Ancient Echoes (19 page)

“I say it’s time we find out what the truth is,” Michael
suggested. “Any luck with the map?”

“Not much,” Quade said with disgust.

“What map?” Jake asked.

Michael showed it to him. “My associate found it in Lionel’s
files back in Washington D.C. Mountains, creeks, and two straight vertical
lines annotated ‘two pillars.’ Does any of this look familiar to you, Sheriff?”

“No. And there are no pillars out in that wilderness, if
that’s what you’re hoping,” Jake said. “I don’t know what the map is showing.”

“How well do you know the wilderness area?” Charlotte asked
him.

“I was born here.”

Quade added, “But you left for twenty-five years, and didn’t
return until three years ago.”

Jake’s brows crossed. “So?”

Michael took over the questioning. “To become a sheriff so
quickly, you must have had some law enforcement experience.”

Jake didn’t like being interrogated, and particularly didn’t
like Quade or Michael Rempart knowing anything about him. Charlotte said
nothing, but he felt her waiting for his answer. He took a deep breath. “Since
all of you are so all-fired curious, I was a Robbery-Homicide detective with
the Los Angeles Police Department.”

Michael looked at him skeptically. “Why leave?”

Jake’s eyes drilled him. “How about because I’d had it with
the shit in L.A. and came home to get the stink out of my nostrils. The prior
sheriff had a heart attack, and the county asked me to hold down the fort. He
passed away, and now it’s my job until the next election. Anything else you
want to know?”

“Yes,” Michael said. “Are you riding with us, Sheriff?”

Somehow, Jake knew it would come to this. He’d already left
his deputy in charge, saying he was following a new lead. He glanced at Quade,
who wore a smirk that Jake would have loved to scrub off his face, and
Charlotte whose gaze was firm and steady. “Since my truck’s been modified to
handle off-road, looks like you folks should ride with me. Theories
be
damned. No evil spirits or anything else strange is out
there. The only thing dangerous is nature itself.”

o0o

“They’re on the move. Roll out.” Derek Hammill gave the
order as he double-checked the safety on his 10 mm Smith and Wesson 1076, glad
to have it near. He was a country boy, grew up in Alabama, and he sensed a
strangeness about this area.

“Fuck this!” Nose shouldered his H&K assault rifle as he
stared off to the left, his mouth a grim line. “Someone’s out there, boss. I
feel him watching us. I say we stop and give whoever it is a lesson.”

“We’ve already checked!” Hammill’s words came a little too
quick, a little too loud. “Heat sensors don’t give off anything big enough for
a man. It’s some animal. Forget it.”

Nose had joked to the men about the river guides’ delirious
stories and old Indian tales about monsters and evil spirits lurking in the
forest. Suddenly, the tales weren’t quite so funny. The guys seemed ready to
blow up chipmunks.

As their leader, Hammill needed to steady them. He couldn’t
let nerves get in the way.

“We’ve got our orders. No delay. We’ve got to return with
the objective A-SAP. Now, move it!”

o0o

“There’s a good reason nobody knows where it’s at,” Polly
Higgins said when Jake asked if she recognized the landscape shown on Thurmon
Teasdale’s map. “Nobody goes up there. I think this stream is most likely
Cayuse Creek. It’s plenty wide, plenty long, and wends its way west from Square
Top Mountain. If I’m right, you’ll have to head due west, some ten miles past
Devil’s Gulch, just like I told you.”

Using ground area maps Quade had printed off of the CIA’s
database, they located the general area they should head toward. “Why don’t we
simply fly over and find the pillars that way?” Charlotte asked.

“As good as maps and technology are, there are a lot of
things you can only find on the ground surveillance,” Michael said. “Those
pillars might be in the middle of a thick forest. They might look like tree
trunks from the sky, maybe diseased ones that had lost their leaves and limbs.”

“Michael’s right,” Quade said. “We need to go there. Ready?”

Polly walked with them out to Jake’s truck. The Ford F-250
had traction bars, three-inch coilover shocks, and thirty-five inch all-terrain
tires. The four of them had fitted it with tents, backpacks, medical supplies,
and enough provisions to last a good ten days, even though they expected to be
gone no more than three or four. If they found anyone alive, the extra food,
water, and medicines would come in handy. Jake even included four Remington 700
rifles, plus magazines. He didn’t expect to need them, but they were going into
grizzly and wolf country.

“That’s a might fine rig you got there,” Polly said with a
frown. “But it won’t do out that way. Ground’s too rough, too uneven. I’ll give
it twenty miles, tops, then you’ll be walking, that’s for sure.”

Jake nodded. “We’ll go as far as we can. I expect we’ll be
in for a long trek.”

“I got horses you can use,” Polly said, “but no trailers.
You’d have to ride them from here.”

Michael turned to the others. “That might be faster in the
long run. Once we’re in the area, we’re probably going to have to go around in
circles before we find those pillars—if they even exist. It would be a lot
easier on horseback than walking. We’d cover a wider area quicker. Can all of
you ride?”

Jake and Quade answered affirmatively. Charlotte’s
expression leaped from scared to
worried
to defiant.
“I’ve ridden a camel in Egypt,” she said. “I don’t know if that counts, but
tell me what to do, Michael. I’ll manage.”

Michael gave a half-smile. The city girl was clearly out of
her league in this wilderness, and was frightened by it, but she had gumption
he couldn’t help but admire. “I suspect Polly has at least one gentle gelding
that’ll be good for a newcomer.”

“Be careful with my kids,” Polly said. “They’re like family
to me. Still, I can’t help but think none of you should go out there. When
people say there’s something evil, they aren’t joking around. You hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Michael said with a smile.

“Humph,” was Polly’s only comment as she led them toward the
stables.

Michael stood a moment, breathing deeply and trying to shake
an oppressive dread. He agreed with everything Polly had said. He could feel
the evil out there, thick, heavy, smothering.

And it waited for them.

FRUSTRATED BY HER scientists’ lack
of progress, Jennifer Vandenburg decided to look at some alchemical documents
herself
. How difficult could they be?

She quickly found out. Nicolas Flamel had couched everything
he said in religious terms. To the medieval mind, his comments may have meant
something, but not in modern times. How should one
interpret:

 ...let him ask of himself, why the figure of St.
Paul is on the right hand, in the place where the custom is to paint St. Peter?
And on the other side that of St. Peter, in the place of the figure of St.
Paul? Why the figure of St. Paul is clothed in colours white and yellow, and
that of Peter in yellow and red?

Who the hell knew? Or cared? Flamel’s writings were useless!
She didn’t have the background to understand. And anyway, to put alchemy into
practice she needed the text Flamel had used—
The Book of Abraham the Jew
.
Only with it could the secret of alchemy be revealed. And it was in Idaho.

She got up and paced as she pondered all she'd learned over
the past few months about alchemy. The reason her attention turned toward such
a bizarre subject was nearly as remarkable as the subject itself.

She came upon it through reading some of the personal
papers, faxes, and emails of the founder of Phaylor-Laine Pharmaceuticals,
Calvin Phaylor. After she replaced him upon his "retirement" by the board
of trustees, she became curious about what had led to, essentially, a firing.
Whispered rumors said Phaylor had lost his mind. She decided to see if his
papers reflected that or if the board had, in fact, staged a coup.
If so, she needed to be wary about them doing it again...to her.

Calvin Phaylor’s interest in alchemy shocked her. No wonder
the board thought him mad! She went through Phaylor’s notes, emails, travel
vouchers, and all other material she could find, surprised at how Phaylor saw
PLP as his personal money machine, and at the amount of personal information
stored on the company servers. She doubted he realized the company’s computers
backed up everything, including private materials.

The more Jennifer learned about the history of alchemy, however,
the more convinced she became that there really might be something to it. All
the men initiated into its arcana weren't gullible fools, and throughout
history many people believed in its power, including most of the outstanding
minds of their time—men such as Roger Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, Carl Jung, and
Leonardo da Vinci. To be fair, she ought to include the bad with the good—Adolf
Hitler.

If they believed in alchemy, why couldn't she?

The alchemist would create a philosopher's stone and somehow
end up with gold. The common man perceived alchemy as a sort of ATM for
Krugerrands.

But the master alchemist, the true believer, did not stop
there.

From pure gold, the alchemist produced the "pill of
transformation," a means for man to achieve his ultimate self, his perfect
self—a man who would not die but live forever in immortal splendor.

That was the alchemist's ultimate goal.

The ultimate goal of Calvin Phaylor.

And now, the ultimate goal of Jennifer
Vandenburg.
Stopping a person from aging would allow her daughter to
live. She could not, would not, fail.

IT TOOK ALL THE Hammer’s willpower
not to speed up, not to wrap his hands around Charlotte Reed’s scrawny neck and
demand she tell him exactly where she was going. Tempting as it was, he knew
that the sheriff, and possibly the other two with her, would put up a fight.
The pretty boy he recognized as Michael Rempart, but he was puzzled by the one
who looked like a walking corpse. He looked like the type who’d pull the wings
off flies and then eat their flightless bodies. Hammill didn’t like going up
against guys like that. Their reactions were never normal.

He decided to see where Charlotte Reed and the others, “the
searchers” he called them, led him. That should be the fastest way to end this
mission,
then
clean-up any collateral damage such as
witnesses, and finally to leave this god-forsaken part of the country and get
his fill of booze, broads, and a soft bed.

He watched through binoculars as Reed and her friends left
the sheriff’s truck at Polly Higgins’ ranch and took off on horseback. “Hell
and damnation!” He pounded the steering wheel of the Suburban before turning to
Fish.
“Looks like we get to play cavalry.
We’ll head
over to the stables and see what’s in it.”

o0o

After the sheriff and his friends left, Polly Higgins went
back to the house to cook biscuits and gravy. She wondered if she'd done the
right thing telling Jake and the others about the Indian legends. Pillars that
created thunder sounded so frightening that no one in his or her right mind
should want to go there. But then, the sheriff’s companions seemed to be
scholarly types, and from what little Polly had seen of that kind, they were
never in their right minds anyway. Besides that, anyone with half a brain could
see the sheriff was a might smitten with that Charlotte Reed, much as he tried
to hide it. More than likely, she could lead him straight to the fires of hell
if she wanted. Polly
snorted,
glad romance was no
longer on her agenda.

Shadow erupted in barks, followed by Gretchen and Lolo. They
raced to the window to see what was outside. The scruffs of their necks stood
on end, their barking loud and hysterical.

Polly grabbed her Mossberg double-barrel shotgun, chambered
some buckshot, and went outside, shocked to see men in black running around her
stables. She ordered the dogs to stay with her.

The obvious leader was blond and muscular, wearing
sunglasses, a heavy black jacket with lots of gear dangling from a wide belt,
black baggy pants tucked into heavy boots, and a black baseball-style cap. What
in the world was he made up for, she wondered. Had war games come to Idaho? No
wonder her dogs barked. She would, too, if she could.

He saw her and approached.

 “Who are you?” she called.

“Major Derek Hammill, retired,” the leader said, removing
the glasses. A cold dread filled her at his flat, hard blue eyes. He stopped a
few feet away. “We're investigating the whereabouts of Sheriff Jake Sullivan
and some visitors. We understand you may know where he went.”

She raised her chin. “Jake can go wherever he wants. This is
U.S. Forest Service land, not military.”

“Yes, ma'am,” The Hammer said. “But he went off without
saying where. Now his deputy needs him. It’s serious, so we were called in.”

She looked over Hammill and the others. There were a lot of
them—six or seven, all moving around. All held rifles and looked like they had
enough fire power on them to conduct a full scale war.

She had no choice and proceeded to explain, giving little
detail, where the sheriff was headed.

“I take it we’ll need horses,” Hammill said. “Do you have
more?”

“Nope.”

The Hammer thanked her for the information,
then
turned to walk away. He glanced at a nearby man and
nodded.

Instead of following Hammill, Bates drew his .44 magnum,
turned toward Polly and aimed. She was too stunned to react, but Shadow did.
The dog flung herself at Bates' throat, clamped down on his Adam's apple and
tore.