The Burning

'Yes, sir, Mr. President.'

It was all Rossiter could do not to smile. In one quick trip to the White House, his fortunes had completely reversed themselves and instead of languishing forgotten in the bowels of the FBI building, he was being given special assignments and unprecedented authority by the president of the United States. His career was not only back on track, it was further along than he had ever expected it to be.

Assuming he got results.

The pressure was on him now. He had been granted the opportunity of a lifetime, but it was up to him what he did with it. If he fucked this up, he'd be lucky to be scrubbing toilets.

The president focused his gaze on Rossiter. 'That was a ghost train, too. At Arlington. No one's ever going to admit that publicly, and everyone's afraid to admit it even to me, but we know that's the case, and obviously these two are connected. What I want to know is, why is this happening, what's causing it, and can we expect more such attacks in the future?''

I'll find out,' Rossiter said confidently.

'I want daily reports.'

'We'll set up a morning briefing,' the chief of staff said. 'But right now, Mr. President-'

'I know, I know.' He nodded at Rossiter. 'Stay as long as you need, be as thorough as you can, do whatever you need to do, but solve this.'

'Yes, sir.'

The others left, leaving Rossiter alone with Horn.

The director was scowling, and Rossiter didn't want to piss him off any more than he doubtlessly was already, but he needed to get to work and fast. 'Do you think I could have a few agents to help me with legwork?' 'You're the boss,' the director said sarcastically.

Great.

'I'm going to oversee the situation here, talk to some of these military investigators, see what I can come up with on my own. After that, I want to take a look at Grant's Tomb.'

'Be very careful,' Horn said. 'You're balanced over quicksand here.'

It sounded like a warning rather than a threat, and Rossiter decided to take it that way. 'I will, sir. And thanks.'

Defiled?

That was putting it mildly.

He had seen the photos and the video on his laptop on the way over, so Rossiter had been expecting severe damage, but he was still taken aback by the savagery of the desecration. It seemed not only much more immediate in person but much more extensive.

True, Grant's wife had been left alone, but the sarcophagus of the president had been smashed open, and the body inside thrown onto the stone floor and ripped apart, arms and legs dispersed to the four corners of the tomb, the formally dressed torso beaten as though it were an old rug. Small fragments were all that remained of the skull, and where the head should have been, there were only oddly shaped pieces of leathery skin and muscle, resting with clumps of wiry hair and teeth on a bed of fine crumbling powder next to the shattered bronze busts that had been positioned around the interior of the crypt.

The marble walls of the oversized room had been defaced but not with spray paint or marking pens or any of the usual suspects. No, this graffiti had been chiseled onto the stone, and on the pendentives below the dome, the perpetrators had carved serial pictures of a single train.

Rossiter focused on those four images. There were other carved pictures as well-people, mountains, abstract shapes-but it was the train that interested him because he had the feeling the artist was trying to impart a message with it, that the pictures were meant to tell them something about what was going on.

He just couldn't figure out what the hell it was.

The carvings were detailed, though. He had to give the perp that. He only hoped they were detailed enough, because one of the first things he intended to do was transmit photos to someone who knew trains, with the hope that if the make and model of the vehicle could be identified, they might learn something about the perpetrator or even the locomotives that had crashed into the cemetery and the White House.

A long shot, he knew, but with no prints or physical evidence so far, they didn't have much else to go on.

Already, in his mind, he was lining up intelligence sources for information about ghost trains, poltergeist phenomena and even military PK experiments. While he was at it, he needed to consult with experts on American literature and folktales to see if there were any regional stories about invisible locomotives. Sometimes legends were grown from a grain of truth.

One of the older members of the forensics team, a bald, fat guy whose name Rossiter had already forgotten, stood up and looked at him with an expression somewhere between awe and horror on his face. 'Can you believe that that used to be the president of the United States?' he said, motioning toward the fragments of skull on the floor. 'That was General Grant? All these years, he's been lying here intact and now, poof, he's gone. We're witnessing history. This is the end of an era.'

Rossiter eyed him coldly. 'Yeah,' he said. 'Now get back to work.'

Twenty

Milner, Wyoming

'BRIGIT'S WELL.'

It was the name on the blackboard marquee outside the coffeehouse that caused Dennis to stop in Milner. And stay. The speed limit through the center of town was twenty-five miles an hour, and he'd slowed to that as he passed by the local shops and businesses. The first stoplight turned yellow as he approached, and assuming this was a speed trap and a cop was hiding nearby for the express purpose of ticketing drivers with out-of-state plates, Dennis stopped. As he waited, he looked to his right and saw the coffeehouse with its freestanding blackboard.

And he turned right at the corner and pulled into the first open parking space he found.

He'd arrived in town on Monday and Brigit's Well wasn't scheduled to play until Saturday night, but he'd been acting on gut instinct this whole trip, spurred by the undoubtedly false premise that there was a reason behind his journey, that he was being led across country for a specific purpose-and if anything was a sign, this was it.

Also, he had to admit, he was excited to hear Brig-it's Well again. Finding the duo out here in the middle of nowhere was like seeing an old friend amid a gathering of strangers, and there was something comforting about that. He wondered if they had a new CD out. He hoped so, although even if they didn't, he'd buy another copy of the old one again, for traveling music.

Just the thought cheered him up, and while Milner was not exactly the garden spot of the Western world, he was happy to be here.

While he told himself that he was driving aimlessly across country, seeing America, California had always been his unspoken destination. He and Cathy had always wanted to see Los Angeles, and from the outset his vague plans for the future had always involved finding a job and starting a new life in Southern California. Yet for some reason, as he'd crossed from Missouri to Nebraska, he'd moved north instead of south, heading not toward Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona but through Nebraska into Wyoming.

Until he'd landed here.

The strange and unbelievably realistic dreams he'd been having ever since leaving home had intensified as soon as he'd started heading north, and for a while he'd been afraid to fall asleep at night. If he hadn't been even more afraid of drugs, he would have bought some No-Doz or other over-the-counter medication to ward off sleep, but instead he simply toughed it out. Certain cities seemed to be flash points, where the nightmares came hard and heavy. In Kearney, Nebraska, he'd been tormented by visions of bloody skeletons working hard on some unseen project, swinging hammers in the bright morning sun while he lay gut-shot behind them on the sand, trying to hold in his spilling intestines with his fingers. In Brubeck, Wyoming, he dreamed he was floating paralyzed down a river while on the shore cowboys with long knives cut up piles of stacked bodies, saving noses and ears for souvenirs, stringing them on long leather cords that hung from their belts. He wondered if he got out a map of the United States, put marks on all of the places where he'd had these terrible dreams and then connected the dots, whether