Glenn Cooper: Library of the Dead aka Secret of the Seventh Son

They were not alone. Someone was beside her. She whirled around to see the dumb blank face and green eyes of the young man blocking the passageway. Sabeline withdrew, her sleeve brushing the leg bones of a corpse, its dry bones clattering together musically. Then, holding the candle high, the nun and watched from a short distance.

Elizabeth was panting like an animal. She could have fled, deeper into the catacombs, but was too afraid. The ginger-haired man stood inches away, his arms limp by his sides. Seconds passed. Sabeline called to him in frustration, “I have brought this girl for you!”

Nothing happened.

More time passed and the nun demanded, “Touch her!”

Elizabeth braced herself for the touch of what seemed a living skeleton and closed her eyes. She felt a hand on her shoulder, but strangely, it did not repulse her. It was reassuring. She heard Sister Sabeline shrieking, “What are you doing here! What are you doing!”

She opened her eyes and, magically, the face she saw was Luke’s. The pale, ginger-haired youth was on the ground, picking himself up from the spot where Luke had roughly shoved him.

“Brother Luke, leave us!” Sabeline screamed. “You have violated a sacred place!”

“I will not leave without this girl,” Luke said defiantly. “How can this be sacred? All I see is evil.”

“You do not understand!” the nun roared.

From the hall, they heard a sudden pandemonium.

Heavy thuds.

Crashes.

Flopping. Thrashing.

The ginger-haired youth turned away and walked toward the noise.

“What is happening?” Luke asked.

Sabeline did not answer. She took her candle and rushed toward the hall, leaving them alone in the pitch-dark.

“Are you hurt?” Luke asked Elizabeth tenderly. He was still touching her shoulder, and she realized he had never let go.

“You came for me,” she whispered.

He helped her find her way from the darkness into the light, into the hall.

It was no longer the Hall of the Writers.

It was the Hall of the Dead.

The only living soul was Sabeline, whose shoes were soaked with blood. She aimlessly walked among a sea of bodies, draped on the tables and cots, crumpled in piles on the ground, a mass of lifelessness and quivering involuntary twitching. She had a sick, glassy expression and could only mutter, “My God, my God, my God, my God,” over and over, in the cadence of a chant.

The floor and tables and chairs of the chamber were slowly being coated with the blood spurting from the quill-pierced eyes of almost 150 ginger-haired men and boys.

Luke led Elizabeth by her hand through the carnage. He had the presence of mind to glance at the parchments that lay on the writing tables, some of them blotting up puddles of blood. What curiosity or survival instinct prompted him to snatch up one of the sheets as he fled? That would be something he would contemplate for years to come.

They ran up the precarious stairs, through the chapel, and out into the mist and rain. They kept running until they were a mile from the abbey gate. Only then did they stop to soothe their burning lungs and listen to the cathedral bells pealing in alarm.

The navy operated a single G-V, the C-37A, a luxury, high-performance business jet favored by the Secretary of the Navy for his personal travel. The twin Rolls-Royce turbofans put out neck-snapping thrust on its steep-angle takeoff, and out its windows, in seconds, the endless incandescence of the Los Angeles night disappeared behind sheets of low clouds.

Harris Lester was running on caffeine after a stressful, time-zone-stretched day that had begun before dawn in his Fairfax, Virginia, home and included stops at the Pentagon, Andrews Air Force Base, and LAX. After a brief layover in L.A., it was wheels up again for the return flight to Washington. His facial tone was slack and unhealthy and his breath was stale. The only things about him that were crisp and fresh were his dress shirt and pressed tie, and they looked like they had just been unwrapped from Brooks Brothers tissue paper.

There were only three people in the passenger cabin, a paneled interior configured in club style, with pairs of plush dark-blue leather seats facing each other over smooth teak-wood tables. Lester and Malcolm Frazier, whose chiseled block of a face was contorted into an immutable grimace, were staring at the man seated across from Lester, who clutched his armrest with one hand and a cut-crystal glass of scotch with the other.

Will was bone-weary but the most relaxed person on board. He had played his cards, and it appeared he had the winning hand.

Hours earlier he had been scooped off the street in Hollywood by Frazier and a team of watchers who were jetted in from Groom Lake to make the pickup. They bundled him into a black Tahoe and sped off to a private aviation terminal at the airport, where they kept him on ice, uninterrogated, in a conference room until Lester arrived. Will had the distinct impression that Frazier would have preferred to kill him outright, or at least inflict a punishing dose of pain; he supposed if someone had shot up one of his FBI teams, he’d have wanted to do the same. But he could also tell that Frazier was a soldier, and good soldiers obeyed orders.

Now, Frazier opened Shackleton’s laptop and after a few keystrokes he spat out, “What’s his password?”

“Pythagoras,” Will answered.

Frazier sighed. “Fucking egghead. P-I?”

“P-Y,” Will said sadly.

Then, in seconds, “It’s here as advertised, Mr. Secretary.”

“How can we be sure you made a copy, Agent Piper?” Lester asked.

Will pulled a receipt from his wallet and tossed it on the table. “Radio Shack memory stick, bought today, postincident.”

“So we know you stashed it somewhere in the city,” Frazier said contemptuously.

“It’s a big city. On the other hand, I could have dropped it in the mail. Or, I could have given it to someone who may or may not have known what it was. In any event, I can guarantee you that if I don’t regularly and frequently make personal contact with one or more unnamed parties, the memory stick will be sent to the media.” He forced his mouth into a thin smile. “So, gentlemen, don’t fuck with me or anyone I care about.”

Lester massaged his temples. “I know what you’re saying and why you’re saying it, but you don’t really want this ever to get out, do you?”

Will put his glass down and watched its sweaty bottom make a wet ring on the wood. “If I wanted that, I would have sent it to the papers myself. It’s not for me to say whether the public should know. Who the hell am I? I wish I never learned about it. I haven’t had a chance to give it a lot of thought but just knowing it’s there changes-everything.” He suddenly chuckled, punch drunk.

“What’s funny?” Lester asked.

“For a guy named Will, the concept of free will is kind of important.” On a dime, he turned serious again. “Look, I don’t know if free will even exists now. It’s all laid out in advance, right? Nothing’s going to change if your name comes up. Am I right?”

“You got that right,” Frazier said bitterly. “Otherwise you’d be in a thirty-thousand-foot free fall as we speak.”

Will let the man’s venom slide off him. “You’ve lived with this. Doesn’t it affect the way you go about your life?”

“Of course it does,” Lester snapped. “It’s a burden. I’ve got a son, Agent Piper, my youngest boy. He’s twenty-two and he’s got cystic fibrosis. We all know he’s not going to have a normal life expectancy, we accept that. But do you think I like knowing that the date of his death is set in stone? Do you think I want to know that day, or have him know? Of course not!”