George Chesbro - The Cold Smell Of Sacred Stone

"Sporting?!"

Veil came back into the bedroom carrying a huge ceramic mug filled to the brim with a steaming, perfectly foul-smelling liquid. "Well, you'd been telling me what a bad-ass this guy was, and he obviously thought he was a bad-ass, along with his various employers. I was curious as to how he'd fight; I thought I might learn something."

At first I thought he had to be joking, but when I looked into his face I could see that he was serious. I shook my head in amazement. "Jesus Christ. I knew you were damn good, and I never doubted that you could beat Kitten, but I never imagined that anyone could have done it so easily. I think I'll start calling you sir."

"Drink this," Veil said, handing me the mug. "Watch it; it's hot."

I sipped at the disgusting brown liquid, almost gagged. "What the hell is this stuff?!"

"I told you; super-duper herbal tea. Mother Kendry's magic healing potion."

"It tastes like you washed your socks and jock in it after our last workout."

"Drink it; all of it. It will make you feel better."

He was right about that. With Veil occasionally prodding me by raising my elbow, I drained off the mug. The throbbing in my forehead eased dramatically, the room no longer threatened to turn upside down on me, and I felt decidedly stronger, less groggy.

"So," I said as I set the empty mug down on the bed's side table, "now we have to figure out what to do with our departed assassin."

Veil nodded as he sat down next to me on the bed and absently adjusted his sling, which he had changed. "If we call the police, they're going to be all over the two of us; Kitten just doesn't look like your average burglar, especially in this neighborhood."

"You got that right. If they identify him-or if they can't identify him, which seems more likely-the cops are going to be leaning very heavily on us for explanations, which we can't give. Shannon's done his part, and we're all home free at the moment; but it's all over if anyone manages to make a link between that dead assassin and Orville Madison. If the cops check with Interpol, they'll find out that Garth filed a request for information on a guy that turned out to be Henry Kitten. A lot of worms will come crawling out of a lot of cans."

"Worms," Veil said, and smiled thinly. "You feel up to helping me with a little spring planting? I'll reward you with a Scotch from your special reserve I keep under the kitchen counter."

We gained access to the alley, which was blocked off from the street at both ends by rusting chain-link fences, through a triple-bolted steel door in the basement of the gutted building. Clambering through a treacherous jungle of rubber tires, twisted shards of rusting metal, various unrecognizable objects, garbage, and a host of scurrying, dog-sized rats, we finally made our way to the mound of junk on which the broken body of Henry Kitten lay askew, leaking blood from all its orifices. Along the way I'd picked up half of a broken steel pole, with one jagged, splayed end. Veil kicked aside some soggy cardboard, and I began digging with my makeshift shovel in the soft, rotting earth which had been exposed.

"Easy does it, Mongo," Veil said as he leaned back against a tangled pile of lumber and steel. If he was the least bit concerned about having a corpse buried beneath the windows of a loft where he lived and worked, he certainly didn't show it. He'd assured me that it would be at least a hundred years before anyone found the remains of Henry Kitten, and-considering the neighborhood-nobody in the next century would give them a second thought. Our conversation-spiced spring planting expedition might have seemed a tad macabre to me if I hadn't been so happy to be rid of Henry Kitten. "You don't want to start that wound bleeding."

"Listen, pal, with that tea you gave me I feel like I could staff an entire gravediggers' union by myself. What the hell is in that stuff? Cocaine?"

"Just herbs. It's a recipe I picked up in Laos, from the Hmong. Very good for whatever ails you. I'll give you the recipe, if you'd like."

"No, thanks. I'm not sure I could handle it."

Veil selected a jagged wood stick from the pile he was leaning against, gripped it tightly in his left hand and began helping me dig. "How's Garth?" he asked quietly.

I paused in my digging, leaned on my pole, sighed, and shook my head. "No change from the way you saw him three days ago at Langley. He's just. . gone away. His eyes are open, but there's no life in them; they look like dull marbles. He blinks, breathes, pisses down a tube into a bag, shits through another tube into another bag, gets fed through tubes in his nose, and doesn't object to being massaged and rolled into another position four times in every twenty-four hours."

"EEG?"

"Damn near normal, which is what's so frustrating. Maybe I could accept the fact that my brother's become a zombie if there were some sign of brain damage, but there isn't. All of his organs seem to be functioning quite normally, considering the fact that he's totally sedentary, but there's nothing going on with him. He reminds me of the way I found your loft that night; all the lights are on, but there's nobody home."

"Are you satisfied with his care?"

"Lippitt says it's the best, and I have no reason not to believe him. You know, the clinic is at Rockland Psychiatric Center, but it's a secret Defense Intelligence Agency facility, staffed by their people and under their control. I don't know enough about what's required in Garth's case to be in a position to evaluate the care, but all of the equipment looks like state-of-the-art, there are plenty of nurses who really seem to care running about most of the time, the food is good, and the rooms comfortable. There's a shrink for every three patients. The place is run by a shrink named Charles Slycke, who doesn't seem to care for me very much."

"What's his problem?"

"Beats me. I only met him this afternoon, before I headed down here, but I sensed a lot of hostility. Actually, I don't give a shit what he thinks of me just as long as he sees that Garth gets the best care."

"I'm sorry, Mongo."

"Yeah; me too. It's a bitch."

"Maybe if I'd handled things a little differently at the end, if I hadn't put that gun down where he could reach it, he wouldn't have snapped the way he did."

"Hell, you were surrendering to him," I said, feeling bitterness well up in me. "How could you have known what was going on in his head? If anyone should have picked up on what was about to happen, it was me."

"Come on, Mongo. It's not your fault."

"You say."

"Lippitt says. If you can't trust the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who can you trust? He says Garth would have died if he hadn't been taken off the case he was working on and assigned to tag along with you."

"He may have been trying to make me feel better."

"No. Lippitt wouldn't do that, Mongo. That old man loves the two of you like sons; he loves you enough, and knows you well enough, not to lie to you."

"There's more to it, Veil," I said distantly as I suddenly heard ghosts from the past whispering, laughing, in my ear. "Something. . very bad happened to Garth and me a few years ago."

"During the time when you disappeared for more than a year?"

I swallowed hard, nodded. "It was a bad thing, Veil; body breaking, mind bending."

"So I gathered from some snippets of conversation between you and Lippitt I picked up," Veil said carefully. "I take it Lippitt was involved."

"I can't talk about it."

"Okay," Veil said easily.

And then, naturally, I began to talk about it. It was time. "It was an act of utter madness called Project Valhalla," I murmured.

Under the vacant, unseeing eyes of a dead ninja, I proceeded to tell Veil about Siegmund Loge, a Nobel-winning scientist, and his plan to save the human race, essentially by destroying it and turning our species into. . something else. This quintessential mad genius had constructed a mathematical model, the Triage Parabola, which had convinced him that humankind's self-destruction, within a time parameter of twenty to three hundred years, was inevitable. We were doomed, because of a propensity to murderous tribalism and religious nonsense that Loge believed was embedded in our genes, to join the thousands of other species that had become extinct over the aeons since life had emerged on earth. Humankind was just one more evolutionary dead end.