The Keepers of the Library (3 page)

“No,” the kid said, slipping away. “You tell him.”

“Phillip?” Will called after him, but he was gone. “What award?”

“His school had all the kids write about what February 9, 2027 means to them. All the essays were entered in a national contest. Phillip won first prize.”

“You’re kidding!”

“It’s online, Dad. It’s everywhere,” Laura said.

“I even reprinted it in my NetZine,” Greg added.

Nancy had a copy in her purse. “I’ll leave it on the bedside table,” she said. “Read it when we leave. You’re in it.”

“Am I?” Will said, unable to prevent a soft, shuddering run of sobs.

N
ancy was gushing. “You look so much
better!”

Will was on a regular hospital floor, disconnected from all but a small IV port in his hand.

“I’m feeling better,” he said.

She’d found him walking the halls in sweatpants and polo shirt, doing a circuit of the ward. Every so often he would stop, check his pulse, grunt, and carry on.

“Breathing okay?” she asked.

He was. He was also pain-free except for his bruised, needle-punctured arms.

They made their way to his room, where he claimed the chair, she, the bed.

“They’re doing an exercise test tomorrow,” he said. “If it’s good, they’re sending me home.”

She nodded enthusiastically, then repeated the word with emphasis. “Home.”

He knew what she meant.

“I hate it in Virginia. You know how I feel.”

“I can’t leave you on your own.”

“I don’t
want
to be alone.”

“Will, don’t you think that your …” She looked
like she couldn’t bear saying heart attack. “… your problem changes things?”

“I agree,” he said. “I do think it changes things. I think you should retire. This was our tipping point. I want you and Phillip with me. Down here. Phillip can go to school in Panama City. Or not go to school at all as far as I’m concerned.”

She closed her eyes in a show of anger and frustration. He expected her to come out fighting, but when she reopened them, it was apparent she’d reined herself in. She spoke evenly with supreme control. “We agreed not to let the Horizon change the way we live. Whatever happens, we’ll be together as a family next February 9, and we’ll be laughing or crying together, maybe a little of both. Until then, Phillip needs to stay in school, I need to keep working, and you need to keep fishing.”

It wasn’t what he wanted to hear but it wasn’t surprising. Nancy was tough. That’s what he liked about her even when it worked against him. “Then at least spend a month in Florida until I’m all better. Then we can go back to Plan A.”

“I can’t.”

He lost his cool. “Why the hell not? Is it the ‘thing’ that Greg said you were busy with? Tell me how this ‘thing’ is more important than me.”

She sighed. “It’s not more important than you. It’s a new case. A big one. I’m up to my keister in it.”

“Christ, Nance, you’re so high on the totem pole, all you need to do is take names and bust asses these days.”

“You’d think. I almost feel like a field agent on this one.”

He saw the anxiety in her face. It was paradoxically calming. “You want to tell me what it is?”

“Postcards,” she said. “We’ve got more postcards.”

What little pink there was in his cheeks blanched out. “You’re not serious!”

“I’m completely serious.”

“Where? How many? Who’s got the capability or the motive? Why the hell now?”

She motioned for him to slow down and emphatically told him she’d only talk about it if he promised he wouldn’t work himself into a state. He reached for a water bottle and agreed.

“To be honest, I thought you’d have seen it on TV or the Net the last couple of days or heard about it from someone in the hospital. I’m glad it’s coming from me.”

“You know I hate the news, and why would anyone have told me?”

“Because you’re Will Piper?”

He saw her point.

“It started two weeks ago. Five postcards, all postmarked on the same day. It’s the same pattern as seventeen years ago, a printed name and address on the front with no return address. On the back there’s a hand-drawn picture of a coffin and a date. And like before, each recipient dies on the date.”

“Only five?”

“It’s fifteen now.”

“Nevada postmarks?”

“New York City.”

“Let me guess. Different causes of death, different MOs, maybe not even homicides at all,” Will said automatically.

“Right.”

“And no linkers or patterns.”

“It’s a little different from 2009. All the recipients are Chinese.”

“What?” he said in amazement.

“The first ten lived mostly in Chinatown in New York. The five newest ones are in San Francisco.”

“Who’s working it?”

“New York, San Francisco. We’ve got good people assigned. Problem is, it’s got my name all over it because of past history. The Director called me in on the first day and told he was cutting through six layers and putting me directly in charge. I’m briefing him personally morning and night. He wanted me in New York, but because of your illness he let me work it from Miami.”

“Other than the curiosity factor which, believe me, I’m not discounting, why the hysteria? It’s obvious it’s a Shackleton-type situation. Some jackass from Area 51 is leaking names again.”

“It’s because of the China angle. The Chinese government and their Ministry of State Security is all over it. Even though the postcard victims are mostly American citizens the Chinese government is highly agitated. They also think it’s coming from Area 51. They think it’s an act of provocation. China’s the second largest economy in the world. We’re declining, they’re closing fast. They’re convinced we’re screwing with them, playing psych-out games. They’ve let it be known through diplomatic channels that unless we find the leaker they’re not going to roll over our debt payments. They call a few hundred billion in notes, and bad things are going to happen here.”

Will signaled he wanted to switch places, to lie down. He sprawled out and said, “It’s so damned juvenile. The world may end in a year, and we’re playing these stupid games right to the last day.”

She nodded wearily. “What can I say? It’s official US policy to maintain the status quo.”

“While NASA and every astronomer in the world
keeps looking for the big one with our name on it,” he said. His eyes drooped.

She sat beside him and stroked his hair. “You look tired, honey.”

“I’ll do it,” he said.

“Do what?”

“I’ll go back to Virginia with you. Until I’m better. Okay?”

“I love you,” she said.

His lip quivered ever so slightly. “Right back at you.”

“And I forgive you.”

He had a mental shot of Meagan in her little bikini and wished he could remember how much forgiveness he needed.

R
oger Kenney rode Elevator One six floors up to ground level and left the chilled air of the Truman Building for the sandy heat of the Nevada desert. It was only a short walk to Rear Admiral Duncan Sage’s office in the Admin Building but he sweated out the armpits of his fatigues by the time he was back in air-conditioning.

Admiral Sage kept him waiting, which was nothing new. Kenney always suspected the waiting game was a display of theater and power on Sage’s part, a brittle show of dominance. It wasn’t as if the base commander at Area 51 was the busiest officer in the US military these past several years. He wasn’t the only landlocked admiral in the US Navy, but he was certainly the only one stuck on an ancient dry lake bed in the desolate Nevada desert. It was only an accident of history that put the base under naval jurisdiction back when it was established in 1947, and Sage was the last in the line of ducks out of water.

Kenney thoroughly and unreservedly hated Sage’s guts. He considered him to be a pompous and insecure son of a bitch whom he wouldn’t trust to shine his shoes in civilian life. To his confidants in the ranks of the watchers, the roster of majors who reported directly to him, Kenney seditiously referred to Sage as the banana slug after the creature so territorial and guarded that it bites off its own penis inside the female to prevent others from depositing sperm. He couldn’t recall how he knew about the mating habits of banana slugs, but it was the typical kind of factoid he was always picking up and tossing around to the amusement of the men he commanded.

Sage’s new PA, a civilian who, rumor had it, had been a showgirl on the Strip, moved papers around her desk in a transparent attempt to appear busy. All service branches of the military had been operating under a mandate to be essentially paperless by 2025, but out-of-the-way bases like Area 51 weren’t visited by auditors and it wasn’t clear that Sage could operate all his productivity devices.

Kenney sat stiffly, watching the PA. She was reasonably ripe and attractive and wasn’t totally out of his age range. He stared intently at her sweater with radium eyes and concluded he wanted to make a move on her. Unless the old banana slug had already bitten off his penis inside her.

“Anyone in with him?” Kenney finally asked her.

“He’s on a conference call, Colonel,” she said. It sounded like a lie, but there was nothing he could do about it. He settled into a game. He was self-assured about his own attributes: dark, cocky features, lean, strong, and fast. He stared hard at her and tried to use mind control to make her look up. When she did, he’d hit her with a devilish little smile. Fifteen fidgety minutes passed. He needed to get back to the
Truman Building. For the first time in his five years as head of watchers Kenney actually had some serious work to do.

Groom Lake Building 34, the Truman Building, had become a shadow of its former self. At its high-water mark, over 700 government employees made the daily commute by charter plane from Las Vegas to the remote desert base. Now there were 134, 16 of them watchers.

After the existence of the Library became a matter of public knowledge gawkers and the press gathered at the security fences at McCarran Airport focusing binoculars and long lenses on commuters. Some Area 51 employees were followed from the parking lots back to their homes in Las Vegas and surrounding suburbs, prompting the security force at Area 51, known not so affectionately as the watchers, to go into overdrive, monitoring employees to make sure they could not and did not leak highly classified information on birth and death dates from the Library database.

The watchers had been knocked on their heels by the Shackleton affair and its aftermath. Their chief, Malcolm Frazier, had been killed by Will Piper’s wife in an FBI shoot-out at the home of a dissident Area 51 retiree. Will Piper had gone to the press and blown the lid off of sixty-four years of maniacal secrecy. They had been disgraced, plain and simple. With an acting chief on board, an outsider dropped in by a Pentagon in crisis mode, they had been relegated to calling the Las Vegas police to deal with paparazzi chasing their analysts around Sin City.

But perhaps no one at Area 51 had been as affected as Roger Kenney. When the shit hit the fan, Kenney had only been a watcher for five years, but he’d already caught the eye of Malcolm Frazier in a big way.
Frazier had latched onto the gung ho kid and put him on a promotion fast track. He’d given him plum assignments and habitually singled him out to the rest of the watchers for his accomplishments. Whenever Frazier had pulled a graveyard shift, he’d made sure that Kenney was there too and the two of them would drink coffee and trade dirty jokes all night long.

And Kenney had loved the attention he’d gotten from the big boss. Frazier had been a stickler for regs and a general hard-ass, but he was a man’s man who had the reputation of supporting his subordinates to the max and being a mentor to a chosen few. When Frazier died Kenney had cried like a baby, and he was still crying days later when he was one of the pallbearers at the funeral.

In the aftermath of his death, Kenney fell into a black hole. The medical officer at the base ordered him to see the Groom Lake psychiatrist. Kenney, being a man who’d rather puke than practice introspection, had been a reluctant participant in the exercise. The day he abruptly ended his therapy sessions was the day the shrink was wondering out loud whether Malcolm Frazier hadn’t perhaps become something of a father figure to the young man.

“Tell me about
your
father, Roger,” the shrink had asked.

“Never knew the man, Doc. The guy was nothing more than a sperm donor if you know what I mean. My mother raised me solo.”

“I see. Do you think there might be a link between your grief over Colonel Frazier’s death and your fatherless childhood?”

Kenney had shifted uncomfortably as if ants had invaded his shorts, and he suddenly rose. “This is voluntary, right? These sessions of ours,” he asked.

“Beyond the initial consult, yes. Completely voluntary. I’ve already certified your fitness for duty.”

“Then I am so out of here.”

In time, Kenney returned to his sunny ways, the hysteria waned at the base and life at Area 51 returned to a semblance of normality. While politicians and the courts decided on the fate of Will Piper’s leaked database, analysts got back to their routine. There were still sixteen years to the Horizon, still work to be done, and the watchers were as vital to the effort as they ever were.

The buzzwords at Area 51 and the Pentagon had always been research, planning, and resource allocation. The CIA and the military had used the Library as a tool since the early fifties, when, after its discovery beneath the ruins of medieval Vectis Abbey, a deal was struck between Winston Churchill and Harry Truman for the Americans to take control of the asset.

The Library, all seven hundred thousand volumes, was flown by the US Air Force from England to Washington. A nuclear-proof vault was built under the Nevada desert. It took twenty years to digitize all the forward-looking material. Before digitization, the books were precious. Afterward, the Library became largely ceremonial, a symbol of the awesome power of Area 51.

One of the early tasks for the staff at Area 51, a motley group of eggheads, braniacs, and military overlords, was figuring out how to exploit the data. After all, the ancient hide-bound books only contained names, written in their native alphabets, and dates of birth and death. Without correlates, the data was useless. Thus began a multidecade quest for virtually every digital and analog database in the world,
birth records, phone records, bank, marital, utilities, employment records, land deeds, taxes, insurance data. North America was filled in first. Within twenty years Area 51 analysts had some form of address identifier for nearly 100 percent of the population. Europe followed suit. Asia, Africa, and South America took longer but the blank spaces on the globe got filled in eventually. Now, with 8 billion people in a world where virtually all personal data was digital, the picture was complete.