and smoke came out of the sides of his mouth. It didn’t hurt, but he thought they must be killing him and he struggled, thrusting himself up, trying to somehow expel either of the things that were doing their work inside him.
Laughter came, high, quick, unmistakable for what it was.
And then there was something—yes, plans. He saw plans. Now they came into clearer focus: pages and pages of reports, of e-mails, of orders. I’m downloading, he thought. He was seeing every report he’d read over the years, every plan he’d examined, every specification he’d approved.
He thought they were looking for something in his mind, but he could not follow the pattern of the search. He’d overseen a lot of construction in his career, most of it innocuous, but not all, and they were soon in his memories of work done at the Cheyenne Mountain facility, and that was very secret.
Stifling heat was what woke him, a great wave of sweating misery drawing him out of what felt like death itself, a sleep so deep that it had no door.
What had just happened?
He crouched in the humming silence, feeling the pressure of the air-conditioning against his back. Then he stood up, went into the head, and stared at himself in the mirror. Hollow-eyed, haunted man.
His mouth tasted of something toasted and sour. Burnt vomit.
He opened the medicine cabinet and found some mouthwash, swilled it, and spit it—and watched in loathing as hundreds of writhing black threads went swarming down the drain. He spit again, a mass of them, ferociously alive, squirming and struggling, making a sound like spaghetti being poured from a pot.
He cried out—and then saw that the sink was clean and the mouthwash still in the cabinet. He was dreaming, that was what was going on here. He started to feel relief—but then noticed that his billet was thick with tobacco smoke, and he did not smoke, he loathed smoking.
He sat down on the side of his bed. The smoke seemed real, but maybe it wasn’t, maybe he was still in the nightmare. Or maybe somebody nearby was smoking, and the odor was being carried into his room. It was possible, of course. In just the short time they’d been in occupation, it had become obvious that the place had been constructed out of cut corners.
The smell was fading and he was beginning to feel a little better. He tried to think back on what just happened, and see if there had been some pattern in what had been looked at in his mind.
When he tried to inventory the flashes of memory, though, he found something odd. They really were not very important, just the debris of his years as a military executive. Of course, some of them were secret, such as the floor plan of the Cheyenne Mountain facility, but they were easily obtainable without revealing to a senior officer like him that they were of interest.
What was odd was the curious feeling that it was something other than the information that was important. He looked down at his own hands—craggy now, once as soft as a surgeon’s. He’d never flown in combat, but he’d read that great aces like Albert Ball and Bubi Hartmann had such hands.
Hands reveal people, he’d always thought that, and he wondered now why this thought was even passing through his mind. But as soon as he did ask himself the question, he knew.
He almost cried out, then he felt a gnarled agony in his gut and understood that his soul had not been stolen from him, but rather that it had been raped.
And he knew that his loves and his secrets had been turned inside out, that his most private places had been seen, that what he was had been violated.
It wasn’t a nightmare. They’d been here, and they hadn’t been looking at floor plans. They’d made a map of his naked soul. His lips twisted, he sucked breath, forced back the screams. This was violation at its deepest, its most profound, violation of the secrets of the sandbox and the playground and the blushing first love, of the sweaty experiments, the discovery of girls and the long descent of his wife, and his losses, so precious to him, mocked and tossed aside by snake-faced monsters.
He had been evaluated and measured by somebody so darkly evil that their most neutral touch was a corrosive horror.
He thought, It’s a negative civilization, a whole world ancient in its days, that has become corruption.
And it had work for him to do.
NINE
DECEMBER 8
HUNTER’S NIGHT
WHEN MARTIN HEARD BELLS, HE leaped off the cot in horror, thinking that the disks had come again. It took another moment for him to become aware that sunlight was slanting in the barred window of the little cell. Despite everything, he had been asleep.
The bells were being rung over at Third Street Methodist, bells that Martin had been responsible for ringing just a few nights ago. And now here he was in this hideous situation, and with no idea why this had happened to him. Somebody in the government had done this, but who? And why ever would anybody consider an archaeologist dangerous?
He had thought all night about it, reviewing his published work, his experiences in the pyramid and in the White House, and he had reached the tentative conclusion that there must be something in his knowledge of the past that made him potentially dangerous. So dangerous that, even when their world was collapsing around their ears, they would still reach out for him.
It wouldn’t be supposition. They would know.
His thought was that the lenses and the disks represented some sort of machine. He knew that a great human civilization had fallen in about 12,000 B.C. It had not been a technological civilization like ours, but it had possessed profound scientific knowledge, including—and especially—a science of the soul. It had also left a very precise prediction, that the present age would end on December 21, 2012. The Maya, possessing fragmentary knowledge from this far more ancient culture, had integrated this date into their system of calendars. In fact, they had started with that date and worked backward, that’s how important they believed—or knew—that it was.
They had gotten the date, he felt sure, from a city that was now deep underwater off the coast of Cuba. This immense metropolis was probably the capital of what legend called Atlantis, and there was something quite strange about it. What was strange was that the British Navy had been guarding the site, and the Canadian archaeological group who had made the discovery ten years ago had been prevented from returning.
It should have been a scandal, but the profession was just as happy that the discovery was being suppressed. Its revelation would overturn a hundred years of theory and wreck dozens of important careers.
Martin had lobbied various institutes to open research in the area. He’d even published a letter condemning the military action in the Archaeological Record. He’d demanded explanations.
They weren’t trying to kill him because they thought he was to blame for the disaster. They were trying to kill him because he was one of the few people in the world who had any chance of understanding it.
The bell stopped with a suddenness that seemed almost to shudder the dew that clung to the three yellow leaves he could see through his bars. He saw cars go past, heading for the church. They were gathering there, then they would come for him.
He felt like a rat, exactly like a rat, except that a rat only wanted to escape, and he was tormented by thoughts of his family. All night, he’d suffered over Lindy and his poor little Winnie who had been limping, and his lost son.
The things that had appeared behind the wanderers after dark—he thought that they must be a sort of cleanup crew, destroying the stragglers. That mangled boy had been their work.
Was Trevor, also, a mangled boy?
Sounds came from the office, a voice raised, then dropping. Bobby’s voice. Sounded angry. Then he blustered in. “Fifty-six to fifteen,” he said, not looking at Martin.
“Hey,” Martin said.
“I have no idea how to hang anybody.”
“Use your pistol.”
