Here.
“I came to find a woman who was on the plane that crashed here. I don’t think she survived,” he added, seeing the way Cal’s eyes shifted, “but she had something, was carrying something, that I was sent to find. And I see now it’s going to be a long search, especially if I’ve got a pissed-off gang of skinheads runnin’ around the woods lookin’ for me.” He thought of those cold mad coal-black eyes in the fear-caster Brattle’s pale face, and of what Cadiz and his band would do to him if they caught him again.
“What you’re looking for. . is it bigger than a breadbox,” asked Goldie softly, “and smaller than the Empire State Building?”
Shango glanced up and met the man’s wild brown eyes. A crazy, he thought, but he had seen the fireballs leap and blaze from his hands.
To his own surprise he heard his voice saying, “No. It’s just a couple of sheets of paper, folded up small. She probably glued it in her purse lining. That’s what she usually did.”
“Did you know her?”
“I met her once or twice.”
“What was her name?”
“Jerri Bilmer. Geraldine.”
Goldie chewed meditatively on his corn chowder. “You have anything she owned, or touched, or wore?”
“No.”
Goldie sighed and set his bowl aside, rising. “You’re gonna make me break a sweat, aren’t you?”
They insisted on going with him to the plane, despite his protests. In the end, his pragmatism won out. With Cadiz and Brattle in the woods somewhere, Shango needed whatever help he could get-even if his common sense told him magic tricks were ridiculous, that this was insanity.
These were insane times.
Still, as morning had broken and they’d set off, he had demanded that the glowing girl and the Russian and the Brooks woman stay behind in camp, sheltered, protected. No need to draw them all into the crosshairs.
So now Shango stood beside the blackened, sheared metal of United 1046 out of Houston, Griffin beside him, alert, his sword unsheathed, while Goldman bent beside a crumpled piece of fuselage and scooped a handful of fine gray ash that might once have been part of a seat cushion, or a backpack, or a dress. Standing, he sifted it slowly in his hand. There was no mirth to him now, no hint of the Woodstock Nation clown.
“What would she have been thinking about at the end?” Goldie asked Shango. “Her family, loved ones?”
“No. . about the mission, and failing.” And Shango realized he was speaking too of himself.
As Goldman concentrated, his color drained, and he looked wounded. He took a couple of hesitant steps to his left and then turned back and strode between two willows.
He led them to the sad, crumpled object that had been Jerri Bilmer.
She had been flung out of the dissolving plane and decapitated by flying debris. Shango soon found her purse under a shattered wing section that had protected it. Delicately, he peeled back the lining and revealed the folded sheets of paper that had cost Bilmer her life and might yet cost him his. Carefully, he unfolded them, drew them apart. Water had soaked most of the sheets, but the inner one was readable. A list of personnel, of home addresses. A last-minute marginal note concerning buffalo and wolves and blue lightning that crawled from the ground.
And that was all.
Shango turned them over in his hands, fighting the urge to laugh. All this, he thought, remembering the chaos of Dulles and the horror of plane after wrecked plane that he’d patiently searched, pawing through the corpses of people he didn’t know, rifling the burned, soaked luggage that was all that remained of thousands of ended lives, and in the end getting only this.
“That what you were looking for?”
Shango looked to Cal. The young man was watching him, concern in his dark eyes, as if he saw how close Shango was to ripping the papers into white flakes of nothingness, releasing them to the winds that would carry off his soul and his life as well.
“Yes,” he said.
“Is it what you need?”
“I don’t know.”
Shango drew a deep breath, reminding himself that his job was not yet done. It wasn’t his to judge, just to find. McKay might be able to make something of this, might match up a name, or a town. If it were what he needed, if it might save the day. If the Source Project was even the cause of all this.
Shango had already done the near impossible. It was time to go.
To McKay, who had trusted him, whom he had left to the care of less-watchful souls.
On sudden impulse, Shango fished the steel dog tag from his pocket, laid it in Goldman’s hand. “Can you see the man who gave me this? See if he’s all right?”
The wild-haired man cocked his head questioningly. Then he took the slip of steel, pressed it between his palms, then to his lips. In the cool morning light, his eyes seemed both focused and distant, seeing beyond the hunks of metal that littered the ground, the stinks of decay. Though the morning was silent, he seemed to hear something, for his face changed, fell a little, the pale brown eyes sad. He made as if to speak, then hesitated.
“What is it, Goldie?” Cal asked.
“I’m sorry,” Goldman said to Shango, handing back the dog tag. “The man you work for, the one you like. . is dead.”
Shango said nothing. Just folded the steel back into his huge palm.
“Goldie’s visions aren’t always accurate,” Cal offered.
“Oh, geez, no,” Goldie agreed quickly, as if the thought that people would take his visions as gospel appalled him. “Sometimes what I see is just ’cause I’m. .” Suddenly, the jangly quality, the wildness ebbed out of him, and he was calm and sure. “If, when you go back, he’s not there to greet you, go to a fountain near the roses.” He peered worriedly from beneath his straw hat brim at Shango’s motionless, expressionless face. “Just wanted to save you the trip,” he said.
“I appreciate it.” The words came out like the dry stir of ash. “I still have to go back.”
Shango slid the metal tag back into his pocket and glanced at the retrieved sheets of wilted paper he still held in his other hand.
Time to go now.
And as he folded the sheets, his eyes tumbled down the list of names.
Wish Heart, Griffin had told him. Shango’s heart was a stone in him, as he kept his silence. And he thought of his duty and of the void that lay there if it were set aside. A void to be looked into and then drawn back from.
And everyone who had drifted through his wandering life floated ghostlike before him now, the ones who had trusted him and stood for him, and whom he had failed. Czernas, and Mrs. Close and Mr. Dean, and all the other guiltless souls at Angels Rest. And perhaps McKay, too, almost certainly so.
He contemplated the men standing beside him, who had brought him here and risked themselves. They were, he knew, going into even greater danger, all innocent, like calves to a slaughterhouse.
What would they be thinking in their last moments?
Of their loved ones, who would be with them.
And he knew that his duty, his oath of office, that everything he stood for, decreed that he tell them nothing of the knowledge he held.
But if McKay were dead, where might that duty lie?
“Wishart isn’t a place,” said Shango. “He’s a person. Dr. Fred Wishart. And he does live in the South. South of here, anyway. A place called Boone’s Gap, West Virginia- though it’s unlikely he was there when all this came down.” Then he told them all he knew-what precious little there was of it-about the Source Project.
Surprise showed in Cal Griffin’s eyes, and he was quiet, weighing this intelligence, shuffling it into all that had unfolded in the days that had brought them here.
Goldie chuckled, but there was no humor in the sound. “You know, funniest coincidence: during the Manhattan Project, there was a serious concern that if they set off an atomic reaction, it might just keep going, blow up the whole world. What the hell, they pushed the button anyway.”