He even found pictures.
“On the screen,” I told him and Bug sent them to the big flat screen on the wall. We stared, dumbfounded. It had been there all along but we were looking for it the wrong way.
The Orpheus Gate. Orpheus descended into hell to rescue his love.
“What is hell anyway,” mused Junie, “but a name for another dimension that’s inhospitable to life as we know it? Couldn’t that just as easily be another dimension, another version of the world rather than something supernatural?”
No one told her she was crazy. Incredulity was a boat that had already sailed, caught fire, hit an iceberg, and sank. Even Hu, who tended not to believe in much of anything, wasn’t trying to knock this down anymore. Want to know why?
There was a photo, a crisp black-and-white, of a bunch of stern-looking men standing in front of the same goddamn machine I’d seen down in the Antarctic. Same thing. The guy who stood in the center of the front row was shorter than the others, with black hair and a Charlie Chaplin mustache. We could see him very clearly because the Nazis always did take good pictures. The accompanying caption told us that we were seeing Hitler inspecting the development of a new weapon being designed by top scientists of the Thule Society.
A second photograph was in color and was grainy and poorly framed, suggesting that whoever took it hadn’t been allowed to snap that shot. It was of an underground chamber filled with clunky old computers of the kind used in Europe in the 1980s. The photo showed workers installing small dark objects into a panel. Gemstones. The photograph was taken at an underground lab in the Ukrainian town of Poliske. Just a few miles from Chernobyl.
And there were other images, photos of worse quality and even some crude sketches by people who claimed to have seen such a device or worked on it while employed either by the government or a defense contractor.
“Guys,” said Bug, “I am ringing all sorts of bells here. Seriously. Orpheus Gate? Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of stuff. Let me put some people on this and I’ll get back to you with the bullet points.”
Dr. Hu stared gloomily at us from a window in the big screen. “Let me study the data.”
His window vanished and we stared at each other.
Junie was thoughtful for a moment, then asked, “You said that this project was under the directorship of Marcus Erskine, right? I know that name. He’s been in the conspiracy theory rumor mill for a while. Back when I was making my list of possible governors of M3, Erskine was always in my top twenty. His sister, Lyssa, was married to Oscar Bell. She was nice but Oscar was a total shit. I think he’s the reason she committed suicide. Poor girl. She never should have married him.”
“Bug told me Bell was on your podcast once.”
“Whoa, wait,” interrupted Bolton, looking completely thrown, “you knew Oscar Bell?”
“Personally?” said Junie. “Not really. I knew Lyssa through the conspiracy community. She was a regular caller on my podcast.”
“And Bell was a guest?” asked Bolton.
“No. He called in once. I didn’t like him very much.”
“Please tell us about it,” said Mr. Church.
She nodded. “I was interviewing a man Oscar used to know. Oscar called in, clearly drunk, and laid into my guest. Accusing him of lying and distorting the truth. He accused him of having driven Oscar’s son, Prospero, to suicide, and then he accused him of keeping his son as a prisoner. Oscar was irrational and contradictory. It really upset my guest, and when Oscar threatened to find him and kill him I ended the interview. I was furious because we were really getting somewhere. We were talking about this amazing dream diary one of his patients had kept, and how the things in it were clear proof that other worlds exist and are accessible.”
Harcourt Bolton leaned forward. “Who was that man? Who was your guest?”
“Dr. Michael Greene. He used to be a psychiatrist in the Hamptons but he closed his practice, sold his house, and went into hiding after he was threatened by men in black. Closers.”
My pulse jumped. “Whoa, whoa, wait a second. His name was Michael Greene? You’re sure?”
“Positive. Why?”
“Because,” I said, “last night Bug found a police report that Oscar Bell walked into a diner in Washington state and killed the only three people in the place. A waitress, the cook, and Dr. Michael Greene. Then he killed himself.”
She stared at me. “Oh my God.”
Mr. Church removed a folder from his briefcase and placed it on the table, drummed his fingers on the closed cover for a moment, and then slid it across to Junie. However, he kept his hand there to keep the folder closed.
“Do you know who Prospero Bell is?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “He was Oscar and Lyssa Bell’s son. He was Dr. Greene’s patient.”
“Have you ever seen a picture of Prospero?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?” asked Bolton.
I said, “Junie has total recall.”
“Why do you ask?” Junie said to Church.
He nudged the folder an inch closer to her. “Because so much of this centers around Prospero, I asked Bug to get me a complete workup This is a photograph taken while he was a cadet at Ballard Academy in Poland, Maine.”
There was something about the way he said this that made Junie hesitate. I hadn’t seen the photo yet, either, so I leaned against her as she opened it. I felt her body go rigid, her muscles tense as soon as she saw the picture. It was a high-res color photo of a seventeen-year-old boy in a military school uniform. Blond wavy hair, blue eyes, a splash of freckles across his cheeks.
He was male and he was twenty years younger, but in every other respect he looked like an almost identical twin of Junie Flynn.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Harcourt Bolton looked at the photo and then at Junie. A deep frown line appeared between his brows. “I don’t understand. Did I miss something? Is Prospero Bell related to you? Was he your brother?”
Junie picked up the photo and stared at it for a long, long time. A tear broke and rolled down her freckled cheek. “Oh God,” she murmured. “There’s another one out there….”
“Another… what?” asked Bolton.
She touched the face of Prospero Bell. “I–I think he’s like me,” she said in a ghostly whisper. Her skin was dead pale beneath her freckles and there were ghosts of old memories haunting her eyes. “I think he was another hybrid. Another hive child.”
Church looked like Church always does. The man could be on fire and he wouldn’t twitch. He ate a cookie, though, and I’m almost positive there’s some kind of subliminal code when he chooses to do that. Bolton, on the other hand, looked like he wanted to jump out of his skin. He almost looked like he was going to leap across the table and kiss Junie.
“Miss Flynn — may I call you Junie? Yes? Great… Junie, can you tell me exactly what Dr. Greene said about Prospero?”
“First off, understand two things,” she replied, “first is that Greene never named him. He referred to him as Patient X. I made the connection only after Oscar Bell accidentally outed his son when he called in to attack Greene. Second, the interview was cut short when Oscar Bell actually threatened Greene.”
“Okay, but what did he say?” repeated Bolton.