Prophet of Bones (33 page)

“Is that what you tell yourself?”

“It’s just a simple fact.”

“So you made the decision for all of us.”

“Somebody had to. And don’t get high and mighty with me. You didn’t even know who we were working for.”

“But you knew, didn’t you?”

“Of course I knew.” She laughed. “You misjudge me, Paul. You think I’m an archaeology student who became an Axiom asset? You’ve got it backward.”

“They killed him, you know. James.”

“He killed himself by staying.”

“Didn’t look like suicide to me. I was there.”

“It was unfortunate.”

“Unfortunate?”

“It’s what happens when you fight the system. You lose.”

“He was our friend. You worked side by side with him for months. How do you sleep at night?”

“I sleep just fine.”

“I can’t believe I fucked you.”

This time her smile grew. She pulled out a gun and pointed it at Paul’s face. “Careful now. That’s no way to talk to a lady.”

Paul looked around at the trees and the empty river, and he realized this had all been planned. The isolated location. Margaret and her gun. The whole thing had been a trap after all.

“Margaret,” Gavin said. He spoke softly, almost in a whisper. During the course of the conversation, Gavin had stepped away from Paul, so that he was standing off to the side.

When Paul glanced over, he saw that Gavin had a gun, a small silver pistol, pointed directly at Margaret’s head.

Margaret didn’t move. “What are you doing?” Her voice was flat and emotionless.

“It’s not supposed to happen like this,” Gavin said.

“This is the way it happens,” Margaret said. “You’re not going to shoot me.”

“We’re supposed to give him a choice.”

“You’re right. What do you choose, Paul?”

“With a gun to my head?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“I
still
can’t believe I fucked you.”

“Wrong answer. Sorry, Paul.”

Her finger began to flex on the trigger, and two shots rang out. She slumped to the ground, dead. A pool of blood spread out from her body while Gavin’s gun smoked in the dim light.

“Fuck,” Gavin said.

*   *   *

Gavin kicked her body into the river, and they watched it drift away, bobbing in the current. They climbed back up the ramp to the car and drove off. Paul guided Gavin to the hotel where Lillivati waited. There was no reason not to.

Gavin shifted into park and turned the car off. The yellow sign from the Days Inn shone through the windshield. They sat for a moment in the semidarkness, neither of them moving.

“Why’d you do that?” Paul asked.

“It had to be done. She would have killed you.”

“Why stop her?”

“It was the right thing to do.”

Behind them, semi trucks rolled by on the highway. The car windows vibrated with the rattle of their air brakes.

Eventually, softly, Gavin spoke again: “I knew your father. I should have told you.”

Paul turned to look at him but his face was hidden in the shadows. “It was a long time ago,” Gavin continued. “Just after you were born, in fact.”

“How did you know him?”

“We worked on related projects. We were colleagues, of a sort. We were friends.”

“Friends.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t remember you from the funeral.”

“No, by then your father had gone his own way. I hadn’t seen him for years by that point, though I heard about what happened. He deserved better than that.”

“Is that why you brought me on the dig to Flores?”

Gavin nodded. “I wish to hell I hadn’t.”

“Me, too.”

Gavin climbed out of the car.

Paul led him up to the motel room.

Lilli opened the door.

“This is Gavin,” Paul said. “He’s here to help us.”

Gavin shook her hand.

She looked at Paul. “How do you know we can trust him?”

Gavin looked at her but said nothing.

They stepped inside the motel room.

“We know,” Paul said.

37

Paul had lost the rain.

They drove south for days, sticking to side roads whenever they could, winding their way through small towns and mountain passes. They bit off their days in three-hundred-mile increments, crashing at cheap hotels for the night, paying in cash. They ate in diners and truck stops. They passed white clapboard chapels and parking-lot-ensconced megachurches—the biggest of which rivaled shopping malls in size and football stadiums in attendance. Billboards for the churches occasionally flanked the highways on both sides. One sign in particular jumped out at Paul, horrifying in its simplicity: a jet-black background on which three words were written in letters ten feet high:
HELL IS REAL.

As if there were any doubt.

Gavin talked as Paul drove. Lilli slept in the back while Gavin’s rental car ate up the miles.

Gavin had a plan. He doled it out in small chunks, a nightmare that kept getting worse.

“You think that will work?”

“I think it
can
work.”

Paul nodded. That was good enough. It was better than hopelessness.

Lillivati made a noise in the backseat, nursing her own nightmares as the car rolled on through the darkness.

On the fourth day, in the mountains, it began to rain. The rain came down hard, a midsummer monsoon, and the windshield wipers struggled to keep up.

Paul leaned forward, trying to see through the pouring rain. The water came down in buckets. Here and there, cars pulled to the side of the road or parked beneath overpasses. The mountain passes were narrow, and there wasn’t much room for error. Paul hadn’t seen rain like this since Flores.

Eventually, he gave in to the storm and took the next exit.

“Time for gas,” he said, though the tank was still half full. “Maybe grab some coffee.” He got no complaints.

He pulled into the station, climbed out, and started pumping gas. The overhead canopy kept him dry. Thirty-one dollars later the nozzle clicked.

He checked his wallet for cash—always cash—then eyed the rain for a moment, hesitating. It was cold in the mountain passes, and between him and the gas station door were a dozen yards of downpour. He turned his collar up against the chill, then sprinted across the wet pavement—and that’s when he noticed it.

He stopped. Halfway across.

The rain fell all around him, drenching him immediately.

He looked around. He reached out to touch the water falling from the sky.

The rain was a curtain. He touched it, reached his hand through it.

With one eye, he had no sense of depth. No sense of being
in
the rain. Even with the rain pouring down on him, there was no sense that he was a part of it.

He realized that he’d lost the rain all those months ago in Flores and hadn’t even known it until now.

Paul walked into the gas station and paid the bill in cash.

When they were on the road again, Gavin said, “You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

*   *   *

They arrived in Atlanta and got two hotel rooms by the airport. Planes descended in a steady, staggered formation, coming down over the five-story hotel where Paul had paid for a whole week—a dashed line of tin and aluminum slanting its way down from the sky to land with a distant squawk of rubber.

They got an early start the next morning, pulling out of the parking lot by ten
A.M.

Paul rolled the window down and stuck his hand out into the muggy air. It was already hot. As different from the raining mountain passes as a place could be. Heat was its own thing here, in Atlanta. Something you were made aware of as you stepped outside, a force that enveloped you. You opened the car door and it hit you like an oven blast. Sweat sprang to your brow.

They found a pay phone at a run-down convenience store a few blocks from the hotel. It might have been the last one in existence.

Gavin stepped out to make the call.

“You said we can trust him,” Lillivati said after Gavin had stepped away from the car. “Why is that, exactly?”

Paul watched Gavin squinting in the sun, punching the buttons on the ancient pay phone that jutted from the edge of the parking lot. Traffic rolled by behind him. Jets up above. People milled in and out of the convenience store’s parking lot. Atlanta was like this. On the move. Paul turned his head to glance at Lilli. They were like this, too.

“He was supposed to bring me in,” Paul said.

“Maybe that’s what he’s doing?”

Paul shook his head. “There were two of them when he came to get me.”

“So maybe this is part of the plan. A way to trick you into going where they want you. Maybe he’s only pretending.”

“He’s not pretending.”

“How can you be sure?”

“There were two of them when he came to get me, and the other one’s not alive anymore.”

She stared at Paul.

“Him,” Paul said to the question she didn’t ask. “He pulled the trigger.”

She glanced toward the pay phone.

A moment later, the car door opened and Gavin sank into the driver’s seat. He slammed the door closed and gunned the engine to life.

“I made the call,” he said, then shifted the car into reverse.

“What did he say?” Paul asked.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I got through to someone. The message should find its way to him. Now we wait for the phone to ring.”

“That’s our strategy?” Lilli asked.

“Calling it a ‘strategy’ is perhaps too kind,” Gavin said. “But a man in Martial’s position has enemies.”

“And the enemy of my enemy…” Paul said.

“Not a friend, no. Don’t ever confuse him with that. But he has a vested interest in helping us.”

*   *   *

That night they ate at an IHOP just outside the city. Lilli was on her second coffee before she brought up the call.

“So who is it, exactly, that we’re waiting to hear back from?”

“A congressman they mentioned by name. Lacefield.”

“You met him?”

“No. But his name came up. They said he was investigating Axiom, so I figured he was a good man to reach out to. I reached out. Now we wait for him to reach back.”

“What’s the endgame?”

“Exposure,” Gavin said. “Total exposure. It’s the only way we get out of this. We give Lacefield everything. The bone. Everything I’ve learned. All the secret experiments. That’s what I’m offering him.”

“Experiments?”

Gavin nodded.

“How does that help us?”

“We shine a bright enough light on this, and maybe we become too noticeable to disappear.”

“So we go to the authorities,” Lilli said.

“There are authorities, and there are authorities. You have to choose wisely.”

“And this Lacefield guy is going to help us?” Lilli asked.

“If he wants Martial bad enough,” Gavin said. He took a sip of his coffee. “It’s the only way out of this that I can see.”

The waitress came with their food.

“You mentioned experiments,” Paul said. “What kind of experiments are we talking about?”

Gavin toyed with his food. “I haven’t seen everything. I … don’t think I even scratched the surface, really. There are places I didn’t go. Whole parts of the facility that were off-limits. The things I did see made me not want to know more.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Things I wouldn’t have thought possible.”

“I’ve seen the impossible,” Paul said.

“Ah, Trieste, you mean,” Gavin said.

“Who?” Lilli asked.

“They take him along sometimes, I heard. On manhunts after dark.”

“So it has a name.”

Gavin nodded. “A name. It has that.”

Lilli pushed her plate away. Her meal half-eaten. “It?” she asked. “What do you mean, ‘it’?”

“It’s not the strangest thing I’ve seen there,” Gavin said.

“Then what is?”

Gavin moved his food around but wouldn’t look up from his plate.

“What is Trieste?” Lilli asked.

“I think he knows,” Gavin said, gesturing toward Paul with his fork.

“Let’s say I don’t.” Paul understood Gavin’s reluctance. To say it out loud seemed profane somehow. But Paul wouldn’t make it easier for him.

“What?” Lilli repeated.

“There are strange things on the compound. Some things part human.” Gavin’s face was grim. “Part not.”

Paul nodded. Lilli, for her part, looked at them like they were crazy.

“You can’t be serious.”

“The old man has a thing for hybrids,” Gavin said. “Of all kinds.”

Lilli stared at Paul in disbelief. “How is that even possible?”

“I’ve seen it,” Paul assured her. He held out his arm, still covered in bruises. “There was a bridge. I barely got away. It could have been a lot worse.”

“He crosses different species?” Lilli said.

“It’s not so hard,” Gavin said. “It happens in captivity all the time. Horses and donkeys, lions and tigers.”

“But why do it?” Lilli said.

Gavin shrugged. “Why does that man do anything? I don’t know. Maybe because there’s no one to tell him not to. Maybe because he’s crazy.”

There was a long silence at the table. “What is it like?” Lillivati asked softly.

“Trieste, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

Gavin’s eyes took on a faraway look, but he didn’t answer.

Paul answered for him: “It’s a monster.”

38

It took two days for the phone to ring.

Two days in the hotel. Gavin lay awake at night, picturing all the ways his plan could go wrong. When he slept, he dreamed of the river. The sound of gunshots. Margaret’s face.

It was a brief, anonymous call. Gavin’s cell rang as they were eating lunch at a fast-food place. “Write this down,” said the man on the line; then he spoke a number. “Call from a pay phone at two-thirty.” The line went dead.

Gavin hung up. He looked at Paul, who was sitting across the table from him. “That was it,” he said.

An hour later they turned into the convenience store’s parking lot and pulled up next to the pay phone. Gavin climbed out. Paul and Lilli waited in the car.

Gavin poured quarters into the metal phone, then punched in the numbers he’d written on a scrap piece of paper.

The phone rang. On the fifth ring, somebody picked it up.