Siege of Stone

by Williamson, Chet

  THE SEARCHERS, BOOK THREE:

  SIEGE OF STONE

  Chet Williamson

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2012 / Chet Williamson

  Copy-edited by: David Dodd

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS PRODUCTS BY CHET WILLIAMSON

  Novels:

  Ash Wednesday

  Defenders of the Faith

  Dreamthorp

  Hunters

  Lowland Rider

  McKain's Dilemma

  Reign

  Second Chance

  Soulstorm

  The Searchers Book I: City of Iron

  The Searchers Book II: Empire of Dust

  Collections:

  Tales From the Crossroad

  Unabridged Audiobooks (as Author and Narrator):

  Ash Wednesday

  Lowland Rider

  Second Chance

  Soulstorm

  Unabridged Audiobooks (as Narrator):

  Blood: A Southern Fantasy

  Blood Lust (Preternaturals, Book One)

  Fabulous Harbors

  Gun in Cheek: A Study of "Alternative" Crime Fiction

  Nightjack

  On the Third Day

  Save My Soul (Preternaturals, Book Two)

  Son of Gun in Cheek

  The Light at the End

  The Seventh Secret

  The War Amongst the Angels

  Torment

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  To the McDonalds:

  T. Liam, Elizabeth,

  and Brendan Redmon (newest of the clan)

  O, beat away the busy meddling fiend

  That lays strong siege unto this wretch's soul . . .

  —SHAKESPEARE, Henry VI, Part II, II, iii, 21

  Blood shall drip from wood,

  and the stone shall utter its voice;

  The peoples shall be troubled,

  And the stars shall fall.

  —2 ESDRAS 5:5

  Chapter 1

  Joseph Stein looked into the gaunt, wizened face of the man. He had been dead a long time. The turnscrew that pierced the top of his skull was hung over a metal rod, and the rod was fitted into one of a row of vertical brackets attached to the paneled side of the case.

  Metal wires ran from the turnscrew down to the man's arms, holding them aloft in an attitude of mid-air crucifixion. The chest had been split open and the ribs folded back, exposing some of the internal organs. Those had been dried, and painted in various colors. The red heart was still connected to the main artery that snaked down from the neck.

  Joseph slowly drew closer, until his face was only an inch from the glass that separated the exhibit from the patrons of the Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Others might have turned away, but Joseph had seen far worse. Besides, he could appreciate the painstaking artistry with which the physician who had prepared this specimen had worked. That same kind of patience and attention to detail had earned Joseph the repute in which he was held in the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Unfortunately, it was that same reputation that had brought him to his current situation. He was hiding out in a safe house in Philadelphia, along with Tony Luciano and their team leader, Laika Harris, while Richard Skye was cozily tucked in back at Langley, probably trying to decide what new madness to unleash on them. Skye had interrupted their much needed R&R in San Francisco to send them to Philadelphia, supposedly to keep them closer to Langley, but also, Joseph suspected, to keep them from being in one place for too long, which only increased their odds of getting spotted.

  As far as everyone in the Company knew, except for Skye and a few above him, Joseph, Laika, and Tony were on individual missions in the Balkans and elsewhere in Asia. But in actuality they were performing black ops within the United States, in direct violation of the CIA charter, first in New York City, and then in the deserts of the high southwest.

  Skye had assured them that the creation of their group was the result of a direct presidential request. The President, however, didn't seem to have shared the news with any other government agency, if the FBI man who had insinuated himself into their party in Arizona had been any indication. He had treated them like dangerous fugitives and had wound up dead as a result. You didn't fire a gun at Tony Luciano if you wanted to stay alive.

  Even though it had been many weeks before, the three operatives still wondered when the dead federal agent's masters would send more of their dogs out on the hunt. Though they hadn't seen anyone suspicious in the two weeks they had been in Philadelphia, that didn't mean the feds weren't looking for them. After all, the ops had killed one of their agents, and they weren't too forgiving about things like that.

  Joseph tried to push the thought to the back of his mind, and concentrated on the exhibits. He and Laika and Tony had seen most of the tourist attractions in the city, including the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, Christ Church, Betsy Ross' house, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Tony had been disappointed that the statue of Sylvester Stallone as Rocky was no longer out front.

  Joseph had even talked Laika into going to the Poe house, but she had been disappointed to find it completely bare, since none of Poe's furniture had survived. Joseph applauded the Park Service's decision not to fill the rooms with period pieces. The empty chambers were, for him, far more evocative of Poe's haunting presence.

  He felt, as he walked through the low-ceilinged, whitewashed rooms, that he had somehow come home. It was Poe's stories that had enthralled him as a child, and led him into his lifelong interest in weird and supernatural literature and films. As he stood in the dirt-floored basement of Poe's house, he had found himself wondering if this place was what Poe had pictured as he wrote "The Black Cat," if those basement stairs were the ones down which the narrator's wife had tumbled, dead, or if that wall was the one behind which he had entombed both her and the cat. It was as close, Joseph thought, to looking through Poe's eyes as he could ever come.

  In a sense, he owed Poe his vocation as well as his avocation. Joseph's love of popular fiction had led him to the spy books and movies that had intrigued him as a teenager and eventually brought him to the CIA, the ideal place for his precise, logical, and encyclopedic mind.

  It was also an ideal place for a person fascinated by the macabre, as was the Mutter Museum. In retrospect, however, Joseph thought the museum was a bad choice for a place to forget what he had been through in the past few months. The first few rooms were innocuous enough, with a turn of the century doctor's office, and some circumspect displays of glass X-ray tubes and presidential artifacts, including Grover Cleveland's jaw tumor.

  However, the cases on the wide gallery and those in the large room below held the things for which the Mutter was notorious. Hundreds of human skulls were carefully labeled with the names of the subjects, their occupations, and causes of death.

  The Soap Woman, whose body, buried in chemical-rich soil, had turned completely to adipose tissue, looked up at Joseph. Her mouth was open in a s
ilent and eternal scream, as if shocked by the glass-cased display her remains had become, a momentary thrill for curiosity seekers.

  Jars filled with preservatives held the raddled heads and limbs of syphilis victims. Next to them were molds of other victims' faces, the decay of their flesh preserved perfectly in multihued wax, like 3-D color photographs.

  In the room at the bottom of the stairs, a massive dried colon reared up like a sandworm from Dune, and the shared livers of Barnum's Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng, sat in shadow in a pan. A number of wide metal cabinets held thousands of items that had been either accidentally swallowed or aspirated by human beings, and a well-worn book detailed the circumstances of every nail, tack, buttonhook, and shard of glass.

  Joseph spent twenty minutes studying the various invaders, and when he looked up again, he saw that he was alone in the museum. There had been only a few other people to begin with, and now they were gone. The solitude did not bother Joseph, even in the midst of so much evidence of human frailty. He knew that there were far greater things to fear in this world than the dead.

  The Prisoner, for one. Joseph and the other ops thought he had been responsible in one way or another for every bizarre occurrence that had taken place since Skye had assigned them to their current job of debunking supposedly paranormal phenomena.

  It had all started with a mass suicide that they had later found out was a mass assassination of a group of men, the last Knights Templar, assigned by the Roman Catholic Church to investigate acts possibly caused by a strange prisoner. And things became stranger when they found out that the church had apparently been keeping the Prisoner captive for centuries.

  The situation had shaken Joseph to the very roots of his skepticism. He had always gloried in his materialism, but now every bit of evidence, and his own experiences, pointed to an ageless prisoner, somehow bound and weakened by lead, who nevertheless had the power to communicate to others with his mind alone.

  If what they had seen was true, the Prisoner had spoken in dreams to a sculptor in Manhattan, to a fat and loathsome guru in Arizona, and to Joseph himself, cajoling, ordering, demanding his freedom. And now, at last, he had gotten it.

  Michael LaPierre, a billionaire and religious right demigod, had assumed the Prisoner was none other than the Antichrist himself. Joseph still didn't buy that story, but LaPierre figured he could stick a real feather in his holy cap by sending the "Antichrist" straight to the flames of hell.

  Unfortunately for LaPierre, it hadn't quite worked out that way. LaPierre had been the one who had gotten burned, along with the small army he had put together, and the rest of his followers. It had only strengthened the "Religious Right = Nut" equation that was hurting the Republican Party while strengthening the Democrats.

  But the worst thing that had resulted from LaPierre's arrogant coup attempt was that the Prisoner was no longer the captive of the church. He or she—or it—was free now, maybe still walking the American desert, or maybe cozying up to Saddam Hussein, for all Joseph knew. And that was a bad thing. No, that was the mother of all bad things, because the Prisoner had an incredible and frightening power, one in which Joseph had to believe, for he had seen its results.

  The Prisoner had the power to enter certain people's minds and use them. He could point them like guns at each other, making them kill or torture or sabotage or commit suicide or whatever else amused him. And from what Joseph had seen, amusement took an awful lot of blood. If the Prisoner wasn't the Antichrist, then at least he was Superprick, or Badass Supreme, with the potential to become Nasty Master of the Universe, now that he was free of his leaden prison.

  Still, several weeks had gone by, and the ops hadn't heard of any new wars or mass acts of violence. If the legends that the church had passed down were true, the Prisoner could take an entire town and turn it against itself. True, some people were immune to the Prisoner's commands, but not enough for comfort.

  Every morning, Joseph dreaded waking up, fearful that he would hear the news of an outbreak of mass violence for no conceivable reason, or receive a report from Skye that some dinky burg in Ohio or Missouri or West Virginia was being swept by a wave of murder-suicides. But nothing had happened, and the more time went by, the more apprehensive Joseph grew.

  Laika and Tony weren't nearly as jumpy as Joseph, but then, the damned thing hadn't touched them. It hadn't crawled inside their heads while they slept, pretending to be Jesus or some other near-perfect entity, begging with all its tenderhearted might for freedom so that it might live and love and bring all mankind to the truth.

  The truth of blood and death. The truth of mass destruction. That was the only truth that would satisfy it.

  Joseph closed the file drawer filled with things that foolish people had swallowed or breathed into their lungs, his mind fully on the Prisoner now. Forget it, he told himself. Forget everything that's happened so far. You're on R&R now, so just enjoy yourself in your little macabre museum. Now, what else is there to gawk at?

  That was when he saw the babies. There were dozens of them. Some were tiny skeletons braced upright, showing the huge skulls of hydrocephaly. There were larger ones, too, who had survived until the toddler stage, if indeed they had ever been able to toddle with those monstrous heads bearing them earthward. There were others in preservative, babies born with trunks instead of noses, or brains on the outside of their skulls, some with no head whatsoever, or with no limbs, or with flippers instead of arms.

  But what lanced through Joseph Stein was a specimen on a bottom shelf, an infant fixed eternally in a standing position it could never have known in life. Its dried skin was as brown as leather, and its eye sockets had been filled with blue glass eyes that looked disturbingly alive in the midst of that parchment-like flesh. It was looking toward the side of the case, away from him, as if denying him the grace of its gaze.

  It would not look at him, because he had killed it.

  Chapter 2

  No. No, that wasn't right. He hadn't killed any baby, and certainly not this poor child, who must have died a hundred years ago. He had shot that other baby, yes, had thought he had killed it, but it was already dead, starved to death, still held by its mother, who had come at Joseph with a knife in some wretched tenement back in New York.

  He had shot at her, in self-defense, and the bullet had passed through the baby and into the mother, killing her, sending the madwoman to wherever her child already was. But when Joseph had thought he had shot the baby, it had been the worst moment of his life. The feeling would never fully leave him, and now, crouching among these cases, filled with children who had never had a chance to live free of agony, the feeling came flooding back. He felt guilty, sick, and empty, and the thought occurred to him that maybe the Prisoner had been able to speak to him inside his head because he was evil, because he was a man who would shoot a child to protect himself.

  The Mutter Museum lost all its interest and novelty, and he stood and walked up the steps and through the exhibits, his eyes on the carpet to avoid the evidences of mortality.

  Outside on the street, the early autumn day had grown chilly, and he shivered and took several deep breaths of cool air, then started walking back toward the safe house. He had thought he might be able to clear his head of some of the things that were bothering him, all the questions and enigmas yet to be explained. But the questions weren't nearly as bad as the guilt that he had hoped to forget. It hung around his neck like a dead albatross, so viciously demanding that he didn't even notice the man following him until he had walked several blocks.

  The man was on the other side of the street, twenty yards behind Joseph. He was carrying a shopping bag for cover, but he couldn't hide the posture and attitude indigenous to feds. Despite the leather jacket and jeans, the man was a little too upright, alert in more than a street-smart way.

  Once he had made him, Joseph tried not to notice him anymore. The man didn't want just Joseph, he wanted all three of them, so he wouldn't try and pounce on his prey until
he reached its den. And then it could get very ugly.

  Three rogue CIA agents working inside the United States, agents who had capped an FBI man when he'd tried to arrest them in their illegal activities, agents who had been at the scene when Michael LaPierre had begun his unsuccessful war against the government. No, definitely not a scenario the ops wanted to get in the middle of.

  And Langley wouldn't want them there, either. Skye would let them twist in the wind. Rogues. Outlaws. Not pretty, but it happened, despite the best efforts of the agency.

  Hell, maybe he was just being paranoid. Maybe the guy was just an Al Gore-type wooden stiff who just happened to be walking in the same direction as Joseph.

  And maybe not. Paranoia could be your friend. It had saved a lot of lives over the years, including his own a couple of times. No reason to doubt it now.

  Joseph turned right at the corner, taking the man away from the safe house. The man followed about as innocently as a pit bull ripping open a cat. Joseph smiled to himself. He would take no more turns until he was ready to lose the man for good.

  A possibility presented itself after he had gone another few blocks. A covered alley ran down between two townhouses, and Joseph, not changing his pace, entered it. It could have been a dead end, but instead it cut across to the next street.

  He darted through and found himself on a street with a number of small shops. He quickly entered a coffee shop, sat near the back, where he could still see through the window, and watched as the man following him trotted by, glancing around as he ran. Joseph ordered a sandwich and coffee, and spent a half hour over his modest meal.

  The man was nowhere in sight when Joseph stepped back onto the street. He started walking away from the safe house. Several blocks later, when he felt sure no one was following him, he flagged a cab and had it drop him off seven blocks north and two west of the apartment, and walked the rest of the way back.