“Was the list translated properly?”
“I don’t know.” Alderman paused to take another drink. “But let’s assume it was. If you knew what was on the list and one of those items came on the market, you’d be in a position to identify it and let us know it had surfaced, yes?”
“Are you in possession of the list?”
Again he watched Alderman search his face, trying to gauge his interest. It was part of an agent’s training to learn how to hide emotions, but the last woman he’d lived with complained he’d learned too well. Gilly had told him once that all she ever saw reflected in his eyes were the room’s lights. You’ve got a cat’s unblinking gaze, she’d said. Not a real cat, though: a small jade animal I once saw in a museum. Cold, precise, perfect-but a facsimile. Her comment had stung because he feared it was the truth.
“Last night, after the funeral, I discovered that the booklet is missing from the vault,” Alderman said. “I’m hoping our historian secreted it away someplace even more secure and we’ll find it.”
“In case it’s been stolen, I’d like a detailed description so I can log it in with Interpol if you haven’t already reported it missing.”
She nodded. “I have the translation of the list, though. That wasn’t in the vault. Would you like to see it?” While Alderman opened her leather agenda, the library took on the immutable silence of a tomb. Pulling out a single sheet of paper, she put it on the table between them and then rested her right hand on top of it as if she were keeping it from blowing away even though the room was windowless.
“I never believed Memory Tools existed, even after a colleague of mine in New York, a well-respected reincarnationist, claimed to have found one of them,” she said. “But I do now and am prepared to offer you anything you want to help us find these.”
“Have you shown this to anyone?” Like the reincarnationist from New York you just mentioned, he wanted to ask but didn’t.
“No one. I’m fairly certain the only other living person who knows there even is a list is in jail and will be for a long time.”
“Dr. Alderman, if the tools listed here belonged to the society and have been stolen, both the FBI and Interpol need to know about it.”
“They haven’t been stolen because, as far as I know, they haven’t been found. At least, most of them haven’t.”
The list could be critically important to his investigation, he thought. It could mean the difference between going back to New York having failed and succeeding. His fingers inched forward. “May I see that?”
It was ordinary typewriter paper. Each item was numbered and handwritten in both English and German in blue ink. He started to read down.
Pot of fragrant wax
Colored orb
Reflection sphere
Bone flute
He never finished because of two things that happened so close together he couldn’t distinguish which came first: a slight gust of wind blew into the room and the doctor gasped. Instinctively, he let the paper fall as he reached for his gun, but just as his fingers touched the comforting metal something came down hard on the back of his head.
The pain was instantaneous and intense. Sharp, jagged and overwhelming. He was seeing darkness and then titanium-white brightness, and even as he fought to breathe through the pain, he wondered how someone could have gotten into the room, because he’d seen Dr. Alderman lock the door from the inside.
The second blow came almost immediately. He’d suffered pain like this a long time ago, and that was what he was remembering when the third strike hit. From far away he heard moaning but didn’t realize it was coming from his own lips. Before he lost consciousness, Special Agent Lucian Glass was thinking that he didn’t really care very much if he died-as long as this time he stayed dead.
FOUR
The boy was only sixteen years old, but he stood over the fallen soldier with a look of total control and calm. The soldier writhed and moaned, a coward’s crying. Around them the battlefield was still; there were bodies everywhere. It seemed that these two were the last men left alive, except the boy wasn’t alive in the same way the soldier was.
The undead can’t be.
“Please,” the soldier begged. “I was only following orders.”
The look in the pale boy’s eyes said that had been the wrong answer. “All this…” He spread his hand out over the devastation. “And you didn’t even believe in the reason you were fighting?”
The wounded soldier stared up at him.
“You could have at least died a hero,” the boy said almost wistfully.
“There are no heroes anymore…” The bloodied fighter managed a disgusted snort.
The expression on the boy’s face was both an answer and a promise. “There will be, there have to be,” he whispered. And then the zombie turned and walked into the encroaching darkness.
For a few seconds there was total silence.
“And that’s a wrap!” Darius Shabaz’s deep voice boomed out, his French accent very much evident. “Bravo!”
The director watched the actors break character, the grips shut down the lights and the set become flat and two-dimensional again. This transitional time when fantasy became reality again always left him depressed.
Making the rounds, he thanked the cast and crew for all their hard work and invited everyone to the final wrap party later that evening.
“Masterful job, Mitch. Thank you, once again,” Shabaz said when he reached his director of photography.
“It’s your vision, Darius. We’ve got another winner here.”
At six-and-a-half feet tall and only 160 pounds, Shabaz towered over everyone and moved faster than any of them. He exuded so much energy one of his assistants once joked that she used to wait for the thunder to follow his lightning.
It took the better part of an hour to talk to everyone. It had been a long day-they’d started filming outdoors at six that morning to catch the early light-but Shabaz wasn’t tired. At fifty-three, he ran fifteen miles a week, lifted weights, never drank and was fanatical about what he ate. The silver threads in his thick black hair were the only outward signs of his age. Shabaz had been brought up to revere his body. “We are all we own,” his grandfather had always told him.
Outside the shooting stage, the sun was just starting to drop down and the orange groves that stretched out almost a mile in every direction were suffused with a warm glow. Glancing at his watch, he calculated that his driver would be getting back from Santa Barbara in twenty minutes and paced himself accordingly as he set off on his end-of-the-workday walk.
Shabaz had come to America to attend film school when he was seventeen, and while he retained his French citizenship, he’d never gone home again. He was directing by the time he was twenty-two and was responsible for one of the highest grossing horror pictures of all time by the age of thirty. Five years after that he started his own studio. He focused on supernatural plots about the dead coming back to life-vampires, zombies and mummies-but always for noble purposes.
While critics labeled him as a B movie director with messianic delusions, filmgoers ignored the negative reviews. Word of mouth kept people standing in line even in the dead of winter without complaining when a new Shabaz movie debuted. It was often remarked that fans preferred to see his films in theaters as opposed to renting them. It wasn’t just because his grand and gory visions were better suited to the big screen, but because seeing them in a roomful of people who collectively gasped was exhilarating.
Passing the main gatepost, Shabaz circled the compound, which included four soundstages, a theater, an editing studio, an employees’ gym, a day-care center, a medical building, a commissary and a dozen bungalows. His architect had relied on natural woods and stone so all the structures seemed to have sprung out of the earth and looked as indigenous to the landscape as the orange and eucalyptus trees.