2012 (16 page)

They had gotten the date, he felt sure, from a city that was now deep underwater off the coast of Cuba. This immense metropolis was probably the capital of what legend called Atlantis, and there was something quite strange about it. What was strange was that the British Navy had been guarding the site, and the Canadian archaeological group who had made the discovery ten years ago had been prevented from returning.

It should have been a scandal, but the profession was just as happy that the discovery was being suppressed. Its revelation would overturn a hundred years of theory and wreck dozens of important careers.

Martin had lobbied various institutes to open research in the area. He’d even published a letter condemning the military action in the Archaeological Record. He’d demanded explanations.

They weren’t trying to kill him because they thought he was to blame for the disaster. They were trying to kill him because he was one of the few people in the world who had any chance of understanding it.

The bell stopped with a suddenness that seemed almost to shudder the dew that clung to the three yellow leaves he could see through his bars. He saw cars go past, heading for the church. They were gathering there, then they would come for him.

He felt like a rat, exactly like a rat, except that a rat only wanted to escape, and he was tormented by thoughts of his family. All night, he’d suffered over Lindy and his poor little Winnie who had been limping, and his lost son.

The things that had appeared behind the wanderers after dark-he thought that they must be a sort of cleanup crew, destroying the stragglers. That mangled boy had been their work.

Was Trevor, also, a mangled boy?

Sounds came from the office, a voice raised, then dropping. Bobby’s voice. Sounded angry. Then he blustered in. “Fifty-six to fifteen,” he said, not looking at Martin.

“Hey,” Martin said.

“I have no idea how to hang anybody.”

“Use your pistol.”

“Martin-” He had to stop. He swallowed, pulled himself together. “We gotta go now. We’re gonna do it over by the bank. There’s that tree there.”

“Christ, you’re not serious about this?”

“They’re getting rope. I’m sorry. So damn sorry.”

This was actually going to happen. “Bobby, I haven’t done anything.”

“I know it.” He raised his eyes. “But what if you have?”

“Oh, for God’s sake!”

“Martin, please don’t make me-you know, drag you.”

As Martin came out, Bobby took his cuffs off his belt.

“Bobby, come on.”

“Martin, it’s regs.”

“Okay, if you put the cuffs on me, I am going to need to be dragged every inch of the way, and I am going to scream, goddamn it, because I have lost everything, and now even my life. My life, Bobby, and for nothing. Not a thing. Zip.”

Bobby put a hand on Martin’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s deal with this.”

They would not know how to hang anybody, and so would tie the rope around his neck and drag him up, where he would die in a slow fugue of suffocation.

Bobby had been a friend not to cuff him, and he noticed, also, that he wasn’t exactly holding onto him as they crossed the square where, in happier days, the Lautner Super-Regional High School band had performed in the bandstand.

Those afternoons had been so damned good, with kids and dogs running around underfoot, and women from the churches selling brownies in the shady park. World without end, amen.

They approached a sullen, miserable little crowd. Nobody wanted this to happen, Martin could see that. They were looking away from him. “Bobby, you gotta shoot me, don’t try this hanging thing, nobody knows what they’re doing.”

“Martin, I can’t.”

A car door slammed, and Rosie got out. She strode over to them. “Come on, Bobby, we’re going home right now.”

“Rosie, this is law, here,” Bobbie said.

“It’s murder!”

“I have a wanted notice. It’s official. So this is law.”

“Then something’s wrong, because Martin’s probably the one person in the world who can help ‘em get this thing straightened out, so why do they want him dead? It doesn’t make sense.” She turned to the others. “Go on home now. Go on, all of you!”

Malcolm Freer and his wife and two boys went over to their old station wagon and got in. They drove off without a word.

“See, at least somebody around here has some sense.” Then, in a lower voice, “Bobby, this is wrong, this is just dead wrong.”

His hand dropped away from Martin’s shoulder. Bill West stood waiting, wearing his butcher’s apron, with a big coil of rope in his hands. Nobody spoke.

Martin realized what Bobby had done. He knew that he had a few seconds, but only a few.

He had also understood something back in that cell. He was indeed unique in the world. Something he knew, or could potentially do, was so dangerous to the enemy that they wanted him dead. That’s why this little corner of Kansas had been scraped the way it had, and why the leaflet had been dropped.

He was not a runner. He’d never even been in the army, or run a marathon or-well, he didn’t even jog.

Bill and Mary West both jogged, he saw them all the time. Will Simpson was a black belt.

Nevertheless, Martin took his chance. He turned and ran wildly toward the far side of the square.

A shot, shockingly loud, whinged off into the trees.

Rosie’s voice rang out. “Bobby, don’t you dare!”

Bobby was too good with a pistol to have missed at this range, and Martin reached the corner of the bank still intact. Behind him, though, he heard engines start up and feet slam on pavement. They all had guns, too, and most of them were skilled hunters.

He sprinted across to Harper’s Café where he’d eaten a thousand hamburgers, then went out the back and into the alley. He was completely at a loss. Then he saw a pickup sitting next to the wall, its bed full of sodden boxes of what he thought had once been vegetables, and he realized that there must be dozens of abandoned vehicles around town. He went up to the truck, but there were no keys. He heard an engine snarl nearby. A car was turning into the alley.

He jumped into the cab of the truck and crouched down. The car came slipping quietly along. In it were Bill West and his son Coleman, both with deer rifles.

How could Bill set a boy of thirteen to hunting a man? But they were so scared now, they weren’t themselves, none of them, that’s why they were willing to engage in this insanity. The savage was never far from the surface, not in anybody, and frankly, he needed a gun, too. And a damn car.

The best place to find a car with keys left in it would be around one of the churches. People arriving late would have been in a panic, and might well have left their keys, and might well have ended up wandering.

The nearest was First Christ, and that was where he would try to go. He didn’t think he was capable of eluding them long enough to get farther away, over to Saint Pete’s, for example.

He was just getting out of the truck when another vehicle appeared, nosing along even more quietly than the Wests’ Lincoln. It was Mrs. Tarnauer’s Prius. He thought that he might get her out of it, he even thought that he could snap the old woman’s neck, but he stayed below the edge of the window as she passed. She wanted to kill him, too, did Jesse Tarnauer. She’d been a teacher, then a librarian.

As soon as she’d gone, he crossed the alley and went into the back of the Darling Dixie children’s store, long since driven out of business by big chains. Nobody bought lacy dresses for their girls anymore, and boys wore T-shirts six sizes too big, not little gabardine suits with fake handkerchiefs in the breast pockets.

Carefully, he approached the display window. Across the street was the First Christ parking lot, which was indeed full of cars. There were a number parked askew, doors opened, as if the occupants had been very late and had jumped out and run in.

He heard a sound, then, the snarl of a really big engine. He listened. What could that be? Nobody would be chasing him on a tractor, surely.

He trotted across the street and got into one of the badly parked cars, a Buick Lucerne that smelled of cigarettes and the floral perfume that Louise C. Wright wore. Her daughter Pam worked as a manager at the Target. Louise was a lush, professional grade.

The car started normally, thank God. He drove out of the parking lot and headed north up Elko. He turned down the Makepeaces’ driveway and went through their backyard, then across the Morgans’ east field, with the car slipping and sliding in the dusty furrows. He broke through a barbed-wire fence and drove onto the same dirt road where he and Lindy had come to neck when they were kids.

As he went down the road, he floored the gas, then hit the brakes to make a turn onto 215. Anybody who saw him would assume that he was heading toward the interstate. Two-fifteen ran straight for about five miles to a long bend, and he forced the car to give all it had. It accelerated to ninety, then a hundred, then 106.

As soon as he reached the bend and was out of sight of anybody behind him, he braked, then took Farm Road 2141, which headed toward the Smokes and home.

Yet again, he made a turn, this time onto Six Mile Road. He followed it up into the Western Division where Louise lived. Her little place was familiar enough to him. She tutored French, of all the improbable sidelines, and Trevor had been among her pupils. Like his father, he was not good at languages.

And suddenly Martin was screaming and hammering the steering wheel and kicking like a lion in a net. He was stunned, he had no idea that this rage was in him. For a moment, it seemed as if it was happening to somebody else, but when the car began swerving across the highway, it didn’t, and he had to fight to regain control.

He caught his breath, choked back another roar, and thought, There are deep things inside us that we aren’t even aware of. Deep, deep things. He was extremely sad, but it was a dullness in the pit of his stomach, not the savagery that had come boiling up just now. He thought, Not only can I kill, I want to kill.

His people had turned against him so easily, just on the strength of a piece of paper dropped either by the enemy himself or by traitors in his employ.

Unfortunately, he was fairly sure that the enemy was overreacting. He had no idea what he might do to defeat them. In fact, the modern world was about as prepared to deal with all this as the Aztecs and Incas had been prepared to deal with the Spaniards. It had taken the Aztecs weeks just to figure out that the horses and the men riding them were two different creatures, and they had not understood how guns worked at all. Of course they had considered their adversaries gods. They had observed them working magic.

The Aztec was overwhelmed by the gun, we by the light. We did not understand what we were seeing, either, any more than the Aztecs had understood the actual way the horse and man worked together.

The Aztec-also using a version of the Mayan calendar-had first encountered the Spaniards on the day that their reverenced god Quetzalcoatl had been prophesied to return. So they were even more certain that they were gods. They fit right in to the Aztecs’ cosmology.

Somebody, working thousands of years in advance, had known when that would happen. But who? How?

Did the answer lie a mile beneath the sea off the coast of Cuba, and had the Brits been obstructing exploration to make sure it was not found?

This, he thought, was true. Had to be. Coupled with the attempt to take him out, there was now no question in his mind but that the enemy had subverted world government, and had done so years ago.

What had been that general’s name? Samson. General Samson, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That man had been evil.

But there was another, deeper truth, wasn’t there? It was that the Spaniards were far more vulnerable than they had seemed. They hadn’t defeated anybody. The Aztecs had been defeated not by the Spaniard’s strength, but by their own ignorance. In fact, Spanish technology had not been that far in advance of Aztec technology, and in many ways behind that of the Incas. Perhaps far behind. Perhaps we were still behind.

He pulled into Louise’s driveway and was careful to park the car in its usual place. Then he got out and went around the house and back into the stand of trees behind it. He needed to get out of sight and stay out of sight, but this was Kansas and these hills were low, their woods were sparse, and they were full of meadows and grassy glades. If anybody realized he’d come this way, they would be likely at some point to spot him.

He moved through the trees and up toward the ridge line that would lead him, after about half a mile, to the old road where he used to bring his archaeology students to search for remains of the stagecoach that had crashed there in the nineteenth century.

He’d also searched the area for fossils and arrowheads, which he’d found by the dozens, even some Folsom points ten thousand years old. He’d searched these hills with Trevor, teaching him the skills that he knew, of finding things that normally would not be found.

He clambered up the ridge, and from here had a long view across to town. He could pick out the white steeples of the churches, the roof of the bank, the roofs of houses, and the top of the Burnside Building above the tree line. He knew this spot well, he’d been coming to it since he was a boy and out hiking alone, come and wondered here about time and chance, and what life might bring.

He thought, Whoever is here is stripping away the people but leaving everything else intact. What the enemy was going to have was an empty but intact world, and millions upon millions of slaves.

Thus he knew that the enemy might be more technologically advanced than we were, but he had a more primitive culture. No modern human society used slaves, or even needed them.

He wondered what manner of creature might come to this same spot in the future, and contemplate those steeples.

Then, incredibly, he heard a familiar but unexpected sound. Somewhere nearby, a helicopter was moving slowly from east to west, paralleling the ridgeline but out of sight, therefore below it in the draw where the Saunders River flowed.

Who would have a helicopter? Certainly not Lautner County. Could it be the state police? That had been a state cop who’d showed up last night, completely oblivious to the danger, so maybe they were still functioning.