Tales From the Black Chamber (27 page)

“You going to quit?”

“Ha. We don't quit, Anne. I may take a powder from the front lines for a while, you know?”

“I do. I was thinking about taking a powder altogether.”

“Don't do that. You've been the key to this whole thing. Without you, we wouldn't even know that thing is out there …” He finally saw the sadness and fear in Anne's eyes. “Hey, on a lighter note, did you see the highlights of that Capitals game last night? God, Ovechkin is unbelievable.”

They chatted on innocuous topics for a while, until they got to the main office. When they walked through the double doors, only Mike Himmelberg was at his desk.

“Hey, slackers, you must have some awesome Posturepedics to sleep in so late. Or is it the Sleep Number bed?” Mike asked.

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?”