The Artifact

by Quinn, Jack

  Both Cassandra and Callaghan seemed extremely concerned about how to disseminate the document since they had begun assembling the translations, which revealed for the first time who had authored it and what he had written. They seemed torn between the need to share it with its rightful owners they judged to be the entire world, before they were apprehended and the manuscript wrested from them. They believed that a singular, universal presentation would ensure maximum acceptance and minimum chaos.

  In an effort to spare Andy the exertion of speaking, Sammy said, “That is an almost impossible task in today’s highly diverse and competitive news environment. The media doesn’t operate in concert, even in cataclysmic events like the assassination of a president, 9/11. Every news org is out to top the others with their own slant, a different spin, innuendoes that even question various aspects of the event. The Internet will run amok with it before anyone else has a chance to explore it.”

  Gerlach and Alvarez left their tasks on the dining room tables and joined Palagi under the wide archway between the two common rooms. Cassandra sensed Andrea’s frustration. “Are you getting tired, Andy? We can break, and pick this up later.”

  The reporter responded to the woman’s concern with a wan smile. “No, I want to do this. The general is right. If you do not present this properly, it could be all for naught, masticated by our glorious fourth estate before you get a chance to qualify it, if that’s what it needs.”

  Geoff addressed Andrea from the position he had taken leaning against the side of the fireplace mantle. “You want an exclusive on this, Miz Madigan. Without sounding cruel, won’t your ALS prognosis limit your options for announcing the story with maximum impact?”

  Sammy’s response was immediate. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. We may need to run this by a couple of producers in different media, maybe an ad agency.”

  Callaghan shook his head forcefully. “Not a chance. Breathe a word of this to anyone, and you’re off the clock, never mind an exclusive.”

  Geoff pushed himself upright, away from the mantel to pace the room. “So, we have to get all the news outlets to accept the document and run it as is, spot-on without telling them what it is in advance.”

  Callaghan shook his head again, this time mystified. “Over a hundred pages?”

  “Never!” Andrea whispered hoarsely. “Some ancient document probably of real interest to five percent of the thinking population of the world?”

  “Which raises the question of translation from English,” Sammy said, “into Spanish, French, German, maybe a hundred other languages.”

  Andrea tried to sound like the voice of reason. “Sammy’s right about not jumping to conclusions. Frankly, I think you’ll regret a mass press conference. Let Sam and I brainstorm this. If we conclude that we need outside expertise, we’ll tell you why and who. Then you decide. If we come up with a feasible strategy, you give me an exclusive. If we don’t...we’re all screwed.”

  The group was silent for several long minutes, until Cassandra said, “Three days.”

  “What makes it so imperative to get this out to every soul on earth simultaneously?” Andrea asked.

  “It’s contents will surely create controversy,” Callaghan said. “If only a fraction of the public learns about it, there would be tremendous conflict not only among those who embrace and reject it, but those who haven’t been exposed to the full manuscript.”

  Cassandra said, “It wouldn’t be fair. This document contains a message for the entire human race.”

  “For God’s sake,” Andrea said, “what is it?”

  “If they’re going to help us,” Cassandra said, “they need to know.”

  Geoff folded his arms across his chest. “If we don’t like their solution, we keep ‘em here till we find one we do like.”

  Sammy’s face registered a challenging expression, but quickly passed.

  Callaghan’s tone was reluctant. “I suppose you’re right.”

  Cassandra’s countenance seemed to exude a soft light, her eyes filled with a million undecipherable secrets unexpressed in the words she spoke. “It is an autobiography written in 67 A.D. by Shimon, the younger brother of Jesus of Nazareth.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Saranac, New York

  December 2004

  The first mistake Travis made was telling Eddie that Paula had no authority to make a deal of reduced charges for his information. Upon that revelation, Eddie refused to repeat his earlier disclosures to the bespectacled, unimaginative agent even without legal counsel. His second mistake was ignoring the Plattsburgh U.S. Attorney who had been present when Eddie had recounted his whitewashed events at the Machias farmhouse, and could have told him about the missing helicopter. His third and most grievous error was acting on the assumption that if Callaghan had survived the car bomb explosion, he would run as far from the northeast corridor as available transportation could take him.

  Although Travis did have the benefit of Paula’s prior reports, it was her intrinsically lone-wolf nature to hold back significant details: in this instance, the presence of the Madigan woman and Simkowski’s helicopter among them. Travis was disinclined to take many of her findings at full value anyway, preferring to establish his own theories based on selective facts and his own assumptions. If Callaghan had escaped the conflagration with the document, he had not left Machias in Charlie Geoff’s single wing plane because Paula had impounded it at the airfield. The duplicitous general would have arranged for some other escape from their yearlong hideaway, he reasoned, probably in a third vehicle that had not burned in the barn with their other two, possibly across the nearby Canadian border. His command decision fanned agents with photographs of the two army officers out to 500 miles beyond Machias to establish roadblocks with state police on major highways and check every private and commercial airline within that radius.

  Reports were sketchy at first, and like the Kennedy assassination, would probably stimulate questions and speculation for centuries. The known facts were that NNC cameraman Steven Sarno had captured the image of the Preacher Lady assassin on tape, which FBI video technicians had enhanced to enable the Bureau to identify a youth in clerical collar and track the movements of that unknown suspect to a Jesuit seminary in Chicago where agents proceeded to interrogate every priest and seminarian in the school. Halfway through that exercise in the first floor library, a shot was heard from the upper dormitory. Second year student Thomas F. Harahan, an expert ex-army sniper who pleaded his release from the military as a conscientious objector after the fall of Baghdad, was found in his room fully dressed in cassock and Roman collar, except for his bare right foot whose big toe had pulled the trigger of the Preacher Lady murder rifle, sending a .30 caliber bullet under his chin, out the top of his head.

  Andrea grudgingly accepted the spoon-fed oatmeal before Cassandra undressed, bathed and struggled with the unfamiliar task of putting the unresponsive limbs of a grown woman into one of her own nightgowns. Lying in bed in the strange, darkened room that night, Andrea realized she was not experiencing the slow pace of deterioration from the disease her physicians had anticipated. She gazed at the pale suggestion of the half moon probing the edges of the drawn windows shades, her mood alternating between violent mental diatribes and the determination to outlive her story; to report it to viewers who depended on her for digging out corruption, the truth behind current events, for her dogged investigations that had led to the exposure of illegal and unjust practices in government and industry. Her job, her calling, her obsession.

  During the past week, the major networks had aired retrospectives on her career, a tribute to a dying, familiar contributor to the often-underlying reality of world events. Most television outlets had focused on her significant reportorial achievements over the years, minimizing their exploitation of her terminal disease, with the exception of NNC that dwelt on their exclusive still shot of Andrea on the sidewalk in front of her condominium, eyes closed, head canted toward her shoulder, looking
for all the world like she was in the final stages of her illness. Unfortunately, news was news, and other stations reluctantly picked up and broadcast that image, displaying Andrea’s pitiable condition to viewers around the globe.

  As Dr. Lawton had predicted, Andrea’s mind was still clear and active, but the muscles in her limbs were atrophying rapidly, her vocal cords becoming weaker by the day, her body tiring from the least effort. She could barely control the motorized wheelchair with the tiny drive stick and could not perform the normal everyday ablutions or use the toilet on her own. At the onset of this physical decline she had complained and ranted to Sammy at the cosmic injustice of this nightmare affliction on her previously healthy body, yet made a conscious attempt to eschew the persistent, unanswerable self-absorbed questions echoed by most victims of catastrophic physical limitations, inevitably creating alienation from the living until the eventual acceptance of their condition.

  She had begun to believe that we were all conceived with some immutable gene or element that drove each of us to her or his pre-ordained destiny. Set upon that course in the womb, no other external or external force could alter our lives: there were no ‘what ifs’ or possible alternatives to what our mysterious live plan was predestined to fulfill. Fate.

  Her thoughts moved to a brighter issue that developed when she called her condo that morning to retrieve her messages from her home answering machine. She had listened to and deleted half a dozen irrelevant calls before the voice of T.P. Viola came on the line. “I am devastated by your health problem, Andy. If there is anything Nancy and I can do, please give us a call. Hey, call anyway, will you? Home number is (201) 555-3534. Love ya.”

  She had closed her cell phone and stared pensively out the bedroom window at the bank of snow the men had plowed behind a Dodge pickup and black Land Rover. Several minutes later, she pressed the little air horn that was supposed to mimic a rutting moose, which Sammy had bought in town, and Cassandra came in from kitchen.

  “I hate that thing,” she whispered.

  Cassandra smiled her concurrence. “Sammy tried to find a cannon but they were all out.”

  Andrea had become aware that Cassandra and Callaghan shared some unspoken leadership of their ‘program,’ as they called it. She patted the side of her bed, and the striking, dusky-skinned woman sat.

  Andy told her that any plan to communicate the document contents would require an experienced producer who would need to be fully informed of its contents. T.P. Viola was not only an ideal candidate for that task, but an extremely savvy all-media strategist who could probably make significant contributions to the presentation itself. Since time was critical, she wanted to bring T.P on immediately.

  Cassandra listened to Andy’s hoarse suggestion without interruption, then asked several questions about Viola’s character, which seemed as important to her consideration of the man as his expertise. “I think you’re right. Let me talk to Clyde.”

  Andrea wondered for the hundredth time about the AmerAsian twins and the various religious themes that seemed intertwined not only with them, but several other aspects of the artifact conundrum: Hannah’s departure from the artifact group with Palagi, Gerlach and Alvarez to preach against organized religion; Mitchell’s dementia that cast him in the role of a Catholic priest; her own conversations about God with Cassandra; the seminarian who assassinated Hannah; and the Shimon autobiography. Coincidence, or some critical undercurrent that she was missing? And what was the relationship between the twins and Callaghan?

  In several discussions with Cassandra, Callaghan and Sammy over the past few days, Andrea had become aware that during the preceding eighteen months, the general had progressed from his original misgivings regarding their concealment of the artifact, to its most ardent guardian. As circumstances evolved, he had ultimately sacrificed his career. If caught in the talons of the government he had served and now disobeyed and deceived, he risked his freedom and possibly his life.

  None of them, the general included, had realized the magnitude of the endeavor on which they had embarked. It was only his constant assurances to military superiors and suspicious government entities that had allowed him the time to bring the document to fruition, just as his public denial had kept reporters, criminal, Iraqi and other interested factions from locating the artifact and impeding its translation and validation.

  Thin cirrus clouds moved across the Washington skyline as a pale winter sun cast dim shadows beneath the historic buildings and monuments of the nation’s capital. Paula sat in the passenger seat of her rental car bundled in a down parka and wool slacks against the biting cold of late afternoon, calling the neurosurgeon for the seventh time since Jerry had infiltrated the data banks of local hospitals to find the name of Andrea’s primary physician. She had barely contained her frustration at being put on hold, disconnected, and shunted from secretary to secretary of busy doctors. Long before she had found Lawson, she had given up all hope of speaking directly to the neurosurgeon himself, experiencing the same difficulty in reaching his nurse or anyone conversant with the condition or whereabouts of patient Andrea Madigan.

  Although tracking down the Madigan woman might give her one surefire advantage over Harrington’s pursuit of Callaghan, it had not been working. If the handicapped newswoman was in fact tagging along with the retired general, her knowledge of Andrea’s cell phone number would enable her to determine her exact location through the loopt device as soon as her phone was turned on. Callaghan and associates would be smart enough not to use their phones, which Harrington was surely monitoring, but he could have overlooked Madigan’s. The problem was, until that very morning, the reporter had not made or received a call either. When she had, Paula’s GPS tracker showed that Andrea had activated her cell phone to listen to her messages on her home answering device. The call had been made from a location in the Berkshire Mountains of northwestern Massachusetts, outside the town of Rowe.

  Paula wrote down the Lat/Lon coordinates before she disconnected and slammed the cell phone down on the passenger seat, feeling a thrill of excitement at the first real break she’d had in this exasperating case. She had the radio news station turned low to keep abreast of bulletins pertaining to the Preacher Lady’s murderer, then increased the volume when she heard the weather alert: a raging blizzard was advancing from the mid-west, currently inundating Ohio with eighteen inches of snow and moving up the northeast corridor toward Washington and New England.

  She started the engine, pausing before pulling the rental car out of the parking space, considering the five hundred mile distance and forecast blizzard on her tail. She needed to get moving, but couldn’t waltz in on those perps alone: trained combat veterans more experienced and wary than any criminals. She picked up her cell again as she figured out how and where Jerry could meet her up there.

  Seated across from Rand Duncan, whose hands were tightly clasped on the clean surface of the wide desk between them, Detective David Leonard gazed around the network executive’s corner office as Sergeant Paul Kramer continued interrogating their increasingly discomfited suspect.

  ‘The two free lance knee-breakers who tried to assault Miz Madigan claim they were hired by a small-time B & E perp goes by the name of Fingers Johnson,” Kramer repeated. “You have no knowledge of him or the thugs?”

  “I haven’t had a clue to anything you’ve asked since you walked in here,” Duncan replied.

  Detective Leonard pulled his scrutiny away from the bookshelves and wall photos, speaking for the first time since dropping unceremoniously into the partner chair his large frame could barely contain. “Johnson says he got the job from a woman. Upscale broad he never would a thought’d put a contract out, never mind find him inna neighborhood inna first place.”

  “A vengeful wife threatening her husbands lover?” Rand suggested.

  Leonard gave a slow shake of his head, his eyes attempting to meet Duncan’s darting glances. “Madigan ain’t diddling nobody. No boyfriend, regular date, sleepov
er, nada.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, gentlemen,” Rand said, arms outstretched, palms up in a gesture of helplessness, “I don’t know how I can help you further.”

  Kramer extracted a sheet of paper from the inside pocket of his suit coat, proffering it to Duncan across his desk.. “This here’s a police artist sketch from Johnson’s description of the woman who commissioned the hit.”

  Rand hesitated before accepting the charcoal drawing of the full-face and profile of a woman who bore an amazing resemblance to Patty Zonfirelli, Duncan’s clandestine mistress.

  * * * * * *

  T.P. had been shocked at the weakness and slurring of Andrea’s voice when she had called, the first time he had heard her speak since she had displayed the insulting digit to Rand Duncan seven weeks ago, after her unauthorized on-air offer of a five hundred thousand dollar reward for information leading to the artifact. When he walked into the Rowe safe house, he was appalled at her wasting body wrapped in a wool blanket, slumped in her wheelchair, her features drawn, eyes dark, yet alert. During their initial meeting, Sammy described the situation and contents of the purloined amphora to the silent amazement of the ex-NNC news director, who took copious notes on a spiral steno pad.

  That afternoon, Sammy wheeled Andrea into a book-lined study where T.P. sat near a low deal table and the warmth of a black, potbelly wood stove. He stood until his former NCC associates were settled with heavy porcelain mugs of coffee. T.P. embraced her again in silence with teary eyes before reclaiming his seat, making an obvious effort to compose himself as Andy sipped from the mug held by Sam, who touched a napkin to her lips compressed in determination.

  “We can’t just stick a talking head in front of the camera with background music,” Andrea whispered.