The Keepers of the Library (10 page)

Clarissa settled into a boring period of solitude. She did her best to pray but she could only remember a few hymns and prayers from beginning to end. She was a prisoner in her cell, but the food was plentiful and her bed was comfortable. She strained her ears to listen for voices from other cells, and when she visited the outhouse, she tried to spy into the dark windows of neighboring cells. The only thing she knew with certainty was that there was a baby down the hall. She heard it crying from time to time as plainly as can be.

When her menses came she dutifully reported it to Sister Hazel who seemed pleased at the news. Two weeks to the day later her life changed forever.

On the appointed morning, Sister Hazel arrived after her morning meal and stood over her.

“Today is the most important day in your life, child. The Lord is calling you for a higher purpose, and that purpose will be fulfilled presently. I am taking you to a part of the abbey that only a privileged few know about.”

“Is it the small chapel, yonder,” Clarissa said, pointing.

“You’re a very curious and clever girl, aren’t you? Yes, that is where we are going. The girls who go there are truly the chosen ones. You are to be one in a long line who have done their duty and been rewarded with the knowledge and certainty that they have served God in a special and singular way.”

“What am I t’ do?” she asked, trembling.

“Just follow Sister Sabeline’s instructions when you are there. She will personally supervise the ritual.”

“What’s a ritual?”

“Always the questions with you! All I will tell you is that some girls, the weak ones, become frightened by what they see. But you are not weak, are you, Clarissa?”

“Nae, Sister.”

“No indeed. You will be brave, you will not cry, and you will obey Sister Sabeline.”

“Aye, Sister.”

“Then come along.”

It was another fine day and she turned her face to the warmth of the sun. Her heart was fluttering with fear but she was resolute. If God had chosen her for some high purpose, then she would bend to his will. Whatever the circumstances.

At the chapel door Sister Sabeline was waiting for them. Sister Hazel handed Clarissa off and quickly left. The old nun sternly bade the girl to follow her inside. Clarissa was surprised to see that the chapel was entirely empty with a bluestone floor, adorned only with a gilded wooden crucifix affixed to the wall above a dark oak door at the rear.

Sister Sabeline pushed the door open, took Clarissa’s hand, and pulled her through.

Clarissa found herself on steep, spiraling stairs that bored into the earth. There were torches set at intervals but she still had to take care with her footfalls. The stairs wound so tightly that after a while she felt her head spinning. When they could descend no farther an enormous door blocked their progress.

Sister Sabeline unlocked the door with a heavy black iron key affixed to her leather belt. To open it, she had to lean into it with all her might.

They were in a dim cavern.

Clarissa squinted and tried to make sense of what she saw. Wide-eyed, she stared at Sabeline and was about to speak when the nun told her not to utter a single word.

The chamber had a domed ceiling that was plastered and whitewashed to increase the luminosity of the candles spaced out on rows of long tables.

Clarissa stopped breathing when she realized what she was looking at. Seated at the tables, shoulder to shoulder, were dozens of ginger-haired men and boys with ghostly white skin, each one grasping a quill, dipping and writing on sheets of parchment producing a collective din of scratching that filled her ears. Some of the writers were old men, some young boys, but despite their ages they all looked similar to one another. Every face was as blank and staring as the next, green eyes boring into sheets of white parchment.

My God, who are these creatures, she thought.

What are they?

“Remember. Say nothing!” Sabeline warned her.

None of the pale-skinned men seemed to take notice as Sabeline dragged her in front of them one by one, row by row.

Suddenly, one man raised his head and looked straight at her. He was ancient, perhaps the eldest. His skin was wrinkled and slack, and there were only a few patches of reddish gray hair on his scaly, pink scalp. Clarissa noticed that the bony fingers on his right hand were colored with ink and that the front of his robe was stained yellow with food. He started to breathe heavily, emitting high-pitched wheezes. Then a low groan emanated from his throat, a primitive animalistic sound that made Clarissa’s knees go weak.

“I cannot believe it,” Sister Sabeline mumbled. “I simply cannot believe it.”

The nun took one of the candles and yanked at Clarissa’s sleeve the way one pulls at a stubborn mule, but when she remained rooted, Sister Sabeline yanked again, setting Clarissa’s legs in motion. At the end of the row, the nun pulled her toward a pitch-black archway.

Clarissa didn’t want to pass through into that void but she was a rag doll in the old nun’s grasp. As she passed through the arch, she turned her head and saw the old wheezing man rise from his table.

The moment she passed through the arch, a hideous stench filled her nostrils. Instinctively she recognized it as the smell of death. She felt her stomach turning inside out but she was able to hold on to her breakfast.

The first yellow skeleton she saw by the light of Sister Sabeline’s candle made her gasp in fear. Its jaw was wide open, as if screaming. There were bits of adherent flesh and hair. Its eyes had desiccated into masses the size of peas. Progressing farther into the catacombs she saw others—many others—skeletons too numerous to count, stacked into loculi carved into limestone. She’d seen a dead body once in her life, her grandfather laid out before the hearth before he was wrapped and carried out to the burial ground. But that had in no way braced her for the immensity of all this death.

“What is this place?” she gasped.

“Hush!” the nun said. “You are not to speak!”

They stopped in a small chamber, lined floor to ceiling with loculi. Sister Sabeline held the candle in her outstretched arm.

Clarissa was shaking like a dog that had just been pulled from the waters of a frozen pond. She heard a shuffle.

Someone was coming.

“Look at me!” the nun commanded. “Do not turn away.”

Someone was behind her.

She could not obey. She pivoted and saw the immobile face of the old man in the flickering light. He was staring at her with his liquid, green eyes.

“You have no idea how blessed you are, girl,” Sister Sabeline hissed. “This is no ordinary scribe. He is Titus, the most venerable, the most prolific. In all my years, he has never chosen a girl. You may be his first! Do your duty well.”

My duty, Clarissa thought! God help me!

The old man started to make low, grunting sounds and began pawing himself.

“Lift your gown,” Sister Sabeline shouted. “And bend over. Do it now!”

Her small pathetic life flashed through her mind. If she ran, where would she go? She had no one to help her, nowhere to hide, no money, no friends. There was only one thing for her to do.

She grabbed the hem of her gown and lifted it to her waist.

“Good, now bend toward me.”

She felt pressure against her privates then a sharp jolt of pain as her maidenhead was breached. Growing up on a farm, she’d seen animals in heat. She knew about these things. She felt like a ewe being mounted. She closed her eyes tightly, clamped her jaw, and thought only one thought over and over.

I will have a baby. I will have a baby.

It didn’t last long. The old man’s grunting reached a crescendo, and when he was done he immediately withdrew and shuffled away.

“Stand up now,” Sister Sabeline ordered.

Blinking away her salty tears, Clarissa stood and let her robe fall to her ankles.

“There. You have done your duty and done it well. I’ll take you back to your dormitory now. You will lie on your back with your knees up for three days. All your needs will be attended to by Sister Hazel.”

“Will I have a baby?” she asked plaintively.

“You will!” Sister Sabeline said. “A very special one.”

A
drenaline purged Will’s fatigue. He sat tense
and rigid beside Annie as she drove their hired car south toward Pinn. It was a moonless night. Theirs was the only vehicle on the narrow road. In the high beams all he could see were hedgerows, drystone walls, and the occasional lonely, dark, limestone cottage.

Annie stifled a yawn. It spoke volumes to him. She wasn’t committed to the assignment. She didn’t have the zeal he had when he was a young Turk. Or the fire in her eyes that Nancy had when she was on a case. Maybe it was just Annie. Maybe it was the younger generation. Maybe it was the pernicious effect of the Horizon. He didn’t much care. His son was somewhere out there in the inky wilderness, in peril. And Will required the complete commitment of everyone involved in finding him.

“How far are we?” he asked.

“Not very. I’m looking for Officer Wilson’s car. He should be there already.”

Will had called Nancy and forwarded Phillip’s message. She was working late at the Bureau and immediately pinpointed the coordinates of Phillip’s beacon on a satellite map. “It’s farmland,” she had
said. “Not many buildings around. What the hell is he doing there, Will?”

“Wish I knew, Nance. Is there a terrorist group in your files called the Librarians?”

He had listened as she issued voice commands to her computer.

“Nothing,” she had said.

“They could be new. The name worries the hell out of me.”

“Me too,” she had said. He’d heard the palpable fear in her voice. She was a mother first. “It could be something ad hoc involving the Horizon. Maybe Phillip’s connection to you made him a symbolic target.”

“His essay was all over the Net,” Will had said.

“Yes, it was.”

“Is there a chance in hell this has got something to do with your Chinese case?”

“I don’t want to rule anything out. Parish relented. I was able to duck the China trip. Should I try to get permission to fly over to the UK?”

“No, stay put. We may need you to do things in Washington that can’t be done here. I don’t trust MI5. They’ve given me a girl not much older than Phil.”

There had been a pause. He had known what Nancy was thinking, but he’d been sure that under the circumstances she wasn’t about to ask: “Is she pretty?”

Instead, she had said, “Will, find him and bring him home. And listen, take care of that silly heart of yours.”

Ahead, in the dark, Officer Wilson’s car was at the side of the road with its interior lights on. Annie slowed and pulled in behind him. They met in the frigid night air.

Wilson pointed toward the darkness. “It’s a chilly night for a lad t’ be out in th’ Dales, eh?”

“Then we’d better find him fast,” Will said flatly. “Are there many houses around here?”

“Maybe seven or eight t’ a square mile. Nae many fowk round here,” the officer said. “This is sheep country.”

Wilson had a police-configured NetPen. The screen was deployed and was displaying a terrain map with a pin marking the satellite position of Phillip’s beacon.

“How far is that?” Annie asked.

“About three-quarters of a mile. It’s gey dark. I’ve only got the one torch—sorry about that—so unless you’ve got your own, we’ll need t’ stay close.”

They found a gap in a hedgerow and began walking into a meadow, dark as sable. Will had no sense of the terrain beyond what he could see in the yellow cone of the policeman’s flashlight. The grass below his feet was winter-clumped and crusty with frost. He shuddered at the thought of Phillip’s stumbling about in the alien landscape.

After a while, he was aware from the tightness in his quadriceps that they were climbing. It wasn’t a steep grade, but it was a steady one. He pushed on his neck to check his pulse and prayed that his heart wouldn’t act up. There was a stone wall ahead.

“We’ll go over,” Officer Wilson told them. “Try not t’ dislodge any stones or I’ll have complaints in th’ morning. Farmers around here aren’t too jolly. And mind the sheep mess.”

Wilson climbed it with ease and offered a hand with Annie who, because of her skirt, went over more awkwardly. Ordinarily, Will would have assisted but because she was showing so much skin, he elected to keep his hands to himself. When he crossed over,
he felt a chest palpitation that made him pause and frown in self-loathing pique.

“You okay?” Annie asked.

“I’m fine,” he insisted, picking up the pace. He cupped his mouth with his hands and called out his son’s name.

The policeman swung his beam toward Will, and said, “Mr. Piper, I understand your concern, but I’d ask you t’ wait a bit till we’re better away from th’ farmhouses. It wouldn’t be pretty for an irate landowner t’ come out here with his shotgun looking for a trespasser.”

Will resisted the urge to tell the guy to go to hell. He needed his cooperation.

After twenty minutes of climbing they had traversed another five walls. Wilson looked at his NetPen and declared, “This is th’ approximate spot where your son set off th’ beacon.”

“I’m going to call for him now,” Will said. “You okay with that?”

“We’re high enough we won’t be disturbing anyone in the valley.”

“Phillip!” Will shouted. He waited and called again. “Phillip! It’s Dad! Where are you?”

Will wandered a few yards in each direction and tried again.

The whistling wind carried no response.

The officer swept the hillside with his light.

“What’s that?” Annie asked, pointing at some dark masses.

“Sheep, I reckon,” Wilson said, “but we’ll take a look. Stay together. We don’t need more missin’ people.”

They approached the shapes, which were indeed a cluster of sheep huddled near a small field hangar.
Wilson checked inside. It was empty but for some straw. He poked around with his shoe and declared it clear but Will insisted on repeating the exercise himself.

They spent half an hour wandering the sloping pasture surrounding the beacon coordinates as Will desperately called for his son over and over. Finally, Wilson insisted that they were done for the night. He’d return with more officers in the morning, request a helicopter from the Cumbrian Constabulary, but any more tramping about blindly was pointless. Will reacted furiously, got into Wilson’s face, and had to be tugged away by Annie, who pleaded with him not to alienate the local authorities.

“We don’t have our own resources up here, Will. We need their continued help. Think about your son, okay?”

Will felt the fatigue buckle his knees and bowed to her gentle logic. They hiked down off the fells.

A
t 9
A.M.
local time, Roger Kenney and his team disembarked from a US Air Force Sikorsky transport helicopter at the 421st Air Base Group at RAF Menwith Hill in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. It was sharply cold and the sun was harshly bright. The three Americans slipped on mirrored sunglasses and climbed into a Humvee.

They had landed in England directly from Nevada earlier that morning, touching down at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, the home of the USAF 100th Air Refueling Wing. There they immediately boarded a chopper to take them onwards. In transit, arrangements had been made to support the Groom Lake team at Menwith Hill, the National Security Agency/CIA
satellite ground station and communications data intercept post.

As the chopper approached, Kenney had pointed out the array of giant white antennae housed in globular white radomes stretching out over the countryside. “Kind of look like big old amanitas, don’t they?”

He had two of his best trackers with him, Lopez, an ex-Ranger, and Harper, ex-Delta—both as loyal as they came, both BTH. Lopez yawned, and Harper contagiously followed suit. “What’s that, chief?” Lopez asked.

“Death cap mushrooms. Good eating until they kill you. Just ask Emperor Claudius.”

“Whatever you say, chief,” Lopez said.

Soon they were comfortably belowground, their natural habitat, in a hardened bunker capable of taking a direct nuclear hit. An American NSA liaison officer showed them around their suite which had a situation room, a dedicated VidLink to Groom Lake, some bedrooms and a self-catering kitchen.

“Thanks for your hospitality,” Kenney told the NSA man. “Feel right at home.”

“Just close your eyes and pretend there are cacti up there,” their host said. “Give us a shout if you need wheels.”

“How long’ll it take to drive from here to Kirkby Stephen?”

“How heavy’s your foot?”

“Made of pure lead, man.”

“About two hours.”

While his guys washed up, Kenney logged onto his Groom Lake server and established sync with his surveillance programs. Within a few minutes he was up and running. There was a queue of audio files of
mobile calls between Piper and his wife and text files between Annie Locke and her superiors at MI5.

He quickly learned that little progress had been made during the night but they were set to resume the search for Phillip Piper that morning. Kenney dragged Will’s and Annie’s photos onto the wall screen and as he called up the locations of their mobile devices on a grid map of Cumbria he cheerfully spoke to each photo in turn. “Annie Locke, you are a fine-looking young thing. I hope we get to meet, preferably under some nice fresh sheets. And Will Piper, I hope we get to meet too, real soon. I owe you for Malcolm Frazier. I am going to seriously fuck you up you sanctimonious son of a bitch.”

W
ill paced restlessly in the hotel lobby after consuming a piece of toast and some bad coffee. There was no sign of Annie, and her tardiness irritated him. He was tempted to ditch her but she had the car keys so he marched up the stairs and banged on her door.

Through the wood he heard, “Just a sec!”

She cracked the door and when she saw it was him, she opened it fully. She had a brush in her hand, and though she was dressed her blouse was partially undone.

“Come in if you like,” she said. “Coffee? I had a carafe sent up. There’s plenty left. I’ll just be a minute. I’m not late, am I?”

“Yeah, you’re late,” he said, ambling in and sitting on her unmade bed. He figured the best way to hurry her up was by planting himself.

She was already back in the bathroom. “Terribly sorry about that. I promise to make it up by driving faster.”

“Have you heard from the cop?” he asked.

“Officer Wilson? Yes indeed. He rang to tell me that he and four other officers were going to be searching Mallerstang this morning. I believe they’re in transit.”

“Mallerstang?”

“That’s the valley we were tramping about last night.”

“What about a chopper?”

“Yes, well, that’s a bit more of a challenge, apparently. It’s being serviced.”

“Well, let’s get another one!” Will shouted, rising from the bed. “Call your people in London! Get one from the RAF.”

“I did place a call. Got quite a lot of blowback, I’m afraid. That’s why I’m running behind schedule.”

“Jesus,” he growled. “I’ll call Washington to light a fire under their asses.”

She emerged from the bathroom, hair in order. “By the time that’s yielded results, the Cumbrian police helicopter should be back in operation. I’m hoping for this afternoon. Ready?”

Her blouse was still undone. He pointed helpfully, but when she didn’t catch his drift, he said, “Your buttons.”

She did them up without blushing and looked him in the eye. “When we find your son, I’d like to help you celebrate.”

He sighed. This was familiar territory. “I’m possibly old enough to be your grandfather.”

“You look just fine to me.” She grabbed her coat and her shoulder bag. “You know, I felt I knew you before we met. I think I developed a schoolgirl crush when I saw your waxworks at Madame Tussaud’s during a class trip.”

He grunted in embarrassment. “That can’t be on display anymore.”

“I think they might have taken it out of storage and dusted it off in honor of the one-year countdown to the Horizon. Perhaps you can take Phillip before the two of you return to America.”

T
hey drove south on the same route they had taken the previous night. The B6259 wound through the floor of Mallerstang, a long dale carved into the Pennines by the River Eden. What had been black and unfathomable in the dead of night was now clear and sun-drenched. They were in a U-shaped trough of wilderness. To the east and west were high undulating grassy fells with limestone outcrops and scattered woodlands. The fells rose to nearly two thousand feet on both sides of the road. Down in the narrow valley, Will had a visceral and claustrophobic reaction to the fells. He felt they were leaning in, pressing his chest, making him work for air, a blunted version of the way he’d felt during his heart attack.

Up and down the fells he saw the complicated latticework of drystone walls like those they’d encountered in the dark. Scattered on either side of the road were gray stone farmhouses and barns, some at the end of winding dirt lanes. Because the drystone walls and the buildings were of the same limestone as the crags they seemed to be part of the landscape, thrust out of the bedrock, not man-made.

They passed a small iron sign. Pinn.

“Not much of a town,” Will said.

Annie agreed. “There isn’t even a pub.”

Ahead were two squad cars. Annie passed them and pulled off the road. They were empty. Will got out and strained his eyes, looking for the policemen in the hills, but he couldn’t make them out.

“Okay,” Will said. “Hopefully, the police are doing
what they’re supposed to be doing. Let’s do our job. Where’s the first house?”

They’d stuck a digital pin in the map on Annie’s NetPen display and drawn a circle with a radius of one mile. Within that circle, there were eight houses plotted on the 1:10000 scale Ordnance Survey map. They’d start there, then extend the radius by half-mile increments.

Will scanned the fells. Someone in Mallerstang, someone in this damn valley knew where his son was.

“We’ll walk to the first two, then hop back for the car,” Annie said. “That house up there’s got a charming name: Scar Farm. Think it’s a different meaning than scar face, but nonetheless, perfect place to start.”

The house at Scar Farm was a limestone cottage lying partway up the fell, as were most of the farms in Mallerstang. The meadows down to the road were for hay and silage, and those up on the fells were for rough summer grazing. Annie knocked on the door, then knocked again when there was no response. Will took over and slammed his heavy fist into it a few times.