Touchstone (Meridian Series) (10 page)

       “A Schroedinger’s box!” Dorland came out with that very
suddenly, as though his thinking had just reached a sure conclusion. “How can
you plan for something like that?”

8

Nordhausen
was gripping the handle over the door in a struggle against the
momentum of the car as it rounded a tight bend in the road. His face was lit by
the green glow from the instrument dash, the only light in the darkness of the
cabin.

“Perhaps Maeve is right,” he
said. “Maybe we should just dismantle the whole shop, shred the documents, and
part out the hardware.”

“No! Taking care of Kelly is one
thing; the project is another matter entirely. Once we recover the DVD, and
figure out how to protect it, Kelly will be fine, and we will be able to
continue the project—and find out about your Rosetta Stone for starters.”

“What
is
the project now
Paul? What are we supposed to do with it all?”

“We’re standing a watch,” Paul
said. “We’re out on the walls of eternity with our eyes puckered against the
dark.”

“Very poetic, you always overuse
that puckered eyes thing, but what does it mean?”

“The alarm just went off and
we’ve got to get a line on what’s happening. Tell me: when was your mission
departure time?”

The professor adopted that sheepish
look again, regret plain on his face. “Oh four hundred.”

“And your retraction?”

“Thirty minutes later.”

“How long were you there?”

“Forty-eight hours, though it
seemed like forever.”

“And when did you meet the
Primes?”

“What? You mean Wilde and
company? Well…” Nordhausen rolled his eyes, thinking. “I was about an hour just
taking things in until I got to my hotel room. Then another three hours until I
made it to the Opera house. The performance was two hours or so, and I suppose
I met Wilde an hour later in the club.”

“That’s seven hours—in that
milieu, correct?”

“Yes, I suppose so. But what is
this all about?”

Paul squinted, slowing to round
another tight curve. “Well that’s odd,” he said. “The alarm went off at three
minutes after four—exactly—just a few minutes after you opened the continuum,
in our time line.

“Yes, I know,” Nordhausen
admitted with a shrug. “I forgot about Kelly’s Golems. I mean, there hasn’t
been an alert since your inadvertent fall into that nest of Assassins at
Massiaf. I completely forgot that my mission would set off the alarm. Stupid of
me.”

“Wait a second,” Paul stopped
him. “Hear me out.  The timing on these things is critical. The Golems call
home the instant they detect a variation. The first call came in at
four-oh-three. That’s three minutes after you breached the continuum—our
time—but that’s almost
five hours
at your target milieu.”

“Five
hours? How can you know something like that?”

Paul thought for a second. “Four
point eight hours, to be a little more precise. If you were running a 48 hour
breach over 30 minutes lab processing time, then each minute here was 96
minutes there. See what I mean?”

“I suppose so, but—”

“Well, what were you doing five
hours into your mission?” He went over the professor’s story again in his head,
vocalizing events and looking to Nordhausen for confirmation. “An hour futzing
about, three hours in your room…Why, that would put you at the opera when the
alarm came in.”

“Yes, right in the middle of the
performance, I suppose.”

Paul brought the car to a halt
at a stop sign, taking advantage of the brief break from driving to hone in on
something. “Think now, Robert. Did you have any significant contact with locals
during the opera?”

“Not that I can recall. I was so
thrilled with the performance that I was totally wrapped up in it. Why, I
didn’t say a word to anyone.”

“You’re certain?”

“Absolutely. I just sat there.”

“You didn’t try to pull anything
like you had planned for the Shakespeare play, right? You didn’t go back
stage…”

“Not at all. What are you
getting at?”

“The alarm went off
before
you encountered the Primes at the club.” Paul started off again, adjusting his windshield
wipers against a blowing squall of rain.

Nordhausen stared at him, the
implications of Paul’s statement finally hitting home. “Very clever,” he said,
feeling a bit relieved, but still somewhat confused.

“Assuming your estimate of the
time is accurate.”

“The show started at
8:00pm
, promptly. I looked at my watch when the curtain
rose.”

“Too bad you didn’t do that when
you arrived. Then we’d have a real good time reference.”

Nordhausen’s eyes widened with a
sudden recollection. “The bells!”

“What?”

“
Oranges
and lemons, sing the bells of St. Clements…The bells, Paul! I
heard them ring the very moment I arrived. Why, I counted four—yes, exactly
four PM
—just a few seconds after I got there.”

“Good for you! That nails down
the time, so it looks like the contamination happened while you were at the
opera.”

“But I wasn’t doing anything. I
was just delighted to watch the play. What harm could I have caused by just
sitting there?”

“Who knows. Pushpoints are very
fragile things.”

“But how could that have
destroyed the Rosetta Stone? I just don’t see the connection.”

Paul was silent for a time.
“Neither do I,”  he said at last, his voice laden with an air of finality.

Nordhausen picked up on the
tonal change at once. “You mean to say… you
don’t
think I’m
responsible?”

“Nope.”

The professor sighed with great
relief. “Thank God—but how can you be sure? You’re the one who says these
little pushpins could be anywhere. Suppose I took someone’s seat at the opera,
like you said, and they moved elsewhere.” He spun out a scenario, inwardly
hoping he would not end up shifting the blame back on his own shoulders again.
“So this guy moves and has a conversation with someone at his new seat—someone
he was never supposed to meet, and the dislocation caused some sort of
cascading event in the continuum. You follow me? Could that have caused the
damage?”

“Yes, I follow you, and no, it
could not.”

“How can you be certain?” The
professor wanted to know if he was really off the hook.

“I’m certain. I thought this
from the very first moment you came out with this.”

“What? And you kept it to
yourself!”

“It’s elementary, my dear
professor.” Paul smiled, pleased to be Holmes to Nordhausen’s Watson. “You say
this artifact was discovered in 1799 by Napoleon’s troops?”

“Yes, at Rosetta. That’s how it
got the name.”

“Fine. And what year was your
breaching point set for?”

“1880. The year
Pirates of Penzance
opened at the Opera Comique in
London
.”

“So how does a contamination in
1880 cause damage to a stone carving that was discovered nearly a hundred years
earlier?”

“Right…” Nordhausen groped about
the argument, feeling he way forward. “The curator! When I saw the damage to the
stone he claimed he had taken very good care of it—that it was
always
that way!”

“So the damage had to occur
earlier on the
Meridian
.” Paul slowed the Honda to look
for the entrance to the memorial grounds. Nordhausen leaned back, exhaling
deeply.

“Thank God,” he breathed. “It
wasn’t me. Why didn’t you tell me if you suspected this all along?”

“You needed to sit with it for a
while,” Paul chided. “You ran off to Reading Station to retrieve
Lawrence
’s manuscript, then dragged me
off to Wadi Rumm for a tour of the Crusades. Now this. I wanted you to stew in
your own pot for a while, my friend.”

Nordhausen was going to say
something, but he caught himself, nodding his head.

“I suppose I had it coming,” he
agreed at last. “Yet I can’t tell you how relieved I am! I thought it was all
my fault—the stone, the hieroglyphics, Kelly. All of it.”

“Well you can finally be done
with that,” said Paul, “because I don’t think you had anything to do with
Kelly’s situation either. We may find out your meddling caused changes in this
Meridian
, but we won’t know that until
we get the Golem report. It’s a pretty fair bet that you didn’t damage this
Rosetta Stone you keep talking about. Didn’t you hear me when I first came in?
The initial reports showed a spatial locus in the
Middle East
—and you were in
London
.”

Robert gave him a wide eyed
look. “Yes… Then I couldn’t be the one responsible for the contamination.  But
who then? How did it happen?”

“You should be.” There was an
ominous tone to that, and Paul gave the professor a hard look.

“What now?” he asked.

“I think we both know who might
be behind this business, Robert.”

“You mean Rasil and his
confederates?”

“Possibly—in fact, very likely.
There’s no doubt he learned of your phone call from the digital log on his
gizmo. A simple number trace would give him Kelly’s cell phone number, and it
would ID our good buddy clear enough. So, in one way, you still
may
be
responsible for what’s happening to Kelly. Someone is on to us, and they’re
trying to counter what we’ve been doing with the project.”

“Damn…” Nordhausen nodded his
head gravely. “We have to find out what is going on… is that the place?” He
pointed to a wrought iron gate up ahead, marking the entrance to the memorial
site.

They  passed a painted white
sign blowing wildly in the rain:
Eternal
Grove
Cemetery
.
They selected the spot when they thought Kelly was lost, burying a few
mementoes in a shallow grave, on a isolated hillside still far from
development, a peaceful oak grove surrounded by green pastureland and harboring
a small cemetery. Now the oak trees were heaving furiously in the wind, bulging
black shapes in the dark. A heavy chain bound the white painted gate, rattling
with the wind. Nordhausen hopped out to open it, while Dorland drove on
through.

Old oak leaves were blowing,
stirred up by the storm. Nordhausen waved the car by, and secured the chain.
They were very much alone, in fact they hadn’t seen another car for miles on
the road, but Paul’s intimations had unnerved him. Thankfully, the rain was
abating somewhat, and the professor ran down the drive after the white Honda,
which finally came to a stop where the driveway opened on a pathway into the
memorial grounds.

After the sharp crunching of
tires on the gravel, the silence was acute. Spread before them in the moonlight
was a rolling hillside graveyard of several acres, descending to a stream that
wound away to the valley in the distance. The shadows of clouds raced across
the headstones, making them flash when the moonlight suddenly bathed them
again. Occasional optimistic frogs started to croak fitfully in the unseen
distance.

Dorland got out, opened the
trunk of the Honda and the two men pulled out a pair of shovels, a pick and a
pry-bar wrapped in a blanket tied with bungee cords.

“Can you find it in this murk?”
asked Nordhausen.

“It’s over here.”

He started down the left arm of
the loop with a shovel in his hand, his lanky frame bent forward against a gust
of wind. Nordhausen followed with the other shovel and the tools.

They heard a car approach on the
main road and stopped walking, their hackles raised with alarm. It was just a
passing vehicle, but it was clear that they both were quite on edge.

“Good thing the moon’s out.”
said Nordhausen.

“If only it weren’t raining,”
Paul complained. Dorland was looking around for landmarks. He located a
familiar stone, a fine marble urn with cherubs,
1807 - 1879, Matilda
Hibbard, Beloved Wife and Mother.
The rain was short and brisk, the tail
end of a squall. It had darkened the granite headstones, and made the polished
marble gleam. He walked around a few tilted headstones, and found Kelly’s, a
modest plaque set flat against the ground.

Behind the plaque, the sod was
humped up, and had fresh cuts around the edges. The ground bore the
unmistakable mark of tampering.

“This has been opened.” said
Nordhausen.

“It sure looks like it. Probably
within the last couple days, possibly even hours.”

The two men looked at each
other, wondering if they should go ahead and do what they had come to do in the
first place.