The Quad buzzed to indicate Robert had received a new text message. Waypoint 039.
His regular cell phone began to vibrate on his office desk. ‘Robert? It’s Horace. We must meet.’
‘Is it safe for you?’
‘Nothing is safe any more. We do what we must do.’
‘There are things I need to tell you. To show you. Thank you for what you did at Hencott. How on earth did you pull that off?’
‘I’ll explain when we meet. Eleven o’clock. Meet me at Grand Central, at the clock. We have a lot to do, and no time. Get to the waypoint.’
‘Horace, I’m terrified for Kat. She’s in danger with Adam.’
‘I instructed Katherine to gather and hide as many keys as she could while staying close to Adam, but she’s starting to be worn down by the presence of the Iwnw. You are right that she is in danger. She is becoming susceptible to Adam’s suggestions, but her proximity to him is the only thing that is allowing him still to fight the Iwnw. For now, she must stay with him.’
The GPS programme showed the waypoint was on First Avenue, near the United Nations. He had just enough time to get there before meeting Horace.
‘If you’re more than five minutes late, I’ll leave,’ Horace said. ‘In that case, make it noon at St Thomas’s Church on Fifth Avenue.’
‘I’ll make it at eleven.’
He drove towards Manhattan, the skyline shimmering before him on the horizon like the scale model of miniatures he had created in his study.
He had to know what else had happened on the day of the Blackout. Everything charted back to that.
It had been a beautiful summer’s day, he remembered. A slow news day. In the morning he’d pottered in his office, taking care of routine administrative tasks. By midday it had become deathly slow. Then Katherine had called with a saucy suggestion, something they did from time to time. They’d take a hotel room, have a late lunch, drink champagne and make love. In the evening they’d stay in town and have dinner, maybe see a show. ‘I was thinking the same thing,’ he’d told her.
By two o’clock they were in their room. They were in the throes of lovemaking for the second time when the lights went out at four. It was always intense on their hotel-room trysts, and Katherine had made it even more so by reciting some of the sex magick words she had used on their first night together all those years before. Robert had been startled when she began, but she quickly soothed his fear away.
Both were climaxing when the Blackout happened, and in the throes of orgasm Katherine opened her eyes wide and stifled a scream that for a split second was more terror than pleasure, and Robert experienced a blizzard of simultaneous images so fierce that he froze, muscles knotted, deep inside her.
Robert saw strands of intense white light binding him to Katherine, Katherine to Adam, Adam to another woman, her face hidden, all of them united in a dance of fire, and, as images of each of them fired off in his mind’s eye, a shadow too joined the dance, a formless creature, and then another, a child.
Katherine had never been able to talk to him about what she saw in her moment of terror. Robert now knew without any doubt that the second woman had been Terri. They had been picking up mental impressions of the moment of entanglement when Adam, Terri and the maker of the Ma’rifat’ became conjoined with the ring of Katherine, Robert and Adam created more than twenty years earlier. And he had believed since that day that the shadow of a child had been little Moss, or at least the possibility of little Moss, just minutes after his conception.
But now, as he drove, new images and words came together unbidden in his consciousness: Terri’s baby. Terri’s baby. It made no sense to him. He’d seen cell division in Terri starting the day they’d made love, but these images were from more than a year earlier.
After the violent blur of impressions at the moment of the Blackout, Katherine and he fell from each other and lay side by side, breathing heavily. Initially neither noticed nor cared that the power had gone out. Once they realized, they assumed it was just the hotel, maybe even just their floor. Then Robert’s cell phone rang. It was Ed at the office.
‘Where are you, Boss? The lights just went out.’
‘They’re out here too. I’m just five blocks away. Did the backup power kick in?’
‘Yes, we’re fine here. The screens just flickered. But we’ve got no a/c, no cable TV. Wait. Wait. The lights are out in Times Square.’
‘Is this an attack?’
‘We’re checking. There’s smoke coming from a transformer over by the United Nations. You’ve got to get back here. The lights are out in Brooklyn, in Queens… holy shit, they’re out in Boston. This is huge.’
‘On my way.’
He remembered looking at Katherine. She’d turned as white as a ghost.
Robert got to the bureau just as police were confirming they did not suspect an attack. But the scope of the power outage kept growing. Parts of Canada were out. Virtually all of the north-eastern United States was out. Thousands of people were trapped in the subway. He organized coverage just as he had on the morning of 9/11. Sent teams of reporters out. Designated the lead writers. Liaised with other bureaux. Sent key people who lived in Manhattan home to rest, so they’d be fresh in the morning. Coordinated the work of the general assignment, power, equities, treasury teams. Hooked up with facilities managers and technicians about how long their backup-power supply would last.
After the initial fear of an attack subsided, New Yorkers took the Blackout largely in their stride. People slept out in the streets that night, unafraid. There were parties. Crime went down. At around three in the morning, after keeping overnight writers and reporters company for a while, he went back to the hotel with four staffers who couldn’t get to their homes. Katherine was a good sport about it and let them sleep in the room.
With the Republican Convention in town, driving across Manhattan was asking for trouble. Robert parked on the West Side near Ninth Avenue and took the Shuttle subway from Times Square across to Grand Central. From there he walked the three and a half long blocks over to the United Nations.
Emerging on to First Avenue at the end of 42nd Street, he checked the Quad. It was pointing him left, and began flashing ‘Arriving destination’ as soon as he started walking. The great green-blue slab of the UN Secretariat and the East River were to his right. Ahead of him, a shining silver needle rose in a tiny park, bounded at its northern end by a soaring, curved retaining wall of heavy stone blocks. Twisting stairs led up the face of the wall to 43rd Street and the small town-within-a-town called Tudor City. Carved into the great wall in gold lettering were lines from the Book of Isaiah:
They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
The waypoint was at the Isaiah Wall.
Robert thought about trying some kind of manoeuvre to see if he was expected or being watched – abruptly changing direction or darting for a cab, seeing who involuntarily jumped or was shocked out of their anonymity by the sudden fear of losing him – but decided it was futile. Nothing is safe. We do what we must do. His own gift, the one he had been terrified of his entire adult life, had emerged into the light. He was in plain sight for whoever needed to see him, let the chips fall where they may. If anyone came after him now, he would give them a damn good fight.
The Quad buzzed. A text message, from the Watchman:
Another digit, to find the widget
In seeking sex, you’ll get the hex
Follow your hunch, you’ll find a bunch
At number one, the battle’s won
To find your kind
Pass the Trial by Mind
He strode over to the silver-steel obelisk. Peace Form Number One, it was called. It was a digit, in the sense of a single pointing finger, like the Emmet obelisk at St Paul’s. And it stood in a park named for a diplomat called Bunche.
He knelt and looked at the base of the sculpture. He searched among the candle-holders and flowers left by people holding peace vigils opposite the United Nations. He reached with his fingers up inside the slots at the bottom of the monument. With his fingertips, lodged atop a metal spar, he felt another film container, taped in place and sealed in a plastic sandwichbag. He extracted it carefully with his fingers and opened it. There was nothing in it but a slip of paper with a handwritten message, all in capital letters. You are losing, it said.
‘Damn!’
He crushed the plastic container in his fist, cursing into the air around him. It had to have been Katherine. Only she and Horace knew the waypoints. Would she give them directly to Adam? Would he force her to? Fear knotted in his stomach.
He rubbed his face with his hands. At least he had the major key, the Malice Box. Without it, surely, they could not properly detonate the weapon?
He realized he had only a few minutes if he was going to meet Horace on time. He jogged back to 42nd Street and turned right, heading west towards Midtown.
The parabolas and inverted Vs of the Chrysler Building’s gleaming tower rose directly ahead in the sky, like angular ripples on a pond. He had walked this street once with Horace, taking in the Art Deco masterpieces that studded it like jewels – the News Building, the Chrysler, the Chanin. Outside the Chrysler, Horace had talked about its closed observation deck, and the legendary elegance of the Cloud Club atop the building, as well as the curiously cramped, curved spaces at the very top of the tower, which Horace had been privileged to visit.
‘At the very top it’s open to the elements, you can feel the gusts. Feels so fragile, but it’s tremendously strong,’ he said. ‘Not many people know this, but there’s a cult movie called Q that has many scenes shot up in the pinnacle. Some nonsense about the plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl having a nest up there and prowling the skies of Manhattan, eating rooftop sunbathers.’
‘Sounds like you quite enjoyed it, Horace.’
‘Terrible nonsense, though Quetzalcoatl the man, the Toltec priest, repays further examination. Take a good look up if you can at the radiator-cap decorations, can you see? Borrow my binoculars if you like.’
He’d done so. ‘Looks like they have wings on them?’
‘Yes, wings of Mercury. Or Hermes, to give him his Greek name. We’ll see the same thing at Grand Central. Hermes everywhere, and sculpted wheels set with his wings. It’s about speed, you see. The fleet-footed messenger.’
That innocent walk with Horace seemed a long time ago now. The old man had spoken of all the closed observation decks in Manhattan.
‘We are so fearful,’ he had said. ‘We should reopen them all. The Woolworth Building. Chanin. Chrysler. Flatiron. Rockefeller Center, especially. Are we afraid of what we’d see up there?’
Now Robert understood that he had been talking about more than the upper reaches of New York’s buildings. And now Robert was on the verge of breaking through to the true sweeping vistas and high places Horace had meant: those of his own nature.
He pressed on, crossing Lexington Avenue. His own offices at GBN, to which he felt no compulsion whatever to return, were nine blocks north.
At last he came to Grand Central Terminal. Just before he entered, the Quad buzzed with a text message: ‘New Waypoint: X87.’
The GPS programme suggested it lay inside the New York Public Library, just a few blocks further west.
It was three minutes to eleven. He hurried to the central information booth under the four-faced clock. The great hall of the station was buzzing with people criss-crossing its floor, not manically, as at rushhour, but in a constant flow.
He felt a hand on his arm and turned to see Horace.
‘We meet at the confluence of Time and Information,’ he said, pointing to the sign above the booth. ‘Let’s walk as we talk. There is someone here that we don’t want to see.’
Robert looked around, unsure what he was looking for, as Horace clamped a hand firmly on to his elbow. He steered Robert north towards the platforms, and they entered a walkway signposted as ‘The North-east Passage’. As they went, Robert reached into his pocket and extracted a small packet.
‘This is the major key,’ he said, handing it to Horace. ‘I took it from Adam yesterday. I’m afraid that in doing so I’ve taken away his last protection against the Iwnw.’
Horace took it quickly from him and slipped it into an inner pocket of his jacket. ‘Thank heaven. Well done. This buys us some time, since they have all the rest. Keep moving.’
‘Who is here, Horace?’
‘I saw a member of the Iwnw. I am sure of it.’
Robert turned and looked behind them. No one had followed them.
‘What do they look like?’
‘White hair. About my age. Listen. We need to talk quickly. First, regarding Adam. He still has Katherine by him. She will help.’
‘He tried to kill her yesterday.’
Horace eyed him with a faint smile. ‘Yes, he did. It also helped you to make a breakthrough on the Path. Perhaps he’s not as far gone as you think. Now, pay attention. There is a very interesting piece of artwork along these passages,’ Horace said. ‘It is called As Above, So Below. It will be instructive to explore one or two parts of it. As we walk, please report. What do you understand of the situation?’
Could Adam truly be pulling off sucha double game? And now Horace was echoing the letter he had received at university from his anonymous relative. As above, so below; as within, so without.
‘Let me think.’
‘Your intellect won’t help you,’ Horace said. ‘Thinking alone can’t help you any more. Let it go. Tell me what your deeper impressions are. Use all of your mind.’
‘The waypoint just now. The key was gone. I think Katherine took it.’
‘Yes.’
Now footsteps echoed in the passage behind them. Robert looked back and saw a fit-looking older man in a dark business suit walking unhurriedly behind them.
‘Is he Iwnw?’
Horace nodded. ‘That’s the one I saw. And wherever there is one, there are usually three.’ He looked up ahead. There was no one there. ‘We must conduct our business quickly. You may not understand the sequence of my questions, but I must prepare you for the next trial, and tell you certain things. I must gauge your level of understanding. You know the whispering arches here at Grand Central?’
On the lower concourse was a sinuous vaulted space of Guastavino tiled arches, where at any time of day, in a disturbing spectacle unless one knew the secret, grown men and women could be observed standing at the corner columns, their faces pressed to the wall like punished children. Standing so, it was possible to have a whispered conversation with someone standing diametrically across the arched space at the opposing column several yards away, each hearing the other’s disembodied voice clearly, echoing in the air above their head.
He looked behind them. The white-haired man was still there, eyes fixed steadily upon them, maintaining an even distance some forty paces away.
‘You are like a radio that’s trying to burst into life. You are seeing connections between everything that’s been happening in the last few days, and decades ago, things that don’t seem at all related suddenly aligning… It’s as though everything is connected to everything else by a secret whispering arch.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you realize you’ve always known this. Felt it.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘You are at the stage of ordination, we might say,’ Horace said, a grave look on his face. ‘Greater mysteries are opening up to you, some might call them priestly mysteries. You are entering upon the Trial by Mind.’
‘I need to go faster. We do. The next waypoint –’
‘I know,’ Horace said. ‘We must hurry, yet the Path cannot be rushed. Balance is all. Walk faster with me.’
Robert began to pour out thoughts and impressions as they went. ‘Adam’s trying with all his power to hold this dreadful thing within him at bay, but it’s winning. I can see it.’
‘He is a very brave man. What more?’
‘Katherine has left me. She has gone to Adam because I slept with Terri, but she’s in huge danger. She’s playing this double game, trying to support Adam against the Iwnw and the Minotaur within him. Terri is in hiding because she’s terrified, I think because she feels Adam will no longer protect her. She sees Katherine displacing her, leaving her alone to face whatever it is that’s scaring her. I think she’s never been so frightened in her life.’
‘All Terri’s hopes are placed in Adam, yet she is terrified of him. She cannot afford to lose him, yet she cannot be with him,’ Horace said. ‘Why?’
‘I think she’s pregnant. With Adam’s child. I had these images… cells dividing… but there was a shadow across them, and something else I can’t fully see, can’t understand. Her pregnancy feels over a year old, and yet only four days old…’
Horace nodded, gazing inwardly as they walked. Robert ploughed on. ‘The shape I have been tracing across Manhattan. It has a spine directly uptown from the obelisk at St Paul’s, through the obelisk opposite the Flatiron. I drew the line further north. It goes directly to the obelisk in Central Park.’
Robert pulled out a tourist map of the city and drew on it the waypoints that he had visited over the previous days. ‘I don’t know what this shape is, or if it’s an amalgam of shapes, or what, but it has these crossbars, and this spacing along the spine – one unit or a half unit, some points skipped… Today’s waypoints suggest another crossbar, here…’
It mapped his movements and trials. After St Paul’s Chapel and Mercer Street, it showed his walk across the island from Tompkins Square Park to Washington Square Park to the Goodnight Moon house. Back up the centre line to Union Square. Another cross-beam from the Asser Levy stepping stones to the second obelisk opposite the Flatiron to the Theological Seminary in Chelsea. A third crossing from the United Nations to the New York Public Library. Continuing the line led to the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel on the far west side.
‘Good. You are slowly tracing a shape that is called the Tree of Life. It is a kind of key to navigating the mysteries, to surviving the adventure we are embarked upon. Each level corresponds to a trial. After today there is one more point to complete the diagram, just as there is one more trial before you face the ordeal of closing down the Ma’rifat’.’
‘Tell me more. I want to understand.’
They walked on. Still the white-haired man did not close upon them.
‘It is one of the most ancient spiritual tools known to mankind,’ Horace said. ‘It is meaningless to the ignorant. Very powerful to the initiated.’
‘What does it do?’
‘It points to certain things that are true. It is a key, and a map. It has existed since before the ancient Egyptians. It is not the only key, certainly, but it is found in several spiritual traditions. It was the pattern used by the maker of the Ma’rifat’ to lay out the keys along Manhattan to carry and amplify the force of the weapon. Not quite perfectly traced but close enoughto be very dangerous. It is also the pattern we have used to direct you along the Path. It can be thought of in many ways. It is a route of power, a map of self-exploration…’
Robert closed his eyes for a moment, seeing again the fleeting multidimensional images that had been hammering at his mind – the sense of a great overarching pattern wheeling about him, threading through the streets of the city, an array of perspectives and sightlines and insights that bound together his inner and outer journeys, buildings and monuments and stages of the trial, in a single geometric shape.
‘What does the full key look like?’
‘Like this,’ Horace said, filling in the lines on the map Robert had given him. ‘Above the highest point on the Tree, there is a further level that is indescribable, a kind of succession of infinities, which we will also explore before your final battle. In terms of Manhattan, they are represented by Central Park.’
‘I have to find Katherine. I have to find Terri. I have to use this to help them.’
‘So you do. Bear with me just a little longer.’
They had walked along the underground passage as far as the exit sign for 48th Street. Set into the wall was a six-foot compass of glass mosaic, a photograph of a youthful Albert Einstein at its centre.
‘You’ll be aware that Einstein’s theories describe how space and time are a single thing, and can be warped and bent.’
‘Yes.’
‘And that energy and matter are equivalent, that each can be converted into the other? With hugely destructive results, in the case of the atomic bomb?’
‘Yes. E equals mc squared. Is the Device some kind of atom bomb?’
‘At the very least. I believe the Iwnw intend to make it into something much worse. Let’s keep walking.’
A few yards further north they came to the next mosaic, another wheel set into the wall, this time showing a young woman holding a bowl of fire in her hands, set against a backdrop of intergalactic space. Two smaller circles were set into the wall on each side. ‘These mosaics represent the elements.’ He pointed left to right. ‘Or the trials you have undergone. Earth. Water. Fire, which is what she holds in her hands. See how she sparkles as the light catches the glass in the mosaic design. Then Air. Then Ether.’
‘This stage is Mind, you said. What is last?’
‘The seventh is Spirit.’
‘What do they consist of?’
At that moment Robert looked north and saw a second white-haired man, identically dressed, coming towards them with the same measured pace.
‘Horace!’
‘This way.’
They retraced their steps towards the Einstein mosaic, heading back in the direction of the first Iwnw stalker, who did not speed up but just stared at them with cold malevolence. Horace and Robert descended a flight of stairs and took the 47th Street Cross-Passage to their right.
‘When three of them converge on us, we will fight,’ Horace said. ‘Now listen. The penultimate trial tests the mind in its fullest sense. Not merely the intellect, or just the conscious mind, but the full spectrum of the conscious and the unconscious, the reasoning and the dreaming and creative minds.’
The sixth trial, Horace whispered as they walked west, would expose him to a shattering new awareness of reality, a powerful truth. Whereas in the Trial by Ether he had found he could affect the world around him through his will, he would now take the next step, realizing that he and the world were identical, and that only his mind constructed the illusion of separation.
‘The insight, when it comes, is like grasping a high-voltage cable,’ Horace said. ‘Only one who has completed the previous five trials can with stand it. Even so, the insight comes only with proximity to death. It brings healing powers.’
To pass the trial, he said, Robert would have to survive accessing those energies, and bend them to a purpose beyond himself. It would force him to face the sixth dilemma: whether to heal, or to kill, his enemy.
Robert would recover a sixthkey, six-sided or six-pointed, and find the penultimate missing component of the light body that was his new awakened self.
The two Iwnw men descended the stairs and walked slowly towards them.
Robert and Horace came to steps leading up to Tracks 32 and 33. Horace paused briefly to point out another mosaic.
‘There are about a dozen panels in total in As Above, So Below. This one may also have resonance for you. It shows Persephone condemned to the underworld for half the year for eating a pomegranate. Seems rather harsh, doesn’t it? It’s partly a Greek retelling of another earlier myth, Inanna in the underworld. Also known as Ishtar.’
‘Terri told me that one. It’s about the Path. I’m entering the underworld to bring out Adam, and Terri… even Katherine.’
‘Many myths reflect the constant struggle between the Iwnw and the Perfect Light.’
‘Speaking of that… look. Now there are three.’
A third white-haired man in an identical dark business suit was walking towards them from the west, a faint smile on his face. Now two were behind them, and one ahead of them.
‘Quickly, this way.’
Horace led him up the steps to Tracks 3 2 and 3 3. They ran back towards the main hall of Grand Central along the North-west Passage.
‘We fight them in this corridor if we must,’ Horace said. ‘In case anything happens to me, it is time you learned a little more about the Hencott family.’
Katherine surveyed the hiding place and decided it was satisfactory. The police sharpshooter had made a good choice. She was early. She always liked to be. She surveyed the equipment, checking every item again. Through the viewfinder, she calculated yet again the distance to her target. It would require a sure touch.
Moving slowly, keeping away from the window, she made herself comfortable against a wall in the unoccupied apartment and closed her eyes in meditation for a moment.
The Iwnw were starting to reach her. As Adam struggled to resist them, she was giving him all the energy she could, as Horace had asked, trying to slow him down as muchas possible to allow Robert time to progress along the Path. Although, in doing that, she was also exposing herself to their influence, and she could feel her own willpower beginning to falter. Her judgement.
Yet she was sure this was a good and necessary move on her part. It was she who had realized there was bound to be at least one police sniper overlooking the location of the final part of the sixth key, given New York’s heightened security levels for the Republican Convention.
She’d surveyed the area, using her professional expertise and her reawakening gift, and quickly concluded that there was just one sharpshooter, and where he had to be. Then she’d gone to see him. It had been a simple matter to put him into a deep sleep, using a hypnotic trick Horace had shown her many years previously.
So now she had a rifle. She’d made sure Robert wouldn’t be shot at by the cops as he recovered the last part of the sixth key, and she could cover him if he got into trouble with the other police on the ground.
Adam had told her he was trying everything he could to help Robert along the Path, even if it meant allowing Robert to believe he had already completely crossed over. It was a miraculous balancing act, for he was at the same time appearing to give the Iwnw what they wanted.
On Sunday, after she had walked out on Robert, Adam had invited her to stay in his latest New York hide, commiserated with her over Robert, told her he loved her. She’d helped ease his pain, helped him in his vigil.
Terri had come to the apartment while Adam was out, noted her presence and immediately turned round and left. Katherine had seen nothing of Terri but her retreating back. She’d called out to her, but all she’d felt in response was a wave of hurt and fear, and, mingled with it, a note of deep resignation.
So much of this was her own fault, she felt. In giving the lost Newton paper to Tariq, she had effectively created the Ma’rifat’. She had given its creator the means to make it, then years later she had caused him to be driven to such pain and anger that he wanted to use it.
She had to make it right. But, above all, she had to focus on her mission. She had to hold the Iwnw at bay.
‘My brother and I grew up in various parts of the world,’ Horace said, whispering between shallow breaths as they walked. ‘We are both somewhat older than you might think. We were born in Alexandria, in the 1920s. Father was a gentleman archaeologist, adventurer, sometime spy. He claimed to have met Lawrence of Arabia several times, to have introduced us to him when we were small boys. I have a faint childhood memory of a man in white robes who spoke oddly. It may be an invented memory, though; he told us about him so many times. My brother, of course, was named after him.’
Robert looked back behind them. He heard footfalls and then saw one of the Iwnw coming slowly up the steps. He was followed by the two others.
‘They’re coming, Horace.’
‘Keep moving. Lawrence joined the military as soon as he could, lied about his age and served throughout World War Two. He was a paratrooper. After the war we worked together for a while, in Paris, and Berlin, and back in Egypt. I was altogether less impressive on the military front, worked in intelligence, at the more unusual end of it, sometimes. Army intelligence, then OSS. Heard of it?’
‘It was the forerunner of the CIA, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Horace, that must make you in your eighties.’
‘Yes. Don’t distract me. Father left us some land in various parts of the world, not farmland, you understand, mining plots, mostly worked-out seams, a couple of barely functioning mines. Made us swear never to sell, to safeguard them for eternity.
‘Lawrence took all the mines on and made something of them. Really something. I’ve no idea how. He knew men, he knew logistics, he was afraid of no one. He studied when he came out of the army, learned engineering and chemistry, metallurgy. He was a force of nature. He built up Hencott Incorporated almost single-handed, built a corporate empire around what father had left us.
‘Lawrence used to say you need presence in the world if you are to do good; it’s better to be strong and protect the weak than be weak in need of protection. He put a lot of resources into researchand development, and based it all in a laboratory so well guarded and secret that most people in the company didn’t even know about it. It was on the grounds of a particular gold mine. You may recall he referred to it in the interview he gave your news service.’
‘Oh, God, yes. What was that about?’
‘One thing at a time. Lawrence was operational. I am meditative. We have both sought a special kind of gold, in our different ways.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘There are a handful of mines in the world – three, to be precise – that produce a certain kind of very rare gold. We call it red gold.’
‘I thought that was just an alloy of gold and copper? The guy who sold us our wedding bands was quite prolix about red gold, white gold, rose gold, and so on. They’re all alloys, because pure gold is too soft to work into most jewellery.’
‘Quite so. But that is not the red gold I am talking about. You will likely have never heard of this kind. Its uses are limited.’
‘To what?’
‘Here is where I must swear you to secrecy. For ever.’
Horace stopped and stared at him intently. Robert had never seen him look so powerful.
‘I swear.’
But before Horace could speak again, a voice rang out from up ahead of them. ‘There’s no way out, old man.’
Behind them, the white-haired men were still advancing at a measured pace, three abreast, now just twenty yards away.
And ahead of them, blocking the way back to Grand Central, was Adam Hale.
‘Listen to me,’ Horace whispered, turning so that he stood facing the Iwnw, back to back with Robert, whose eyes never left Adam. ‘Red gold may be used in certain procedures of a hermetic nature. Named after Hermes, the messenger of the gods. It was the name taken by a series of sages several thousand years ago. Alchemical procedures, if you will.’
‘It was in Adam’s play. But he said there is none left in the world.’
‘Well, there is. Hencott controls all three mines. They were among the ones left to us by our father, who was himself acting on behalf of the Perfect Light. There are perhaps thirty people in the world who know these things. Red gold, correctly handled, correctly prepared, after many years of trial and error, can in some circumstances draw to itself great amounts of energy, or trigger in the world the release of same. It is extremely powerful, but only in conjunction with the psychic state of those around it.’
‘It sounds like the Ma’rifat’. The Device.’
‘The Device must contain some of it. Of the thirty people I mentioned, some are of the view that the power of red gold must be used for political purposes. To advance certain political tendencies, to work against others, to shape the world. To rule it. Lawrence and I are not of this view.’
‘Who are these people?’
The three white-haired men had drawn to within ten yards of Horace. They stopped and stared at him.
‘They are the Iwnw. The word means “column” in the language of the ancient Egyptians. We stand against them. We are the Perfect Light.’
Adam, standing twenty paces ahead of Robert, gave a booming laugh. ‘Well, well, gentlemen. You find yourselves in a tight spot.’
He walked towards Robert. In the baking heat of the underground passageway, they were all sweating, but Adam’s shirt was drenched. He looked cadaverous.
‘Stay strong, Adam,’ Robert shouted. ‘You don’t have to do this. They don’t control you.’
‘It’s too late for that,’ Adam called back. ‘Was Horace just telling you about poor Lawrence and the red gold? It’s a very touching story.’
Robert whispered to Horace: ‘The Iwnw got some of your red gold?’
‘Tell everyone, Horace,’ Adam boomed.
‘Last year, the unthinkable happened,’ Horace shouted, his gaze fixed on the three Iwnw men facing him. ‘Lawrence and I learned that Hencott had been infiltrated by several of these… people.’ He spat out the final word. ‘They had taken twenty years to insinuate their way into the more secret corners of the company, but they finally managed to gain access, briefly, to the research and development laboratory.’
‘The one Lawrence talked about in his interview? The one he said Hencott was closing?’
‘That’s right,’ Adam shouted. ‘That one didn’t work out too well for you, did it, Robert?’
Horace ignored Adam’s goading. ‘They took some. Far less than a gram. But that is sufficient.’
‘How long before you found out?’ Robert asked.
‘Almost immediately. And we decided to begin the immediate running down of the experiments that were under way. It took nearly a year to power them down. Red gold must be handled, once the process of elaboration begins, with very great care. What they managed to take was not elaborated, it was raw. Some rudimentary work was clearly done on it later. When, finally, it had all been removed and placed in a safe location until mankind is ready to make better use of it, Lawrence decided to tell the world. Not in a way that anyone but the thirty-odd people I mentioned would understand. But it is a timehonoured technique. Make a public announcement, disguising the real content, in such a way that it will be widely reported. Those who need to see the true meaning will understand. It also puts down a marker in time, for those who come later who might understand. That on this date, we took these measures.’
‘What happened then, Robert?’ said Adam.
‘The company called to say Lawrence had gone off his rocker. They reversed themselves.’
Horace resumed. ‘All of this had taken a great toll upon Lawrence. It is true that the stress of the discovery of the infiltration, the decision to close down his life’s experimental work, the hunt for the missing red gold, eventually caused a crisis in his marriage. His wife did leave him. But he was of perfectly sound mind when he called you to set up the interview, Robert. He did so at such short notice because he became aware of an attempt to oust him as head of the firm. It went ahead shortly after your news item ran on the wires.’
‘Oh, Jesus. I played right into their hands.’
‘You didn’t know. It’s not your fault. Lawrence was a soldier. He fought back. Set up his base of operations at that hotel and began to make calls. Rallied support. Made sure arrangements he’d put in place for the succession – his will, company rules, and so on – had not been tampered with. And then’ – Horace twisted his head, eyes blazing, to see Adam – ‘Mr Hale showed up to visit him.’
Robert stared unblinkingly into Adam’s face as his old friend drew nearer. ‘What happened, Adam? What did you do?’
‘I did what these gentlemen demanded. I tried to persuade Lawrence to tell me where the rest of the red gold was. The hidden stock. He did not want to help.’
‘Adam was under the influence of these henchmen of the Iwnw, using the Minotaur as a conduit after Adam killed Lawrence,’ Horace said. ‘This may have been the first time they were able to corrode his will so fully. Remember it was he, working with me, who found where the stolen red gold had gone, when he tracked down the maker of the Ma’rifat’ last year. But it cost him. It cost him severely.’
‘It allowed me to see whose side I should be on in this endless contest,’ Adam shouted. ‘Don’t go thinking dear Horace has all the answers.’
Still the three men with white hair stood silently in the dark suits, their relentless gaze on Horace. Robert felt they were waiting for something, though he couldn’t tell what. He cast his mind back to the night of Lawrence’s death. Last Wednesday night. It already seemed a lifetime ago.
‘Lawrence tried to warn me. He called me. He wasn’t threatening me. He was trying to warn me!’
‘He would have been in great pain. He chose to die rather than to give in to Adam. He wrote to you too, yes? You remember?’
‘Said it was all my fault. No, wait. It was because of me –’
‘I had flagged you to Lawrence as someone who might one day come to our aid.’
‘Lawrence said I had a poisonous ego…’
‘No. He said To the poisonous ego of Robert Reckliss I say vile, intense torture reveals impossibility of living. He was giving you advice. On how to help. He was telling you your ego was blinding you to truth, as happens to all of us.’
‘Dear God. I’ve understood so little.’
‘It was suicide, in a way. But pushing a man so hard that he chooses to die, in order to escape the torment, is murder, of course.’
‘I had no choice,’ Adam said.
‘Our friends here, however, were not as clever as they thought. Lawrence was able to ensure that after his death, controlling authority in the company moved quickly and irrevocably to me. By Sunday evening I had almost everything in place. By Monday morning, while the funeral was taking place, I was able to act to call those damned lawyers off you.’
‘That was extraordinary. You should have seen their faces.’
Sweat ran into Robert’s eyes. Tension knotted every muscle in his body.
‘I needed you. I need you now. So does Adam. So do Katherine and Terri. So do a great many people. These creatures cannot be allowed to stop us.’
Now the leader of the Iwnw spoke for the first time. ‘You have something we want, Mr Hencott. We have come to reclaim it. Mr Reckliss here stole it from our colleague.’
‘Take it from me, if you can,’ shouted Horace, defiance in every syllable. ‘In my brother’s name, I swear you’ll get it no other way.’
Then suddenly Adam threw himself at Robert, scrabbling for his eyes and throat. Horace twisted one way as Robert leaped the other, feeling his body ignite with the accumulated strength of the five trials he had undergone. He flipped Adam sideways in the air and watched him slam into the wall of the passageway. Turning to face the Iwnw, he saw Horace deflect the charge of their leader and simultaneously twist the wrist of a second attacker with such speed and timing that the man’s entire body left the ground and landed with a crack of breaking bone five yards away.
Adam rose again and made a dive for Horace, trying to reach inside his jacket, but Robert grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around so that he and Adam were face to face. Robert dragged him to one side and punched him with all his strength in the belly. Adam folded in half, letting out a bellow of pain, blowing air and blood from his mouth, and lay still on the ground.
Robert turned again to help Horace fight the Iwnw. One had the old man from behind by the neck and the other was belabouring Horace’s ribs and chest with punches. Robert launched himself headlong at the second man, knocking him flying and landing on top of him in a crunch of breaking ribs. Robert punched him once in the face, and he stopped moving. The third Iwnw man, his wrist shattered from Horace’s earlier throw, knelt with his head lowered, muttering over and over an incantation while holding his forearm tightly in his good hand.
Now Horace twisted out of the grasp of the Iwnw leader and turned to face him. With a yard of clear space between them, he stepped forward and seemed to project a wave of force from his chest. His opponent flew backwards against the wall and fell heavily, knocked unconscious without a finger having been laid on him.
Breathing heavily, Horace caught Robert’s eye and pointed in the direction of Grand Central. ‘I still have the major key,’ he panted. ‘We must leave.’
Adam still lay motionless on the ground, doubled over. Robert made to go to him. ‘Leave him,’ Horace ordered.
A few minutes later Horace and Robert walked out of Grand Central Terminal on to 42nd Street and turned right, heading west. For a minute or two neither spoke. Horace dabbed some blood from the side of his mouth with a handkerchief.
‘Do you think they’ll come after us?’
‘Yes, but not for a while. Possessing the major key and the traces of red gold it contains, even rudimentarily worked as it has been, I was confident of protecting us both. Of shielding us, at the very least. Without it they might have killed us. Thank you for your help.’
‘How did it help to shield us?’
‘It amplifies whatever psychic force is around it. With it in my hands, my powers are increased many times over. I am forbidden to say exactly how it operates, by my oath to the Perfect Light. Mankind at large does not yet have this knowledge, although the new collider at CERN may bring signs of it when it starts in a few years’ time. I can say it resonates at a certain rate, setting up certain harmonics, that are also the harmonics of operations in the human brain.’
‘It’s like birdsong? The language of the birds?’
‘That is one way it may be experienced, yes.’
‘Adam’s play, all that time ago, spoke of a device like the Ma’rifat’. But he said there were three components.’
‘Yes. The so-called Philosopher’s Stone, which is a fusion of metal and glass with psychic resonances similar to red gold. The red gold itself, which harmonizes with the Stone. They are like male and female components. Then, a knowledge of certain geometric arrangements that allow these materials to be brought into play on each other, like lenses. That is why each of the keys has a different geometric form: to reflect and shape the internal forces of the Ma’rifat’ in different ways, according to the lensing required at different moments. All this is useless without a highly refined state of spiritual attainment in the operator. There is one exception, however. They can also be activated by a person in a desperate state of psychic collapse.’
As they walked, Horace fumbled in his pocket and handed him a piece of paper. ‘I would have sent you this by text message, but since you’re right here…’
Robert read the paper.
Don’t be a rube, follow the cube
Now visit Babel, if you’re able
An unseeing guide, leads you to the hide
To see, though you’re blind
Pass the Trial by Mind
Call Number JFD 00–19002.
PS To get the waypoint number of the next cache, treble the letters in the item you seek and subtract the Deadly Sins
‘A call number,’ Robert said. ‘To get a book at the library?’
Robert’s adrenalin level was sky high from the fight. Fire was still coursing through his limbs. He felt lightheaded, with a tinge of nausea. The image of Adam crumpled on the ground began to bother him. He had hit Adam very hard.
They crossed Vanderbilt and Madison and came to Fifth Avenue. Robert fired up the GPS programme at the intersection and confirmed that Waypoint X87 was indeed inside the New York Public Library.
‘Let us read between the lions,’ Horace said with an uncharacteristic wink, and timed his crossing so they could traverse 42nd southand then Fifth west in quick succession. Robert saw that the old man was not immune to an adrenalin buzz himself.
They strode up the front steps between Patience and Fortitude, the two lions that guarded the library entrance. ‘Arriving destination’ flashed on his screen as they got to the top. He read the clue again to Horace.
They entered the great hall of the library, passing security, and made their way up the stairs to the third floor.
‘What about the unseeing guide? Reminds me of Terri.’
‘Yes, it would. We need to help her, Robert. Poor woman. Have you ever heard of a character called Tiresias? He is the originator of the magic wand carried by Hermes, or Mercury, you know. The caduceus, as it’s called. The twin snakes spiralling along a winged staff. There are some splendid representations of it on the stonework outside, I should have shown you.’
‘On the way out. So we’re looking for a book about Tiresias?’
‘Not quite. A book by someone similar to Tiresias, I suspect. A one-time librarian, blind, one who saw further than most. From Buenos Aires.’
They entered the catalogue room and jotted the number in the clue on to a call slip with one of the stumpy pencils provided.
‘We don’t have the title, I’m afraid,’ Horace said to the librarian. ‘It’s part of a scavenger hunt.’
‘Two in one day,’ the librarian said. ‘That’s OK. We get it all the time.’
‘Asking for the same call number?’ said Horace sharply.
‘I couldn’t tell you.’
‘Do you remember the person? Or people?’
‘Wow. You take your games seriously. A woman in her late thirties or early forties? Beautiful blue eyes.’
They were given a three-digit number and walked through to the breathtaking main reading room. Under luminescent trompe-l’æil ceiling paintings of open skies, ranks upon ranks of readers sat in hushed concentration at oak tables. An arrow pointing right, to the North Hall, indicated book deliveries with odd numbers would take place there; even numbers would be delivered in the South Hall. A staff area divided the two halls, serving as a distribution point for volumes brought from anywhere along the library’s ninety-odd miles of bookshelves.
‘We don’t use the odd numbers, it never gets busy enough,’ the librarian said, ushering them to the left. ‘Do you have an access card?’
Horace assured him that he did.
They sat and waited for their number, 5 42, to come up on an electronic board. The book came in less than ten minutes. Horace collected it. It was a slim volume, bound in library-issue brown hardcover to protect the original green, red and black soft covers inside. Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges, in an Englishtranslation.
On page 46 was the story ‘The Library of Babel’. Robert read: ‘The universe (which others call the Library) consists of an indefinite, and perhaps infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts in between, ringed by very low railings.’ It described a terrifying, endless library holding an infinite number of books, and the life of those who lived in it. ‘From any hexagon, the floors above and below can be seen: they go on for ever… A spiral staircase passes through, which plunges and rises into the remote distance… The Library is a sphere, the exact centre of which is any of the hexagons, and the circumference of which cannot be attained.’
‘I’m going to need a drink after reading this, Horace.’
‘How many letters does it speak of?’
He read on till he found it. ‘Twenty-two, it says. All the books in the Library of Babel are written with twenty-two letters, a full stop, a comma and a space.’
‘Trebling it gives 66. Subtract Seven Deadly Sins. It’s 59. Waypoint 59.’
‘I thought we’d be doing a Star of David today, not a hexagon.’
‘The Star of David is a symbol of great reverence, and not solely in the Judaic tradition. The Mark of Vishnu. Magen David. In Islam, they say Solomon used it to capture djinns. The six-pointed star produces the hexagon, and vice versa. They’re the same thing. If you want to see one, I’ll show you where there was one, just outside. But we need to inspect this book more closely first. There should be something attached to it.’
They took turns examining the volume page by page. On the inside back cover, Robert noticed a rough patch on the surface, as thougha length of Scotchtape had been torn off it.
A look of resignation crossed Horace’s face. ‘It was holding something. I’m afraid we’re too late. Katherine has it.’
They returned the book and left via the front entrance. Horace took him to the northern end of the library’s balustraded patio and pointed north-east, to the corner of 43rd Street. ‘The biggest synagogue in the world was there, Temple Emanu-El, from 1868 to 1927. Two Moorish towers. Quite beautiful. The congregation moved uptown. Their new one is still the biggest in the world. For much of that time, until 1911, the synagogue looked back across here, not at this library but at a massive Neo-Egyptian wall of stone, fifty feet high. It was a huge water reservoir for Manhattan. People used to promenade along the top. I do miss the idea of it.’
‘I want to get to the next waypoint. I need to work out what’s next.’
The Quad showed Waypoint 059 was over near the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel, just under a mile away.
‘We have five minutes,’ Horace said. ‘I need to jam your mind with things to fuel it.’
He led Robert down the steps at the northern end of the patio and pointed out the caduceus, beautifully carved into plinths on each side at the bottom.
‘You are right to say we are on a spine,’ he said. ‘It runs almost exactly along Fifth Avenue. In the 1920s, before there were stop lights, there used to be manned traffic towers directing vehicles from Washington Square Park along Fifth as far as 57th Street. They were made of bronze, with a distinct Egyptian Revival design. They were beautiful. All gone now, though I have a memento of them. Remind me to show you.’
They walked around the front of the library and went west on 40th Street. Horace turned towards Bryant Park, on the other side of railings painted, like the American Radiator Building opposite, in black and gold.
‘Look at that beautiful lawn, Robert. What do you see?’ ‘I see people lolling about enjoying the sun. What should I see?’
‘I see forty miles of bookshelves six feet under the grass, joined by a tunnel to the library we just left. I see a great domed, octagonal Crystal Palace, built for a grand Exposition in 1853 on the park next to the monumental reservoir. I see a young Mark Twain visiting it. I see the palace burning down in a dreadful fire. I see a stooped, rail-thin man of advanced years named Tesla, gently feeding the pigeons in the park, forgotten and alone, dreaming of a world energy and radio system that no one will back him to build. I see General George Washington’s troops in retreat from the British, crossing the parkland. I see the penniless dead being buried in a potter’s field.’
‘Horace, was the fact that you and I met on that walking tour an accident?’
‘When the pupil is ready, the teacher appears.’
‘My head is going to burst. Please stop now.’
‘There is no stopping. It can no longer be stopped.’
‘Will you come with me to the next waypoint?’
‘Consider me your bodyguard,’ he said, patting his jacket pocket.
They walked to 39th Street and took a cab directly west to the corner of Tenth Avenue.
When they got out, the Quad almost immediately acquired a signal and flashed ‘Arriving destination’. Horace read out the corresponding clue:
‘A tower of light holds the key to your plight
A hex marks the spot, ready or not
To vanquish the night, seek the inner eye’s sight
Up the spiral you wind
To pass the Trial by Mind’
Tower of Light.
‘I see it,’ Horace said immediately. He pointed to the tongue of asphalt that curved down into the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. There were more police than usual, because of the Convention. Early-afternoon traffic was relatively light.
On eachside of the tunnel entrance rose Art Deco towers like stylized radio masts, surmounted by powerful searchlights. They reminded Robert of Flash Gordon-era science fiction ray-guns. A spiral staircase ran up their core.
‘There are six platforms, you see?’
‘You can’t be seriously suggesting we go up one of those things?’
‘Not we. You.’
Robert walked west along 39th Street on the southside of the tunnel entrance, where the tower looked easier to get to. ‘This is the nearest one to the waypoint,’ he said.
‘Up you go.’
Horace handed Robert a bandanna. ‘Put this around your face.’
‘Are you insane? We’ll bothbe arrested.’
‘No, just you. Hex marks the spot. Hex and sex, both meaning six. The cache is on the top platform, I’m sure of it. We need that key. It will be part of a hexagon or a Seal of Solomon. Go.’
‘Horace –’
The old man’s anger flared. ‘If anything goes wrong, meet me at the Market Diner at 43rd and 1 ith. Now can you not trust me? Go!’
The towers were set on a brick base that rose above his head height. ‘Help me, then. Give me a leg-up.’
Horace interlocked his fingers and formed a stirrup, his back to the base, for Robert’s foot. He pushed up with remarkable strength as Robert clambered up. Then he walked nonchalantly away.
Atop the base, Robert pulled himself up further to the bottom platform, inside the tower, then climbed the spiral staircase. At any moment he expected to hear bullhorns, sirens, the crack of bullets. Up he rose, through each platform, along the spiral stair that twisted like strands of DNA. It was as though he were climbing one of the staircases between hexagonal floors in the Borges story.
‘I don’t believe it,’ he said to the air. ‘I’m in the Library of Babel.’
At the top platform he stepped off the stair and looked around. Nothing. Bolted metal, thick black cables. The view of Manhattan was stunning.
It looked like he could go up another level, via a ladder, to where the lights were mounted. Carefully he climbed up and stuck his head through the gap in the platform. Right before his eyes, taped to one of the metal struts, was a film container in a sealed plastic bag. Stretching his arm forward, he reached it and put it in his pocket.
At that point he heard the first cop’s voice, through the speakers of a police car. ‘Stop! Don’t move. Stay where you are. Stay where you are. Slowly show your hands.’
Katherine saw it all.
She focused on Robert through the telescopic sight, bringing the crosshairs to bear on his forehead as he leaned out of the top of the light tower to show his hands to the police. Two hundred and fifty yards. She’d have one shot, two at most. It had been a long time since her specialized training. She’d have to use the laser sight. She reached for the switch to turn it on.
Robert looked down, leaning his upper body out of the tower.
A ring of policemen was around the base. An officer sat in the police car, keying the microphone. Horace was nowhere to be seen.
Robert made an overt display of showing his hands. For the love of God, what next? Suddenly he saw a flash of multicoloured light. The middle of his forehead lit up with sensation. He closed his eyes, and still could see.
Time halted. He with drew behind his eyes, behind his mind, to a place where, for an instant, he saw nothing but patterns upon patterns of light, streaming like rain from the sky, diffracting and interfering and weaving in colours he had never seen. It was world rain, unfiltered rain, a rain of light coalescing in and out of matter, twisting and arching back on itself, and he was simply a fold in it, an eddy, a swimmer in a sea of which he was himself made.
As above, so below; as within, so without.
He saw part of his mind filtering the stream of vibrations and light, the mercurial stuff of the universe, neither wave nor particle but both and neither, saw his mind building a representation of the world, a selection adapted to survival needs, an editing job so seamless as to be invisible.
Mind is the builder.
He saw the world being made. Every day. In every instant. He saw endless cycles of refinement, of evolution.
He opened his eyes. He saw that he was both free and predestined: that he had wanted and chosen everything that had happened to him, that his task was to learn why he had created this life, these events, for himself.
He resigned himself to whatever would happen.
Katherine saw the red dot dance about Robert’s head and settle on his brow. She held her aim on him, breathing deeply in, saying a quiet prayer to herself to calm her nerves.
Robert saw the senior officer talking to uniforms, pointing to the car and up at him. There was a dumbshow of reluctance, of remonstrance, of consideration. Then everyone at once stopped and stared up at Robert. He could see alarm spreading through the group.
The senior police officer spoke into his walkie-talkie agitatedly.
Katherine saw they’d seen the laser dot. They’d be radioing to check whether it was one of their men and not a rogue sniper. Then they’d realize one of their own sharpshooters wasn’t answering his radio. She’d give them another minute to do this. Then she’d have to move very fast.
Robert saw the policemen nervously taking positions of better cover. Two started gesturing to him to come down.
Then a voice boomed over the police-car loudspeaker: ‘Come down slowly and calmly, sir. Come down.’
He started back down the spiral staircase.
Katherine shifted her aim down towards the policemen.
‘Good boy, Robert,’ she whispered. ‘Keep moving.’
She brought the laser dot to rest on a cop’s chest, just long enough for the police commander next to him to notice it, then moved it up to the policeman’s forehead just as Robert reached the bottom of the tower.
She saw Robert jump down to the street as the cops flew in all directions to take cover from her.
‘There you are, baby.’
Then a shadow entered Katherine’s soul. She aimed the laser sight again at Robert’s head.
She had a clear shot.
‘I love you, Robert,’ she whispered.
She refocused her aim. Then Katherine emptied her lungs of air, and between two heartbeats softly squeezed the trigger.
Robert looked up towards the muzzle flash and then time stopped. His mind ripped along the trajectory of the bullet, and he knew Katherine was at the other end of it, and he felt in her mind the terrifying shadow of the Iwnw.
A bullet was coming, and he couldn’t move. He could see it, frozen in mid spin, a glint in the air, and then there were minds trying to reach his. He felt Adam, and behind him the Iwnw. He felt Horace. Duck your head to the right. Duck your head to the left. Look up. Look down. Pressure in his head, forcing him this way and that, paralysing him as each fought to nudge his head an inch either way.
He could feel Horace failing, desperately trying to block the murderous intent of the Iwnw through Adam’s raw pain. He saw how seriously he had hurt Adam. Blood was pumping internally, he was bleeding to death within his own body. Robert saw the pooling blood, distended tissues. Horace was losing his grip, exhausted from the fight at Grand Central, and now Robert felt his head being tipped against his will, down and to the right, into the path of the flying bullet…
Had Adam crossed over or not? Was he still playing a double game? Robert felt he’d lost control to the Iwnw now. He was allowing them to feed into Katherine through him. He was trying to force Robert to duck into the bullet. He was Robert’s enemy. He had become the enemy. Dear God.
Robert could let him die. Adam was bleeding out. If he just held the balance between the forces trying to tip his head this way and that for a few minutes longer, Adam would die and the Iwnw’s gateway would collapse. He reached out again with his mind to Adam. He could even accelerate the bleeding.
Adam Hale. The brother he wished he’d had. Troubled, crazy, lovable Adam. Robert could not believe the good was lost.
Drawing on the powers of earth and water, fire and air, ether and mind, Robert looked into Adam’s injuries and closed the internal wound. He stopped the bleeding and fired every repair and recovery mechanism in Adam’s battered body. Then, in a blaze of burning mental light, he threw Adam and the Iwnw from his consciousness and twisted his head a millimetre up and to the left.
Robert heard the zip of an angry wasp and felt the bullet’s shock-wave as the skin of his forehead split. The windshield of an empty car ten yards from the policemen shattered, and a boom echoed among the buildings. The policemen all hit the deck. Robert ran.
Katherine felt the shadow lift from her. She fired off two more shots in quick succession to cover Robert’s escape, hitting two more police cars in the tyres. She saw him pull off the bandanna and make the corner. Then she put her escape plan into operation, emerging three minutes later on to the street in a business suit, unruffled and smiling.
Horace was waiting for him in a booth at the diner, his face white with shock, when Robert entered. A handkerchief jammed against his forehead to mask the blood, barely able to speak, Robert sat down and started to shake.
‘I lost you,’ Horace said. ‘You saved yourself. I’m so sorry.’
For minutes neither said another word.
Robert put on the table between them a copper-red fragment of metallic glass, part of a hexagon.
He took a deep breath. Tried to calm his mind.
‘The design of these keys is hundreds of years old,’ Horace said. ‘Perhaps more. Exquisite. The full hexagon will show a six-pointed star, forming another hexagon at its core. Within that shape, another Star of David, and so on, each nesting in the other, to an exquisite degree of detail.’
‘Horace, are we safe here? Shouldn’t we be moving?’ Police sirens were sounding now in the street.
Horace closed his eyes. ‘We have a few minutes.’
‘I healed him. I healed Adam.’
Horace looked deep into Robert’s eyes. ‘You did well.’
‘He can still be saved. There is still good in him, even if he no longer sees it himself. I couldn’t kill him.’
‘Yet he was your enemy when you healed him.’
‘He was.’
‘Your abilities are becoming greater than Adam’s, greater than mine.’
‘No.’
‘There is another who needs healing. One who is deeply afraid.’
‘Terri.’
‘Tell me, when you were at the Worth Monument, was there anything Adam said to you that has stuck in your mind?’
‘Well, he kept going on about the two Metropolitan Life buildings at Madison Square Park. I couldn’t figure out why. He loves to go off on tangents like that, but it was odd.’
‘He wanted to lodge a phrase in your mind. What exactly did he say?’
‘MetLife. He kept saying MetLife.’
‘And what do you conclude from that?’
‘Not much, I’m afraid.’
‘He was telling you where Terri is hiding. He was telling you while masking it even from himself.’
‘What?’
‘Did he pronounce it just like that? MetLife? What did he actually say?’
‘Actually, he pronounced it oddly. As if he’d developed a speechimpediment. The F was more of an S. At first I thought it was the phone, but it seemed very marked. Very odd.’
‘So. Solve it.’
‘MetLice… So basic a riddle, he said. He said that twice. So basic a riddle. MetLice.’
‘And so?’
‘Metal ice, so basic –’
‘Stop there. It’s a riddle involving those letters. What was the context? What else did he talk about around then?’
‘Umm… he mentioned a sex club, to be honest.’
‘What name did he give?’
‘None.’
‘Very well. Use your mind, Robert. He was telling you something, in the language of the full mind.’
‘So, a basic life met…’
‘Keep going. Write it down if you must.’
Robert scribbled letters into a notepad, turning them over in his head. ‘Boite à malice. Good God. It’s an almost perfect anagram of boite à malice.’
‘And boite in French means nightclub, I believe? Or place of work?’
‘That’s right.’
‘That is where she will be hiding. Such an establishment, of that name, where she may have worked or which she may have frequented. He will have managed to shield that information, but not for long, especially not from himself. He bypassed even his own conscious mind to tell you that. You must find her as soon as possible.’
Robert googled variations on the club name on the Quad, coming up blank on all of them. He tried other searchengines. Nothing.
‘Some of these places are public, though discreet, but others are very word of mouth, I believe,’ Horace said. ‘Even the New York Times has written about them.’
Robert racked his memory for any indication Terri had given that might help. Finally, he called an acquaintance who freelanced for Time Out and other publications, including occasionally GBN, about nightlife.
‘Matt, I need to ask you a question of some delicacy. It’s quite urgent, and it requires great discretion.’
Matt said he’d never heard of La Boîte à Malice but would ask around.
Horace scribbled a note to Robert on a napkin. Does he need money? Robert shook his head. Matt either liked you or he didn’t.
‘The next ten minutes, Matt, would be ideal.’
Robert regarded his old friend for a moment. ‘You don’t eat, Horace? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you eat.’
‘At my age one is careful about what one puts into one’s system. Let’s move to another location now.’
By a circuitous route, they moved to another restaurant several blocks further away from the scene of the shooting. Robert heard police sirens off in the distance, near where they had been sitting.
Matt called him back in fifteen minutes, just as they were sitting down.
La Boîte à Malice was neither a sex club nor a floating kink party that moved from private loft to private loft, as he had imagined. It was something very high end, extremely discreet and very expensive: a consulting agency, run by a woman, that was said to offer imaginative problem-solving services, using methods from psychic to sexual, with a trademark sense of humour. The name, in that sense, could be loosely translated as the Mischief House, or even Tricks ’R’ Us.
‘Matt says it has a very strange vibe, cool and scary at once, and people talk about it as if it were an urban legend. It only employs witches, they say. And no one ever messes with them,’ Robert told Horace.
‘Is there a name for the woman who owns it? Some way to get in touch? Or,’ Horace added with a smile, ‘do they contact you?’
‘It’s the sort of firm Adam would know about. Matt had a phone number, but no address.’
Horace took from his pocket the map of New York with the Tree of Life shape sketched on to it and placed it flat on the table.
‘Do you have anything that Terri has worn? Anything she is attached to, or worn close to her skin?’
Robert hesitated. Then he took a chain from around his wrist. It was the chain she had worn around her neck on the day they’d made love. He felt it glow in his hand. ‘This is the chain that held the second key.’
Horace took it between his fingertips and closed his eyes. For more than a minute, he sat perfectly still, breathing deeply.
Without opening his eyes, he asked Robert to write down the phone number for the Mischief House and give it to him. He placed his palm down flat on the piece of paper while still holding the chain in his fingers.
‘Personal items have resonance,’ he said. ‘With the red gold on my person, I may be able to find a matching resonance. Do you have any idea where Terri usually lives?’
‘She said Adam called her his Red Hooker.’
Horace concentrated harder.
‘She’s not in Brooklyn.’
After another minute of intense concentration, he suddenly grimaced. ‘I have found her fear… And pain. Call that number.’
Robert keyed it in and heard it ring. After six rings it cut over to an answering machine. No voice to identify the firm or confirm the number. He cut the line.
‘She is wherever that phone is,’ Horace said. ‘It made her jump whenit rang. She was scared, then intrigued. Now she has put up a wall. She was afraid to answer it, even though she wanted to very badly. Call her again. Say it’s you and ask her to call. Say you are with me. She knows me.’
Robert called. He saw Horace wince again. When the answer phone came on, he spoke. ‘Terri, darling, it’s me, Robert. I’m with Horace. We can help you. We can protect you. We need your help. Please pick up?’
Nothing happened. He waited till the line went dead.
‘We need to start heading east,’ Horace said.
The Quad rang as they were crossing Seventh Avenue. ‘Robert, stay away from me. It’s too dangerous.’
‘We can protect you.’
‘There’s no protection against them.’
‘Let us help you.’
‘The women here are helping me.’
‘Terri, I know you’re pregnant.’
She began to weep. ‘There’s no way out… no way out for me.’
‘There is if we help you. Tell us where to meet you.’
‘Where are you?’
She was silent for what seemed an age. ‘Mossman Lock Collection, at the General Society, 44th and Fifth, fifteen minutes.’
The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, founded in New York in 1785, when the British had only been gone two years and the US Constitution was still four years from adoption, was in a jewel of a building.
Robert and Horace, still breathing hard from their brisk walk, exited the bronze-doored elevator on to a hardwood first-floor landing that curved elegantly over a hushed reading room below. The library was bathed in light from a breathtaking skylight three storeys above. Great reading lamps hung by chains from the ceiling like floating lilies. Robert and Horace followed a curving brass handrail to their left that led to a small room ranged with glass display cabinets.
Terri was not there.
The cabinets contained an astonishing collection of locks and keys, most of them mind-bogglingly complex. Everywhere he looked he saw an orgy of precision instrument-making in polished brass and silver. There were time locks, magic key locks, combination locks, plunger cylinder locks, examples of back-action key locks, grasshopper locks, outside-shaft locks, knob combination locks. One was labelled ‘a very complicated lock’. Great iron keys and ornately scrolled locks from the Renaissance were displayed next to exquisitely tooled pieces from the nineteenthand early twentiethcenturies that looked like code-breaking machines with numbered drums, star wheels and notched cylinders.
Horace called him over, his eyes gleaming, and pointed in awed silence at some carved wooden instruments, their parts looking like wooden toothbrushes. This is a wooden Egyptian lock which is about 4,000 years old, the label said. Pin tumbler lock. This mechanical principle was developed by Linus Yale Sr for modern use.
At the far end was a five-foot-tall black metal safe, painted in gold-yellow lettering. Next to it sat a strongbox of heavily riveted black iron. Robert’s mind flared with pain as his eyes fell upon it. The black bolts of the cracked bell at St Mark’s in-the-Bowery rushed at him. Mary fat Mary fat Mary fat Mary.
Coloured lightning flashed through his eyes, blue and purple and yellow. Saw-tooth patterns like the Chrysler arcs, twisting in geometric forms, scoured his brain. Then everything went black. The heavy bolts of the strongbox had set off a terrifying string of associations in his mind that ended in a single image: a picture he had seen as a child of the early atomic bombs. Thick rivets on black metal. Fat Man. Fat Mary. Ma’rifat’. And the words quoted by Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project, when he described seeing the first atomic explosion: I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
He stepped back in bewilderment and spun around. ‘Horace?’
Before him stood a shape, in grey light against black, radiating black-blue waves. He blinked his eyes and shook his head. His hearing warped and squealed. His regular senses were overwhelmed, shutting down. He felt energy draining out of his body.
‘I can’t see,’ he whispered. ‘It’s close. The detonation is close. If we can’t stop it…’ Then slowly everything stabilized, and the greys became light grey, then white.
He saw it was Terri standing before him, holding Horace’s hand.
Horace flagged down a cab outside the General Society. ‘Come to my apartment. I can look after you best there.’
Terri beamed sadly at Horace. ‘Where is your place? I’ve always wondered.’
‘A building that used to be called the Level Club, on the Upper West Side. Near the Verdi statue.’
‘Why is it called that?’
‘It was built by Freemasons, as a facility for visiting members from around the country. The venture went bust, though. It had some very rough years. Eventually it was rescued and restored. I’m not a Mason, but some of the building’s features have great resonance for me. Some even say it is the most ambitious effort ever made to actually reconstruct King Solomon’s Temple.’
‘Now I really want to experience that.’
‘Before we go, Robert,’ Horace added. ‘Look there.’
Just by the entrance to the General Society, the building was adorned by a muscular arm in iron bas-relief, holding a hammer in vigorous workerly manner.
‘Remember it,’ Horace said.
After Horace had finished dressing the wound on his forehead and examining his eyes, Robert got up impatiently from the sofa.
‘What else happened on the day of the Blackout?’
Horace glanced at Terri. ‘I suspect that on that day, everything happened,’ he said. ‘Everything that has happened, all of this, was set in train that day.’
Robert frowned. He could barely keep his eyes open; his entire body felt as though it were made of lead, and yet he couldn’t still his mind.
‘Tell me.’
Terri spoke: ‘I didn’t see all of it. Adam overcame great fear. Paralysing. But he went anyway.’
‘Start at the beginning,’ Robert said. ‘Enough talking around it.’
‘I only know a part of it,’ Terri said. ‘Adam will have to tell you some of it.’
‘Go on.’
‘Among other things, as I told you, it was the day I lost my eyesight.’
Terri arrived at the apartment building on Greenwich Street at Charles shortly before ten o’clock in the morning, the appointed hour.
Since she had a couple of minutes to kill, she crossed the street to the little white clapboard farmhouse that sat diagonally across from the client’s building. It looked like something she had seen in a children’s storybook, a long time ago. All bent out of shape and non-linear.
It promised to be an interesting job. The client, some kind of minor aristocrat in his forties from Britain, had contacted La Boîte à Malice asking for someone with very specialized skills to help with a particular problem. Terri was the best qualified. As usual, the agency had checked up on the client and sent her a summary. It had been entirely up to her whether to accept.
When he opened the door, her first thought was that he had a far more smiling presence than she had felt from afar; her second thought was that he had intensely magnetic eyes. The client, who went by the name of Adam Hale, introduced her to a pretty, petite woman about twenty years her senior with straight black hair and blue eyes, whose first signal to Terri was a powerful block around some core issues in her past.
Terri recognized it because she maintained the same defence. Despite the older woman’s superficial friendliness, she also read some unease: guilt about being there, high regard for a life partner and sadness. A feeling of something lost.
‘Please meet Katherine Rota,’ Adam said. ‘Katherine, this is Terri, from La Boîte à Malice.’
There was a strong bond between Adam and the woman, one that had gone on for a long time. She saw a shape of three people, bound together through the years, changing combinations but always together… the third was a man, Katherine’s significant other. She saw it lasting through lifetimes.
Hale she read as a dynamo. Energy coursed through him and from him. He was powerful but stymied somehow, and afraid.
‘Terri, I’ll lay this out as baldly as I can,’ Adam said. ‘I have learned of an act of great obscenity, an attack, that is being planned against this city. It is the kind of thing that would not be taken seriously by the authorities, and indeed if they were to intervene it would only make things worse.
‘The subject is a very dangerous person, with the ability to carry out a very serious act. He is also quite fascinating, and someone that in other circumstances I would find very gratifying to hold as a friend. However, this cannot be.’
Terri felt his intensity wash into her. Then she felt an enormous wave of potential harm. For a moment it took her breath away. In the middle of it, at its core, was a word. She tried to read it, amid swirling patterns of pain and shame. Revenge.
‘Who is this man?’
‘His name is unimportant, but his father and grandfather, both Egyptians, had access to a great tradition of ancient knowledge, in addition to being trained as scientists in the Western tradition. They passed along the reverence for this tradition, and some of its tenets and secrets, to the boy as he grew up between Cairo, London and America. His mother is American, and he is an American citizen.’
‘OK.’
‘Something dreadful has happened to this man. It has caused a psycho-spiritual breakdown. This has served as a gateway for certain forces of great potential evil. I have detected him and must stop him –’
Katherine interrupted: ‘Pause for breath, Adam.’
Terri felt Katherine’s barriers harden even further. But she smiled at Terri. ‘He can be a little overwhelming. Would you like some tea?’
‘Just water, please.’
Terri felt Katherine’s attempts to appraise her. No hostility, a neutral but searching sweep initially, now turning positive. She felt Katherine was someone accustomed to assessing people quickly, trained in doing so. She was also like a television tuned to static. Deliberately so, though she didn’t realize it.
‘May I go on?’
Terri focused again on Adam Hale. ‘Please.’
‘In a few hours I plan to go to confront this man. I’m not strong enough to do so without help. There are forces attached to him of great power.’
‘You want me to go with you? As I understood, that’s not the problem I was brought in to address.’
‘No. Just over twenty years ago, when Katherine and I met at university, she had one of the most powerful gifts I have ever come across. I need her help now, but she can no longer tap into it.’
‘I see that.’
‘I had hoped that, at least for the next twelve hours or so, you might be able to help her recover it. Add your own power, if you are willing. I need… armour, so to speak. Or depth. A deep well to draw on. It can’t be described.’
‘I know. I understand.’
She closed her eyes and drew a deep breath, holding it till it had absorbed all distractions, all incoherence, all negativity, in her being. Then slowly she exhaled, expelling it all. She held Katherine, Adam and the unnamed man in her focus, letting it spread slowly out to those around them.
She saw something deeply puzzling. Beautiful… virginal…
‘Your husband,’ she said to Katherine. ‘Why didn’t you call on him? He’s…’
She looked at Adam, saw his eyes flit to Katherine’s.
‘He doesn’t know,’ Adam said. ‘He has buried it so deeply that he believes he is a sceptic.’
‘It’s not the time,’ Katherine said. ‘Robert’s not ready, and he’s to be preserved until there’s truly no option but to call on him.’
Terri saw the three of them again, in a chain of being, linked together and unchanging as worlds shifted and blurred around them. Adam. Katherine. Robert.
She turned to Adam. ‘How will you prepare?’
‘Breathing. Meditation. Movement.’ He smiled at her. ‘Focus on my quarry.’
She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘You want me to raise your sexual energy too. So you can build on it as a base.’
‘You’re doing that just by being in the room.’
‘I might be able to do better than that.’
She turned to Katherine. ‘Ms Rota, could you and I talk while he does his deep breathing?’
Robert held up his hand. ‘Can you stop for a moment, Terri?’
Clouds of darkness and foreboding had filled his mind as he listened to Terri’s account. He strained to throw off a sense of doom. The idea of Katherine trying to help Adam behind his back, of Terri and Katherine knowing each other over a year before he’d made love with Terri, made him feel idiotic, however much they’d excluded him to protect him. His whole adult life of denial of his gift seemed cowardly, somehow.
‘You seriously need to rest,’ Horace said.
Terri took his arm and led him, following Horace’s directions, to a guest room. As he lay there, curtains drawn, in the half-light, a great wave of fear broke over him, and then he melted into exhausted oblivion.
He slept right through dinner. At some point in the night Terri brought him some soup. Then she with drew and left him to sleep his fill.
After weeks, I was suddenly released. There was no explanation, just a warning never to speak of what had happened to me. They knew what I’d done, they said, but I would not be charged. Simply, no one would ever again believe a word I said.
I was dropped in the middle of Manhattan one night, in the clothes I had been abducted in, with all my belongings except my identity papers.
I returned to Long Island to find I had lost my job. In addition to vanishing without explanation, I had been shown to have fabricated data. Pictures taken during my interrogation had been sent to my friends, to my family, showing me in compromising positions with other men.
They discredited me as a scientist and as a man. My credit cards stopped working. I was forced to live on my meagre savings.
I could not forgive them.
But I could take revenge.
Sir Isaac Newton’s third law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I determined now to honour that law.
And ironically, I would use in part the formula Newton himself had passed down to me through my Beloved.
I found my destruction as a human being had brought me capacities I had sought for years in our tradition. Inchoate and poisonous but real none the less. Malevolence gathered around me and began to feed on my soul.
My grandfather had placed in my father’s keeping a metallic drum of exquisite design, which, as a boy, I had once been allowed to see revolve, and glow, and feel its power, as the adults prayed and chanted around it. It seemed to amplify and to broadcast their love, their spiritual rapture. My father passed it on to me, and, in keeping with his admonitions, I hid it in a secret place, as befitted a sacred treasure, until I was worthy of it. I had hoped, one day, to become an adept and learn its secret uses.
Now, with Newton’s help, I made a copy of it. It was made of the same metal-glass that he described as the Philosopher’s Stone. Only one element was missing.
They say that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.
I now came to the attention of a group of people who had felt my rage, my humiliation. For fifteen years, I had been striving in my secret studies, to transmute a tiny amount of regular gold into the kind we know as red gold. It is an alchemical operation, requiring both delicate physical treatment and heightened spiritual states. I had never succeeded. It was the one thing missing from Newton’s paper. He did not say how to obtain it.
Now the Iwnw brought me some.
On August 14, 200), I rose early, intending to enjoy every last drop of the beautiful day that was dawning. As the sun rose, I stood at the open window and felt the gloy of the heavens enter my heart.
The final preparation of the Device would be a long arduous task. I meditated for an hour. I tried to find a place of forgiveness for what had been done to me, and found none. I honoured my father’s memoy. I cursed the Mukhabarat. All Mukhabarats. Above all, I cursed the American Mukhabarat.
Two days earlier I had sent a message to Katherine, to my Beloved. It was our only contact after I was released. I asked her to meet me in Las Vegas, at the Luxor Hotel, on the evening of Thursday, August 14, 2003. I did not intend to be there, but I wanted her to be out of New York. I did not want her to be destroyed in the detonation of the Ma’rifat’ that she had unwittingly helped me to build. I wanted her to witness it. To understand my pain. My destruction.
After breakfasting, I took care of final routine matters. I paid bills and burned personal items. I sent a final entry to the small weblog I had kept as an enthusiast for the great Nikola Tesla, who, like me, had explored the outer reaches of phenomena such as resonance and vibration, who had warned that such knowledge, in the wrong hands, could split the earth apart, whose laboratory near Washington Square Park, like Newton’s in Cambridge, had burned down in a freak fire, who had seen beyond the limitations and prejudices of his age, and suffered for it.
Then I went to my garage and put all I would need into the trunk.
It was a short drive from my home to the place I had chosen as a suitable locale for the final construction of the Device.
It was at Robinson Street and Tesla Street in Shoreham, Long Island, just a few miles from my place of work. It was the empty shell of the laboratory where Tesla planned his most audacious vision: a Radio City of his own technology that would transmit energy and information through the earth itself to all mankind. He had not been backed sufficiently. He failed, though decades later his contributions to the world would be recognized.
I had studied and observed when to elude the security guards. When I was ready, I made my way into the grounds through my secret entrance. To face my destiny, in the form of Adam Hale.
