Bolton sniffed. It was a snobbish, fussy thing for him to do and I could feel some of my affection for him beginning to bleed away. He’d been kind and considerate to me, but I did not like the way he treated his son. There’s a saying that in order to understand someone you need to see how they treat their children. Or maybe it was their dog. Not sure. Worked out to the same thing in this case because Bolton seemed to treat Harry like a dog that had just shit on the rug.
“What intel?” asked Bolton, directing the question to Church.
“This,” said Violin. She placed a heavy suitcase on the conference table, opened it to reveal a bulky item wrapped in a thick comforter. We all crowded around to watch. Inside the comforter was a book. Very large, very old, covered in strange markings and sealed with iron bands and heavy padlocks.
“Jesus,” I said, “is that what I think it is?”
It was. One of the Unlearnable Truths.
“Hate to break it to you,” I said to Violin and Harry, “but Bug thinks that there are complete scans of all these books in the Gateway records. He’s working on locating them now.”
“Impossible,” said Violin. “This book has not been opened in years.”
“Let’s see,” I said, and bent to pick it up, but Violin caught my wrist.
“Joseph, don’t,” she urged. “It’s dangerous.”
“It’s only a book.”
“It’s much more than that, Joseph. It has power.”
“I have a vault,” said Bolton. “Hell of a sturdy one. We could lock it away.”
“I don’t think that would be our best choice,” said Church, and he surprised everyone by picking the book up. Violin and Harry gasped and stepped back. Bolton looked like he wanted to grab it out of Church’s hands and maybe throw it out of the window. Church turned it over, smiling faintly. “An ocean of blood has been spilled over this.”
“You shouldn’t touch it with your bare hands,” cautioned Violin. “My mother says—”
“Your mother is a bit more superstitious than I am,” he said. “I’ve found that things like this only have the power you give them.”
Harry Bolt shook his head. “I picked that thing up and my head went blank. Like… a couple of times.”
“You were probably hungover from partying,” said his father in a caustic and emasculating way. Harry’s face went beet red.
“Please, Harcourt,” said Church. To me he said, “Remind you of anything?”
“Too many things,” I said. “Apparently Project Stargate wasn’t a total failure. Imagine that.”
“No way,” said Bolton, disgusted. “I told you that Stargate was scrubbed.”
Church ignored him and gave Harry an encouraging smile. “Tell me everything that happened.” Tell me, he said. Not us. It was the right thing to say. After a moment’s hesitation, Harry told his tale. His report was hesitant at first, but I saw him visibly shift his focus from his father’s disapproving scowl to Church’s encouraging smile. When he got into gear he gave a clear, concise, and surprisingly insightful report of what he and Violin had experienced.
Church nodded and placed the book on the conference table. We all clustered around, and as Church bent to examine the locks and the binding, I saw him frown. He ran his fingers over the parts of the cover not blocked by the metal bands, then he licked his fingertips and wiped at the leather. Church grunted and straightened. “Now, isn’t that interesting.”
“What?”
“Captain,” he said to me, “you’re good at this sort of thing. Do you think you could pick those locks?”
“I’m better at kicking down doors,” I admitted, “but I can try.”
“No!” said Violin.
“Maybe we shouldn’t,” said Bolton.
“I can do it,” suggested Harry. We all looked at him. He produced a small leather toolkit from his pocket and opened it to show as sweet a set of lock picks as I’ve ever seen. “Really, I’m pretty good with locks. I opened the chest this was in.”
“You opened a chest sealed by the Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum?” said Bolton, his skepticism evident and intense.
“Um… sure.”
Church stepped back. “If Captain Ledger has no objections.”
“Knock yourself out, kid,” I said to Harry, clapping him on the shoulder in a way that pushed him a couple of steps toward the table. “It’s all yours.”
Actually I didn’t want to touch the thing. If it was going to explode or open a gateway to a hell dimension or whatever, better him than me. Selfish, I know, but there it is. I’m a good guy but I never claimed to be a nice one.
Harry Bolt set himself in front of the book, selected his tools, stuck his tongue partway out of his mouth the way some people do when they’re concentrating, and set to work. The kid was good, I have to give him that. He had each of the locks open in seconds.
“Easy-peasy, Mrs. Wheezy,” he said. Bolton made a disgusted grunt. Violin blew Harry a little kiss. The dynamic in the room was getting kind of strange.
Church placed a flat palm on the book to prevent Harry from opening it.
“Here’s the issue,” said Church. “I have some experience with ancient books. Perhaps not as much as Circe O’Tree, but enough. From what you’ve told me, Violin, and from what your mother has said, the Brotherhood and the Closers were both after this book because it is the last of the Unlearnable Truths. All of the others, according to the inventory sheet we found among the Gateway papers, have been accounted for. They were all obtained by Gateway, and it is presumed they were destroyed along with the lab.”
That earned me a few chilly looks but I managed not to fall down. That bell was already rung and couldn’t be unrung.
“Apart from some aspects of their subject matter,” continued Church, “one of the few things that each of those books shares is that they are all examples of anthropodermic bibliopegy.”
“What the heck’s that?” asked Harry, beating me to the question.
It was Violin who answered. “He means that each of those accursed books is bound in human skin.”
“Okay,” said Harry, “I may throw up.”
“Be a man,” his father said under his breath.
“This book,” said Church, tapping the cover with a forefinger, “is bound in leather. Ordinary bovine leather.”
Harcourt Bolton pushed past his son and peered suspiciously down at the book. “I don’t understand.”
“People have gone to great lengths to obtain De Vermis Mysteriis,” said Church. He flipped open the cover and then fanned through the pages. They were all blank. “This is not it.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
“And that, sir,” said Dr. Kang, “is the long and short of it.”
Across the desk from the director of the computer lab sat a man with a visitor’s badge clipped to his lapel and an NSA identification card hung on a lanyard around his neck. The name on the card was Special Agent Stephen Priest.
“You’re entirely confident in your computer and Net security?” asked Mr. Priest. He was slim and tall, and even in his bland black suit and plain dark tie he seemed to exude a tigerish strength. It made Kang as uncomfortable now as it had when they’d begun this tour.
Kang was certain that Mr. Priest was a very dangerous man. He had the look. His smile was warm but his eyes were cold. Very, very cold. And though he always laughed in the right places — even at Kang’s lamest jokes — there was something creepy about it. As if the laughs were faked to present an air of affability instead of being genuinely good-natured.