by Bill Schutt
“Well, guys, here’s where it gets complicated,” Mac said, motioning toward the parked helicopter. A decal guaranteeing safe passage had been pasted prominently onto its hull—a symbol of the religious orthodoxy. “I’ve always wondered,” he continued, “what happens when two irresistible forces meet an immovable object.”
Whenever anyone addressed him as “Captain MacCready” or, worse yet, “Doctor,” Mac knew he was probably going to have a hard time talking his way out of whatever it was he had just stepped into.
The same humorless bruiser who held Cousteau for an inquisition four days earlier once again greeted him as “Captain Doctor MacCready.”
“Who’s the Russian?” Sergeant Papandreas demanded.
“Special Agent Chernov,” Mac answered. “And he’s under my jurisdiction.”
“And he’s French,” Yanni added.
The sergeant nodded. “Yes. I believe you both. I believe you, just as I believe a cab company at the Athens airport can answer all of my questions about you—Doctor.”
The last person who addressed Mac in this manner—being simultaneously mocking and grave—was a Nazi rocket scientist, and that bit of snafu had turned into nothing good. “So, how bad a problem do you have with us?” he asked.
Papandreas turned his attention toward Yanni. At first his facial expression seemed to be answering her claim about Chernov. He returned her a severe grimace, then broke into a grin. “So, your new friend is French, eh? Then it’s a lucky day for all three of you that I’ve had a long conversation across the cable with your Patrick Hendry. It appears you might have undersold yourself, Doctor. If you’re as smart as your CO thinks you are, I may need your assistance with what’s in the next room.”
Mac allowed himself a sigh of relief. “What can I help you with?”
The sergeant’s calm brown eyes stared into him. “First, it’s boats. And now I hear about an airplane incident—and worse. Your friend Cousteau tried to say we had a shark problem. But I’ve seen what sharks can do to a person, and it’s never been that, has it?”
“Uh-uh,” Mac conceded. “We think it’s a relative of the common octopus, but rather larger, and smarter.”
“You mean, a polypus?”
“You’ve been reading your Pliny,” Mac said.
“And do not forget our Homer.”
“No. Never forget Homer. But, yes—Pliny’s polypus. Something like that.” He glanced over at Yanni and saw that she had chosen to remain tight-lipped about precisely how smart the intruding cephalopods could be. They both understood that to say anything more now would only invite trouble. Yanni seemed to have firmed a resolve, at least for the moment, to obey her own First Law: Don’t go inviting trouble until you know what you’re going to get out of it.
“Come with me,” the sergeant said, opening a door to reveal a table on which the body of Dmitri Chernov’s brother lay. Mac motioned for Dmitri and Yanni to follow him inside. Sergeant Papandreas did not object.
When he arrived at the table, Mac found that the bishop and a local physician had removed a surprisingly intact shirt from the body. Yanni’s attention was drawn immediately to the circular patterns of barb punctures, clustered around two slitlike incisions in the umbilical area. Dmitri had cried out his brother’s name and fallen to his knees the moment he saw the helicopter passing overhead. Now he stood for a moment in shock, but quickly turned stoic, displaying an impressive poker face for the Greeks despite what had to be an intense inner grief.
The upper abdomen and the upper chest cavity were already surgically opened. Mac had expected to see much more damage, beyond the early destructive stages of the autopsy itself. The “polypus” attack had left all of Alexi Chernov’s ribs unbroken. His eyes were open. His face, overall, expressed an incongruous calm.
“Name’s Spiros Marinatos,” the physician said, without looking up from the body. “My cousin here—he is the bishop from Crete.”
“Most of us have had roots on these islands for five hundred years or more,” Papandreas explained. “If you look hard enough, you will find the black sheep of the Marinatos family on the very south of Santorini—looking for the great biblical flood. Either that or Atlantis. Sometimes he seems a bit too full of wild ideas for his own good.”
“Or for anyone else’s,” the bishop added.
“Then I’ll make sure to avoid him,” Mac said, chuckling inwardly as he said it, because a person with too many ideas was precisely the kind he most liked to meet. Returning his attention to the body, he asked, “These two umbilical incisions? Why?”
“I did not make those cuts,” Spiros replied. “The animal made them.”
“It stabbed him?”
“No. The cause of death was organ failure—system-wide.”
“But you’ve had no time for a complete examination,” said Dmitri—trying, with limited success, to conceal the strain in his voice. “How can you tell which organs failed?”
“Because it took them. Something entered through those two little incisions and removed his internal organs. Lungs. Heart. Digestive tract. All of them.”
Mac glanced again at the corpse’s disconcertingly peaceful expression, as if death for Alexi Chernov had been simply a matter of falling quietly into a deep slumber despite the horrible display. Until now, the worst animal attack the scientist had seen was a horde of ravenous white worms that could make sharks look mellow, by stripping all of a man’s flesh away from the bones, then eating the bones.
“A polypus?” Sergeant Papandreas said again. “Captain, you believe it is really that dangerous?”
“I’m not saying our lives would be simpler and so much safer if it actually was frenzied sharks—or even piranha worms—but if you get my drift . . .”
“That bad, huh?” Dmitri responded, somewhat absently.
“Worse,” said Bishop George Marinatos. “Worse, because it may concern the purpose of this red miracle you have been seeking, and what the people have awakened.”
“Go on, Your Eminence,” said Mac.
“To begin, just call me what everyone has always called me—Father George.”
Mac nodded. He was caught a little left-footed by the bishop’s unrequired humility, and his respect for the man had just gone up a few notches.
“Our faith has taught us to anticipate visitations of this kind—in a time when deceivers like Hitler and Stalin have existed, and when the weapons of superscience are echoing, from almost two thousand years ago, the images of destruction we find in the books of Revelation. It frightens me. And perhaps it should awaken you, because at least two of the books hold out a hope, that although these are things that may happen if we are not very careful, they do not have to happen.”
“Wait a minute,” Mac said, “books of Revelation?” He noticed that Dmitri had his head bowed. “There’s more than one?”
“Four of them, actually. One for each horseman of the apocalypse. The prophetic books told of a great human change—a terrible day if we are unwise. Today, the agent of change is not riding toward us on the backs of four skeletal horses. It springs from our own hands, by our own perversion of the atom, and of the chemicals of the earth, and now maybe even the nature of life itself. And perhaps this is what the prophets saw, and why we read, ‘To this race, a conflagration will come upon the Earth—and the Nile will fill more with bodies than with water. And their error, that they acted against themselves.’”
“The Apocalypse of the Egyptians,” Dmitri said softly, as if in prayer.
R. J. MacCready looked at the Russian in frank astonishment. Either he’s Orthodox in a country where they have been squashing religion, or he reads a lot.
“Father George?” Mac asked. “Where do you believe these animals fit in with prophecy?”
“An ancient Revelationist wrote, ‘The enemy gives authority to the animal. It comes with false signs and miracles. It is he who shepherds them. And there is he who leads them to the springs of living water.’”
“The e
nemy?”
For many long seconds it seemed the bishop had finished and would not answer at all. Mac was about to fill the silence with a new question when, placing a hand over Alexi’s forehead, George Marinatos said, “To Pontius Pilate’s question, ‘What is truth?’ the answer of the Christ was silence, not unlike the silence surrounding the truth of who is the real enemy. And when Cain cried out to God, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’—what did God answer?”
“He gave no word at all,” answered Dmitri.
“It seems as if the human mind is condemned to the word, as if truth can be sought out only within the silence. Still, it can be a blessed condemnation.”
“What?” said Mac, realizing that he was about to roll his eyes in utter puzzlement, and stopping himself.
“What, is exactly correct,” said Mac’s immovable object. “‘What is truth? Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Twice in the Bible, human beings demand an answer of God and are left with their questions. The rest of the Bible, and the rest of history, might be described as humanity’s attempts—as a sort of homework assignment from within—to answer those two questions.”
“And now you’ve left us with a new question,” Mac observed.
“Yes, I have. Haven’t I?”
“Here’s where we part,” Dmitri said as they reached the outskirts of Fira, almost halfway to the quarry. In the distance, a woman had climbed out of the great pit and was now walking toward them along the road.
“I don’t think I need to tell you, but find high ground,” Yanni warned. “Especially because we don’t know how high up they can climb.”
“If I had a bomb big enough, I’d take it into the lagoon and cut all those animals straight through with it.”
“Not the best plan I’ve heard today,” said Yanni.
“Maybe because I know a few verses the bishop chose not to mention.”
“Such as?”
“The ones that warn, if it is not slain, the people will fall before this animal that speaks, this dragon.”
“And there,” Dmitri recited, “‘we beheld the Earth’s abominations and a sea of glass shot through with fire. For nature is burdened and she is troubled, and the Earth must tremble, and the mountains must smoke and shatter, like a cup.’ Look around you! Any of that sound familiar?”
“And how is it you know all this?” Mac asked.
“My father is a high-ranking . . . let’s just call him an astronomer, and a teacher. But he is also Russian Orthodox. He reads every scrap of ancient text that comes out of Egypt and Rome. As you probably know, we’ve had a lot of those discovered lately.”
Mac returned him a confused expression.
“What? You have not heard of them?”
He shook his head.
“The lost revelations. They’re exactly what the bishop was recalling, and trying to explain.”
“Mac’s not much of a churchgoer,” Yanni said.
“Nor am I. But you must admit, it’s difficult to determine if what has happened is the biggest coincidence of all time, or prophecy being realized—these echoes, these maybe random shrieks across time, warning about a terrible war, and these animals.”
“No, it’s not difficult to determine,” Mac said. “These animals killed your brother. I know it burns inside. Burns deep. I understand this better than you can imagine.”
Dmitri slowly turned his head and looked into the face of the man he had come ashore to follow and capture. Instead of prey, he was confronted by an expression of genuine compassion.
“Where will you go?” Mac asked. The woman from the pit had now come halfway along the road and was trotting toward them.
“Damn,” Yanni muttered. “Nora . . .”
“New plan,” Dmitri replied enigmatically, and intentionally so. “You don’t get where I’ve been going by sticking to the plan.”
The woman on the road was picking up her pace.
“Their error, that they acted against themselves,” the Russian said, and began to walk away, uphill. “It’s what the bishop quoted!” he called over his shoulder.
“And you?” Yanni called back. “You said, ‘an animal that speaks.’”
“And it spoke to you, no? What did it tell you?”
“I think it was afraid.”
“I think it deceives,” Dmitri said. He had paused near a telephone pole and a stand of fig bushes. “Someday soon, we shall all know the real truth about them.” He then ducked behind the pole and bushes and disappeared like a ghost, leaving Mac and Yanni with a final warning: “And when that happens, friends, there will be no doubt about it at all.”
Mac shook his head. “I’m afraid,” he said to Yanni, “that some part of his brain is only a gnat’s breath away from going Ahab.”
Mac was about to ask, now given a Russian who had so much as declared to them that he just had to have his whale, and who would doubtless bring reinforcements—against a creature that apparently learned to do nothing less grandiose than mimic the books of Revelation—how the day could possibly be any stranger, or get any worse. As if on cue, Nora Nesbitt came running up beside them.
“You’d better come back to the camp at once,” she said. “We’ve had another death.”
“Who?”
“Guy from my lab. Name’s Hata.”
“Kraken attack?”
“Not this time. One of your people just murdered one of mine.”
Chapter 12
Codes and Conspiracies
All moons, all years, all days, all winds, take their course and pass away.
—Mayan prophecy
July 2, 1948
Hell’s Kitchen, New York City
The postwar world of 1948 was a study in gold and scarlet: a planet of enlightened intellects pitted against blackened hearts, of incomparable splendor and incomparable squalor, of political savagery and lofty ideals, of freedom and enslavement, of religions that preached the sanctity of life and crosses burning during murders in the guise of religious ritual, of logic against riot, genius against madness.
In the city where Genya and his friend Victor had been spying through a theremin device, Jimmy Powell was not like most eleven-year-olds. He had a memory at least the equal of Genya’s, combined with a strange talent for detecting subtle patterns and anomalies easily missed by others. This talent was amplified by a tendency to direct his thoughts with extreme focus, on even the most arcane subjects.
On the same day R. J. MacCready and Yanni Thorne met Dmitri Chernov, Jimmy had already become the wrong kid, in the wrong place, at just the right moment to cause a swerve of history. Even before Genya had reached the diner, after buying a newspaper from him, Jimmy noticed that the 1944 nickel with which “the Frenchman” paid did not feel right. He knew that wartime nickels with the large mint marks above Jefferson’s Monticello were made with silver. This one felt far lighter than a silver nickel had any right to be. His first guess was that someone had somehow hollowed it out to steal the silver—hollowed it out with extreme care, causing no noticeable damage at all—then spent the lightened coin as a full nickel.
But why? Jimmy asked himself. He guessed someone would need to carefully mine the silver out of several thousand coins to make just one decent-sized silver bar—a job that would require more weeks or months of work than could lead to a profit.
And hollowing out little nickels instead of half dollars? Jimmy wondered. Ten times more work for much less silver, he concluded.
He bit the nickel with gradually increasing force and noticed that it caved in ever so slightly. The mystery deepened when he shook the coin next to his ear. Something very small could be heard rattling inside.
By the time Jimmy’s mother arrived home with groceries, it was almost lunchtime, but he was too focused to be hungry. The boy had taped wartime blackout paper over a window to darken the room and was tirelessly manipulating a magnifying glass and a little black square of film in front of a lamplight. He had taped the piece of film to a perfectly matched hole, cut into
the side of a cereal box. Lines of numbers, clearly some sort of code, were projected onto a sheet of white loose-leaf paper.
“What’ve you got there, Jimmy?”
“I dunno, Ma. Something a whole lot tougher than Tracy.”
Mrs. Powell smiled. Two of the latest-model Dick Tracy decoder rings had already been tried, then discarded on the kitchen table.
“This is much longer than some stupid code for ‘Enjoy Quaker Oats,’” said Jimmy. “Some of da numbers are repeating in patterns, like words.”
“You mean, like a longer cereal ad?”
“No, Ma. Look. It’s like a whole newspaper article, or something. But I don’t think they’re tawkin’ English. That would havta mean there’s a real prize for decoding it.”
“But you don’t think it’s in English?”
“Nah. Pattern ain’t right.”
She moved in closer, adjusted her glasses, and squinted. “You sure there’s a pattern?”
Jimmy nodded enthusiastically.
“Where’d you find this?”
“Inside that nickel,” he said, pointing to the two unscrewed halves. “Some foreign guy paid for a paper with it.”
“Foreign guy . . .” The headlines on the morning paper read, “Tito Appeals to Stalin for Reinstatement” and “Store Union to Aid in Red Probe.”
“This is definitely bigger ’en Dick Tracy—right, Ma?”
“Yes, Jimmy. We need to go find a cop.”
July 2, 1948
The Quarry at Santorini
The peculiar qualities with which light reflected from and around the island’s cliffs produced an eerie beauty like nowhere else on earth—with perhaps the skies over New Mexico coming in as a close runner-up, Mac told himself. Presently, late afternoon was promising another of the lagoon’s legendary sunsets, in the direction of the little white island fragment where an entire Russian crew had fallen before the Kraken.
To everyone gathered around the body in the quarry, the island paradise was degenerating into a fairly good approximation of hell. Or at least it will serve, Mac told himself, until some more demon-infested version comes along to replace it.
