A Vision of Fire (12 page)

CHAPTER 17

F
lora Davies, the forty-year-old chairwoman of the Group, was locking the airtight door of their basement on Ninth Street. The founder of the Group, Otis Davies, had purchased this grand mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue early in the twentieth century. Named the Global Explorers' Club, ostensibly it was a home for travelers who came to the city and needed a place to rest before leaving. Here they could relax among fellow adventurers, swap tales, study maps and rare books in the library, or leave treasures they had found to be collected at some future date. Treasures that the Group examined thoroughly. Statues, vases, tablets, and other finds that might have writing or images, carvings, or paintings that fit their particular interests served the Group's highly secret need. It had proved a worthwhile arrangement. All the results of the Group's efforts, previously scattered throughout the world in bank vaults and secret warehouses, were now consolidated in this basement.

Flora emerged from the side of the building and walked up the steps to the quiet street. She was heading to her apartment with the intention of getting some long-overdue sleep before Mikel arrived with his latest artifact from the Falklands. Other members would be arriving within hours to study it, and there would be much to do.
Each new find was a key, and this particular key could well be the one that exponentially expanded what they knew, confirmed what they suspected, and ultimately narrowed their ancient search.

At this moment, however, Davies's mind was not on the artifact. She stood at the top of the steps that led from the well of the basement door to street level and looked south toward the park. Something was wrong. She heard voices in the park, which was not unusual even at this hour, and dogs barking, which was also not uncommon. What she could not understand was why she didn't see the towering white marble arch that was built to celebrate the centenary of George Washington's inauguration as president. It was gone.

At a fast clip she walked toward the park where the Washington Square Arch used to be. As she neared it she realized she was wrong; the arch was there. Only it wasn't white. And it wasn't marble.

Through the center of the arch she saw a dozen or so students backed well away, standing by the fountain toward the south. They were looking, pointing, taking photos and cell phone videos—not that they would convey the real-time creepiness of a nearly eighty-foot structure covered bottom to top with rats.

When Davies realized what they were she stopped dead in her tracks and gasped. There must have been hundreds, even thousands. She had never seen, never heard of anything like this. Her first thought after her brain unfroze was that it was some kind of stunt, something concocted for a reality show or a guerilla cinema project by film school students.

That has to be it. They couldn't be real, could they?

Suddenly spots of white appeared beneath the undulating carpet. First small and then larger, unevenly shaped patches. The students on the other side began to scream and as Davies started to realize that the rats were leaving their perch in great heaving swaths, someone jokingly cried, “Stampede!” The creatures raced in all directions, with one tidal wave of them rolling unswervingly toward her. A charge of dark gray fur pushed down the center of Fifth Avenue and along both
sidewalks. She stood transfixed, not so much with fear or revulsion—though she felt both as the rats rushed over her feet—but because the rats were real, there were no cameras, and though her heart was racing, her mind was working harder still, trying to figure out what on earth was going on.

She turned protectively toward the club and that was when the real horror struck.

The concrete recess outside the basement door was overflowing with pile upon pile of the surging vermin. Were they trying to get in the door? They were squealing, scratching, and tearing at each other to get higher still as they formed a roiling triangle in the doorway. Under the streetlight she could see tufts of fur floating upward and the occasional streak of blood. Those that could not get into that small area flowed into the garden that fronted the structure. All the rats that couldn't fit in the stairwell were facing in one direction, aligned as much as possible to the north and south.

Davies got as close as she could without making further contact. With shaking fingers she retrieved her cell phone from her shoulder bag and began shooting video. The rats' activity was inexplicable indeed, but what challenged and distracted her was that this behavior was not entirely without precedent.

As lights flicked on in surrounding apartments, people rising to check out the shouts coming from the park and the strange thumping and scratching taking place right outside their doors, Davies switched off her video and stepped into the shadows.

She thought back to the call she had received from Mikel when he landed in Montevideo. The field agent had mentioned something strange—a flock of albatrosses that had flown directly at the plane from the north.

Davies put her cell phone away and walked up the vast stone steps to the front door of the Global Explorers' Club. There would be no sleep tonight.

CHAPTER 18

U
nder orders from Joseph P. O'Hara, Caitlin was allowed to send exactly one e-mail about the drawing before she went to bed.

“That's it, little lady,” he'd said in a voice she recognized from those old, old days when he let her make a phone call or have a Scooter Pie before retiring.

She had to tell Ben, and she had to tell him now; it couldn't wait. Caitlin took her tablet into the bedroom, sat cross-legged against the headboard, prepared an e-mail with attached notes from her trip and a photo of Gaelle's sketch, then wrote:

You might think I'm crazy but forget Polynesia. That's not what I drew. Dad recognized it: a Viking longship. The teeth are either circular shields on the hull or people sitting inside it; the eyes are the tall, curved carvings at the prow and stern. He's been dabbling in genealogy and our Irish roots are all mixed in with Scottish and Norse. He hit a few museum collections online and he saw a brooch design very similar to this. Gaelle sketched a symbol too—see the jpeg—that seems Celtic to me. Could the ship be connected to Gaelle's almost drowning? I know that sounds nuts and you're probably too busy to meet but call if you can tomorrow. I mean today. Tuesday. Thanks. —C xo

Caitlin set the tablet on the floor and crashed. Her mind and energy and body had all hit a wall and she had no trouble sleeping through the night.

She awoke feeling rested but restless, with a readiness to prowl through this mystery. Her father dropped Jacob off at school on his way out of the city and Caitlin looked over her work schedule. There was nothing until noon, after which the day was packed. To her surprise, Ben had not only called early and left a message but had time to meet. She called him back as soon as her “lads” were gone.

He picked up on the first ring.

“Hey, Cai.”

“That's not good news, is it? That you have free time?” She didn't really have to ask; his solemn voice said it all.

“No, it's not,” he said. “The highest-level diplomats haven't come back to the table. They've sent their lower-level people—trusted staff, essentially—to sort of act as placeholders. They can't say much so they're taking a lot of breaks.”

“So the world is closer to the brink?”

“I wouldn't say closer,” Ben replied. “More like the cliff could give out with just one good sneeze. I'll tell you more in person,” he said cautiously. “So please, let's talk about something we can actually work out.”

“Roger that, and I have to say I'm really glad you can meet.”

Ben laughed, somewhat wryly. “Is that a crisis in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

“Both.” Caitlin laughed and said good-bye.

She slugged down some coffee her father had made and headed out. It was one of those blessedly mild days that late fall in New York sometimes delivered. Caitlin appreciated the transition from the heat of Haiti so she texted Ben suggesting they walk. He readily agreed.

Sitting in the cab for the short ride over, she saw the already infamous “Rat Pack” video on the backseat monitor. It was creepy, and the speculation was that Con Ed's working underground replacing
cables had caused the rodents to leave their “homes.” What was even creepier was the army of pest control personnel descending on stately Fifth Avenue, bagging dead rats and setting traps.

Caitlin met Ben with a warm hug that momentarily pushed his long, drawn expression into something like a smile. They strolled north from the United Nations through the small park in Turtle Bay. The sunlight glittered on the East River and they unbuttoned their coats.

“Anything new with Maanik?” Caitlin asked.

“She had a small incident,” he said. “Hansa found her talking to the dog in the middle of the night. What was strange was that he seemed to be listening. When Hansa tried to get her back to bed, Maanik started sobbing and flailing a little. But your cue worked.”

“How are her parents doing?”

“I didn't speak with Hansa but the ambassador's emotional state has shifted. He's less anxious but he seems more . . . ‘sad' is the only word that fits. A part of it has to be the sense that he's failing the peace process, but I also think he feels as though he's failing his daughter. He said something about having to take some kind of action before she's stuck like this for life. I told him you were making progress.” Ben looked at her. “Are you?”

“Maybe. I've got so much to share with you—”

Ben put a hand on her arm. “Before we get to that, I . . .”

Caitlin sensed he was struggling with something and put a warm hand on top of his.

“I feel guilty for putting this on you.” Ben looked at the pavement.

“Go ahead. Seriously. You know I'll keep it confidential.”

“Okay. There is a rumor—and I want to stress that it
is
a rumor—that some countries are considering shutting down their embassies in India and Pakistan and flying out their employees. Countries that include us, the UK, and Japan.”

“Oh my god,” said Caitlin.

“God?” Ben said. “You see
God
in this?
Anywhere?
”

Caitlin didn't answer. The question made her think of her vision, of millennia of prophets and shamans and mystics who had visions, of the ivory-tower debates about the difficulty of distinguishing between profound faith and dementia. She got back on topic. “The cliff you talked about on the phone. It's that close to crumbling?”

“It might be a brinksmanship maneuver, but those have a catastrophic tendency to take on a life of their own. It could be politicos testing the water to see how everyone reacts, whether the Indian and Pakistani delegates will come back to the table given the right impetus.” He exhaled and rubbed the bone below his ear. “I just don't know.”

“What do you think?”

He hesitated. “I think it's a ploy.”

“Is that what you would say to me anyway, to keep me from worrying?”

“No, Caitlin. I would never play you.”

“Okay.” She pressed his hand again. “You know those Magritte umbrellas that look black to everyone else but underneath they're blue sky and puffy white clouds? We're going to stand under one of those. Because if I don't ignore what you just told me, I won't be able to focus.”

He nodded and half-smiled. “I just felt like one of your patients getting a safe-haven visual.”

“You were.” She half-smiled back, then jumped into a description of her trip, ending with the conversation with her father. “So, his crazy idea that my drawing invokes the Vikings—when I say it out loud it seems to lose some weight but, Ben, he was one hundred percent certain.”

“It's not so crazy,” Ben said. “My linguistic programs broke down the snatches of language we have and I did some comparing. Part of what came out of Maanik's mouth seems to be rooted in Old Norse.”

Caitlin stopped and gaped at him. Finally, at least some of the pieces were coming together. She allowed herself a big smile.

“Don't get too comfortable,” said Ben. “There's a strong strand of Mongolian as well.”

“Oh. But Mongolian and Norse had no connection, at least not that I know of.”

He shook his head and laughed. “None at all. Nor the snippets of Japanese. This kind of discovery could make history in certain circles. Last night, when I confirmed all those languages, was the most exciting night of my life. Thank you, Cai. You made it happen.”

“What every woman loves to hear!” She grinned and realized she was flirting. She blamed it on his infectious enthusiasm and switched back to professionalism: “Can you give me specifics?”

He spoke slowly and deliberately to make his point. “This hybrid language should not exist, but it does. And it makes sense. The hand gestures are superlatives but they apply to nouns as well as adjectives. So for example, if I say ‘
hergha
' ”—he rolled the r and sort of hacked out the second syllable—“it means ‘fire.' But if I say it while doing this”—he made a circle with his hand, the palm facing his torso, then pushed it to the side exactly as Maanik and Gaelle had both done at different points—“it means ‘the biggest fire,' a conflagration.”

“Can we sit down?” Caitlin could hardly believe what she was hearing. She needed a bench to take it all in. She shook her head not just in awe but in relief. Seeing her old friend perform the gesture without an accompanying fit of screams and scratching was profoundly comforting.

“You are amazing,” she said.

“Eh, it's just good software.” He grinned, shrugging away the compliment. “I only have about twenty-five percent of the words translated, and we don't have that many to begin with. Nouns have been easiest. What's most interesting to me is that the word for ‘fire' and its superlative appear very near the word for ‘sky.' ”

“Do you have any idea why?”

“Well, I'd like to be cautious about interpretation but I doubt the proximity is accidental. This shows up in ancient China as yin-yang,
with the sky being the ‘fire' force and earth being a ‘water' force. But in this language, the superlative for ‘fire' also appears very near what I think are the words for ‘arm' and ‘pain.' So maybe . . . ?” He urgently patted his forearms as if he were putting out flames.

“God,
yes
!” Caitlin exclaimed when it had soaked in. “If burning sparks were falling on my arms and wouldn't go out, burning deeper into my flesh, I might try to scratch them away, like Maanik. All right, so in the broadest of terms, what kind of causes do we have for fire in the sky? Either it was manufactured means—firebombing or a burning building—or there was a natural cause. Lightning? A volcano? A meteor?”

“All of that is possible,” Ben said. He repeated another gesture they had seen in the videos: pointing his left hand away from him at an angle while crossing his body with his right hand. At the same time he said, “ ‘
Ogrusse.
' That seems to be the superlative for ‘water,' meaning ‘the
biggest
water,' and it appears very near the word for ‘sky' too.”

“You mean they're interchangeable? ‘Sky' and ‘water'? Because they're blue?”

“I don't think that's it,” he said. “I took it to mean water that touches the sky.”

“Like a tsunami?”

“Again, still guesswork, but that's a possibility.”

Caitlin thought back to Phuket. “You'd have to be sitting on the beach to see it quite like that, rolling in from the horizon.”

“If we're talking about recent tsunamis, yeah. But what if this is a mega?” He extended his arms as if he were holding a barrel. “One big mother?”

“How big are we talking?” she asked.

“In living memory?” Ben replied. “Lituya Bay, Alaska, July 9, 1958. An 8.3-magnitude earthquake along the Fairweather Fault caused a landslide that pushed a hundred million cubic feet of earth and glacier into the narrow inlet of the bay. The result was a wave that rose 1,720 feet. That's the tallest mega-tsunami of modern times, and I stress
‘modern times.' There's a whole lot of history that happened before we started keeping records.”

“Apparently,” Caitlin said. She shook her head, not quite able to process all of this. Partly from gratitude, partly for comfort, she hugged her companion. “Thank you, Ben. I have no way to say it enough, thank you.”

“
Thurstillalotlfttoworkt
,” he said into her collar.

They laughed at his muffled voice and she pulled back.

“There's still a lot left to work out,” he repeated. “I was hoping you would bring back a video or something with more language from Haiti, but it doesn't sound like you had a chance?”

Caitlin deflated. “No. I brought back stuff but I don't know what it was.”

“More writing?”

“No,” she said.

“Caitlin?”

“The Vodou vision I had there, and then the nightmare on the plane. When I was hit with—with whatever it was, I felt heat, I saw fire.”

“Power of suggestion?”

“Well, sure, maybe. But from whom? The madame and her son didn't say anything about fire. I mean, I was choking on sulfur, Ben. What would do that except a volcano?”

“But you weren't around a volcano then. Or ever, were you?”

“I was around a caldera, once, in Southern California.”

“Right, dormant for how many thousands of years? How about incense, was there any of that in Haiti? Anything that could have suggested that smell?”

She shook her head.

Ben took a deep breath. “So, a volcano. How? Where?”

“What about
when
?”

“No.” Ben shook his head. “Not buying where you're going.”

“Honestly, I don't know where I'm going but stay with me. We
know that both of these girls experienced something—nightmares, visions, hallucinations, whatever you want to call them. And we know that they didn't experience these things at any other time in their short lives. All they seem to share, what stands out, is that both have a parent or stepparent—in any case, a close adult figure—who recently experienced a near-death incident.”

“And the suicidal boy in Iran that you mentioned, didn't he have a relative who just died?”

“Yes, a brother who was executed. So these physio-visual-linguistic reactions are being triggered by family trauma, even if there is no direct bloodline.”

“Which tells you what?” Ben asked. “Other than some kind of post-traumatic stress being a possible trigger. Where's the physical volcano? Where's the water that touches the sky? You're saying you all experienced some part of that. Where?”

“That's just it,” Caitlin said. “I don't know.”

“What else could it be, then? Genetic imprinting? Vodou? Aliens?” Ben said.