Changeling (6 page)

In the instant
that he jolted back to consciousness, Professor knew what had happened. He had been in close proximity to enough explosions to recognize the signs even without raising his head. The overpressure wave had pulverized the Land Rover’s windows and sucked the air out of the interior, which more than anything had probably contributed to the black out.

“Jade?” He knew he was shouting, but all he could hear was a persistent ringing sound inside his head.

He could feel her beneath him, still breathing but not moving. Unconscious. Possibly concussed, but more than likely just stunned. He lifted up a little, brushing away particles of safety glass that looked like a shower of diamonds, and stared out at the still burning wreckage of the car they had been chasing. The sedan looked like it had been turned inside out.

Professor did a quick check in every direction to make sure that no one was creeping up from behind, and then turned his attention back to Jade. He shook her gently. “Jade. Wake up!”

She stirred and then came awake with a start. Her lips moved, a question.
What just happened
?

He faced her squarely so she would be able to read his lips. “Gas tank explosion.”

Her forehead creased in confusion.
Rafi
?

“Don’t know.” He laid a hand on her shoulder. “Stay here.”

He doubted that she would heed his admonition, but at least this way, if something happened, she would have only herself to blame. It was the kind of lesson that only experience could teach.

He twisted around and worked the door lever, but the door did not budge. He tried shouldering it open, but the explosion had mangled the door and the surrounding frame and nothing less than the Jaws of Life would get it open. Professor abandoned the effort and instead squirmed through the hole where the window had been.

Heat from the burning car buffeted his face, prompting him to raise a shielding hand to his eyes. There was little chance of a secondary explosion; as he had surmised, the gas tank had been the source of the explosion, though what had triggered the detonation was anyone’s guess. He had not fired a single round outside the museum which strongly suggested that Rafi himself had caused the explosion, probably by shooting into the tank. That explained the what, but not the why.

His first thought was that the killer might have been trying to use the exploding car as a diversion to cover his escape or possibly some kind of flanking attack, but if that had been Rafi’s plan, it had ended disastrously. A smoldering body lay twenty feet beyond the wreckage. His clothing had been almost completely burned away, and his skin had not fared much better, but there was enough left for Professor to recognize the corpse as the young intern that had worked alongside him only a few hours before.

He felt Jade’s hand on his arm, felt her shudder in horror as she glimpsed the burned remains. Whether by accident or intentionally, Rafi had killed himself with the explosion, and any answers that he might have given had gone with him into the afterlife.

“I have to
know,” Jade insisted.

Professor smiled patiently. He had seen this confrontation coming almost from the moment the attack had occurred. “I understand that. And I agree with you. It’s imperative that we learn what’s really going on. But that doesn’t mean you can go off half-cocked. Let me do some digging.”

“Fine. You dig. I’m going to London.”

He sighed. Although they had been taken by ambulance to the hospital in Pisco—the same place Rafi had been treated after his near-drowning—the doctor had elected not to admit them for observation. Professor felt certain part of the reason for the clean bill of health was the fact that the hospital was now under intense scrutiny from the police who wanted to know how Rafi had slipped away from the hospital without anyone raising an alarm. That was fine with Professor. The hospital was too public, too exposed. Their current accommodations, a cabana at a resort in Paracas, were marginally safer, but Professor would not breathe easy until they were well away from Peru.

He and Jade had also been the focus of police scrutiny, initially at least, since there were no witnesses to corroborate their version of what had happened. Several members of the television crew confirmed that Roche had requested a private meeting with Jade but that did little to exonerate them, particularly when those same individuals reported that Jade’s reaction to Roche’s arrival had been “tense.” An investigation into Rafi’s background however had soon shifted the suspicion away from Jade and Professor.

A cursory examination of Rafi Massoud’s social media presence revealed a connection to the “Crescent Defense League,” a coalition of journalists and Muslim social activists dedicated to fighting Islamophobia. Given the level of anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States and Western Europe, which often took the form of outright racism, the mission of the CDL was laudable, but their tactics, more often than not, only added fuel to the fire. Overly generous application of terms like “Islamaphobe,” “racist” and “Nazi” had stifled meaningful discussion of what many believed was valid criticism of a religious belief system that seemed inextricably, and all too often unapologetically, linked to acts of violence, while inflaming extremists on the opposite side of the political equation who were only too happy to wear such titles as a badge of honor.

Some of their crusades had a polarizing effect on people who would otherwise have been sympathetic to the cause, such as the call to boycott a summer blockbuster film because one of the characters used the term “pachys,” an abbreviation of the polysyllabic name of a particular dinosaur species appearing in the movie, which to the ear of CDL social justice warriors sounded suspiciously like “Pakis,” a slur sometimes used in the United Kingdom to refer to citizens of Pakistani descent. What most regarded as a completely innocuous homophone instead became yet another subtle racially-charged attack. The resulting blowback, predictably, was further antipathy toward the so-called “politically correct” movement and an increase in anti-Muslim sentiment, which was, Professor suspected, what the CDL had intended all along.

There was nothing on the CDL’s carefully worded website that could be construed as advocating violent solutions, but the rhetoric was rife with subtext and dog-whistles, particularly in the section listing “Enemies of Islam.”

Gerald Roche had been on that list.

Rafi Massoud seemed to have merely been a passive supporter of the group—a Facebook follower, one of several hundred thousand worldwide—and not an activist, but it was a connection the Peruvian national police had no trouble making. Their working hypothesis was that the young archaeology student, seeing an opportunity to strike a blow against a hated enemy of his faith, had slipped away from the hospital, procured a rental car and a gun, and then gone after Roche, subsequently immolating himself in an explosion intended to take the lives of the only witnesses to his crime.

There was no denying that the narrative fit the facts of the situation, and Professor had seen Rafi pull the trigger on Roche with his own eyes. Nevertheless, something felt off about what had now become the official version of events. He knew Jade felt it, too.

For one thing, although the Crescent Defense League had put Roche on their hit list, there was very little in his conspiracy-theory fueled world-view that could be described as anti-Muslim. In fact, he was on record as being a supporter of Palestine and a vocal critic of the Israeli government, which on balance ought to have made him a hero to the CDL. His inclusion on the list seemed to derive solely from a chapter in one of his books where he described in great detail how religions—not just Islam, but all the world’s major faiths—were being used to advance the “Changeling hegemony.” Professor suspected that Roche, who was almost universally regarded as delusional, had been included to make the other people on the list seem equally deranged—insane by association.

Of greater concern to Professor however was the fact that Roche had specifically sought Jade out, and now he was dead. If the official version was correct, then the attack had been an impulsive action brought on by a coincidental encounter. But if the official version was wrong, there were a lot of missing pieces in the puzzle, and Professor needed to know what they were.

Jade wanted to know as well, and she had every right to feel that way, but in typical fashion, her response was to leap before looking, which in this instance meant traveling to London in order to figure out what Roche had been trying to tell her.

“Roche is the key,” she said, almost shouting, though whether this was because of lingering temporary deafness from the explosion or simply unrestrained ardor, it was impossible to say. “Rafi targeted him. Almost like he wanted to silence him. Roche was onto something.”

“You may be right,” Professor said, not for the first time. “All I’m saying is, take it slow. Before we do anything, we have to figure out who was behind this.”

Jade regarded him warily, as if sensing that he was trying to catch her in a logic trap. “So you agree that this whole Muslim extremist thing is a load of crap.”

“I don’t know what to believe. Something about it seems a little fishy. But what’s the alternative? Changelings? Aliens?” He waggled his hands like Jeremiah Stillman which had the desired effect of getting Jade to crack a smile. “Roche said he was being targeted because of what he had discovered about Phantom Time. I’ve got to say, that makes even
less
sense than the idea that Rafi was some kind of terrorist assassin, but that’s about the only lead we’ve got.”

Jade folded her arms. “Which is why I want to go to London. Roche said he wrote a book explaining everything. We need to see what’s in that book.”

“Roche also said that his publisher was murdered to keep the book from being released. That’s something we can verify with a phone call.”

“Fine. Make the call.”

“I will,” he replied, a little more sharply than intended. She stared back at him for several seconds and then they both burst into laughter.

With the tension finally broken, Professor set about making good on that statement. He took out his smart phone and entered the string “Gerald Roche publisher” into Google. The top result directed to Chameleon Press International, a British firm with a catalogue primarily composed of books written by Roche, but the search also returned an unusual news item.

The story, dating back three weeks, was actually quite familiar, though Professor did not immediately grasp the connection until he looked at the section of the article which had caught the attention of the automated search engine. “Oh, this is interesting.”

“What?” Jade moved closer so she could read over his shoulder.

“Roche was technically wrong when he said his publisher had been killed. Officially speaking at least, Ian Parrott, president and editor-in-chief of Chameleon Press International, is not dead. He’s missing, along with everyone else on Flight 815.”

“Wait,
the
Flight 815?”

Professor nodded. There was no need for further elaboration. Three weeks after the fact, the disappearance of Flight 815, Sydney to Los Angeles, was still the subject of water-cooler discussions across the globe.

The plane, a Boeing 777, had been proceeding along its designated trans-Pacific flight plan, the pilots making routine checks with international air traffic controllers, with no hint of trouble, until three hours into the flight, all communication ceased. The plane’s GPS locator and radar transponder failed to return any signals and an exhaustive—and still ongoing—search for the plane had not yielded even a scrap of physical evidence as to its fate. The only thing that could be said with any certainty was that Flight 815 had not crashed anywhere along its intended course.

The loss of the aircraft was eerily reminiscent of Malaysian Air Flight 370, which had gone missing more than a year earlier, which invariably led to the as yet impossible to refute belief that the two events were connected. The fact that some debris from Flight 370 had recently been discovered did little to silence the speculation. Were the disappearances the work of international terrorists who were hijacking planes in mid-flight in order to build a fleet of jets for a 9-11 style suicide raid? Or was the explanation something even more diabolical? Theories ranged from the improbably mundane to the unthinkably impossible.

“Roche’s publisher was on
the
Flight 815,” Jade said again. “Do you realize what that means?”

“It doesn’t
mean
anything,.” Professor said, a little more forcefully than he intended. “It’s a coincidence. The kind of thing men like Roche and Stillman use to spin their conspiracy webs. Nothing more.”

“Except now Roche is dead,” Jade countered.

Professor lowered his voice an octave, as if afraid that someone might overhear. “Jade, you don’t seriously think that some shadow conspiracy killed hundreds of people just to keep a crazy man from publishing his book. The world doesn’t work that way.”

Even as he said it, he knew better. The world
did
work that way, all the time.

“You know I don’t believe in Changelings or aliens or any crap like that,” Jade said, “but we both know that conspiracies and secret societies
do
exist. Maybe Roche stumbled on something in his research, something that they don’t want anyone knowing. Probably something that doesn’t have anything to do with Phantom Time. The answer will be in Roche’s book. There’s got to be a copy of the manuscript. Either at his place in London, or with the publisher. If you’re right, and this is all just a bizarre coincidence, then we won’t be in any more danger in London than we are right here. But if Roche was killed to keep this a secret, then whoever did it is going to come after us eventually. We need to know.”