Tales From the Black Chamber, page 19
Anne just shook her head, while behind her, Joe silently mouthed, “Eat me.”
“Sorry, sorry. But you guys have missed some stuff. I mean, unless you were at home monitoring Canadian radio frequencies, news reports, and cell phones.”
“They think something happened at the house?” said Joe, concerned.
“No, no, we covered that up just fine. They haven’t even found Monsignor Clairvaux’s body yet.”
“What’s happened?” asked Anne.
“Well, it’s circumstantial, but I have no trouble figuring out what’s going on. First, a village in northern Ontario north by northwest of Nicton is hit by what’s described as freak wind shear. Six people dead, seventy injured. Then there’s a huge fish kill northwest of there on a three-hundred-plus-mile stretch of the Hudson Bay between East Pen, Manitoba, and Walrus Islands, Nunavut. And just now the NSA picked up that some WWF types in the Central Barrens came across an entire herd of caribou dead, with their flesh ripped off and bones crushed.”
“Holy crap,” said Joe. “That’s our … thing.”
“That’s my guess. It seems to be getting stronger.”
“Any idea how fast it’s going?” said Joe.
“Well, it’s probably covered over a thousand miles in under a day.”
“Where’s it going?” asked Anne.
“No idea,” said Mike. “Rafe’s been working on a plot of all the incidents, starting at Nicton, and has a pretty clear idea of the path. But where it’s actually headed, provided it’s heading somewhere specific, isn’t clear at all. Especially since it’s heading towards the Arctic.”
“Hyperborea?” joked Anne. “Ultima Thule?”
Joe’s eyes looked at a spot on the ceiling to his right. “Somewhere in … Asia,” he said. “Airliners fly trans-polar routes all the time. It’s faster. Look, has Rafe gotten into the government’s geospatial databases, yet? Satellite imagery?”
“No, I think he’s working on Google Earth.”
“Okay,” said Joe, grabbing a flash drive out of his desk drawer. “I gotta go find him and hook us up. Sorry to run, Anne.”
“No problem,” she said. She asked Mike, “What am I supposed to do?”
“Go see John. Figure out how to stop this thing.”
Damn, Anne thought. I was hoping you’d say, “Go into the ladies’ room and cry for an hour or two.” Because that’s about all I feel up to doing.
John Ashton sat in his office, his desk covered with piles of books, with only space for his computer and a yellow pad. He looked up and saw Anne in his doorway, miserable.
“Time for homework,” he said in an exaggeratedly perky voice, hoping to get a rise out of her.
Anne nodded. “Mike Himmelberg said that we’re supposed to figure out how to stop that thing. It’s apparently destroying its way across Canada.”
“Abaddon the Destroyer. That’s what he does. It’s on his business cards.”
“How can you joke? People are dead!”
“I can’t do this job unless I joke. I’m going through the History trying to see if past cases have any clues. Honestly, I don’t think we’ve ever been faced with an entity like this before, so I’m looking for smaller, maybe analogous cases. But I’m not finding much.”
“So can I help?”
“No, I’ve got this. What you’ve got to do is really get to work on the Library … by which I mean the Archive as well.”
“I haven’t been a very good Librarian, have I?”
“You haven’t had time. But what you need to do is start scanning the summaries of all the books and artifacts and so forth and see if you can figure out something that can banish a very, very powerful demon, for lack of a better word. Then, if you find something, you get to go down to the Library and open up the brown-paper wrappings and dig through the book or check out the thingamabob or whatever seems useful. You get to peek into some weird stuff. Enjoy it, if you can.”
“It actually sounds really fun, if only I weren’t panicked about what could happen if I don’t find anything.”
“Have some soothing tea, or head down to the firing range and put a couple hundred rounds through a machine gun, whatever works for you. Just get your head in the game as fast as you can.”
Anne scowled. “What about the Voynich Manuscript? Is it possible that it contains the answer on how to dismiss this thing?”
John laughed. “That would be a great I-told-you-so!”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“No, I know.” John kept laughing. “Still, it’d show that the best-intended rules can have some bad effects. I actually thought of that just after I heard what happened. I had Lily take one of the transliterations of the V.M. into arbitrary Roman letters that’s on the Internet, swap in the rest of our letters, and see what turns up. When I checked last night, she had filled in the remaining consonants and was working on translating anything that looked like ‘dismiss,’ ‘send away,’ banish,’ ‘defeat,’ or the like in proximity to that ‘Chidag Dü-Abaddon-Apollyon’ sequence. So far, she was stumped, but was still working on it.”
“Can I e-mail it to Professor Geoffrey? He could read the whole thing inside a day, I expect.”
John looked hesitant, then said. “Why not? Who knows how long we have with this thing? Give me his e-mail address and I’ll get it to Lily and we’ll send him an encrypted copy. Also, tell Claire that when this is all over, I’m going to need her help in setting up a file on him as an official Collaborator.”
Anne nodded. “I’ll have her send you his e-mail address.”
“And then get down to the Library and see what you can do.”
Anne walked down the spiral staircase that led to the Librarian’s office. She flicked on the lights and saw a tidy, well-organized office lined with books, and a large flat-screen iMac on the desk. Still on the desk were an enameled fountain pen and a pair of cat-eye glasses in a slipcase. Mrs. Garrett, she thought, tears welling in her eyes. I miss you. If you’re around, please help me figure something out. Wiping at her cheeks, she walked over to the shelf where the large, handwritten volumes of the Index to the Library sat. There were a good number of them, she thought, for an institution less than a century old. When she opened the first volume, she saw a complex list of topics with an unusual set of numbers and symbols below them. She scowled, not knowing what to make of them. Then she noticed a little notebook-sized book on the same shelf. Opening it, she saw it contained the key to all the symbols and showed how a given topic could be explored and a list of relevant books and objects could be drawn up with relative ease, though a lot of flipping through the large registers’ pages was involved, and it provided no analysis of what the categories actually connoted or might imply. For a system apparently designed to conceal the totality of its holdings, even from its maintainer, it was surprisingly useful. She felt rather unsure of how well she’d be able to update the Indices in the future, but the bold strokes of at least six hands told her that competence lay out there somewhere to be found. She hefted two volumes over to her desk, then pulled the Voynich Manuscript and the Jesuit breviary out of her ninja-suit carry bag, which someone, presumably Steve, had left next to the desk for her. She looked at them, a tad amazed that a couple small books could unleash such a powerful evil. Books had always been her Eden, and she stared at these two like serpents.
Then she got to work.
She had no idea how much time had passed when the phone on the desk—she couldn’t quite think of them as her phone and her desk yet—rang. The display said HISTORIAN.
“Hello?”
“Anne, it’s John. Come on up to the conference room. Rafe and Joe have something.”
“Okay, I’ll be right there.”
She checked the clock. Five o’clock. And she still hadn’t found anything. Dammit.
Up in the conference room, Rafe Stoll and Joe McManus were standing next to the large screen. Anne and Steve McCormack were the last to arrive.
“Okay, everyone,” said Rafe. “Here’s what we know. We’ve got a more or less straight-line path between all these awful incidents in Canada. Assuming it started in Nicton, this is what we’ve got.” A number of spots lit up on a map of Canada. Then a line shot from Nicton, slightly to the left of the village dot, over Hudson Bay, then slightly to the right of the caribou-kill dot. “We’re assuming it’s traveling this path, with the odd slight deviation to kill stuff. Based on the times of these incidents, we’re guessing that it’s traveling about sixty miles an hour.”
“Hey, wait a second, Rafe,” Mike Himmelberg interrupted. “Just got something out of the NSA.” He was sitting with a set of wireless headphones held up to one ear. “Two things. Okay, first, we got a call from an electrical engineer doing routine maintenance on some of the early-warning radars on Jenny Lind Island. Hey, Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale”—she got an island. Good for her. Anyway, he reports seeing a dark cloud or fog or shape sweeping rapidly through the air and a whole flock of birds exploding and dropping out of the sky when this cloud hit them.”
Rafe scrolled the map north. “The eastern part of Jenny Lind Island is on our line. What else do you have?”
“This one’s a little worse. I have a sat-phone call from a guy who seems to be part of an Eskimo hunting party on Victoria Island. He’s describing this weird weather front or something coming in, then he just starts screaming, saying, ‘We’re all dying,’ then the phone goes dead.”
“Dear God,” said Claire.
“Do you have coordinates for the call?”
“They’ll be on my computer. Let me go get them.” He came back a moment later and read off a string of numbers, which Rafe typed into the computer. “Christ, they’re exactly on the line.”
“Let me ask a question,” said Claire. “So, we know which direction and how fast this thing is going. But do we have any idea where it’s going?”
“Let me turn that over to Joe,” said Rafe.
Manipulating the map to illustrate his words, Joe said, “Okay, the path takes us over the pole, then down into Russia. Fortunately, it’s way out in Yakutia, which is one of the most sparsely populated places in the world, then across the Chinese border into Inner Mongolia, and then across the very eastern tip of the country of Mongolia, then back across the Chinese border. Then it crosses these mountains and so forth—that’s the Great Wall—until we get to Beijing.”
“Peking,” Mike Himmelberg interjected.
“Peiping,” said Claire.
“Whatever,” said Joe. “So I’m guessing that’s not an accident.”
“No, makes sense,” said John. “I mean if you’re going to kill a lot of people, why not head for a big city? Although wouldn’t New York or Mexico City have been closer? And with lots of delicious cities along the way?”
“Well, I have a theory about that,” said Joe.
“It’s a doozy,” said Rafe.
“Okay, let’s see. Here’s the refined plot of the line.” He zoomed the screen into a view of Beijing with individual buildings visible. “See how it tracks into the city between the Olympic stadium over here to the east, and the Summer Palace to the west?”
“Wait a second, Joe,” said Mike. “How confident are you in this super-exact track? I mean, this thing could go right, left, or hang a U-turn at any point, right?”
“More than moderately, based on what data we have and the assumption that this thing is making as much of a beeline as possible for its destination.”
“Okay,” said Mike.
“So, you’ll notice that the line leads right across this big office complex here. This is a northern suburb of Bei—the capital. I’m told it’s pronounced Ch’ing-ho or something, but it’s spelled Q-i-n-g-h-e on all the maps, so no ‘ch’ing ho’ jokes, Mike.”
“Damn,” Mike said.
“Anyway, this office complex is the headquarters of the Second Artillery Corps, and if I were a betting man, I’d say that’s where it’s headed.”
“Why?” asked Steve. “It wants some howitzers? What does artillery have to do with anything?”
“The Second Artillery Corps,” Joe said, his voice sinking, “controls China’s nuclear arsenal.”
The room erupted in oaths, questions, and the sound of Anne crashing into the wall behind her and sliding to the floor when she unconsciously took a quick step back. Anne got back to her feet and everyone else began to calm down.
“Wait,” said Mike, his voice loudest. Everyone turned to him. “Why would this thing fly all the way to China when it could have just gone to SAC in Omaha or the Pentagon or the White House? Isn’t that going out of its way? And doesn’t China have a lot fewer nukes?”
“They do,” said Joe evenly, “but they’re a lot less loosely controlled. They still have a top-down command structure, in which no one does anything without the order of the guy above him. So they don’t have a lot of redundant checks on a launch. My theory is this thing will go in there and take over the people or whatever, and launch everything they’ve got. It’s the Destroyer, right? What’s better to destroy with than nukes?”
No one said anything.
“Plus,” Joe continued, “as far as anyone knows, China’s nukes are targeted three ways. At us, at the Russians, and at the Indians. Maybe Taiwan gets one, and maybe Japan is also on the list. But, if they launch everything in all directions, they get retaliatory strikes from Russia, us, and India—and maybe Japan if they’ve got secret nukes. If Russia is panicked, who’s to say they don’t fire a few at us and Europe for good measure? And we, the French, and the British would fire back on them. I’m just guessing, but with India and China being so densely populated, a general free-for-all like this could kill more than a billion people, and wreck civilization as we know it. Leaving the field clear for whatever else Chidag Dü has up his sleeve. Or some of the stuff in Revelation. Or … worse.”
“Okay, thanks, Joe,” said Mike. “I’ll be changing my pants shortly. But putting aside what could happen, what do we do next?”
“Stop it,” said Joe.
“How?” said half the room.
“I don’t know,” Joe said. “I’m just an engineer.”
“Anne?” said John.
“I’ve got nothing. And nothing from Professor Geoffrey yet.”
“Lily?” John asked.
“Nothing. Though my Tibetan’s getting better.”
“Well, that’ll be nice when we’re all hiding from the Four Horsemen in the Himalayas,” John chuckled.
Steve McCormack spoke up. “Ignoring the hoodoo aspect of this, we’re likely going to have to intercept this thing, right? I mean, we can’t just sit here and say, ‘Mumbo-jumbo,’ and it’ll disappear half a world away, right?”
“Probably,” shrugged John.
“So, let’s work on that for a minute. Now, we’re dealing with some big, empty spaces, right? So could we risk a landing in Russia or China?”
Mike Himmelberg said, “I don’t know about that. We’d have to get some crazy high-level CIA authorizations. Claire?”
“Eesh, I don’t think so.”
“So that leaves us exactly one option,” Steve said. Looking around the room at his colleagues’ confusion, he said, “Mongolia. The eastern tip. Was I the only one listening?”
“I think we were all distracted by the fiery nuclear holocaust, Steve,” said Claire.
“So when does this thing get to Mongolia?”
Joe stared at the ceiling. “Okay, it’s up in the Canadian Arctic now. It left Nicton around midnight, say. At sixty miles an hour. It’s about twelve hundred miles out of Canada, and about twenty-three hundred miles to Russia. I’m gonna say it’s going to hit Russia in about a day and a half. From Russia to Mongolia is …” He typed a few keys and the relevant arc on the path lit up. “About nineteen hundred miles. That’s another, say, thirty-two hours. And it’ll be in Mongolia for … a hair under sixty miles. So we have a one-hour window before we’re chasing it into China and maybe causing an international incident. Which beats the end of the world, but, still.… If we do miss it in Mongolia, it’s four hundred ninety miles to Qinghe. So we’d have about eight hours to get to our cave in the Himalayas,” he joked grimly.
“How do you say ‘abominable snowman’ in Tibetan?” Mike Himmelberg joked.
“Mekö,” Lily said, dead serious.
“So we’ve basically got three days to figure out how to stop it, get to a remote location in eastern Mongolia, then take it on,” said Steve. “Plus, it’s probably twenty or thirty hours in the air to Mongolia. So we’ve really got less than two days here, then we have to be on a plane.” Everyone blanched. Steve smiled a little and said, “How about I go out for some coffee?”
15
Anne read her American Express number into the phone again, thanked the other party, then hung up, thinking, Well, so much for my savings. Though at this point, saving seems a little dumb.
She dialed her parents’ number in Albuquerque and made some small talk with her mother. Then she got to the point. “Mom, I have a surprise for you and Dad. I’ve got this great new job and they gave me a big bonus, so I’m sending you on a vacation!… No, seriously. It’s this great place called Apache Lodge up in the mountains above Taos. It’s in this secluded little valley, totally surrounded by mountains. They’ve got their own wells, electricity, the whole deal. They have satellite TV, phones, radio, and Internet. And it’s five-star all the way. Food, suites, and all sorts of awesome activities.… No, no, I got a special rate…” Ten grand a day for last-minute reservations. “No, it’s not too much at all. No, it’s just because—” her throat closed and tears squeezed from her eyes, as she forced cheerfulness back into her voice, “because you’ve been such great parents. I couldn’t ever have done any of this without you.… No, no. Really, it’s not too much. There is one thing, though. My rate applied to an immediate vacancy. You have to get there by tomorrow. But it’s two full weeks. I know Dad must have a ton of vacation saved up. Is that going to be a problem?… Oh, good, good. Now, here’s the thing, Mom, they have a ton of excursions and the like, but you still probably want to pack the trunk with food and water and stuff, in case you want to picnic or stuff separately. I’m sure the hotel could provide you with stuff, and I think it’s all-inclusive, but you never want to end up paying fourteen bucks for an eight-ounce bottle of Evian out of the minibar. Go by Costco and stock up. Oh, and tell Dad that they not only have guided hunting parties up in the mountains, but they’ve got shooting tournaments as well, so he should pack a lot of his guns and tons of ammo.… No, no, you’re totally welcome. Really, it’s my absolute pleasure. I just—love you guys so much, I want to do a little thing for you like all the huge things you’ve done for me over the years.… Don’t cry, Mom! You’re going to make me cry!… I love you too. Kiss Dad for me and call me when you get there. I’ll e-mail you directions.”
