Book of Souls

Spence chimed in. “We’ll be in each other’s hands. I don’t have much time. Please help us.”

The traffic on Broadway was light. Will liked being high up, observing the city from a throne chair. He was detached from New York; he wanted no part of it anymore. He imagined commandeering the bus, tossing these men out on their ears, swinging back to pick up Nancy and his son and driving south until the sparkling aquamarine waters of the Gulf of Mexico filled the giant windshield. “What is it you think I can do for you?”

Spence answered, “We want to know the significance of 2027. We want to understand what’s so special about February 9. We want to know what happens on February 10. We think you also want to know these things.”

“You must want to know!” Kenyon added emphatically.

Of course he did. He thought about it every time he watched his son sleeping in his crib, every time he made love to his wife. The horizon. It wasn’t so far away, was it? Less than seventeen years. In a blink, it would be there. He’d be there too. He was BTH, beyond the horizon.

“Your card said The 2027 Club. How do you get into that club?”

“You’re already in it.”

“That’s funny, I don’t recall getting my membership in the mail.”

“Everyone who knows about the Library is a member. De facto.”

Will was clenching his jaw hard enough to ache. “All right. Enough. Why don’t you tell me who you are?”

OVER THE NEXT hour Will lost track of their route. He was vaguely aware of moving through Times Square, Columbus Circle, passing the dark, sprawling Natural History Museum, looping through Central Park a few times, the wide tires of the bus sending showers of brittle leaves shooting through the night air. He was listening so hard the city almost disappeared.

At Princeton, Henry Spence had been a prodigy among prodigies, a teenager with an advanced case of precociousness. It was the early sixties, the Cold War in full bloom, and unlike many of his peers who applied their intellectual horsepower to the natural sciences, Henry immersed himself in foreign languages and politics. He mastered Mandarin and Japanese and had serviceable skills in Russian. He minored in international relations, and given his conservative Philadelphia Main Line roots, his earnestness and rectitude, he practically wore a flashing “recruit me” sign on his back, beckoning the local CIA man. The professor of Soviet Studies rubbed his hands in anticipation every time he saw the crew-cut young man smoking at the Ivy Club, his pale, intelligent face stuck in a book.

To this day, Spence remained the youngest recruit in CIA history and some of the old-timers still talked about this genius kid, prancing around Langley with his giant ego and enormous analytical powers. It was probably inevitable that in time, he would be approached by a nondescript man in a suit, pressing an unlikely business card into his hand bearing the insignia of the US Navy. Spence, of course, wanted to know what the navy wanted with him, and what he was told set his life on its current arc.

Will recalled the same puzzlement the day Mark Shackleton told him Area 51 was a naval operation. The military had its traditions, some of them stubbornly silly, and this was one of them.

As Will had learned, in 1947, President Truman tapped one of his most trusted aides, James Forrestal, to commission a new, ultrasecret military base at Groom Lake, Nevada, in a remote desert parcel bordering Yucca Flats. Carrying the cartographic designation, Nevada Test Site-51, the base came to be called Area 51 for short.

The Brits had found something extraordinarily troubling at an archaeological excavation on the Isle of Wight on the grounds of an ancient monastery, Vectis Abbey. They had opened their Pandora’s box a crack, then slammed it shut when they realized what they’d stepped into. Clement Atlee, the Prime Minister, recruited Winston Churchill to be the go-between with Truman to persuade the American President to take the trove of material off their hands, lest the postwar reconstruction of Britain be sidetracked by this monumental distraction.

Project Vectis was born.

Forrestal happened to be Secretary of the Navy when he got the assignment, and the project stuck to the Navy Department like paste, qualifying Area 51 as the driest, most land-locked naval base on the planet. The Project Vectis Working Group, personally chaired by Truman, hit upon an ingenious idea to shroud the Area 51 site in disinformation, a ruse that was still working after sixty years. They capitalized on the country’s mania about UFO sightings, orchestrated a staged little drama at Roswell, New Mexico, then spread the rumor that a brand-new base in Nevada might have something to do with alien spacecraft and the like. Area 51 got on with its real mission, the gullible public none the wiser.