The Burning

On the desk was a volume of the unexpurgated memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. He'd known, of course, that presidents' memoirs and diaries were sanitized, their words edited and bowdlerized for public consumption, ostensibly for reasons of 'national security,' but he'd been surprised to learn that he'd needed top top secret clearance in order to view a manuscript so old. What in God's name, he'd wondered, could possibly be in there?

He'd found out quickly enough. The drunken old bastard had written down far more than he should have, had spilled the beans about a brutal massacre that had occurred in the Utah territory in which scores of innocent civilians had been killed by U.S. troops for no apparent reason. The president had gotten involved after the fact, directing the cover-up like a military operation, a tactic so successful that no mention of it had ever been made anywhere by anyone involved-except here. But Grant was maddeningly vague about the location of the slaughter or the ostensible reason it had occurred.

Ordinarily, the cover-up was worse than the crime. But in this case, that was obviously not so.

'/ most regret the incidents in emulation,' Grant wrote.

/ have no means of knowing how news of the Massacre could have reached the ears of others, but it is plain to me that it has. My emissaries tell me that it is impossible to judge how many have been killed in these like-minded attacks, and though the victims be heathens and infidels, killing without cause is ever wrong.

Heathens and infidels.

It was the only clue Rossiter had as to the identity of the victims, and since vast sections of the nation were at that time uninhabited by Christians or Europeans, particularly in the West, it didn't exactly narrow down the field.

He was not one to scoff at curses and ghosts and retribution from beyond the grave, not after what he'd seen, not after Wolf Canyon. And he could understand why Grant might be targeted, why his tomb might be desecrated and his body defiled. It tied in as well with all those Civil War dead who'd been disinterred and tossed about Arlington National Cemetery. Even the White House might be fair game for vindictive spirits out to avenge a massacre.

But how did that relate to the other unexplained incidents that were happening all over the country?

The latest was at Mount Rushmore, where twin lines had been carved on the faces of the presidents, as though a giant with a switchblade had slashed twice across the stone.

Or a train had driven sideways across the mountain.

For that was the first thing he thought when he saw the photos: train tracks. Although since that was all he'd been thinking about for the past three days, such an interpretation was probably to be expected.

Grant's head wasn't carved on Rushmore, though. So what was the connection?

And what was the significance of trains in all this?

Everything was confusing; nothing quite fit together. He was already taking heat from all the president's men for not putting this mystery to rest. The leader of the free world needed to be able to focus on a whole range of important issues that were coming to a head, the chief of staff said. But instead he was obsessing over the attack on the White House to the virtual exclusion of everything else.

As well he should, Rossiter thought.

He pressed a key on his desktop PC and the image of a train, generated from data extracted from damage to the White House and analyses of shatter patterns, appeared on-screen. The president was right. Whatever had crashed through the building may have been invisible, but it was definitely a locomotive. Rossiter pressed another key and the angle shifted, offering a three-dimensional view of the CGI train. He'd contacted railroad experts from all over the country, hoping someone would be able to identify the engine, assuming they would recognize it as one that had been in use during Grant's tenure, between 1869 and 1877. But either the computer model was flawed or the information it had been fed was contradictory, because no one recognized it. The picture looked like a typical train to him, but he was assured by a whole host of scholars and railroad professionals that it did not resemble any known locomotive.

Rossiter found that troubling.

The press had been successfully kept away from Arlington and Grant's Tomb, and were buying the cover story about the White House, but reporters were all over Mount Rushmore, and it was probably only a matter of time before the lid blew off everything and he found himself hip-deep in dog shit.

News was starting to come in from a variety of sources, and he had a whole team of agents sifting through information both new and old, trying to find connections and correlations. A lot of it was useless and had no bearing on anything, but some of it was pertinent to the investigation and he wanted to make sure nothing was overlooked. There was, for example, a report that some sort of phantom train had appeared in Zion, Canyonlands or one of those other Utah national parks. That was something that called for further investigation.

It had to be something that bore a grudge against the United States, he thought, because it was targeting not just relics from the Civil War era but buildings and land owned collectively by everyone in the country, like national parks. Whatever it was, it was not after a specific person or place; it was attacking the most potent symbols of the entire nation.

The screen on his monitor suddenly turned red, the picture disappearing, and a loud shrill beeping issued from the speakers.

There'd been an attack on the White House.

The instant his brain recognized the thought and realized what was happening, a live camera shot of the White House appeared. He felt as though he'd been punched in the gut. A huge gaping hole, almost as high as the building itself, had been punched in the structure, nearly cleaving it in half, and chunks of debris from the sides of the opening continued to be knocked out and thrown forward as if some great invisible force was tunneling through the building.

A train.

He knew it without question.

The White House was the most heavily secured and monitored building on the planet, so at the click of a mouse he could access literally dozens of hidden cameras located in each and every office, gallery, library and bedroom. But this situation was a first-nothing even remotely comparable had ever happened before- and without consulting a two-hundred-page instruction manual, he did not know how to call up the views from specific rooms, so Rossiter palmed his mouse and hurriedly clicked from one camera to another, scrolling through the progressive scenes, trying to catch up to the train. A program designed by some computer whiz specifically for a situation like this sorted the shots by order of incident, so the first section of the building hit was followed by the next affected area and the next and the next, allowing him to chart the progress of the intruder.

Rossiter clicked as fast as he could. All of this was being recorded, but he was watching it in real time and he did not want to miss a second of it as it happened, wanted to see exactly what occurred when it occurred. A microphone from somewhere in the White House captured ambient sound that did not quite match the scenes on his monitor, loud crashes and screaming that were a second or two off and made the video appear dubbed, like a foreign film.

He found the head of the invisible train. It was moving much more slowly than he expected, and he assumed that was because it was pulling to a stop. It crashed through a small office, shattering furniture and light fixtures, people leaping away in front of its unseen mass. One man tripped over a chair and was gruesomely crushed, his body folding in the middle and then splitting open as wheels with the weight of a locomotive behind them cut him in half, blood not merely gushing but shooting out and splattering all over the walls of the room.

There was no way this could be hushed up or hidden. Photos of the White House were going to be on the front page of every newspaper all over the world, video running 24-7 on CNN, Fox and every other news channel on the planet.

But that wasn't his concern. There were teams of people to deal with the press and control the spin. He needed to focus on the facts, not the fallout.

Even as he thought that, though, he couldn't help reflecting that after this there would be universal interest in potential threats from paranormal phenomena and a sudden urgent need for experts in the field, for people who had the ability and the knowledge to combat psychic and supernatural threats.