Kill Switch

CHAPTER ONE

For the record, I don’t believe in this stuff.

No goddamn way.

There’s possible, there’s improbable, there’s weird, and there’s no-fucking-way. This is a mile or two past that. So, no, I don’t believe in it.

What pisses me off is that it seems to believe in me.

CHAPTER TWO

I was four minutes away from calling it a day and cutting out early to catch an Orioles-Padres game at Petco Park here in San Diego. Hot dogs loaded with everything that’s bad for me, ice-cold beer in big red cups, and the opportunity to spend a few hours yelling at a bunch of young millionaires trying to hit a little ball with a big stick. Baseball, baby. The American pastime.

It was the first game I’d managed to catch since the craziness at Citizen’s Bank Park last year. You know what I mean. The drone attacks on opening day. I’d spent a lot of the rest of the spring in hospitals. A bunch more time in rehab, then way too much sitting behind a desk doing paperwork and feeling my ass grow flat. Then I went back into the field and since then I’ve done nothing but run.

The Big Bad for us right now was ISIL. The press writes about them like they’re a disorganized goon squad who are only a threat to the notoriously unstable governments in the Middle East. They’re not. They’re a whole lot scarier than that. Most of the people running them are former officers from Saddam’s army. These are experienced soldiers who have been nurturing grudges. That was bad enough, but now they’ve upped their game and have put several special ops teams in the field. Real pros, too, and they managed to scoop up leftover Kingsmen from the ruins of the Seven Kings organization. Was it weird that ISIL was using shooters who were not Muslims? Yup. Very weird. And very scary, too, because it allowed them to come at us in unpredictable ways. A bunch of their SpecOps fighters were Americans, so even with the heightened security and paranoia here in the States following the drone stuff, we were feeling some rabbit punches from them. Attacks on power grids, an attempted sabotage of a nuclear power plant. Like that.

And our super-duper computer system, MindReader, has been picking up some hints about a really big attack planned for the US of A, and if the rumors were true then it was going to involve some kind of electromagnetic pulse weapon.

So, yeah… bad guys. Really scary bad guys, and they were causing a whole lot of very serious trouble. We had DMS teams running joint ops with the CIA and Homeland, with Barrier in the UK, with Mossad in Israel, and with a dozen other special operations crews.

Overall, I was busier than a three-headed cat in a dairy. That’s not to say I spent all of my time in the field kicking terrorist ass. Mind you, I’m still a gunslinger for Uncle Sam, but now that I run the Special Projects Office I’m also management, which sucks six kinds of ass.

Baseball kept calling to me, though, and today was the first time I could reasonably justify leaving the shop early to have some actual fun.

The phone began ringing while I was tidying my desk.

If you work in a bank, an insurance company, or pretty much most jobs, you can pretend you don’t hear that call. I know cops at the ragged end of a long shift who swear their radios were malfunctioning.

But when you do what I do, you have to drop everything else — your time off, your family, your friends, even baseball — and you take the call. Kind of like the Bat-Signal. You can’t just blow it off.

So I answered the call.

It was my boss, Mr. Church.

“Captain Ledger,” he said, “I need you on the next thing smoking. Dress warm, it’s going to be cold.”

I looked out the window. This was August and the Southern California summer was cooking. Temperature was eighty-eight in the shade. I was wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a Hawaiian shirt with surfing pelicans on it.

“How cold?” I asked.

“This morning it was minus fifty-eight.”

I closed my eyes.

“I hate you,” I said.

“I’ll manage to live with your contempt.”

“Okay,” I said, “tell me.”

INTERLUDE ONE

“Are you going to talk today?” asked the psychiatrist. “Or are you still mad at me?”

The boy sat in the exact middle of the couch even though it was not the most comfortable place. He was like that, preferring precision over comfort. It was reflected in the number of pieces of food he would allow on his dinner plate, the number of tissues he would use no matter how many times he sneezed. Numbers mattered in ways that Dr. Greene was still discovering. So far the psychiatrist had been able to determine that Prospero Bell believed that math, in all its forms, was not merely a way to calculate sums, but was in fact tied to the very structure of physical reality. He’d even made himself a hand-drawn T-shirt last year that had a quote from mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss: “God arithmetizes,” itself a variation of a quote Plutarch famously attributed to Plato: “God geometrizes continually.”

Prospero was very tall for his age, but thin as a stick. As he perched on the couch, his long body seemed to be temporarily suspended, as if he was about to slide down between the two big leather cushions but chose not to fall. Always awkward and always strange, and he did not seem to ever fit into the world as it was. Dr. Greene knew that this reflected the boy’s inner life. After four years of therapy, the doctor was quite convinced that this boy lived in two entirely separate worlds. The one inside, where Prospero clearly felt he belonged, and the one outside that he loathed and resented. That discomfort, and the resulting disconnect from ordinary social interactions, was the basis of their frequent sessions.

“I never said I was mad at you,” said the boy. He was eleven and his voice was beginning to deepen. No cracks or squeaks, just a timbre that hinted at the baritone to come.

“You threw an apple at me last Thursday,” said Greene.

“It was handy.”

“That’s not my point.”

Prospero gave him a microsecond of a sly grin. “I know.”

“Then—”

“I didn’t want to talk about my father anymore and you wouldn’t shut up. I didn’t hit you with the apple.”

“You tried. I ducked.”

“No,” said Prospero, “I missed. The fact that you ducked says more about you than my ‘missing’ says about my aim. I wanted to miss. You didn’t want to duck, but you did anyway because you didn’t know that I wouldn’t have hit you.”

Today the boy wore a green cloth jacket that he had systematically covered with symbols from cabalism, magic, and alchemy. Greene knew this because there had been three full sessions about those designs. Now there was a gray hoodie under the jacket, the top pulled up to throw shadows down over Prospero’s thin, ascetic face. The boy had painstakingly drawn an elaborate and technically excellent monster on the hood. The thing had a bulbous, flabby body, stubby wings, and a beard made from writhing tentacles that trailed from the gray hood onto the green material of the jacket.

Greene met with Prospero three times a week, down from the five talks per week that marked the boy’s most extreme phases, up from the twice weekly of last year when Prospero seemed to be balancing out. Greene was therapist for the whole Bell family, including the father, Oscar Bell, a major defense contractor; Oscar’s current wives; and his long line of ex-wives. Greene also did occasional check-ins with Prospero’s older brother from Oscar’s first marriage. Greene’s sessions with the rest of the family were routine, sparse, and almost pointless. They didn’t need him and he privately found them intensely dull. The older boy was a clone of his father and would doubtless become fabulously wealthy building secret, terrible things for the American military. As the Bell family had since the Civil War.

Of all the Bells, Prospero was the one who logged frequent-flyer miles on Greene’s therapy couch.

Greene asked, “What would you have done if I wanted to keep talking about your father after you threw that apple?”

Prospero shrugged.

“No,” said Greene, “tell me.”

The boy nodded to the coffee table. “There were five other apples in the bowl. I can throw pretty good.” He shrugged again, point made.

There was no bowl on the table now. There was nothing there, not even magazines. Greene was moderately sure the boy wouldn’t throw the table itself.

“Is it your opinion that hitting me with an apple is the best way for us to proceed?”

“We didn’t have that conversation, did we?”

Even after all these years and all these sessions it still unnerved Greene that Prospero never spoke in an age-appropriate way. He never had. Even when he was five years old his intellect and self-possession were remarkable. Or maybe “freakish” was a more accurate term, though Greene would never put that in any report. Freak. It was the best word, then and now.

Prospero Bell was a freak.

None of the tests Greene or his colleagues had administered had been able to accurately gauge the boy’s intelligence. Best guess was that it was above 200. Perhaps considerably above that, which lifted him above the level of any reliable process of quantification. Prospero had completed all of his high school requirements last year at age ten, and passed each test with the highest marks. The boy’s aptitude was odd, though. Savantism is generally limited to a few specific areas — math, say, or art. Occasionally a cluster. But Prospero seemed to excel at everything that interested him, and his interests were varied. World religions, folklore, anthropology relative to belief systems, art, music, mathematics in all its aspects, science, with a bias toward quantum and particle physics.

He was now eleven.

But he was also deeply read in areas that were built on less stable scientific ground — cryptozoology, metaphysics, alchemy, surrealist art, pulp horror fiction. The boy was all over the place. The rate at which Prospero was able to absorb information was only surpassed by his ability to both retain and process it. He had a perfect eidetic memory, and it seemed genuine, without any of the mnemonics of someone who uses tricks or triggers to recall data. Prospero never forgot a thing he learned, and because he was so observant that meant that he possessed an astounding body of personal knowledge. Greene had given Prospero tests to determine what kind of intellect the boy had, but the results had been confounding. Prospero had marked fluid intelligence — indicating that he was able to reason, form concepts, and solve problems using unfamiliar information or novel procedures — but he scored equally high in crystallized intelligence, which meant that he possessed the ability to communicate his knowledge, and had the ability to reason using previously learned experiences or procedures. People seldom scored that high in both aspects. And he did just as well with long- and short-term memory, memory storage and retrieval, quantitative reasoning, auditory and visual processing, and others.

Greene felt that his “freak” diagnosis was the most clinically accurate assessment. There was a lot of savantism in the world, but there was no one like Prospero Bell. The question that burned hottest in Greene’s mind was what the boy would do with all of that brainpower. He had hinted that he had a plan, but so far had kept that secret to himself.

Prospero’s intense hatred and distrust of his father was a common topic for them, and the old man wanted Greene to determine the best way for the elder Bell to gain the trust of his son. Not the love. All that mattered to Oscar Bell was a useful trust.

But that was only a secondary goal for Greene and he didn’t devote much time to it. Instead he focused on something he found far more interesting. It was also the thing that most deeply concerned Prospero.

Prospero was absolutely convinced that he was not human. Not entirely.

And he was equally convinced that he was not from this world.

CHAPTER THREE

“What’s the op, Boss?” asked Bunny, the big kid from Orange County who looked like a plowboy from Iowa. His dog tags said he was Master Sergeant Harvey Rabbit, but not even his parents called him by his first name. Bunny was the muscle and in many ways the heart of Echo Team. “Those ISIL shooters find a two-for-one sale on snowshoes?”

“Funny,” I said. “But no.”

We were aboard an LC-130 Hercules, a big military transport plane fitted out with skis. None of us liked the fact that our plane had to have skis. I had a third of Echo Team with me. Two operators: Bunny and Top — First Sergeant Bradley Sims. My right and left hands.

“We going way down south to get out of the summer heat?” drawled Top.

“This is a look-see,” I told them. “This gig is a handoff from our friends in the CIA.”

“We’re all going to die,” said Bunny.

“There’s a bright side,” I told him. “The quarterback who handed it off was Harcourt Bolton.”

Both Top and Bunny came instantly to point, grinning like kids.

“Seriously?” said Bunny, wide-eyed. “Wow. We made it to the pros.”

“I thought he retired,” said Top. “Glad to hear he’s still in the game.”

Guys like us don’t much go in for hero worship. The exception is when the hero in question is someone like Harcourt Bolton. If America has ever had an agent on par with the movie version of James Bond, then it’s Bolton. He’s the spy’s spy. Cool, suave, sophisticated, incredibly smart, and very capable. I may be one of Uncle Sam’s top shooters, but Bolton is the Agency’s sharpest scalpel. And it’s not too much of a stretch to say I’m captain of his fan club. Harcourt Bolton, Senior, was someone I knew very well. Or, should I say, I knew of very well. His role as a semicelebrity gazillionaire philanthropist, entrepreneur, and notorious playboy was tabloid legend. He was like Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne — a rich man who always seemed to be caught in a paparazzi photo with this year’s supermodel while spending his days investing in worthy causes to better humanity. It was the kind of superstar status that never seemed quite real, because how could someone be that rich, that lucky, that smart, and that generous all in one lifetime?

That’s the Bolton the general public knew. I’ve heard my lover, Junie Flynn, talk about getting him involved in some FreeTech ventures in developing countries. Using money and technology to save whole villages.

My guys and I knew the other side of him, however. We knew that the Bruce Wayne cover was just that. A cover. A brilliant cover, actually, because just as Bruce Wayne had that darker vigilante side with an obsession for flightless mammals of the family Chiroptera, there was a hidden side to Harcourt Bolton. He was, by anyone’s estimation, the greatest spy who has ever worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. That is saying a lot. No matter what the public perception is of the CIA, they are not, on the whole, a clown college. There is a very effective little office within the CIA that makes sure the Company is regarded from a skewed perspective, because it lowers the expectations of the bad guys.

The other side to Bolton’s career was the above-top-secret operations, the real 007 stuff. Like infiltrating and destroying a secret North Korean missile base that was primed to detonate the Cumbre Vieja volcano, which would have sent five hundred cubic kilometers of rock into the Atlantic Ocean, resulting in a two-thousand-foot-high tsunami. It would have wiped out the African coast, Southern England, and then the eastern seaboard of North America.

Then there was the bioweapons lab buried four stories beneath a Siberian work camp. Bolton went in alone, killed sixteen people, and blew the lab pretty much into orbit.

And the time he ripped apart a coalition of rogue Saudi princes who were financing ISIL. Bolton wore a disguise, spoke flawless Arabic, forged perfect credentials, and once he had ingratiated himself with the group, he shot all seven of them and uploaded a computer virus that stole their data and destroyed the target computers.

I could go on.

And on. I could obsess and go full-tilt fanboy on him. I would buy an action figure of Harcourt Bolton and, yes, I would take it out of the package and play made-up adventures with it. If someone told me he could turn water into wine, my only question would be whether it was red or white. And the answer would probably be the 1982 Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande. Not because it’s the most expensive, which it’s not, but because while the 1982 is not a classic Bordeaux, it has an over-ripe, exotic quality that he’s discovered would make any woman on Earth instantly disrobe. That’s how Bolton would do it. Guys like him walk on water and make the rest of us look like grubby amateurs. Even my personal hero, the late, great Samson Riggs, couldn’t hold a candle to him.

Bolton was the top field operator for a lot of years. Much longer than most guys manage it. He never seemed to want to retire and I could understand that. When you’re at the top of your game — especially this game — there’s a real fear that if you head to the showers and let a newer, younger, and less experienced player step up to bat, then he won’t know better than to swing at fastballs and sliders. You stay in the game because you know it better than the other guys. Or at least you think you do. Maybe it’s an ego thing — and that’s got to be a chunk of it — but you know how far you’ve gone in the past to take the bad guys down, you know the tricks that worked for you time and again, and you don’t want to take that skill set out of play. It’s why so many guys like us die out there, caught in the moment when age and experience can’t make up for the fact that you’ve lost a step getting to first base. You fall, and maybe your arrogance and fear drags someone else down, too. Maybe a lot of people. But how can you not risk it?

Bolton risked it, and he had a couple of missions go south on him. Luckily the DMS was there to back his play when things fell apart. I was the relief pitcher on the last two of Bolton’s operations. I got the saves and the DMS got the credit, even if it was only an off-the-radar pat on the back by the president.

Bolton was done as a field op, though. His team was reassigned and he was given a nice desk in a nice office and people were very nice to him. Which must have been hell for a guy like him.

However, anyone who thought Bolton would just walk off the field and go sit on a porch at the Old Spies Retirement Home was sadly mistaken. Because he’s a class act, and maybe an actual superhero, he shifted his gears and over the last few years he’s worked his old network of contacts to get mission intel for younger CIA turks, and even for the DMS. Serious intel. If he’d been regarded as a superspy before, you can double that since then. His network was so deeply embedded in the global underworld that none of us could figure out how he did it. Someone hung a nickname on him that got some traction. Mr. Voodoo. If Harcourt Bolton says something hinky is happening — even if no one else has heard a peep about it — then you lock and load. So if he passed along intel on this job, it was on us to nut up and earn that level of professional respect.

“I’ll give it to you the way I got it,” I said. “The mission has two layers. Our cover story is a surprise inspection to evaluate the status of a research base designated ‘Gateway.’ This is a repurposed facility. The original Gateway was an old radar station from the early Cold War era. Satellites made it mostly obsolete so it was closed up. Operative word is ‘was.’ The base was built at the foot of Vinson Massif, the tallest mountain in Antarctica. The Russians and Chinese both have research stations in the same region.”

“What’s the hurry for us to get down there?” asked Top. “The neighbors getting cranky?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “Our intelligence says that in the last twenty-eight hours the Russian and Chinese bases have gone dark. No radio, no communication of any kind. Nineteen hours ago our facility also went dark. We’re about six hours ahead of the Russian and Chinese investigative teams. Bolton got wind of this from his network but he’s in the middle of something else so he called Mr. Church.”

Top grunted. “Do we think it has been taken?”

“Unknown, but on the list of possibilities,” I said. “Gateway isn’t a radar outpost anymore and hasn’t been for over a decade. But that’s where things get muddy. Bug had trouble finding out who actually opened it and what they’re doing. We know it’s some kind of black budget thing, but we only know that because of how well the details have been hidden. Very little of it is in any of the databases Bug and his geek squad have infiltrated. And like all of that kind of stuff there are lots of things named only by obscure acronyms, and projects identified by number-letter codes instead of names. That makes it tough to find, because something labeled A631/45H doesn’t exactly ring alarm bells. Bug needs to have something to go on.”

Top and Bunny nodded. This was familiar — and deeply frustrating — territory for us. Our own government is so large and so compartmentalized, and there’s so much bickering, infighting, and adherence to personal and political agendas, that one hand truly does not know what the other is doing. And that gets even murkier when you factor in illegal operations, of which there are many.

“Do we know anything about what they’re doing down there?” asked Bunny.

I shrugged. “Not much, and what we do know is because Bolton brought us into the loop. Not sure how he found out.”

“He’s Harcourt Bolton,” said Bunny.

“Fair enough. Anyway, we now know the Gateway base is active and apparently serving as a research and development shop. Mr. Church had Bug do a MindReader search on Gateway and so far he’s only come up with a few things, but not as much as we’d like.”

“How’s it possible we can’t find out everything?” asked Bunny. “MindReader can go anywhere.”

“In theory,” I said, “but a lot of people in Washington know that we have MindReader and some of them are pretty stingy with their stuff. Can’t blame them. It’s not like we are actually allowed to poke our noses everywhere.”

“Yeah,” said Top dryly, “been a whole bunch of stuff on the news the last few years about government overreach. Maybe you read something?”

I ignored him. “The point is that more and more departments are using intranets instead of the public or military networks. Closed systems that can’t be accessed from outside. MindReader can’t go and hardwire a tap, you know.”

Top punched Bunny on the arm. “That don’t mean your browser history is safe yet, Farm Boy, so stop looking at all those naked pictures. Gonna grow hair on your palms.”

“Blow me,” said Bunny.

“There are other ways to hide from MindReader,” I told them. “Paper files instead of computer records. That sort of thing.”

“Still got to be paid for,” said Top. “Operating a research base way down here? Even if it’s coded, something like this has to be expensive. Got to be mentioned in the budget somewhere.”

I nodded. “That’s what Bug’s looking at now, but it’s time-consuming.”

“If they ain’t a radar station, then what are they doing down there?” asked Top.

“That’s the problem,” I told them, “we don’t know for sure. The intel is thin. Bolton said his sources believe they’re working on some radical technology for renewable energy. Nonnuclear but with a lot of potential. Far as he could tell it was sold to the black budget people as the thing that will take us away from any dependence on foreign oil. Don’t ask me what the science is because I don’t know and neither does Bolton.”

“If this is energy research,” said Top, “and it’s non-nuclear, then why go all the way the hell down to the rectum of the world to develop it?”

“That’s what I asked,” I said. “Almost the same words. The short answer is we don’t know. Bolton and Bug both found some oblique references to — and I quote—‘side effects resulting in pervasive power outages of limited duration.’”

“EMP?” suggested Bunny.

“Maybe. Dr. Hu said that there have been a number of new energy technologies that have had side effects, and EMPs are on that list. What confuses us all is the ‘limited duration’ part. EMPs fry electronics. There’s nothing limited about that effect. You have to replace the damaged parts.” I sighed. “So you see our problem — we have bits of intel and the pieces don’t fit together. We’re not even sure if any of that intel is reliable or even relevant, and we can’t get anyone up here to admit to knowing anything about it, and no one down at Gateway will pick up the damn phone. Bug found a code name in the same partial data file that referenced the power outage side effect. Kill Switch.”

“Cute name,” said Bunny, not meaning it.

“If the power outage thing is a reproducible effect, then they may have isolated it in order to develop it into a new classification of directed-energy weapon. Maybe some sort of portable EMP cannon.”

Bunny whistled.

Top frowned. “EMPs,” he muttered in pretty much the way you’d say genital warts. “Been hearing nothing but trash talk about portable EMPs for ten years now.”

“I know,” I said, “but that’s the next new technology for the good guys and bad guys. We want them to use as the next generation of missile shields, and to protect against small drones launched by hostiles. The bad guys want to use them against us because everything we put in the field or in the air has a microchip, motor, or battery.”

“That sucks,” said Bunny. “Couple guys sitting in a cave with a portable EMP weapon and suddenly our gunships are dropping like dead birds.”

“Won’t just be caves, Farm Boy,” said Top. “Portable is portable. Put those same assholes in a UPS truck in Manhattan and it’s lights out for the whole damn city.”

“Well, for some of it,” countered Bunny. “One cannon’s not going to flip the switches on a whole city.”

Top spread his hands in a “we’ll see” gesture. To me he said, “Washington send us down here to see if the Russians or Chinese been stealing our toys?”

“Unknown,” I said, “but that’s an obvious concern.”

Top made a show of looking up and down the otherwise empty hull of the transport. Except for our gear and a modified snowcat we were all alone. “Small team to start a war with a couple of superpowers.”

“Not the plan. There’s some concern that a strong military presence might send the wrong message and draw attention when it might not actually be needed. Send in a lot of soldiers and people start wondering what you have to hide. That said, though, Boardwalk and Neptune Teams are five hours behind us. They’ll hold back unless we call for them, and the USS California is in range in case we need to open a can of industrial-strength whoop-ass. However, the president has asked us to go in first, quick and quiet. No one except the Gateway staff are supposed to know we’re here. We don’t want anyone or anything connected with Gateway to make the news, feel me?”

Top snorted. “The Chinese and Russians probably have every eye in the sky they own looking at this. This whole area’ll probably be featured on Google Earth before we’re wheels down.”

“Got to love the concept of ‘secrecy’ in the digital age,” said Bunny. “Ten bucks says that some hipster blogger will be there to meet our plane.”

It was almost true, and that was somewhere between sad and scary. With the vertical spike in digital technology, anyone with a smartphone had greater capabilities of discovering and sharing sensitive information with the world than the combined professional world media of ten years ago. Social media could be used for a lot of good things, but it’d turned everyone into a potential spy or source. And, yeah, I really do know how paranoid that sounds, but it is what it is. I’m a cheerleader for the First Amendment except when I’m in the field, at which point I have the occasional Big Brother moments. My shrink is never going to go broke.

Top asked, “We have thermal scans of our base and the others?”

“They’re next to useless,” I said. “The mountains there are thick with metal ores, so that screws things up.”

Top sat back and folded his arms. He had dark brown skin crisscrossed with pink scars. Most of them earned since he’s been working for me. “Seems like they’re throwing us into a situation about which we have shit for intel.”

“Pretty much,” I said.

“The day must end with a Y,” muttered Bunny.

I opened my laptop and called up a few random images of Gateway that Bolton and Bug had each found. There were some preliminary floor plans that might as well have been labeled GENERIC LAB, and some photos taken by satellite showing unhelpful pictures of prefab buildings nestled against a snow-covered mountain.

Bunny made a face. “We could give an Etch-a-Sketch to a rhesus monkey and he’d come up with better intel.”

“No doubt,” I said. “Bug found some shipping manifests that at least tell us what’s been brought out there. Lab equipment, drilling gear, six generators — two active, two emergency backups, two offline in case — and all of the other stuff necessary for establishing a moderately self-sufficient base. Staff of seventy. Ten on the science team, twenty support staff that includes cook, medical officer, site administrator, and some engineers. The rest are military but we don’t know what branch, so I asked Bug to run a MindReader deep search to find out. We’re waiting on additional intel now.”

The whole DMS was built around the MindReader computer system. Without it we’d be just another SpecOps team. MindReader had a superintrusion software package that allowed it to do a couple of spiffy things. One thing it did was look for patterns by drawing on information from an enormous number of sources, many of which it was not officially allowed to access. Which was the second thing. MindReader could intrude into any known computer system, poke around as much as it wanted, and withdraw without a trace. Most systems leave some kind of scar on the target computer’s memory, but MindReader rewrote the target’s software to completely erase all traces of its presence. Bug was the uber-geek who ran MindReader for the DMS. I sometimes think Bug believes that MindReader is God and he’s the pope.

Bunny asked, “What happens if we knock on their door and some goon from the People’s Liberation Army Special Operations Forces answers?”

“Then all of us become a footnote in next year’s black budget report,” I said.

Bunny sighed. “Like I said… this only happens to us on days ending in a Y.”

I wish I could call him a liar.

INTERLUDE TWO

“Why do you hate your father?” asked Dr. Greene.

“You’ve met him,” said Prospero. “You tell me.”

“Let’s focus on your feelings.”

Prospero Bell sat cross-legged on the couch. He’d spent time setting the angles of his knees and ankles just so. He still wore his green jacket with the gray hoodie underneath. Each time he showed up for a new session there was more detail in the monster on the hood, and he’d begun adding colors to indicate light through water, as if the monster were submerged beneath a sunlit sea.

Prospero sighed. Heavily and dramatically. “Look, it’s not that complicated a thing and it’s wasting my time. But, since you’re probably going to badger me until I talk about it, here it is. Do I hate my father? Yes. Is it because he divorced my mom? No. Mom’s a complete wacko. I love her and I can’t even stand to be around her. So, no, it’s not that. So why can’t I stand him? Gosh, let me think. How about the fact that he’s always mean to me. Always. He hates me and he doesn’t mind showing it.”

“Your father loves you, Prospero.”

“Oh, please. I’m young but I’m not stupid. It’s not me he loves. It’s this.” Prospero tapped his head. “He loves what’s up here because he knows it can make him a lot of money.”

“Your father is a very intelligent man,” said Greene.

“Sure, but I’m smarter by at least an order of magnitude. We all know it. And I’m getting smarter all the time. And, sure, Dad’s smart, but he only uses his brains to build weapons of war. Am I against war? Not really. Wars happen. But to spend your life making it easier to kill people, and easier for very few people to kill large numbers of people, then, yeah, I don’t like that.”

“Because of the potential for loss of life?”

Prospero’s green eyes seemed to look straight through him. “No. I don’t care about people. I’m not one of them.”

“Then why?”

“Because it’s a waste of intellectual opportunity.”

“Fair enough,” said Greene, interested. “What else?”

“Well, Dad doesn’t believe in anything. Not God or a larger world. Nothing. And he hates it because I do. He thinks it’s a waste of my time. A distraction. He’d rather me spend all my time in the lab.” Prospero snorted. “Have you seen the latest upgrades to my lab? Dad broke through the wall so that I now have the entire basement. All of it. He got rid of his billiards room to put in new sequencers and to give me table space to build whatever I want.”

“That’s very generous.”

Prospero shook his head. “I kind of like you, Doc, so I’m going to pretend you’re not that naïve. We both know that Dad will keep giving me as much scientific equipment as he can cram into the house in the hopes that I make another toy for him.”

Greene nodded. Twice in the last sixteen months Prospero had built small electronic devices that, from things the father let slip, had great potential for military application. Greene did not understand the science, even when Prospero tried to explain it to him. Something about a short-range field disruptor and something else about a beam regulator. Whatever they were. Oscar Bell had been extremely excited about both, and from the things Greene had picked up, was able to obtain contracts to develop them for the Department of Defense.

Prospero had been mostly indifferent to the devices, labeling them as “junk,” and ultimately disregarding them because they did not help him in his “work.” He said one was a by-product and the other was an interesting side effect. Greene was trying to determine what that work was, convinced it was a key factor in understanding Prospero.

Overall, Oscar Bell was openly obsessed with his son’s genius. Bell talked about almost nothing else, and that was disturbing to Greene. He did not know how this would play out over time. Bell was the least pleasant man Greene had ever met. He was acquisitive, demanding, inflexible, and probably cruel in many ways. His household staff was terrified of him and there was a high turnover rate among them. Bell was the kind of man who had no real friends and instead relied on maintaining a network of acquaintances whose shared agendas were based on financial reward rather than personal enrichment.

“I guess you know,” said Prospero, “that Dad hates me because I actually believe in something. He thinks it’s a distraction. He accused me of losing focus.”

“Do you believe, Prospero?” asked Greene, surprised. “You’ve told me on numerous occasions that you reject the idea of the Judeo-Christian version of God. You said that Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha were all con men. Those are your words.”

“I know. I was only ten, so that was the best I could phrase it at the time.”

Greene had to suppress a smile. He said, “Would you care to restate your position?”

Prospero shot him a sly look. “Let’s just say that I’ve opened my mind to other possibilities.”

“What possibilities? Is it something your mother suggested?”

The boy seemed surprised by that. “What? No. She’s a loon.”

“Then what?”

Prospero shrugged. “Something else. I’m not ready to talk about it.” He paused, considering, then changed the subject. “Do you remember the dream I had last Christmas? About having brothers and sisters?”

“Of course. You said that you believed there were at least fifty other children like you.”

“Exactly like me. Same face,” said Prospero. “Even the girls looked like me. We were all in a big room. Not a school exactly and not a hospital. A little of both. It was a horrible place, though. The people who worked there hated us. No… no, that’s wrong. They were afraid of us.”

“So you told me. Why do you bring it up now?”

The boy looked at his hands for a moment. “I dreamed about one of them again. Last night, I mean. In my dreams most of my brothers and sisters were dead. All but one. A sister.”

Greene said nothing. He’d asked Oscar Bell about this and had been told, very curtly, to mind his own business. The encounter, and the boy’s persistent dreams, reinforced Greene’s suspicion that Prospero was adopted.

“What can you recall about her?” asked Greene, but Prospero shrugged.

“Not much. She was sad. She was older in my dream. Grown up. And she was sad. She’d been hurt. Shot, I think. She didn’t die but she was sad because she couldn’t have babies.” The boy knotted and unknotted his fingers. “That was all there was to the dream, but it was so real. More real than us talking right now. I don’t think it was just a dream. I think I do have a sister and that she’s out there somewhere. And… she looks exactly like me. Not like clones. Something else…”

His voice trailed off.

“Very well. Have you ever shared these dreams with your father?”

“No. I tried once and he smacked me across the face.”

“That was two years ago,” said Greene. “Your father told me that he’d hit you and that he was very sorry. Perhaps you could try to talk to him again. If not about your dreams, then perhaps about your relationship? About your feelings about his focus on your scientific achievements.”

“Share? With Dad?” Prospero laughed. “Dad doesn’t talk to me. Not unless it’s to ask what I’m working on and how it could be used.”

“Used?”

“You know what I mean,” snapped Prospero. “Daddy-dear’s always fishing for the next shiny toy to sell to the military. You think all of this — the mansion, the cars, the private jet, all that crap — comes from what he makes in the private sector? Please. It’s all military contracts and he’s always after me to come up with something because he’s tapped out when it comes to his own genius.”

“You’re only a boy.”

Prospero gave him a withering look. “We both know that’s not really true.”

In that moment the boy sounded like an old man. There was a world-weariness unearned by the number of years he’d already lived. It was in his eyes, too.

“So, no,” concluded Prospero, “Dad doesn’t say a lot to me. Not the way people do.”

“Your father is a reticent man,” said Greene. “Do you know that word? Reticence?”

“Of course I do. And it doesn’t really fit him. Dad’s simply an asshole.”

“He’s your father. You shouldn’t speak like that about him.”

“Really? You want me to start self-editing in therapy?”

Greene flinched. “Fair enough. My apologies.”

“Dad hates me,” said Prospero.

“You must know that’s not true,” said Greene.

Prospero gave him a pitying look. “Of course it is.”

They went back and forth on that for a bit, but Greene knew it was an argument he could not win. Perhaps “contempt” was not the best word to describe how Oscar Bell treated his son, but it was close and everyone knew it. The father even intimated as much, telling Greene in private that “If it wasn’t for his brains, the kid wouldn’t be worth the money it takes to feed him. I sure as shit can’t take him out anywhere. After what he did at the science fair? No way.”

At a national science fair for grade-school kids, an eight-year-old Prospero took out his penis and urinated all over the judges’ table, all the while loudly proclaiming that they weren’t smart enough to judge a competition for the smelliest dog turd. It was not an isolated incident. Oscar Bell had been forced to write a lot of checks to mollify the judges, the school, and, Greene suspected, the press.

“I don’t want to talk about Dad anymore,” declared Prospero.

Greene accepted it, recognizing that particular tone in the boy’s voice. “What would you like to talk about? We have plenty of time. I see you’ve added something new to your hoodie.”

Prospero raised a hand and touched the tangle of tentacles that he’d drawn with such care on the gray cloth and down onto the green jacket.

“Is that from something you read?” asked Greene. “Or from a video game?”

“I don’t play video games anymore.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“They’re designed to encourage failure,” said Prospero. “The game levels get more difficult and complicated and you waste a lot of time beating them.”

“Isn’t that the point of those games? Overcoming obstacles and—”

“No. The point of those games is to addict people to playing them and make them desperate to win. But each time you beat a level your ‘reward’ is another even more difficult level. Addiction isn’t growth. The game designers make them for sheep. I’m not a sheep because sheep are for slaughter.”

“Prospero… have you been having thoughts of hurting yourself?”

“No, and don’t be stupid. You know that’s not what I meant. I said I was not a sheep.” The boy paused. “Look, if the game designers wanted smarter kids to play there would be something better at the end of the last level than some cheap ‘you won’ graphic bullshit. I don’t have time to waste on games. It’s not what I care about.”

Prospero once more touched the tentacles he’d drawn on his hood. He shrugged again.

Greene asked, “What is that thing? If it’s not from a game, then where did you come up with it?”

There was a long pause during which Prospero’s fingers traced the lines of ink on the gray cloth hood. When he spoke his voice was soft, distant, the way people spoke sometimes when they were quoting something that was deeply important to them. “‘A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.’”

“What is that quote? Is it from a book?”

Prospero shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I know you’re recording this. You can look it up later. All that matters is that it’s something someone dreamed once and wrote down. Don’t focus on the messenger, pay attention to the message.”

“And what is the message?”

Prospero burned off nearly a full minute before he answered. During that time he reached up and pulled the hood forward so that the shadows now obscured his entire face.

“People are afraid of the Devil. They think the Antichrist is going to come and go mano a mano with Jesus, blah blah blah. That’s bullshit. You’re a Jew, so I know you don’t believe it. Or, maybe you’re an atheist and really don’t buy into any of that apocalyptic bullshit.”

Greene said, “My personal beliefs are irrelevant to this conversation, Prospero. The question is what do you believe?”

Instead of answering that question directly, the boy asked, “How would you answer if I said, ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn’?”

“I have no idea what that is or what it might mean.”

“It’s a prayer I learned in my dreams.”

“I would like to talk to you about your dreams, Prospero. You know I’ve always found them fascinating.”

Prospero leaned his face out of the shadows and the smile he wore made Dr. Greene actually recoil. It was a smile filled with strange lights and ugly promises. It was not a smile Greene had ever seen on the boy’s face before, or on any human face. It was less sane than the Joker from Batman, and less wholesome than the toothy grin of a shark. It was so sudden and so intense and so wholly unexpected that Greene flinched.

“Dr. Greene,” said the boy, “I’ll miss you when I leave this world.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The LC-130 did a pass so we could take a good look at Gateway. The scattered buildings looked like tiny cardboard boxes, the kind Christmas ornaments come in. Small and fragile. As we swept up and around for the approach to the icy landing strip, I had a panoramic view of Antarctica. I’ve been in a lot of Mother Earth’s terrains — deserts, rain forests, caverns, grassy plains, and congested cities — but nothing ever gave me the feeling of absolute desolation that I got from the landscape below. There was white and white and white, but mixed into that were a thousand shades of gray and blue. The total absence of the warmer colors made me feel cold even in the pressurized and heated cabin of the plane. I could already feel the toothy bite of that wind.

Suddenly Bug was in our ears. “Got some stuff and I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

“We’re in Antarctica, Bug,” I said. “Our expectations are already pretty low.”

“Yeah, even so,” he said. “There are so many darn layers to this thing. They really went out of their way to hide it. They tried to keep the whole thing totally off the public radar, but with the ice caps melting there are too many people looking at the poles. So they have a cover story for when they need it.”

“Which is?”

“Studying the Antarctic Big Bang. Before you ask, I had to look that up, too,” said Bug. “Apparently a few years ago planetary scientists found evidence of a meteor impact that was earlier and a lot bigger than the one that killed the dinosaurs. They say it caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth’s history, the Permian-Triassic. We’re talking two hundred and fifty million years ago. There’s a crater on the eastern side of the continent that’s something like three hundred miles wide. The impact was so massive that it might have caused the breakup of the supercontinent of Gondwana. They’ve taken a lot of samples from meteor debris and it looks like the meteor was actually a chunk of rock knocked out of the surface of Mars by an asteroid that smacked it during the Permian Age. And there are some scientists who say that there was an even earlier impact about a billion years ago.”

“You’re saying Gateway was set up to study Martian rock?” I asked.

“Well… on paper, yeah,” said Bug. “With a bias toward looking for microbes that might prove the existence of life on Mars. The colonists they’re planning to send need to know stuff like that. But that’s only the cover story, and it’s the same cover story the Russians and Chinese used when they set up shop. The problem is that when I go deeper what I find are files marked VBO.”

VBO means “verbal briefing only.” All pertinent information is to be relayed in person. Nothing written. Or if there are papers they’re typed old school and photocopied. Nothing in a searchable database. Nothing e-mailed. Ever since some skittish types in the DoD and Congress got wind of MindReader there are more and more VBO files popping up. It’s making me cranky.

“This is fascinating as shit, Bug,” I groused, “but it doesn’t tell me what I need to know. Find out who is writing checks for this thing and tell Mr. Church that I want interrogators making life unpleasant for them until I know why I’m about to freeze my nuts off.”

“Copy that,” he said, and disconnected.

The pilot put us down with no trouble and informed us that the twilight temperature outside was a balmy fifty-six below. He told us that, temperature-wise, we caught a break.

Let’s pause on that for a moment.

Fifty-six below.

And that is miles from what’s considered cold down here. Pretty nippy by my personal standards, however.

We bundled. Mr. Church always makes sure we have the best toys, and one of the goodies we had were Therma-skinz, a pre-market kind of long johns that had micro-fine heating elements woven into the fabric of the new generation of spider-silk Kevlar. We’d stay warm and moderately bulletproof. The ’Skinz were ultralightweight and designed for combat troops who need to move and fight.

“You ready, Farm Boy?” asked Top.

Bunny looked out the window. “Nope,” he said.

CHAPTER FIVE

He lay back and got comfortable. Back then comfort mattered. Back then it took a lot to get him in the mood.

No sleeping pills. He’d tried those, but that was a mistake. Sometimes the drugs blocked him; sometimes the drugs trapped him. A nightmare either way.

Comfort was the thing. A good bed with enough pillows. A recliner by the fire. The sofa in his office. Maybe later it would be easier. Cat naps. That would be good. That was a goal. A little sleep on the road, on a mission, in the field.

For now, though, he had to cater to the needs of the body in order to soothe the mind and open all those doors.

He closed his eyes and let himself drift.

Drift.

Drift.

Until he was very far away.

CHAPTER SIX

The LC-130’s nose lifted on powerful hydraulics to allow us to drive the snowcat out, and the inrush of frigid air was like a punch in the face. I tugged my balaclava into place as I walked down the ramp with Bunny. Top drove the cat and the flight crew waved him down and guided him onto the access road. The crew was instructed to button up the plane and remain aboard. A team from Gateway was supposed to refuel the bird, but so far no one had come to meet us. That was troubling for all of the obvious reasons.

The closest buildings were utility sheds, all of which were dark and probably locked. The main building was a quarter mile away — a two-story central structure with single-story wings stretching off as if embracing the foot of the mountain.

“Lights are on,” said Bunny.

“Doesn’t mean anyone’s home,” murmured Top.

We had all of our normal gear and a lot of the nasty little gadgets developed for us by Dr. Hu. But Bug’s information about the ancient meteor strikes made me paranoid about some kind of weirdo alien space bugs trapped in ancient ice and now melting because of the engines and general operations of Gateway. So I made sure we all wore BAMS units. These are man-portable bio-aerosol mass spectrometers that were used for real-time detection and identification of biological aerosols. They have a vacuum function that draws in ambient air and hits it with continuous wave lasers to fluoresce individual particles. Key molecules like bacillus spores, dangerous viruses, and certain vegetative cells are identified and assigned color codes. Thanks to Mr. Church we had the latest models, which were about the size of a walkie-talkie. We clipped them to our belts. As long as the little lights were green we were all happy. Orange made us sweat. If they turned red we’d be running like hell.

We climbed onto the snowcat and I’m pretty sure we were all thinking something was hinky with Gateway. When you lived at the bottom of the world, visitors were rare. You came out to greet them. And yet every door on the station remained closed. We drove in silence to the main building and Top parked us at an angle that would allow the cat to offer us protection if this turned into an ambush. He idled there for a full minute.

Nothing.

“Maybe they’re putting their mittens on,” suggested Bunny.

“Uh-huh,” grunted Top. “And maybe they’re baking us some cookies.”

“Let’s get to work,” I said. “Combat call signs only.”

I screwed a bud into my ear and tapped it. “Cowboy to Bug. Talk to me.”

“Welcome to the winter wonderland, Cowboy.” The fidelity of the speaker was superb and Bug sounded like he was right next to me instead of sipping hot cocoa at the tactical operations center at the Hangar, the main DMS facility in Brooklyn. “We are mission active and all telemetry is in the green.”

“Okay, we’re on the ground and about to leave the cat,” I said. “Bunny, let’s go knock. Top, watch our backs.”

Top nodded and clicked the switches that made a pair of thirty-millimeter chain guns rise from concealed pods. A second set of switches folded down a pair of stubby wings on which were mounted Hellfire missiles, six per side. Like I said, Mr. Church always makes sure we have the best toys.

“Don’t get trigger-happy, old man,” said Bunny.

“Don’t get in my way if I do, Farm Boy,” said Top.

We got out. The sun was a cold and distant speck of light that seemed poised to drop off the edge of the world. Winds cut across the open plain with the ferocity of knives. The ’Skinz kept us from freezing, but the cold seemed to find every devious opening in our face masks and goggles.

I stopped and raised my head to listen to the wind. It blew across so many jagged peaks that it picked up all sorts of whistles and howls. I wasn’t experienced enough with this part of the world and its sounds, but it seemed to me that there was more to that wind than the natural vagaries of aerodynamic acoustics. It actually seemed like the wind was shrieking at us.

Bunny caught it, too. “The fuck is that?”

I had no answers and didn’t want to give in to any kind of discussion on the topic.

“Time to clock in,” I said. “Bug, where are we with thermal scans?”

“They’re online but the readings are all over the place. First I get one signature, then I have a couple of hundred, then a dozen, then none. It keeps changing. I don’t think we can trust that intel. Geological survey of the area indicates heavy concentration of metal ores in those mountains.” He paused. “Not sure why that’s messing with thermal imaging for the buildings, though. Best I can advise is to proceed with extreme caution.”

“Roger that.”

Bunny swore softly and then faded to the left side of the main door; I took the right side. I reached out a hand and knocked on the door. Even when you know it’s a waste of time, you go through the motions in case you’re wrong. And, sometimes you do the expected thing in order to provoke a reaction.

We got no reaction at all.

I reached for the handle. It turned easily and the lock clicked open.

Bunny mouthed the words, “So much for the concept of a ‘secure facility.’”

I waved my hand for Top. He turned off the snowcat, dropped down to the ice, and came up on our six, fast and steady.

We entered in silence, moving quick, covering each other… and then stopped. Just inside the metal doorway was a small vestibule, and the back wall of it was one mother of a steel airlock.

“Bug,” I said. “Tell me why I’m looking at an airlock.”

“Huh? Um… I don’t know, it’s not on the schematics for the old radar station. And there’s nothing in the materials purchases or requisitions about it.”

“Balls.”

Top ran his hand over the smooth steel. “Ten bucks says it’s a Huntsman.”

I nodded. In our trade we get to see every kind of airlock they make. And, unfortunately, we get to deal with what’s behind most of those airlocks. Fun times.

“There’s a geometry hand scanner, too,” said Bunny. “Pretty sure it’s a Synergy Software Systems model. The new one that came out last December.”

“Good,” said Bug, “that gives me a starting point. Sergeant Rock, put on a glove and run the scanner.”

Top took a polyethylene glove from a pocket and pulled it onto his right hand. It looked like the blue gloves worn by cops and airport security, but this one was veined with wires and sensors that uplinked it via satellite to MindReader. He placed his hand on the geometry scanner and let the lasers do their work. Normally they create a 3-D map of the exact terrain of the whole hand, but the sensors hijacked that process and fed the scan signature into MindReader. The computer fed its own intrusion program into the scanner and essentially told it to recognize the hand. Sure, I’m oversimplifying it, but I’m a shooter, not a geek. I’m always appropriately amazed and I make the right oooh-ing and ahhh-ing sounds when Bug shows me this stuff, but at the end of the day I just want the damn door open.

The damn door opened.

“You da man,” Bunny said to Bug.

We stepped back from the airlock as the two-ton steel door swung out on nearly silent hydraulics. I expected a flood of fluorescent light and a warm rush of air. Instead we saw only darkness and felt a cold wind blow out at us like the exhalation of a sleeping giant. It was fetid air, though, and it stank of oil and smoke and chemicals. But it was more than that. Worse than that.

It was a meat smell.

Burst meat. Raw meat.

Like the inside of a butcher’s freezer.

INTERLUDE THREE

“Prospero,” said Greene, “we need to talk about your dream diary.”

“I figured we would,” said the boy. He sat on the floor between the potted ficus and the couch.

“When I asked you to start your dream diary it was with the understanding that you shared your own dreams.”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“Prospero, if these are your own dream images, then what should we think about this?” Greene had his laptop open and he turned it so they could both see the screen. Then he held up one of the boy’s drawings, which showed a pair of giants kneeling in water. The giant on the left was colored in umber and other earth tones; the one on the right was in cooler blues and grays. On the screen there was a high-resolution jpeg of a painting with almost identical composition and color. “This is a very famous painting called Metamorphosis of Narcissus,” said Greene. “It was painted in 1937 by the artist Salvador Dalí.”

“Yes,” said Prospero.

“You admit to having copied this painting?”

“No.”

“But—”

“My drawing is different,” he said. “It’s not the same angle, and some of the other things are different. The decay on the stone figure is worse in mine. And in Dalí’s painting there is a hand holding up a bulb from which another figure is growing. I didn’t put that in because that figure’s not there anymore. The sky’s different, too. He painted it at twilight, but mine is clearly dawn.”

Greene said, “Making changes to someone else’s art is not the point. You took the theme and basic composition from Dalí and gave it to me as if it was something from your own dreams.”

Prospero shook his head. “No, that’s not what happened.”

“It is. And I checked, most of your ‘dream’ images are borrowed from paintings by famous artists. The big organic machine picture is The Elephant Celebes by Max Ernst. The drawing of the red building is Giorgio de Chirico’s The Red Tower. Do you want me to go on?”

“Wait,” said Prospero, surprised, “are you mad at me?”

“I’m disappointed. I thought we had established a relationship of honesty, Prospero. I don’t enjoy being lied to.”

The boy looked alarmed. “I’m not lying. You’re the only person I ever tell the truth to. The whole truth.”

“Then explain these drawings. Why did you copy them and try to pass them off as your own?”

“No,” said Prospero quickly. “Look at them. You think my bull-god is the same as de Chirico’s? It’s not. My bull is older and it has the marks of the whip and the claw. It’s ready to be given to the Elder Things as payment.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” said Greene. “Did you know about these paintings before you had your ‘dreams’?”

“I knew of them before I started the dream diary for you,” explained the boy, clearly upset, “but that’s because I went looking for them.”

“What does that mean?”

“I… well, I’ve always had dreams like this. I never dream about the stuff human kids dream about.”

“You are human, Prospero.”

“Don’t start that again, Doc. Not now, okay?”

Greene spread his hands. In several previous sessions Prospero had expressed his hope that there were others like him here on Earth, and that if he found them maybe together they would be able to solve the problem of how to get home. Wherever and whatever home was. “Continue,” he said, his patience thin.

“I had those dreams and then once I was surfing the Net, looking for people like me, you know? That’s when I found this Web site about the artwork of the surrealism movement. There was a painting by Max Ernst that showed the Loplop.”

Greene nodded, and located the image online, and then in Prospero’s sketchbook. It showed a strange creature that was part bird, part human, and entirely unreal. The artist had done a number of drawings of the creature, claiming that it was his alter ego, which he also referred to as his “private phantom.” The painting that matched — or nearly matched — one of Prospero’s drawings was one of the creature in the midst of running, or perhaps dancing. The painting, known as L’Ange du Foyer (Le Triomphe du Surréalisme), or The Fireside Angel, was subtitled “The Triumph of Surrealism.”

Prospero came over and bent to touch the picture on the laptop screen. His touch was gentle and on his face was an expression of self-aware pleasure that Greene thought looked beatific. There was text beneath the image, and Prospero read it in a soft voice. “‘Naked, they dress only in their majesty and their mystery.’” He turned to the doctor. “Don’t you get it? This isn’t me copying what they did. This is me finding other people like me. Other people who have seen the things I’ve seen. Not just Ernst. Others. André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault.” He laughed and then rattled off a long list of names. “Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, Max Morise, Man Ray, Roger Vitrac, Gala Éluard, Salvador Dalí, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, Yves Tanguy…”

Greene held a hand up to stop him. “I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

“They saw what I see. They knew it’s real. They wrote about it, painted it, told people about it. They knew, Doc. They knew that my world exists. Do you know how much I needed that? To know that I’m not crazy, that this is real?”

Greene said nothing. This was a dangerous moment for the boy and he had to decide if he had reached a new level with Prospero or if the boy had revealed just how far his psychosis ran.

Before he could organize a comment, Prospero snatched up the sketchbook and hugged it to his chest.

“I think I understand now,” he declared. “Those devices I’ve been building? The ones my dad keeps taking from me and selling to the military? They’re nothing. That was just me starting the wrong way. No… no, it was me getting up to speed. But this, this,” he said, thumping his palm against his sketchbook so hard that it seemed he wanted to push the book into his own heart, “this is what I needed to make me stop doubting myself. God, it’s like a light went on in my head the way it does in cartoons. Wow. I know, Doc. I really know what I have to do. The writers, they’ve been dropping clues for years. Lovecraft, Derleth, Howard? All of them, the ones everyone thinks were writing stupid horror stories? They weren’t. Oh no. Oh, hell no. They were dropping clues. They were sending up smoke signals, knowing that someone like me would be out there, watching, looking, waiting for contact.”

“Prospero,” said Greene evenly, “I’m going to need you to calm down. Why don’t you take a seat and let’s do some control breathing together—”

“Shhh, Doc,” said Prospero, “you need to listen now. This is so big. This is so huge my head feels like it opened up on hinges. I can feel the truth in there. I can feel the answers. They’re whispering to me. They want me to find them.” He cut Greene an almost conspiratorial look. “You’ve been a big help. You kicked me in the butt and now I know what I have to do.”

“What is it you think you have to do?” asked Greene carefully.

“I have to find the books. They all hinted about them. Those writers, they weren’t writing about fake monster stuff. They were making sure the clues got out there. Most people — the human herd — they think it’s all nonsense and junk. But it’s not. No. I need to find those books and then I need to get to work building it.”

“Building… what?”

“My God Machine,” said Prospero as if that answer should have been obvious to even the meanest intelligence. Laughter bubbled out of him. “I bet my dad would even help me. He’ll have to. He’ll want to.”

“What is a God Machine, Prospero?”

The boy walked slowly across the room, still clutching the sketchbook to his chest. He stopped by the window and raised his face to the warm sunlight.

“It’s how I’m going to go home,” he said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I heard Bunny’s sharp intake of breath.

I heard Top softly murmur, “God in heaven.”

Then something moved in the darkness. We crouched, weapons ready, barrels following line of sight, fingers lying nervously along the curves of our trigger guards.

Inside the chamber, a dozen yards away, we could hear something. It wasn’t footsteps. Not exactly. This was a soft, almost furtive sound. A shift and scrape as if whatever moved in there did not move well. Or was unable to move well.

“NV,” I said very quietly and we all flipped down the night-vision devices on our helmets. The world of snow white and midnight black instantly transformed to an infinitely stranger world of greens and grays.

The thing in the darkness was at the very outside range of total clarity. It moved and swayed with a broken rhythm, obscured by rows of stacked supplies.

“What the fuck…?” breathed Bunny.

The thing moved toward us, a huge, weird shape that was in no way human. Pale and strange, it shuffled steadily toward the open door, but we only caught glimpses of it as it passed behind one stack of crates and then another. The abattoir stink of the place was awful and it seemed to intensify as this creature advanced on us.

“Got to be a polar bear,” whispered Bunny.

“Wrong continent,” said Top.

Their voices were hushed. They were talking because they were scared, and that was weird. These guys were pros, recruited to the DMS from the top SpecOps teams in the country. They don’t run off at the mouth to relieve stress. Not them.

Except they were.

“Cut the chatter,” I snapped, and from the way they stiffened I knew that it wasn’t my rebuke that hit them — but the realization that they were breaking their own training. Each of them would have fried a junior team member for making that kind of error. So… why had they?

The thing in the darkness was behind the closest set of crates now. In a few seconds it would shuffle into view. I could feel fear dumping about a pint of adrenaline into my bloodstream.

And then the creature moved into our line of sight.

In the glow of the night vision it was green and unnatural, though I knew that it was really white. Not the vital white of an Alaskan polar bear, or the pure white of a gull’s breast. No, this was a sickly hue and I knew that even with the NV goggles. This was a pallor that had never been touched by sunlight, even the cold light here at the frozen bottom of the world. This was a mushroom white, a sickly and abandoned paleness that could only have acquired that shade in a place of total darkness. It provoked in me an antagonism born of repugnance and I nearly shot it right there and then.

The creature was as tall as Bunny — six and a half feet or more — with a grotesquely fat body and eyes that were nothing more than useless slits in its hideous face.

I heard a sound. A short, humorless laugh of surprise and disgust. Could have been Top, or Bunny. Or me.

“It’s a goddamn penguin…” said Bunny, his voice filled with surprise and wonder.

A penguin?

Sure it was.

In a way.

The problem is that it was too big. Way too goddamn big. Massive. Twice the size of the Emperor penguins and bigger than the prehistoric penguins I saw in a diorama at the Smithsonian. The wings were stubby and useless as if it no longer flew even through the water. The beak was pale and translucent; the body was blubbery and awkward. It waddled toward us and we gave ground, though we kept our guns on the thing. Crazy as it sounds, I was scared of it. The sight of it was triggering reactions that were way down in my lizard brain — miles from where rational thought could laugh off instinctive reactions.

The penguin shambled past us through the airlock but then it suddenly stopped at the exterior door. The sunlight was almost gone but what little there was touched its face. The creature turned toward the warmth for a single moment, and then it reeled backward from the light and uttered a terrible sound. It was the kind of strangled shriek of terror you hear only from animals whose throats are not constructed for sound — like rabbits and deer. A scream that is torn from the chest and dragged through the vocal cords in a way so violent and wet that you know it has damaged everything it touched. The penguin careened into the wall as it fled backward from the touch of the dying sunlight. Its screams were terrible.

Even after the blind animal crashed backward into the airlock it continued to scream and scream. I could see black beads of moisture flying from its beak and with sick dread I knew that they were drops of bloody spit from its ruined throat.

“Boss…,” said Bunny, his voice urgent with concern and horror.

“Push it back inside,” yelled Top.

Bunny let his rifle hang from its strap and with a wince of distaste he placed his hands on the animal’s back and gave it a short, sharp push toward the airlock, away from the sunlight. The penguin paused, though, at the mouth of the airlock, and immediately began fighting its way backward, screaming into the darkness it had come out of. Bunny shoved again, throwing his massive upper-body strength against the creature’s resistance. It lurched forward, but then it turned and stabbed at Bunny with its pale beak. Bunny howled in pain as the razor-sharp beak tore through the knitted wool of his balaclava. Black blood erupted in a line from the corner of Bunny’s mouth to his ear.

“Shoot the fucking thing!” bellowed Bunny as he backpedaled, shielding his eyes from another peck.

Top shoved him out of the way and raised his Glock. There was a single, sharp crack! A black hole appeared between the slitted, useless eyes of the penguin and the entire back of its head exploded outward to spray the line of stacked crates. The sheer bulk of the thing kept it upright for a moment, giving the weird impression that the bullet hadn’t killed it. Then it leaned slowly sideways and collapsed.

We stood there in a loose circle staring at it.

Bunny said, “What…?”

Just the one word and he let it trail off because clearly we had no more answers than he did.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Sixteen cars roared around the track.

In the stands tens of thousands of fans leapt to their feet in groups as the cars swept around. The race was five minutes old. Every car was still in the game; all of the drama and potential was still ahead. Anything could still happen. And this was the start of the NASCAR Spring Cup series. With each race more of the drivers would be eliminated until that last grueling challenge between the top four. All of that was to come.

This was the first race.

Everyone was wired. The announcer and color commentator were already yelling, calling the moves, talking about the drivers and their cars, their histories, their crashes, their lucky escapes, their courage. Pit crews were in position, each of them ready, and even the most jaded among them filled with nervous energy as they watched the cars accelerate to breakneck speeds.

Even though it was early, vendors were selling beer by the hundred gallon. Hot dogs and chicken wings, chips and pretzels were being devoured by the ton.

It had all started. The race season was on.

Danny Perry, the rising star of the NASCAR world who’d come out of nowhere two years ago to win a record number of races, was there, third back on the inside, driving a Ford Fusion with the decal of a sports drink on the hood and half a dozen other advertisers crowding the doors and roof. The car had a sky blue body, and images from the interior cameras inside the car flashed the masked and helmeted face of the four-wheeled hero onto the screens. The hot money was on him to come in no lower than fourth, and maybe even second place. High enough to insure his place in the rest of the series. Some of the sports reporters were saying that he had the chops to make it all the way to the winning flag at the end of the season. He had more under the hood, they said. He had tricks he hadn’t yet used, they said. He had things to prove, they said.

A lot of fans in the stands wore his colors. One group of three hundred people who had bussed in from his hometown of Greenwood had little fans with cutouts of his face on them, and each time his car roared past they waved his own image at him, and then chased him with their screams.

The cars ripped around the track, changing places, fighting each other for position, taking calculated risks, going too fast for mistakes. The interior cameras flashed one face, then another and another, onto the screens. The helmets and fireproof masks showed nothing, but the commentators made those masked faces human with anecdotes and predictions. The crowds knew the faces of their heroes anyway.

Twenty-six minutes in, just as the pack began to stretch out and lose its bee-swarm shape, Danny Perry made his move. He was known for waiting to see how the other drivers were playing it, getting the pulse of the players on the field, and then he’d make a move to take the lead. So far he’d made that play sixteen times, and each time he got the lead early he kept it. As soon as he cut through a gap that didn’t look wide enough for a bicycle and shot out in front with an acceleration that lived up to the hype, the crowd went absolutely mad. Even the fans who weren’t rooting for Danny leapt to their feet because this was a history-book moment. Danny wasn’t racing against anyone who lived on the second or third tier of the sport. He was jousting with kings, and he’d just taken the lead in a move that made a bold damn statement.

Catch me if you can.

If you can.

The whole pace — already insane — rose up as the hunt began in earnest. It was going to be brutal. Everyone knew it.

Which is when it all went to hell.

There was no warning. No bomb. Nothing that indicated an attack. Nothing sinister.

On one side of a scalding moment of raw high-speed entertainment, sixteen stock cars raced at more than 185 miles an hour. Danny Perry had bulled his way to 190.3.

On the other side of that moment the engines of every car on the track stopped.

There were no explosions. Not at first.

The electrical conduction within the transmissions ceased. Gone. Just as the video feeds from the cameras and the big screens mounted around the track went dark. Bang. The commentators’ voices were silenced. Just like that.

Only the sound of the crowd pushed its way past the moment. They were screaming, cheering, yelling. And then when the first cars spun out of control and the next wave struck them, it was only the screams that lingered.

Lingered, grew, rose, detonated into shrill blasts of horror as every car crunched together. The drivers had no chance. There was no power at all. No steering, nothing. Only the bull muscle of feet on brakes and desperate hands on dying steering wheels gave the cars any chance.

It was too small a chance, though. The speeds were too great. The shock was too much.

Engines exploded. Electricity was not flowing and there were no sparks from damaged wires. No, the sparks that touched off the fuel were from metal hitting metal. Not many sparks.

Enough.

Enough was too much.

A fireball punched upward from amid the crunched fist of the collision. The screams of the crowd changed in pitch, rising higher, sounding like a great flock of birds in pain.

CHAPTER NINE

Top pulled off his helmet and balaclava so he could see better as he applied a quick field dressing to Bunny’s face. I stood guard. Nobody talked about the penguin. We probably should have, but we didn’t.

Instead Bunny asked the only question that mattered. “What the hell is going on down here?”

Good question, but none of us had even a clue how to answer it.

Once Bunny’s wound was dressed we began moving again. I checked the BAMS unit and got the same steady green, so I tugged down the edge of my own balaclava and sniffed the air. It smelled of machine oil, ozone, ice, and sulfur. Nothing more mysterious than that. Even the rotted meat smell seemed less evident the deeper we went into the complex.

We checked the rest of the storeroom, but it was empty.

Almost empty.

There were no more penguins and there were no people, but all along the back wall there was blood. Pools of it. Drops of it. Arterial sprays of it on the wall.

“Oh… shit,” breathed Bunny.

Against the wall was a stack of crates that was ten boxes high and went all the way to the ceiling, the wooden boxes pressed closed. Somebody had written across the face of the stack.

“The hell’s that supposed to mean?” asked Bunny.

Instead of answering, Top leaned close to the writing, then he winced and recoiled. He didn’t have to tell us what had been used to write those words. The floor was covered with bloody footprints. In shoes, in military-style combat boots, and in bare feet.

“Looks like a parade’s been through here,” said Top.

“Whoa, whoa,” said Bunny, kneeling by one set of boot prints, “look at this. That’s not American.”

He was right. The tread marks of those boots were different from any of the patterns used on the boots and shoes of American military. In our line of work you learn these things. Just as you learn the tread marks of shoes worn by allies and others. This was an “other.”

“Russian,” said Top. “No doubt about it. Standard-issue combat boots.”

We spread out and checked the rest of the prints and found two other sets of Russian boots and five different sets of Chinese boots.

“So,” said Bunny, looking around, “this was an invasion? Does that mean this was an act of war or—?”

Instead of answering I called it in and told Bug, Aunt Sallie, and Church what we’d found. Bloody footprints. No bodies, no shell casings. No answers.

“That base is U.S. military property,” said Aunt Sallie. “That makes it de facto U.S. soil. If you encounter enemy combatants anywhere in Gateway and if they do not surrender their weapons, you will respond appropriately to protect yourself, your team, the Gateway staff, and the physical assets on site. In that order.”

“Copy that,” I said.

Church added, “Get us some answers, Cowboy.”

I promised that I would. Answers would be nice. Kicking some ass would be nice, too.

We followed the Russian prints out of the storeroom and down a corridor lined with closed doors. These opened into offices, bedrooms, small labs, an infirmary, and other functional rooms. No one was in any of them and there was no sign of disturbance. No blood, no damage, no shell casings. The bloody footprints had long since faded to paleness and then vanished.

Despite the coldness of the storage room, the temperature was up in all of the other rooms. Very high. The thermostat read 82.

I reached out to turn it down but found that the dial was broken. Someone had jammed a screwdriver into the gear. There were bloody fingerprints all around.

“Our bad guys don’t like the cold,” said Top.

We pressed on and eventually cleared the whole floor.

“Nobody’s home,” said Bunny. “Sort of feel happy about that.”

“You know what they say about assumptions, Farm Boy,” Top said quietly.

Suddenly Bug was in my ear. “Cowboy,” he said, “I’ve been digging up more stuff on this. It’s all hidden behind black budget code and—”

I held up my fist and the three of us formed a triangle facing outward.

“We’re kind of in the middle of something here, Bug,” I said, “so give it to us fast.”

“Okay, I’m checking the profiles of everyone on the team and it’s really strange. Not the individual members, but what they do. The team leader is Dr. Marcus Erskine, a particle physicist from Cal Tech. His second in command is a quantum physicist named Rinkowski, and you have four top electrical engineers, a structural engineer, an astrophysicist, a geologist, an archaeologist, a professor of comparative anatomy, a psychologist, and — get this — three people with PhDs in parapsychology.”

“That’s a weird damn posse for studying meteor craters or building EMP cannons,” said Top.

Bunny said, “Oh, man…”

“Anything on the BAMS units?” asked Bug.

I checked. “Everything’s in the green.”

“Well, that’s good, right? No Martian bacteria.”

Top made a disgusted noise. “Now what makes you think our BAMS units would pick up some kind of alien space virus—?”

“Bacteria,” corrected Bug.

“I’ll hurt you, boy,” said Top. “I can fix your mouth so it won’t hold soup.”

Bug gave a quick, uncertain laugh.

“Top’s right,” said Bunny. “I do not want to catch something that’s going to make me grow a third eye or turn my dick into a cactus.”

“Let’s not lose our shit,” I said. “You have anything else for us, Bug?”

“Just equipment manifests. Hundreds of tons of building materials. And they brought down every kind of drilling and excavating equipment in the catalog. Big stuff, too. Earth movers and a hundred-ton crane.”

“For what?” demanded Bunny.

“Documents don’t say,” said Bug, “but there’s something else. We tried to hack the Russian team’s mainframe. Their system is offline, but I was able to grab some stuff that had been uploaded to their satellite. They have two separate operations going on. Cowboy… it looks like the Russians are building a hadron collider down there.”

A hadron collider is a very large particle accelerator that’s used to test all kinds of extreme theories in particle physics and high-energy physics. I didn’t know a lot about them other than what I learned when I took Trident Team to keep an apocalypse cult from taking over the Large Hadron Collider in the Jura Mountains near the Franco-Swiss border. They believed that if it was ramped up to overload it would create a black hole that would destroy the entire solar system. Or something. I didn’t delve too deeply into their rationale. We shot a bunch of them and freed the hostages they’d taken.

“Why in the wide blue fuck would the Russians be building a collider here?” I demanded.

Bug grunted. “You tell me, Cowboy. I just look stuff up. But, from the materials and equipment Erskine brought down with him, there’s a chance he was building one, too.”

“How’s a hadron collider tie into renewable energy research?”

“Not sure it does,” Bug said. “It’s all weird, because from what we can tell, the EMP project, the crater excavation thing, and the hadron collider all seem to be parts of the same project. Don’t ask me how.”

I didn’t, and since he had nothing else, I ended the call. We stood for a moment, facing out, weapons in our hands, heads filled with questions.

“Anyone else feel like bugging the fuck out of here?” asked Bunny hopefully. “This place is freaking me out and we don’t have enough boots on the ground to do this right.”

“It’s not a job,” said Top, “it’s an adventure.”

We moved off. There was a tunnel that connected the main building to an oversized equipment shed. But when we got there it was empty. No cranes, no drills. The BAMS units kept reading in the green, which was comforting. What we found was not.

What we found instead was a big goddamn hole in the ground.

It was in one corner, but it took up nearly a quarter of the floor space — maybe forty yards across. Like I said, a big hole. It dropped down into shadows.

“Look here,” said Top as he squatted down on the far edge. “See this? This isn’t a sinkhole, not a proper one. They started digging right here, and from the drill marks on the edge, they got down to a certain point and then something happened. Looks to me like a big-ass chunk of the floor fell in.”

Top shone his light down. There was a rough ice slope angling down, steep but walkable. His light swept back and forth, then stopped on a pool of blood. Bunny touched the edge of the pool with his boot.

“Boss,” he said quietly, “this hasn’t even had time to freeze. Whatever’s happening here is still happening.”

They looked at me, and I nodded. “Rules of engagement are as follows. Pick your targets, good muzzle discipline. Let’s not cap any friendlies… but gentlemen, I don’t intend to bleed for this thing, whatever it is.”

“Hooah,” they said. I could see their inner hardness rising to the surface to supplant their fear. Well, some of their fear. I turned my face away, not wanting them to read whatever expression was there.

The ice slope dropped down into shadows. Everything around us was dead quiet. We were too deep underground to hear the howling winds, and all of the machinery here at Gateway was still.

The silence felt wrong, though. It was not the quiet of something empty, something over. It was the quiet of the poised fist. The tension in my chest was like a vise being tightened around my heart.

I licked my lips, which had gone very dry, and then took one single step down the slope. That’s when a shrill scream shattered the silence and something came rushing at me out of the shadows.

It was a man. A soldier. Not a Russian. Not a Chinese.

The man was dressed in the camo pattern of the Marine Corps. His eyes were wide and wild, with no trace of sanity. Bloody drool flew from his lips as he shrieked nonsense words.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

His clothes were torn and splashed with gore and he drove straight at me, stabbing at my heart with a bloody bayonet.

CHAPTER TEN

There was no time to dodge out of the way.

He was right there. The blade was falling.

I was dead.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

Then suddenly the man was turning, spinning, twisting, breaking apart as bullets tore into him. I heard the gunshots almost as an aftereffect. Bang! Bang! Shot after shot as Top and Bunny fired.

The marine slammed into the wall, rebounded, spun halfway around, and dropped face-forward onto the ground, making no attempt to break his fall. The bayonet clattered to the cold stone and the echoes of the gunshots banged and bounced all around me while I simply stood there. I had not moved at all. I hadn’t reacted. Not to evade, not to defend myself.

“Cowboy,” said Top. He had to repeat it again, more sharply this time, before I snapped out of it. I blinked at him, then down at the dead marine.

“What—?” I asked.

Bunny hurried over and turned me toward the light, checking to see if I’d been injured, but the blade hadn’t touched me. I saw the frown of uncertainty carve itself onto Bunny’s face.

“You okay, Boss?” he asked.

“I…”

It was all I could manage. Top came over and they both studied me for a moment, all of us ignoring the dead man.

“You in there, Cap’n,” asked Top gently.

I blinked again and suddenly the strange paralysis was gone. I was myself again and I was back in the moment. It was like waking up from a dream. One of those dreams where you think you’re awake but you aren’t. You’re trapped in that sleep paralysis that keeps you half in one world and half in the other but belonging to neither.

I pushed myself back from them and shook my head. “What just happened?”

No one answered. The facts were all there. Facts, not answers.

I squatted down next to the corpse and rolled him onto his back. He was a Latino man, maybe twenty-three or — four. Probably a good-looking kid in life, but death made him ugly; it made him strangely alien.

“Cowboy,” said Bunny, still using my combat call sign, “what happened to you just now? What was that?”

I glanced up at them, then shook my head. “I really don’t know.”

“I never saw you freeze before,” said Top. “Not ever.”

All I could do was shake my head. My lack of hesitation in combat has always been one of my most important survival skills. It was one of the reasons Mr. Church picked me to join the DMS. Hesitation kills. Hesitation in a special operator can get a lot of people killed.

So why had I hesitated?

Why?

Top said, “Who is he?”

We all looked at the dead man. The name stitched onto his pocket was GOMEZ. That told us nothing. Top tapped my shoulder with the BAMS unit and I nodded and leaned back to let him run the machine over the poor kid. If Gomez’s brain chemistry had been rewired by some kind of pathogen or bioweapon the BAMS unit would pick something up. The green lights didn’t flicker.

“What was that he was yelling?” asked Bunny. “That wasn’t Spanish.”

As if in answer, we heard other voices scream out those same words.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

The shrieks rose out of the shadows from farther down the ice slope. Top and Bunny brought up their guns. This time I was right there with them, my Sig Sauer rising with professional speed and competence. Whatever bizarre hesitation had frozen me a moment ago was gone.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

A knot of figures came swarming out of the darkness. Eight of them. All of them wearing military uniforms. All of them armed with guns, with knives. All of them covered in blood. All of them with eyes that were filled with madness.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

Russians, Chinese, and American military, coming at us like a pack of wolves.

They opened fire at the same moment we did.

The air of that strange place was instantly torn apart as if by a swarm of frenzied hornets. I dropped low against the wall, firing, firing. Top and Bunny split apart, firing, firing.

All of us firing.

The first man was a Chinese soldier and I caught him with a double-tap. One center mass to stall him and one in the head. He was close enough for that kind of precision. His own shots went high and wild. Almost as if he wasn’t aiming. He dropped down, those strange words dying on his tongue.

“Tekeli-li! Tek—!”

Bunny sawed through two others, burning halfway through a magazine. On the other side of the slope, Top was cutting a bloody swath.

It was the most savage one-sided fight I’d ever been party to. The eight of them were armed and those with guns were firing, but they weren’t aiming. Their rounds hit walls and floor and vanished into the lofty ceiling, but they came nowhere near us.

We did not miss a single shot.

It was all over in ten brutal seconds. It could not have been more than that.

Three of us, eight of them.

A red slaughter.

They fell like broken dolls. Not like soldiers, not like men. They dropped like puppets. Down and down and dead.

The whole world seemed to be filled with thunder. They had been screaming those strange words, but they had not yelled in pain. Not once.

Not one sound as the bullets tore them down.

When it was over we swapped out our magazines and waited for the next wave. Waited for more.

Waited.

Amid the echoes of thunder and the billowing smoke, we waited.

The silence that fell was strange and ugly and wrong in more ways than I can possibly describe.

No one else came running up the slope at us.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

We needed to understand this. I wanted to check these men, to see if there was something about them that would explain this.

The moment wouldn’t allow it. Whatever was happening… it was down there. Down the slope, inside those deep shadows.

I gave my men a quick, meaningful look and got very tight nods. They were clearly as terrified and confused as I was. This mission had started out wrong and it was slipping sideways, losing whatever tenuous shape it had.

I nodded toward the shadows, then removed a flash-bang from my rig, pulled the pin. I didn’t need to call “frag out.” We all moved back, looked away, covered our ears.

The flash-bang bounced on the dense ice, then settled into a roll, vanishing into the unknown.

Then it went off.

The bang was huge, magnified by the stone walls and the vastness of the cavern. We ran down the slope, guns ready, barrels tracking everywhere we turned our eyes, ready to fire, ready to continue this surreal fight.

The slope was littered with chunks of ancient ice that was veined with discoloration as if polluted water had been frozen here over the centuries. We saw bloody footprints, going down and coming up. We saw pools of blood and fallen equipment. We passed through the ice layer and entered the rock hardness of the mountain. As the ice gave way we realized that we were on a stone slope, and one that was far too regular to have been anything natural. And far too old to be anything our own drills and engineers had cut.

“Looks clear,” said Bunny, though he stood braced to fight.

I put my high-intensity flashlight on the widest beam setting and shone it down. I heard Bunny gasp in the same instant my heart jumped inside my chest.

“Cap’n,” breathed Top.

“I know,” I said, my throat dry.

“I don’t think Erskine’s team was looking for no damn meteors,” said Top.

“I know.”

Bunny just said, “No.”

The slope was some kind of rampart that angled downward for at least a thousand yards. It was cracked in places, and in other places byways led off from it to form slopes both angled and flat. It became clear that this was a cavern of unbelievable size. The ceiling soared above us and, except for titanic support pillars of natural rock, the cavern stretched for miles. We could see some of it, just a hint, because of weird bioluminescence — probably some species of mold — that clung to every surface. All around, on the slope, built into the walls, and tumbled ahead of us, were gigantic stone blocks. They were stacked like prefab building units and intercut with other structures — cones, tubes, pyramids, each of fantastic size, some of them taller than the Great Pyramid in Egypt. I know how that sounds, but we were all seeing it.

The flashlight had a quarter-mile reach and it barely brushed the outer perimeters of what could only be a vast city of stone.

INTERLUDE FOUR

The boy was being cooperative for a change. Even expansive. He’d recently had a new series of vivid dreams since their last session and clearly wanted to talk about them, and of course Dr. Greene wanted to hear every detail. Not because these sessions were billed at four hundred an hour, though that was a factor; no, it was because the boy genuinely fascinated Greene. In his entire professional career, including all of his clinical work, he’d never encountered anyone like Prospero Bell. No one as intelligent and no one with this unique combination of skills and psychosis.

“… and then I came through a door in the ice and I was in this immense city,” the boy said, continuing a long narrative that had begun with a shipwreck and a walk of days across mud flats that gradually turned into an ice sheet. “Huge city with stone buildings made from geometric shapes. Cones and balls and blocks of all kinds. Wild, because some of those stones were bigger than the Great Pyramid. I saw the pyramids, did I tell you? We went to Egypt when I was nine.”

“Yes,” said Greene, “you described that trip with great precision. You have a remarkable eye for detail.”

Prospero nodded, accepting that as a statement rather than a compliment. “This was bigger, and it looked like the stones were carved out of single blocks. They had to be a million tons. And just thinking about that level of technology knocks me out. Humans couldn’t do that, you know. We don’t even know how the pyramids were built, and each of these blocks was as big as a whole pyramid.”

“Did you see any people in this city?” asked Greene.

“People?” echoed the boy. He looked momentarily confused by the question. “You know, I… I’m not sure how to answer that. I don’t know if the word ‘people’ applies. There were citizens, I guess you’d say. Things that lived there. Really strange, very weird.”

“Describe them. Were they like the creatures you sketched?”

“No. They weren’t my people. They were different. A separate race.”

“Were they the Elder Things? You mentioned them before but you haven’t explained what they are.”

Prospero thought about that and began nodding. “I… think so. And maybe the reason I didn’t go into what they are is because I wasn’t sure. Not before last night, anyway. Not before this last dream. You’re right; I think they are the Elder Things.”

“And who exactly are these Elder Things? Are they aliens? Are they gods? What is the name of their race?”

“I don’t know. They’re too old for that. Names don’t matter to beings like that.”

“How can a name not matter? What about identity?”

“They know who they are. I guess that’s all that matters. But… maybe I’m wrong. There are names, I suppose.”

“I thought you said they didn’t need names,” said Greene.

“They don’t,” said Prospero, nodding, his eyes still unfocused, “but people need to call them something, don’t they?”

“Can you explain that to me?”

The boy said nothing for a few moments, clearly struggling with the task of explaining the interior logic of a series of dreams. Greene knew that dreams can make perfect sense and be completely clear in the mind but often could not be clearly expressed because spoken language and freeform thought do not always share the same vocabulary.

Prospero grunted and then his eyes came into very sharp focus. “I once read that the Judeo-Christian version of God as a white man with a beard isn’t based on anything in the Bible. People made that up because they need to identify with whatever they worship. Every religion does that.”

Greene nodded. That had been in one of the books he’d given Prospero to read last year when they were discussing the boy’s complex understanding of his own evolving view of spirituality.

“These beings,” said Prospero, “don’t need names for themselves, okay? But the people who worship them gave them names. Just like people made statues and carved three-D images on walls of gods and demigods and angels and all that. Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Christians. They all carved those images on walls. What’s that called?”

“Bas-relief?” suggested Greene.

“Right,” he said, and Greene could almost see the word click into place in the boy’s mind. He would never need to ask for the word again. “Statues, too, and icons. All of that.”

“Iconography,” said Greene.

Prospero nodded, filing it away. “People who see spiritual beings like these need to give them form or they can’t think about them. So they paint them and draw pictures of them so they can think about them without going crazy.” Prospero’s hand strayed to his gray hood and touched the twisting tentacles. “Me, too, I guess.”

“Are you saying that the creature you drew is one of these ‘beings’?”

“Yes. No. I mean, it’s not one of the Elder Things, but’s part of that same world. Or… same universe, dimension. It’s hard to explain.”

“But this is something from your imagination.”

“No,” corrected Prospero quickly. “It’s from my dreams.”

“Which amounts to the same thing. It’s a monster.”

“Doc, why do people believe that the things we see in dreams aren’t real?”

“Some of them are,” conceded Greene, “but many dream images are metaphorical in nature. They represent other things. We talked about sexual imagery and—”

“No,” said Prospero firmly. “That’s not what I’m talking about. You’re supposed to be smart, Dr. Greene. Don’t go getting stupid on me now.”

Greene nodded, accepting the rebuke.

“I’m asking you a serious question,” persisted the boy. “But… let me put it another way. And you know I’m talking about the things I’ve been seeing in my dreams. I know they’re real, even if you and my dad don’t believe it. No, don’t lie. Please. I can see it in your face. You think I’m crazy, and maybe I am — by your standards, by human standards — but I know that what I see aren’t dreams, they’re visions. Like race memory for people like me.” He paused. “Let me ask you a different question, okay?”

“Okay,” said Greene.

“You know that I’m really into quantum physics. You know that I understand it. It’s not a hobby and we both know that up here,” he paused and tapped his skull, “I’m a lot older than my age. We know that, right?”

Greene nodded.

“Okay,” said Prospero. “In quantum physics, in superstring theory they talk about how there are more than four dimensions. More than height, width, depth, and time. That’s part of superstring theory, that the universe is much bigger and more complex than even Einstein thought. So, go farther. What if there are an infinite number of dimensions? What if there are an infinite number of realities? Parallel worlds, each one separated by differences however minuscule or massive.”

“An omniverse,” said Greene, nodding again. “It’s an old concept.”

“That’s right,” said Prospero, excited. “You do understand. Cool. Now… what if it’s not a theory? What if that’s true? What if there is, in fact, an infinite number of worlds, and if those worlds are — as some people believe — right next door to us, then imagine what would happen if we could build a doorway, a kind of gate, that would allow us to move back and forth.”

“To what end?”

“That’s what Dad asked me and I’ll tell you what I told him. It pissed him off, so let’s see what it does to you.”

“I’ll be sure to listen with an open mind,” said Greene.

They smiled at each other for a moment. Genuine smiles on both sides.

Prospero said, “If there are infinite worlds and if through quantum physics and the science of superstring theory we can access them, then why would we need to ever fight another war?”

“I don’t follow. How does one relate to the other?”

“Natural resources,” said Prospero. “Imagine if no one had to fight wars over limited supplies of oil, natural gas, coal. Imagine if no one ever had to fight for a place to stand, for a place to build a home. For land to raise sheep and cows and things like that. Imagine if there were infinite oceans in which to fish. If there was enough for everyone and more than anyone could ever use, why would people like my father and his cronies ever have to build bombs or fighter planes or any of that stuff?”

Greene nodded. “That is an appealing thought, of course. An end to the cause of war. By inference it would cancel out greed because there would be no limit to the things one person could possess.”

Prospero brightened and nodded enthusiastically. “Then you do get it.”

“I understand the benefits of such a scenario,” said the doctor. “But it’s a dream, Prospero, and dreams are only dreams.”

“That’s just it,” said Prospero, a strange light igniting in his eyes. “What if they’re not dreams? What if, when we dream, we’re somehow looking from our world into another world? What if everything people dream is that? What if all dreams, no matter how weird or wild or crazy, are people seeing other versions of the world, other universes where maybe the same rules of physics don’t apply?”

The boy leaned forward, his fists clenched.

“Doc, that’s what is going on in my dreams,” he continued, his voice dropping to a terse whisper. “The people of my world, the gods of my world, and even the slaves — the shoggoths — they all whisper to me. They want me to build the God Machine. They know I can do it. They want me to come home.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

A city?

It made no sense.

None.

Bunny said, “Who built this?”

“No one,” whispered Top. “You know how deep we are, Farm Boy? We’re beneath a hundred million goddamn years of ice. Maybe twice that. No one had ever built no city down here. No one ever lived here.”

The presence of the city — the sheer scope and complexity of it — made a lie of Top’s words.

We stood there, dwarfed by it. It was as if the builders of ancient Egypt had constructed a megalopolis on the scale of New York or Hong Kong. Only bigger. Much, much bigger. We stopped talking about what we were seeing. It was an impossible conversation, and the echoes of our voices seemed incredibly tiny in that vastness. It made us feel like ants. It took us ten more minutes to reach the bottom of the slope.

“All that excavation equipment,” murmured Top. “And the tunnel we followed to get down here. Erskine and his crew were looking for this. Maybe the Chinese and Russians, too.”

“How’d they know?” wondered Bunny. “With all the iron in the rock, they couldn’t have seen it with ground-penetrating radar. How’d they know it was here, Top? How’d they know?”

Top shook his head. “That’s one more question to add to a long damn list.”

He cut a sideways look at me as he said that.

Fair enough. I needed those same answers, and for the same reasons.

“Spread out and scout the area,” I ordered.

Aside from a confusion of bloody footprints and a few pieces of dropped or discarded gear, we saw no further traces of people down here. That should have been a comfort, but it wasn’t.

Top called, “Hey, Cap’n, you seeing this?”

“Yeah,” I said, gaping at the city. “Of course I see—”

“No,” he said, “over there.” He pointed to a space between two of the titanic blocks. I hadn’t noticed it at first because it was nestled closer to the ground and was dwarfed by this impossible architecture. There, half-hidden in shadows, was a machine. We approached it with caution. My heart was still beating wildly and there was cold sweat on my upper lip.

Bunny stumbled a couple of times because he kept looking at the city instead of where he was going. Guess I wasn’t the only one who was out of it. And that was deeply troubling. Even with everything we were seeing, we were above becoming slack-jawed tourists. Except right now that’s what we were.

“Get your fat head out of your white ass, Farm Boy,” snapped Top.

Bunny twitched and gave Top a brief, blank stare that showed a lot of fear and a lot of incomprehension, then his eyes cleared and he nodded.

“This is nuts,” he murmured.

“Well, no shit,” said Top. He was trying to sound casual, offhand. He didn’t. There was a quaver in his voice.

“Come on,” I said, walking down a steep granite slope toward the object. Our shoes had gum-rubber soles but they still managed to send rhythmic echoes up into the frigid air, and distance warped the sounds as they bounced back to us. The noise sounded like the muffled heartbeat of some sleeping thing.

Because everything down there was on such a cyclopean scale, it took longer to reach the machine than I expected. And when we got there it was larger than I thought. It was built like the mouth of a tunnel, thirty feet high, with a series of inner rings that stepped back at irregular intervals. The primary structure looked to be made of steel, but there were other metals, too. Lots of exposed copper, some crude iron bands, gleaming alloy bolts, and long circular strips of what looked like gold. Heavy black rubber-coated cables were entwined with the rings of metal, and coaxial cables as thick as my thigh snaked along the ground and ran farther down the slope to where a series of heavy industrial generators were positioned on a flat stone pad. Sixteen generators. Lots of power.

The tunnel stretched back so far it disappeared into darkness. Top shone his flashlight down the gullet but the beam simply faded out after fifty yards. I leaned around the outside to see that the tunnel was built into the wall. There were blast and drill marks on the stone to show that they had bored into the heart-stone of the mountain. The throat of the machine looked like it ran deep into the bedrock.

“What the hell is this?” asked Bunny.

Top cut me a look. “Hadron collider? I mean, what else it could be?”

Bunny touched the bundles of copper wire. “Doesn’t look right, does it? Different than the big one at CERN. I read about that.”

“So you’re an expert in damn collider design now, Farm Boy?” Top smacked Bunny’s hand away from the machine. “Don’t touch nothing. We don’t know shit about this thing. Might be something nuclear. Don’t know, can’t say, so don’t touch. Besides, you already been bitch-slapped by a mutant penguin. You want to get your balls blown off, too? No? Good, then stop getting grabby.”

“Copy that,” said Bunny, taking his hand back.

I tapped my earbud for Bug. It took a few tries and when he came on the line I couldn’t understand a word he said because of the static.

“Cowboy to Bug, do you copy?” I said it again and again. Static. Maybe a fragment of a word. Nothing I could understand. Just in case it was my gear I had Top and Bunny call in. Same thing. And we couldn’t hear each other on the team channel. We stood for a moment in silent frustration.

Top said, “Interference? Iron in the mountains could be eating the signal.”

“What’s the play?”

“Take some pictures and then we’ll leave it alone,” I said. “We have bigger fish to fry.”

“Like finding out why everybody lost their damn minds,” said Top. “And whether we’re at war with Russia and China. Little stuff like that.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Little stuff like that. Kind of interested to know where the hell Erskine and the rest of the Gateway geeks are.”

“Kind of thinking they’re somewhere with their throats cut,” said Top.

“Maybe. But there were our own people mixed in with the Chinese and Russians. I’m actually not leaning toward this being an invasion. More like a shared problem.”

He nodded, looking unhappy. “Some kind of bioweapon that messes with people’s heads?”

“Or something,” I said, nodding.

“Sheee-eeee-eeee-it,” he said, dragging it all the way out.

“Okay,” said Bunny, “but what do we want to do about the city? Are we going into it?”

“Not unless we have to,” I said. “Let’s document this machine, then find the Gateway team.”

“When we do,” said Top, “I’m going to be okay with beating some answers out of someone. I’m going to go ugly on them and make it hurt.”

“Hooah,” said Bunny.

“I’m in,” I agreed.

We each took out small but powerful ultra-high-res cameras and began documenting everything. The machine, the city, everything.

As he worked, Bunny very quietly said, “Do not let my calm, cool exterior fool you gentlemen. I am a really short step away from freaking the fuck out.”

Top was leaning in to take flash pictures of the interior of the big machine. “Hell, Farm Boy, don’t go thinking you hold the patent on being sphincter-clenching scared. I would give your left nut to be ten thousand miles away from right here.”

“Is ten thousand miles really far enough?” mused Bunny.

The cameras went flash-flash-flash. Water dripped behind us, somewhere in the city. And several times I heard the soft, shuffling feet of heavy and awkward bodies. I couldn’t see more of the penguins, but we could smell them. Bunny kept throwing uneasy glances over his shoulder. His face and shirt were still stained with his blood. It’s always hard to keep your best game face bolted on when you’ve already been hurt by something this strange. It didn’t help that our intel didn’t match the situation on the ground. Or that we had no way to get fresh orders. Normally I don’t mind operating without a leash, but this was beyond me.

It was beyond anything I could have imagined. The plots of nine hundred science fiction movies began rumbling through my head. Bunch of guys trapped in a remote place with inexplicable weirdness. Some unseen force picking everyone off one at a time. Those things never end well.

Top pointed into the opening of the machine. There was a tunnel that ran backward into shadows. “Looks like this thing curves down. There’s something just over the edge but I can’t get a shot. Think it’s safe to stand up on the edge to get a better—?”

Before he could finish, the machine suddenly pulsed. No other word for it. There was a sound like the electrical kick of a starter. A growl that was cut off almost at once. And for a split second the first dozen rings of the tunnel flashed as LED lights hidden in the recesses throbbed once.

Then… again.

A third time. Each time there was that chunk sound, as of a giant engine trying to start and failing.

If that’s what it was.

“Damn it, Farm Boy,” bellowed Top, “what did you touch?”

But Bunny was standing on the far side, twenty feet back from the mouth of the tunnel, camera raised to take a wide-angle picture. “I didn’t touch anything.”

The lights and sound pulsed once more and then paused. That’s how it felt. A pause. The activity did not feel as if it actually stopped. There was a feeling of awful anticipation as the whole cavern suddenly fell silent. Bunny hurried over and we stood there, staring down into the tunnel of darkness.

“What the hell—?” began Bunny, and then his words were also cut short as a thousand lights suddenly flared on with a brilliance so intense that it was like being stabbed through the brain. It was an almost physical blow and we all cried out and staggered back. As we stumbled, we all tried to turn and run.

But we weren’t fast enough.

Out of the depths of that black throat came a massive exhalation of foul air that struck us with hurricane force, plucked us off our feet, and hurled us up the slope. That air was thick and humid and smelled of rotting meat. It exhaled at us as if the tunnel was the throat of some great carnivore. We were big men carrying heavy equipment, but in that belch of black wind we were nothing and it vomited us from the entrance. We hit hard on the stone ramp and rolled a dozen feet. I tried not to breathe in that foul wind, but the impact knocked the air out of my lungs and I gulped in a breath through sheer reflex. It was horrible. It was the worst smell, the worst taste I’ve ever experienced, and as soon as I stopped sliding I rolled over, tore the balaclava away from my mouth just in time, and vomited. I could hear Top and Bunny retching, too. The whole world seemed to swirl around me and my stomach heaved again. And again. Even when my stomach was empty I could not get that terrible taste of rotting meat out of my mouth.

The machine pulsed once more, and light flooded the cavern, bleaching out all colors, casting everything into sharp lines of black and white. The light was so monstrously intense it felt like I was being burned by it.

Then…

Nothing.

The light vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The pulsing machine noise stopped and there was some indefinable quality to the silence that let me know that whatever this was… had stopped.

Our flashlights and BAMS units and everything else, every piece of equipment we owned, went dead.

We damn near went dead, too. I slumped down, feeling spent and sick and weak. Feeling swatted flat. Feeling like nothing at all. Bunny groaned and flopped over on his back. Top was on hands and knees, head hung, lips slack and wet, eyes bugged and staring.

I turned my head…

… and…

… looked at myself.

No, it wasn’t a reflection.

I was on hands and knees looking at my body, my face, my own eyes staring back at me with total shock. The other me flinched back away.

“Wh-what — what the fuck…?” I said.

Or, he said with my mouth and my voice.

I — the other me — was still on hands and knees. I raised one hand and reached out toward him. Toward me.

There isn’t a way to say this because there wasn’t any way to be this. My brain felt different. There were other thoughts in there that weren’t my thoughts.

I saw Lydia Ruiz, one of the most senior members of Echo Team, there. Laughing. Wearing only bra and panties as she walked across the bedroom floor toward the bathroom.

Only it wasn’t my bedroom. I’ve seen Lydia in her underwear before. I’ve seen her naked once when we all had to strip out of contaminated clothes. But not like this. She was in frilly underclothes, not the plainer stuff she wore when going to war. She was singing along with a Bruno Mars song, translating it into Spanish as she sang. Then she unhooked her bra and hung it over the doorknob as she entered the bathroom and leaned in to turn on the tap.

I wanted to look away. I really did. This was not mine to see. This was not anyone’s to see. Not even Bunny, who was her live-in lover. Lydia was in a private moment and my being there — however and in whatever way I was there — was an intrusive and violative act.

I said, “No!”

But I did not say it in my own voice. I said it in Bunny’s voice.

The me over there gaped at the me here. I blinked.

And then it was me — inside my own flesh — staring at a bug-eyed Bunny who knelt nearby, one hand extended toward me, confusion and terror in his eyes. He collapsed flat on his chest and his eyes glazed. I fell over onto my side. Now that memory of Bunny’s had somehow followed me….

Followed me where exactly? Home? Back?

I mean… what the Christ just happened?

The memory of seeing Lydia in that private moment made me feel grubby, like a peeping Tom. That was not for me to see. It did not belong to my experience. And yet the memory was there. Fading… but there.

I closed my eyes. This was a dream. I was probably concussed. Or something. It wasn’t real. Could not be, no matter how real it felt in the moment.

I lay there, uncertain of how to even think.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The candidates stood behind a curved row of podiums. Seven in all, each from different states but all from the same party. All vying for the same party endorsement and the same office. Each of them holding forth on why they — and definitely not their colleagues, and in some cases friends — should become the most powerful man on Earth.

The moderator, Wilson Fryers, was the dean of the university’s law college, and was both a son and nephew of multiterm congressmen. His textbooks crossed the line to become bestsellers, and his latest, Thinking It Through: Smart Politics for the 21st Century, had jumped back to the New York Times and USA Today lists as soon as this debate had been announced. Because of his firm hand with the candidates and his challenging questions, he was currently trending higher on social media than any of the six men and one woman who were trying to sell themselves to the voting public.

The auditorium was packed, with handpicked political science undergrads in the front rows and a lottery selection of students, press, and celebrities filling out the rest of the seats. Secret Service agents were stationed around the room and, Fryers knew, dressed in plainclothes and seeded through the audience. The debate was the last before the national convention, and the millions watching knew, as Fryers did, that this was going to come down to two key players. So far there was an even odds split on which of them was likely to get the full party endorsement. The trajectory of this debate would almost certainly settle that.

“Next question,” said Fryers. “Remember, please, that each of you will have two minutes for your statement and then we will open it up to the audience for follow-up questions.”

The candidates nodded, though some of them were obviously wary. The questions from the audience had been vicious. Polite, but uncompromising. Fryers loved poli-sci majors. No one asks a harder question, and most of them were better schooled in politics than the gameplayers on the stage. The disparity between what these kids wanted to know and the politicians were willing or able to say was obvious. And embarrassing. Fryers felt like Caligula at the games. There was blood on the sand and the lions were still hungry.

“This question is on immigration,” said Fryers, and he saw the flinches. He could imagine seven sphincters suddenly tightening. Nobody in politics wants to field open questions on immigration. It was an enduring hot-button issue and when things were this deep into the primary process, there was no more room for verbal gaffes. Just as there was absolutely no sage answer. No matter what a candidate said it would polarize a portion of the national audience. Fryers was sure that if he asked if the sky was blue, the politicians would have a similar hesitancy, because somewhere out there was a lobby group, religious group, environmental group, or special interest group who fundamentally disagreed. It was maddening, unless you were the moderator and any kind of controversy jumped your social media and book sale numbers.

“A recent study published by The New Yorker indicates that small businesses, including crop farms, would be adversely affected by tightening immigration standards. Should you be elected president, would you sign or veto a bill that—”

And the lights went out.

All of them. Lights, speakers, cameras, everything.

Bang.

The library was plunged into total darkness. No emergency lights. No alarm bells. Nothing. There was a shocked collective gasp from the audience. Fryers fumbled for the battery-operated backup microphone that had been placed there for situations like this. For accidents or power failures. He found the button, tapped it, bent to speak into the mike.

“Please,” he said, “remain calm.”

The only one who heard his voice was him. The microphone was as dead as the lights.

Fryers froze in place, immediately trying to remember the protocols drilled into him by the Secret Service. Wait. Listen. The emergency system will kick in.

There was a scream. Of course there was. Someone always had to scream. Someone always had to panic. Always.

“Idiot,” he muttered, because he knew what happened. What inevitably happened.

One scream became two. Became five.

He shot to his feet. “Everyone, please calm down!” he yelled.

The volume of panic was already rising. Fryers dug into his pocket to remove his cell phone, punched the button to get the screen. A flashlight app would be helpful. He was surprised everyone else wasn’t doing the same thing.

Except the screen did not come on. His phone was dead, too.

That was…

His mind stalled. How could a power outage take out his cell phone? And the emergency lights were battery operated, too. The Secret Service had wire mikes and flashlights.

But there were no lights on in the hall.

None.

That’s when he heard the screams turn into cries of pain and dull, angry thumps as blind people began fighting their way toward the doors. In total darkness.

Fryers tried to yell.

Tried to keep this from becoming what he knew it would become. Blind, destructive panic.

He tried.

And failed.

At the end of sixty seconds, when all the lights finally flared back on, and cell phones began automatically rebooting, and the speakers squawked with alarm bells, the crowd had already become a tidal surge of blood and broken bones.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Not sure how long it took us to recover.

Not sure we actually did.

Three, four minutes dragged by before I could even summon the willpower to rise, let alone the sheer muscular commitment. My head rang with the after-effects of the light. My brain felt bruised. The horrendous smell and taste still polluted my senses.

It was my flashlight that jolted me out of the daze. The light came on again. Pop, just like that. It wasn’t a matter of the switch moving. The light had already been on but when that big machine did whatever the hell it did, the power in the flashlight simply died. Ditto for all of our other gear. Pop. Out. And now it was all back on. I turned my head and stared at the light as if seeing it could reveal some answers. It surely did not.

Top got to his feet first. He was the oldest of us, and probably not the strongest, but in many ways he was the hardiest. He struggled up and stood swaying over me, chest heaving from the effort, hands shaking as he checked his gear. The process of doing that kind of routine check made sense. It was a reset button to reclaim normalcy and control. Doing routine things can do that. When he was done he still looked like crap, but less so. He blinked his eyes clear, then hooked a hand under my armpit and pulled me up. My muscles were composed of overcooked rigatoni and Play-Doh. It didn’t even feel like I owned a skeleton anymore. Top had to hold me up until I could stand, however badly, on my own.

It took both of us to get Bunny on his feet.

We stood in a nervous huddle, legs trembling, faces pale with sickness. Nerves absolutely shot. Burned out like bad wiring.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” breathed Top. And he crossed himself. I had only ever seen him do that once before.

Bunny wiped pain-tears from his eyes and sniffed in a chestful of air.

The machine sat there, cold and silent and dark. Around us the impossible city loomed, mocking us and everything we believed in. Top’s prayer faded into nothing.

Bunny coughed, cleared his throat. “What… what…?”

“I know,” said Top.

Bunny’s head snapped around. “Top, did you…? I mean…”

“I don’t know, Farm Boy,” said Top, but he was clearly in distress that ran deeper than the physical. “This is some voodoo shit right here.”

“It’s nuts,” said Bunny, shaking his head, “but for a moment there I…”

Once more his words trailed away, and he shot me a very strange look. A suspicious and horrified look.

“What?” I asked cautiously. “What did you see?”

“Nothing. I didn’t see nothing.”

“Bunny… look, I saw something, too.”

His eyes widened. “What?”

“I saw something, too,” I repeated. “For a couple of seconds after that thing went off I saw…”

And I stopped, too. How exactly do you have that kind of conversation? You need to hear that someone else shared it so that it’s not just you. And you’re afraid that it is just you. But at the same time what if it’s not just you and stuff like this is possible? You see the problem? There’s no way to Sudoku your way out of it.

“Say it, Cap’n,” said Top. “What’d you see?”

I wiped sweat out of my eyes and took a moment. “I saw two things and neither of them make any sense,” I began. “I saw me — my body — kneeling a few feet away, looking right at me.”

“Yeah,” said Bunny, nodding but not looking anything but scared shitless about it.

“Then for a second I was somewhere else,” I continued. “I was in your cottage, Bunny. Lydia was there and…”

I let it tail off. Bunny’s face went from a greasy mushroom white to a livid red.

“What else did you see?” he asked in a low growl. A frightened dog growl, but definitely a growl.

“The fuck does it matter what else he saw?” barked Top. “He saw it.”

Benny wheeled on him. “What makes you so sure?”

“Because I saw my ex-wife,” he snarled. “Clear as motherfucking day. Sitting at the kitchen counter drinking that shit mint tea she drinks and reading stock numbers off her damn computer. Want to know where Apple stock is right now? I can still taste that son of a bitching tea.”

He dragged a trembling hand across his mouth, which had become wet with spit. He looked at the moisture, shook his head, then they both looked at Bunny.

“What did you see, Farm Boy?”

“What,” exclaimed Bunny, “so we’re all just going to accept that this stuff just happened?”

“What did you see?”

Bunny cut a look at me and then he looked up at the ceiling far, far above us. “I had a nightmare,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t see Lydia or your ex, Top. I didn’t see anyone I know.” He shook his head. There was a quaver in his voice that made his teeth start to chatter. It wasn’t the cold, though, and we all knew it. He was simply that scared. “It couldn’t have been anything but me freaking out. It was this weird place… like the beach, except the ocean was black and oily, and the sky was wrong. Not our sky, you know? The stars were wrong. And… and there were monsters.” He stopped and shook his head, unable or unwilling to continue. “There aren’t words for it, you know?”

They both looked at me. As if I had any answers.

“I feel sick,” said Bunny. “That air we breathed? I feel like crap.”

He raised his BAMS unit. The light was no longer green. Now it flickered back and forth between green and yellow. Mine was doing the same thing. So was Top’s. I peered at the tiny digital screen to see what kind of particles it had picked up, but all it said was: SYSTEM ERROR.

Top frowned. “Was it me or did the power go out when that thing flashed?”

“It went out,” I said.

“And it came back on?”

“Yeah.”

He held up his watch. The digital display was flashing the way those things do after a power interruption. “All my gear’s in reset mode except the flashlight. It doesn’t have a circuit breaker. Just a battery. It went off but came back on.”

We all checked our gear and got the same results. Bunny said, “You think that machine is the EMP weapon they were building?”

Top shook his head. “Can’t be the EMP cannon. It’s too big.”

“I know, but we got hit by something like that.”

“EMP would have fried the electronics,” said Top. “This just interrupted the power.”

“What can do that?” asked Bunny. “I mean to everything, even our flashlights?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“Doesn’t make sense,” said Bunny. “If something could interrupt electrical conductivity all the way down to a watch battery, wouldn’t it fry our central nervous system? I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, guys, but why ain’t we dead?”

We had no answer for that.

Top gave the big machine a long, hateful look. “Cap’n, I’m two-thirds convinced we ought to put some blaster plasters on that thing and blow it back to Satan. We got a nice airplane waiting outside.”

“Yes,” said Bunny fiercely.

I shook my head. “Blowing it up isn’t our job and we don’t know what will happen if we damage it.”

They didn’t like it, but they nodded. Hell, I didn’t like it, either.

“Let’s gather what intel we can,” I said, “find Erskine and his team, and then get the hell out of Dodge.”

“Hooah,” agreed Top.

“Hooah,” said Bunny, but his voice was small and unemphatic.

We stood in silence, lost in the strangeness of the moment, still caught in the net of whatever had just happened to us. Three soldiers, gasping like beached trout, feeling small and scared.

That’s when we heard a voice say, “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

INTERLUDE FIVE

“Did my son talk to you about his God Machine?” asked Oscar Bell. He sat on the doctor’s couch, legs crossed, hands resting on his lap. Greene thought he could see a flicker in the man’s eyes. Nerves, perhaps, or excitement.

“Please understand, Mr. Bell, that I encourage an air of unrestricted confidence in my sessions with your son,” said Green. “However, that comes with a certain level of trust. He knows that what he says goes no farther than—”

Bell held up a finger. “Don’t. You want to stick to some set of bullshit doctor-patient rules, then consider your services terminated.”

That hung in the air, ugly and real.

“I…,” began Greene, but once more Bell cut him off.

“I don’t need a blow-by-blow. I don’t want to know what the kid jerks off to, and I don’t want to know what he thinks of me. That’s all psychobabble nonsense and we both know it. But I do want to know about the God Machine. And I mean everything.”

Greene felt as if he had been nailed to his chair by the force of Bell’s green-eyed stare. The man frightened him, and that went beyond the threat of a massive financial loss. Bell seemed willing to give him a few seconds to work up to it.

Finally Greene took a breath and said it. “Prospero does not believe he is a human being. Not entirely. It’s his belief that he is either an alien from another world or perhaps another dimension, or that he is a hybrid of human and alien genes. It is his belief that he is not your actual son but the product of some kind of genetics experiment. He believes that you ‘adopted’ him only as a means of profiting from the genius he gets from his alien DNA.”

Bell uncrossed and recrossed his legs. “Kid has some imagination.”

“Has he said any of this to you, sir?” asked Greene.

“Don’t change the subject, Doctor. Tell me what Prospero’s told you about the God Machine.”

“Well… your son has been researching the artists and philosophers of the surrealism movement and believes that their works represent visions of the world from which he comes. Notably the paintings of Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, and the pulp fiction horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft. Your son is uncertain as to whether the surrealists are from the same world or if they somehow traveled there in dreams. I think he’s leaning toward the latter opinion.”

“And the machine is what?” asked Bell. “A phone so E.T. can call home?”

“No, sir,” said Greene. “Your son believes that it will somehow open a doorway and allow him to return to his true home.”

“Did he say anything about EMPs?”

“I’m not sure what that is.”

“Electromagnetic pulses. Has Prospero mentioned that at all?”

“No, unless a ‘null field’ is the same thing.”

Bell’s eyes flared momentarily. “What did he say about that?”

“Not much. He said it was an unwanted side effect and he was trying to correct it.”

“Correct it?” Bell shot to his feet and for a moment Greene thought the man was going to punch him. Then Bell sagged back and sat down hard, shaking his head. “Correct it, Jesus fuck.”

“Is something wrong?” asked Greene.

Oscar Bell ran trembling fingers through his hair. “You wouldn’t understand if I told you.” He took a breath and bolted his calm back in place, one iron plate at a time. “Exactly how was he planning on correcting it?”

“I’m not sure. Something about a mathematical pattern that he couldn’t solve unless…”

Bell’s eyes hardened. “Unless what, Doctor? I need you to be very specific.”

“Very well,” said Greene, “but believe me, I’ve looked into this myself and there’s nothing to it. Not even a mention on the Internet. Prospero believes that the key to making his God Machine function properly requires a sequence code that can be found in certain rare books he refers to as ‘The Unlearnable Truths.’ These are, according to him, books of magic that have been hidden for many centuries. He said that they are guarded because they contain dangerous secrets.”

“What kind of secrets? The God Machine isn’t magic, Doctor. It’s absolutely bleeding-edge science. I have forty physicists scratching their heads trying to understand what the fucking thing does, do you know that? I have guys at MIT, Cal Tech, and Stanford losing sleep over it. I’ve got two Nobel laureates about to go into therapy because my twelve-year-old son’s designs make their heads hurt. The only thing they agree on is that the machine is real. It will do something, but wild as it sounds, Prospero understands quantum mechanics on a level that no one alive can match. No one. I sat down with Stephen Hawking and he started to cry when he read Prospero’s notes. It was like he was having a religious experience, and we’re talking about Stephen goddamn Hawking.”

“Not to be rude, Mr. Bell,” said Greene, “but what makes you believe the machine will do anything at all? From what Prospero tells me, it doesn’t work.”

“Doesn’t work? Jesus wept. Maybe it’s not doing what Prospero wants it to do, but it sure as shit does a lot of other things.”

“What things?”

Bell’s eyes narrowed. “That’s above your pay grade, Dr. Greene.”

“I feel I must caution you about placing too much stock on your son’s projects,” said Greene. “Since he’s discovered surrealism he has become visibly detached from the real world.”

“What he’s doing is real to him.”

“Perhaps,” conceded Greene reluctantly, “but encouraging it is hardly in the best interests of Prospero’s emotional and psychological health. His fascination with these ‘Unlearnable Truths’ has become an obsession, and I fear what will happen when he finally becomes convinced that no such books exist. He is placing a dangerous amount of faith on ultimately possessing them, or at least reading them so he can divine their mathematical secrets.”

“Has Prospero told you the titles of any of these unlearnable books?”

“No. A few. Even though I could find nothing on anything called the Unlearnable Truths, there is plenty on the Net about the individual books. As I mentioned, the titles appeared in horror stories written in the early twentieth century. They don’t really exist. It’s only Prospero who believes they’re real.”

“Interesting.”

“No, sir, it’s not interesting. We’re talking about Prospero’s mental health.”

Bell shook his head. “Mental health? I think that ship sailed a long time ago.”

“Mr. Bell, we’re talking about your son.”

Bell stood up. “That little freak is nobody’s son.”

Greene stood up, too, angry but afraid of this man. He wanted to punch Bell, break his nose, throw him down the stairs. He kept his fists balled at his sides. It was clear, however, that Bell was aware of Greene’s anger. He even glanced down at the white-knuckled fists.

“Let’s be clear,” said Bell quietly. “You’re going to shift the focus of your sessions and talk only about things that relate to the God Machine, the science behind it, and Prospero’s intentions for it. You will also write down the titles of every single piece of art and every single one of those unlearnable books. You’ll do that right now, before I leave your office. If I like what I see, and if I am assured that you are going to continue to remember that you work for me, not for the boy, then I’ll consider whether to increase your hourly rate. What is it now? Four hundred an hour? That sounds low to me.”

Bell did not wait for an answer. Instead he turned and walked to the door.

“I’ll be downstairs. You still have some of that scotch I gave you for Christmas? Let me go see.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

We spun toward the sound, our combat reflexes doing what our numbed minds probably couldn’t. Our guns came up, our fingers laying flat along the trigger guards. The voice was far away but it was piercing and shrill.

“It’s back in the lab complex,” said Bunny, and we began moving that way. Stumbling at first but finding our coordination. Walking, fast-walking, running. We left the cavern and reentered the corridor that led back into the Gateway complex, and then moved quickly but cautiously between the rows of stacked boxes. The sound continued, calling us, drawing us. But it was still far away, deep inside the structure.

“Boss,” snapped Bunny, “on your ten o’clock.”

We all turned. Ready to fight. Ready to kill. I could almost hear the coming thunder of fresh gunfire. The savage Killer who shares my mind with me was poised, ready to do the things that earn him the name he wears. All of my earlier hesitation was gone.

A figure came walking around the end of a long row of crates.

It walked slowly and a bit awkwardly, but it wasn’t another albino penguin. It wasn’t another soldier, either. This time it was a thin, fortyish man wearing a lab coat over a plaid shirt and khakis. His feet were bare. His glasses were nearly opaque from the blood that was splashed across his face. It soaked his clothes and dripped from him, and he left a long line of bare red footprints behind him.

“Stop right there,” I yelled.

He kept walking.

“Sir — you need to stop right there or I will put you down. Do you understand me?” My finger was along the curve of the trigger guard, quivering, ready to slip inside and squeeze off the shot. The Killer snarled inside my mind.

The man slowed and stopped. He lifted his head as if listening to something far away, and again I thought I heard that voice cry out those same meaningless words we’d heard before. Not Russian and not Chinese. Not any language I ever heard of.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

We couldn’t see who spoke, but it was closer now. Just beyond the range of our flashlights. A hundred yards? Less? Fifty? Twenty? The echoes were deceptive.

“Put your hands on your head, fingers laced,” I told the man. “Do it now.”

The man seemed to smile for a moment. “We are always what you want,” he said in a voice that was muddy and thick. “The sequence is written in the stars.”

“Put your hands on your head,” I repeated. “I won’t tell you again.”

“It is there to be read.”

He said those words — or at least those are the words I heard — but I swear to God that those aren’t the words his mouth formed. It was so strange, like watching a foreign film with bad dubbing.

“No truth is unlearnable.”

“Tell me your name,” I demanded. “What is your ID number?”

The man opened his mouth to say something else, but this time instead of words a pint of dark blood flopped out and splatted onto the front of his shirt. He made a faint gagging sound and then his knees buckled and he collapsed with exaggerated slowness to the ground.

“Go,” said Top as he moved up to cover me.

Bunny and I broke cover and ran cautiously toward him, checking each side corridor in the maze of crates, covering each other.

“Green Giant,” I said, and Bunny grunted an assent. He took up a defensive posture while I dropped to one knee by the fallen man. I put my fingers to his throat and got a big silent nothing. “Dead.”

He was a mess. Blood everywhere. A name tag hung askew from his lab coat.

The scientist in charge of this project. From close up I could see that his skin was as gray-white and mottled as the penguin’s feathers had been. Like the skin of a mushroom.

Erskine looked up at the ceiling with dead eyes and a slack mouth. And then he spoke again. “We are always what you need.”

We all jumped.

“He’s alive!” yelped Bunny.

“No, he ain’t,” growled Top.

I jabbed my fingers back against his carotid and got the same nothing as before. Top tried, too.

He jerked his hand back.

“We have waited for you since the lands split,” said the dead man.

We scrambled back.

“What the fuck?” yelped Bunny.

“I know, I know,” I said, my heart hammering in my chest.

“No,” insisted Bunny, and he held his BAMS unit in front of my face. The comforting little green light was glowing bright red.

We scrambled back from the dead man.

“Reads as unknown biological agent,” Bunny said.

“Yeah,” growled Top, “but what kind? Bacteria? Nerve gas? A virus? Are we hallucinating this shit?”

Bunny shook his head. “I don’t know… it paused on viruses for like half a second and then went to unknown particles.”

Top looked at his while I covered everyone. “Mine says bacteria… no, I’m wrong. It’s reading unknown, too.”

I glanced at mine just as the reading changed from virus to unknown.

We stared at each other, then at the units, then at the dead man.

We backed away from Erskine and tried to get readings from different parts of the airflow. Every few seconds the BAMS units would shift. Virus. Fungal spores. Bacteria. Mycotoxins. And even plant pollen. But each time the meter flicked back to the display for UNKNOWN PARTICLES.

“Something must be interfering with the sensors,” said Bunny.

“Can’t,” said Top. “They’re self-contained and they have ruggedized cases.”

The red lights flickered at us like rats’ eyes.

On the floor the dead man spoke again, and once more his words and his mouth didn’t match. His body trembled as with the onset of convulsions, but the tone was normal. No, “normal” isn’t a word I can use here. Normal wasn’t in that place with us. His tone sounded casual, like he was having a calm conversation with someone. The tone and words were well modulated. It sounded for all the world like a tape playback of something this man might have said at another time and under incredibly different circumstances, but somehow repeated now despite his condition.

What he said was, “There’s nothing to worry about. This is a clean facility.”

I could feel the shakes starting. They started deep, in my bones, in my muscles, and then shuddered outward through my skin.

“Cap’n,” whispered Top, “this motherfucker is dead.”

“I know.”

Bunny said, “What?”

“No pulse. He’s dead.”

“We defeat time because it interferes with service,” said Erskine. Or, at least, that’s what the voice said. His mouth formed different words. Even dead. I made myself look at the shapes his lips formed. And as I read those words I could feel — actually feel — my blood turn to ice. The words his dead mouth formed were, “I’m sorry. God forgive us. We should never have opened the gate. I can see the sleeping things. God forgive us.”

Over and over again. His dead, cold lips pleaded for mercy while the cooling meat of his body spoke to us in this vast and impossible place.

Bunny held his BAMS unit in one hand and had his M4A1 carbine pointed at the man’s head.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” repeated the voice. “This is a clean facility.”

Suddenly all of the red lights in the BAMS unit turned green.

I stared at my unit. The display read NO DETECTABLE PARTICLES.

I’ll buy one malfunctioning unit. Maybe two at an absurd stretch. Not three. And not three malfunctioning in the same way at exactly the same moment.

Then the dead man on the floor sat up.

He didn’t struggle to get up; he sat up as if he’d been doing ab crunches five times a day for twenty years. With his legs straight out in front of him, Erskine’s upper body folded forward until he sat erect. He turned his head very slowly toward me. His eyes were no longer totally vacant. There was a strange new light in them, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that says someone’s home. It wasn’t that at all.

Bunny actually shrieked. It was the only thing you could call that sound. I was so close to doing the same thing that I had to clench my jaws shut.

Erskine said, “All doors can be opened.”

Top said, “What?”

“Any open door allows ingress and egress,” Erskine said in that same reasonable tone. “This is a fundamental truth of all dimensions.”

Blood, thick as molasses, dribbled from the corners of his mouth and ran down over his chin.

Dead things don’t bleed.

But that blood didn’t look like normal blood. It was so dark, almost like oil.

“The question of controlling ingress is solved at the quantum level.”

The dead man looked at Bunny, then at Top, and then at me.

He smiled. With black blood oozing from his mouth, he smiled.

It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. In a life spent fighting every kind of human monster, every twisted aspect of natural evil, here was a smile that shook me, stabbed me through the heart, froze my soul.

Behind us we heard a voice say, “Tekeli-li!”

I whirled and saw a shape, pale as one of the penguins, and I fired at it without pause, without thinking, breaking all protocols and training. The bullets tore into the flesh of a naked man. Holes opened in his flesh and black blood poured from it.

The man I shot was Dr. Erskine.

I froze, finger still on the trigger, smoke drifting from the barrel.

Behind Dr. Erskine was another man.

Another Dr. Erskine.

Other figures emerged from the shadows. More Erskines.

Then other people. Some in bloody clothes, others naked and pallid as mushrooms. The lights on the BAMS unit flared red again.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” they said.

Then behind me, the first Erskine said, “Function is a by-product of need.”

There was a rattle of gunfire as Bunny emptied half a magazine into him.

Then the man said, “Tekeli-li!”

More and more figures stepped from the shadows. Dozens of individual people. More than a hundred. Some of them were dressed in the bloody shreds of lab coats. Some were in military uniforms or engineers’ coveralls. Some were American. Some wore the uniforms of Chinese or Russian military. Beyond, amid, and around them were hundreds of others. Copies of each. Hundreds of copies of each.

“Tekeli-li,” they said. “Tekeli-li!”

Though they each spoke with their own mouths, it was all said with a single voice. One voice that spoke in perfect harmony.

One voice.

Beyond the figures I thought I saw something else. No, make that two things. Maybe I saw them. Maybe my mind was slipping gears. I really don’t know.

Off to our left I thought I saw a man dressed in almost the same kind of thermal combat rig as we wore. Except he had a different kind of helmet and he seemed to be holding out a small device. I’m pretty sure it was a camera of some kind. He saw me looking, lowered the camera, turned, and vanished behind a row of metal shelves. Neither Top nor Bunny saw him, and a second later the image of him was crowded out by something else.

Something that was so wrong. So totally wrong.

It was huge and mostly hidden in the darkness, but for all its mass the thing moved with a fluid bulk. It was as if a body of viscous liquid was somehow moving without the need of containment. There was an oily iridescence about it and a stink of pollution worse than anything I’d ever experienced. And there were things coming from it. Not arms. Nothing like that. No, I swear to God that this thing had tentacles, as if it was some kind of obscene octopus. But it wasn’t that. Maybe there’s no word for what it is.

I saw it, though.

We all saw it. And in that moment of awful clarity I saw the machine outside of the ancient city. I saw the gateway opening and this thing came out. This tentacled abomination. It reached out of its world and into ours.

I saw it.

We all saw it.

“No,” breathed Bunny. His eyes were wide and unblinking and he seemed like he was tottering on the edge of total panic.

Then all of the Erskines came charging at us. Some of them were bare-handed. Many of them held guns, knives, chunks of rock. Anything they could grab. We saw Russian and Chinese soldiers mixed in, guns in their hands, eyes empty of sanity but filled with madness. Something had taken hold of all of them and had turned this entire group of people — at least a hundred men and women — into a mindless swarm of killers.

They surged toward us, screaming their weird chant, hurling stones, firing wildly.

“God almighty,” breathed Top in a terrified whisper. “If this is real… if this gets out… Jesus Christ…”

The swarm came howling toward us. I said nothing. I opened fire. It was a target-rich environment. We filled the chamber with thunder. We fired every bullet. We threw every grenade. We hurled every satchel charge.

Then we turned and ran.

We screamed the whole time as the collective voice screamed back at us.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The LC-130 was still taxiing down the runway when I called in the air strike.

Top’s words rang in my head.

If this is real… if this gets out…

I yelled the orders to hit the lab. To hit all of the labs. Ours, and the ones run by Russia, and the Chinese. All of it.

The USS California hit the Vinson Massif with six Tomahawks. I told them to empty the whole closet on them, so they sent the other six.

There is no Vinson Massif anymore. Not one you’d recognize.

We huddled in the belly of the plane, wrapped in the barbed wire of shock, hurt down deep on levels we could not name.

Behind us the missiles did their work.

And we prayed it was enough.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

He walked in dreams.

It was beautiful.

So many things to see, to know. To learn.

So many secrets.

Open to him.

It was like having a key to every door.

Almost every door.

Some places were shut to him. Some minds. He didn’t know why. Not even the people at Gateway understood that. No one in Project Stargate had ever understood it.

Some minds were so open they invited you in. The Mullah in that little town in Iraq was like that. His mind was uncluttered, without defenses, without guile. A simple man of simple faith living a simple life. The Dreamer could go into his head without effort. He could almost do it while awake. There were a few hundred others who were like that. The Dreamer went in and out of them with no more effort than walking through doorless rooms in a big house. The more often he went, the less effort it took to push the inhabiting consciousness to one side, to gag it and bind it and tell it to be quiet. That was fun. That was very useful.

Others were different. Some were harder to breach, and it took effort that drained him, aged him, exhausted him. A few were worth the effort. Some made even the dangers worth it, even when it left him so thoroughly spent that his mind nearly broke loose and went drifting. That was bad because there were awful places a drifting mind could go.

He knew. He’d been there. He had scars on his mind, on his soul. Some things are not unseeable.

So for those people, he had to weigh risk against reward. The way a soldier does, the way a spy does.

And then there were those other minds. The dark ones. The dangerous ones.

There were not many of them, but he had encountered a few. They were sealed against him. Or, if he managed to get inside, the things he saw there terrified him. The worst of all had been that time he had tried to crawl inside the mind of the man who called himself Church.

God.

Such darkness there.

If people only knew.

If anyone knew.

He knew, though. The Dreamer knew.

It had taken weeks to recover from that one brief encounter. Even now he had nightmares. Real nightmares, not dreamwalking. He woke up screaming sometimes.

It had been a harsh lesson.

Since then he had focused on other minds, on sailing through less dangerous seas.

Where next? he wondered.

There were so many places he could still go.

So many.

So many…

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

He was the Mullah of the Black Tent.

That is what he came to be called.

He was born to a poor family near the Iraq-Kurdistan border. For the first forty-seven years of his life he was known by his given name, Maki Al-Faiz. He went to school to study Islamic traditions, known as hadithi, and spiritual law, fiqh, and over time he became a quiet, devoted, and respected man of his local mosque. Al-Faiz said his prayers and made his offerings. He was generous and humorous, but not a particularly brilliant cleric. However, since the villagers of his town were often less educated than Al-Faiz, over time they came to regard him as their mullah. When the mosque’s official cleric died, Al-Faiz became the mullah in fact and from then on it was the only thing people called him. The Mullah.

When the soldiers of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant took over the town, some of the men of the village joined them. Some fled with their families and what few possessions they could carry. Some died.

The Mullah listened to what the fighters of ISIL had to say and although he was not deeply involved with politics, he understood that to stand with them meant that fewer of the villagers would be killed. And so he raised the black flag.

When the Americans came and drove the ISIL garrison away, the Mullah stood wide-legged before the doors of the town’s tiny mosque, guarding it with his body, willing to die to keep it safe. He begged the soldiers for mercy on behalf of the villagers and this small, modest place of worship. Most soldiers might have pushed past him and searched that mosque anyway, but not the CIA man. He was in charge of this team of soldiers and he did not allow anyone to defile the mosque.

The CIA man was tall and powerful and you knew right away that this was not a green college boy who had gone off to fight. No, this tall man was a killer of men, and perhaps of many men.

He came up to where the Mullah stood and said nothing for a long time, merely staring in the cleric’s face. The CIA man asked the Mullah for his name, took his fingerprints, and then abruptly turned and left, taking the other American soldiers with him.

The mosque remained undefiled.

That night, however, Al-Faiz had a dream. And in the dream he fell backward out of his body. Not all the way, but far enough that he no longer felt like he was in control of his own flesh. Not anymore. It was as if someone else had taken over control of his muscles and nerves. When his hand moved, it was not Al-Faiz who moved it. He watched as some unseen hand worked the strings and moved his body with the dexterous skill of a puppeteer.

He rose from his bed and walked out into the moonlight where several men were up late, talking by the light of a small fire. These were men who had joined with ISIL and were being trained for the war. Al-Faiz came up to them and stood at the outer edges of the fire’s yellow glow. The other men greeted him, but he said nothing for a long time, and instead waited while the others gradually fell silent and turned inquiring faces toward him.

The quiet of the night settled around them and the moment gradually grew strange. Later, those gathered men would tell their friends and family — and anyone else who would listen — that weird fires seemed to burn in the Mullah’s eyes. They said that when the Mullah spoke it was not in his own voice. And though he spoke in Arabic, even his accent was different. The Kurdish inflection on certain words, common to all of the people in that region, was gone.

They never forgot what he said that night, because the words of the Mullah were the match that set fire to the world.

“I am no one,” he said. “I am a vessel through which God speaks. And I will tell you how we will destroy the infidels. I will tell you how to throw them into a world of darkness.”

INTERLUDE SIX

“What’s he building in there?”

Oscar Bell sat behind his desk and nodded to the papers. He didn’t get up and hand them across. He did not do that sort of thing. Not even to a physicist whose name had appeared on the Nobel ballot four times in seventeen years. It’s doubtful he would have done so had Dr. Gustafson in fact won those four prizes.

That was Oscar Bell.

For his part, Dr. Gustafson did not expect simple courtesies from this man — nor indeed any graces. He’d been warned by his colleagues and Bell’s senior assistant had given him a twenty-minute talk on deportment. A younger and wealthier man might have taken offense. It’s possible that a younger Gustafson might even have walked out. Youth and optimism can craft moments like that. Age and being an also-ran tended to make a person more conciliatory.

So he reached for them himself, opened the folder on his side of the big desk, and began sorting through the papers. He already knew that this would be something involving both advanced electronics and physics, but he was not at all prepared for what he saw.

What he saw confused him.

“Where did you get these plans?” he asked.

Bell sipped coffee from an expensive china cup, his face giving absolutely nothing away. “You tell me.”

“Ah. Well… see here?” said Gustafson, rising and spreading the papers out so they puzzled together one very large schematic. “In a general sense it appears to be a hadron collider. This circular chamber is the tunnel through which the particles are run. You aim and bang and study what happened during that impact. Most of these devices are designed as large rings, of course, because you can better regulate the speed of the particles. In either case what is absolutely necessary is to get the tunnel perfectly cylindrical. Imperfections cause explosions — miner ones, of course, but damaging and time-wasting. Or your particles can strike irregularities in the wall and then the nature of the experiment is warped due to interference, and with the materials used to make the tunnel. Ultra-high-speed collisions with a loose steel rivet can spoil weeks of careful planning, and if anything is chipped off you then have particulate contaminates. It would be like doing blood work in dirty test tubes. You could never separate out the impurities from the desired particles.”

“Firing tunnel and smooth bore,” said Bell. “Got it. What’s next?”

Gustafson shifted to a second set of papers. “Mmm, this looks like some kind of propulsion system. These are superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way. Very streamlined from what you typically see, but the structural design looks good. Very good, actually. This is elegant.” He named a number of other key components. “You see, inside an accelerator, two high-energy particle beams travel at close to the speed of light before they are forced to collide. The beams travel in opposite directions in separate beam pipes, like these two here and here. These tubes are kept at ultrahigh vacuum and are guided around the accelerator ring by the strong magnetic field maintained by the electromagnets. The electromagnets themselves are built from coils of special electric cable that operates in a superconducting state. So, essentially they conduct electricity without resistance or loss of energy. To accomplish this, the magnets need to be chilled to minus two hundred seventy-one point three degrees Celsius. That’s actually colder than the ambient temperature of deep space. This is really a fine piece of design work.” He went through more of the designs, then abruptly stopped and frowned. “Wait… no, that’s odd. This isn’t right.”

Oscar Bell leaned forward. “What isn’t right?”

Gustafson’s frown deepened. “A couple of things. First, this here… I don’t know what it is. It looks like the frame for an airlock, but you wouldn’t need one for a hadron collider. I mean, a door to what? It doesn’t even enter the main tunnel. There’s nowhere to go. Strange.”

“What else is wrong with it?”

“Huh? Oh…,” said Gustafson as he placed one sheet atop the others. It had several lines of serial number-letter codes paired with corresponding numbers given down to ten thousandths of inches. “See this scale key? Each of these codes indicates a component of the overall machine, and the numbers on the left are the dimensions.”

“And—?”

“And the scale is completely off. These plans are for a large machine approximately eighty feet in diameter. But you said that you had a model of a smaller one?”

“A working prototype,” said Bell, nodding.

“I don’t see how it could work. It would be impossible to generate the kind of electromagnetic power necessary to do anything or learn anything. The wires and capacitors would be too small to take any serious strain, and even if they did manage to keep from fusing, they couldn’t generate the near light-speed necessary for any kind of serious particle collisions.”

“You’re certain?”

“Absolutely certain,” said Gustafson. “And any qualified civil engineer, electrical expert, or metallurgist would agree.”

Bell nodded. He stood up to take the materials back, folded them, and put the designs into his desk drawer. He removed a separate set of papers, considered them, and then tossed them onto the desk so that they slid across to the scientist. “Now tell me what that is.”

With some trepidation, Gustafson opened the folder and went through each of the papers. There were more design sketches, wiring schematics, materials lists, power output predictions, and other technical data. Some of it was computer printouts, some of it was written in an awkward hand. Gustafson’s frown went deeper still.

“Does any of this make sense to you?” asked Bell. “Take your time with it. Be sure.”

Gustafson took ten more minutes reading through the papers, comparing one set of notes to corresponding sketches, and back again. Then he looked up, clearly troubled.

“I don’t mean to offend, sir,” he said, “but did you commission this work?”

“Why?”

“Well… if this is something you paid for, then you have been tricked.”

Bell brushed lint from his sleeve. “How?”

“This is nonsense. I mean, sure, this is impressive work in many ways and whoever designed this has some appreciable understanding of physics, collider technology, and materials… but really.”

“What is it a design for?”

“I… I don’t know. Nothing that makes any sense,” said Gustafson.

“Try to make sense of it,” said Bell. “Indulge me. What would such a machine do?”

Once more Gustafson placed the papers on the desk and pointed to a sketch. “See this? This piece is a more detailed version of the airlock from those other sketches. It looks like one of the NASA designs that they are working on for the proposed Mars settlement. See here? Atmosphere filters, air scrubbers, a bio-aerosol mass spectrometer, a radiation detector. All of that by itself is reasonable for an airlock for a base on a planet with uncertain atmosphere. Though the filters here are based more on identifying air quality rather than protecting against the kind of radiation you’d have on Mars. It’s not something you’d use, say, in a space station or on the moon, where there’s no atmosphere.”

“But—?”

“But why build something like this into the wall of a hadron collider? There is no way that makes any sense.”

“If it’s a hadron collider,” suggested Bell.

“It is,” said Gustafson. “At least that’s the central design of those other plans. It’s some kind of particle accelerator.”

Bell nodded. “What else can you tell me?”

“Mm, well, some of these plans are for a power generator that makes no sense at all. The output predictions are way off the scale. You couldn’t hit those numbers with any generator short of a nuclear reactor, but this isn’t a centrifuge or a reactor. There’s no mention of a reactor or nuclear fission.”

“No,” agreed Bell.

“And yet there are numbers for the amount of kinetic energy created by this engine that are not possible outside of fission. I mean, look here, there are references to something called refractive crystalline source generation. What is that? It’s nonsense. There is no such thing.”

“I see,” said Bell. “So this is all nonsense?”

Gustafson hedged. “If I may be frank—?”

“Please.”

“Whoever designed this is probably a genius. There are some truly elegant refinements to the standard collider components. Things I’ve never seen. Possibly even revolutionary. Any of those elements would be worth filing patents on right away because they, at least, are sound and, really, they’re quite exciting.” Gustafson shook his head. “But the rest… either someone is trying very hard to sell you a bill of goods, in which case if you’ve paid for this work you could probably sue. This is someone trying to dazzle you with bullshit. With science fiction.”

“You said ‘either,’” observed Bell. “What’s the rest? What’s the other possibility?”

“Well… you know the saying that there is a fine line between genius and madness? If the person who designed this actually believes that this machine will work, then he’s quite mad.”

“I see. But tell me one last thing, Doctor,” said Bell. “You’ve told me what’s wrong with it and why it won’t work. However, you haven’t speculated on what you think this machine is for. If — and indulge me on that — if the person who developed this was working toward a specific end, then what end is that?”

“You don’t know? Surely he told you.”

“As I said, indulge me.”

Gustafson shrugged. “The power calculations, the placement of a door in an accelerator, the fact that the door is designed to scan for air quality and radiation… it’s obvious. However deluded or misguided, it’s obvious. The person who designed this is trying to generate enough power to open a door.”

“Be specific, Doctor.”

“This person is trying to open a door to another dimension.”

Bell smiled. “Ah.”

“As I said,” Gustafson added quickly, “this is nonsense. It can’t ever work. And if anyone was unfortunate enough to actually build this thing, it would probably blow up.”

“I see.”

“It gets worse, I’m afraid,” said Gustafson. He picked up one of the papers. It showed a diagram of several electrical circuits connected to gemstones. Diamond, ruby, emerald, topaz, garnet, and sapphire. Beneath the diagram were several scrawled notes. “Did you take note of this?”

“I did. What do you make of it?”

“It’s labeled ‘crystal power sequence regulator,’ and it corresponds to a key section of the firing controls for this device. From its placement in the system it clearly keeps the machine from overheating or exploding. Even if something that improbable were to work, the cost of obtaining gemstones of the type and size indicated here would be enormous. Prohibitive.”

“I didn’t ask you here to comment on the budget, Doctor.”

“No, um, very well,” fumbled the scientist, “but let me say two things. First, using gemstones to regulate this kind of power is pure fantasy. There’s no valid science to support it. And frankly it’s unreasonable to assume that a few carats of precious stones could in any way act as a regulator for any machine as complex and sophisticated as this. And please let me stress that as designed, those gems are key to the safety features.”

“Point made. What’s the other thing?”

“This,” said Gustafson, placing his finger on a list of notes written in the lower left corner of the page. “These are book titles, I think. A few have bylines, so we can assume that much. And they’re placed as a footnote to the power sequencer. The indication is twofold. That there is a very precise sequence needed for safe firing of this ‘God Machine’ and—”

“‘God Machine’?” interrupted Bell.

Gustafson nodded. “There is a small notation indicating that this is the name, or perhaps code name, of the machine. Shall I continue? Yes? Very well, sir, it appears that the crucial sequence can only be found in one or more of these books. Look here, the designer says as much. I quote, ‘the sequence is hidden in the prayers to the ancient ones,’ and ‘the Unlearnable Truths are the key,’ and yet he notates that ‘nothing is unlearnable.’”

Bell nodded. “I saw that. Do you have any idea what the ‘Unlearnable Truths’ are?”

“If I were to guess, they are the product of a delusional mind.”

Bell stood up. “Thank you, Dr. Gustafson,” he said without warmth, “you can show yourself out.”

The scientist rose and moved awkwardly toward the door. He paused, his fingers touching the doorknob. “Sir, you asked what ‘he was building in there.’ Who’s ‘he’? Who designed this? And is he actually building it, because again, I need to caution you…”

His words trailed away as Oscar Bell turned his back on him and went to stand by the window, looking out on the roses in the garden. After a long, uncomfortable moment Gustafson sighed, opened the door, and left.

When he was alone, Bell crossed back to his desk, lifted the receiver, and punched in a number. The call was answered on the second ring.

“You were right,” he said. “I want a team over here. I want this machine out of here before my son is home from school. All of it. The papers, Prospero’s prototype. All of it. Get moving.”

He made a second call to a gem merchant and a third to his banker to transfer funds. The banker cautioned against so large a transfer and warned that some holdings might have to be liquidated. Bell told him to stop whining and do it.

After those calls he replaced the phone in the cradle and then returned to the window. The early-afternoon sun turned the waters of the Atlantic into a rippling blanket of deep blue. His lips formed three words but the sound of them echoed only in his thoughts.

The Unlearnable Truths.

Oscar Bell turned and reached for the phone again.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

We sat in the empty hull of the airplane and did not look at each other. I couldn’t bear to see the truth of what had just happened in the eyes of Top or Bunny. They avoided my eyes, too.

We’re soldiers and we’re a very specific kind of special operator. We’ve seen things that no one else has seen. Monsters. Genetic freaks. Doomsday weapons. That’s our job, that’s the kind of thing we face.

But this…?

This was something else.

That gateway was ten kinds of wrong. The shapeless mass with all those tentacles? Wrong.

Swapping bodies with Bunny for a few seconds? Doing some kind of bullshit astral projection and spying on Lydia while she undressed? Really, really wrong.

The clones of Professor Erskine… or whatever they were?

So wrong.

When giant violent albino penguins are the least extraordinary issue of the day, then your day has slipped a gear.

We were all wasted, wired, and sick.

Really sick. And getting sicker.

Bunny suddenly staggered to his feet and ran in a stumbling lope toward the head. Almost made it. Then stomach cramps stopped him as solidly as if he’d been punched in the gut. He bent forward and vomited with terrible force all over the wall. Everything came up. Everything he’d eaten, everything he’d experienced, too. It was worse than when we’d first been hit by whatever had come blowing out of that machine. The force of it dropped Bunny to his knees and then forward onto his hands. Top and I rushed over, but we were losing it, too. Top wrenched open the door to the head and spewed inside. Into the toilet, onto the walls, the sink, the floor.

I threw up, too. Right where I stood.

The cramps really hit then. They dropped us and for a while all we could do was curl into balls and scream. The plane’s crew tried to help. Tried. But there was nothing they could do.

Not for a long time.

Not until the spasms passed.

Not until we were so spent that we wanted to die. It was like seasickness times ten. I’ve never experienced anything as sudden, as fierce, as painful. The cramps pulled muscles and tore cries from each of us.

What the hell had we breathed down there?

What the hell had happened down there?

The plane flew on, taking us home, but if it was flying anywhere in the direction of comfort or answers, that part wasn’t clear to Top, Bunny, or me.

Jesus H. Christ.

INTERLUDE SEVEN

“Dr. Greene?” said Oscar Bell. He stood at the window, holding his cell phone to his ear and cradling a glass of scotch against his chest.

“Mr. Bell,” said the psychiatrist. “Good to hear from you.”

“I need to cut right to it,” said Bell. “In your sessions with Prospero, has he ever said anything about where these damn books are? These Unlearnable Truths? Where are they?”

“Not directly. He said that some have been destroyed.”

“Christ.”

“But that the essential knowledge — the knowledge he claims that he needs — is repeated in sections in the other books. As long as one possesses certain key texts from that collection, then a critical truth can be learned.”

“His exact words?”

“No… I believe his exact words were that the books contained a message that would allow him to, and I quote, ‘solve the riddle of the stars’.”

“Which books would he need to do that?”

“Sir, this is—”

“Now, Doctor.”

Greene sighed and then there was the sound of rustling papers. “Very well, Mr. Bell. They are as follows: The Book of Azathoth, The Book of Eibon, The Book of Iod, The Celaeno Fragments, The Cultes des Goules, The Eltdown Shards, On the Sending Out of the Soul…” The list included fourteen entries and he read them all carefully.

“Is that all of them?” asked Bell.

“Yes. Wait, no, there was one from yesterday’s session. Here it is. De Vermis Mysteriis,” said Greene. “It translates as—”

“Mysteries of the Worm, got it. Anything else?”

“No. But, Mr. Bell, please understand, I researched these titles. They’re pure nonsense—”

Bell hung up without saying good-bye.

He finished his drink, poured another, and then called a man who knew a man who knew a man. One of those kinds of calls.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Sergeant Brick Anderson sat across from Mr. Church. They were the only passengers aboard the Gulfstream G650 as the bird rocketed westward at mach point-nine-two, near the upper range of its fast cruising speed. Church was finishing a call with the president of the United States, and Brick had eavesdropped on some of it. The president was an unhappy man. He yelled. A lot. Captain Ledger’s name was taken in vain, and there were threats against his life. A lot of those. The jet had flown a lot of miles while Church tried to calm the commander in chief down and convince him that Captain Ledger had not taken leave of his senses and that the missile strikes against Gateway One were not, in fact, evidence that the man had become a global terrorist or simply a madman. Church had to do a lot of maneuvering to assure the president that the actions taken were well within the scope of the powers granted to the DMS as part of this mission. Church reminded him, section and verse, of the special powers granted through the Department of Military Sciences charter, particularly in cases involving an imminent and dire biological or technological threat.

Church had the call on speaker because, Brick suspected, why should he suffer alone?

Several times Brick had to turn away to hide a grin, even though they were painful grins. No matter how this ultimately played out, Captain Ledger’s ass was going to be in a sling. Church caught one of his grins and gave him a sour look, but then he smiled and mimed putting a pistol to his own head and pulling the trigger.

When the call ended Church looked ten years older. Brick poured them both glasses of wine and they sat drinking in silence for a few minutes.

“Is POTUS going to want Joe’s head on a pike?”

Church considered the deep red depths of his wine. It was a Homer pinot noir from Shea Wine Cellars in Willamette. Not terribly expensive but very good. Rudy Sanchez had sent Church a case some months ago and this was the last bottle.

“It would be in the president’s best interest to reread the DMS charter.”

“You’re saying he can’t order you to fire Joe?”

Church merely shrugged and sipped the wine.

The phone rang and Brick answered it, spoke quietly, grunted in surprise, and held the phone against his chest for a moment.

“Wow,” he said to Church. “It’s Harcourt Bolton, Senior. Says it’s important.”

Church held out a hand and took the phone, once more put the call on speaker, and said, “Harcourt, it’s good to hear from you.”

“Right back at you, Deacon. Listen, I have a couple of things,” said Bolton in his usual boisterous tone. “Heard you’re having a challenging day. POTUS said something about your boy Ledger blowing the ass off the world. Words to that effect.”

Church said, “No comment.”

Bolton laughed. “Wasn’t asking for one. Just offering sympathy. Ledger’s a good kid, but he’s still young. Not like us old dinosaurs.”

“I have complete faith in Captain Ledger.”

“Oh, hey, I’m not saying otherwise. He saved my bacon a couple of times. It’s nice to know that fogies like us have hotshot kids to send out tiger hunting. Makes me wish I still had the tools for that kind of stuff. Those were good days. Damn, we pissed on walls all over the world. Geez, remember that time in Madrid when I—”

“Harcourt,” said Church, “much as I would love to chat, this isn’t the best time for it.”

“Right, right, of course. You have some spin control to do. I know the timing sucks, too, ’cause you and your boys have had a run of bad luck lately. Big win against the Seven Kings but the last six or seven cases have turned on you. Bad luck can go in runs; believe me, I know. Sorry to see it happening for the DMS.”

Brick studied the red depths of his wine, not wanting to meet Church’s eyes. Bolton was right about the DMS hitting a rough patch. And it wasn’t seven cases that had gone south on them, it was closer to a round dozen. High casualties in firefights, some civilian casualties, too. Failed missions, questionable intel, squandered resources, wrecked vehicles, and hostiles that slipped through the DMS’s fingers. So far Joe Ledger’s Special Projects Office had managed to hold a near-perfect track record, but given the bizarre verbal field report and the lack of substantiating data — at least so far — the DMS all-stars were likely to lose their shining status. It was all very stressful and so strange. Brick knew a lot of the team commanders and many of the field operators. It was not like them to be clumsy. Church didn’t hire second-stringers. So far, though, there were mysteries and questions and nothing even remotely like an answer.

Bolton said, “Hey, Deke, I’m sorry as hell that it was my intel that put Ledger at Gateway. I thought it would be a walk in the park for a gunslinger like him.”

“We’ll survive,” said Church. Brick knocked back the rest of his wine and poured more for both of them.

“Sorry, boy. Not trying to kick you when you’re down. I know what it feels like when you lose a step getting to first base. That’s why I stepped out of the field. Just commiserating,” Bolton said, then cleared his throat. “Listen, the real reason I’m calling is to ask if you’ve been tracking those power outages? You know the ones I mean, the racetrack mess and the GOP debate?”

“I’m aware of them,” said Church. His voice was as wooden as his face.

“You looking into it?”

“You probably know I wasn’t given that case, Harcourt,” said Church. “POTUS assigned a task force. Joint Homeland and NSA.”

Bolton snorted. “Then you know they found exactly nothing. That team’s a step down from a clown college. Their report concluded that the two incidents, though remarkable, are probably not connected. They’re calling the power losses a coincidence. What do you think of that bullcrap?”

“That report has not yet been forwarded to me,” said Church.

“Really? They filed it this morning. My people got it for me within half an hour. I’ll send you a copy.”

Brick winced, but Church merely said, “You have an excellent team, Harcourt. I take it you disagree with the team’s findings?”

“Findings? Ha! That bunch couldn’t find their asses with a laser-guided missile. Of course I disagree. Don’t you?”

“It’s not my case, Harcourt. Why are we having this conversation?”

“Geez, why are you so cranky lately? You didn’t used to be like this.”

“Harcourt…”

“Right, right. I’m calling you because it actually might be your case after all,” said Bolton. “I called the president as soon as I was done reading that piece-of-crap report. I told him that it was wrong.”

“And how did you come to that conclusion, Harcourt?”

“Easy math, Deke. I’ve been juggling a couple of investigations, you know, tapping my old network to see if I can shake some bedbugs out of the linen. There are a couple of case profiles I’ve been putting together to hand off to the young lions here at Central Intelligence. But as it turns out, two of these cases are different ends of the same case. First one is a real Dan Brown thing, you’ll love it. Somebody ought to write a book. Short version is that there’s a new black market that’s been operating on the fringes of the Middle East. Run by a guy named Ohan, who’s a non-Muslim Turk who’d cut out your mother’s liver and sell it back to you for ten bucks plus installation. Sweetheart of a guy by all accounts.”

“Ohan?” said Church. “I haven’t heard of him.” He glanced at Brick, who was already typing it into a MindReader search. Brick shook his head and mouthed the word “nothing.” “How did you come up with this intel, Harcourt?”

“Oh, you know what the kids are calling me when they think I’m not listening. Mr. Voodoo. I have my sources.”

Church made a noncommittal grunt.

“Anyway, Deke,” said Bolton, “this Ohan character has cornered a very specialized part of the global black market. He’s managed to obtain a lot of items from libraries, tombs, sacred sites, and university museums in areas overrun by ISIL. A lot of the stuff they claim to have destroyed because it doesn’t fit their version of Islam wasn’t so much ‘destroyed’ as sold. Ohan fences it for them and their cut goes into the Islamic State’s war chest. Somebody has to pay for all those bullets and beheading swords. Actually, from what I’ve been able to put together, it looks like ISIL is using that money to step up its game.”

“Step it up how?”

“That’s where this story gets really interesting, because I managed to get a partial inventory list from one of Ohan’s people. Call it a catalog page, or close enough. Some of the stolen tech had been in development by an international team of for-hire science nerds. Like DARPA, except they are completely mercenary with no specific national or political affiliations. Geeks R Us. Apparently some private labs in Syria had become go-to spots for off-the-books R and D. According to Ohan’s list, they had stuff in development for the Russians, the North Koreans, the Iranians, the Egyptians. Fun stuff, too. Missile defense jamming systems. Laser-guided man-portable rocket systems designed to take out drones. Like that. This is quality science, Deke. This is the kind of thing that could cause real problems for us and for NATO.”

“Sounds like it.”

“Three items on that list popped out and that’s why I called. The first is something called a ‘God Machine,’ which I can only assume is a code name. I showed it to a couple of big brains. You’re not the only one with friends in the industry. Heh-heh. Anyway, one said that it looked like a portable version of a hadron collider, which is a contradiction in terms. Those things are huge. The other said that it was a component of a directed-energy weapon being developed under the code name of ‘Kill Switch.’ A kind of nondestructive EMP device, as I understand it.”

“Ah,” said Church.

“Now you’re interested, right? Ohan claimed to have partial schematics for the God Machine and a completed prototype of the Kill Switch for sale. My sources tell me that ISIL snapped it up, which means that they’re looking to take the fight to us. And get this, they didn’t buy Kill Switch with cash money. What they did is give Ohan a couple of tons of priceless ancient sculptures and rare books for it.”

“This is very interesting, Harcourt,” said Church, “and I very much appreciate you bringing it to me. I’ll talk to POTUS about having the power blackout case shifted to the DMS.”

“Good luck with that. You’re not POTUS’s favorite guy these days.”

“We still have a useful working relationship.”

“Sure, but for how long?” said Bolton. “Look, it’s no secret that he blames you for him not having a chance at a second term. He thinks you should have stopped the Seven Kings. He hasn’t come right out and said that the drone disaster was your fault, but it’s clear that’s how he feels.”

Church said nothing. Brick shook his head, wanting to say something but keeping his vitriolic comments locked inside.

Bolton said, “Geez, I didn’t call to kick you in the shins, Deacon. It’s just that this power outage thing is scaring the crap out of me. If I was twenty years younger I’d go after this myself. Guess you feel the same way. But, bad luck streaks happen in baseball and special operations, too. They pass. Shame about Gateway, ’cause this Kill Switch thing would have been perfect for your boy Ledger.”

“Captain Ledger is not the only team leader I have in play.”

“Oh, I know, but he’s the best now that Samson Riggs is gone.” Bolton sighed. “He was good, Samson. The only guy I thought could give me a run for my money. Now there’s Joe Ledger. But you know, Deke, if we’re going to be honest about this, you’d never have gotten the funds to open the Special Projects Office if the president hadn’t taken me out of the game. That’s a fact.”

Brick Anderson watched Church’s face as Bolton said this. Was there a flicker of annoyance there? Or pity?

“Harcourt,” said Church quietly, “this isn’t a cult of personality. You did a tremendous amount of good as a field operative and now, with your intelligence network, it’s possible you’re even more valuable to the war we fight. No one will ever say otherwise.”

There was a pause on the line, a heavy silence.

“Christ, will you listen to me?” said Bolton. “I sound like an old dog yapping at puppies. Sorry, boy. Let’s put it down to stress and not enough sleep. Don’t hold it against me, Deacon.”

“Of course not, Harcourt.”

Bolton made a sound, somewhere between an uncomfortable laugh and a self-deprecating sigh. “I hate getting old.”

“We all do.”

“Yeah, well, it hits some of us harder than others. You never seem to change.”

“I feel my years,” said Church. “It’s why I stopped going into the field, too. I leave the gymnastics for younger men and women.”

“You left under your own terms, though. I didn’t leave the game, the game left me.”

“And yet here we are, Harcourt. You’ve brought valuable intel to me twice in one day.”

“Yeah, yeah. We’re all superheroes. Got it,” said Bolton. “Listen, talk to POTUS. Run down that ISIL thing. Don’t back-burner it, Deke. If ISIL has gotten hold of some kind of portable EMP technology, then we are in deep, deep trouble.”

“Yes, we are,” said Church.

“Ohan knows who bought it. I passed this along to some guys I know in the field. Agency station chiefs who don’t have their heads up their keisters. I’ll send Ohan’s info to you, too.”

“I appreciate that, Harcourt,” said Church.

“And…,” said Bolton, drawing it out, “there’s one more thing. I don’t see how it could be connected to Gateway or ISIL or the EMP tech, but those ancient books ISIL gave to Ohan? I recognized some of them and it really gave me a jolt, too. Remember that op we ran about thirty-odd years ago? Belgrade?”

“Thirty-seven years ago. What about it?”

“That was the first time you and I crossed paths. I was hunting for a couple of Kazakhstanis who were trying to sell nuclear components from the old Soviet days. And you were doing that hinky little deal with Arklight to close out those shooters from the Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum? The Brotherhood of the Lock, remember?”

“I remember.”

“Remember what the Brotherhood were doing in Belgrade? Remember what they were after?”

Church said nothing.

“You never did find it. Well,” said Bolton, “someone else is looking for it now, and Ohan says he has it to sell. My sources tell me there are at least two buyers bidding on it right now.”

Church said nothing.

“Yeah,” said Bolton, “I figured that would get your attention. Someone is trying to sell one of the Unlearnable Truths.”

INTERLUDE EIGHT

The man looked like what he was.

A killer. Though Oscar Bell knew that this was a side effect of his profession, not a calling. The man was not psychotic or sociopathic, and from the reports Bell had paid for, it seemed clear the thief did not particularly enjoy killing. It was a means to an end when all other options proved inefficient.

Bell could appreciate that. The blood he had on his own hands — at however many removes — was equally cold. Emotional attachments to that sort of thing created problems.

Bell hated problems. What made him happy were solutions.

“What do I call you?” asked Bell.

“Priest,” said the killer. They sat on opposite sides of Bell’s big desk. They hadn’t shaken hands when the thief arrived. Bell’s courtesy extended to providing the man a cold beer, which sat untouched, beads of sweat running down the outside of the bottle. Bell hadn’t even suggested a glass of his very old, very extraordinary scotch. The killer was dressed in a dark suit, with a white shirt and dark tie. His sunglasses lay on the edge of the desk.

“‘Priest’?”

“An old joke,” said the killer. “You had to be there.”

“Whatever,” said Bell. “You come very highly recommended, Mr. Priest.”

The man said nothing; merely lifted a finger and let it drop back.

“And yet,” said Bell, “your former employer was killed.”

Priest smiled. “Not on my watch. My team was in Yemen when that went down.” He spoke with a faint Spanish accent. Cultured and elegant, though Bell thought it was overlaid atop a more plebian one. A self-made man.

“Would things have been different had you been there?” asked Bell.

“I could not say,” said Priest. “I wasn’t there.”

Bell shifted the subject. “Have you had time to go over my request?”

“I have.”

“And—?”

“I asked a few discreet questions and received some interesting leads,” said the killer.

“How interesting?”

“We do not yet have a contract, Mr. Bell. I did not mind asking those questions, but sharing the answers is different.”

“Fair enough.” Bell opened a drawer and removed an envelope, weighed it in his hand, and then tossed it onto the desk. Priest took it, opened it, leafed through the sheaf of bearer bonds.

“It’s light.”

“It’s enough to pay for those answers. If I like what I hear we’ll negotiate a fee for the rest.”

Priest nodded. “The Unlearnable Truths aren’t a myth. References to them have been heavily fictionalized, but they are real.”

“And you know this for a fact?”

“I do. It’s why my colleagues referred you to me. I have had some experience with rare collectibles of this kind.” Priest grinned, showing a lot of white teeth. “You might say that this is kind of ‘my thing,’ as the saying goes. It is a very small community of people who deal in such things, and a much smaller group who know about the Unlearnable Truths. Whoever told you about these books, though, must have very specialized information sources.”

“That’s an understatement,” muttered Bell. “Continue, please.”

“Do you know the phrase ‘Index Librorum Prohibitorum’?”

“I can translate the Latin. Let me see… ‘list of prohibited books.’ Something like that?”

Priest nodded. “The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a list of books deemed heretical, lascivious, or anticlerical. Exciting, yes? Intriguing. Such a list makes you hunger to know what is in those books, does it not?”

“I will admit that I have a certain interest,” conceded Bell.

“Yes,” purred Priest. “The first list was authorized by Pope Paul IV in 1559.”

“Ah,” said Bell, “you’re talking about the Pauline Index.”

“Then you have heard of it.”

“A passing reference,” said Bell. “I’m not too familiar with it. Feel free to explain.”

Priest laughed. “You would not believe what I would tell you.”

Bell sipped his scotch. “I wouldn’t make assumptions, friend. Now, stop dancing around it. Give me the basics. I catch on pretty quickly.”

“Very well. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum has two parts. One was made public through priests whose job it was to remove restricted texts from their parishes. These priests would visit homes and inspect books to make sure that their flocks had no access to heretical, blasphemous, or obscene materials, yes? And as the years passed this became less official and more of an advisement. Banned books, book burnings. These things happen even today.”

“Sure. There are a lot of very aggressive idiots in the world. I do business with some of them.”

“You disapprove?”

“Whatever else I am, Mr. Priest, I am not a fan of censorship, and particularly enforced censorship. It gets in the way of the flow of information. Now, you said that there were two parts…?”

“The main list is the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. That is the published list of forbidden books. But there is a second list that is shared only among the most trusted members of the inner circle at the Vatican. This list is never named except in oblique references, but in the house of the Goddess — and to a few true scholars — this most secret of lists is known as the Unlearnable Truths. Many of these books have been found and destroyed by the Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum.”

Bell picked his way through that translation, as well. “The Order of the Brothers of the Lock…? What’s that?”

“They are a very ancient brotherhood of warrior priests. This brotherhood was created by a papal bull, but you will never find a record of it in any church history. They, like a few other groups, were kept secret. Only a few cardinals knew of them. Most popes, by the way, did not. I doubt Pope Francis will ever be told about it. He is too liberal and humanist. In any case, it was the mission of this brotherhood to seek out the Unlearnable Truths and to protect humanity from the secrets they contained. This they did by any means necessary. Much blood was spilled. Many heretics were burned or butchered by the Brotherhood, because, after all, sacrifices must sometimes be made to protect the flock.”

“Assholes,” groused Bell. “Are these jerkoffs in possession of the Unlearnable Truths?”

“They have some of them. Not all. Some of the Unlearnable Truths were burned by the Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum, others were locked away in special repositories known only to the Brotherhood. Others still remain hidden, lost perhaps. Or kept by those who seek to understand the mysteries contained therein.”

“If this brotherhood is so secret, how is it that you know of them?”

Priest picked up the beer, looked at it, took a sip, and then set it down. Then he unbuttoned his left cuff and pushed up the shirt and jacket sleeve. There, on the inside of his forearm, was a very old tattoo of a burning cross set against the silhouette of a book.

“As I said, Mr. Bell, this is very much my kind of thing.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

His handlers kept people away most of the time. These things had to be managed.

Abdullah was his personal aide and Akbar was his bodyguard. There were others assigned to the detail. The rules were simple. Until and unless the Mullah spoke to one of them in the other voice, then the man was to be kept in absolute isolation. This was critical because when he was not the Mullah of the Black Tent, as he came to be called, he was merely Maki Al-Faiz, a frightened man from a tiny village who did not know what was happening to him. Al-Faiz was probably mad, they decided. Touched by God, as the saying went. Al-Faiz would rave and beg and swear that he was not the same person who spoke with his mouth and stood in his body and who directed the actions of the soldiers of the caliphate. That person, the crazy man, was kept far from the public.

Only the Mullah of the Black Tent was allowed to walk free.

He, after all, had become the most important man in this war.

Akbar and Abdullah, both longtime soldiers of the caliphate, were there when Abu Suleiman al-Naser, the head of the War Council and military chief of the Islamic State, came to see the Mullah. That had been such an incredible day, a blessed day. And within a week of that meeting the soldiers of Allah had scored two massive attacks against their enemies. After another meeting with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph himself, special teams of soldiers were able to detonate bombs in Syria, Egypt, and Kurdistan.

The pattern was like that. A high-ranking member of the caliphate would visit with the Mullah and shortly thereafter some great victory would occur.

It was only a matter of time, Akbar confided to Abdullah, before bombs would begin going off in America.

But they were wrong.

It was not bombs that would fall.

It was planes and it was hope.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Marty Hammond didn’t consider it cheating. No way. Cheating was something you did when there was some kind of emotional commitment. When there was the chance the girl — or the woman — was going to want more, to expect something beyond a dinner, some drinks, a few joints, and a hump in the hay. Cheating was what broke marriages apart, and as Marty saw it, these little encounters — his word of choice — had probably saved his marriage to Connie ten times over.

Connie was great. He loved her. Really loved her. Had since eleventh grade, and always would. They had three kids together. Bobby, who was a senior at LSU; Caitlyn, who was just starting at Emory; and little Cindy, who was still in the ninth grade. Great kids. Good-looking, too, which they got from Connie. Smart as whips, which they got from him. Or, to be fair, maybe a bit from both, because Connie was clueless but she wasn’t stupid. Not by a long walk. She was smart enough in her way, but her way was St. Anthony Park in St. Paul. Connie almost never left her little town. Never willingly, anyway, and never for long. She didn’t like to travel, not even to the islands. She’d gone with Marty to conventions in Jamaica, Aruba, and Hawaii, but after the third one she said that she was done. Tired of traveling. Bored with the whole thing.

That’s what she called it. The “whole thing.” Conventions, travel, meeting new people, parties, mixers, dinners with clients and colleagues, hotels, new places. The whole thing made her long for their home, their two acres of grass and trees with the little koi pond. Connie would rather stay behind even when the International Association of Commercial Realtors had their annual convention at the Paris Casino in Vegas. It boggled Marty’s mind. It made no sense at all. Who the hell did not want to go to Vegas? The crowds, the restaurants, the shows? Really? Ditto for Houston. There was a lot of fun to be had in Houston if you knew where to look. A whole lot of fun.

Not as far as Connie was concerned, though. She’d rather stay back in St. Paul and play bridge. Bridge, for Christ’s sake? Who the hell played bridge anymore? At first Marty thought that it was a code name for Connie and her friends having hen parties where they bring in male strippers and blow them. But he had a buddy of his randomly drop by a couple of times to pick up things from Marty’s home office. What he found was twelve women playing cards and eating those faggy little sandwiches. Marty believed he would actually have been okay with Connie smoking some bone-a-phone. It would be real. Bridge was not real. Bridge was a rerun of Mad Men or some shit like that. Old-fashioned yesterday stuff.

Marty sometimes wondered how the two of them ever managed to have kids. Connie was pretty, and when they were in the mood and in the sack, she had all the right moves. Even some mildly kinky stuff. Did anal twice. Wore a costume a couple of times. Like that. She wasn’t exactly frigid, but she never made the first move. And if he didn’t make a move at all, she seemed cool with it. As if sex didn’t really matter. It wasn’t any kind of serious thing to her.

It was a lot more than that to Marty. Hell yes. He was a man in his prime. Okay, upper end of prime. But these days fifty was the new thirty, or that’s what Marty heard. He had needs. He had urges. He needed to get laid a lot more than Connie ever did, and since he was on the road sometimes twenty, twenty-five weeks a year, either he built up inch-thick calluses on his hand whacking off, or he took a more practical approach. The girls who worked the bars on the convention circuit weren’t street hags. They were pretty. Some of them were gorgeous. And they were clean. You don’t get to work a circuit with high rollers if you’re carrying crabs. No way, Jose.

They were also commitment free. It was no different than any of the business transactions that went on a hundred times a day at these conventions. Marty got his needs met and he didn’t get attached to anyone because no one at these hotels was looking for complications. A little money changed hands. They all took plastic and the billing was discreet. And when the weekend was over Marty went home to Connie. Clean and happy and without issues.

Everybody walked away a winner.

Tonight was just like all the others. He was way up on the sixteenth floor. Nice room, big king bed, and a Korean gal in the bathroom washing round one out of her snatch while he tried to get it up for round two.

“You ready for me?” she asked, her voice floating through the semidarkness.

“Getting there,” he said. Being honest about it because there are things you can fake and things you can’t. And you can’t fool a hooker into believing that a soft dick is a blue steel spike. It would be a professional discourtesy. Besides, he’d been with this one before. Last May and the December before that. Houston was a good conference town. The girl — Lily — knew some tricks to put some iron in the ol’ putter. Yes, sir, she had a full and complete set of techniques for that. Back in December she’d helped him get it up three times. Three. He hadn’t done that since the late nineties. Marty thought his heart was going to explode. So, yeah, he booked Lily again and again. And each time she proved that her skill set was mighty damn impressive. Borderline supernatural.

The drapes were open and outside the sprawl of predawn Houston was gorgeous. Lights by the million, even this early. Glittering like jewels, making him feel rich. Making him feel like he was on top of the damn world. Above the glittering skyscrapers he saw a line of jumbo jets angling down toward Bush airport. They passed directly over the hotel on their way, and somehow imagining all that power roaring above him helped Marty find that tingle that let him know tonight was going to be at least a doubleheader. If not another December hat trick.

“Here I co-o-o-o-ome,” teased Lily. She opened the bathroom door and stood hipshot in the spill of light, her naked body slim and curvy and silhouetted. Marty’s cock jumped. God, she was a knockout. Not one of those big bouncy broads he used to like when he was younger. No. Lily looked like she was maybe fifteen. She had to be at least twice that, but she always played it like she was a kid. A naughty, naughty kid. “Are you redeeeeee?”

His groin throbbed again. “I’m readier than ready,” he said. And he was.

She giggled. He never cared whether her joy was real. Probably wasn’t, but so what? She got wet and she got him hard and what more did either of them need?

“You want the light on or off?” She flicked the switch up and down, creating a strobe behind her.

“Leave it on,” he said. “I want to see you.”

She laughed again, and it sounded real. Happy to be admired. Or whatever. She came running toward him.

And then the lights went out.

All of them.

In the bathroom. The light on the clock. The glow of his iPad over on the desk. Out.

Bang.

The iPod went silent, too. All at once. The U2 mix he had on was gone. Just like that.

Bang.

There was a solid thump on the side of the bed and Lily’s laugh turned to a sharp cry of pain as her shins hit the frame. She cursed and pitched forward into the bed. Marty could hear her but he could not see her.

Not at all.

For a single freaky moment he thought that it was him, that he’d gone blind. That the stress of sex with a woman two or three decades younger than him had pushed his ticker past the red line. He thought, Oh Christ, I’m going to die in a Houston hotel with a Korean hooker. Connie will be pissed.

But it wasn’t him. He understood that a half second later.

Outside, the sky was filled with stars and the lights of Houston were still on. A splash of jewels.

“What’s going on?” asked Lily, and the little-girl quality was gone, replaced by a voice that was colder, harsher, and in no way playful.

“I told you to leave the lights on,” he snapped.

“I did. Maybe there’s a power outage in the hotel.”

As she said it the world seemed willing to prove her wrong.

Outside the lights began changing. First it was the buildings closest to the Marriott. They went dark. Bang. All at once, as if someone had found a single switch that could shut off every light.

Then the buildings across the street from them went out. And the buildings on the next block. The next. The next.

Bang.

Bang.

Bang.

All dark.

Marty and Lily froze, staring through the glass at the city.

No, staring at the blackness that had been the city. Now it was nothing. Only the upper floors were edged with thin blue lines of starlight. And Marty had an irrational thought.

At least the stars didn’t go out.

It was almost the last thought he had.

He heard the sound then. Not an engine whine. No, he might have understood what was about to happen.

This was a whistling sound. Almost a shriek.

Getting closer.

Getting louder.

Something moving so fast through the dark air that the wind screamed along its sides.

Marty knew what it was. He knew.

The moment that his brain identified what it was… that was his last thought. He even said it aloud.

“They’re falling,” he said in a whisper that was filled with awe. “They’re all falling.”

A moment later a Boeing 737 struck the top floor of the Marriott.

Between the hotel and the airport, the rest of the planes stacked up for landing fell.

Like dead birds.

Like stricken crows. Black and falling through blackness.

Until the darkness recoiled from the fires.

But by then Marty was long gone.