Jabr started up, his face beaming with celestial joy. “Jibra’el has sent an angel, Do-Rahlan! An angel has come to guard your soul and call you home!” He clutched the volume of the Koran to his breast and stood. ”I will go bring offering. We will burn sweet incense here, Allah be praised!” All of his hopes had come true. Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful, had seen fit to accept this man as a believer.
Paul gaped at the place where the apparition had appeared. The cold residue of fog was strangely familiar to him. Something in his mind tugged at him, whispering some inner knowledge of what he had seen, but he did not heed it. Jabr was up and gone to another chamber of the vault, and Paul waited, a feeling of hope and redemption dawning on him.
Then the distant sound of men’s voices came to him, echoing in the stony recesses of the archive. There was anger in the words, though he could not make out what they said. A clamor of strife and warning resounded from the entrance to the cave. They had been found! Aziz was barring the way, guarding the entrance while he shouted the alarm.
The Sami had come, with five men on fast horses. Even as Aziz drew his sword, faithful to his charge, black arrows whistled from the shadowy slopes and struck him down. The Sami had come, his heart flushed with the thrill of the hunt, and the vengeance he would soon mete out upon the stranger for the shame he had endured. He could not allow the man to stand before Sinan, no matter what his master had pressed upon him. He would say the man cursed him, and fell upon him with death in his eyes. Sinan could not condemn him, for in his heart of hearts he knew as well that every action would simply make a new truth. The Sami would act by the credo he held dearest. Everything was permitted, he thought to himself as he sped on up the hill, and nothing was written. Nothing at all.
A thousand years, and half a world away, Kelly sat breathlessly at his terminal, monitoring the progress of Maeve’s brief jump. He kept a tight rein on her, just a five second window opening at the coordinates he had fed into the machinery of the Arch. He hoped it would be enough for her to see whether his hunch was correct—that Paul was actually there in the place where the token had been unearthed. Even as he closed the breach, bringing Maeve back to the year 2010 in Berkeley, doubt gnawed at him. He heard all Maeve’s arguments alive in his mind, but then, a second later it was her voice in real time that commanded his attention, speaking over the intercom from the Arch corridor below.
“Kelly? It worked. I’m back. Good God! It was amazing, but he’s there. He was right in front of me, gaping at me like he had seen a ghost!” The excitement was driving her on. “Eight feet… maybe ten feet away from me, Kelly; and directly in front.”
“The angel has spoken!” Kelly beamed with elation. “Get dressed, Maeve. I’m adjusting the Arch coordinates now. Make sure you’re out of the chamber!” His hands moved with feverish motion as he began to key commands. Easy, now, he said to himself, forcing calm on his agitated movements. You have to get this right.
He was feeding in the last known pattern signature on Paul from the first mission. It would not be precise, but there would be some data there that would find a match. He wanted the system to open a breach and locate the centermost point of any matches it found—and he would set the search coordinates just where Maeve indicated, ten feet from the GPS position where she had appeared. Once he had this central anchor he could tell the system to expand outward from that point. It was a gamble, but it was his only chance. He was going to scoop up a tiny segment of reality from another time and place, and bring it here to the Arch corridor. He had the retraction set to shift everything spatially as well.
Now he could only hope that Paul’s theory was correct—that time did not want him there, and would do anything possible to send him on his way. The system would be looking for anomalous readings within the sphere of his retraction scheme—anything that didn’t belong in the milieu of 1187.
His coordinates were in, and the Arch was spinning out smoothly at 100% power. He raced to the retraction module and opened the safety on the switch. “I hope you’re right, Paul. For God’s sake—let this work.”
The Sami’s men swept past the fallen body of Aziz as they reached the top of the ridge. They found the hidden cleft in the hillside and burst through, sharp knives drawn at the ready. They were driven on by the Sami, as much by the fear of his following as anything else. The Sami strode into the hidden vault, his hand tight on the hilt of his dagger. Just one flick of his wrist and the blade would run true. Its poison would steal away the life of the heathen in their midst. The wolf in the fold would be slain, and Sinan would see the wisdom of his deed in the end.
The five assassins fanned out, flitting from one chamber to the next like silent shadows. Then there came cries of fright and alarm. The Sami rushed after them, finding at last the hidden vault of the archive. There was a chill upon the air, unearthly cold, and the room shimmered in a wavering mist. The blue fire flared in his eyes as he sought for his enemy, and he thought he saw the shape of a man cowering on the floor, a heavy fog surrounding him. At once he moved, his hand striking out like a coiled snake, his dagger lancing at the formless shape in the shadows. Yet he heard, to his great dismay, the chink of the blade where it struck the hard stone wall, glancing harmlessly away and falling with a dull thud on the thick carpeting of the alcove. He rushed forward, braving the frosty mist when his men quailed at the sight. His arms reached out, striking this way and that in wide arcs as he groped in the violet haze, but all to no end. The stranger was gone.
Epilogue – The Time War
Nordhausen was the last of the project team members to arrive for the meeting in his study that night. He told the others to go right ahead and let themselves in, using the key he left under his mat. He had been delayed at U.C. Berkeley, purportedly doing some research there that he claimed had some bearing on the debriefing. As he hastened up the steps to the study door he was still thinking about it all, the dig, the Ammonite, Paul’s strange disappearance, and his own narrow escape from Wadi Rumm.
After Rasil returned to him, the two men did not have long to wait until the Nexus failed. Rasil was the first to know of it, but Robert recalled the shivering sensation of déjà vu that had come upon him. The ride was over, and they had both survived. Apparently the Meridian had not been altered—at least not to any appreciable degree that he could discern there and then. What had happened to the world beyond the silent red walls of Wadi Rumm was anybody’s guess.
Rasil’s men were both safe, returning to the cave and setting explosives in the well. Rasil gave the order to detonate them with real reluctance. When the smoke billowed out into the russet evening he stared at Nordhausen with a look of recrimination in his eyes. The sharp report of the explosion echoed through the canyon, resounding from the tall pillars of wind sculpted stone.
“So goes the Well,” he had whispered. “No more will it deliver the souls of the faithful to our agents in Massiaf. I wonder how Sinan will fare without the scrolls to guide him now?”
“What’s that?” Nordhausen pretended he had not heard the man, still uncertain of his own fate now that the interval of safety within the Nexus Point had elapsed. Rasil was so focused on his own inner reverie that he did not realize the professor was so close at hand. He had given him a chilling look, his eyes replete with emotion that resolved to a feeling of intense hostility, carefully controlled, a smoldering anger that he kept in check.