“And when would that be that you could guarantee such a thing?” Frawley asked him. “It doesn’t seem possible.”
“October thirty-first of this year, when they intend to consecrate Angelique and turn over the power to her, and, not coincidentally, I would think, a day after the final transfer of her inheritance and a day before the next scheduled meeting of Magellan’s Board of Directors. They’ll all be there on that night, and probably only on that night. Not before or after will they be in one basket.”
“I think you left out one important point in that plan, my Lord Bishop,” MacDonald noted.
“Oh? What?”
“Whoever goes in, assuming they can plant that thing, will almost certainly be stuck there. We don’t dare to just arm and leave it. Security will be extra tight that day and we can’t leave the success of a bomb to chance or remote control. It must be hidden, assembled at the last possible minute, and then exploded. Anyone involved in that would be stuck there, too. It’s a suicide mission you’re talking about. Leaving is as hard or harder than getting in, particularly now, after two escapes. We couldn’t afford to risk anyone leaving and getting caught. Everyone involved in this will die in the same atomic blast as they do. And they’ll know as well as we do how likely that date is for an attack.”
The Bishop polished off the last of his breakfast. “Well, my boy, perhaps it’s not quite as drastic as you suggest, nor are we quite as defenseless against the magic as you might believe. However, let’s float this by the King and see what happens. We’ll need some good, dedicated people, solid planning, as much training as we can get, and intelligence if we’re to carry any of it off, and time is of the essence.”
“Yes,” added Frawley skeptically. “We’ve got all of five weeks.”
There was no more need for secrecy now, as they packed up rather leisurely and prepared to link up with others in their organization. Greg MacDonald went back into the motel room to confront Maria.
There was no question that she felt both bitter and angry, but she also left little doubt that she felt less the betrayer than the betrayed. She was certainly still recognizable, but she now stood about four one and weighed perhaps sixty-five pounds, with long light brown hair. She had a good figure, for a kid, but, of course, no breasts, pubic hair or other signs of puberty, and her voice was higher and sounded very child-like. The Dark Man had chosen a particularly cruel point at which to revert and then freeze her; the child-woman, stuck eternally just on the edge of physical ripening.
He tossed some clothing down on the bed, having gone into Carson City to run a number of errands before leaving. MacDonald had never taken pains choosing his own clothes, but he had a good eye for what fit other people. He’d gotten her a sleeveless tee shirt, some jeans, a light jacket, and sneakers. He hadn’t bothered with underwear; he thought she’d rebel against panties with cartoon characters on them and she hardly needed a bra.
She put them on rather sullenly, then looked at herself in the mirror and frowned. Many people had fantasies of being children again, but he could read her thoughts just looking at her. I’m going to be like this forever. . . . Worse, she might look like that and be subject to the emotional extremes that were physiological at that point, but inside she was the mature and highly experienced woman in her mid-forties she’d been before, finally, she turned to him and asked the big question.
“What happens to me now?”
“Up to you,” he told her. “None of us have any real sense of love and responsibility towards you, you know. If it wasn’t for you, the nightmare for many would be over. Now, if we didn’t lose everything last night, it’ll cost a lot of innocent lives to put it right. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll stake you to a couple of hundred bucks and drop you at the Carson City bus station.”
There was panic in her eyes and her expression, and she fought back tears. “You can’t just leave me here! You can’t!”
“Why not?”
“What am I supposed to do? Where can I go? I don’t have anybody, you know that. To everybody else I’m just some kid who should be in sixth grade someplace, only I got no papers, no identity, no family, and I’ll never grow out of the sixth grade! I can’t even go back to the church. Who’d believe me?”
“Yeah, well, that’s a problem, all right. What would you do?”
“Take me with you,” she said, almost pleading. “I’ll be good—honest. No more trouble. I’ll do whatever I’m told. Just—don’t leave me here.”
“I wish I could count on that, but how can I? We trusted Angelique to you, and you ran at the first trouble and then called in the enemy. We bet our lives on your loyalty, and at the first sign of trouble you turned us in.”
“I still think I did the right thing. You heard that old geezer in the van! How many people has he killed or ordered to be killed? He didn’t even care about people—he was talking about messing up her body like she was some piece of rock or something. And they wouldn’t have stopped looking for you two if you blew her cherry. They need her as a front no matter what. I saved her life, damn it!”
“No, you didn’t, Maria. You probably made sure she’d die. What choice have you left anybody now? She’s target number one, and probably so well protected that they’ll have to take out half a city to get her—but they’ll get her. You turned her from a fugitive needing protection into the most dangerous person alive. Can’t you ever understand that there’s no perfect world, no perfect situations, no perfect choices except in the movies? And did you really think I’d just fall romantically into your arms when you did this to her, to me, to everybody? What conceit! What arrogance! You really should have stayed on their side.”
And now she was in tears, and, particularly looking as she did, it was a heart-rending sight. It softened him just a bit inside, but he wouldn’t permit it to show.
“How can we trust you, Maria? Blow any plans we have and they’d offer you the moon for the information. You’d crack in a minute.”
“No, no! I won’t! I swear it! No more dreams, no more illusions! I’ll stay this way until the end of time. What would I get out of them now? Lots of promises, but I got promises this time, too. No, all I want do now is get even. It’s all I got.”
He thought about it a moment. It was true she couldn’t be trusted, but it was also true that she had roamed that island for weeks as one of the enemy. She alone might know where some of the traps were, and what new things had been added. She knew who was who. This information, supplementing his own, might be very valuable.
“All right,” he told her. “You come along—for now. But one step out of line, one little thing done wrong, one look crosseyed at anything, and if you don’t know too much you’ll be dumped on a street corner with nothing in some city somewhere and that’ll be that. If you know too much by that time, then it’ll be your body they find someplace, and you won’t go quick and easy. Understand?”
She practically threw herself at him, crying uncontrollably. “Oh, yes, yes! I’ll be good. I swear it. . . .”
The model was a good one: a complete, detailed duplicate Allenby Island in miniature, measuring a good six feet by four feet and showing all the major details, including the town, road, Institute, and even the meadow and woods trails.
“Quite impressive for such short notice,” Lord Frawley commented.
“It wasn’t very hard. This one used to be in the lobby of the home offices of Magellan in Seattle,” MacDonald told him. “It’s not quite up to date, but it’s useful.”
“I won’t ask how it wound up here,” the older man said. “Here,” in fact, was a luxury beach house on the far side of Aruba, well away from much of the built-up and tourist-dominated areas. “However, I’ve been going over the model with these aerial photographs from this year and I’ve noted changes where there shouldn’t be any.”
“Huh? How so?”
“This meadow—the evil place where all this devil rubbish centers—with this big hunk of obsidian in it. It’s not very large, but the so-called altar stone on the model is shaped something like a primitive drawing of a sheep or deer. See the two little legs, the U shape between the curvature into this headlike protrusion? Now look at the photograph taken— let’s see—May twentieth of this year. The meadow’s the same, but the altar stone is a relatively straight line, like the flat of a ruler, with curvatures and slight protrusions on both sides. See?”
MacDonald frowned and examined the two carefully. He’d looked at this many times, but the fact was he’d always been looking for trails, roads, and new construction. The removal or planting of trees was important, but he’d never really paid any attention to the rock formations. Frawley was certainly correct in this, though. The altar stone had changed shape—if the model was accurate. “You’re sure it’s not just the model builder?”
“I’m certain. The early construction photos we have indicate the same shape as the model.”
“Yeah, sure—but that’s tons of obsidian! How could they switch or carve or do anything to it without messing up the meadow—and why?”
“Well, it wasn’t carved. The mass now is larger than the mass at the start. Perhaps a side view would be more illuminating. See, here, that the computer complex goes down six stories below the common with the antennas. That’s roughly a hundred and twenty feet. Now extend that elevation out towards the down slope of the mountain, and you see that the meadow is almost exactly at the surface elevation you would be at if you extended this sixth level out to the south.”
“Yeah, but the engineering to do something like that would be enormous. We’d have seen something.”
“Not necessarily. Do you know anything about the geomorphology of volcanoes?”
“I’m a cop from Canada.”
“All right. Well, it’s not necessary to build one if you understand that the island is honeycombed with natural lava tubes. When the old mountain blew its cork, lava rushed through, cutting its own way through cracks and weaknesses in the rock. The outside was cooler and the flow was fast, so it more or less built its own pipe. This sort of lava is common in Hawaii, quite rare in the Caribbean, but it was true of our old mountain here. Now, masses of obsidian are formed when lava reaches the surface in such a state that it cools rapidly, too rapidly to form crystals and become true rock. It’s a glob of glass. It’s my guess that there was a first eruption, the tube was born, but the lava from that cleared the tube entirely, leaving it a slightly crooked cannon, so to speak. Then there was a second eruption with a heavier, more plastic flow, possibly a small amount that shot down the tube and hit a rainstorm, or was blocked in some other way, and cooled immediately. The obsidian, the altar stone, is a plug for the tube which still exists.”
“There are some old caves on the island, but they’re short and not much use and some of them are caved in or blocked off to prevent any accidents. None of ’em go anywhere that I know of.”
“Precisely. Now you know of one that does. I believe the chamber was opened up and then followed all the way to the plug. Then it was carefully excavated from the cave side, possibly with lasers or other high-heat diggers that wouldn’t be good on solid rock but would be fine for obsidian. I have discovered that some such prototypical tools were in fact used during the construction stage. They removed the plug in this manner, taking the remains out via the tunnel, and then replaced it with something that looked natural, probably during the construction although not in the official blueprints. That explains not only the shape change, but why the replacement is larger. They had to lose some of the surroundings during the operation. I think you’ll find long cables running from the power plant to the tunnel and through it to this stone or whatever it is. There’s your device—computer controlled, computer activated—for all the mumbo jumbo of special effects, specters in the air, and the rest.”
MacDonald was fascinated. “Then it is high tech, somehow. But these caves, these lava tubes, interest me more and more now. If they could do this with one of them, maybe they have a whole warren under there. No wonder they could hide so much in such tight quarters! I wish we had a way of knowing where those tubes were, though.”
“We do,” Frawley replied, and took out a set of rolled-up maps. “Remember, before this was anything it was a station of the Royal Geographic Society during its most active period.” He took first one map, then another, then another, examining each for a moment, then said, “Ah! Here we are! The summit area before any major construction.”
They were copies of what were less maps than blueprints of the mountain from the eighteen eighties, but they clearly showed all the known tubes, including a few that had crater openings. There was clearly one leading inward from the crater’s low point, although no exit point was indicated.
“I think I’m going to go talk to Maria again,” MacDonald told him, and walked out.
He walked out on the patio and found Bishop Whitely there, reading his Bible but dressed only in a pair of swimming trunks, a Panama hat, and sun glasses. Maria was out on the beach, doing something in the sand.
“Ah, my boy,” said the Bishop, putting down his book. “Have you and Pip solved the whole thing for us?”
“Not quite. Uh—how is she today?”