“Don’t count those chickens yet,” Montross said quietly. “There’s the little matter of the Morpheus Initiative in your way.”
“Oh, I don’t think they’ll be in my way much longer. Last I checked, Phoebe and Orlando had their car destroyed outside of Cairo. And your brother and nephew…” He shrugged. “Only a matter of time. There’s no escape. I may have Nina give them the opportunity to join us in this momentous occasion, but I doubt Caleb’s visions could actually extend so far as to see the greatness of what we’re doing.”
“Which is what, exactly?” Montross asked, his wrists struggling against the sharp bonds. “Besides wiping out everyone on the planet?”
Calderon smiled. “Not everyone.” He tapped his cane against the floor. “It’s heartening to know that despite your powers, you can’t see it all.”
I haven’t asked the right questions, Montross thought. That was something, at least. To know there might be more, another way to save themselves.
Calderon turned and walked confidently up the stairs. The soldiers jabbed Montross along, and as he followed, Jacob and Isaac moved so they ascended on either side of him. Both looked up at him with an unnerving curiosity, like executioners taking perverse pleasure in watching the condemned on his final climb to the scaffold.
Montross tried to ignore them. At the top, as he emerged into the museum’s westernmost wing, he took a moment to get his bearings. He thought about remote viewing the next passage of time, trying to glimpse what lay in store. But instead he got a flash of something else:
Mason Calderon standing on a dizzying metal platform, pale blue electric sparks in his hair, his cane raised high. Like a modern-day Merlin, calling down elemental spirits. The sky itself turns a magnificent swirl of orange and hardened emerald, folding and twisting like a multicolored tapestry, everything churning and exploding over snow-capped mountains.
Suddenly, Calderon’s face appeared in his sight, jarring the vision. “What are you seeing?”
Montross had gone pale. His lips trembled. “I think… it was the beginning.”
“Of what?”
“The end of the world.”
Calderon nodded, with a light dazzling in the darkest centers of his pupils. “I may not be psychic, but that’s one vision I’ve seen as well. Many, many times…”
6.
“This is crap,” Orlando said with a groan about thirty minutes later. He thumbed through the papers, the small-print, the few photographs of the region, the caves seen from a distance, some satellite maps, and a blurred-out picture of a little girl working in the fields with what may have been her parents.
“I agree.” Phoebe snatched up the last photograph, unclipped it from the folder’s edge. “This here, this is all we need. The other stuff will only cloud our thoughts. Focus on her, and let’s get this over with.”
“But there’s a lot of that ‘other stuff’ in here. If this is true, Jesus. She’s only ten! The daughter of an American missionary and a Bamian native woman. Watched her mother butchered before her eyes.”
“Stop,” Phoebe insisted. She closed the folder, tossed it on the floor. And with a scornful glance at their sleeping companion, she reached into her pack and pulled out a scrapbook. Two pencils. Offered one to Orlando and ripped out a sheet of paper.
“I’ll use… damn. No laptop.”
“Sorry to bring you back to the Middle Ages, but just grab a damn pencil.” She took a deep breath, leaned back and grasped her pencil lightly between her finger and her thumb. In a moment, as Orlando watched, her eyes rolled back, her mouth opened and her arm shook.
Orlando sighed. “All right then. Don’t wait for me.”
First: a full vision of Blue. Deep and tranquil like the depths of the Caribbean. Close, and yet impossible to grasp, like the sky.
Phoebe struggled. Pulled back. Sent her questions away from the depths, toward more solid ground. Toward the past…
Blue again. But this time, the pure infinite blue of the Afghanistan sky. Down to the great cliffs of the Kohebaba range. A rock wall pockmarked with caves, ridges and steep grooves beside an immense hollowed out niche. Its smaller twin far to the right.
Pull back…
The fields. Dust and sand. A few straggly juniper bushes. A goat here and there. In the blistering sun, a crowd of villagers stand in the center of a loose scattering of adobe shacks. A lone rusty well sits untended and unused at the edge of the village, and scrawny buzzards perch on its rotting boards.
Riding horses, three men carrying AK-47s are keeping the villagers together in a group. Forcing them to remain. To watch.
A mujahedeen fighter, all in black astride a white horse, unravels the sash from his face. A single eye glares at the villagers; the other—the left, is hidden behind a black patch with jewels embedded in the cloth. He raises his gun and shouts toward the cliff wall, addressing the seemingly empty caves. “Bring her out!”
The walls are silent. The largest niche, holding only the rubble now of the largest statue ever built, trembles slightly as if the earth had just rumbled.
The man known as The Eye shouts again. “Bring her out, infidels! Or the will of Allah will fall upon your friends.” He makes a motion with his left hand, a nonchalant waving in the direction of a bewildered young man standing by himself.
Another fighter on horseback rides up behind the youth and with a ululating cry, brings down a scimitar, silencing the boy’s sudden cry of fright. A spray of blood across the sand, and the other villagers erupt in shrieks and cries.
“NOW!” the Eye shouts again to the hills. In a moment, he points to another villager, a huddled old woman.
But then, motion in one of the caves. A man and a woman emerge, heads bowed. Dressed in tattered clothes.
The Eye holds up a hand restraining his men. Gallops ahead a short distance. “Show me the girl!”
The man’s shoulders slump as he steps away from the woman, letting a small girl walk into the sunlight. Blinking, shielding her eyes, she walks to the edge. Trying to appear brave, she raises her dirty face to the sky and spreads her arms as if they’re tiny wings.
And the villagers murmur to themselves. Some drop to their knees, others whimper.
“Enough!” hisses the Eye. He motions to his men. “Bring her down.” And as they gallop toward the base of the giant niche in the cave-riddled mountainside, he stares at the girl, not more than seven or eight. And he finds it difficult to look at her, despite the grime and dust covering her face and hair, her shredded clothes.
She’s glowing, reflecting the painful brilliance of the sun.
But in minutes, the three of them are down, herded like wayward sheep into the clearing.
The Eye dismounts and stands before them.
“You gave me a good chase, girl.” She refuses to look up at him. Her eyes—bright blue like the sky—stare only over at the headless young man at the edge of the clearing. Her father squeezes her hand tight and her mother clasps her other hand.