Laika and her partners were supposed to be relaxing now. Skye had allowed them a week off before he would give them their next assignment. They went to movies, and Laika attended the opera. They ate long, lingering meals at good restaurants, and stayed up late into the night, talking about what had happened and about what might come, thinking about which book, of all the books in the world, might be the one to unlock the riddle of the code.
Now Laika lay in the darkness, music in her ears, and shuddered. She was listening to a recording made in the forties of Lauri-Volpi singing Verdi's Otello, calling out for "sangue, sangue." Blood, blood.
She had seen enough blood.
She turned off the Discman, set the earphones on the bed table, and closed her eyes. But the pealing cry for blood remained in her head, making her think of the powdery remains of Peder Holberg, for the blood tests had proved it was him, and the torn, bullet-riddled body of James Winston.
Tears pooled in her eyes then, not at the thought of what he had become, but what he once was, a man who had laughed with her and loved her. A man she had loved, until something he'd buried away for love of her crept back out and possessed him.
And at the end, it had been Shakespeare's green-eyed monster of jealousy that had plagued James just as it had plagued Othello, the thought of white men sleeping with his woman. It had drawn James Winston to the Weyandt Tower and his death as surely as it had drawn Othello to his suicide in Desdemona's bedchamber. The only difference was that this time Desdemona was black as well. And alive, because she was stronger than Othello. Because it was her business to see through subterfuge.
But if that was the case, why couldn't she see any further into the secrets of this prisoner who'd escaped them? Was he, as Tony had suggested, actually Christ, living for millennia, or a descendant of Christ, the less fantastic premise in which she suspected Joseph believed?
Or was he someone else, someone completely different? What powers did he have? Why was he encased in lead? And if the Roman Catholic Church was holding him, why they? Was he evil? Or was he of such a great good that even the church could not permit his freedom? How did he threaten them?
What was he?
She had no answers, but she continued to look for them in her dreams.
Three days later, FBI agent Alan Phillips gave Quentin McIntyre the report he had been waiting for. "We found them—Luciano, Harris, and Stein. They were holed up for the past few months in an apartment in New York City. An agent who had seen the three photos just happened to spot them coming out of a movie theater late yesterday afternoon. Followed them to a restaurant, then to an apartment building on West 72nd Street."
McIntyre nodded eagerly. "Any idea what they've been up to?"
"Not yet. But whatever it was . . ." Phillips paused uncomfortably, ". . . they seem to be done in New York."
"What? Why?"
"We lost them. The agent put a twenty-four on the building, but at three in the morning Luciano comes up in a car, the others come out the door with a lot of bags, throw them in the trunk, and they're off. The agent calls in a trace car soon as he sees they're heading out, but it's such quick notice that the only driver available was a real novice. Still, traffic was light that time of morning, so he was able to tail them through the city and the Holland Tunnel over to the New Jersey Turnpike. They caught Route 78 at Newark, and that's when they made our tail. They dry cleaned the kid, slipped off at the next exit, slammed through a business district. Luciano's a great driver—this kid didn't have a chance to stay on him."
"So which way were they headed when our agent lost them?" McIntyre asked.
West.
He was going west. Clad in darkness, sheathed in lead, still a captive.
The road he was on was made of iron. How fitting a trail for someone new to follow, he thought. He had nearly been freed. Nearly. What had happened in the process, at least that was good. The blood.
He regretted the loss of the artist. Those he could reach were becoming fewer on this world. People used their minds less—at least, that part of the mind he could touch. The world was too fast. There was too little time for meditation, introspection, those soft hours of thought when souls were open like petals.
Still, the artist had betrayed him. He knew as clearly as if he had read it in a book that he was planning to destroy the work he had had him create, the work that would guide his followers to him.
And that betrayal had infuriated him, enraged him so that the force burst from him, even through the lead, and did what it had done, made the artist one with his work, blended flesh and blood and iron until the place of imprisonment was found.
But then it was too late. The surge of power had weakened him, as it always did, and when he was being moved, when his captors were most vulnerable, he was, ironically, at his weakest. His powers were finite, even if his life was not.
No matter; there would be further opportunities. His strength would return. He would endure. He would inspire.
He could wait.
He had all the time in this world and the next.
Readers wishing to further investigate the reality of the paranormal will find much of worth in the following books: The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal edited by Gordon Stein, Ph. D.; The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher by Martin Gardner; An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural by James Randi; The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan; and the publications of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) at http:// www.csicop.org.
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