Chapter 22
She couldn't tell whether or how much the grizzled Jesuit was kidding her. She decided not to ask. "You think they're the ones who roughed up poor Byron and snatched the Holy Child?"
"You were thinking perhaps al-Qaeda?" Godin asked.
"No," Annja replied.
But she was thinking of Dr. Cogswell and his portentous warnings. She had not told Godin about the retired professor turned monster hunter. She wasn't sure why. But even now she could not bring herself to mention what Cogswell had said to her. Or how their last exchange had ended.
Yet the words of that last, interrupted call returned to ring like alarms in her brain. "You must study the sightings," he had said. "Treat them as puzzle pieces. Find how they fit..."
"Seek the center, Annja Creed," she muttered to herself.
"I beg your pardon?" Godin said.
She shook her head. Damn! A sure sign I'm wearing down – I start thinking aloud without knowing it.
She opened her geographic-information-system software.
"Okay," she said, pushing her chair back and inviting Godin to come and look. "I've got something."
He swung off the bed and came to join her. She was pleased to see that he displayed his customary vigor, and the color had come back to his cheeks. The skin looked a little tauter and less porous, too, as he leaned in close.
"I've plotted all reports of Holy Child encounters from the latest flap," she said. The screen displayed a map of New Mexico covered with a surprising number of little red dots. A sort of vague pink paramecium shape enveloped them, defining the area where sightings had occurred.
"The distribution is nowhere near circular – that Murakami case skews it all to heck and gone to the West. But look what happens if I weight by total numberof sightings," she said.
She pressed a key. A darker pink circle appeared, much smaller. A blinking red cross indicated its geometric center.
"That's the sanctuary of Chimayó," she said. "Cool. No?"
"Indeed. But your objection would still seem to apply. A diameter of nearly twenty miles gives us a great deal of ground to cover."
She slumped back in her chair. Deflated again. "Betrayed once more by technology's bright promise."
"Wait," he said.
She looked up at him.
"What about the monster sightings?" he asked.
"What about them?"
"Can you plot them, as well?"
She felt a weird falling-elevator sensation in her throat. "You must study the sightings." She recalled Cogswell's words. "Seek the center..."
What if he was talking about the creature reports? Theywere his main interest. Monsters. Not the Holy Child.
"You know," she said, typing furiously, "you're probably almost as clever as you think you are."
"My dear, I have inhabited this mortal shell long enough, and in alarming enough circumstances, that I believe I can honestly say I know exactlyhow clever I actually am. But as a Jesuit, might I not choose to pose as deemingmyself more or less clever than I am? Or perhaps – "
She held up a palm. "Okay, we've just reached my maximum recommended dose of Jesuitry for one day. Feel free to run that by me tomorrow if you want. But you'd better do it early," she said.
He laughed.
She turned back to the screen and pumped her fist. "Yes! I've got you now, you little – "
She felt Godin's deceptively bland gaze upon her, and decided not to finish the sentence.
"Behold. We have the anomalous-creature reports plotted in shades of blue. Courtesy of a cryptozoology Web site that kept a running of them all."
"A wondrous thing is the Internet," Godin said drily. The variegated colors of the screen reflected on the lenses of his glasses.
"A wondrous thing is nerds." That didn't sound quite grammatical, but she was tired and on a roll. "And here– "
She stabbed the screen with a triumphant forefinger. It flexed slightly to her touch, momentarily distorting the image in a polychrome swirl. "The statistical center of the monster reports. Includingthe ones I was involved in."
Godin's eyebrows rose from behind his spectacles. "Just within our three-league limit," he said, "and north-northwest of the sanctuary."
Annja sucked in a deep breath and made a fretful sound, half nasal, half hum. "But we still don't have any evidence. Just circles on a computer screen. And one thing going on digs has taught me – computer projections are one thing. What's really in the ground is another."
The Jesuit smiled. "I think I've got something to contribute here." With his first two fingers extended he made a rolling gesture at her notebook computer. "If I may?"
She pushed back from the table. "Knock yourself out."
He sat in the chair across from her and swung the computer around to face him. Frowning slightly, she got up to come around and look over his shoulder.
He held up a finger.
She stopped. "You have gotto be kidding me!"
The finger wagged. "Please. Allow me a few secrets. Or at least a little professional mystification."
She jutted her chin and scowled. Ignoring her, he began to type.
"I've had enough run-ins with guys in black helicopters," she said finally. "Don't do anything that's going to get my motel room door kicked in, okay?"
"I assure you," he said, gazing intently at the screen, "I will do nothing that is illegal. For me."
She spun and walked huffily into the bathroom to splash water on her face. "Damn him," she said to her image in the mirror, behind a safely closed door. "I do all this awesome sleuthing, and he dismisses me as if I'm a schoolgirl."
She scowled more fiercely and flared her nostrils at herself. Then she exhaled and relaxed, laughing softly. "He's right," she said. For all the mad exigency of her curiosity it occurred to her there might be some things she was best off not seeing. Especially if they did happen to draw official interest. "And I am acting like a schoolgirl. A little bit."
She felt better when she opened the door and went back into the main room.
He had thrust himself back from the table and was sitting with long legs stretched out before him, arms folded and chin on clavicle, gazing at the screen.
"No luck?" she asked, coming around to stand behind him.
"It depends, I suppose, upon one's definition of luck."
He swiveled the PC toward her. Its screen showed an overhead shot of what looked like a farmhouse with a pitched tin roof. It was hard to tell exactly. The picture was slightly blurry. She got an impression of general disuse and disrepair.
"There is indeed an underground facility in the vicinity of our epicenter," he said. "It was built late in WWII as a Los Alamos auxiliary. Nothing so unusual in that – the Manhattan Project was scattered all over the United States."
"And we know the labs still keep numerous facilities in the area," Annja said.
"Just so. This particular facility was greatly expanded during the fifties."
"The height of Cold War paranoia."
"It was decommissioned and abandoned in the sixties. Allegedly. While its location, even its existence, were not classified per se, they were, shall we say, never publicly announced," Godin said.
"Where would you find information like that?" she asked. "Who'd keep it online, I mean? Or would you have to kill me if you told me?"