The Joshua Stone

by James Barney

  “Found an old carbide lamp in the passenger’s seat, which is probably what he used to smash the window. Title and registration in the glove compartment. In the console, we found a bag of marijuana. About six ounces. Could’ve been the owner’s, but we’re not sure. A pack of rolling papers, a lighter, some CDs, cell phone charger . . . and a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff.”

  “Is all that stuff still in the car?” Ana asked.

  “All except the marijuana.” The sheriff paused, noticing their inquisitive looks. “We tagged and bagged it already and sent it to the evidence locker. Standard procedure for drugs and cash.” He paused again, observing their continued expressions of confusion. “Look, that stuff tends to disappear real quick if you don’t lock it up, okay?”

  Ana nodded that she understood. “So what time did the suspect check in here?”

  Fitch rubbed his face and exhaled loudly. “I talked to the night manager this morning. Best he could remember, the guy checked in around three fifteen A.M. Same description as before. Long gray hair, beard, fingernails.”

  “What name did he give?”

  “He didn’t.”

  “But . . . I thought hotels were required by law to check ID.”

  “Come on,” said Fitch, laughing sarcastically. “Look at this place. The night manager figured the guy was homeless, so he made him pay up front in cash. Didn’t bother to ask for an ID.”

  “How’d he pay?” Ana asked.

  “Same way. Two fifties. Guy said he had a whole wad of them.”

  Ana suddenly thought about the money they’d found in Dr. Holzberg’s wallet. “Can I see those bills?”

  Fitch shook his head. “Like I said, young lady, cash and drugs get sent to evidence right away. So if you want to see those bills now, you’ll have to go downtown.”

  “Or,” Ana retorted. “You can bring them here.” She held the sheriff’s gaze for several seconds, leaving no doubt that she expected him to do just that, and that she did not appreciate being called “young lady.”

  Fitch bobbed his head back and forth, then scowled and cursed under his breath. “Hey, Davidson!” he barked to one of his deputies. “Go to evidence and bring back those fifties we got from the store, and the hotel register.”

  “Will do,” said the deputy.

  “Anything else?” said Fitch.

  “Yeah,” Ana replied. “Has anyone seen the suspect since he checked in here last night?”

  “Nope, we’ve had the room under surveillance since about nine thirty this morning. No one’s come in or out since then. I’m guessing he’s sleeping like Rip Van Winkle in there.”

  “I doubt it,” McCreary mumbled.

  “Got a room key?” asked Ana.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  Ten minutes later, they were all in position. Ana Thorne stood beside the door to room 132 with her pistol drawn. One of the sheriff’s deputies stood on the other side of the door. Thorne drew a deep breath and nodded for him to proceed.

  Keeping his body as far to the side as possible, the deputy slowly inserted the key into the lock. He glanced at Ana one last time, and she nodded for him to continue. Then, in one quick motion, the deputy turned the key clockwise and popped the door open a quarter inch.

  At the same moment, Ana stepped forward and gave the door a hard kick. “FBI!” she shouted as she charged in, training her weapon at chest level all around the room.

  Empty.

  “Bathroom!” Ana shouted, nodding toward the open bathroom door.

  The deputy rushed into the bathroom with his weapon leveled. A second later, he yelled, “Clear!”

  Ana activated her earpiece. “No one here,” she said.

  McCreary’s voice came on the line. “I’m not surprised.”

  “Hey, check this out,” the deputy called from the bathroom.

  Ana entered the dingy bathroom and saw what he was pointing to. The window above the shower stall was wide open. She tapped the transmit button again. “Bill, he went out through a back window. No telling how long ago.”

  “Probably when he saw a bunch of cops digging through his car,” McCreary replied. He sighed and added, “Okay, I’ll have a team comb the area behind the motel and put out an APB for the immediate vicinity.”

  Ana looked down at the bathroom floor, which was covered with mounds of gray hair. She pushed the transmit button again. “Oh, and you can drop the Santa Claus description,” she said. “He’ll look different now. Short hair and probably clean shaven.” She waited for the transmitter to time out, then turned to the deputy and pointed to the mess on the floor. “Bag all of this,” she said. “It’ll be useful for DNA.”

  Five minutes later, it seemed the whole police squad was in the room, including Sheriff Fitch. Ana spotted McCreary standing outside, near the doorway, and she made her way over to him.

  “Have them box everything up,” he instructed her quietly. “We can take the boxes with us tonight.”

  Ana nodded and was just about to say something when a young police corporal interrupted. “Excuse me, ma’am. Sheriff asked me to give these to you.” He handed her two plastic evidence bags, each containing two fifty-dollar bills.

  Ana waited for the cop to leave, then closely inspected one of the bills through the clear plastic bag.

  “Checking the date?” asked McCreary quietly.

  “Uh-huh. This one says ‘Series 1970.’” She quickly checked the other bag. “Series 1971.’” She looked at McCreary, confused. “They postdate 1959 by more than ten years. What do you make of that?”

  McCreary shrugged. “Maybe he stole them.”

  Ana looked unconvinced. “Where would he have stolen a wad of forty-year-old bills?”

  McCreary shrugged. “Good point.”

  “Hey, guys,” said another police officer. “Sheriff wants you inside. Thinks he might have found something.”

  Thorne and McCreary quickly pushed their way through the crowd of policemen inside the motel room. “You got something, Sheriff?” asked McCreary as they approached.

  Sheriff Fitch was hunched over the nightstand with his back to them. “Yeah. Got a notepad here that appears to have some residual writing impressions. You could submit it for ESDA analysis, but I don’t think that’ll be necessary.” He straightened, turned around, and held out a small piece of paper between his thumb and forefinger. “Just look at it at an angle to the light.”

  Ana took the paper carefully by one corner and inspected it closely in the glow of the nightstand lamp. It was a page from a small notepad with several letters prominently indented from someone having written with a ballpoint pen on the preceding page. It took several seconds before the light hit the page just right and a legible word suddenly appeared. “Jasher,” she whispered.

  “Mean anything to you?” asked the sheriff.

  Thorne and McCreary both looked at each other and shook their heads.

  Five minutes later, when they were away from the crowd, Ana leaned close to McCreary and whispered emphatically, “We need to have Michael plug this into his program right away.”

  “Speaking of Michael,” said McCreary. “Where the hell is he?”

  Part Two

  And he bade them, teach the children of Judah the use of the bow: behold, it is written in the book of Jasher.

  HOLY BIBLE, 2 Samuel 1:18

  20

  BEURY MOUNTAIN, WEST VIRGINIA

  Absolute darkness has a way of playing tricks on your mind. Am I awake? Mike Califano wondered. Am I even alive? In fact, he was lying in total blackness against a cold, damp wall, nine hundred feet underground. He had lost all orientation as to time and place. Tactile sensation was gone. His sense of sight and sound, even smell, were gone. His only sensation now was a strangely comforting warmth that was spreading from his core to his extremities and head. And, with it, an irresistible desire to sleep.

  Yet something deep inside him was fighting . . . resisting . . . warning him no
t to give in to the warmth. He struggled to amplify that voice. What was it telling him to do? The answer arrived slowly, like a long-forgotten tune. Wake up!

  Now!

  Suddenly, Califano could feel sharp rocks poking painfully against his back, and gravel pressing hard against the right side of his face. Mustering all his remaining energy, he managed to lift his head a few inches off the ground. The feeling of gravel against his face subsided. Crawl! Califano obeyed the voice inside his head. Like a bear arising from hibernation, he rose to all fours and began plodding awkwardly on hands and knees away from the wall, struggling mightily to do so. Somewhere in his mind, it began to register that he was crawling uphill. Yes, urged the voice. Uphill is good.

  Inch by agonizing inch, Califano slowly emerged from the invisible cauldron of “black damp” at the end of shaft twelve, a deadly pool of odorless methane and other heavy gases that had almost become his grave. He was gasping desperately for air now, his body instinctively sensing the presence of oxygen. His mind was slowly beginning to clear.

  Minutes later he was on his feet again, stumbling groggily in the darkness toward the northwest end of the shaft. Uphill. Toward safety. His motor skills were gradually improving. His breathing was becoming more regular. His memory was starting to return. . . .

  Califano stopped in his tracks, suddenly remembering where he was. And why. The lab. The men in miners’ hats. And . . .

  Where’s my gun?

  Shaking off the lingering effects of hypoxia, Califano quickly retrieved his aluminum flashlight from his pocket and clicked it on. With the help of the light, he went back and recovered his gun from the other end of the mine shaft, being careful this time to hold his breath.

  Having now recovered his weapon and most of his strength, Califano once again resumed his trek toward the Thurmond lab.

  He reached the entrance to the connecting corridor in shaft thirteen and stopped there briefly, half expecting to hear voices coming down the corridor. Hearing nothing, he ventured cautiously into the corridor, flashlight in one hand, pistol in the other, and walked for several minutes until he reached a dead end. This made no sense at all. Where had those men come from? Califano quickly scanned the stone walls with his flashlight and soon had his answer. At a height of about six feet was a neatly formed rectangular opening, approximately three feet across. A cross-ventilation shaft.

  Califano pulled himself up to the lip of the opening and, with great effort, managed to snake his body headfirst into the shaft. Using his flashlight, he peered down the opening and saw that it extended straight for a very long distance and eventually disappeared into darkness. He began carefully making his way along the shaft, propelling himself with his elbows and knees until he reached the other end. He paused there for a moment, bewildered by what he saw as he swept his tiny LED flashlight all around.

  Spread below him was a large rectangular room with unpainted cement walls and a high, arched ceiling. The room was crowded with control panels and scientific equipment. So much for the lab having been destroyed.

  After observing no human activity for more than a minute, Califano eased his body out of the ventilation duct and carefully dropped to the floor. He slowly approached the nearest workstation and inspected it in the beam of his flashlight. It was a large gray console with a flat U-shaped desk portion, a sloped skirt portion, and a tall vertical section beyond that. The skirt portion contained numerous knobs, push buttons, and toggle switches, which presumably would have been within reach of an operator seated at the desk. The vertical portion behind it was studded with dials and gauges of various shapes and sizes. Definitely late 1950s, Califano thought. He quickly skimmed some of the labels below the gauges: VOLT. 1, VOLT. 2, AMP. 1, AMP. 2, INLET PRESS., INLET TEMP., OUTLET PRESS., OUTLET TEMP. Not particularly informative.

  He noticed two large analog clocks, situated side by side in the middle of the vertical section, which were labeled ATOMICHRON 1 and ATOMICHRON 2. Why did that name sound familiar? Then he remembered that he’d read about the Atomichron a few years earlier. It was the world’s first commercial atomic clock, based on a cesium standard, and built in the late 1950s by the National Company. But why would they need two of them? He looked again at the two clocks mounted on the instrument panel and noticed that they were frozen at different times.

  Venturing farther into the room, he next came upon a tall gray cabinet on wheels, containing several racks of gauges and buttons. A metal plaque on the front of the cabinet read AUTOMICHRON NC-2001. Jesus, that thing should be in a museum, he thought.

  Continuing toward the center of the room, Califano eventually arrived at a large pool of water, about thirty feet across, with a sturdy steel railing circumscribing its entirety. In the middle of the pool was a square structure with no top, which appeared to be a chamber or vault of some sort, about four feet square. It was partially submerged in the pool and was suspended by cables from a steel catwalk that stretched from one side of the pool to the other, about six feet above the surface of the water. Califano observed a tangle of cables and wires, as well as a narrow metal ladder extending from the catwalk down into the partially submerged chamber.

  Without question, this was the heart of the lab, the focus of whatever was going on here.

  Califano spotted a nearby staircase that led to the elevated catwalk and quickly made his way to it. As he skirted the edge of the pool, he thought about similar pools he’d seen at other DOE laboratories, which were typically associated with “swimming pool”–type nuclear reactors. A pool this size indicated the need for a large heat sink—a way to absorb and dissipate a tremendous amount of energy. But he doubted this was a nuclear reactor.

  He reached the stairs and ascended quickly to the top. He paused there for a moment before venturing out onto the catwalk, testing it first with one foot and a portion of his weight. Once satisfied that the structure was sturdy, he eased himself out onto it and inched forward until he was standing directly above the vaultlike structure in the middle of the pool. He shined his light down into it. Definitely not a nuclear reactor.

  The dry chamber below him was entirely empty except for a tall instrument cabinet in the middle, which appeared identical to the one he’d seen earlier. The other Automichron.

  At the same moment, something at the far edge of the pool caught his eye. Something . . . floating in the water. What is that? He took two more steps along the catwalk and then peered down into the water with his flashlight. He immediately found himself gazing upon the bloated face of a dead man floating belly up in the pool, eyes wide open in terror, staring lifelessly toward the ceiling. The water around him was tinted red with blood. What the hell?

  Just then, he heard a delicate beep somewhere behind him. He unholstered his Glock and quickly swiveled in the direction of the noise, which had come from the opposite side of the room from where he’d entered. As he quickly scanned the far end of the room with his flashlight, he noticed more workstations, cabinets, wires and cables, a gray metal desk, and . . . what was that?

  Califano squinted to make out the lumpy object that was lying on the ground near one of the workstations. It took a moment before he realized what it was. A bloody body.

  “What the—”

  He continued scanning the scene and soon spotted another lifeless body, then another, and another. Four in total, not counting the one in the pool, all bloody and definitely dead.

  “Jesus,” he whispered, preparing to go investigate.

  Just then, he heard another beep. At the same moment, he saw a tiny flicker of red light across the room, just a few feet from the dead bodies. He trained his light on that spot and saw what appeared to be a metal suitcase on the ground, lid open, wires extending in all directions. He followed one pair of the wires with the flashlight until they terminated at a bundle of cylindrical objects about fifteen yards from the suitcase. His heart skipped a beat.

  Dynamite.

  Another beep. Califano quickly traced another pair of wires wit
h his flashlight and saw that they, too, led to a bundle of dynamite on the other side of the room. Judging from the number of other wires coming out of the suitcase, he concluded there must be at least a dozen such explosive charges throughout the space. Enough to incinerate the entire room. And him with it.

  Beep.

  Califano didn’t waste another second. He scampered back along the catwalk to the stairs, taking them two at a time to the bottom. He made a hard right and darted at full speed toward the other end of the room.

  Beep.

  Ten seconds later, he reached the end of the room where he’d originally entered. He looked up and saw the ventilation shaft above his head. He leaped up and curled his fingers around a narrow ridge at the bottom lip of the ductwork. It was difficult to get a grip, and his fingers began sliding off.

  Beep.

  Califano readjusted his grip and with all his remaining strength managed to slowly pull his body up. Several seconds later, his head and torso were in the duct.

  Beep.

  Come on! He wiggled his body into the rectangular shaft and scrambled on knees and elbows down the steel tunnel, desperately trying to clear the shaft before the explosives detonated. Ten feet . . . five feet . . . one foot. Suddenly, there was a deafening boom in the lab behind him, followed by a rapid sequence of several more explosions, each as powerful as the last. Califano felt a massive disruption of air and searing heat as his body launched violently out of the shaft and into the air like a human cannonball.

  That was the last thing he remembered.

  21

  MOSCOW, RUSSIA

  Vladamir Krupnov sat alone in the back of a black Mercedes sedan with today’s edition of Kommersantt—a Russian business newspaper—folded across his lap. “Misha, how much longer to the airport?” he asked his driver.

  “Another twenty or twenty-five minutes,” Misha replied.

  “Goddamn Moscow traffic,” Krupnov mumbled. He opened his newspaper and was just beginning a fresh article when his cell phone suddenly buzzed in the pocket of his blazer.