that they’ve been to the Lazarus Gate.”
The man with the withered arm pointed to Veil’s mural. “That’s what they see? That’s the Lazarus Gate?”
“That’s it,” Veil replied curtly. “Go on, Sharon.”
“Years ago I was in Monterey doing secret research—the Lazarus Project—for an ex-astronaut named Jonathan Pilgrim who’d had a near-death experience and believed he’d found heaven; he was looking for a way to control the experience. I worked in a hospice that was separate from Jonathan’s main operation, where researchers studied individuals with highly developed talents or unusual traits. Veil had been invited to come there as a test subject, and he wound up with me at the hospice because—”
“That’s irrelevant,” Veil interrupted.
Denny Whalen shook his head impatiently, said, “But you said you’d tell us what we wanted to know!”
“There’s nothing of any value for you to learn from my experience. I ended up in Dr. Solow’s hospice by accident because of some funny business with a KGB operative who was monitoring the whole situation at Pilgrim’s Institute. My experience is irrelevant to your purposes because I wasn’t dying when I wound up in the hospice, and I’m not a Lazarus Person.”
The three researchers exchanged puzzled glances, then looked back at Veil. The white-haired woman said, “But there’s your painting …”
“How do you know I didn’t work from some Lazarus Person’s description of the experience?”
“Did you?”
“No. Listen up, folks, because I’m only going to go over this once and I’m not going to answer any personal questions. Denny here will tell you just how jealously I guard my privacy. The problem is that you’ve already shoved your noses so far into my private business that I have to give you this information to push you back out. By definition, a Lazarus Person is a child or adult who has suffered a very particular near-death experience. A consciousness of the world and a sense of self had been formed in the individual, and it is this perception of the world and self that is so profoundly changed when a person sees the Lazarus Gate and then returns to life. That isn’t what happened to me. I almost died at birth, and a newborn infant has no sense of self or the world. I was born with a cawl, and my parents named me Veil as a kind of prayer. Obviously, I lived, but I suffered—suffer—brain damage. I was left a vivid dreamer, a condition that can best be described as a kind of rupturing of the protective membrane separating dreams from
reality. I dream in Technicolor and surround sound, and those dreams are every bit as coherent and vivid as what I experience when I’m awake. The condition can drive you insane, and not a few vivid dreamers die in their sleep of heart attacks; vivid dreamers not only get chased by ogres, sometimes they get eaten. Denny here may harbor suspicions that I’m a violent person. I became one because of my vivid dreaming, and I eventually learned to control both the violence and the dreams through painting. Now I can go virtually anywhere I like and do anything I want in my dreams—but I’m still just tucked in bed, dreaming. There’s no astral projection, no telepathy, no precognition, and none of those other wet dreams the Russians were having. Just dreams, with absolutely no practical application—unless you want to count my work as an application. It’s just imagination. That’s how I discovered the Lazarus Gate, which seems to be a kind of shared racial consciousness some people experience as they die. It probably has to do with endorphins and hard-wiring those people have in their brains. The point is that I got there through the back door, in a manner of speaking. I was able to go to the Lazarus Gate and return, literally without losing any sleep over it, because I wasn’t dead, just dreaming. I’d learned to control my vivid dreaming, so I just checked out the neighborhood, then turned around and went home. When I woke up, I started this mural. Anyone you try to send there by artificial means, with your machines and your drugs, isn’t going to be so fortunate. You can manipulate their brain waves to match that pattern, all right, but anybody you kill and try to send there is going to stay dead. That’s all the Lazarus Gate is—death. The drugs you need to use to artificially create that brain-wave pattern block the way back. Your test subjects aren’t going to be sending messages from submarines, or anywhere else, to other test subjects because they’ll very quickly become biologically as well as clinically dead. End of story.”
Again, the researchers exchanged glances. It was Denny Whalen who finally spoke. “What’s on the missing panel in the mural?”
“Jesus, Denny,” Veil said, then sighed and shook his head. “What a great question; it shows how impressed you are by what I just told you. My work is totally irrelevant. We’ve told you everything you need to know. You can interview all the Lazarus People you want about those crackpot KGB theories, and they’ll laugh at your questions like the others have done. You think they’re all involved in some conspiracy? They’ve all survived a similar, profoundly moving experience that has left them with mixed emotions about returning to life, and they’re looking forward to repeating the experience when the time comes. They’re not about to be bothered trying to describe the experience or explain themselves to a bunch of science wonks working for the CIA.”
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