Fatal Tide

by Lis Wiehl

  “The meeting is in thirty minutes, upstairs,” Allison said. “Let me know if you need anything.”

  He saw a young man approaching down an aisle between a row of workstations and recognized the younger Guryakin from his school photograph. He was a handsome young man with long black hair parted in the middle and brushed back over his ears, and he wore a bow tie as he had in his St. Adrian’s ID photo, apparently unaware of how affected it made him. He walked with a swagger, accompanied by a young and attractive secretary.

  Quinn tapped on the app that turned his phone into a digital voice recorder and then slipped the phone into his shirt pocket with the microphone facing out.

  “Dr. McKellen,” the younger man said, offering his hand. “Andrei Guryakin. I wanted to say hello before the meeting. How are you finding everything?”

  “First-rate,” Quinn said. “Allison has been getting me up to speed, but it will be good to meet the others personally. To hear what people are working on.”

  “I read your work on Purkinje cells,” Guryakin said, moving away. “Very interesting. And promising.”

  “I’m familiar with your father’s work,” Quinn said. The younger man stopped and turned. “Or I should say, his reputation.”

  Quinn wondered if he’d overplayed his hand, but he needed to make something happen. Time was running out, in more ways than one.

  “Are you?” Guryakin said. “Which reputation would that be?”

  “As a research chemist,” Quinn said. “Does he have another?”

  “He was once ranked as a chess player,” Andrei Guryakin said. “He beat Boris Spassky, but that was after Bobby Fischer destroyed Spassky’s will to win. I was seventeen before I could beat my father regularly.”

  “We should have a game,” Quinn said.

  “We could do that,” Guryakin said. “Though I like to play for stakes. It’s the only thing that makes it interesting anymore. How much are you willing to risk?”

  What Quinn wanted to say was that you can’t bluff someone who has nothing to lose.

  “Loser buys the winner dinner,” he said to sound friendly, though they both understood that the game had already begun, and it was anything but friendly.

  “Good,” Guryakin said, a cocky smirk on his face. “Until then. See you at the meeting.”

  16.

  December 22

  12:50 p.m. EST

  “Gevaudan was easy,” Tommy’s Aunt Ruth said, fifteen minutes later. “There’s more, but first things first.”

  She’d volunteered to pitch in as a research librarian and help Tommy gather information. They were in the kitchen, enjoying lunch. Tommy and Reese were having truffle oil grilled cheese sandwiches, one of Tommy’s “bachelor specials.” Ruth and Dani had salads. A tray of blueberry muffins Tommy had spent the morning whipping up were cooling on the stovetop.

  “The Beast of Gevaudan,” Ruth said, clicking on a link that brought up a map of France on Tommy’s flat-screen computer monitor. “Named after the region in the Margeride Mountains in the south of France.”

  “Or as I like to say, south France.” Tommy said. “Why do people always add the of ?”

  His aunt gave him the same look she used to give him when he was a child making too much noise in the library. Reese laughed.

  “Never mind,” Tommy said.

  “As I was saying.” Ruth cleared her throat. “The stories tell of an unidentified animal, said to resemble a man or a wolf or a panther or a bear or some combination, thought to have killed as many as 113 people in the 1760s. Ninety-eight of those victims were partially or entirely eaten. There were numerous accounts by eyewitnesses. The first documented victim was a fourteen-year-old girl named Jeanne Boulet who was attacked in 1764 near Langogne. King Louis XV sent a pair of royal huntsmen to hunt the beast with bloodhounds. Did you hear that, Otto? You may be useful once again. Apparently these things have a foul odor.”

  Tommy recalled the night when Otto had seemed to react to a scent. He’d assumed it was the wolves in the nearby sanctuary; perhaps not.

  Ruth continued her story. “The first two huntsmen didn’t get the job done, so the king sent his top man, a fellow named François Antoine. He tracked and killed a massive gray wolf that seemed to be stalking the inhabitants of a nearby abbey. They thought that did the trick, but a few dozen more deaths followed. Then a local man named Jean Chastel killed a second wolf—but only after reading the Bible and praying for assistance. The second beast, according to the best information available, was stalking him but was unable to attack him while he was in the middle of prayer. When they cut open that animal’s stomach, they supposedly found human remains.”

  “According to whom?” Dani asked.

  “The most reliable account is an 1814 history by a French author who collected newspaper stories and interviewed a few of the eyewitnesses, who would probably have been quite old at the time they were interviewed,” Ruth said. “There’ve been any number of fictitious uses of the story, mostly in werewolf movies. The History Channel did a piece called The Real Wolfman. Do you want me to see if I can find it on YouTube?”

  “If you can,” Tommy said. “It might be interesting. Maybe later.”

  “The best scientific explanation,” Ruth said, turning to Dani, “is that the beast in question was a mesonychid. Sort of a carnivorous hooved bear. They know mesonychids were the dominant predator in North America and Asia in the Pliocene and Eocene eras.”

  She clicked on a screen of multiple images, ancient etchings and engravings depicting an animal that resembled a wolf or a bear, but with a much longer neck.

  “Which was when?” Tommy asked.

  “Sixty-five to thirty-three million years ago,” Reese said, reaching for another half a sandwich from the plate in the middle of the table. “Science is my best subject.”

  “They think these things might have survived?” Dani asked.

  “They thought the coelacanth was extinct until a fisherman caught one in the deep waters off the east coast of South Africa in 1938,” Ruth said. “The scientific community calls them Lazarus taxon. A species mistakenly thought extinct. The Margeride Mountains are riddled with caves, and even today they’re still discovering new species that survive in caves. Though nothing this big.”

  “The things in the woods absorb light,” Tommy said. “A carnivore living in caves might do that as a method of camouflage.”

  “How far apart are the Margeride Mountains and the cave of Lascaux?” Dani asked.

  “You’re thinking the same thing I thought,” Ruth said. “Not far at all.” She turned to Reese, who didn’t seem to get the reference. “The oldest, most elaborate cave paintings in the world were found in Lascaux, France. Deep, deep underground, painted a little over seventeen thousand years ago. Two thousand images, with over nine hundred depictions of animals, and only six hundred of them have been identified. There were horses and bison and animals that were easily recognized. And then there’s this one.”

  She clicked on an enlargement of one of the pictographs, a sepia-colored line drawing of the same animal they’d seen in the etchings and engravings.

  “So these things are at least seventeen thousand years old?” Tommy said.

  “They appear to be,” Ruth said. “But I kept thinking about paintings. So I kept looking and I came across an image you might recognize.”

  A painting appeared on the screen, one Tommy and Dani had made themselves intimately acquainted with.

  “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” Tommy said.

  “Hieronymus Bosch,” Ruth said.

  “Also known as The Millennium,” Dani said.

  “That’s the painting Dr. Villanegre brought to the school,” Reese said. “The one that zillionaire German alumnus owns.”

  For a moment Ruth let them rediscover the mysterious Dutch painter Bosch, whose acclaimed masterpiece depicted a bizarre landscape of deformed animals, monstrous hybrids and chimeras, lascivious couples engaged in sin, and in the frig
htening right-hand panel, a depiction of hell so unique and vivid that one suspected the painter had some kind of insider’s information.

  “Now watch,” Ruth said. She clicked to enlarge a section from the “hellscape,” then zoomed in to enlarge a single image, that of a painter’s palette; spread-eagled on the palette was a knight of the Crusades, a large red cross on his breastplate, encircled and devoured by a pack of what looked like wolves. She enlarged the image again to show that the wolves were not wolves but had long, almost prehensile-looking tails. Ruth called up an engraving of the Beast of Gevaudan for comparison. They were identical.

  “So the things that attacked Reese on the way to the airport,” Dani said, after they’d all taken a moment to study the images, “are the same things in the painting. The same things that are in the woods at night. The werewolf/bigfoot/mesonychid that killed 113 people in France.”

  “B-O-Gs,” Tommy said. “Beasts of Gevaudan. Bogies. Bogiemen. Whatever they are, they’re real.”

  “What do you make of the fact that when I tried to examine the body of one of those things, I found oil paint instead of blood?” Reese asked.

  “Well,” Tommy thought, trying not to reach the conclusion he found impossible to avoid, “I suppose it might mean that those things in the painting are coming to life. Hell on earth. And not metaphorically.”

  17.

  December 22

  2:23 p.m. EST

  “I want to go back in the tank,” Reese said.

  “Why don’t you get changed and we’ll meet you down there?” Tommy said.

  “Right. I’ll just get changed and meet you down there,” Reese said.

  At last Tommy and Dani were alone.

  “He’s a little nervous,” Dani said.

  “He’ll be okay. I have something I want to show you,” Tommy said. “But first—would you like a blueberry muffin?”

  “Not particularly.”

  Tommy frowned. She’d told him that homemade blueberry muffins were one of her favorite comfort foods. He was sure of that. Or was he remembering wrong? Whether or not she liked blueberry muffins wasn’t that big a deal, really, but the diamond engagement ring he’d hidden inside one of them for her to find … that was important.

  He took that special muffin from the tray, set it on a plate in front of her, and smiled. “Still warm from the oven.”

  She shook her head. “No thanks. Just ate. What did you want to show me?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want a muffin?”

  “I’m sure I don’t want a muffin.”

  “Well … it’s right here when you want it,” he said, deciding to stop pushing and let her be surprised.

  “We should go downstairs,” she said. “I don’t want to leave him alone down there.”

  “He’s fine,” Tommy said. “He doesn’t need us hovering over his shoulder twenty-four hours a day.”

  He was thinking of all the parents who would shout out from the sidelines during youth soccer games in the winter league he ran at the sports center. They meant well, he understood, but for the kids it was like trying to listen to thirty coaches instead of one, and more to the point, they weren’t given the time and space to learn from their mistakes.

  “I’m not talking about ‘hovering,’” Dani said. “I just think we need to be hands-on. I don’t think you understand how important this is to him. His brother is the last member of his family. He needs to know we’re going to be there for him.”

  “We will be,” Tommy said. “He knows the door is open for him.”

  “What was it you wanted to show me?” Dani asked.

  “Take a look at this.” Glad to change the subject, he opened a file on his computer. “I was overflying St. Adrian’s this morning at about three thousand feet. Though if anybody asks, it was four hundred feet because that’s the maximum altitude for private drones according to the FAA.”

  He ran the video. The screen showed a pair of limousines passing through the school gates and up the drive, the long black vehicles moving slowly through the leafless winter trees, stopping short of the portico in front of the administration building where the path forward was blocked by a parked vehicle. Two men in black coats got out of the first limo. One man in a fur-trimmed overcoat got out of the second. The three men met behind the first limousine and greeted each other.

  Tommy froze the video and enlarged the image. The definition was incredible, the faces of two men clearly visible. The third man had his back to the UAV mounted camera.

  “The school is closed,” Dani said. “Why are limousines arriving?”

  “I don’t know,” Tommy said. “But I followed the cars. That’s Honors House where they’re unloading their suitcases. These guys are staying for a while. I think we should find out who they are.”

  “How would we do that?”

  “We can’t,” Tommy said. “But we know someone who probably can.”

  “Oh.” Dani nodded. Tommy meant Ed Stanley. He was a fishing buddy of Dani’s grandfather Howard, who’d retired to Montana to be closer to the trout streams. Ed Stanley was also a retired CIA officer who’d worked in Moscow. They’d reached out to him earlier when they’d been looking for information on the Russian orphanage where Amos Kasden, born Alex Kalenninov, had been placed after killing his abusive father. Ed had used his CIA sources to help.

  Tommy had another question he wanted to ask Stanley—did he know Amos Kasden had an identical twin? And if he did, had it just slipped his mind when he failed to mention it?

  “Ed Stanley is not going to help us snoop around St. Adrian’s,” Dani said, “and go on thinking we’re just a couple of local law enforcement officers. He’s going to want to know the full story.”

  “Maybe it’s time we told him,” Tommy said. “We may not have the resources we need to do everything ourselves.”

  “The Curatoriat—”

  “Needs to be informed,” he agreed. “It’s time to bring them in. But I doubt anybody has the facial recognition programs the CIA has. Or, frankly, the firepower, if it comes to that. If something is really happening in two days, we need to go down every alley we can. Even if it means widening our circle …”

  “And risk being discredited and ignored as religious crackpots who see satanic conspiracies where there aren’t any,” Dani said. “Which is probably what the devil is counting on. Which would leave us dead in the water.”

  She pointed at the screen. “What was that?”

  “That’s just the image you get after the parachute deploys,” Tommy said. “You hit auto-return and the drone flies back to the launch coordinates, cuts the engines, and drops back into the yard.”

  “No, before that. Back it up,” Dani said.

  “Back it up?”

  “The video,” she said. “Rewind it. Or whatever you call it.”

  “To the beginning?”

  “Here—let me,” she said, reaching to take the mouse from Tommy. She placed the cursor on top of the right-facing arrow that was slowly crawling across the transport bar and backed it up a quarter of an inch. Tommy saw the ground below as the drone approached his house, and then a blinking red parachute icon in the corner. Dani clicked on the pause button to freeze the image.

  “Right there!” she said.

  “Where?”

  “In your pond,” she said. “What’s that?”

  “May I?” Tommy said, taking the mouse back from her. He clicked it once to center the image, then clicked on a magnifying glass icon in the lower right to move in closer, and closer, and closer.

  “Well,” he said. “Speaking of dead in the water … I could be wrong, but it appears to be a body.”

  18.

  December 22

  3:41 p.m. EST

  Detective Phillip Casey arrived in his own car, alone, as Dani had requested. She met him in the courtyard, with Tommy by her side. Casey was wearing old-fashioned black rubber galoshes, unzipped. His tweed overcoat was frayed at the collar, and his brown leather glov
es were coming unstitched at the fingertips.

  “Should we go inside? Talk about whatever it is you want to talk about?” he said, gesturing toward the kitchen.

  “Not right away,” Dani said. “We have something to show you first. And after you see what we have to show you, we’d like to have a conversation before you call anybody.”

  They took him out to the pond and showed him the body. It was floating facedown or, rather, was frozen in the ice in a facedown position. It appeared to be a male, but even that was difficult to determine. The ice was no more than half an inch thick and still slushy near the shore, at a time of year when the cycles of hot and cold, and cold nights and warmer sunny afternoons, prevented the pond from freezing completely.

  At the edge of the pond, Casey looked from the pond to the house and back to gauge the distance, taking his gloves off and shoving them into his coat pockets before he spoke.

  “When did you find this?”

  “Right before I called you,” Dani said.

  Casey looked at the house again. “You both did?”

  Dani nodded.

  “How’s that?” Casey asked. “I only see one set of footprints in the snow, and they’re too big to be yours.”

  “I was looking on the security cameras.”

  “You saw it happen?” Casey asked.

  “No,” Dani corrected him. “I was watching the video feed and noticed the body.”

  “Right before you called me?”

  Dani nodded.

  “So you have no idea how it got there?” Casey asked. “Not how and not when?”

  “Those are my footprints. I was out here last night, late,” Tommy said. “I didn’t see it then, though, to be honest, I don’t remember looking.”

  “What time were you out here?”

  “One a.m. or so, I think. We can look on the security footage if you want. I’ve got a seventy-two-hour buffer before it starts recording over itself.”

  “We should do that,” Casey said. “First things first.” As he dug his cell phone out of his coat pocket, Dani touched him on the arm.