Empire of Dust (6 page)

None of them trusted him. His reputation for cutting field agents loose had preceded him, and they also suspected that he had been responsible for planting the bug they had found in the warehouse that had contained Peder Holberg's final work.

But the main reason for their distrust was the mass poisoning of eleven Scotsmen in upstate New York. There had been one survivor, a man who had called himself Kyle McAndrews, and who had tried to kill them in return.
You, your organization, what difference does it make? You work for him, there's blood on your hands
. That was what he had said before he had tried to kill them, and they had killed him instead. He had, in so many words, accused Skye of the mass assassination.

What made the situation even more confusing, and, to Tony as a Catholic, compelling, was the mark identifying McAndrews as one of the Knights Templar, and a first-century wooden cup among his few possessions, a cup that now lay in a safe deposit box back in New York City. Further evidence from other sources suggested McAndrews' involvement in some way with a prisoner being held by the church. The more the operatives learned, the more it seemed that this prisoner was either descended from the bloodline of a Jesus Christ who had survived the cross, or—and this was what had truly stunned Tony—an immortal Christ himself.

As Tony thought about the possibilities, he broke the silence that had settled on them after Laika's last pronouncement. "You know what we
oughta
be doing? Looking for the prisoner."

"Damn right," Joseph said softly. "But no way we can tell Skye about it. Not yet anyway, not until we know where he stands."

"Sonofabitch stands over a pile of bodies," Tony said.

"We don't know that," said Laika coldly from the back. Tony glanced in the mirror, and saw that she was looking out the window at the trees whipping by. "Suspicion isn't certainty."

"But it's kept you alive more than blind trust would have," said Joseph, and Tony saw a thin smile crease Laika's dark and lovely face. Tony wished that he wasn't attracted to her, but damn it, a woman was a woman, and he'd never be able to look on Laika as merely his team leader. His hormones wouldn't allow it.

But he also wouldn't ever attempt to start any kind of relationship with her other than professional or platonic. Anything more was out of the question, even if she were willing, which he was sure she wouldn't be.
Get back on track, boy
, he told himself. "Maybe we'll stumble across him again . . . the prisoner."

"Could be," said Joseph. "After all, he had a connection to Holberg. Maybe some other so-called paranormal bullshit will draw us to him. Of course, it all depends on Skye's directives. The odds are long, I'm afraid."

Tony knew they were. Yet who would have suspected that Holberg's last work, once they had reconstructed it, would point the way to the prisoner? The damn sculpture had been a map showing precisely where Mister X was being held. But when the ops had gone there, he had been whisked away right under their noses, and they had been nearly killed by a stronger-armed force that seemed to be there for the same reason as they, to free the mysterious prisoner.

Two people had died that night, and on the body of one of them, the agents had found a list of cities and dates headed "
Locus hominus aeterni
," or "Place of the one who never dies," which only added fuel to the theory that the prisoner was, to say the least, long-lived.

There was also a sheet of paper whose front and back were filled with numbers. They had identified it immediately as a book code, but without the proper book to check page, line, and word, it was impossible to decode. They could have sent it to Langley, but didn't want to tip their hand to Skye. As far as Tony was concerned, Skye knew next to nothing about the prisoner, and the ops wanted to keep it that way.

Tony glanced over at Joseph as he pulled another book from the backpack at his feet. "What are you reading?" he asked him.

"I'm trying to find out about what McAndrews said just before he died," Joseph said. "That word . . . or words."

"You still think it had something to do with that Andrea guy?" Johann Valentin Andrea was said to have been the head of the Priory of Zion, a group that wanted to put the bloodline of the Merovingian dynasty, supposedly descended from Christ, back on the thrones of Europe.

"Well, Andrea's Rosicrucian connections link nicely to the Templars, but I don't know."

"Still," said Tony, "it'd be kind of a roundabout way of delivering the message." He thought for a moment. "What if he was trying to say his own name?"

"What?"

"Sure. He said something like 'anda' or 'andra.' What if he was trying to say 'McAndrews?' Andra . . . McAndrews?"

"First off," Joseph said, "his name probably wasn't McAndrews to begin with, and second, if you were dying, do you really think you'd try and say, 'Luciano'? I know I wouldn't."

"You might if I was around."

The second car was right where Skye had informed Laika it would be. They transferred their bags from one car trunk to the other, locked the keys to the first car in its trunk, and headed west on Route 78 again. "I think the leg room in this one is worse than the Chevy," Joseph said.

"Stop complaining," Laika replied. "We may have a bigger problem."

"I spotted it," Tony said. "It was with us when we got on 78. When we stopped, it pulled over. Further on, it picked us up again after we switched cars."

"What do you want to do, Laika?" Joseph asked.

"We can't lose them here. Let's get off at the next exit and get back on right away, as if we got off by accident. If they follow us, we'll know for sure."

"Then confront them?" Tony asked.

"First, let's see if we're just being paranoid."

The next exit was four miles ahead, and when they got off, the van followed them. But when they looped right back on, the van turned onto a state road and disappeared. "Feel better?" Joseph asked.

"Much," said Laika.

A
half mile behind the three agents' car, the driver of a 1995 Ford Taurus spoke into a cell phone. "I've got them again," he said. "We better stay further back from now on. They made us too quickly that time."

Tony, Laika, and Joseph did not notice the car following them, nor did they notice the six changes of vehicles behind them that occurred over the next day and a half. When they left their motel on the outskirts of Indianapolis the following morning, the driver who had watched their room all night from his car made another call for the next pickup. The surveillance they were under was handled professionally and systematically.

T
hey crossed the state line into Missouri in the late morning. "We're here, Laika," said Joseph, who was now driving. Laika ignored him, continuing to look out the window. "La-
ee
-ka?" Joseph went on in a singsong voice. "Did you
hear
me? We're in Mis-
sour
-i, and you know what Mis-
sour
-i is?"

"What?" Tony could see a smile creeping onto her face.

"The Show Me State," said Joseph. "So show me. . . ."

"Show
us
," Tony corrected.

Laika gave a small laugh and picked up her dossier from the floor. "You two, I swear, you're like a couple of kids. Okay, okay. Let me read it first."

Although Tony glanced back over the seat several times, he could not make out any of the small type on the four-page directive. Finally Laika looked up at him as if to caution him to wait, and he gave a sheepish grin and faced the road again. After a few more minutes, she spoke.

"We're going out to Arizona to investigate a mummy that's been found there."

"A mummy?" Joseph said, with more than a touch of sarcasm. "And no doubt the archaeologist who found it is suggesting that its discovery proves a link between North America and Egypt via ancient astronauts."

"An archaeologist didn't find this one—a hiker did."

"So what's the big deal?" Tony asked.

"The big deal is that the hiker who found the mummy had eaten lunch with him just two days before."

"Whoa," Joseph said. "Are you saying that the mummy wasn't old?"

"Brand spanking new. The mummy's name was Philip Lynch, and he was backpacking alone through the high desert."

"The Four Corners area," Joseph said.

"So where'd he find him?" asked Tony.

"Just a few miles south of the Navajo reservation, off a dirt road. Nearest town of any size is Joseph City."

"Never heard of it," Joseph said.

"No reason you should have," said Laika, flipping through the dossier. "It's hardly a metropolis. Anyway, the hiker met Philip Lynch in Winslow at a cafe; they ate together and chatted enough to exchange names. Turned out they were both going to the same area—up near the border of the reservation, near Louis Well. Indian roads, mostly, dirt or gravel, and both intended to take trails off of them."

"What's the difference between a trail and a dirt road?" Tony asked.

"You'll have to ask the hikers that. But two days after they meet, the hiker comes across Philip Lynch. At least, he
thinks
it's Lynch—the mummy is wearing Lynch's shirt, shorts, and hiking boots, and carrying Lynch's backpack. Though how a mummy got into all this is beyond the hiker. He gets back to civilization, gets the police, and they pick up the body and get it ID'd."

"How?" asked Tony.

"There's enough left of the fingerprints, and Lynch had conveniently left a set with a Flagstaff backpacking club. Apparently it's par for the course when they go into the back country alone."

"You have the medical examiner's report?" Joseph asked.

"Yes. The gist of it is that the tissues are completely dried out. Leached. Not a drop of moisture in the body."

Tony rested an arm on the seat back. "Could he have been burned somehow?"

"No. Not a trace of ash. And his clothes weren't burned, remember."

"Well, what about spontaneous combustion?"

Joseph snorted. "Spontaneous
human
combustion. SHC. It's a crock, Tony. Bodies don't bum by themselves. There always has to be an external heat source, since the human body's mostly water. For the body to burn, that water has to be vaporized away first, and it can't happen from the inside."

"Carl Sagan was wrong," Tony said.

"About what?"

"Life after death. Reincarnation in particular. He came back in you, Joseph."

"I can think of no higher compliment, Tony. But I have to decline the honor. Sagan would never have been swept away by the Holberg case and this whole prisoner thing the way I've been. But hell, we're off the subject. Was there any heat source near the body, Laika? Anything that might have . . . dried him out?"

"Just the sun," said Laika. "But whatever dried the hiker worked a lot faster than that."

"Did the M.E. have any conclusion?" Tony asked.

"No. Apparently he doesn't want to believe this is really Lynch's body. He has 'hoax possible' in his notes. Still, the fingerprints. . . ."

"That's how it strikes me." Joseph suddenly seemed to think of something. "What about blood? Any trace of it, or did the
chupacabras
get that, too?"

Laika's face clouded for a moment, then brightened as she chuckled. "Oh, the Mexican goat-suckers. Well, if it was them, they're pretty picky. All the blood solids were present, but no liquid at all."

"Stranger and stranger," Tony said. "That's one selective phenomenon. Can we rule out Joseph's vaporization?"

"We can't rule anything out," Laika said, "until we investigate ourselves. And even then, who knows? There's something else, too. Skye has it almost as a footnote, doesn't want us to investigate it specifically, but only if we suspect some connection. . . ." She seemed hesitant to continue.

Tony prodded her. "And that is?"

"Between Winslow and Joseph City," she went on, "around the same time as the discovery of the corpse three days ago—and only several miles away from where it was found—someone made a huge design in a sandy area near the main highway, Route 40. It's a fairly well-traveled road, but no one noticed any lights or anything else the night before it appeared, or saw anyone or anything in the area the day before."