Conspiracy of Angels

by Laurence MacNaughton

  The cabin felt smaller than she remembered. Cramped, dingy, primitive. It made her feel guilty, thinking like that. Made her all the more aware of the aching hollowness inside her.

  She’d thought the cabin would feel haunted. But it didn’t. It just felt dead. Empty. Like a burned-out lightbulb, all the energy gone, leaving nothing but a fragile hollowness.

  Mitch came in behind her. He unscrewed the head from his flashlight, turning it into a tiny lamp. He held it overhead, bathing the room in a soft gold glow.

  She cleared her throat and motioned Lanny in. “Come in. Close the door.”

  “In there?” Lanny poked his head in through the doorway, eyes wide. “I don’t know. Think I’m safer out here, where there ain’t no man-eating mountain lions made a nest or something.”

  “Come on.” She went over to the door and waited for Lanny to come inside. Broken plates crunched under her boots. Lanny slunk inside, shining his flashlight at every shadow.

  The door stuck at first, then swung closed. The wrought iron latch clanked.

  She turned off the pulser and stuck it back in her waistband. “Come on. Help me pick up the table.”

  Lanny looked worried. “You serious? Probably something living under there.”

  “Nothing’s going to hurt you, I promise. Come on.”

  “Wait! What was that?” Lanny froze, eyes wide, looking around. “You hear that? Like a rattlesnake or something.”

  “It’s too cold for rattlesnakes.”

  “Maybe it’s a raccoon. Or a rat. Or a porcupine or something, I don’t know.”

  Mitch turned off the Cerenkov and handed it to Geneva. He grabbed one end of the table and nodded to Lanny. “You gonna help or what?”

  Lanny touched the table, then gripped it with the tips of his fingers.

  Grunting, they lifted the table up and set it on its legs. Dirt and dry leaves sifted to the floor.

  Geneva nodded. “Okay. Good. Now, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m cold. So if we’re going to be here, let’s get a fire going.”

  Mitch took the Cerenkov back from her. “You sure you want to do that?”

  “What’s wrong with a fire? This is my home. I grew up here. I lived here. This is where I belong.”

  Mitch nodded. “I can see that.”

  “Good. So glad.” She picked up firewood by the pale light of the flashlight. “God, I forgot how much work it was chopping firewood. Splitting the logs. There’s a stump out back you set the logs up on for splitting. I used to be out there every afternoon, sometimes.”

  Mitch picked up a couple of logs and brought them over to the fireplace. “Hard to imagine anybody still doing that. Living here. Chopping wood. Just like frontier days.”

  He dumped the logs into the fireplace.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I thought you wanted to make a fire.”

  “Mitch, you build a fire. You don’t just throw a bunch of logs in together.”

  “Yeah? That’s what I do, kid. Squirt some lighter fluid on there and you’re all set.”

  Geneva dropped her firewood on the stone hearth and knelt down. She pulled out the logs Mitch had thrown in. “You put a big one in the back, facing out.” She wrestled the biggest log into place. “That’s your hearth log. That’s what reflects the heat out into the room. Then you put a smaller one in front of it, like this. Get that just right.” She settled it into the sooty iron grate. “And before we put the last one on top, we need some kindling and tinder. Something light and flammable.”

  Lanny dug in one of the backpacks and came up with a roll of paper towels. “Here. I don’t know why we have these anyway. I ain’t cleaning this place.”

  She took the roll and tore off a long strip of paper towels, crumpling them up. “These’ll be good for tinder. But we still need kindling. Some little sticks and stuff that’ll burn long enough to start the logs.” She picked up some of the leaves and twigs that had blown in over the years and piled them between the logs, snapping the longer twigs to fit. Lanny and Mitch did the same. “Okay. Now the last log, we put that on top. In this case, we’re going to have to use two, but that’s okay.” She settled the logs in place and stood up. “My dad built this fireplace. He used to say a good fireplace keeps good memories. I guess he was right.”

  Lanny held out his gold Zippo. The metal was smooth and warm. She flicked it open and watched the lazy blue-yellow flame. “Now why didn’t I ever have one of these? Beats the hell out of striking a flint.” She bent down to light the tinder.

  Mitch put a hand on her shoulder. “Wait.”

  She stopped, the Zippo an inch from the crumpled paper towels. “What?”

  “Just wait.” Mitch stepped back from the fireplace. He held out his hands, framing it in his vision. “Doesn’t this look just a little too big for this place?”

  “What? What’s too big?”

  “The fireplace. Come back here and look at it.” He motioned her back.

  She snapped the Zippo closed and walked over to join him. The fireplace looked the same as it always had her whole life. Giant, solid. Made of sparkling rounded river stones cemented together. “I don’t see anything.”

  Lanny went over to join them, frowning at the fireplace. “Big old medieval fireplace, man. What’s the problem?”

  “It’s too big. Look, if you’re gonna haul rocks up a mountainside for your fireplace, you’re not gonna make any extra trips if you can help it.” Mitch scratched his chin. The stubble was loud beneath his fingers. “Your parents built this place?”

  “No. My dad said he was hiking one time in college and he found it. Way before I was born.”

  “So someone used to live here, maybe a hundred years ago. Like a gold prospector or something.”

  “Probably.”

  “They had to have a fireplace, right? I mean, originally. There’s a chimney poking out of the roof.”

  “So?”

  Mitch walked over to the fireplace and tapped a rock with the butt of his flashlight. He put his ear against the stone and tapped another rock.

  “What are you doing?”

  Mitch closed his eyes and kept tapping, working his way across the fireplace. “I don’t think your dad built the whole fireplace. I think he just added onto …” He stopped, went back a few inches, and tapped again. “I’ll be damned.”

  “What?” She put her ear to the rock.

  Mitch tapped the stone. Tunk tunk tunk. “You hear that?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “Listen.” Tunk tunk tink. “It’s different here. You hear that?” He tapped that spot again. Tink tink tink.

  Geneva pulled back and looked. The stones didn’t seem any different. “Mitch, you’re driving me nuts. What are you talking about?”

  Mitch pointed. “Somebody added onto the original fireplace. This whole thick mantel on top, it was all added on later. The rocks are different. The mortar’s different.” Mitch traced out a rectangular patch with this finger, directly above the hearth. “Here. This whole area. It’s hollow.”

  He left her staring at the spot and came back a few moments later with a hammer. It still had the bar code sticker on the steel head. “You know, when we went shopping for this stuff, I never thought we’d use it. Better get back.”

  “Mitch, don’t—”

  He drew the hammer back with both hands and swung it into the middle of the mantelpiece. The noise sounded like a gunshot.

  She backed away as Mitch hammered at the stones, leaving white half-circles on the rock, sending chunks of mortar flying and skittering across the floor. A few blows later, a rock came loose. Mitch dug it out and dropped it. He stepped back, breathing hard, and wiped his nose.

  She was about to start yelling at him when something caught her eye. In the hollow gap where he’d pulled out the rock, she could see the flat side of a steel box, covered in dust.

  THIRTY-THREE

  It took a while to chip away enough stones to get the box out. In the cavi
ty it left behind, Geneva could see the outline of the original fireplace. Her dad had simply mortared stones over the top of it, sealing the steel box inside.

  Mitch carried it over to the table and set it down. He brushed the dust off with his hands. Blowing out a long breath, he stepped back and looked at Geneva. “You want to open it?”

  She shook her head. Seeing the box made her feel sick inside. It had been there all her life, just inside those rocks, and she’d never known. How could they have kept it from her? What was so bad that it had to be sealed away inside rock? Buried, as if it would kill her to see it?

  The lid wasn’t locked. Mitch lifted it. The hinges squealed.

  Inside was a stack of giant old floppy disks, eight inches wide, all of them melted and warped. Mitch lifted them out and set them on the table. They rasped against each other.

  Underneath was a stack of reports, some of them a couple of inches thick, held together by brass brads and blue cardboard covers. Inside a little window in each front cover, yellowed paper showed through, and each had two neatly typed words:

  PROJECT: ARCHANGEL

  Geneva stared at those two words as Mitch lifted out one report after another and placed them in a stack. She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. Just watched them pile up, one on top of another.

  PROJECT: ARCHANGEL

  There it was, right in front of her. The information that Michael had hunted for all these years. The technical documentation of the Archangel Project. The secret texts. The holy writ.

  And all this time, it had been hidden inside the fireplace her dad built with his own hands. It could mean only one thing.

  His face flashed in her mind. His calm presence, the faraway look in his eyes, the wrinkles that formed around them when he smiled. She backed away from the table and wiped at the tears that ran freely down her cheeks. Her knees felt weak. Her stomach turned sour.

  “Hey? You okay?” Mitch reached for her.

  She backed away. “It was a mistake. Oh, God.”

  He looked puzzled. “What mistake?”

  “The Archangel didn’t come here for Jocelyn. It came for me. Me and my family, because it thought we might have the black box. Jocelyn just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. When they said the girl’s dad … they meant my dad.”

  Mitch looked stunned. Lanny stared at her, then at Mitch. Neither of them said a word. A gust of wind picked up outside, and tree branches scratched against the roof.

  Geneva went over to the fireplace and cleared the mortar-crusted rocks away with her foot. She knelt and lit the crumpled paper towels, then sat down cross-legged and watched the flames creep along the broken twigs. Watched the individual fibers of wood on each log blacken and start to smoke, and then glow a dull red. Before too long, flames licked out between the logs, and she felt the cold start to seep away.

  Mitch sat down next to her, holding one of the musty reports in his hands. The edges of the paper were yellow. He flipped through the pages. “I’m not getting a lot out of these. These are all research reports. I don’t know how to read this stuff. You want to have a look?” He held the report out to her.

  She couldn’t. Quietly, she said, “Why the hell would I want to do that?”

  “Well, he was your dad. I figured—”

  “What? That he taught me all about the Archangel? That he warned me maybe someday his fucking project would show up and start killing people? Is that what you figured? That he would do the right thing and tell me what he’d done, instead of hiding it away and keeping it secret?”

  Mitch cleared his throat. “Maybe he was trying to protect you.”

  “Yeah, right.” She wanted to laugh, but she couldn’t. “You know, all this time, I hated myself for not saving him and my mom. I thought I’d failed them. I thought I didn’t deserve to live. And you know what the really screwed-up thing is? I actually might’ve been able to save them. I might’ve been ready, if I knew what I was dealing with that night. If he’d just warned me.”

  “There wasn’t anything you could’ve done. If you’d tried to fight the Archangel then, you’d be dead too.”

  She stared into the fire for a while. “Maybe that would’ve been better.”

  Across the room, Lanny sighed and dropped a report onto the table with a thump that blew dust in all directions. “Yo. This all getting too deep. Know what I’m saying? We going to get nowhere trying to read these in some freaky old cabin in the woods. I mean, I have read some heavy stuff in my time, dog. Carl Sagan. Stephen Hawking. But this right here?” He tapped the stack of reports. “This requires beer, and lots of it.”

  Mitch got to his feet, moving stiffly. “You’re right. We got what we came for. Let’s get out of here.”

  Still staring into the fire, Geneva nodded. “Give me a minute.”

  “Okay. Let me pack this stuff up.”

  Lanny zipped his coat up. “You do that. I need a smoke break. Girl, you got my lighter?”

  She held it up, and it disappeared into his palm. Lanny put a cigarette to his lips and picked up the big silver Cerenkov. “You mind? There’s a grizzly bear or something out there, I’m showin’ him some heat.”

  Mitch switched it on for him. “Keep this pointed away from the cabin. I mean it. It’ll vaporize anything it hits.”

  Lanny bared his teeth. “My point exactly.”

  *

  Lanny stepped outside into the crisp mountain air. “First thing I’m doing,” he said, to no one in particular, “is quitting.” He cupped his cigarette and lit up, the flame looking unbelievably bright compared to the darkness of the woods. He breathed in, savoring it, and let it out. The laser gun, whatever the hell Mitch had called it, was reassuringly heavy in his hand.

  Carefully, Lanny went down the cracked wooden steps, trying to put just a little distance between him and the freaky old cabin, even just a couple of feet. That place was about to drive him out of his mind. He was done up here, he decided. They’d found something, so now it was time to get the hell out.

  What could they do with those papers, though? Who could they take them to? Maybe it didn’t even matter. Maybe the point of all of this was that they were on their own. That’s the way life was.

  He was going to quit smoking. He didn’t know how. Maybe get Clean to throw all the cigarettes away, pick up some of that nicotine gum. Or eat some of Clean’s corn chips or something, keep his mind off of it.

  As long as Clean lived through this.

  Lanny shook his head. Hell, if any of them lived through this, it’d be a miracle. That’s all there was to it.

  A chill ran down his spine. He froze, trying to figure out what it was. The night air was still, although he could hear a distant moan as the wind worked its way across the far side of the mountain.

  He brought the heavy gun up to his shoulder and turned in a slow circle, the gun humming in his ear. The woods smelled like pine trees and something else, like the air after a thunderstorm. It made goose bumps stand up on his arms. Something was out there in the darkness of the trees, watching him. He couldn’t see anything, but he could feel it.

  He took a step back toward the cabin, then another. He had to warn Mitch. He turned to run up the steps, and something rushed at him from the darkness.

  *

  While Mitch stuffed the reports into the backpack, Geneva watched the logs in the fireplace start to glow as the fire consumed them. That was how she felt: burning up inside, but so quietly. So intensely. Anger and guilt and grief glowed red-hot inside her. Remembering her mother teaching her to read Golden Books, with their rhyming animals and watercolor pictures. Her father showing her how to change Brutus’s oil, how to spray the carburetor clean. A brief flash of Jocelyn trying to pick wild blueberries and falling into the bush, and the two of them laughing, eating blueberries until their faces were smudged purple.

  Outside, something thumped to the ground. Geneva sat up straight, and the memories evaporated in a surge of fear. She felt the hair on the back
of her neck stand up. All she could see in the windows were dirt and cobwebs against the stars. “What was that?”

  Mitch fumbled with the drawstring of the backpack. He didn’t look up. “What was what?”

  She drew her pulser and switched it on. It whined as it charged up. “Get Lanny.”

  Mitch looked up, suddenly aware. He set the backpack on the floor and picked up the AK-47.

  Geneva crept over to the door as fast as she could. She felt Mitch behind her, heard the metal clasp on the AK-47’s strap click against the wooden stock.

  She got up to the window and peeked out. She couldn’t see anything. The front porch was pitch black, and the only light came from the fireplace behind her.

  She realized she made a perfect target, silhouetted against the glass, and she ducked. When she looked back at Mitch, he was standing ten feet behind her, the rifle to his shoulder.

  She waved him to the side, out of the direct line of fire if anyone shot through the front door. After a second, he understood and stepped out of the way.

  She grabbed the cold iron latch and lifted it, eased the door open an inch, until she could see most of the porch.

  A few feet from the bottom step, a cigarette glowed on the damp ground. There was no sign of Lanny.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Mitch grabbed a flashlight off the table. He played the beam across the porch and out into the bushes. The pale yellow smudge of light washed across bare branches, pine trees, dead grass. Not a trace of Lanny.

  Mitch stepped out onto the porch, AK-47 heavy in one hand. He checked the corners of the cabin. Nothing. “Lanny?”

  Behind him, Geneva whispered Mitch! What are you doing?”

  “I gotta find Lanny. Hey Lanny!” A tight knot grew in his chest. He tried to tell himself that Lanny was off in the bushes somewhere. But there was a cold nagging feeling inside him that said it wasn’t so.