Book of Souls

Her jaw was quivering. “Nobody tries to kill my people. We protect our own. I scrambled a jet from Teterboro. We picked Nancy up in New Hampshire and flew all night. We just got here this second. Will, Mueller’s dead.”

“I’m sorry,” Will said. He truly was.

Then it hit him that if his bus hadn’t been delayed in LA, he would have gotten to the house too early to be saved. It was meant to be, he thought.

Nancy was standing over Frazier’s body. “Is this the man who killed my parents?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Will asked, “Where’s Philly?”

“Laura and Greg have him up at the lake. I need to call them.”

With Nancy ’s help, Will dragged himself back onto the sofa. “All hell’s going to break loose here. Another wave of watchers is going to come. We’ve got to move fast.”

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

Will squeezed Kenyon’s hand again. “Alf, where did Henry put the Cantwell papers?”

Weakly, “Lower desk drawer. Over there.”

Nancy ran over to the desk. The parchments were in a plain folder lying on top of the 1527 book. The letters from Felix, Calvin, Nostradamus, and that simple page with the scrawl: 9 February 2027. Finis Dierum.

“Does that printer scan?” Will asked her, pointing to the printer beside the desktop computer.

It did. It was a fast, expensive one, and the pages flew out of the feeder. He had Nancy scan the Vectis letter and the others to the memory stick they recovered from Frazier’s pocket.

Will opened his laptop computer, plugged in the memory stick, and clicked on HenryNet. There were sirens echoing off the hills. He needed the password. “Alf, what’s Henry’s network password?”

Sanchez shook the man. “He’s passed out.”

Will rubbed his eyes and thought for a moment.

Then he typed 2027.

He was in.

With the wail of sirens getting closer, Will banged out a quick e-mail, attached some files, and hit SEND.

Greg, old boy, your life’s never going to be the same, he thought. No one’s is.

Nancy helped him to his feet and got on her tiptoes to kiss him, the only way she could reach his mouth.

He told her, “Go get the book and the papers. I want to go to the hospital, and I want to go home with you. In that order.”

THE ONLY THING moving slowly in Will’s life was the drip, drip, drip of the antibiotics flowing into his veins.

Lying in his bed at the New York Presbyterian Hospital on that Monday evening, he savored a rare period of solitude. From the moment the ambulances and police had arrived at Spence’s house in Henderson, he’d been inundated with doctors, nurses, cops, FBI agents, and an Air Ambulance crew of EMTs that talked his ear off all the way from Vegas to New York.

His hospital room had a killer view of the East River. If it were a condo, it would have been insanely pricey. But for the first time ever, he missed his one-bedroom shoebox because that was where his wife and son were.

This was a relative calm before the storm kicked up again. He’d had his sponge bath, administered by a tough little nurse at car-wash speed. He’d picked at his dinner tray and watched a few minutes of ESPN for normalcy. Nancy would be in shortly with a shirt and a sweater to put on for the TV cameras.

Outside his door, a cordon of FBI agents protected his room and secured access to his floor. Agents from the Department of Defense and the CIA were trying to get to him, and the Attorney General was engaged in internecine warfare with his angry counterparts at the Pentagon and Homeland Security. For the moment, the FBI wall was holding firm.

The world hadn’t been expecting the news that hit the streets, mailboxes, doorsteps and the Internet on a sleepy Sunday morning just before Halloween.

The headline in The Washington Post trumpeted a story that at first blush made people think the venerable newspaper was perpetrating a hoax:

US GOVERNMENT HAS VAST LIBRARY OF MEDIEVAL BOOKS WHICH PREDICT FUTURE BIRTHS AND DEATHS UP TO 2027; SECRET INSTALLATION AT AREA 51, NEVADA ESTABLISHED BY HARRY TRUMAN TO MINE DATA; SOURCE OF LIBRARY: A BRITISH MONASTERY; CONNECTIONS SEEN TO DOOMSDAY KILLER CASE.

by Greg Davis, Staff Reporter,

Washington Post Exclusive

The five-thousand-word story was not a hoax. It was rich in documentation and extensively quoted Will Piper, former FBI Special Agent in charge of the Doomsday case, who described the circumstances of one Mark Shackleton, computer scientist, Area 51 researcher, and the architect of a fictitious serial-killing spree in New York, and the violent government cover-up orchestrated to protect a secret desert installation hidden for six decades. The Post had in its possession a copy of the library database that covered the United States through the year 2027, and they had been able to successfully correlate database predictions for hundreds of individuals across the country against actual contemporaneous birth and death data.