Spiral: Book One of the Spiral in Time (2 page)

Now discretely garbed in jeans and a dark sweater, Ian walked over to Jemmy and gave a friendly hand clasp to his shoulder.

“How’re you doing, Sapper? Got a light?”

Jemmy’s eyes had a furtive look as he nodded and struck a match. Mick knew the nickname Sapper meant a specialist who sneaked in and destroyed the enemy’s fortifications. Maybe Ian meant it in an innocent way, but Mick could tell Jemmy didn’t like it as he quickly looked away. The match burned unnoticed until it hit Jemmy’s fingers and was quickly dropped.

Ian came over to Mick and whispered in his ear. His speech was slurred.

“Little Jemmy’s buying drugs and if he’s not careful, he’ll get caught.”

“No.” Mick said. He grabbed Ian by the arm and led him off a ways.

“No? I seen it,” Ian said. “It started back there in Iraq.” He pronounced it “Eye-rack.”

“Well, you don’t talk about Jemmy. He’s my little brother, not yours. I can see what the war did to him. I’m going to make him well again, so shove off.”

An angry Mick Aston walked to the back of the car and opened the boot. He pulled out a big flashlight and a shovel. He did not take interference in his life kindly. He was a big, ruddy-faced man with hands that easily lifted a truck tire off a jack or rolled kegs of beer into his pub. He slammed the boot shut. It was time to give some orders.

“Come on lads, grab a shovel and let’s get up this hill. No nonsense and no lights until we’re up on top.”

A large sign marked the entrance to Maiden Castle. They stumbled up the twisting path in the dark. An eerie stillness greeted them at the top. Robbie was a real clown and started making ghost sounds until Ian shut him up with a smack.

“I was up here yesterday. We can do it,” Mick said. “It’s mostly chalk, not heavy clay, so it won’t be too hard to dig.” Someone moaned in protest. Robbie. Mick cut that off right away.

“Look, there are four of us. We can dig old Merlin a hole in no time at all. But we need to hurry. The rest will be here with the body before dawn. We don’t have much time.”

“Are you sure this is...OK?” Ian asked.

“Look around, mate, it’s late. No one is up here to see us. We have a right to do this. It’s our heritage. That’s what the sign at the entrance down there said —
English
Heritage. It belongs to the people. We’ll have him buried proper in a sacred place like he deserves and we can all come up here anytime we please and honor him.”

“But it’s a government place, Mick. I didn’t know you was planning on burying him here! I thought we were going over to the old cemetery down the road” Ian said. “If they catch us, it’s too late! They’ll put us in jail, and I’ve got a record!”

Robbie made a gasping sound.

“Don’t worry; I know what I’m doing.” Mick drew a deep breath and slowly let it out. Now Ian was spooking Robbie. Mick would do it without Ian if he kept it up.

“See, I was up here yesterday and walked it off, I even made a map.”

Mick pulled a piece of paper from his shirt pocket, but couldn’t see what was on the paper in the dark. Jemmy struck a match and held it over the map. He put one arm around Mick’s shoulder. Usually withdrawn, Jemmy’s affectionate gesture surprised Mick.

“There is an old Roman temple, and forty paces or so past that is the round hut place. It’s under there where the true Druid holy place is buried. Merlin told me all about it once. Those Roman bastards built right over it. I marked the place behind the Roman temple with white chalk stones. See ...”

Mick turned on the big flashlight he was carrying.

Jemmy gasped as it lit up a broad path. Bright green grass glistened in relief against the pitch black sky all around them. The white chalk stones stood out in sharp contrast.

Just then, over on the A354 to Dorchester, a lorry down-shifted gears and backfired several times. Loud and sharp, it sounded like gun shots in the dead stillness of the night.

Jemmy let out one long, terrible scream and rolled onto the ground, curling up in a defensive position. If he had a gun in his hand, he would be firing it right now, thought Mick.

Everyone was totally freaked out. Robbie’s eyes looked like some animal’s caught in the headlights of a car. Ian had jumped to one side, looking all around. Even Mick felt rattled by his brother’s scream.

He doesn’t know how to act around people anymore, Mick thought. God above, someday he’ll have to get over this Iraq thing. I’ve got to muzzle him and not scare the others. He helped Jemmy up and put his arm around him like he would a child. Jemmy was shaking.

Mick kept his arm around Jemmy. “Can’t stop now, lads. Start digging.”

They stared at the marked spot; the flashlight was on the ground, still shining on the white rocks.

“Dig!” Robbie said. “That’s what they always said. So we’ll just pretend we’re digging latrines in the army again.” His silliness and laugh eased some of the tension.

It was much harder going than Mick thought it would be. They all went at it for a while, digging hard. All except Jemmy, who just stood there, staring at the sky.

“I have an idea,” he said in a low voice. It surprised everyone. He had been silent, except for that one blood-curdling scream that everyone wanted to forget. They turned to look at him.

“I’ve been thinking, Mick, ever since you first told me what you wanted to do with old Merlin. There is an easier way.”

He reached one hand back and patted his backpack.

“C4—it works every time. Let’s dig a little deeper, and I’ll throw some C4 down there. It’ll loosen up everything, so we won’t have to work so hard.”

They all knew how it was used. C4 was the plastic explosive of choice for both the military and terrorist alike.

Ian gave Jemmy a strange look. “Where’d you get it Sapper?”

Jemmy ignored him.

“Not legal,” Robbie muttered.

“Well, it can’t hurt here,” Ian said. “One bang and it’s over.”

Jemmy gave a short harsh laugh. “You dig down some more, and I’ll set it off. It’s the one thing I still know how to do.”

Mick opened his mouth to say something and then shut it. He didn’t like this new idea. It was not in his plan, but if it got the job done...

A half hour later, they had dug a hole about four feet deep. Jemmy stepped up to it and dropped his backpack into the hole. Mick’s eyes opened wide at that. Jemmy had a long wire detonator in his hand.

“Now, you all get back. Way back.” Jemmy held up his hand, palm open, and kept motioning them away, toward the earthen rampart behind them.

The flashlight lay on the ground, its beam shining toward the newly dug hole. The bright light was behind Jemmy illuminating his pale hair as he moved closer to the hole, his body outlined in white light against the black sky.

He turned and gave Mick a sweet smile.

“I can’t take it anymore.” His voice sounded faint and thin, as though coming from a great distance. “It will all be over soon.”

His hand pressed down on the detonator.

The explosion was huge. Earth and chalk stones erupted high into the sky and spewed everywhere. Mick and Ian and Robbie were knocked flat by the impact. Flying debris rained down and covered them, like a giant cairn. A great cloud of white dust billowed up, hovered for a while, and then slowly drifted away. It looked like a battlefield. Wisps of dust floated over a large, smoking hole in the ancient ground. All was still at Maiden Castle.

Much later, Mick rolled over and groaned in pain. He looked at the dark sky and whispered.

“Jemmy! Oh, my Jemmy! What have you done?”

PART I

Germaine

CHAPTER 1

London

June 4, 2006

Germaine O’Neill eyed the computer printout taped to the conference room door as if it were a message from the depths of hell. A cryptic note was scrawled across the bottom in bright red ink:
The Past is within us all!

She leaned closer to read it again. The line was smeared as if written in a hurry. The signature was a red blur. Was that meant to be a joke? It’s like graffiti she thought, and a flash of anger broke through her jet-lagged fog. Her fellow archaeologists had a strange sense of humor, but she hadn’t flown over 5,000 miles to be reminded of her past on her first day in London.

The seminar’s title was clear enough;
Mitochondrial DNA: A Road-map from the Past to the Present
marched across the top of the printout in bold black letters. She peered up at the room number and then checked the note in her hand. It was the right room.

Whatever that red-inked message was supposed to mean, she knew one thing for sure: her past was far away in California. She was in England, free to forget. She could have sprouted wings and flown here on her own.

Running away is more like it, her more truthful inner voice chided. Let’s call it like it is.

Even her time zone-challenged brain knew that was true.

It was as if a great storm had blown through her life this year, leaving debris everywhere. A painful divorce, her ruined job, and an important, unfinished book lay scattered around her like pieces of a building blown apart by the wind. The very core of her life and identity had fallen from a once solid foundation.

She would have to find a way to start rebuilding everything, and that was overwhelming. It looked impossible. Her heart fluttered with dread and anxiety.

“One thing at a time,” Aubrey reminded her whenever some catastrophe occurred. “Don’t panic. You’re an archaeologist—think like one. Look at this priceless, shattered artifact and gently pick up the pieces. You can rebuild it if you take one piece at a time.” And Aubrey was always right.

Finishing her book felt like something she could handle. She would take a one-year sabbatical and get away from everything that reminded her she was thirty-nine, no longer young, and her life was a mess.

One last conference and she’d be free to go on and try to patch up her life. She was presenting a paper on ancient Celtic burials—her specialty—and an opportunity to keep a high profile in her chosen field. If she lost her job, she’d need that. Germaine shook her head. That was a depressing train of thought. Way too negative. But heavy jet lag and a hangover did not improve her mental attitude. She rubbed her temples, pressing her fingers on the pressure points to relieve her headache. It didn’t help.

Flying to conferences had a traumatic history in her family she never forgot. Both her parents had died in a storm-driven crash over the North Atlantic on their way to a conference in Paris. Just a little over two years old, everyone thought she had been too young to remember them, but she had her carefully-guarded trove of secret memories—dream-like fleeting glimpses, a certain scent her mother always wore, voices whispering in the next room at night.

The memory of how they died turned into an intense fear of flying—perhaps the only way a child could master such a loss. Flying half-way around the world to archaeological digs, she had learned how to blanket her fear with several in-flight drinks. This time she overcompensated with the alcohol, and her body was a wreck.

Damn!
Germaine’s temper flared. It was a miracle she was standing and able to walk. She grabbed a big, iced Coke from the hospitality table near the door and took a long drink, praying for the sugar and caffeine to kick in.

Her biggest worry was about her job, and there was nothing she could do about it now. She was a gifted archaeologist and assistant professor of European Prehistory at the University of California at Berkeley, where she hoped and prayed for the security of a tenured position. She needed that more than ever after the messy, expensive divorce. She was more than good enough, but now her career—years of work!—was in jeopardy.

And, she’d inflicted the damage herself.

Nigel Mallory’s cold eyes haunted her, summing her up as she had impulsively defended all people proud to claim Celtic ancestry. Mallory was the new Chair of the School of Anthropology and her superior, and his first week on campus they clashed. Her special field was Celtic history, and she quickly discovered they held opposing viewpoints. Just mention the word ‘Celtic,’ and he practically sneered. To him, the word was misused, an invention that began in the 18
^th
century when the term was first used to embrace all those—whether Scots, Irish, Welsh, or Breton—who spoke a Celtic language. It was a false identity, he said. He questioned the very existence of the Celtic culture held dear by so many.