The Memorist (34 page)

Thursday, May 1
^st
—8:25 p.m.

T
he symphony had been hijacked and so had David’s plan. But there was still time if he acted fast. Except his head felt like it was exploding and there was too much pain. And so much sadness. He thought about the woman with dark hair and almond-shaped green eyes…about Ohana…and her father…and…impossibly…his own death. Tears streaming down his face, he reached for the det cord. He needed to activate it and apply the current to the wire.

Fumbling, he struggled to get control of his trembling. He had to stop thinking about the past, except he could still smell the flowers from the sacred
ashoka
tree and feel the agony of the blows. Could see the older man coming at him with the rock again. Could feel Devadas’s horrible pain.

David willed his fingers to pick up the cord but they didn’t move. He was lying on the ground, blinded by pain, and then, somehow, surprisingly through the pain, he experienced the joy that Devadas had experienced as he lay dying, knowing he’d saved the life of someone he’d loved.

David’s wife had told him once his news stories saved lives. If Lisle was here now, she’d tell him it had never been his karma to cause violence.

Except he couldn’t give up now. He had to do this for her, for them. Reaching once more for the det cord, he picked it up, held it and tried to remember what he was supposed to do next. Two steps. There were only two steps left.

No! There were only two steps left, create the short circuit and force the explosion. He stared at the science project and felt a sadness so heavy descend on him he thought he might never be able to get up again. Maybe he could just stay down in the catacombs forever, become part of the rock, part of the ancient burial ground.

Do this
, he silently screamed at himself.
Do it now. Get it over with
. He held the wires in his hands. Felt the heavy strands of Lisle’s hair.

Who had he been kidding? He’d never been capable of killing anyone. Not even the rats down in the caves with him. But if he didn’t do this now, the rest of his life would be an endless loop of loss. If he stayed on and lived out all his days missing them, his family would be gone from him in a more final and aching way than at any time in the last eighteen months.

His hands fell open and dropped to his sides. He saw endless blackness. No matter how many people he’d loved and lost, could he really do to others what had been done
to him? Could he be the one to disturb the fragile threads that tied people to each other over time and through time?

Do it. Do it now.

With a burst of resolve, he picked up the wires and the Semtex and the det cap but instead of connecting them to each other, with one great last effort he heaved them all into the shaft, into the same empty channel he’d forced the rats to crawl through, the same hollow that the music had traveled through.

He had to hurry. His computer was set to automatically send his articles to the newspaper in less than an hour. He had fifty-four minutes to get out of there, up to the surface and back to his hotel if he intended to save his own life tonight. The last life he ever would have guessed he’d care about saving.

Thursday, May 1
^st
—8:27 p.m.

M
eer stood stage left watching the police take Sebastian away. There would be time later to try and understand how it had happened and what the ramifications would be of the fact that tonight, here in Vienna, he’d caused thousands of people to remember brutal, horrific experiences from lives they’d lived before. And died before.

More than once, when her father had tried to explain the mystical light of wisdom to her, he’d told her how when we die our souls leave our bodies as pure light that shatters into thousands of fragments, and how each of those fragments returns in another time as another soul. The ultimate goal was that one day all those fragments would be made whole again.

Whose soul inhabited Sebastian’s body? Was it really a fragment of the same soul that had lived in Archer Wells? So it seemed. First Archer and then Sebastian had succumbed to base and selfish motives, defiling the promise of the flute. Why couldn’t Sebastian have learned his karmic lesson? What was he still working out? And why
had so many others needed to be hurt in the process? Had part of her purpose been to give him this chance to do the right thing, repair what he’d done before?

If it was, all she’d managed to do was help him to fail.

An arm gripped her from behind. Strong and secure. The voice was familiar and kind. “I think it’s time for us to leave, Meer.”

Hearing Malachai’s voice she slumped with relief but he kept her supported. “Let me help you. I’ll take care of everything now. Just come with me.”

“I have it—” Meer showed him the flute.

“I know. Just hold tight and let me get you out of here.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“Meer,” Malachai whispered, “we need to hurry now. We have to keep the flute safe. You understand that, don’t you? We have to protect our memory tool.” He chanted soothingly, leading her farther away from the police and Sebastian.

They were in the wings, his arm in hers, when she realized he didn’t know about Jeremy. “Malachai—”

“We can’t stop to talk now. We must get you and the flute out of here without anyone noticing. Please, just keep walking. All of the exits in the main hall are blocked off so the police can control the exodus in an orderly fashion. We need to use the stage door.”

Ahead of them a group of three musicians were running and assuming they knew where the exits were, Malachai followed in their path, leading Meer deeper into the guts of the backstage area. The shouts and screams coming from the hall were muted now and she could hear her footsteps and Malachai’s on the concrete. They rounded a corner and were alone. So much quiet after so much noise was disconcerting.

“This way,” he said as he took a right in the direction of a glowing red exit light at the end of a long otherwise dark hallway. By the time he saw there were two security guards flanking the oversize metal door, it was too late to turn back.

“We’re going through. Don’t try to act brave. It’s all right that you look shaken up,” Malachai whispered. “They expect everyone to be upset. The only thing I want you to do is act as if you’re used to coming and going this way. By now I’m sure they all know someone’s been arrested and taken into custody. I doubt they’re looking for anyone else. Probably just trying to keep the situation calm. If they stop and ask to see what you’re carrying, show it to them, tell them it’s your instrument, that you’re in the orchestra.”

Clutching the bone, Meer tried to use Malachai’s words to keep her in the present but time was shimmering.

Ohana was running away in the ancient past. Everyone she’d ever been had run away. Always running away. She had to learn to stop and stay. This time she was trying to escape from Sunil’s wrath. Clutching the bone, all she had left of her dead lover Devadas, she kept running, not knowing where she was going, only knowing where she had been and that she had to leave there.

“Meer? Meer?”

Time shimmered again. She was with Malachai, backstage at the concert hall in Vienna. Her father had died, not a man named Devadas. From behind her, scurrying footsteps rushed by. Suddenly the hallway was crowded as a group of four dark-suited men escorted a well-dressed couple through the area. Malachai gripped Meer by the wrist and pulled her back, deep into the shadows.

Meer thought she recognized the thin, tall tuxedoed man who was weeping but she wasn’t sure. The blond woman with him was trying to comfort him, whispering to him but as they reached the exit, he collapsed and everyone rushed to his side.

“We should stay here,” Malachai whispered. “Until they’re gone.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“They aren’t going to want anyone to see him like that. That’s Edward Fields, the head of the American National Security Commission. It would exacerbate the perception that chaos has been unleashed. I don’t want them to realize we saw him and detain us. Let’s turn around. Go out the front. Give me the flute—if they stop me I’ll do some sleight of hand to confuse them.”

Meer’s fingers tightened around the bone instrument.

“Give it to me,” he repeated.

“No. I can’t. I can’t let anyone else have it.”

“Meer?”

“No one.”

Thursday, May 1
^st
—8:39 p.m.

T
he street was illuminated with old-fashioned lamps and Lucian Glass had no trouble seeing Malachai and Meer as they emerged from the concert hall’s front doors. Paparazzi, originally there to cover the concert, jostled each other for position, shooting the horrific expressions on the exiting concertgoers’ faces. The continuous explosion of flashes lit up the street so that for seconds at a time it seemed as bright as daylight.

Lucian was still haunted by what had happened inside the concert hall when the music turned into human cries. Suddenly there was no air and no space and no time and it didn’t matter that he couldn’t breathe because breathing wasn’t necessary. He was smoke, floating, no longer seeing what was in front of him but visualizing another time and place in some eternal, intuitive way.

He’d been watching Meer make her way up on the stage when she transformed into a different woman with longer, darker hair, wearing a torn and tattered blue robe…she
held a flute…and was crying…no…it wasn’t a flute. Not yet. It was just a small bone, broken off at one end, and she was handing it to him, telling him she’d stolen it from the burial site. While she spoke she continued crying and her face was filthy except where streaks from her tears had made tracks.

Lucian didn’t know who the woman was. He’d never seen her before but he felt as if he’d never
not
seen her. None of this made sense but it didn’t matter. He’d been emotionally and physically mesmerized by the vision.

Watching through an expanse of space that seemed to have no connection to distance as he knew it, he saw a man he was part of and who was part of him take the bone out of the woman’s hand. Then in quick moving images illustrating different scenes of the same story, he saw the man—he saw himself—carving seven holes in the bone and turning it into a flute while the woman slept nearby, close to a fire in the workshop he used to share with his brother, Devadas.

When the symphony came to its abrupt stop, Lucian was sucked back into the present with violent force, watching Meer in her black jeans and leather jacket, Meer with her auburn hair and shocking green eyes, not Ohana, not the robed woman.

Now as his eyes followed her through the hysterical crowd, Ohana hovered, ghostlike, beside her. Was it possible to exist in two states of being? Could he be Lucian Glass, FBI agent working a case that was breaking open around him and also be alive and aware in another time?

It looked as if Meer was clutching something to her chest and although he was too far away to tell what it was, he didn’t doubt it was the memory flute he’d seen her take out of Sebastian’s hands. Then, as more of the crowd gushed out of the auditorium like blood from a wound, he lost sight
of Meer. Around him painful screams mixed with shrieking ambulances and police sirens arriving at the location.

Finally spotting Meer and Malachai again, he also noticed an older man with thick white hair who was moving, catlike, through the melee toward them. It was Fremont Brecht, the head of the Memorist Society. More robust than his age or size suggested; his only sign of infirmity was a slight limp but it didn’t seem to be doing anything to slow him down.

Lucian had been with the agency long enough to trust his instincts when he sensed danger. He would have screamed out to Meer and Malachai to warn them if there was any chance they would have heard him but he was too far away. He was cut off by a wall of terror-stricken people. These were the men and women who created foolproof security firewalls in cyberspace, GPR systems, tracking devices, mantraps, and machines to test the air for traces of explosive. Their alarm was exacerbated because they knew too much, understood how impossible it really was to protect anyone and that no lockdown procedure was ever completely secure. Certainly, none of them had any idea that the violent dreamlike images they’d just experienced were their own past life memories. More likely they believed they’d been the victims of a mass hypnotic trance induced by some kind of chemical warfare. But Lucian didn’t. He guessed that what Malachai had spent his life trying to verify might very possibly have been proved tonight, triggered not by a sophisticated biological agent but by a handful of notes: a memory song.

And then the crowd broke and in the crazy flashing paparazzi light Lucian saw Brecht pull a gun.

“Meer! Watch out!” The multitude swallowed his scream.

Suddenly Malachai doubled over. Clutching his stom
ach, he dropped out of sight and Meer disappeared along with him. The crush of people was too thick. Brecht must be after the flute, too. That meant that when he realized Malachai didn’t have it, the Memorist would go after Meer. Damn the crush of people. Lucian started shoving his way through.

A heavyset woman was in his way. Swaying on her feet, she was obviously disoriented. Lucian yelled at her to get out of the way but instead of moving, Gerta Osborne froze, panic on her face. And as the opera singer fainted, Lucian had no choice but to dive and try to catch her.

Thursday, May 1
^st
—8:42 p.m.

T
om Paxton sat alone in the makeshift office, barely aware of his surroundings. He looked at the melee on the monitors but was seeing images the music had induced in him…malignant scenes of a man raping a woman while a little boy looked on… He could smell the fire and filth and hear the screams of the woman underneath him…no, not him…a vicious man in another time. The screams were so horrifying…

And then he realized the screams were real. They were happening now. In the theater. The cries and shrieks of an audience that had come to hear a symphony and celebrate only to be terrorized by an act no one could have anticipated.

“Boss?” It was Kerri.

Paxton looked over, so relieved to see her. “Are you all right?”

“Fine.”

“Did anything happen to you?”

“No.”

“You’re lucky,” he whispered.

“Was it awful?”

Paxton nodded, then looked away, back at the bank of monitors.

She walked over to his side and put her hand on his shoulder, surprised to feel his back trembling and even more so to see the tears in his eyes.

“Tom? What happened?”

Paxton heard her, felt her hand, wanted to lean into her and let her comfort him but his attention was drawn to one of the monitors aimed on the theater’s front door. There, a swell of people poured out, a wave powered by its own momentum with David Yalom in its midst. The journalist looked how Tom felt. As if he’d been to hell and back. Except in Yalom’s eyes there was something else. Even via the mediocre-quality screen, he looked as if he’d found some resolution while he’d been there.

“That’s a relief, at least,” Kerri said, nodding toward Yalom. “I was worried about him. He’s been through enough.”

Paxton nodded.

“Tom, I came in to tell you the police want to talk to you,” Kerri said.

“Yeah, I’m sure they do.”

“They don’t know for certain, but there don’t seem to be any fatalities.”

“What about our team? Has everyone reported in?”

“Everyone is fine.”

“Tucker?”

She nodded.

“There was an attack on my watch, Kerri,” he said as his voice broke.