Far edge of darkness, p.16
Far Edge of Darkness, page 16
She visibly collected herself and looked up at him. Either she didn't notice the strained expression on his face or chose to ignore it. "I'd give a lot to know who made the time-travel breakthrough, not to mention how the mafia got their hands on it, and how Bartlett's connected with them; but we don't have time for that right now. There's something more urgent I've got to know." She worried her lower lip with her teeth. It was an endearing habit and made her look more like Shirley Temple than ever. When she finally spoke, her question surprised him. "Charlie, how long have you been here?"
"As near as I can figure, about four years."
She nodded. "Okay, that's what I was guessing. Good. Who was on the Imperial throne when you arrived?"
"I'm not likely to forget him. Old guy by the name of Vespasian. I was sorry when I heard he'd died. . . ."
He trailed off. Her face had gone positively chalky.
"And Titus is emperor now? How . . . ?" Her voice actually cracked. She stopped, licked her lips, and tried again. "How long has Titus been on the throne? As close as you can figure!"
The intensity in her voice, the white pallor of her skin alarmed Charlie.
"Uh . . ." He thought hard, tried to reconstruct the days. Time had nearly ceased to have meaning for Charlie. "A month, or close to it. I remember the coronation celebrations. They lasted a whole week. Then the week after that Xanthus' favorite gladiator died in the arena and he— Never mind." He looked away from the quick sympathy in her eyes. "Then the week after that, we got in a pair of dancing girls and sold them to Tellus Martonius. Caelerus brought you in maybe six days after that and you were at Xanthus' for a couple of days before we set sail."
She hugged herself tightly. "If the city still exists— That's got to be it. God, what day is this? Titus was only emperor for a month or so before— Wait!" She held up an impatient hand when he started to ask a question. "I've got it. The festival was just—" She leaned forward and grasped Charlie's arm, hard enough to raise welts with her fingernails. "Charlie, has Rome celebrated the Festival of Vulcan yet?"
Charlie shook his head. "It's today. Xanthus was angry at having to miss it."
She shut her eyes. Charlie received the impression she was trying to shut out a vision too terrifying to face. He felt a chill creep over him.
"Murdering son-of-a . . ." She drew a quivery breath and opened her eyes. They mirrored a panic that left Charlie feeling positively icy. "Charlie, Tony Bartlett doesn't plan for me to stay alive in this time any longer than Carreras planned for you to survive. Whatever else happens, if you want to live through the next twenty-four hours, you've got to get hell and gone away from Herculaneum. With or without Lucania, you've got to get away."
The chill that had overtaken him crawled its way up his spine to his scalp. "Why?"
The look she gave him reminded him of the looks his teachers had given him all through school. Without warning, he was angry clear through. Then she shook her head and chewed at her lip again. Instant irritation disappeared. She was under tremendous pressure, too, and nowhere near as trained for it as he was. Besides, Sibyl was clearly accustomed to dealing with people who spent their lives reading books, not dragging illiterate slime up out of the sewers.
"I'm not much of an expert on Roman history," he said quietly. "You know the old song, 'Don't know much about history . . .' That's me. I guess I'm thanking Anybody who'll listen that someone who does know came along. So why do we need to snatch Lucania and get out of town?"
She reached over and squeezed his hand. It felt like an apology. Her eyes were dark, though, and she had trouble meeting his gaze. Her voice was pitched almost too low to hear.
"Tomorrow night, just about midnight . . . Herculaneum is going to be buried under a lot of very hot mud, ash, and pumice. Between, oh, sixty to a hundred feet of it."
Charlie hissed wordlessly.
"You see," she went on, her voice dull, "most people don't remember that Mt. Vesuvius buried two major cities, and a couple of smaller towns, when it erupted and destroyed Pompeii."
Even Charlie had heard of Pompeii. He'd seen the movie.
"Holy shit," Charlie whispered into the silence that followed.
She nodded bleakly. "A lot of people escaped Pompeii before the main eruption—and the fiery avalanches full of poisonous gas and glowing pumice—hit the city. Only the ones who ignored the earthquakes or stayed to wait out the ashfall were trapped. The wealthy resort town of Stabiae—it was famous for its mineral springs, and let me tell you, that place was loaded with money, same as Herculaneum—was eventually buried, too. So was the little town of Oplontis. The eruption lasted three days."
She hugged herself, as though chilled by the images she was describing. "The Imperial fleet tried to rescue survivors. Pliny the Elder, he was the fleet admiral stationed at Misenum, took his ships across the Bay of Naples to rescue survivors. But he couldn't get close enough to get anyone out. He was trapped at Stabiae instead, rescuing people there, and was killed. His nephew at Misenum, Pliny the Younger—the famous historian—left a really vivid account. He was afraid they'd be killed, once the fiery avalanches started. Took his mother and ran for it. The Bay of Naples isn't all that large. A few miles across, no more. Herculaneum's only about four miles from the volcano's summit."
Charlie whistled softly. "So Herculaneum was wiped out, too. How come nobody ever mentions it, if several cities were buried? And how come anybody was crazy enough to build cities on an active volcano?"
"They didn't know it was a volcano. In a.d. 79, Vesuvius hadn't erupted for at least three hundred years. Almost nobody understood what caused the earthquakes all through the Campanian region, like the one that damaged the Temple of Jupiter in Pompeii in a.d. 62. Not even Seneca, who was something of a naturalist, understood it; although Strabo did guess there had been volcanic activity there at one time." She shivered. "We used to think everybody got out of Herculaneum. We'd never found any bodies, not like we did at Pompeii." She swallowed. "Then we, uh . . . We found the ancient beach. It's about half a kilometer inland from the modern waterfront. Most of them made it that far."
She looked like she was about to cry again.
Charlie sympathized. "Holy shit."
He didn't know what else to say.
Chapter Eight
The guards at the door wore military uniforms, but they weren't Dan's men. They weren't even Uncle Sam's men. They checked his ID suspiciously, even though he was well known to each of them by now. Four months of this treatment had only exacerbated Dan's temper, whipping him with the need to remain submissive at all cost. At one time, this had been Dan's building, Dan's project. At one time, he'd been able to call his life his own. . . .
His face went stiff and cold as he thought of what lay beyond these doors through which he'd once passed so freely. Of what they had the potential—and the ruthlessness—to do with it. They'd only begun to grasp what they had hold of. God help the world when they started to figure it out.
And God help him—not to mention Lucille and Danny and the others—when they didn't need him any longer. . . .
Dan had been one of the pivotal engineers on this project from the beginning. Only the physicists understood it better, and while they had the top-security clearances, same as Dan, they didn't have the military connections Dan did. Without Dan to hide behind, the mafioso thugs who'd taken over his life wouldn't have had a prayer of pulling this off.
He drew a ragged breath, hating and blaming himself for that, and clung to the fact that they still needed him, needed what he knew, needed him as a screen to hide behind. As long as he still had access, however limited, to the equipment—
He wondered if Lucille would understand that he had to choose. Soon. Guilt tore at him. Awake or asleep, he remembered Lucy's tears, Danny's quivering attempt at a stiff upper lip. If he ever found out which of his people had originally sold them out. . . . There wasn't a legal punishment on the books that would come close to what he had in mind.
As it was, he was no longer sure which of his people were still his people. The entire communications section definitely wasn't. Crighton had rotated out and subsequently vanished. O'Keefe had died in a car wreck on his way to visit his wife in Juneau. . . . The finance officer was definitely in it up to his traitorous little ears. Counterfeit pay vouchers for direct deposit payroll slips for people who weren't even in the army were coming through Tenbroeck's office. Dan wondered how they'd gotten to the man. He'd thought Tenbroeck solidly loyal—until Danny and Lucille had vanished. Someone in Security had to be involved, too; probably Sergeant Manning. Manning was in charge of the duty rosters. Dan wondered how much Carreras had paid him. For all he knew, of course, Kominsky might well be in on it, too. He remembered vividly what First Sergeant Szkolny had said the other day in the mess hall.
"Something strange going on with the MP rosters, sir," Szkolny had muttered in the chow line. "I keep seeing the same dozen or so names pop up for the high-security areas. Come to think of it," he added, glancing at Dan, "that new bodyguard you ordered is always staffed by one of those guys."
"Thank you for bringing that to my attention, Sergeant. I'll take care of it," Dan had answered, trying very hard not to let the man know how very wrong things were on this base. He had not wanted Szkolny's death on his conscience.
Dan thought of Logan McKee and went cold again. McKee definitely wasn't one of his. Nor was Dan certain he was anyone else's. Logan McKee was an anachronism. Ever since McKee's abrupt arrival, Dan had been thinking a whole lot about Dr. Gudekinst's early worries on slippage. And every time he thought about it, Dan began to sweat all over again. If slippage were occurring, severely enough to drop someone through a temporal crack . . .
Christ—what had these goons been up to? What sort of monkeying around with the time stream had they done without consulting anyone? There were dangers they didn't begin to comprehend. Dangers which—Dan had to shut his eyes and shoulder the guilt which was his alone to carry—dangers which very carefully had not been explained to them.
Explanations would have required revealing aspects of the process which Dan and his physicists had managed so far to keep secret, in the vain hope they could turn this thing into a weapon to fight back. Dan knew the imprisoned scientists were counting on him to stop this madness. He winced a bit. With his wife and son hostages, he couldn't even count on himself.
Dan held fears at bay with less than sterling success and waited for clearance to enter the building. Since Dan was expected this morning, once the scrutiny of his ID was completed, the door guards called for one of their own to escort him inside. The man who arrived was built like a linebacker—or a refrigerator.
Dan hadn't seen this one before. How many of his own people had Carreras brought in by now?
The linebacker confiscated Dan's pistol, then escorted him into an alcove just inside the door. While Dan's bodyguard watched, the man performed a very thorough—and humiliating—body cavity search.
"Satisfied?" he finally snapped.
The linebacker just looked at him. "Get dressed," he said tonelessly.
Dan's fingers shook as he buttoned his shirt and zipped his fly.
He was escorted through a familiar maze of corridors and security devices. An elevator ride dropped them deep into the interior of the mountain which this base skirted. When the doors opened, Dan stepped out into deep pile carpet, as out of place as the man who now inhabited it. Once this had been his situation room. Security monitors were still in place, as were computer linkups to installations across the globe. Inwardly he winced at the thought of the compromised top-secret security installations this room now represented.
The rest of the room had been altered almost beyond recognition. A solid Brazilian rosewood desk at least seven feet long and four feet wide stood opposite the elevator, along one wall of the vast room. Dan recognized some of the paintings. There were ancient marbles, as well, which should have been in a museum, but probably never had been.
Enthroned in a leather chair was the ruling lord of all this. And of Dan's life. Jésus Carreras wasn't yet forty. His body was as sleek and deadly as a rattlesnake's. His eyes were just as cold.
"Colonel Collins," Carreras acknowledged without bothering to rise from his seat. "That will be all, Nelson."
The linebacker retreated silently into the elevator. Dan's personal bodyguard took up a position between Dan and the elevator.
The sweat trickling down his armpits stank. Don't blow this, don't blow it . . .
"Four months," Carreras said quietly. "Four very interesting, trouble-free months." He shook his head slowly, then rose almost lazily to his feet and strolled toward Dan.
"Do you know, Colonel," Carreras continued quietly, making Dan feel like a dying fish with the shark circling in for the kill, "in those four months I have almost come to like you?" His black eyes glinted briefly with some inner amusement.
A smashing backhand caught Dan's mouth. The blow sent him staggering back a step. Dan grunted and fought the urge to retaliate. He knew better, but his gut didn't. Slowly, to distract the fight-or-flight tension in his belly, Dan wiped blood from his lips.
"How is it, Colonel," Carreras hissed, "that you failed to inform me of this little situation in a timely fashion?"
Dan sounded like a grammar-school truant and knew it. "I wanted to give you as much information as possible on him."
"Ah. I see." Carreras paced a few steps, hands clasped behind his back. "Tell me, Colonel," he asked over one shoulder, "how is your lovely wife these days? And your charming son?"
Dan spat out something profoundly ugly.
Carreras clucked chidingly. "Temper, Colonel. Let me see," he said, tipping his head back in evident reflection, "if we pulled the generators, the temperatures in the shelter would probably drop to fatal levels in, what, six hours? Seven?"
Dan clenched his fists at his sides and didn't dare answer.
"Yes. It would be a pity, wouldn't it? Such a lovely marriage, such a lovely family."
Dan couldn't look at him, couldn't look at the laughter in those reptilian eyes. If he met Carreras' gaze, he'd kill him. And that would be the worst disaster yet.
"Tell me, Colonel," Carreras went on, as though the threats hanging between them didn't exist, "what do you think we should do with this McKee fellow?"
Dan flexed his fingers and risked glancing up. "Lock him in a psych ward. He's crazy. Who'd believe him?"
A brief smile touched the Latin's dark face. "Who, indeed?" Carreras paused for a moment, apparently lost in thought. "No, Colonel," he said at length. "We cannot simply lock the man up." He glanced at Dan. "Do you know what I think, Colonel Collins?"
Dan was sure Carreras would tell him, if it suited Carreras' plans.
"I think our friend McKee isn't crazy at all."
Dan twitched. "What? I questioned him myself, under truth drugs. Carreras, his mind never came home from 'Nam. He's as certifiable as they come."
Carreras smiled. Dan suppressed a shiver.
"I think," Carreras said, leaning easily against the edge of his massive desk, "that our friend is a killer without purpose. Without a job. When he is placed in war, he is like the orca, deadly and efficient in his own element. Take him out of war . . . Tell me, Colonel, have you ever seen a beached whale? The seagulls peck at it, pluck at its eyes, nibble it to death."
"So what do you want me to do with him? Find a nice, bloody little war for him?"
Carreras chuckled. "No, Colonel. I do not want you to find a war for him." Carreras rested his palms against the desktop and glanced into one corner of the vast room. "He knows too much."
"He doesn't know anything—" Dan protested.
"He knows this place!" Carreras struck the desktop with one fist and propelled himself toward Dan. "He knows that he has been . . . displaced. When I get my hands on Tony . . ." Carreras muttered. "I warned that fool. . . ."
Dan didn't want to hear this. Men had died for knowing less. Men, he realized with a sickening lurch, like McKee.
When Carreras straightened, Dan already knew what he was going to say. He wasn't wrong.
"Kill him, Collins."
Dan shook his head in a hopeless bid to save the man's life. "He doesn't know anything, Carreras. Nobody's going to believe a crazy man. And with his record—"
"Need I remind you, Colonel"—Carreras' voice was an icy whiplash—"that you are in no position to defy my orders?"
Dan bit back the rest of his arguments and swallowed. "I know," he managed.
A polished obsidian gaze caught and pinned him in a puddle of stinking sweat. "I could easily arrange an unpleasant transfer for our mutual acquaintances. You do understand that, don't you, Collins? Judea, perhaps, say, 50 b.c.? I'm told leprosy was quite common—"
"You wouldn't—!" Dan halted abruptly. Carreras would dare and there was absolutely nothing Dan could do to stop him. Dan shrank away from Carreras' contemptuous look, from the knowledge that he was a traitor, a coward, a crawling worm. . . .
Jésus Carreras' voice was as cold as the Arctic night wind. "Kill McKee, Collins. See to it personally. I don't care how or where. Pick a time, a place, program the jump. I'll send a couple of my men to help manhandle him through, since he is clearly a dangerous fighter, even unarmed. Once you've taken him through, Collins, kill him. Quickly and neatly. Or I'll start sending you pieces of your family."
Dan stumbled into the waiting elevator. He hid his face in the corner, unable to face his bodyguard or the polished metal of the door. One day, he swore, clenching his fists so tightly his hands hurt, one day . . .
He drove himself home, alone with the hated guard. Dan nearly wrecked the jeep twice and received a jab in the ribs with a gun muzzle for his trouble. Once home, Dan locked himself into his study with a bottle of bourbon. The guard stationed himself, as always, in the hall just outside. He knew from bitter experience there were also guards outside his windows. After three brimming tumblers of straight bourbon, Dan picked up a family portrait and ran his fingertips across the images of his shattered life.
