If what they had seen was true, the Prisoner had spoken in dreams to a sculptor in Manhattan, to a fat and loathsome guru in Arizona, and to Joseph himself, cajoling, ordering, demanding his freedom. And now, at last, he had gotten it.
Michael LaPierre, a billionaire and religious right demigod, had assumed the Prisoner was none other than the Antichrist himself. Joseph still didn't buy that story, but LaPierre figured he could stick a real feather in his holy cap by sending the "Antichrist" straight to the flames of hell.
Unfortunately for LaPierre, it hadn't quite worked out that way. LaPierre had been the one who had gotten burned, along with the small army he had put together, and the rest of his followers. It had only strengthened the "Religious Right = Nut" equation that was hurting the Republican Party while strengthening the Democrats.
But the worst thing that had resulted from LaPierre's arrogant coup attempt was that the Prisoner was no longer the captive of the church. He or she—or it—was free now, maybe still walking the American desert, or maybe cozying up to Saddam Hussein, for all Joseph knew. And that was a bad thing. No, that was the
mother
of all bad things, because the Prisoner had an incredible and frightening power, one in which Joseph had to believe, for he had seen its results.
The Prisoner had the power to enter certain people's minds and use them. He could point them like guns at each other, making them kill or torture or sabotage or commit suicide or whatever else amused him. And from what Joseph had seen, amusement took an awful lot of blood. If the Prisoner wasn't the Antichrist, then at least he was Superprick, or Badass Supreme, with the potential to become Nasty Master of the Universe, now that he was free of his leaden prison.
Still, several weeks had gone by, and the ops hadn't heard of any new wars or mass acts of violence. If the legends that the church had passed down were true, the Prisoner could take an entire town and turn it against itself. True, some people were immune to the Prisoner's commands, but not enough for comfort.
Every morning, Joseph dreaded waking up, fearful that he would hear the news of an outbreak of mass violence for no conceivable reason, or receive a report from Skye that some dinky burg in Ohio or Missouri or West Virginia was being swept by a wave of murder-suicides. But nothing had happened, and the more time went by, the more apprehensive Joseph grew.
Laika and Tony weren't nearly as jumpy as Joseph, but then, the damned thing hadn't touched them. It hadn't crawled inside their heads while they slept, pretending to be Jesus or some other near-perfect entity, begging with all its tenderhearted might for freedom so that it might live and love and bring all mankind to the truth.
The truth of blood and death. The truth of mass destruction. That was the only truth that would satisfy it.
Joseph closed the file drawer filled with things that foolish people had swallowed or breathed into their lungs, his mind fully on the Prisoner now.
Forget it
, he told himself.
Forget everything that's happened so far. You're on R&R now, so just enjoy yourself in your little macabre museum. Now, what else is there to gawk at?
That was when he saw the babies. There were dozens of them. Some were tiny skeletons braced upright, showing the huge skulls of hydrocephaly. There were larger ones, too, who had survived until the toddler stage, if indeed they had ever been able to toddle with those monstrous heads bearing them earthward. There were others in preservative, babies born with trunks instead of noses, or brains on the outside of their skulls, some with no head whatsoever, or with no limbs, or with flippers instead of arms.
But what lanced through Joseph Stein was a specimen on a bottom shelf, an infant fixed eternally in a standing position it could never have known in life. Its dried skin was as brown as leather, and its eye sockets had been filled with blue glass eyes that looked disturbingly alive in the midst of that parchment-like flesh. It was looking toward the side of the case, away from him, as if denying him the grace of its gaze.
It would not look at him, because he had killed it.
N
o. No, that wasn't right. He hadn't killed any baby, and certainly not this poor child, who must have died a hundred years ago. He had shot that other baby, yes, had thought he had killed it, but it was already dead, starved to death, still held by its mother, who had come at Joseph with a knife in some wretched tenement back in New York.
He had shot at her, in self-defense, and the bullet had passed through the baby and into the mother, killing her, sending the madwoman to wherever her child already was. But when Joseph had thought he had shot the baby, it had been the worst moment of his life. The feeling would never fully leave him, and now, crouching among these cases, filled with children who had never had a chance to live free of agony, the feeling came flooding back. He felt guilty, sick, and empty, and the thought occurred to him that maybe the Prisoner had been able to speak to him inside his head because he was evil, because he was a man who would shoot a child to protect himself.
The Mutter Museum lost all its interest and novelty, and he stood and walked up the steps and through the exhibits, his eyes on the carpet to avoid the evidences of mortality.
Outside on the street, the early autumn day had grown chilly, and he shivered and took several deep breaths of cool air, then started walking back toward the safe house. He had thought he might be able to clear his head of some of the things that were bothering him, all the questions and enigmas yet to be explained. But the questions weren't nearly as bad as the guilt that he had hoped to forget. It hung around his neck like a dead albatross, so viciously demanding that he didn't even notice the man following him until he had walked several blocks.
The man was on the other side of the street, twenty yards behind Joseph. He was carrying a shopping bag for cover, but he couldn't hide the posture and attitude indigenous to feds. Despite the leather jacket and jeans, the man was a little too upright, alert in more than a street-smart way.
Once he had made him, Joseph tried not to notice him anymore. The man didn't want just Joseph, he wanted all three of them, so he wouldn't try and pounce on his prey until he reached its den. And then it could get very ugly.
Three rogue CIA agents working inside the United States, agents who had capped an FBI man when he'd tried to arrest them in their illegal activities, agents who had been at the scene when Michael LaPierre had begun his unsuccessful war against the government. No, definitely not a scenario the ops wanted to get in the middle of.
And Langley wouldn't want them there, either. Skye would let them twist in the wind. Rogues. Outlaws. Not pretty, but it happened, despite the best efforts of the agency.
Hell, maybe he was just being paranoid. Maybe the guy was just an Al Gore-type wooden stiff who just happened to be walking in the same direction as Joseph.
And maybe not. Paranoia could be your friend. It had saved a lot of lives over the years, including his own a couple of times. No reason to doubt it now.
Joseph turned right at the corner, taking the man away from the safe house. The man followed about as innocently as a pit bull ripping open a cat. Joseph smiled to himself. He would take no more turns until he was ready to lose the man for good.
A possibility presented itself after he had gone another few blocks. A covered alley ran down between two townhouses, and Joseph, not changing his pace, entered it. It could have been a dead end, but instead it cut across to the next street.
He darted through and found himself on a street with a number of small shops. He quickly entered a coffee shop, sat near the back, where he could still see through the window, and watched as the man following him trotted by, glancing around as he ran. Joseph ordered a sandwich and coffee, and spent a half hour over his modest meal.
The man was nowhere in sight when Joseph stepped back onto the street. He started walking away from the safe house. Several blocks later, when he felt sure no one was following him, he flagged a cab and had it drop him off seven blocks north and two west of the apartment, and walked the rest of the way back.
When he got there, Tony was in the kitchen cooking homemade cheese ravioli and Laika was at one of a row of three computers on a long table against the living room wall. They both took the time to greet him. "You're pretty late," Laika said. "I was starting to worry." A smile of concern creased the caf
é
au lait skin of her face.
"Not me," Tony said, coming in from the kitchen. The full chef's apron he wore made his stocky frame look even more solid. "I just figured you'd gotten all wrapped up in those stiffs and pickled body parts. You've got strange tastes, Joseph."
"Somebody tailed me," he said without preamble.
"What?" said Laika, rising. Tony's face grew equally grim.
"I lost him. He picked me up outside the museum. I think he might have been a fed. At least, he moved like it."
"You led him away?" Tony asked.
"Of course. He was easy to lose. I just nested for a while, and he was gone."
"You're sure?" Tony asked. Joseph gave him a look. With over twenty years in the Company, he knew when he had lost a tail. "Okay, sorry." Tony shook his head as though he wished he hadn't said anything.
"One or tandem?" asked Laika, and Joseph held up a single finger. "That's good. Maybe he stumbled onto you then, recognized you. They've got to have our photos out there. Eyes only for field agents, in the hopes that one of them gets lucky."
"Like Brian Foster did out west," Tony said. It was the name of the man he had had to kill. "So you think the town's gonna be crawling with agents by tomorrow?"
Laika looked thoughtful. "How close was the guy to you?"
"Twenty yards away," Joseph said. "He may have been closer when he made me, though."
"Young guy? Or old?"
"Pretty fresh-faced. Looked right out of Quantico."
"He'll report it, then," said Tony.
Laika shook her head. "I doubt it. If he could've tracked you down, he would've, but odds are he lucked onto you. Then his luck changed. He probably doesn't feel positive enough about his ID to report that he found you and lost you. It'd make him look bad, and why risk that if he's not sure it's you to start with?"
"So what do we do?" Tony asked.
"We stay put," Laika said. "But we'll report the incident to Skye. If he wants to relocate us, he can. But this is a big city, and he picked you up a couple miles from here. Let's just stay away from that part of town from now on."
Tony headed back toward the kitchen. "Suits me. I never wanted to see any babies in jars anyway."
Joseph felt Laika's gaze on him, as hard as hail. "You okay?"
"Yeah. Just tired. Think I'll lie down a little bit before dinner." Joseph went into his bedroom and sat on the bed. It was after six o'clock, and the sky outside was lit only by the lights of the city. He left the blinds open and lay down, looking out at the sky from which all the stars had been washed by the millions of bulbs that shone from the earth below.
He closed his eyes, and felt the albatross again, pushing down on him, its weight made heavier by the mysteries he could not explain and by his being a fugitive in his own country. Although he doubted he could sleep, only minutes passed before he was dreaming.
He dreamed of darkness, thick, dense, cloying. He was breathing it, aspirating the black, and it felt gummy, tarry in his lungs. His eyes tried to pierce it but it was no use. He could see nothing except the flashes, fire against velvet, within his eyeballs.
Joseph brought up his hands, and they pressed against soft cloth, with hardness behind, like the lining of a heavy box, and he knew that it was a
buried alive
dream. He had had them before, and although the inability to breathe easily was disquieting, he was not afraid, for he
knew
it was a dream, and that nothing bad would happen to him in reality.
Still, for the life of him, he couldn't remember
where
he was sleeping. Was it one of those damned motels out west? The apartment where he had lived in New York City while they were investigating the death of the sculptor? But no, that was long ago. His townhouse in Alexandria? Hell no. That was even longer ago, when he worked at Langley. Oh Christ, that must have been a hundred years or more.
Or was it over a hundred years since he had been lying in this casket?—yes, that was it. He had been in here for centuries, sealed inside and buried down under the earth, and it was goddamned well time that he got out. He
had
to get out. He didn't know why, but it was important, not just to him, but to others, too—to Laika? Tony? He remembered them all right. So if he was going to get out, he was going to have to yell, just scream as loud as he could, like that screaming woman in the Ray Bradbury story, the one the little girl heard screaming under the ground. Maybe a little girl would hear and go get help, someone to dig his casket up and open it and let him out.