City of Iron

by Williamson, Chet

  "You mean the prisoners, as in more than one," Laika said.

  "You don't know Latin?" Tony asked, and Laika shook her head.

  "German, French, Italian," Joseph said dryly, "but they never spoke Latin anywhere I was assigned."

  "I learned it in Catholic school," Tony said. "And those words at the top of the list? They mean 'Place of the one who never dies.'" Laika watched Tony, but he kept his eyes straight ahead. "So. I say the prisoner. As in one."

  "You think," Laika said slowly, "that this list refers to one person only? For nearly eight centuries?"

  "'The one who never dies,'" Tony repeated. "How does that make any sense otherwise?"

  "The line," Joseph offered almost desperately. "The line never dies."

  "Hominus. Singular. Not the line, not the many, not one in general—the one."

  "We don't even know where this list came from," Laika said. "We don't know who those people were."

  "They came for him," Tony said. "Like the cultists, only it wasn't them. These people were disciplined, ready. They were after him." He was silent for a moment. "I think they wanted to free him. The Bible suggests they were Christians. I think they wanted to free . . . Him."

  Tony said the last word with so much reverence that it chilled Laika. It was impossible, unfathomable. "This paper," she said, "is all the evidence we have. That's a big conclusion to jump to on that basis."

  "It's a crazy conclusion," said Joseph. "Jesus, Tony? You're saying that this prisoner is Jesus, the Christ himself, semi-mythical founder of the primary religion of the Western world? Uh-uh, no way can I believe that. That would mean—"

  "That would mean," Tony said, "that all your cynicism was bullshit, that everything you've believed—or disbelieved—over the years was false. What was it that Sherlock Holmes used to say? When you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth. And this truth means that your world's turned upside down, Joseph."

  Joseph said nothing for a moment, but when he spoke, his voice was calm. "No, Tony. It means yours is. If Jesus didn't die, it might mean he's immortal, but it also means that he wasn't resurrected and lifted into Heaven. And unless I'm very much mistaken, it's that little miracle that's the pillar the Catholic Church is based upon. You can't have it both ways—he had to be a mortal to die and be resurrected. But if he's immortal, then he's not divine. Sorry."

  Tony's cheeks reddened, his hands gripping the steering wheel tightly, and Laika saw the sudden panic and confusion in his eyes. "Okay," she said, trying to keep him from exploding, "this isn't a seminary. We're going to deal with facts here and nothing but. The list isn't the only thing we have—we've got the coded message, too."

  She took it out and looked at it. It was on one sheet of paper, front and back, and consisted of numbers. It began: "250-17-4 19-2 293-4-3 26-8 29-10 7-30-2," and continued. Both sides were covered with the numbers, written in precise and tiny handwriting.

  "It's a book code," Joseph said, leaning over her shoulder. '250-17-4' means page 250, line 17, the fourth word. Then '19-2' is line 19, second word. '293' starts with another page."

  "So what's the book?" Laika asked. "That Bible?"

  "I already checked. That Bible's double columned, so that makes the line numbering tricky, but I tried it several ways and just got gibberish. Besides, you'd never carry a book code message along with the book. No, I think the Bible was more a sign of devoutness than it was a code breaker." Joseph quickly looked over the paper. "Highest page number is 452, which means the book could have more pages but not fewer. Highest line number is 34, and highest word number's 14."

  "What about the Greeley book?" Laika asked.

  Joseph shook his head. "Not long enough." He sighed. "There are a whole lot of books in the world. I guess we should start checking what's common to . . . religious people, for want of a better word."

  "There's something else we need to do first," Laika said, "and that's to return to the sculpture and see if there's anyplace else it leads. We still don't know what happened to Peder Holberg. Then we'll disassemble it and destroy the plans. If we figured out where to go using it, other people will be able to as well."

  "We can look again," said Joseph, "but I don't think there's going to be a damn thing that leads us anywhere else. And as for taking the time to destroy it, why? Even if somebody follows the map to the Weyandt Towers, there's nothing there now."

  "We don't leave a trail," she replied. "We cover all our tracks, and that sculpture is one hell of a provocative piece of evidence. It'll be a lot more enigmatic as a pile of iron. Let's go. Now. To the warehouse."

  Chapter 50

  The sun shone in through the windows as they crossed the bridge to the Bronx. It was going to be a warm day. Tony had cranked down his window, and the breeze stroked Laika's hair. It felt good, she thought, clean. She had been in too much darkness lately. She was ready for some light.

  Four young kids were playing baseball in the parking lot, and Laika realized that school must be out by now. Summer was here, and she hadn't even noticed its coming. They parked, stepped out into the sunshine, and went up to the door.

  It seemed undisturbed since they had last been there. Tony had started putting a thread near the bottom of the door after Laika had discovered the bug, and the thread was unbroken. They unlocked the locks and went inside.

  When the bright overhead lights went on, Laika realized immediately that something had changed. For a moment she didn't know what it was, and then she saw that the iron itself was different. It seemed darker, as though the rust had fallen from it and it had resumed the previous deep black of wrought iron.

  "What the hell. . . ." she heard Tony say, and followed him as he walked closer to the sculpture.

  At the heart of the structure, where the explosion had torn and bent the iron, there was a substance on the dirty wooden floor. It looked like flaking rust that had fallen from the iron above. Mixed with it were small yellow shards, none more than a quarter inch wide. Though the powder was spread over a large area, Laika thought that if it were all swept up it would easily fit in one bucket, perhaps two at the most. On the one side, the powder had seemed to form itself into a very definite isosceles triangle whose short point seemed to indicate one of the walls.

  Laika knelt and dipped her fingers in the powder. Where her hands were moist, the red particles clung to her flesh and seemed to melt at the contact, like remarkably tiny bits of ice. But she knew they were not ice. And the small fissures in the yellow fragments, like cells in a honeycomb, told her what they were.

  "Rust?" Joseph said. "The rust came out of the metal? How the hell could that happen?"

  Laika saw that Tony was kneeling, too. "I've seen too much of this to call it rust," he said. Then he gathered a thimbleful in his palm, spat on it, curled his fingers inward, and rubbed. His palms and fingertips gleamed a brighter red, the moisture working its alchemy.

  "The powder—it's dried blood," he said. "And those little shards are bone fragments." He looked at Laika. "His blood tinted the iron."

  "Wait a minute," Joseph said, now on his knees as well. "The blood was in the iron? And . . . and whose blood? That's crazy, how could it—"

  "You know damn well whose blood," Tony said. "We'll type it, run a DNA test on it, but you know whose it's going to be."

  "Peder Holberg," Laika said quietly. "He's here." She looked at the small, dry pond of brown dust. "Whatever's left of him was here all the time. In the iron." She looked at Tony, then at Joseph. "Who wants to put it all together? That's what we're here for, right? When you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable. . . ."

  "Even," said Tony, "if the truth is what we thought was impossible? I don't know what Holmes would've said about that. But I know what I'll say, if nobody else is willing to."

  Tony straightened up and looked at the chaos of ironwork before them. "Peder Holberg built this," he said. "He built it when he was in what we'll call,
for lack of a better term, a fugue state. A trance. And while he was in that trance, something—some entity, some voice, some intelligence—took over most of his mind. And it, and he, built this." Tony wrapped a fist around a rod of iron.

  "Holberg didn't understand what he was doing," he went on. "He had no idea why he was suffering these blackouts, where he was going, or why. When he came across the cultists in some club, he felt an affinity for them. Maybe somehow they just caught the psychic tail end of the messages this entity was sending to Holberg, and they misinterpreted them. It seems certain that their version of whoever he was is corrupted, somehow.

  "But somehow, maybe through contact with the cultists, or maybe just over time, Holberg became aware of what he was doing, and maybe even caught a glimpse of the reason behind it."

  "Which was?" asked Joseph in a voice heavy with irony. "Which was to show where he was being held prisoner."

  "If it had this power over Holberg," Joseph said, "then how come this critter didn't just tell him where he was at? Why go through the whole sculpture routine?"

  "Because maybe he didn't want Holberg to free him, or knew that he wouldn't or couldn't. The purpose was to show somebody else. But then Holberg threw a monkey wrench into the works. He started building his bomb. He might not have realized what was guiding him, or he might have mistaken it for something evil."

  "Instead of what, Jesus Christ?" Joseph said.

  "I don't know. But he built the bomb, probably to destroy the sculpture, thinking that if he did that, he'd be free of this control. Guaraldi said that during the show Holberg had seemed distracted, as though he was hearing voices in his head. I suspect he actually was, and he went up to that storeroom either to be alone, or to get the bomb and take it to the warehouse and blow the whole thing up. But he didn't get that far."

  Tony looked down at the red powder on the floor. "Okay, maybe he did, in a way. But somehow the bomb went off. It didn't kill Holberg. Not there. Instead he was, what, beamed into the warehouse?"

  "'Apported' is the proper term," Joseph said dryly. "'Beamed' sounds a little too Star Trek."

  "Fine, apported. But it was done with such force that the sculpture was shattered, and Holberg's body—blood, muscle, and bone—was blended with the iron, became one with it."

  "And you think that Jesus—if that's who this prisoner is—did that to somebody he had chosen to be his guide for the people who were looking for him? Not a very merciful savior, if you don't mind my saying so."

  "There could have been another force," said Tony, "a force in opposition to . . . to the prisoner, that was trying to keep people from discovering his location."

  "An eee-vil force," intoned Joseph.

  "Yeah," said Tony, nodding shortly. "An evil force."

  "I'm not a subscriber to extremes of good and evil, Tony. I see political expedience in most situations where people tend to bring in those absolutist concepts. But although I may not buy everything you say . . ." Joseph looked at the sculpture, at the layer of red dust, at the faces of his partners, ". . . I don't have any better explanation right now. Not to say that there isn't one. Hell, there are a lot of possibilities."

  "Like what?" Laika asked.

  "Like maybe this entity, good, bad, or indifferent, wanted revenge for Holberg's bomb, or maybe Holberg was sacrificed by the thing, with his death being the final ingredient for whatever-the-hell purpose this thing was to have. And maybe Holberg even came up here on his own, sneaked out of his studio before the bomb even went off, and then whatever happened . . . happened." He shook his head and Laika saw agony in the small gesture. "But whatever it was, I'm spooked by it. I don't like this shit. I've never seen a weirder assortment of circumstances and unexplained phenomena. I don't know. I feel like I don't know anything anymore."

  Joseph took a small glassine envelope from his pocket and scooped up some of the dried blood. "But at least I know how to do a blood test." He sealed it and tucked it away. "Now, let's look at this gigantic piece of crap one more time before we tear it down."

  After further examination, they concluded that there was nothing more to be learned from the sculpture. Then they turned their attention to the most recent anomaly, the triangle of blood. They investigated the area of the wall that the short point faced, but found nothing there. Then Joseph, thinking of a larger picture, took a compass reading. "It's pointing roughly west-southwest," he said.

  "So what's there?" asked Tony.

  Joseph shrugged. "Lots. Ohio, Kansas, Arizona, Hawaii, and it just keeps going."

  "They went that-a-way," Laika said, but did not smile.

  "Maybe," said Joseph.

  She hissed in frustration. "I'm sick of 'maybes.' Tony, what's the fastest way to bring down this piece of shit?" She pointed at the sculpture.

  "Small charges," he said, "placed in certain junctions. It'll collapse like a house of cards. I guarantee nobody will ever put it back together without the plans."

  "Do it."

  Laika rolled up the plans while Tony went out to the car to get what he needed. Joseph started to sweep up the earthly remains of what Laika was sure would be Peder Holberg, and she helped him after she put a rubber band around the plans, which she planned to burn later.

  She paused at the triangle, trying to listen in the dead, dusty air for whatever it commanded, but heard nothing, and swept it up so that it lost its meaning, becoming only particles of dried blood, as devoid of significance as the brown dust was devoid of life.

  They put the remnants in a cardboard box in which one of the computers had been transported. Laika had overestimated. Swept up, Peder Holberg's remains would have filled only half a bucket.

  When Tony had the charges set, they went behind the wall that separated the anteroom from the warehouse. The noise of the explosions was surprisingly muted, but the clattering the iron made as the pieces fell was nearly deafening, and seemed to go on far longer than Laika would have guessed.

  Tony had promised the truth. All that remained of Peder Holberg's work was a pile of iron bars and rods. The charges had actually done more damage than the original force that had battered the sculpture months before.

  Using an exclusive Company program, they wiped the hard drives of the computers in the warehouse past recovery, and went back outside, where the sun was continuing to shine brightly. The boys who had been playing were gone.

  By the time they'd reached the apartment, Laika had made her decision. She asked the others to sit down in the living room while she explained.

  "I want to tell you," she said, "what I want to do with the report we send to Richard Skye. It won't be what really happened, because I don't trust Skye with that information. Because of the Company-issue bug in the warehouse and what MacAndrews said before he died, I don't think Skye is telling us everything he knows, or disclosing the real reasons for our assignments. And if he is indeed connected to the killings of the eleven men in Plattsburgh, that would be a flagrant violation of the CIA charter. That would also be multiple murder.

  "Now, I know we've got little room to talk, since our very existence as a unit here is against that charter. And also, as you both know, my actions in withholding information would be considered gross insubordination, and possibly traitorous. Still, this is what I'm planning to do, but only if you both agree. If either of you disagrees, then you'll have to band together and both make the true report yourselves. At that point I'll be relieved of my assignment and turned over for a private judicial hearing within the Company."

  She looked at them, putting her life in their hands once again.

  Chapter 51

  A week later, Richard Skye looked out his window across the green treetops that surrounded Langley. He was frowning as he held the telephone to his ear and listened. But when he heard Mr. Stanley's voice in the earpiece, he smiled as broadly as he would have had the man been sitting across the desk from him.

  "I'm afraid, sir," he said in a cloying voice, "that I have some discouraging news. I have a
full report from the operatives, and despite all initial appearances of a positive link, the entire Holberg case seems to have a natural explanation. It seems Holberg was never in the room when the bomb went off, which accounts for the lack of human remains."

  Skye winced as he listened to Mr. Stanley's response, and then tried to explain further. "Well, as it turns out, those witnesses who saw Holberg enter the storeroom seem to have been unreliable. There had been a good deal of drinking, as well as other illicit drug use. While they might have seen Holberg go into the room, they apparently didn't notice him coming out again after he had set the bomb to go off. . . ."

  "Why? An attempt at faking his own death, apparently. These supposed fugue states were merely a sign of mental distress, an inability to cope with his own success, from what his homosexual lover said. My people found the warehouse where Holberg had been working, and after he left his showing, he went up there and destroyed his final work of art. The lover was later killed in an accident trying to restore it. . ."

  "No sir, Holberg is gone. My people traced his last whereabouts to a steamer heading back to Norway. But Holberg never arrived. I suspect his body is somewhere in the North Atlantic. It's only a short step from faking one's death to actually accomplishing it. . . .

  "No, there appears to have been nothing paranormal connected with it at all. I had hoped our quarry might somehow be involved, but such was not the case. I'm sorry. . . .

  "I certainly understand your disappointment, sir. Believe me, it's no greater than my own. I really thought this was a valid incident. After all, it had all the earmarks of—

  "Yes sir, no, I'm sure I don't have to explain them to you, no indeed. But there is a new development, something I've never come across before. It's begun to draw some attention, and it is totally inexplicable. . . .

  "Well, sir, it's a phenomenon that's taking place in the Southwest. Out in the desert."