Book of Souls

Chapter 38

The only thing moving slowly in Will’s life was the drip, drip, drip of the antibiotics flowing into his veins.

Lying in his bed at the New York Presbyterian Hospital on that Monday evening, he savored a rare period of solitude. From the moment the ambulances and police had arrived at Spence’s house in Henderson, he’d been inundated with doctors, nurses, cops, FBI agents, and an Air Ambulance crew of EMTs that talked his ear off all the way from Vegas to New York.

His hospital room had a killer view of the East River. If it were a condo, it would have been insanely pricey. But for the first time ever, he missed his one-bedroom shoebox because that was where his wife and son were.

This was a relative calm before the storm kicked up again. He’d had his sponge bath, administered by a tough little nurse at car-wash speed. He’d picked at his dinner tray and watched a few minutes of ESPN for normalcy. Nancy would be in shortly with a shirt and a sweater to put on for the TV cameras.

Outside his door, a cordon of FBI agents protected his room and secured access to his floor. Agents from the Department of Defense and the CIA were trying to get to him, and the Attorney General was engaged in internecine warfare with his angry counterparts at the Pentagon and Homeland Security. For the moment, the FBI wall was holding firm.

The world hadn’t been expecting the news that hit the streets, mailboxes, doorsteps and the Internet on a sleepy Sunday morning just before Halloween.

The headline in The Washington Post trumpeted a story that at first blush made people think the venerable newspaper was perpetrating a hoax:

US GOVERNMENT HAS VAST LIBRARY OF MEDIEVAL BOOKS WHICH PREDICT FUTURE BIRTHS AND DEATHS UP TO 2027; SECRET INSTALLATION AT AREA 51, NEVADA ESTABLISHED BY HARRY TRUMAN TO MINE DATA; SOURCE OF LIBRARY: A BRITISH MONASTERY; CONNECTIONS SEEN TO DOOMSDAY KILLER CASE.

by Greg Davis, Staff Reporter,

Washington Post Exclusive

The five-thousand-word story was not a hoax. It was rich in documentation and extensively quoted Will Piper, former FBI Special Agent in charge of the Doomsday case, who described the circumstances of one Mark Shackleton, computer scientist, Area 51 researcher, and the architect of a fictitious serial-killing spree in New York, and the violent government cover-up orchestrated to protect a secret desert installation hidden for six decades. The Post had in its possession a copy of the library database that covered the United States through the year 2027, and they had been able to successfully correlate database predictions for hundreds of individuals across the country against actual contemporaneous birth and death data.

They also had a group of letters from the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries that purported to explain the origin of the books and place them in some historical context. The article made reference to a mysterious order of monk savants on the Isle of Wight but stressed the lack of corroborating proof. Future Post articles would talk about the influence of the Library on famous historical figures such as John Calvin and Nostradamus.

Finally, there was the matter of 2027. In a fourteenth-century letter, there was a notation about some kind of apocalyptic end-of-days event, but the only certainty was that the books did not have entries beyond February 9, 2027.

Piper had been a target of violence that had claimed the lives of his in-laws, and he had been wounded in an action against covert government agents. His whereabouts were unknown, but his condition was reported to be stable.

On Sunday morning, the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department all issued official no comments, but senior sources close to the administration, namely the White House Chief of Staff and the Vice President, without attribution, told the paper they had no idea what the Post reporter was talking about-and in retrospect they were, in fact, telling the truth. They hadn’t been in the Area 51 loop.

By Monday, the official Washington language was shifting by degrees from “no comment” to “stand by for an announcement from the White House,” to “the President will address the nation at 9:00 P.M. EST.”

The newspaper story sparked a fire that spread across the globe at the speed of electrons. The revelations hijacked nearly every conversation on the planet. By that first evening virtually all sentient adults in the world had heard about the Library and had an opinion. People were consumed by curiosity and gripped by apprehension.

All across America, constituents called their elected representatives, and congressmen and senators called the White House.

Across the globe, worshippers flocked to their priests, rabbis, imams, and ministers, who worriedly tried to match official dogma to the supposed reality.

Heads of state and ambassadors of virtually every nation barraged the State Department with demands for information.

TV, cable, and radio airwaves devoted themselves to wall-to-wall coverage. The problem became quite apparent several hours into the news cycle that there was no one to interview. No one had heard of the Post ’s Greg Davis, and the paper wasn’t making him available to the media.

Will Piper was nowhere to be found. The Post ’s Publisher made the rounds, standing by the story, but could do no more than repeat the facts as they had been reported. The paper was refusing to make any of the data public, referring the matter to the Post ’s attorney at Skadden Arps, who issued a statement that matters of ownership and privacy were under study.

So, for the moment, pundits could only interview each other, and they were whipping each other into a lather while their media bookers hotly pursued philosophers and theologians, people whose phones were normally quiet on weekends.

Finally at 6:00 P.M. EST on Monday, CBS News issued an urgent press release that 60 Minutes would present a special live televised interview with Will Piper, the source of the story. The world had only two hours to wait.

The White House was outraged that the President was being preempted, and the White House Chief of Staff called the president of CBS News to inform him that issues of national security were at stake and remind him that the man they were going to put on camera had not been interviewed by the appropriate authorities. He hinted that there could be serious charges forthcoming against Piper and that he was a potentially unreliable rogue source. The network executive politely told the White House to go pound sand and sat back to wait for a federal court to issue an injunction.

At 7:45, Will was sitting up in his hospital bed, wearing a nice blue sweater. He was bathed in TV lights. Considering what he’d been through, he looked handsome and relaxed. Nancy was there, holding his hand, whispering encouragement out of earshot of the camera crew and producers.

The network’s general counsel bounded off the elevator at Will’s floor, waving the faxed injunction. The network president was huddling with the show’s executive producer and Jim Zeckendorf, who was there advising Will as a friend and lawyer. The network president had just finished talking to Will and was still visibly moved.

He took the injunction, folded it, and put it in his coat pocket. He told his lawyer, “This is the biggest story in history about the biggest cover-up in history. I don’t care if I spend the rest of my goddamn life in jail. We’re going live in fifteen minutes.”

Cassie Neville, the veteran 60 Minutes anchor, sailed down the corridor with a pack of assistants in tow. Although well into her sixties, after an hour in hair and makeup, she looked youthfully radiant, branded by her trademark steely eyes and pursed lips. Yet that night, she was frazzled by the time lines and the subject matter, and she blurted out her main concern to the network president. “Bill, do you think it’s wise to do this live? What if he’s a dud? We’ll be dead ducks.”

He replied, “Cassie, I’d like you to meet Will Piper. I’ve just spent some time with him, and I can assure you, he’s not a dud.”

Zeckendorf piped up, “I just want to remind you that I’ve instructed Will not to answer any questions about the murder of the Lipinskis and the circumstances of his being wounded. There’s an active criminal investigation that can’t be compromised.”

Nancy stepped aside when Cassie entered the room. The anchor went straight to Will’s bedside and stared into his eyes. “So, I’m told you’re not a dud.”

“I’ve been called a lot of things, ma’am, but that’s not one of them.”

“I haven’t been called ‘ma’am’ in a great many years. Are you from the South, Mr. Piper?”

“Florida panhandle. Redneck Riviera.”

“Well, I’m pleased to meet you under these extraordinary circumstances. We go live in about ten minutes, so let’s get set up. I want you to relax and be yourself. I’ve been told this may be the most-watched interview in history. The world wants to hear this story. Are you ready, Mr. Piper?”

“Not until you call me Will.”

“Okay, Will, let’s do it.”

The director finger-counted down to one and pointed to Cassie, who looked up and started reading off the teleprompter. “Good evening ladies and gentlemen, I’m Cassie Neville and tonight 60 Minutes is bringing you a ground-breaking, exclusive interview, live from New York City, from the hospital bed of the man everyone has been talking about, to get his perspective on, what I sincerely believe, is the most extraordinary news story of our time: the revelation that a mysterious Library exists which predicts the births and deaths of every man, woman, and child on the planet.” She ad-libbed the next line. “Just saying that sends shivers down my spine. And further, that the US government has kept the knowledge of this Library a deep secret since 1947, hidden in Area 51 Nevada, where it is used for classified research purposes. And the man who has revealed this is with me today, a former FBI agent, Will Piper, who is not here in any official capacity, in fact, he was on the run and in hiding, a target of a government cover-up of the story. Well, he was on the run, but no longer. He’s here tonight, with me to tell you his incredible story. Good evening, Will.”

Cassie’s jitters began to fade a few minutes into the interview. Will was calm, articulate, and so plainly credible that she and the rest of the audience hung on every word. His blue eyes and big handsome face were utterly camera-ready. From her reaction shots, it was clear she was smitten.

The facts established, she wanted to see how he felt about the Library, as if he were an everyman, a surrogate for universal reaction.

“My brother, John, passed away last year very suddenly from an aneurysm,” Cassie said, a tear welling. “Someone knew about it, or could have known about this in advance?”

Will replied, “That’s my understanding, yes.”

“That makes me angry,” she said.

“I don’t blame you.”

“Do you think his family should have known, do you think he should have known?”

“That’s not for me to say. I’m not any kind of authority on morality, but it seems to me that if someone in the government has that information, it ought to be given to a person if they want it.”

“And what if they don’t want to know?”

“I wouldn’t force it on anyone.”

“Did you look yourself up?”

“I did,” he answered. “I’m good until at least 2027.”

“And what if you had found out that it was next week, or next month or next year instead?”

“I’m sure everyone would have a different reaction, but I think I’d take it in stride and live every day I had to the fullest. Who knows, maybe they’d be the best days of my life.”

She smiled at the answer, nodding in agreement, “Twenty twenty-seven. You said the books stop in 2027.”

“That’s correct. On February 9 of that year.”

“Why do they stop?”

“I’m not sure anyone knows.”

“There was some reference to an apocalyptic event.”

“I’m sure people need to look at that,” Will said evenly. “It’s pretty sketchy stuff, so I don’t think folks should get all bent out of shape.”

“Hopefully not. And you say that little is known about the people who produced these books.”

He shook his head. “They obviously possessed an extraordinary power. Beyond that, I couldn’t speculate. There’re going to be men and women a lot more qualified to give opinions than me. I’m just a retired federal agent.”

Neville set her famous jaw. “Are you a religious man?”

“I was brought up a Baptist but I’m not really religious.”

“Can I ask if you believe in God?”

“Some days more than others I guess.”

“Does the Library change your views?”

“It tells me there are things about the world we don’t understand. I guess that’s not all that surprising.”

“What was your personal reaction when you learned about the existence of the Library?”

“Probably the same as most people. I was shaken. I still am.”

“Tell me about Mark Shackleton, the government employee who stole the database and was shot and seriously wounded.”

“I knew him from college. I was there when he was shot. He seemed like a sad fellow, I’d say pathetic.”

“What motivated him to perpetrate the hoax of the Doomsday case?”

“I think it was greed. He said he wanted a better life.”

“Greed.”

“Yes. He was a very smart man. He was in a position to pull it off.”

“If you hadn’t broken the case.”

“I had help-my partner, Special Agent Nancy Lipinski.” He sought her out with his eyes from behind one of the cameras and smiled at her. “She’s my wife now.”

“Fortunate woman,” Cassie said coquettishly. “The US government doesn’t want us to know about the Library.”

“I think that’s pretty obvious, yes.”

“And people within the government were willing to kill to keep the secret.”

“People have died.”

“You were a target.”

“I was.”

“Is that why you went public, why you gave the story to the press?”

He leaned forward as much as he could. “Look, I’m a patriot. I was in the FBI. I believe in law and order and our system of justice. The government can’t be judge, jury, and executioner even if they’re protecting classified data. I have every reason to believe that they were going to silence me, my family, and my friends if I didn’t act. They killed people trying to get at me. I’d rather my fate be in the hands of my fellow citizens.”

“I’m told that you’re not going to answer questions about Mr. and Mrs. Lipinski or about how you got wounded. You’re recovering well, I trust?”

“Yeah. All of that will come out eventually, I guess. And thanks, I’m going to be fine.”

“When you were briefing the press on the supposed Doomsday case, they called you the Pied Piper. Are you?”

“I can’t play the flute, and I don’t particularly like rats.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m sure as heck not a follower, but I’ve never thought of myself as a leader either.”

“That may change tonight. Tell me, why did you choose to give this to a very young reporter at The Washington Post who broke the story yesterday in that remarkable front-page article?”

“He’s my daughter’s husband. I figured this might give his career a kick.”

She laughed, “What honesty!” Then she got serious again. “So, Will, last words: what should be done? Is the Library going to be released to the public? Should it be released to the public?”

“Will it be? Maybe somebody ought to ask the President that tonight. Should it be? I’d say, put a lot of smart and good people from all over the world in a big room and sort it out. It’s not for me to decide. It’s for the people to decide.”

When the tungsten lights were off, and Will’s lapel mike was shed, Nancy came out of the shadows, embraced him, and held on for dear life. “We got them,” she whispered. “We got the bastards. There’s nothing they can do to us now. We’re safe.”

The President of the United States gave a brief speech, heavy on national-security themes about the dangers the country faced from foreign enemies and the vital importance of intelligence operations. He obliquely acknowledged the role of Area 51 in the grand scheme of intelligence assets and promised to consult with congressional and world leaders in the coming days and weeks.

At his flat in Islington, Toby Parfitt, read his home-delivered copy of The Guardian while a croissant warmed in the toaster oven. A journalist had found the old Internet auction listing from the Pierce & Whyte catalogue. On the front page was a picture of the 1527 book with a “no comment” comment from Toby, who had been rung by the reporter the evening before for his views.

In fact he had strong views, though none for public consumption. He had held the book in his hands! He had felt an emotional connection to it. It was undoubtedly one of the most valuable books on the planet! And now there were claims that a Shakespearean sonnet had been secreted in its endpapers!

Two hundred thousand pounds! He’d sold it for only two hundred thousand pounds!

His hand shook as he lifted his cup of breakfast tea to his lips.

In a few days, the Post announced that no one was getting access to its copy of the database until a federal lawsuit seeking its return wended its way through the system, presumably all the way to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, the paper’s newest star reporter, Greg Davis, began doing interviews and proved to be good at them.

And the media circus and the public outcry did not abate, nor would they for a very long time. Life and death were very hot topics.

On Garden Street, north of Harvard Square, most of the staff at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics were having lunch at the campus cafeteria or at their desks.

Neil Gershon, an associate professor of astrophysics at Harvard and the Assistant Director of the Minor Planet Center, was cleaning a gob of mayo off his keyboard which had squirted out the end of his roast beef wrap. One of his grad students came into his office cubicle and watched with amusement.

“I’m happy to entertain you, Govi. Can I help you with something?”

The young Indian researcher smiled and accommodated his boss’s forgetfulness. “You told me I could see you lunchtime, remember?”

“Oh yeah. February ninth, 2027.”

Astrophysicists were suddenly popular.

The Post article and the Piper interview had unleashed a torrent of academic and amateur speculation on humanity-eliminating events. To dampen down the hysteria, governments turned to scientists, and scientists turned to their computer models. While they worked on the problem the popular press blithely dived in.

That very morning, USA Today published a survey of three thousand Americans asking about their favorite hypotheses concerning that suddenly famous date. There were a lot of theories ranging from the plausible to the ridiculous; a quarter of Americans believed that an alien invasion was in the cards, War of the Worlds — style. Divine retribution and the Last Judgment scored fairly high too. Asteroids were also in the double digits.

A task force was immediately established at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena comprehensively to explore some of the plausible extraplanetary scenarios. The Minor Planet Center at Harvard-Smithsonian was assigned to sift through their Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking database to eliminate collision threats.

That was quickly accomplished. Of the 962 Potentially Hazardous Asteroids, PHAs, in the database, only one was relevant to the 2027 time frame: 137108 (1999 AN 10), an Apollo-class near-earth asteroid discovered in 1999 at MIT’s Lincoln Lab. It was a very large body, almost thirty kilometers in diameter, but only of casual interest. Its nearest pass to earth in the next one thousand years was going to take place on August 7, 2027 at a distance of 390,000 kilometers. On the ten-point Torino Impact Hazard Scale, the asteroid rated only an anemic score of one, hardly noticeable.

To be ultraconservative and thorough, Gershon had assigned his best student, Govind Naidu, to relook at the asteroid and update its orbital parameters. The NASA project had a priority designation, and Naidu was able to cut into the queue to task the forty-eight-inch telescopes at the Maui Space Surveillance Site and at the Palomar Observatory to reimage 137108. He was also given eight precious hours of time on the government’s supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“You’ve got the new MSSS and Palomar data?” Gershon asked.

“Yeah. You want to go over to my workstation?”

“Just log on from here.”

“You’ve got mayo on your keypad.”

“And this is against your religion?” Gershon got up and relinquished his chair. “I’ve got a telecon with JPL this afternoon, and I want this nailed.”

Naidu sat down and logged on to the observatory databases. “Okay, here’s the orbital plot for 137108 as of the last observation point in July 2008. Right now, it’s past Jupiter heading inbound with an orbital period of 1.76 years. Here’s the last simulation-let me fast-forward to August 2027. You see, there, it gets within 400,000 kilometers of us.”

“I need the new data, Govi.”

“I’m getting there.” He clicked through and opened spreadsheets that were time-stamped to the previous night. “Okay, both telescopes got clean images. Let me merge the databases from Hawaii and Palomar. It’ll just take a minute.”

His fingers flew over the keyboard as he conformed the two sets of observations, and when he was done, Gershon said, “Let’s see it.”

Naidu clicked on the orbital plotting tool and fast-forwarded the simulation to 2027. “See? It’s unchanged. The closest point is still in August at a distance of almost half a million kilometers. On February 9, it’s not even close.”

Gershon looked satisfied. “So that’s it. We can scratch 137108 off the oy vey list.”

Naidu didn’t get up. He was accessing the Lawrence Berkeley database. “I thought you might get more questions, so I ran a series of scenarios on the NERSCC supercomputer.”

“What kind of scenarios?”

“Asteroid-asteroid hits.”

Gershon grunted his approval. The young man was right, he’d probably get the question. There were about five thousand asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it wasn’t unprecedented for them to slam into each other from time to time, changing their orbital characteristics. “How’d you model it?”

Naidu puffed out his chest and proudly described a sophisticated statistical model he’d constructed which exploited the massive computing power at the NERSCC to examine hundreds of thousands of hypothetical asteroid-to-asteroid strikes involving 137108.

“Lot of second-body variables,” Gershon whistled. “Mass, speed, angle of contact, orbital dynamics at point of collision.”

Naidu nodded. “Each potential hit can change every parameter of 137108. Sometimes not by a lot, but you can get meaningful differences to the aphelion, the perihelion, the orbital period, the ascending node longitude, the inclination, the argument of perihelion, you name it.”

“So show me. What do you have?”

“Okay, since I had only eight hours of computing time, I limited the model to about five hundred higher-probability asteroids based on their orbital characteristics with respect to 137108. Only one simulation out of six hundred thousand produced something interesting.”

Naidu launched a graphical-simulation program and provided running commentary. “This one assumes an asteroid-to-asteroid collision between 137108 and 4581 Asclepius, an Apollo-class object that’s just a little guy, about three hundred meters diameter. It passed within 700,000 kilometers of earth in 1989. If it had hit, it would have been no big deal,” he snorted, “just the equivalent to one Hiroshima-sized explosion every second for fifty days! This simulation assumes 4581 gets tweaked by another rock, gets its own orbit perturbed, and hits 137108 near Jupiter in March 2016. Here’s what goes down if that happens.”

Naidu set the orbital simulator to run from the present. On the screen they watched a green dot representing 137108 move through the solar system in an eccentric elliptical orbit, approaching the earth approximately every two years, then sling-shotting past Jupiter before turning back again toward the sun.

When the simulation got within five years of 2027, he slowed it down so they could watch it more carefully. They stared at two independent orbits, the earth’s and the asteroid’s, a green dot and a red dot moving through the solar system. At a January 2026 time-point, Naidu slowed the simulation again to a snail’s pace.

Gershon leaned in over his student’s shoulder. “It’s really hard to say visually whether its new orbital is going to make things better or worse.”

Naidu said nothing.

The clock turned slowly and at mid-2026, asteroid 137108 turned toward the sun. The earth’s orbit was slowly positioning the planet to get close to an intersection with the asteroid’s track.

October 2026.

November 2026.

December 2026.

January 2027.

The red and green dots were getting close.

Then February 2027.

The simulation halted on February 9.

A pop-up box appeared on the screen:

Impact Probability-100 %****Torino 10**** Torino 10****Torino 10****

Gershon gasped. “The asteroid’s size. Does it change postimpact with 4581?”

Naidu scrolled down to a table, double-clicked on a cell, and pointed. “It’s still huge, a game-ender.” He logged off the terminal and stood up. “It’s all hypothetical, but I thought you needed to see it. We’re not talking about large probabilities.”

Gershon looked out the window. It was a blustery fall day, and sharp gusts were separating the last leaves from their branches. He had an urge to feel the wind on his face and to crunch through the dry leaf piles on the lawn.

He gently touched his student’s shoulder, and said, “I’m sure you’re right, Govi. Listen, I’m going to go out for a little walk.”