Submerged (30 page)

Perry took Janet’s
uniform blouse
in his hands and pulled just as Carl arrived.
Buttons flew into the air.

“Janet. Janet!” Carl whispered. “Stay with
me, baby. Stay with me.”

Perry opened the uniform top and saw what he
was hoping to see—a black bulletproof vest. He could see where the
round had hit her. By his knee, resting on the floor, was the
smashed remains of the bullet. Placing two fingers to Janet’s
throat, he felt for a pulse and found it. Relieved, he let out a
sigh.

“She hates wearing these things,” Carl said.
“I’m glad they’re mandatory.” He started to say something else when
someone forced him to the ground. A second later, Perry was
facedown. Hands patted his body. He saw Lloyd remove Carl’s gun.
The other man took Janet’s weapon. The men retreated to the
door.

Perry stood and faced the trio. Fury boiled
inside him, but he forced himself to remain calm. He glanced at
Jack and could see the same emotion on his friend’s face.

“I take it the vest saved the pretty deputy’s
life,” Finn said.

“She’s unconscious but alive,” Perry shot
back. “That was uncalled for.”

“She was reaching for her gun,” Lloyd said.
“I had to defend myself and my team.”

“That’s enough, Dean,” Finn warned.

“So your name isn’t Lloyd,” Carl said. “At
least I got that right.”

Dean smiled and bowed his head. “Colonel Ryan
Dean.”

“I’m surprised that you’d tell us your name,”
Perry said.

“Why? I’m not doing anything illegal. I’m
here in service to my country.” Dean took a step forward. “I want
everyone against the back wall. Drag her with you.” Perry and the
others did as ordered. “Sit down and cross your legs. You will not
move until we tell you to move.”

Again, they did as ordered. Perry sat in the
middle, his back against the sloping wall. Jack was to his right
and Gleason to his left. Carl sat next to the unconscious Janet,
and Zeisler sat to Jack’s right.

Finn shook his head. “There are always people
like you, people who can’t stay away from trouble. I told you that
you were interfering in a mission of national security. Now I have
to figure out what to do with you.”

“We could all go for pizza,” Jack said.

“Very funny, big man,” Finn said, but he
didn’t laugh. He looked at Zeisler and furrowed his brow. “I don’t
recall seeing you before. You weren’t on the road at our last . . .
meeting.”

“I was relaxing in the Hummer,” Zeisler
explained, “watching your men being shut down by unarmed engineers.
It was very entertaining.”

“What’s your name?” Finn demanded.

“Dr. Victor Zeisler.”

“Well, Dr. Zeisler, you have hooked up with
the wrong people because . . .” Finn’s words faded. “
The
Victor Zeisler.”

“I’m a legend in my own time.”

“Who is he?” Colonel Dean asked Finn.

“He’s one of the original consultants. He was
here thirty years ago.”

“You’d think the years would have made him
smarter.”

“Stand, Zeisler,” Finn ordered.

“That’s
Dr.
Zeisler.”

“Very well,” Finn said. “Stand up,
Dr.
Zeisler.”

Zeisler did.

Finn scrutinized the electrical engineer from
head to toe. “You look pretty good, considering.”

“I maintain a steady diet of junk food. It
adds years to a man’s life.”

“What do you mean, considering?” Perry
asked.

Finn narrowed his eyes in disdain. “I do my
research, Mr. Sachs. I know who was down here three decades ago and
what has happened to them. Only Zeisler remains alive.”

“And my father.”

“The CDC people tell me he doesn’t have
long.”

“You’ve been following my father’s case?”
Perry said. The thought angered him all the more. Having strangers
peeking in on private lives was abhorrent.

Finn walked to the ring. “I have to admit,
after reading Ed Sanders’s report from 1974, I expected much more.
It seems he exaggerated things.”

“Time changes things,” Jack said. “I used to
be young and good-looking, but now I’m just good-looking.”

“You’re starting to irritate me,” Dean
said.

“Really? Usually people get irritated with me
much sooner.” Jack smiled.

“Why do you have to antagonize people with
guns?” Gleason asked.

“It’s a gift,” Jack said.

“This is where the column of light appeared?”
Finn asked Zeisler.

“That’s right.”

“And the shiny disks?”

“Right again.”

Finn peered down into the pit and scowled.
“Can you make it work?”

“I don’t know. It’s been a long time, and the
place looks a little worse for wear.”

“Try.”

Perry watched Zeisler as he neared the ring
and looked in. He studied it, then took a step back. From his
seated position, Perry could see the man’s face. It was drained of
color.

“I said, make it work,” Finn ordered.

Zeisler stepped closer and extended his hand
over the sand. “We think it senses the presence of life and
responds.”

“I know. As I said, I read the report.”

Zeisler extended another hand, and a shaft of
light beamed down from the inverted wineglass opening in the
ceiling and touched the dark spot on the sand. The light thickened,
growing wider until it reached the edge of the ring. Four disks
appeared at the bottom of the pit and rose, their surfaces parallel
to the floor. Then, in a blink, they turned on their sides and
began to orbit around the vertical axis of the column.

“Whoa,” Dean said. “Am I really seeing that?
Tell me you see that, Tuttle.”

“Sir, I see it all right. Yes, sir.” The man
called Tuttle paused. “To be honest, sir, I don’t know what I’m
seeing.”

“It’s a type of computer,” Zeisler said. “It
runs this place.”

“This is how it looked thirty years ago?”
Finn demanded.

Zeisler shook his head. “Yes . . . well,
no.”

“Which is it, Dr. Zeisler? I’m in no mood for
games.”

“It was brighter then and faster. The disks,
which I think are like our computer monitors, were shinier and had
lights around the edge.” He glanced back at Perry. “Before you
crashed our party, we were talking. I think this place is
dying.”

“Dying? Machines break down, Dr. Zeisler.
They don’t die.”

“Zeisler believes the base has artificial
intelligence and enough self-awareness to know that its death is
near,” Perry said.

“It’s a living computer, and you think it’s
dying.” Finn frowned. “You’ve been watching too much
television.”

“It’s not a computer as we think of one,”
Zeisler said. “It wasn’t designed to surf the Internet or retrieve
e-mail. It must be the heart and soul of this place, of
Mishmar.”

“Ah, Mishmar,” Finn said. “You don’t know
this, but Sanders recruited a team of linguists and
foreign-language specialists to analyze the terms you heard. What
were they? Mishmar . . . ker . . . kar . . .”

“Mishmar, keroob, ophawn, and kahee,” Zeisler
explained. “It referred to itself as Mishmar.”

“Well, whatever the words were, they didn’t
make sense. The report states that the specialists’ best guess was
that the words were similar to some Semitic language but couldn’t
be precisely identified with any known language. Their best
translation was just nonsense, just a string of unrelated
words.”

“What words?” Perry asked. As long as Finn
was talking, he and his men weren’t shooting.

“It doesn’t matter,” Finn said. “Nonsense is
nonsense.”

“One man’s nonsense is another man’s . . . ,”
Jack began, “is . . . sorry, I got nuthin’.”

“Insight,” Gleason suggested.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Jack said. “One man’s
nonsense is another man’s insight.”

“Shut up,” Colonel Dean said.

Jack raised his hands. “Just trying to be an
encouragement.”

Finn studied the disks as they moved. “They
thought kahee might mean ‘living thing,’ and ophawn might mean
‘wheel.’ ” He studied the floating disks. “I suppose these
disks could be called wheels.”

“What about keroob?” Zeisler asked.

“They came up empty on that. The best they
could do is associate it with either an Egyptian word that refers
to a chariot or to an Assyrian word meaning ‘to be near.’ Not much
help.”

Something stirred in the back of Perry’s
mind. Gleason leaned over to him. “Does this sound familiar to you?
I feel like I should know this.”

“Did they come up with a translation for
Mishmar?” Zeisler asked.

“It’s the only word that came close to making
sense,” Finn said. “There’s a similar word in ancient Hebrew that
refers to a guard or to a ward or prison.”

“This can’t be.” Perry’s mind was
spinning.

“What can’t be?” Finn said. “You know
something I should know?”

Perry reached for his vest pocket. Finn,
Dean, and Tuttle all raised their weapons. “I’m just reaching for
my handheld computer.”

“Do it slowly,” Finn warned.

Perry pulled up the Velcro flap that held the
safari vest pocket closed and removed an HP iPAQ handheld computer
and turned it on. He removed the stylus from its holder and began
tapping on the screen.

Finn frowned. “You want to let us in on your
little secret, Sachs?”

“I’m looking at a Bible program,” Perry said.
“I think all those words are connected.”

“Bible?” Finn laughed. “You should have
started your prayers sooner.”

Perry ignored him. “This concordance program
lets me search for particular words and shows me where they appear
in the Bible.”

“You’re wasting my time,” Finn said.

“No, he’s not,” Jack countered. “You said the
experts thought the words were rooted in Semitic languages, right?
Well the Old Testament is written in Hebrew and Aramaic.”

Perry tapped “prison” into the concordance. A
long list appeared. He focused on the Old Testament books and
tapped on the first reference. “Genesis 42:17 is the first
reference to prison. He read, ‘So he put them all together in
prison for three days.’ ”

“Is that the story of Joseph and his brothers
in Egypt?” Jack asked.

“Yeah, and the Hebrew word for prison is . .
.” Perry tapped the tiny screen again, and his heart skipped.

“What?” Finn demanded. “What did you
find?”

“The Bible program has an interlinear
function,” Perry said. “Do you know what that is?”

“No.”

“It displays the English translation of the
verse in parallel with the original language and with an English
transliteration of the Hebrew. In this verse the Hebrew for prison
is mishmar.” He tapped the screen again, and an abbreviated
definition appeared. “It means ‘a place of confinement, a jail, or
a ward.’ ”

“That’s what I just said.”

Perry heard a soft
plop
but continued staring at the tiny screen. This
time he did a different search. He entered “wheel” and started the
concordance search. The first reference was from 1 Kings 7:32.
Again, he read aloud: “ ‘The four wheels were underneath the
borders, and the axles of the wheels were on the stand. And the
height of a wheel was a cubit and a half.’ ”

“I know that passage,” Gleason said. “It has
to do with the building of Solomon’s Temple. The wheels are the
wheels on the bronze stands, right?”

Perry nodded. “Right. The carts that carried
the bronze basins. But I don’t think that’s what we’re looking for.
First . . .” He called up the interlinear and checked the
transliterated Hebrew word for wheel: “Ophawn.”

“Another hit,” Jack said.

“How did your experts define . . . kahee?”
Perry asked Finn.

“ ‘Something living,’ ” Finn said.
“And they were not my experts. I would have made sure they did a
better job. When I get back, I plan to put a team on—”

“Kahee . . . thing . . . living . . .” Perry
didn’t care what Finn planned to do when he got back. His own mind
was racing with different thoughts. “Living thing . . . you don’t
suppose the word means ‘living being’?”

“As in Ezekiel?” Jack asked. “The four living
beings?”

Perry searched and the handheld computer
yielded another set of verses, Ezekiel 1:5: “‘Within it there were
figures resembling four living beings. And this was their
appearance: they had human form.’ ”

There was another
plop
.

“You guys are nuts,” Dean said. “A bunch of
Bible nuts.”

“This almost fits,” Perry said. “Dr. Zeisler,
what did the entity say to you about kahee being something and
something being kahee?”

“It said that kahee was karoob, and karoob
was kahee, then went around telling us that we were neither and
didn’t fit.”

“Karoob? If kahee refers to the living
creatures seen by Ezekiel, and karoob refers to the same thing . .
.”

“Does anyone else smell that?” Carl asked. He
was cradling Janet’s head in his lap. “It reeks.”

Plop
, plop
.

“Um, guys.” Zeisler was looking past the
disks and into the pit ring. “We have a problem.”

The light column flashed and retreated from
the edge a few inches.

Perry rose.

“I didn’t tell you to get up,” Dean said.

“Shoot me,” Perry said. He approached
Zeisler. “What problem?”

“Look.” Zeisler pointed at a thin layer of
sand at the base of the pit. Perry looked, saw the sand, and the
dark spot in the middle.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be
seeing.”

“The dark spot—the sand is wet.”

As Perry gazed down, a drop of water fell in
the center of the ring. As it did, a strand of vapor rose. The
smell of it turned Perry’s stomach. Perry looked up through the
light pillar in time to see another drop descend.

“So there’s a little water,” Dean said.
“You’re not going to melt.”

“I’m not so sure,” Zeisler said.