The Descent Part 50

On the third night, the mercenaries came for the girl again. Hours later she was returned, semiconscious. While she and Troy washed the girl, Ali quietly hummed a tune. She wasn't even aware of it until Troy said, 'Ali, look!'

Ali raised her eyes from the yellowing bruises on the child's pelvic saddle. The girl was staring at her with tears running down her cheeks. Ali lifted the hum into words. 'Through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come,' she softly sang. ''Tis grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.'

The girl began sobbing. Ali made the mistake of taking the child in her arms. The kindness triggered a terrible storm of kicking and thrashing and rejection. It was a horrible enlightening moment, for now Ali knew the girl had once had a mother who had sung that song.

All night Ali spent with the captive, watching her. In her fourteen years the girl had experienced more of womanhood than Ali had in thirty-four. She had been married, or mated. She appeared to have borne a child. And so far she had kept her sanity through brutal ma.s.s rapes. Her inner strength was amazing.

Next morning Twiggs needed to go to the bathroom for his first time since the starvation. Being Twiggs, he did not ask the soldiers' permission to leave the room. One of the mercenaries shot him dead.

That spelled the end of what little freedom the rest of them had. Walker ordered the scientists bound, wired, and removed to a deeper room. Ali was not surprised. For some time now, she had known their execution was imminent.

24 - TABULA RASA.

And darkness was upon the face of the Deep -GENESIS 1:2.

New York City The hotel suite was dark except for the blue flicker of the TV.

It was a riddle: television on, volume off, in a blind man's room. Once upon a time, de l'Orme might have orchestrated such a contradiction just to confound his visitors. Tonight he had no visitors. The maid had forgotten to turn off her soaps.

Now the screen showed the Times Square ball as it descended toward the deliriously happy mob.

De l'Orme was browsing his Meister Eckhart. The thirteenth-century mystic had preached such strange things with such common words. And in the bowels of the Dark Ages, so boldly.

G.o.d lies in wait for us. His love is like a fisherman's hook. No fish comes to the fisherman that is not caught on his hook. Once it takes the hook, the fish is forfeit to the fisherman. In vain it twists. .h.i.ther and thither - the fisherman is certain of his catch. And so I say of love. The one who hangs on this hook is caught so fast that foot and hand, mouth, eyes and heart are bound to be G.o.d's. And the more surely caught, the more surely you will be freed.

No wonder the theologian had been condemned by the Inquisition and excommunicated. G.o.d as dominatrix! More dizzying still, man freed of G.o.d. G.o.d freed of G.o.d. And then what? Nothingness. You penetrated the darkness and emerged into the same light you had left in the first place. Then why leave in the first place? de l'Orme wondered. For the journey itself? Is that the best we have to do with ourselves? These were his thoughts when the phone rang.

'Do you know my voice, yes or no?' asked the man on the far end.

'Bud?' said de l'Orme.

'Great... my name,' Parsifal mumbled.

'Where are you?'

'Huh-uh.' The astronaut sounded sluggish. Drunk. The Golden Boy?

'Something's troubling you,' de l'Orme said.

'You bet. Is Santos with you?'

'No.'

'Where is he?' Parsifal demanded. 'Or do you even know?'

'The Koreas,' said de l'Orme, not exactly certain which one. 'Another set of hadals has surfaced. He's recording some of the artifacts they brought with them. Emblems of a deity stamped into gold foil.'

'Korea. He told you that?'

'I sent him, Bud.'

'What makes you so sure he's where you sent him?' Parsifal asked.

De l'Orme took his gla.s.ses off. He rubbed his eyes and opened them, and they were white, with no retina or pupil. Distant fireworks streaked his face with sparks of color. He waited.

'I've been trying to call the others,' Parsifal said. 'All night, nothing.'

'It's New Year's Eve,' said de l'Orme. 'Perhaps they're with their families.'

'No one's told you.' It was an accusation, not a question.

'I'm afraid not, whatever it is.'

'It's too late. You really don't know? Where have you been?'

'Right here. A touch of the flu, I haven't left my room in a week.'

'Ever heard of The New York Times? Don't you listen to the news?'

'I gave myself the solitude. Fill me in, if you please. I can't help if I don't know.'

'Help?'

'Please.'

'We're in great danger. You shouldn't be at that phone.'

It came out in a tangle. There had been a great fire at the Metropolitan Museum's Map Room two weeks ago. And before that, a bomb explosion in an ancient cliffside temple library at Yungang in China, which the PLA was blaming on Muslim separatists. Archives and archaeological sites in ten or more countries had been vandalized or destroyed in the past month.

'I've heard about the Met, of course. That was everywhere. But the rest of this, what connects them?'

'Someone's trying to erase our information. It's like someone's finishing business. Wiping out his tracks.'

'What tracks? Burning museums. Blowing up libraries. What purpose could that serve?'

'He's closing shop.'

'He? Who are you talking about? You don't make sense.'

Parsifal mentioned several other events, including a fire at the Cambridge Library housing the ancient Cairogenizah fragments.

'Gone,' he said. 'Burned to the ground. Defaced. Blown to pieces.'

'Those are all places we've visited over the last year.'

'Someone has been erasing our information for some time now,' said Parsifal. 'Until recently they've been small erasures mostly, an altered ma.n.u.script here, a photo negative disappearing there. Now the destruction seems more wholesale and spectacular. It's like someone's trying to finish business before clearing out of town.'

'A coincidence,' said de l'Orme. 'Book burners. A pogrom. Anti-intellectuals. The lumpen are rampant these days.'

'It's no coincidence. He used us. Like bloodhounds. Turned us loose on his own trail. Had us hunt him. And now he's backtracking.'

'He?'

'Who do you think?'

'But what does it accomplish? Even if you were right, he merely erases our footnotes, not our conclusions.'

'He erases his own image.'

'Then he defaces himself. What does that change?' But even as he spoke, de l'Orme felt wrong. Were those distant sirens or alarms tripping in his own head?

'It destroys our memory,' said Parsifal. 'It wipes clean his presence.'

'But we know him now. At least we know everything the evidence has already shown. Our memory is fixed.'

'We're the last testimony,' said Parsifal. 'After us, it's back to tabula rasa.'

De l'Orme was missing pieces of the puzzle. A week behind closed doors, and it was as if the world had changed orbit. Or Parsifal had.

De l'Orme tried to arrange the information. 'You're suggesting we've led our foe on a tour of his own clues. That it's an inside job. That Satan is one of us. That he - or she? - is now revisiting our evidence and spoiling it. Again, why? What does he accomplish by destroying all the past images of himself? If our theory of a reincarnated line of hadal kings is true, then he'll reappear next time with a different face.'

'But with all his same subconscious patterns,' said Parsifal. 'Remember? We talked about that. You can't change your fundamental nature. It's like a fingerprint. He can try to alter his behavior, but five thousand years of human evidence has made him identifiable. If not to us, then to the next Beowulf gang, or the next. No evidence, no discovery. He becomes the invisible man. Whatever the h.e.l.l he is.'

'Let him rampage,' de l'Orme said. He was speaking as much to Parsifal's agitation as about their hadal prey. 'By the time he finishes his vandalism, we'll know him better than he knows himself. We're close.'

He listened to Parsifal's hard breathing on the other end. The astronaut muttered inaudibly. De l'Orme could hear wind lashing the telephone booth. Close by, a sixteen-wheel truck blatted down through lower gears. He pictured Parsifal at some forlorn pit stop along an interstate.

'Go home,' de l'Orme counseled.

'Whose side are you on? That's what I really called about. Whose side are you on?'

'Whose side am I on?'

'That's what this whole thing is about, isn't it?' Parsifal's voice trailed off. The wind invaded. He sounded like a man losing mind and body to the storm.

'Your wife has to be wondering where you are.'

'And have her end up like Mustafah? We've said goodbye. She'll never see me again. It's for her own good.'

There was a b.u.mp, and then scratching at de l'Orme's window. He drew back into his presumption of darkness, put his spine against the corduroy sofa. He listened. Claws raked at the gla.s.s. And there, he tracked it, the beat of wings. A bird. Or an angel. Lost among the skysc.r.a.pers.

'What about Mustafah?'

'You have to know.'

'I don't.'

'He was found last Friday, in Istanbul. What was left of him was floating in the underground reservoir at Yerebatan Sarayi. You really don't know? He was killed the same day a bomb was found in the Hagia Sofia. We're part of the evidence, don't you see?'

With great, concentrated precision, de l'Orme laid his gla.s.ses on the side table. He felt dizzy. He wanted to resist, to challenge Parsifal, to make him retract this terrible news.

'There's only one person who can be doing this,' said Parsifal. 'You know it as well as I do.'

There was a minute of relative silence, neither man speaking. The phone filled with blizzard gales and the beep-beep of snowplows setting off to battle the drifted highways. Then Parsifal spoke again. 'I know how close you two were.' His lucidity, his compa.s.sion, cemented the revelation.

'Yes,' de l'Orme said.

It was the worst falseness he could imagine. The man's obsession had guided them. And now he had disinherited them, body and spirit. No, that was wrong, for they'd never been included in his inheritance to begin with. From the start, he had merely exploited them. They had been like livestock to him, to be ridden to death.

'You must get away from him,' said Parsifal.

But de l'Orme's thoughts were on the traitor. He tried to configure the thousands of deceptions that had been perpetrated on them. A king's audacity! Almost in admiration, he whispered the name.

'Louder,' said Parsifal. 'I can't hear you over the wind.'

'Thomas,' de l'Orme said again. What magnificent courage! What ruthless deception! It was dizzying, the depths of his plotting. What had he been after then? Who was he really? And why commission a posse to hunt himself down?

'Then you've heard,' shouted Parsifal. His blizzard was getting worse.

'They've found him?'

'Yes.'

De l'Orme was astounded. 'But that means we've won.'

'Have you lost your mind?' said Parsifal.

'Have you lost yours? Why are you running? They've caught him. Now we can interview him directly. We must go to him immediately. Give me the details, man.'

'Caught him? Thomas?'

De l'Orme heard Parsifal's confusion, and he felt equally dumbfounded. Even after so many months spent treating the hadal as a common man, Satan's mortality did not come naturally. How could one catch Satan? Yet here it was. They had accomplished the impossible. They had transcended myth.

'Where is he? What have they done with him?'

'Thomas, you mean?'

'Yes, Thomas.'

'But Thomas is dead.'

'Thomas?'

'I thought you said you knew.'

'No,' groaned de l'Orme.