The shadow war

by Glen Scott Allen

  The shadow war

  Glen Scott Allen

  Glen Scott Allen

  The shadow war

  PROLOGUE

  WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS, OCTOBER 1675

  The man ran across the clearing as though the devil himself were at his heels. He stumbled and fell more than once, but each time picked himself up and struggled on, glancing furtively over his shoulder. Plunging into the tree line, he hid for a moment, crouching behind the wide trunk of a huge, gnarled oak tree. Panting heavily, he looked back toward the stockade walls of the encampment visible in the bright moonlight. And what he saw there was a scene out of hell.

  The flames had spread from the outside walls to the dozen buildings inside. A storm of sparks and smoke writhed over their peaked roofs, roiling and billowing as if feeding off the pandemonium of war whoops from the Indians and the wails of their victims. Rising highest was a wooden steeple topped by a large cross, which stood out against the glare of the fire that even now was reaching upward to engulf it. And over it all shone the sterling moonlight, casting grotesque shadows against the smoke, as though the struggling figures hidden from his view were dancing in ecstasy rather than agony, celebrating some perverse Witches' Sabbath.

  He silently murmured a few words of what might have been a prayer, then turned his face away and rose with effort, pushing his way farther into the tangle of thornbushes and vines. The moon was hidden for a moment by the thick clouds scudding by overhead, and in the sudden darkness his vest caught on the twigs of a small sapling. He was wearing only a nightshirt beneath the vest, barefoot and bareheaded, his long white hair flying loose; against his chest he clutched a loose leather wrapping, cradling it as he struggled with the twigs, protecting it as though it were a child. Finally he freed himself from the sapling and continued stumbling on, pushing aside the underbrush with his one free hand. He paused, listening for the rushing sound of a nearby river, then struck out with renewed vigor, certain of his direction.

  Moments after he left, two other figures entered the spot, moving more slowly, cautiously. As the first proceeded, he pushed aside the low branches with a small stone-and-wood hatchet, the other following in his footsteps. In the darkness their faces weren't visible, but against the background glare of the burning encampment, the profile of the first was distinct: his head was bald except for a narrow strip of hair in its center running from his forehead to the nape of his neck and rising straight up several inches above his skull. The figures both stopped, crouched, listened for a moment, then followed the sounds of breaking branches and crackling leaves a few dozen yards ahead.

  The man with long white hair reached a small clearing, or rather a meadow, a natural amphitheater surrounded by woods on all sides. The floor of the meadow was interrupted here and there by mounds of earth, each mound topped by stones piled in small pyramids. He stood on the edge of the clearing, uncertain whether to leave the relative cover of trees; then, with a final glance over his shoulder, he ran quickly to the nearest mound.

  He immediately fell to his knees at the small monument of stones and, carefully setting aside his leather bundle, began to dig frantically beneath them. He scooped out a small cave beneath the stones. When it was large enough, he shoved the wrapping and its contents into the recess, then began to throw and pack dirt over the opening.

  Suddenly he heard something behind him-a distant scream-and stopped his frenzied activity, looking back at the tree-lined boundary of the meadow. The moon was behind the clouds for the moment, and he saw nothing there. He turned back to his work, scraping more earth and then some leaves over the hole, then patted his handiwork one final time.

  He stood and began to run to the other side of the clearing; then, pausing, he looked again at the mound, at the woods, at the moon overhead-and instead turned and ran back the way he had come.

  He had worked his way only a short distance into the trees again when he saw the outline of the two men who had been following rise up before him. With the moonlight obscured he could make out no details of their forms, but the black shadow of the first, his arm raised high overhead, was clear; then suddenly a break in the clouds allowed moonlight to stream through the branches, and he saw the necklaces of teeth and beads around the man's neck, the simple leather loincloth, the hide moccasins… and the glint of stone in the small hatchet held ready to strike.

  Frozen, he raised his right arm in defense, or perhaps to block the moonlight streaming through the window in the clouds. His assailant came closer, and leaned over him, bringing his face fully into the moonlight. It was then the crouching man's expression turned from one of simple terror to utter astonishment, and his mouth gaped open in silent surprise.

  "Judas," he whispered.

  Then the second man came closer, and his face, too, became visible. Beneath the crude stripes of war paint and smudges of smoke, above him was a face that shone in the moonlight, a face with blue eyes. A face as white as his own.

  SOUTHEASTERN SIBERIA, OCTOBER 1968

  The man walked briskly down the hallway, glancing back over his shoulder occasionally. His footsteps made no sound, as he was wearing low rubber slippers pulled over his black shoes. He came to a door-oval-shaped and with a large metal wheel in the center. He stood for a moment, his hands on the wheel, looking back the way he'd come.

  The hallway's ceiling and walls were curved, and at irregular intervals the entire corridor bent first right then left at sharp angles, like some huge, painfully contorted snake. Parallel rows of pipes and conduits ran along the walls. Ceiling, walls, floor, pipes-all were painted a uniform pale gray. Harsh fluorescent lights in the ceiling made everything shine, as if slightly wet. A stenciled word over the door read (Officer Barracks).

  He turned the wheel and pulled the door open with some effort, stepped into the small room, then pulled the door closed behind him, locking it with a spin of the wheel. The room's walls and ceiling were curved, too, making it cramped. There was only enough room for two small metal cots, two upright metal wardrobes, and a small metal desk. He went to the cot next to the wardrobe marked (Leverotov) and sat down.

  He was wearing a military uniform: a sea green jacket over similarly colored tunic and pants, a blue beret, and a brown leather gun belt buckled around his waist. The only insignia on the entire uniform were brass pins, one on each collar: two crossed cannons, the symbol of the artillery.

  Reaching inside his tunic pocket, he extracted two objects: a green-and-blue pack of cigarettes and a small wooden box of matches. The cigarette pack read (Shipka) in white letters against a green background, with a picture of a square monument rising in exaggerated perspective into the sky. The number 1877 was printed on the side of the monument. The matchbox cover displayed a simple drawing: two raised hands, one with a hammer and the other with a sickle, and a miniature rocket arcing over them.

  He sat for a moment looking at the cigarettes and matches.

  The faint squeaking of footsteps in the hallway brought his head up, his eyes concentrating on the wheel of the door. The footsteps grew closer-then passed by.

  He opened the matchbox, dumped the matches on the cot, and removed the box's cover. He took a small pencil from his pocket and began carefully drawing something on the inside bottom of the box-lines, some in sharp wriggles, others straight, a tiny dot and rectangle, some other symbols. It was painstaking work, and soon he was sweating, even though the room was chill with recycled air.

  Finished, he turned to the matches. He began putting them back into the box, counting as he did so. When he reached thirty-three, he took another match and, inserting it into his mouth, bit off the blue-colored tip-and swallowed it. He put the beheaded match into the box; the matches inside now covered his tiny sketch.

  Tak
ing up the pencil again, he wrote 34 on the box cover, beneath the tiny rocket. There were six matches left on the cot. He shook a filterless cigarette from the pack and pulled it out with his lips, then lit one of the remaining matches on the side of the box, brought it to the cigarette. He inhaled deeply. Then he picked up the remaining five matches and brought the burning match against them. The matches flared, bringing his face into sharp relief, reflecting in his brown, grim eyes. He watched them burn, then blew them all out. He reached over and took a metal ashtray from the desk. Putting all six spent matches into the ashtray, he stubbed out the cigarette and placed it on top of the matches, then returned the ashtray to the desktop.

  He tucked the matchbox inside the nearly empty cigarette pack. He stood and crossed the narrow aisle to the cot opposite his: (ORLOV) read its wardrobe. He opened the thin metal door and, parting the front of a dress tunic identical to his draped on a hanger, slipped the package into the tunic's inside pocket. Then he carefully straightened the tunic and closed the locker's door.

  Returning to his own cot he sat down. He looked at his hands, which were trembling, and closed them into fists. The trembling stopped. He removed a small black-and-brown automatic pistol from the gun belt's holster. Embossed on the grip was a tiny five-pointed star. The pistol looked surprisingly light for something made of metal, something so lethal. He removed his beret and placed it carefully on the pillow of his cot. Then he raised the pistol to his temple and pulled the trigger.

  The sound, in such a confined space, was deafening.

  CHAPTER 1

  WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS, OCTOBER 200-

  The low, rolling, thickly wooded hills of western Massachusetts passed by the windows of Benjamin's car. The leaves were just beginning their transition to browns and golds and reds, and as Benjamin rounded another curve in the winding country road, his passage sent up a colorful, swirling wake that settled with a soft rustling behind him. The sky was a clear blue, the air crisp with a hint of the winter chill to come… All in all, a beautiful day for a leisurely drive through the country.

  But Benjamin wasn't feeling leisurely. And while the sights and sounds were those of a Thanksgiving television special, Benjamin's gut told him a Halloween thriller would be more appropriate.

  Until late afternoon the day before, Benjamin Wainwright had been a happy-if-obscure postdoctoral fellow at the Library of Congress, pursuing his research on Colonial Native Americans with the pure focus of a scholar who had found his little bit of heaven in the bowels of the most extensive library on earth, a modern-day Alexandria. He would have been perfectly content to be left alone for the next two years rooting among historical detritus that hadn't been important even when it was new, and now was important only because it was so very old.

  And then he'd received the phone call from Jeremy Fletcher.

  Benjamin hadn't heard from Jeremy for nearly ten years; not since they'd been undergraduates together at Harvard. They'd been occasional friends back then, but too different to become more than that: Benjamin the bookworm, Jeremy the computer whiz kid; Benjamin raised in a solidly middle-class family of scholars, Jeremy from the titled British upper crust. Even their physiques were a contrast: Benjamin was above-average height, with short, curly black hair, his body fit and solid, whereas Jeremy was short and thin, as though his body fed on itself to supply his brilliant, methodical intellect.

  Benjamin had always felt slightly intimidated by Jeremy's brilliance. But then, so did most people. Jeremy simply saw the world differently than other people did. For Jeremy, life wasn't random and haphazard; it was a complex network of interrelating causes and effects.

  "Take your favorite subject, history," Jeremy had said late one night as they sat on the steps of Widener Library, the neatly trimmed grass of the Harvard quad a checkerboard of dark trees and pools of light. "It's created by people, not some disembodied 'forces.' And people are, as the saying goes, creatures of habit."

  "That's an old theory, Jeremy," Benjamin had objected. "Or are you becoming a conspiracy nut?"

  "Oh, I'm not talking some drivel about who killed JFK," Jeremy replied. "I'm talking about the fact that people do things for the same sorts of reasons, century after century. There are decidedly patterns there, patterns made up of millions of individual acts, like dots in one of Seurat's pointillist paintings. The dots may not know the whole picture, but it's bloody well there, just the same. One merely has to find the proper perspective from which to see it."

  "And you're going to find that perspective buried in one of your computer programs?" Benjamin teased.

  "Perhaps," he'd said enigmatically. "Just perhaps."

  Benjamin hadn't seen history that way. To him, the past knew things the present had forgotten, and one didn't kill that wisdom by autopsying it. The true wonder of the past lay in the ineffable complexity of human minds. And the key to those minds was to be found in books.

  He remembered standing in front of his father's floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, inhaling the smell of leather and age, and feeling as though he were praying at an altar. Thus, when the opportunity for a postdoc at the Library of Congress had presented itself, it seemed to him those prayers had been answered.

  After college, Benjamin followed in his father's footsteps, taking a degree in Colonial history at Georgetown University; meanwhile, he'd heard that Jeremy had finished MIT and then taken a postdoc at the RAND Corporation, doing some sort of supersecret work for the government with computer modeling. And they hadn't communicated in all those years since.

  So when an intern at the Library had interrupted Benjamin-he'd been preparing a lecture he planned on calling "Savage Art: Civilization Confronts Chaos in the New World"-telling him there was a Jeremy Fletcher on his office phone, at first he couldn't believe it.

  Why would Jeremy call him, after all this time?

  After the usual shallow pleasantries of a friendship gone stale with the years, Benjamin had finally asked Jeremy if what he'd heard was true: Was he doing some sort of supersecret work for one of the "spook factories"?

  "Not exactly," Jeremy had replied cautiously. "Actually, I'm out here at the American Heritage Foundation."

  " The Foundation?" Benjamin had whistled appreciatively. "Even better. They're richer than the spooks."

  "Well that actually brings me to why I'm bothering you." There'd been an uncomfortable pause, then, "Benjamin, I'd like to share some of that wealth with you. I wonder… do you think you might be enticed into coming out here for a few days?"

  Benjamin had been stunned. Nothing he knew of either Jeremy's work or that of the American Heritage Foundation would seem to relate in any way to his own expertise. "Not that I don't appreciate it," he finally managed, "but what on earth could I do for you?"

  "Well, it's difficult to explain, but you see, some of my own research… well, it's gotten tangled up in that Indian Wars muddle you love so much."

  "Native Americans," Benjamin said reflexively, but really thinking about the curious, almost artificial breeziness of Jeremy's tone. "We colonials don't call them Indians anymore."

  "Yes, quite right. Anyway, I could use that musty encyclopedia you call a brain to help me sort it all out. It would only be for a few days, a week at most. But it would have to be now, Benjamin. Tomorrow, actually. Think you could make the slog out here to the wilds of western Massachusetts?"

  For a moment Benjamin had no idea what to say, but after a bit more hedging, Benjamin had allowed himself to be… seduced seemed like the right word. But not by Jeremy's promise of exorbitant reward; rather, it had been the mystery of the thing, the sheer eccentricity of Jeremy's offer.

  Of course Benjamin had heard of the American Heritage Foundation; it was one of the most prestigious and most secretive "think tanks" in the entire country. Young obscure scholars went into the Foundation-as it was known with a certain instinctual awe-and came out to appointments in the corridors of power that would otherwise have required decades of thankless service to obtain. And
while the occupants of those corridors were elected officials and therefore merely passing through, the overseers of the Foundation were answerable to no one-or at least not anyone so lowly as a mere voter.

  Ergo, any young academic would kill to gain entry into that world, and here Benjamin was being handed his opportunity on a silver platter.

  But why him? And why now?

  Thus had Benjamin's mind spun around the problem ever since he'd boarded a flight to Logan, rented a car, and begun his long journey across the length of Massachusetts, out to where the wealthy Boston Brahmins kept summer cottages the size of boarding schools and listened to classical music under the stars.

  He glanced at his briefcase sitting on the seat beside him. Inside it were a few reference books to the Colonial Indian Wars-general stuff, as Jeremy hadn't been specific about his "muddle"-and his father's notebooks. Whereas Benjamin's area was early Native Americans, his father had instead concentrated on what he called "non-Native Americans"-the Puritans. He'd spent his entire career tracing the Byzantine sects and schisms among America's spiritual founding fathers, and just when he was completing work on a book, he and Benjamin's mother had been killed in a car accident, leaving Benjamin a small inheritance, and the large collection of his father's notes, which he treasured as a sort of family heirloom. And, while he doubted those notes would prove useful to Jeremy's work, bringing them along made him feel as though his father were along for the ride in this unlikely adventure. They were a kind of comfort-even though the ache he felt when he thought about his parents, about their sudden, violent erasure from this world… that ache knew no comfort.

  Finally Benjamin found the exit, and thirty minutes later he sat at the end of a narrow, winding road, facing the Foundation's formidable entrance.