Book of Souls wp-2

by Glenn Cooper

  “Then leave us alone for a minute. You don’t have to hear it, but you’ve got to grant a dying man’s wish.”

  “Christ, Henry, that’s all I’ve been doing for the past two weeks!”

  “Your burden is coming to an end. Now get out of here.” The two men gave each other brotherly smiles.

  A couple of minutes later, Kenyon came back in with a tray of coffee mugs. He looked at both men and clucked. “I’m not asking, and you’re not telling. I don’t want you messing up my nice, organized relationship with God. I want the Lord to surprise me. The natural way.”

  “Suit yourself, Alf,” Spence said. “I’ll take one of those coffees. I’m all done now. Will’s given me a great gift. I can die in peace.”

  The narcotics were kicking in, and Will felt himself wanting to sleep. “I need to get online.”

  “There’s a wireless network,” Spence said. “It’s called HenryNet.”

  Will clicked on it. “It’s looking for a password.”

  “Can you guess it?” Spence asked with a twinkle.

  “No, I can’t.” He didn’t feel up for games.

  “I’ll bet you can.”

  Glass shattered.

  A mass of hot air rolled off the hillside and blasted through the broken sliding doors.

  There were two more men in the room.

  Then, from the hall, a third.

  Will was looking at a couple of Heckler &Koch machine pistols resting in the hands of heavily breathing, fit young men. Frazier was sporting something lighter, a Glock, like his.

  Will didn’t have the strength or the speed to pull his gun from his waistband. One of the watchers plucked it away from him and threw it through the broken glass, splashing it into the swimming pool.

  Frazier ordered his man, “Get the computer.”

  It was pulled from Will’s weak grasp.

  “Where’s the memory stick?”

  Will reached into his pants pocket and tossed it onto the floor. There was no point being cute. He’d lost.

  “You could’ve knocked, Frazier,” Spence said.

  “Yeah, next time. You don’t look so good, Henry.”

  “Emphysema.”

  “I’m not surprised. You were always a big smoker. You used to break the rules and smoke in the lab, remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “You’re still breaking the rules.”

  “I’m just a retiree who runs a little social club. You might want to join one day. We don’t charge dues.”

  Frazier sat down wearily on a chair across from them. “You need to give me the 1527 book and all the materials you recovered from Cantwell Hall. Every piece of it.”

  “Why don’t you just leave us alone?” Kenyon protested. “We’re just a couple of old men, and he’s hurt. He needs medical attention.”

  “I’m not surprised you’re involved with this, Kenyon. Always palling around with Henry.” He waved his gun toward Will. “He killed two of my men,” Frazier said evenly. “You think I’m going to get him to a doctor? Who do you think you’re talking to? You think I’m going to turn the other cheek?”

  “Greater men than you have done it.”

  Frazier laughed. “Save it, Alf. You were always one of the weak ones. At least Henry had balls.” He turned his attention back to Spence and Will. “Give me the book and tell me what you found in England. I’ll get it one way or the other.”

  “Don’t give him anything, Henry,” Kenyon said indignantly.

  Frazier raised an eyebrow, and one of his men swatted the side of Kenyon’s face with the back of his hand. He fell to the floor onto his knees.

  “Leave him alone!” Will shouted.

  “What are you going to do about it?” Frazier spat. “Squirt blood at me?”

  “Go to hell.”

  Frazier ignored him and spoke to Spence. “You know what’s gone into keeping the Library a secret all these years, Henry. Do you think we’re not going to pull out all the stops to find out everything there is to know about the missing book? This is more important than any of us. We’re just little pawns. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

  “I’m not telling you anything,” Spence said defiantly.

  Frazier shook his head and turned his gun toward Kenyon, who was still on the floor, kneeling in pain and shock, or maybe in prayer. He fired once into his knee.

  Blood sprayed into the air, and the man shrieked in agony. Will tried to rise, but the watcher closest to him shoved him back down with a hand to his chest. Will swung his arms wildly, but the man subdued him with a sharp, cruel punch to his thigh, right over the bullet wound. He howled in pain.

  “Alf!” Spence screamed.

  “Put a tourniquet on it,” Frazier told the other man. “Don’t let him bleed out.”

  The young man looked around, then hurried over to Spence to pull his tie from around his neck. He rushed back to Kenyon and began to cinch it tight, just above the knee.

  “Now, listen to me, Henry,” Frazier said. “If you don’t give me what I need, I’m going to take that tourniquet off, and he’ll be gone in a minute. Your call.”

  Spence was purple with rage and gasping for air. “You bastard!” he shouted.

  Then he full-throttled his scooter, aiming it straight for Frazier.

  It wasn’t much of a ramming wagon, a red three-wheeled scooter, barreling down at six miles per hour. Frazier probably could have just lifted up his legs to avoid contact, but he was tired, and he wasn’t wired to underrespond. Instead, he put two rounds into Spence’s face, one in the mouth, one through the left eye.

  The forward momentum carried the scooter into Frazier’s shin, and Spence’s body dropped heavily off onto the carpet. Frazier sprang up hurt and swearing, and in anger put another two rounds into Spence’s lifeless side.

  Kenyon began to wail, and Will bit his lip in anger. He looked around for something he could use as a weapon.

  Frazier was standing over Will, pointing his gun at his head. “Alf, tell me where he’s got the material, or I’ll shoot Piper too.”

  “I’m not dying today,” Will seethed.

  “I can’t argue with that,” Frazier growled. “But I’m going to give you the next best thing.” He changed his aim to Will’s groin.

  “Don’t tell him anything,” Will shouted to Kenyon.

  Frazier countered, “Don’t be stupid.”

  Will saw something. Frazier was unnerved by his sudden smile.

  “I’m not dying today,” Will repeated.

  “You already said that.”

  “You are.”

  As Frazier opened his mouth in a sneer, his head exploded in an eruption of red-and-gray foam.

  By the time his body hit the floor, Nancy had already gotten off a second shot, narrowly missing the watcher closest to Kenyon. She was firing through the shattered sliders, flanked by John Mueller and Sue Sanchez, all of them fighting to get a handle on the chaos in the room.

  Will rolled off the sofa and locked his arms around the lower legs of the closest watcher. As the man struggled to free himself, he released a burst of automatic fire, which streaked across Mueller’s abdomen like the tail of a comet. Staggering backward, Mueller managed to fire a half dozen rounds before collapsing into the pool. The watcher fell back onto Will, gasping, with a sucking lung wound.

  The other watcher spun around to help his partner and when he saw he was down, he pointed his machine pistol at Will, ready to squeeze the trigger.

  Sue and Nancy fired simultaneously.

  The watcher crashed through the coffee table, a dead-weight.

  Nancy ran to Will while Sanchez made sure the scene was secure, kicking away weapons, prodding each man with her shoe.

  “Will! Are you okay?” Nancy cried.

  “Jesus, Nancy. You came!”

  Sanchez was calling her. She needed help getting Mueller out of the bloodstained water. The two women struggled to pull him onto the pool deck, but it was too late.

&nb
sp; Sanchez pulled out her cell phone and called 911. She screamed she was FBI. She yelled for them to send every ambulance they had.

  Will dragged himself over to the communications headset lying next to the closest watcher, lured by the tinny chatter just audible. He put the headset on. There was a voice, hollering away, asking for their status.

  “Who is this?” Will asked into the mic.

  “Who’s on this frequency?” the voice asked.

  “Frazier’s dead. The other ones don’t look so hot.”

  “Who is this!”

  “How’s the weather at Area 51?” Will asked.

  There was silence.

  “Okay, now that I’ve got your attention. This is Will Piper. You tell the Secretary of the Navy, you tell the Secretary of Defense, you tell the goddamned President that this is over. And you tell them right now!”

  He ripped off the headset and stamped on it with his good leg.

  Nancy rushed back to him. They held each other for a moment, but this wasn’t the time or the place for a long embrace.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” he said.

  “I called Sue. I told her you were in trouble, that we couldn’t bring in outsiders.”

  Sanchez had the postadrenaline shakes. She was trying to comfort Alf Kenyon and keep him from going into shock.

  Will knelt and squeezed Kenyon’s hand. “You’re not going to die, Alf. Not for a good long time.”

  Kenyon grimaced in pain and nodded.

  Will turned to Sanchez. “Thank you.” That was all he needed to say.

  Her jaw was quivering. “Nobody tries to kill my people. We protect our own. I scrambled a jet from Teterboro. We picked Nancy up in New Hampshire and flew all night. We just got here this second. Will, Mueller’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” Will said. He truly was.

  Then it hit him that if his bus hadn’t been delayed in LA, he would have gotten to the house too early to be saved. It was meant to be, he thought.

  Nancy was standing over Frazier’s body. “Is this the man who killed my parents?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  Will asked, “Where’s Philly?”

  “Laura and Greg have him up at the lake. I need to call them.”

  With Nancy’s help, Will dragged himself back onto the sofa. “All hell’s going to break loose here. Another wave of watchers is going to come. We’ve got to move fast.”

  “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

  Will squeezed Kenyon’s hand again. “Alf, where did Henry put the Cantwell papers?”

  Weakly, “Lower desk drawer. Over there.”

  Nancy ran over to the desk. The parchments were in a plain folder lying on top of the 1527 book. The letters from Felix, Calvin, Nostradamus, and that simple page with the scrawl: 9 February 2027. Finis Dierum.

  “Does that printer scan?” Will asked her, pointing to the printer beside the desktop computer.

  It did. It was a fast, expensive one, and the pages flew out of the feeder. He had Nancy scan the Vectis letter and the others to the memory stick they recovered from Frazier’s pocket.

  Will opened his laptop computer, plugged in the memory stick, and clicked on HenryNet. There were sirens echoing off the hills. He needed the password. “Alf, what’s Henry’s network password?”

  Sanchez shook the man. “He’s passed out.”

  Will rubbed his eyes and thought for a moment.

  Then he typed 2027.

  He was in.

  With the wail of sirens getting closer, Will banged out a quick e-mail, attached some files, and hit SEND.

  Greg, old boy, your life’s never going to be the same, he thought. No one’s is.

  Nancy helped him to his feet and got on her tiptoes to kiss him, the only way she could reach his mouth.

  He told her, “Go get the book and the papers. I want to go to the hospital, and I want to go home with you. In that order.”

  Chapter 38

  The only thing moving slowly in Will’s life was the drip, drip, drip of the antibiotics flowing into his veins.

  Lying in his bed at the New York Presbyterian Hospital on that Monday evening, he savored a rare period of solitude. From the moment the ambulances and police had arrived at Spence’s house in Henderson, he’d been inundated with doctors, nurses, cops, FBI agents, and an Air Ambulance crew of EMTs that talked his ear off all the way from Vegas to New York.

  His hospital room had a killer view of the East River. If it were a condo, it would have been insanely pricey. But for the first time ever, he missed his one-bedroom shoebox because that was where his wife and son were.

  This was a relative calm before the storm kicked up again. He’d had his sponge bath, administered by a tough little nurse at car-wash speed. He’d picked at his dinner tray and watched a few minutes of ESPN for normalcy. Nancy would be in shortly with a shirt and a sweater to put on for the TV cameras.

  Outside his door, a cordon of FBI agents protected his room and secured access to his floor. Agents from the Department of Defense and the CIA were trying to get to him, and the Attorney General was engaged in internecine warfare with his angry counterparts at the Pentagon and Homeland Security. For the moment, the FBI wall was holding firm.

  The world hadn’t been expecting the news that hit the streets, mailboxes, doorsteps and the Internet on a sleepy Sunday morning just before Halloween.

  The headline in The Washington Post trumpeted a story that at first blush made people think the venerable newspaper was perpetrating a hoax:

  US GOVERNMENT HAS VAST LIBRARY OF MEDIEVAL BOOKS WHICH PREDICT FUTURE BIRTHS AND DEATHS UP TO 2027; SECRET INSTALLATION AT AREA 51, NEVADA ESTABLISHED BY HARRY TRUMAN TO MINE DATA; SOURCE OF LIBRARY: A BRITISH MONASTERY; CONNECTIONS SEEN TO DOOMSDAY KILLER CASE.

  by Greg Davis, Staff Reporter,

  Washington Post Exclusive

  The five-thousand-word story was not a hoax. It was rich in documentation and extensively quoted Will Piper, former FBI Special Agent in charge of the Doomsday case, who described the circumstances of one Mark Shackleton, computer scientist, Area 51 researcher, and the architect of a fictitious serial-killing spree in New York, and the violent government cover-up orchestrated to protect a secret desert installation hidden for six decades. The Post had in its possession a copy of the library database that covered the United States through the year 2027, and they had been able to successfully correlate database predictions for hundreds of individuals across the country against actual contemporaneous birth and death data.

  They also had a group of letters from the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries that purported to explain the origin of the books and place them in some historical context. The article made reference to a mysterious order of monk savants on the Isle of Wight but stressed the lack of corroborating proof. Future Post articles would talk about the influence of the Library on famous historical figures such as John Calvin and Nostradamus.

  Finally, there was the matter of 2027. In a fourteenth-century letter, there was a notation about some kind of apocalyptic end-of-days event, but the only certainty was that the books did not have entries beyond February 9, 2027.

  Piper had been a target of violence that had claimed the lives of his in-laws, and he had been wounded in an action against covert government agents. His whereabouts were unknown, but his condition was reported to be stable.

  On Sunday morning, the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department all issued official no comments, but senior sources close to the administration, namely the White House Chief of Staff and the Vice President, without attribution, told the paper they had no idea what the Post reporter was talking about-and in retrospect they were, in fact, telling the truth. They hadn’t been in the Area 51 loop.

  By Monday, the official Washington language was shifting by degrees from “no comment” to “stand by for an announcement from the White House,” to “the President will address the nation at 9:00 P.M. EST.”

>   The newspaper story sparked a fire that spread across the globe at the speed of electrons. The revelations hijacked nearly every conversation on the planet. By that first evening virtually all sentient adults in the world had heard about the Library and had an opinion. People were consumed by curiosity and gripped by apprehension.

  All across America, constituents called their elected representatives, and congressmen and senators called the White House.

  Across the globe, worshippers flocked to their priests, rabbis, imams, and ministers, who worriedly tried to match official dogma to the supposed reality.

  Heads of state and ambassadors of virtually every nation barraged the State Department with demands for information.

  TV, cable, and radio airwaves devoted themselves to wall-to-wall coverage. The problem became quite apparent several hours into the news cycle that there was no one to interview. No one had heard of the Post ’s Greg Davis, and the paper wasn’t making him available to the media.

  Will Piper was nowhere to be found. The Post ’s Publisher made the rounds, standing by the story, but could do no more than repeat the facts as they had been reported. The paper was refusing to make any of the data public, referring the matter to the Post ’s attorney at Skadden Arps, who issued a statement that matters of ownership and privacy were under study.

  So, for the moment, pundits could only interview each other, and they were whipping each other into a lather while their media bookers hotly pursued philosophers and theologians, people whose phones were normally quiet on weekends.

  Finally at 6:00 P.M. EST on Monday, CBS News issued an urgent press release that 60 Minutes would present a special live televised interview with Will Piper, the source of the story. The world had only two hours to wait.

  The White House was outraged that the President was being preempted, and the White House Chief of Staff called the president of CBS News to inform him that issues of national security were at stake and remind him that the man they were going to put on camera had not been interviewed by the appropriate authorities. He hinted that there could be serious charges forthcoming against Piper and that he was a potentially unreliable rogue source. The network executive politely told the White House to go pound sand and sat back to wait for a federal court to issue an injunction.