Book of Souls

Will knew where he was going. Over the last year, he’d thought about these things himself. “Predestination.”

“Precisely!” Kenyon exclaimed. “I was a Calvinist before I had a concrete justification for being one. Let’s just say the Library turned me into a High Calvinist. Very doctrinaire.”

“And very opinionated,” his friend added.

“I’ve spent my retirement becoming an ordained minister. I’m also writing a biography of John Calvin, trying to figure out how he had the genius to get his theology so right. Frankly, if it weren’t for Henry’s passing, I’d be happy as a clam. Everything makes sense to me, which is a nice place to be.”

“Tell me about the 2027 Club,” Will said.

Spence hesitated at the wheel as a light turned green. He had to decide whether to swing through the park again. “As I’m sure you know, the last book of the Library ends on the ninth of February, 2027. Everyone with no recorded date of death is BTH, beyond the horizon. Everyone who’s ever worked at the Library has endlessly speculated why the books ended and who was responsible for them in the first place. Was the work of these savants or monks or fortune-tellers or extraterrestrials-yes, Alf, my explanation is as good as yours-was it interrupted by external factors like war, disease, natural disaster? Or is there a more sinister explanation that maybe the people of earth ought to know about. As far as any of us are aware, there was never much of an official effort to understand the significance of the horizon, as it’s called. The Pentagon’s always too focused on mining the data and generating intelligence findings. There’s a lot of badness in the cards, megadisasters in the not-so-distant future that our folks are obsessing over. Something big is looming in Latin America, truth be told. Maybe as 2027 gets closer, it’s going to occur to these geniuses in Washington that we really ought to know what the hell is going to happen the day after. But let me tell you, Mr. Piper, one’s curiosity about the horizon doesn’t cease with retirement. The 2027 Club was formed in the 1950s by some ex-Area 51 types as part retirement social club, part amateur sleuthing group. It’s all very sub rosa, violates our retirement agreements and all that, but you can’t stamp out human nature. We’re curious as hell, and the only folks we can talk to are ex-employees. Plus it gives us a chance to get together and drink adult beverages.”

The long soliloquy winded him. Will watched his chest heave.

“So what’s the answer?” Will asked.

“The answer is…” Spence paused for dramatics, “we don’t know!” He let out a belly laugh. “That’s why we’re driving around Manhattan trying to romance you.”

“I don’t think I can help you.”

“We think you can,” Kenyon said.

“Look,” Spence added, “we know all about the Doomsday case and Mark Shackleton. We knew the guy, not well, mind you, but if someone was going to go off the reservation, it was going to be someone like Shackleton, a grade-A loser, if you ask me. You had some kind of connection to him beforehand, no?”

“He was my college roommate. For a year. What’s your source of information on me?”

“The Club. We’re networked like crazy. We know that Shackleton smuggled out the US database all the way to the horizon. We know that he set up a smoke screen by inventing a serial-killing spree in New York.”

Kenyon sadly shook his head and interrupted. “I still can’t believe the rank cruelty of sending people postcards with their date of death!”

Spence continued, “We know his real purpose was base: to make money from a life-insurance scheme! We know you exposed him. We know he was critically wounded by the watchers. We know you were allowed to retire from the FBI and presumably live an unfettered life. Therefore, Mr. Piper, we strongly suspect, virtually to the point of certainty, that you have unique leverage over the authorities.”

“What would that be?”

“You must have a copy of the database.”

Momentarily, Will was back in Los Angeles, fleeing from the watchers, in the backseat of a taxi, urgently downloading Shackleton’s database from his laptop onto a memory stick. Shackleton: rotting away like a vegetable in some godforsaken back ward.

“Not going to confirm or deny.”

“There’s more to tell,” Kenyon said. “Go on, Henry, tell him everything.”

“Back in the midnineties, I got friendly with one of the watchers, a man named Dane Bentley, to the point that he did me the ultimate Area 51 favor. I was insatiably curious. The only people with access to what I wanted to know were the people tasked with making sure we had no access! The watchers, as you know, are a grim lot, but this fellow, Dane, had enough humanity to break the rules for a friend. He looked up my date of death. October 21, 2010. At the time it seemed very, very far away. Kind of creeps up on you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. I appreciate that.” He waited until the next red light before asking, “Did you look yourself up?”