The Cold Smell of Sacred Stone

by George C. Chesbro

  “Maybe if I’d handled things a little differently at the end, if I hadn’t put that gun down where he could reach it, he wouldn’t have snapped the way he did.”

  “Hell, you were surrendering to him,” I said, feeling bitterness well up in me. “How could you have known what was going on in his head? If anyone should have picked up on what was about to happen, it was me.”

  “Come on, Mongo. It’s not your fault.”

  “You say.”

  “Lippitt says. If you can’t trust the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who can you trust? He says Garth would have died if he hadn’t been taken off the case he was working on and assigned to tag along with you.”

  “He may have been trying to make me feel better.”

  “No. Lippitt wouldn’t do that, Mongo. That old man loves the two of you like sons; he loves you enough, and knows you well enough, not to lie to you.”

  “There’s more to it, Veil,” I said distantly as I suddenly heard ghosts from the past whispering, laughing, in my ear. “Something … very bad happened to Garth and me a few years ago.”

  “During the time when you disappeared for more than a year?”

  I swallowed hard, nodded. “It was a bad thing, Veil; body breaking, mind bending.”

  “So I gathered from some snippets of conversation between you and Lippitt I picked up,” Veil said carefully. “I take it Lippitt was involved.”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “Okay,” Veil said easily.

  And then, naturally, I began to talk about it. It was time. “It was an act of utter madness called Project Valhalla,” I murmured.

  Under the vacant, unseeing eyes of a dead ninja, I proceeded to tell Veil about Siegmund Loge, a Nobel-winning scientist, and his plan to save the human race, essentially by destroying it and turning our species into … something else. This quintessentially mad genius had constructed a mathematical model, the Triage Parabola, which had convinced him that humankind’s self-destruction, within a time parameter of twenty to three hundred years, was inevitable. We were doomed, because of a propensity to murderous tribalism and religious nonsense that Loge believed was embedded in our genes, to join the thousands of other species that had become extinct over the aeons since life had emerged on earth. Humankind was just one more evolutionary dead end.

  Loge’s solution, his plan to hoodwink Mother Nature, was to loose an epidemic that would affect every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth, playing havoc with the genetic code in human DNA and causing every member of our species to rapidly devolve to something resembling the primitive creatures our prehistoric forebears had been, in the hope—Loge’s word—that we could, over a few hundred thousand years, once again evolve into humans, but without the crippling psychological, intellectual, and moral cracks in the human psyche he considered fatal. There would certainly be no more large-scale wars, holy or unholy, since all the guns, tanks, and planes strewn over the planet would be nothing more than objects of curiosity to the creatures we would become, and it would be all we could do to learn once again, through the glacial crawl of millennia, how to manipulate sticks and stones.

  The Valhalla Project.

  He was a clever one, that Siegmund Loge, with a most curious fantasy. The problem was that he had the intellectual and technological capacity to make the nightmare a reality—if only he could find a way to iron out a few minor kinks that had developed along the way in his chemical formulations.

  Alas, the Frederickson brothers, with their decidedly mixed bag of genes, would turn out to be just what the doctor ordered, as it were.

  To lay the groundwork for this ultimate experiment in social engineering, Loge had masterfully exploited precisely those pockets of infection in the human spirit he deemed to be the genetically based time bombs that would eventually kill us all if not scraped out. Incredibly, there were individuals and groups all over the world who were helping him, in the remarkably naive—but predictable—belief that whatever it was he was up to would serve to make their particular group or religious faith supreme on earth. Loge had been not only a scientific genius, but a genius at collecting the unquestioning loyalty and aid of true believers all over the world. And it made no difference at all that each group of true believers believed something different about him. Indeed, the seemingly infinite capacity for individuals and groups to be religiously and politically manipulated was a point Loge went to great pains—both literally and figuratively, for both him and us—to make to Garth and me. Loge controlled the fanatical loyalty of dozens of religious communes circling the planet. Each commune was insulated from the others, and each had a radically different theology. The one belief they shared in common was that Siegmund Loge, whom they called Father, was the Messiah, or God incarnate.

  What they didn’t know was that they were to form the human seedbeds he would use initially to grow and then to spread the genetic holocaust he’d planned.

  But the persistent kinks remained, and he could not infect his commune members, his Children of Father, until he had worked out a proper formulation for the serum that was to be the principal agent of the epidemic.

  Garth and I had ended up with our systems filled with the stuff as the result of an attempt to kill us. Normally, an organism—animal or human—injected with the imperfect serum died a quick and horrible death as its cells, their genetic code hopelessly short-circuited and confused, almost literally “exploded,” resulting in a mass of melted flesh, feathers, scales, claws, fangs …

  But, for some reason, the serum “took” in Garth and me, and a slow, controlled process of devolution began taking place in our bodies. It was just what Loge had been looking to achieve, and thus we became human Petrie dishes, the “keys to Valhalla” Loge could use to solve his problems and launch his holocaust—if we could be caught, dissected, examined. We weren’t too eager to be dissected, but neither were we too enthusiastic about completing the transformation into whatever beasts we were slowly but inexorably changing into. He needed us to destroy the world, and we needed the knowledge in his head—or thought we did—to keep from being destroyed. For almost a year, until it came to a cataclysmic end in fire and ice in the Arctic, the Valhalla affair had threatened forever to alter not only the Fredericksons, but our entire species.

  It had been a real bummer—not least because the basic premise Loge had gleaned from his Triage Parabola and acted upon, that we were inevitably doomed to extinction within a relatively brief time, remained unrefuted. I was convinced that Garth, who had suffered the most, had never fully recovered from the horrors of Valhalla, and the thought persisted that Valhalla—perhaps residual effects from the serum combined with the poison he had ingested—could very well have something to do with his present condition.

  “Jesus Christ,” Veil said in a hollow voice when I finished.

  “Aside from the people who were involved, you’re the first person who knows anything about this. Lippitt feels there are serious national security considerations, and I agree with him. It’s hard to know how people would react.”

  “It won’t go beyond me.”

  “You see my point? Garth remained under a great deal of stress, and the signs that he was ready to come apart were there all the time we were tracking you. I should have seen them, and then done something about it.”

  “Like what? Take time off? Madison and his men, not to mention this Henry Kitten, were breathing as hard on your ass as they were on mine—harder, since they usually knew where to find you. Kitten had threatened to kill Garth if you stopped looking for me, remember?”

  My response was to shrug, and then resume poling away dirt in the deepening trench in which I stood.

  “Run the present situation by me again, Mongo,” Veil said quietly. “That is, if it doesn’t bother you to talk about it. What was Garth poisoned with?”

  “A chemical called nitrophenylpentadienal, also known as NPPD or ‘spy dust,’” I replied in a flat voice. “Because it bonds very s
trongly to flesh and clothing, and can be seen under ultraviolet light, it’s used by a lot of intelligence services to track people. Most information on the stuff is classified, and they’re not even sure what the long-term effects may be for people whose flesh has been exposed to it. It sure as hell isn’t meant to be eaten.

  “Garth was working undercover on an industrial espionage case in a place called Prolix Pharmaceuticals; it’s one of a handful of plants in the United States authorized by the government to manufacture NPPD and conduct classified research projects. The D.I.A. suspected a security leak at Prolix, and Lippitt arranged with the NYPD for Garth to be put on the case. There must have been a leak at the NYPD, or Garth made a mistake, because the spy or spies at Prolix got on to him. They began poisoning him with NPPD.”

  “How?”

  “Lippitt thinks it was done slowly, over an extended period of time. Maybe they dosed his coffee a few times, or sprinkled small amounts on his food.”

  “Do you suppose whoever did it to him knew what the final effects would be?”

  “There’s no way of knowing that until they catch the guys. Garth may strongly suspect who did it to him, but we won’t know unless—until—he comes around.

  “Anyway, I’d just begun pondering the problem of where you’d disappeared to. As you know, Madison sent his men to find out what you might have told me over the years, and then burn me to death. When they succeeded in burning out a whole floor of my apartment and killing five people, that made it a case of arson and murder, and Garth was assigned to tag along with me to try to find you, since you were considered a material witness. The transfer put a stop to the slow poisoning, but he’d already absorbed a lot of shit into his system—his brain. You saw him snap; he killed Madison, and tried to kill you, and then sank into the catatonic trance he’s in now.”

  “What’s the prognosis?”

  “There is no prognosis—not yet. Nobody’s ever been poisoned with NPPD before, so Garth’s the test case. Since there is no standard treatment, everything now is a wait-and-see show.”

  Veil shook his head, then reached down, gripped my shoulder, and pulled me out of the trench. “That’s deep enough, Mongo. Let’s put him under.”

  Veil grabbed hold of one of the corpse’s splayed arms. I took hold of the other, and we dragged Henry Kitten down off the mound of junk, into the shallow grave. Together, we poled and kicked dirt over the body, then piled up refuse over the site.

  “I’m ready for my Scotch,” I said when we had finished.

  Our clothes and bodies reeked of death and garbage. Fortunately, because Veil and I often worked out together in his loft, I kept a spare set of sweats there. I stripped off my clothes and threw them away; then, while Veil showered, I soaked in a hot bath, taking care to keep my bandage dry. Afterward, I toweled off, dressed in my clean sweats, and joined Veil at the kitchen table, where he had a tumbler of Scotch over ice waiting for me.

  Veil said, “Since you’ve quit teaching, I assume you’ll be spending as much time with Garth as possible?”

  I sipped at my drink, nodded. “Yeah. The hospital’s a little more than an hour’s drive from lower Manhattan, depending on the traffic.”

  “Oh, I know where it is, all right,” Veil said softly. “I spent time there, as a kid. Didn’t you find that out?”

  “I wasn’t sure it was a subject you’d appreciate me bringing up.”

  “Thanks, but it doesn’t bother me to talk about it. The staff in the children’s division saved my life and mind in a dozen different ways.”

  “I could commute from Garth’s apartment, but I don’t want to. Lippitt arranged for me to get a small apartment in a staff dorm they’ve got there, and he gave me keys and a pass that will get me into the clinic any time I want; I intend to take full advantage of the privileges. I want to be at Garth’s side until this thing is resolved … one way or another. Until they tell me Garth is going to stay a vegetable, I want to stick close in case he needs me.”

  Veil nodded, then studied me as he sipped the tea he had brewed for himself. “Any other plans at all?” he asked. “Will you do any work? What about your P.I. practice?”

  “Shut down, at least for now. I don’t have any cases pending, and anything that comes along I’ll refer to some of my colleagues. I’ve got enough money put away so that I don’t have to do anything if I don’t want to, at least for a while. I’ve been giving some thought to working at the Children’s Hospital there. There’s a whole separate facility, which they didn’t have when you were there.”

  “Teaching?”

  “Yeah. The school’s right there in the hospital. I’m not certified for teaching emotionally disturbed children, but you don’t need certification to substitute, and I’ve been told they have a hell of a time getting substitutes. If they want me, they’ve got me.”

  “You’d be great teaching those kids, Mongo,” Veil said, his voice low and serious. “Forget certification; with disturbed kids, it’s the singer, not the song. You’ve got a great voice.”

  “Thanks. We’ll see.”

  Veil smiled thinly. “Then again, teaching at Rockland Children’s Psychiatric Center won’t exactly be like teaching at the university, Mongo.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “You don’t get admitted into RCPC unless you’re either homicidal or suicidal—sometimes both, which was my case. It’s bottom-line work. You’ll be dealing with some very sick puppies there—and not a few of them will be dangerous.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “I think it’s a great idea for you to teach there while you’re looking after Garth—but I want you to know what you’re getting into.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “What about Prolix, Mongo?”

  “What about it?”

  “Who’s continuing that investigation—the D.I.A. or the police?”

  “I really don’t know. I didn’t think to ask Lippitt, and I’m not sure the NYPD would welcome inquiries from me.”

  “I thought your problems with the city cops had all been smoothed over.”

  “Maybe,” I said with a shrug. “Maybe not.”

  Veil was silent for some time, sipping his tea. Finally he leaned back in his chair, ran both hands back through his long, yellow hair, fixed me with his blue eyes. “My relationship with the NYPD is about the same as it’s always been—a lot of cops dislike me intensely, but not all. I may be able to find out a few things, if you want me to. I can do it, and still keep a low profile. It’s up to you.”

  “Veil, right now I’m not thinking about anything but seeing that Garth gets better. Sure, I’d appreciate any information you can give me—but not if it’s going to get you into any trouble.”

  Veil nodded slightly.

  “I’ve got to go,” I continued, draining off the Scotch and getting to my feet.

  “Stay the night, Mongo. You came close to getting killed earlier, and you’ve got a hell of a nasty cut on your forehead. It’s not a good idea for you to drive all the way up to Rockland, which is where I assume you’re going.”

  “Yeah. This is Garth’s first night in the clinic, and I want to be with him when he wakes up in the morning. Thanks for the invitation.”

  “From what you tell me, Mongo, he won’t know whether you’re there or not.”

  “Nobody seems to be certain what Garth knows or doesn’t know, what he sees or doesn’t see. Remember; his EEG is almost normal. I want to be there, Veil.”

  Veil nodded again. “I understand. I still think you should have a plastic surgeon look at that cut as soon as possible.”

  “I’ll stick with what I’ve got. Thanks for the sewing job.”

  “Thanks for the rescue job.”

  I wrote down my new address and phone number for Veil, and left. As I drove off, I glanced off to my right, into the dark alley where the Archangel affair had ended at last. For everyone but Garth.

  3.

  The Rockland Psychiatric Cente
r complex covered hundreds of acres, and was virtually a city unto itself, with its own locksmith shop, fire and police departments; there was a summer camp in the woods beside a large reservoir, cornfields—now leased to local farmers—where patients had once been encouraged to tend crops, an outdoor swimming pool, small parks nestled among a myriad of tall, ivy-covered stone buildings which were, for the most part, designated by numbers. In many ways, RPC reminded me of an Ivy League college campus.

  Many of the buildings were now unused; years before, with the best of intentions, the state had decided that many of its mentally ill but otherwise harmless patients would be better served by so-called community support services, and these patients had been released by the thousands from state hospitals. The problem was that there had been no adequate community support services, and the results of this decision could be seen in the surge of numbers of homeless, helpless men and women living on the streets of New York, and many other cities. In addition, many of the criminally insane at RPC had been transferred to various other institutions throughout the state. Consequently, a number of the buildings with bars on the windows were empty, although a few had been converted to staff residences and recreational facilities.

  The Defense Intelligence Agency clinic was housed on the upper floors of Building 26, and that was where I headed at seven o’clock the next morning, walking the short distance from Building 18, where I had been assigned an apartment. An armed guard who had not been on duty the previous afternoon sat in a kiosk discreetly set back behind a row of trees, near the entrance to Building 26. The guard, who had a harelip only partially hidden beneath a bushy handlebar mustache, frowned when I handed him the plastic-shrouded, beige-colored identity card with my picture on it. He turned it over a few times in his fingers, as though he could not believe it wasn’t counterfeit, then telephoned somebody. He recited my badge number, said something behind his hand which I couldn’t hear, then listened for a few moments. Finally he hung up, handed me back the pass, and waved me on. I used the same pass card to open the magnetic lock on the entrance door, then clipped the card to my shirt pocket and took the key-operated elevator to the fourteenth floor. Two orderlies pushing a racked cart loaded with insulated food trays gave me a strange look as I stepped out of the elevator into a corridor, but they passed by and I was not challenged.