The
Face
of the
Enemy
Book One of the Rebecca Series
Walker Buckalew
Smashwords ebook edition published by Fideli Publishing Inc.
Copyright 2011 by Walker Buckalew
No part of this eBook may be reproduced or shared by any electronic or mechanical means, including but not limited to printing, file sharing, and email, without prior written permission from Fideli Publishing.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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ISBN: 978-1-60414-483-3
Library of Congress Catalog Card number: 2003107909
Cover illustration by Jeff Whitlock, Whitlock Graphics
Cover design by John Tracy
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
This story is offered to readers in honor and in memory of:
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) Thomas Merton (1915–1968)
M. W. Buckalew Sr. (1911–2000)
“The
word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not
widespread.”
—
1 Samuel 3:1
PROLOGUE
COULD THERE EVER BEFORE HAVE BEEN A NIGHTMARE like this? Of course, the thing could hardly have been a true “nightmare,” I suppose, since it happened in broad daylight — warm, comfortable, sunny, early fall daylight — and came just as I was strolling across Clare Bridge.
After all, I was wide awake.
Wide awake, yes, but no less terrified than if asleep.
And — humiliating thought — I find that I am still terrified.
Dear God in Heaven ... What does it mean simply to be walking to prayer service in King’s College Chapel, thinking of nothing in particular, and then to see such things as I saw this day? What could it mean? What must I do? How should I be?
Oh, You’ll insist that I know quite well.
Right, then. Martha Clark, ordinary Christian person, shall proceed to set down, here on paper, just what I saw, leaving out nothing, and then I shall read my story to Paul when he comes home, and then to Elisabeth and Jason. And then we four, together, can think, and pray, and, perhaps, do ... if doing is somehow called for.
Yes. That’s the thing.
And so here I will begin, in this little book. Here is everything that I saw this morning, just as I remember it. And if these words make me appear (to my husband and friends) a crazed woman, well, that’s just how it will need to be.
I came across the little bridge, intending to walk into town through Clare College, and just as I reached midpoint and turned to look downriver — the Cam is so tranquil at that time of day — my view of the water was, first, interrupted, and then, by degrees, completely obscured by what I can only call a vision. I began to see a picture before me, one with bright outlines and clear contrasts. It formed itself right in front of my gaze, blocking out the Cam, and then it began to grow and grow until it occupied my whole field of sight. I remember that I held on to the railing as tightly as I could, because I was afraid I might actually fall prostrate on the bridge.
And then the nightmare proper began. I was not at first so much frightened as I was confused. After all, it was, when it started, just a “perplexing optical phenomenon” — as my psychologist husband might call it — that scared me in one way (What could be happening? I thought to myself.) yet not in any other way.
At least I don’t think it scared me, at first, in any other way.
But following a perfectly innocuous beginning — with, in the center of the dreamed landscape, perhaps a dozen men stacking little books, hundreds or thousands of little books, in a small clearing in a woodsy place — the thing changed. It all became somehow bigger than that. Everything became quite large: the men, the individual books themselves, the number of books ... all perfectly huge ... and all somehow perfectly horrid. (I can’t quite say how.)
And then suddenly there was fire. The books were burning. And the men seemed to cheer and clap their hands. And I tried — we all know how frustrating dreams are — to cry out to them that they should stop, and when I did, they stopped cheering and looked right at me. One pointed toward me, and several of them began to advance in my direction. Quite menacing, really. I tried to cry out, but, of course, it was just a dream and nothing happened when I tried.
And then the thing began to go away, and yet, before it was quite completely gone, I saw that the fire was spreading from the books to some buildings that I had not noticed before. I don’t know if they had been there at the start of the vision, or if they were made present while my attention was drawn to the men. But the buildings were, I’m quite certain, churches. Big ones, tiny ones, ancient ones, young ones, stone ones, frame ones ... all shapes and sizes and types ... but quite definitely churches, every one of them. And I saw the fire beginning to run toward them.
And that was the end.
The vision just vanished, and I was left there on Clare Bridge, holding on to the railing for dear life. There were people around me all the while, mostly students, I believe, crossing the bridge and, as I think, paying me no mind.
And when it was all over, I felt so weak I could hardly stand. And so, I didn’t try to walk for some time. I remained and looked over the Cam, and tried not to be so frightened. I suppose I appeared to others altogether normal the whole time. No one stopped to inquire. People just continued to pass behind me.
I stayed a long time, just standing, looking, thinking. And, of course, praying. And praying desperately, I’m ashamed to admit even to this page of my own writing. After all, when something like that happens to a Christian person, one can’t just say, “Father in Heaven, I’m terrified by something that just visited my mind and I am awfully keen on never seeing such a thing again.”
So, my desperate praying was quite silly, I now think. Whatever the thing — the vision or nightmare — actually was, reason suggests to me that it should be regarded as holy, in some fashion, and that my prayers should take the line that I require assistance in understanding what it all meant. It’s not as if God is to be regarded as unaware of the event, after all.
And I can’t believe that it was all just the result of my failure to have a proper breakfast this morning. This wasn’t about bad digestion or no digestion or running a fever or slipping into an elaborate daydream at an inconvenient moment. No, this was something done to me, or with me, or for me, with clear purpose and exquisite timing. There is holiness here somewhere, and I must come to understand it.
There. I’ll have done with this now. It is all set down here on paper. I only wish I could know what will be next.
Then, after nearly three decades, a new generation has come, and a new story — the new generation’s own story has begun ...
CHAPTER ONE
THE DAY THAT CHANGES our lives forever does not introduce itself by that name. It just comes.
We awake. We arise. We move about. We may pray. If we do, we may ask God for His protection. From what, we do not yet know.
United States Navy Lieutenant Matthew Clark, age twenty-seven years and one day, stretched to his full six-foot four-inch length on the upper bunk of his diminutive stateroom. He smiled as the aircraft carrier’s steam catapult, anchored within the flight deck’s superstructure just above his head, slammed an F-4 Phantom into a summer morning. This was the flyoff of the air group to Oceana Naval Air Base after a seven-month patrol in the Mediterranean, and it meant that in twenty-four hours the ship would be berthed at Norfolk and he would begin processing out, his active duty at an end, and on his way to Charlottesville to begin graduate school.
Matt was genuinely excited. He had enjoyed his military experience even though it had meant enduring Naval ROTC in the years of an unpopular war, especially so on university campuses. And it had meant serving on active duty at a time of low morale throughout much of the United States military. But his country’s involvement in an Asian morass had finally come to an embarrassed, miserable end, while the resignation of a United States president had seemed to place an exclamation mark on an interminable paragraph in the nation’s history. The chance to return to his alma mater as a graduate student was delicious to him.
He was proud of his military service and happy with his prospects. He felt that his British parents, Martha and Paul Clark, were, too, at least to the extent of endorsing graduate studies as a worthwhile post-Navy step. His father had loved his academic career in psychology, first at Cambridge, then, after their immigration to New York City shortly before Matt’s birth, at Columbia. Matt, as an only child steeped in his parents’ love of ideas and, especially with regard to his mother, of books themselves, understood academic life. His intention was to complete graduate studies, then immerse himself in the business world just long enough to achieve a “financial platform.” He told himself that at that point he would, having proven himself in that fast-paced, competitive world, move into academia for a second career of teaching and research in economics, marketing, or international finance. Matt had thought it through with his usual intense care. He relished this future, played it out in his mind often, and at times could scarcely contain his impatience to begin after five years in the military. His father shared his excitement. His mother did not, but only because, he felt, she did not really value either business or money. She would come around soon enough once he began to find his way.
Another F-4 cranked its twin jet engines to a fury directly over his head, engines capable of driving the huge fighter plane into a completely vertical ascent when necessary. Matt had not been counting the launches that morning, but he knew the flyoff had been underway since 0600. It was now 0745 on this June Thursday, and, even at the relatively leisurely launch pace of an end-of-cruise flyoff to Oceana, he knew that by now few of the carrier’s eighty-five warplanes would still be on board. He swung his long-muscled frame out of the upper bunk and dropped to the polished deck. He would go topside as soon as the “secure from flight operations” announcement came. He intended to walk the flight deck one last time while still at sea. He wanted to stroll aft, to the fantail, and watch the seventy-five-thousand-ton vessel’s enormous wake churning toward the bow of the dutiful rescue destroyer, a mile to stern.
As he laced on his scuffed brown shoes, the telephone at his elbow emitted its jangling alarm, a unique sound he despised, even though, in comparison with the roar of steam catapults and Navy jet engines, it ranked far lower on a decibel scale. He lifted the receiver.
“Mr. Clark speaking, sir,” Matt responded with practiced military elocution.
“Matt? This is the XO. Can you come down right away?”
“Yes, sir, Commander.” He replaced the receiver, making sure the heavy weather clamp was in place. The clamp, designed to prevent the telephone receiver from being dislodged from its cradle in turbulent seas, served no purpose on a ship the size of a Forrestal-class aircraft carrier, a ship almost completely impervious to the sea’s violence. But it was a useful reminder that this was indeed a warship, one that could be as susceptible to other kinds of threats as the smallest minesweeper in the fleet.
Matt finished with his laces and straightened his uniform, careful to align his shirt buttons’ vertical seam with his slightly tarnished gold belt buckle. When he had the alignment perfect, thereby calling the eye’s attention away, he hoped, from the wrinkles his khaki shirt had developed during his fully clothed, two-hour post-mid-watch attempt at sleep, he snatched the clipboard from his desk and stepped gingerly into the brightly lit passageway. The last time he had been in the ship’s executive officer’s cabin had been two years previous, when he had first reported aboard after having served nearly three years on a new frigate. Matt assumed that the XO had summoned him for the same sort of procedural conversation with which he had been greeted twenty-four months ago.
Yet, there was something in the XO’s voice that did not suggest routine. An edge. A slight discomfort, undefined. Matt pushed the disquiet from his mind with practiced dispatch. He stepped purposefully through two of the regularly spaced watertight hatches that interrupted the carrier’s longitudinal corridor, wheeled left into the starboard escalator shaft, and waited for three of his junior officer colleagues to reach the top. As they cleared the ascending escalator with nods of morning recognition, he twice slapped the rubber-coated directional switches to reverse the gears, descended the now rapidly downward-moving stairway at full gallop, switched off the escalator mechanism with a deft open-hand punch, and, fifteen seconds later, stood at the executive officer’s closed door. Matt squared his shoulders, breathed deeply one time, knocked twice, and heard the basso response: “Come in.”
As he entered the spacious living and working area of the XO, three senior officers rose to meet him. The XO was one. Matt’s immediate superior, the operations division officer, was another. The third was the ship’s Protestant chaplain, a Methodist minister with the rank of commander. None was smiling. The sight of the chaplain sent an alarm to Matt’s brain. Why would the chaplain be present for a routine exit interview? He tensed, eyes narrowing. He turned slightly to face the executive officer.
But it was the chaplain, whom Matt scarcely knew, who spoke, without preliminaries and with all four men still standing at a sort of informal attention. “Matt,” he said with set jaw and what he may have thought was a don’t-be-alarmed voice, “something may have happened at home. It may be nothing, but we wanted to relay the information to you immediately. Your parents’ whereabouts ... That is, it appears that your parents have been missing for several days now. Police just now reached us.”
Matt, unmoving, stared, first at the chaplain, then at his division officer, the only one of the men whom he knew more than superficially. But they simply turned their own eyes back to the executive officer. When Matt’s eyes followed theirs, the XO spoke.
“The flyoff is finished, Matt. We’re holding the mail plane for you on the flight deck. Grab your shaving kit out of your stateroom and go. We’ll take care of your gear and of your processing out in Norfolk. Here’s the name and phone number of the New York detective who spoke with me by radiotelephone half an hour ago.” He paused. He stepped forward. “Good luck, Matt. You did a fine job for us. Let us know if we can help.”
With that, the XO thrust a folded piece of ship’s notepaper into Matt’s hand, then attempted to shake that same hand with his own. Matt did not reciprocate. He stared down at the paper in his right hand, still unmoving.
Then he felt his division officer’s hand on his arm. “I’ll fly with you to Oceana, Matt. Let’s go.”
Seven minutes later, at 0802, only two minutes behind scheduled departure, the ship’s twin-propeller mail plane lumbered down the flight deck, assisted not by catapult, but only by the thirty-five knots of wind streaming over the deck as the ship’s massive engines drove her through the green swells of the Atlantic. Near the bow, the stubby craft rose and, reluctantly airborne, lifted into the June sky. Matt Clark, near-civilian, was going home.
At 0945, standing at a telephone placed on the edge of an otherwise bare metal desk by the teen-age yeoman serving as receptionist in the lobby of the Oceana Naval Air Station BOQ, Matt fought the infuriating rotary dial with an adrenaline-driven index finger. Plowing through a formidable long-distance bureaucratic barricade comprising abrupt New York City questions and surly transfers, he heard finally the guttural, two-syllable response, spoken as a well-rehearsed challenge.
“Belton!”
“Detective Sid Belton?”
“Belton!”
“This is Lieutenant Matthew Clark,” said Matt, dropping the pitch of his voice and placing emphasis on his Navy rank. “My executive officer gave me your name. I’ve flown to Norfolk from the ship. What’s happened to my parents?”
Despite his effort to match the detective’s brusqueness with his own, the words began to tumble from his lips, faster as he spoke each one, words competing nervously with each other and progressively weakening themselves in contrast to the detective’s finely honed bark. There was a pause at the other end of the line. Matt could hear drawers opening and closing, papers shuffling, and finally the leather-and-rusting-spring complaints of an ancient swivel chair. When Sidney Belton spoke again, his vocal demeanor had changed. He was no longer speaking, it would seem, to an inconsequential distraction to his midmorning paperwork. His voice maintained its guttural tone, but the pace of his words now traced a measured trajectory, one filled, it seemed to his listener, with omen.
“Twenty-four hours ago, we got a call from Columbia. Your father’s department chairman told us that Dr. Clark had not come to work on the day before, that he had also missed an eight o’clock meeting that morning, and that there had been no response to repeated phone calls. Asked us to check on him. We did. Found nobody at home. Interviewed several people in your parents’ apartment building, and three of Dr. Clark’s colleagues at the university. No one could say they had seen either your father or your mother since Monday morning, almost seventy-two hours ago now. We wanted to go in the apartment yesterday, but your father’s colleagues wanted us to wait until we talked to you. It took us a few hours overnight to track you down through the Navy. I finally got your boss on the line about 7:30 this morning. You want us to go in the apartment, Lieutenant? We can be in there fifteen minutes from right now, and I can call you back from inside the apartment.”
When Matt did not respond immediately, the detective resumed his original tone. “Hey! Are you there? We got missing persons here!”
Matt, accustomed for five years to being spoken to with some deference by all those not clearly of higher rank than he, was instantly livid. “Why don’t you go to the devil! Why, you ...”
“Hey! Take it easy, kid! We’re on the same side here. Just gimme a ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ We go in the apartment now, then give you a call? Or not? What do you say, kid? Just gimme an answer.”
Matt was easily chastened. The word “kid” had done it instantly. He felt like a child and responded in kind. “Well, I suppose it’s the best thing. Sure. What? Oh, here’s the yeoman. He’ll give you this number.”
Just over an hour later, the same yeoman handed the phone to Matt, and Matt’s ear was assaulted by the same rough New York City rasp: “Lieutenant Clark? Belton here. No luck in the apartment. No sign of a struggle. Nothing out of place.” The detective paused, then modulated his voice to a caricature of persuasive intimacy. “Understand from your boss that you’re practically out of the Navy now? Yes? Come on up to New York, Lieutenant. Go through everything here in the apartment and see if you can come up with anything. We’ll notify police and highway patrol personnel across the country. We’ll find ’em ... I always find ’em.”
Ten minutes later, Matt replaced the receiver with a certainty that he must not stop and think about anything at all. Experience told him that when things seemed most confused to him, he needed to delineate a course of action and move on it immediately. This New York detective’s suggested course would do just fine. If he stopped to think ... to try to sort everything out ... to imagine the possibilities of foul play that his parents might somehow have encountered on the streets of Manhattan ... to weigh the consequences of this unforeseen emergency for his life, for his entry into graduate school, for his imagined sequence of careers ... above all, to decide how he actually felt about any of this ... he would become frozen, mentally and physically inert. So, thinking about little other than the next five minutes’ demands, he moved efficiently from one step to the next: meeting with the base transportation officer, securing passage on a Navy cargo flight that evening to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, arranging for lodging that night on the air base, and reserving a civilian rental car for early next morning. It would have been possible to drive from Norfolk to New York immediately, but he had served the midwatch the previous night, with less than two hours’ sleep just before the XO had summoned him, and now, in late afternoon, he knew he could not start an eight-hour-plus drive that would bring him to New York City well after midnight. He would accept the military cargo flight, sleep for several hours at the Air Force Base in Delaware, and then start the three-hour drive from Dover to Manhattan. He did not want to think. He only wanted to rest, to gain his parents’ apartment by noon tomorrow, and then, in that familiar sanctuary, begin to make sense of this catastrophic intrusion.
For that was still Matthew Clark’s first response to nearly every unexpected, uninvited interruption, small or large: resentment that “his time” had been encroached upon. It was not that he did not love his parents. It was not that he was not desperately worried about them. It was that his habitual response to unplanned events was irritation borne of a sense that, once something was planned, the time thus allocated for it had become, quite simply, his own.
And so it was an angry, irritable Matt Clark who began his journey north to New York, a Matt preoccupied more with this newly unsettled quality in his own life than with the ominous uncertainty surrounding his parents’.
Still clad in the clothes he had been wearing on board ship when the executive officer’s summons had come the previous morning, Matt Clark entered the borough of Manhattan via the Holland Tunnel, extricated himself from the snarl of tunnel traffic, and raced north surrounded and buffeted by a flight of New York City Yellow Cabs toward his parents’ West Side apartment. As agreed, Sid Belton and several uniformed city police officers awaited his arrival. Two police cars held a place for his rental car in front of the apartment building. Matt stepped from the car, self-conscious in his now thoroughly disheveled at-sea working uniform, and shook hands with a stooped, rumpled mid-fortyish man nearly a foot shorter than he. “I’m Belton, Lieutenant. Glad you made it. You tired? Hungry?”
Detective Belton’s physical presence was a revelation to Matt. Heretofore the disembodied voice of arrogant, authoritarian rudeness, he seemed in person almost cuddly, with a crooked smile that by itself softened the harshness of the voice, and with deep-set, almost black eyes peering with something like naïve inquisitiveness at the world at large. Matt’s long-distance anger and frustration dissolved in a surge of wholly unexpected gratitude at the detective’s demeanor and at the extraordinary preparations he had engineered in anticipation of Matt’s arrival. Not only had he been waiting as promised, and personally solicitous, he had assigned one police officer to turn in Matt’s rental car, another to pick up a ham sandwich for his lunch, and still another, after having estimated Matt’s height and girth with the critical eye of the gendarme, to go to one of the neighborhood haberdasheries to buy a few “civies” with taxpayer money, on the correct assumption that Matt’s clothes — military and civilian — were still on his ship or in storage. When Belton explained all of this, Matt found himself staring at the detective, stunned by such generosity and thoughtfulness. Belton smiled his crooked smile again: “Hey, kid, we’re rude, but we’re not bad people. We do try to help, y’know?”
Together, the two of them went up in the elevator to the ninth-floor apartment. They were silent as they entered, using Matt’s own key. Matt shivered involuntarily as he stepped into the familiar living room. He had a sense of somehow entering his parents’ tomb. An uncanny feeling of abandonment enfolded him in the silence. The door closed behind them.
Belton spoke: “We’ve dusted for fingerprints, and tried to find out if valuables have been taken. I don’t think we have anything, but that’s why we need you to go through their things and see if anything looks wrong. And another thing, son. Everything we can find out about your parents leaves me confused as to why anybody would kidnap them or do anything to them at all. There is such a thing as randomly targeted crime and violence, of course, but your parents ... they’re boring, son. Know what I mean? They’re not rich; they’re not controversial; they don’t hang out with anybody except their university and church friends; they don’t gamble; they don’t have anything to do with drugs. I don’t know what they left behind in England, but in more than twenty-five years in the U.S., they haven’t done a thing that makes them targets for anybody ... for anything. And, of course, if they were actually kidnapped for any reason, we’d expect the kidnappers to contact somebody long before now. So, I don’t get it. But I want you to look carefully at this apartment, and then I want you to just sit down and think. Think about their lives. Think about anything they may have written to you recently that meant nothing to you at the time, but might fit into this puzzle somehow.
“I’ll leave you to it. Your lunch and a few clothes will be here in a couple of minutes, and we’ll station one officer just outside your door and his partner out front in their squad car. You come up with anything at all, you tell the guy at the door. Okay? You need anything at all, you ask for it. Okay?”
Matt nodded. “All right, Detective. I might as well get started.” He thought for a moment and spoke again. “Detective? Why all this trouble? I don’t mean the sandwich and the clothes, which, believe me, I do appreciate. I mean ... why are you ... why are the police so ... interested in this? Is there something that you suspect that you haven’t told me? I need to know. Really. I want to know.”
Belton shook his head. “Nope. Don’t know anything that you don’t know. But it’s not every day that a Columbia professor and his wife go missing for a week, son. I don’t know if anything bad has happened to them or not, but I don’t like it. When someone does something to good New York citizens, I take it personally, son. Understand?”
As soon as Matt was alone, he quickly walked through the apartment, scanning every surface for something amiss. Then he dropped to his hands in front of each piece of furniture, peering under each. He did not know why. He did not know what he was looking for. But he had immediately trusted the detective, once he was face to face with him, and he wanted to comply with Belton’s directives as best he could.
After nearly two hours, he sank into his father’s living room chair, and allowed his mind to run free in his parents’ past. He tried to do what Belton had asked, tried to think of anything his mother and father had said in their letters during his seven months’ cruise in the Mediterranean. He tried to imagine sinister meanings behind their stories of university politics and church pettiness. Campus intrigue. Parish scandals. He laughed aloud, softly. His parents were so ... upright. What had the detective said? “They’re boring, son.”
His gaze, unfocused until now, absently scanning the rooftops and balconies visible just across the street, moved idly to the left of the window. Without conscious effort, his eyes brought into focus a framed print. The print was a striking, snowy depiction of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge University.
Matt sat straight up in his father’s chair. His eyes narrowed again as they had in the XO’s cabin thirty hours previous. King’s College. Cambridge University. It was long ago, but ... if there did happen to be any “intrigue” in his parents’ past, perhaps it lay there, in England, not here in New York. What had Belton said? “I don’t know what they left behind in England. ...”
What had they left behind in England? He searched his memory. They had left Elisabeth and Jason Manguson, their best friends. They had left Dr. and Mrs. Ashford, their “campus parents.” They had left that strange story of a “war,” something to which they alluded from time to time, usually somewhat cryptically, his father, lightly and jokingly, his mother, always with deadly seriousness. Waged just after the real Second World War, this apparently clandestine conflict had somehow been conducted above and below and behind the public’s consciousness. Yet, it had been fought, if one could accept his parents’ characterizations of it, in deadly earnestness and would have become real enough, and public enough, had it turned another way. And Matt knew even as he thought it through that he actually knew almost nothing about it. He had listened to his parents’ accounts of the conflict with the polite interest with which he listened to his history professors’ accounts of Persians fighting Greeks. His war interests had always been kindled by aircraft carriers and aerial torpedoes and dive bombers ... modern Naval warfare. Real warfare. But this other thing, the “Cambridge War,” as his parents had termed it, or the “Prayer Book War,” as Matt himself had once jokingly called it, seemed to Matt to have been fought over some ludicrously obscure threat to the Christian church in England, something about corrupting or replacing the Anglican prayer book. He had never even tried to understand any part of the story. Religion had never “taken” with Matt. He had no idea what all these religious conflict tales had been about. And none of it had ever mattered to him in the least. Until now. He frowned. Detective Belton hadn’t known “what they left behind in England.” Well. Neither did he.
Matt rose quickly from his chair, crossed the room, and stopped at the doorway of his mother’s study. He stood for seconds, looking around the compact room with new eyes. He knew his mother wrote here, always at the small desk tucked just inside the doorway. He knew she prayed here daily, a fact that made him uncomfortable at this reminder of her unabashed piety, the image of her here in this room suddenly highlighting by way of contrast his own breezy and cynical materialism in a fashion that made him flush with an unexpected and unfamiliar sense of shame. He brushed the feeling away with a characteristic, nearly imperceptible wave of his right hand. It was a skill borne of long practice.
He let his eyes fall to the floor while he processed the prior thought. He knew nothing about this room, precisely because he knew his mother prayed here, read Scripture here, wrote in her diary here. And he wanted nothing to do with any of that. He shook his head slowly.
Then he looked up sharply. Her diary. Where was it? He knew she wrote in her diary each day, but he could not recall ever having actually seen it. He turned to face the desk. It was orderly, of course. His mother’s Bible was placed carefully just to the right of the lamp, itself on the left corner. To the right of the Bible was her red leather-covered Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, with its slender, graceful, gold cross on the cover, and with three red-ribbon page markers trailing from it onto the desk surface.
He turned his head away, looking back into the living room without moving from his position in front of the desk, and thought. There had been no signs anywhere in the apartment of his parents packing for a trip, and all their luggage seemed to be in its expected place. But this, his mother’s desk, was the most telling sign that, wherever his parents might be, their departure was not planned ... and not voluntary. His mother never went anywhere overnight without her prayer book. It was unthinkable.
He reached for the prayer book, cradled it in his huge left palm, and fingered the first of the ribbon markers, sliding the ribbon upward while the pages separated obediently. A small heading announced the start of the Nicene Creed. He read to himself: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible; And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God. ...”
The words further heightened his discomfort, his sense of alienation from the room itself. Replacing the first marker, he quickly turned to his mother’s second ribbon-marked passage. The italicized phrase at the bottom of the page announced, “Ministration to the Sick.” The prayer just above that phrase began, “This is another day, O Lord. I know not what it will bring forth, but make me ready, Lord, for whatever it may be. If I am to stand up, help me to stand bravely. If I am to sit still, help me to sit quietly. ...” He shivered. The words dripped with piety and resignation. Why was this page marked? Was his mother ill? Or did she simply pray daily for the sick as part of a regimen?
His discomfort nearly overwhelming him now, he turned to the third of the marked pages. His eyes fell on the heading at the top of the right-hand page: For those in the Armed Forces of our Country. Under that heading, he read, “Almighty God, we commend to your gracious care and keeping all the men and women of our armed forces at home and abroad. Defend them day by day with your heavenly grace. ...”
He smiled as he read the words to himself. He knew exactly why this page was marked. He read the words a second time. The words of the prayer seemed to go deep down into his mind, and beyond. He read them still again. And he realized that he was actually beginning to relax. He pictured his mother reading and praying that prayer, and he knew that she would have had Matt’s image before her, in her mind, as she prayed. He smiled again. As the seconds and minutes passed, his discomfort subsided, at length leaving him in the midst of a rising sense of his mother’s presence, her maternal protectiveness and love for him enveloping him as of old. Eventually, for perhaps the first time since his shipboard meeting in the executive officer’s cabin, he sensed outrage mounting in his chest, radiating outward to the muscles of his forearms and hands. He closed the prayer book, replaced it on the desk, and saw both hands tighten into fists. Although he could not have put it this way, the fact was that he was just now beginning to think about someone other than himself, for the first time since his parents’ disappearance had been announced to him. The thought that actually formed itself was this one: “How is it possible that anyone could do something to this woman? And if God were here for her prayers, how, exactly, might He permit something to happen to someone this ... this ... good?”
Now genuinely angry, he forced his mind back to the diary. He saw that nothing else graced his mother’s desk except for her pens and two photographs of his father and himself together, one taken on his last leave, just before the Mediterranean cruise, with his mother standing between them in the picture, and one taken by her five years before, when he had reported aboard his first ship. He then noticed for the first time that the desk had no drawers; it was just a writing table. His eyes moved to the bookcase just to the right of the desk, and fastened quickly on a rectangular lock box on the lowest shelf, probably dark green once, now presenting a near-colorless, metallic image, almost military in its studied dullness. He stepped to the bookcase, stooped, and lifted the box with both hands, placing it in the center of the desk. He moved the clasp and raised the hinged handle, testing the lid; it yielded. He saw that the box contained a small stack of near-identical booklets. He was certain even before opening them that the tattered, spiral-bound, untitled volumes were his mother’s diaries.
Matt pulled the chair away from the desk, took a deep breath, and seated himself. He removed the topmost booklet from the box, turned to the back, and paged forward until he encountered the most recent entry. His mother’s familiar script — as familiar to him as his own — met his eyes. As he turned back two more pages to the start of her final entry, his eyes were attracted to a grouping of words that were set off from the rest. He leaned forward in the chair and stared at them uncomprehendingly. Martha Clark’s careful formation of letters left no doubt that he was reading what she had intended to write:
Unig-genedledig
Fab Duw,
cenedledig gan y Tad
cyn yr holl oesoedd,
Duw o
Dduw,
Llewyrch o Lewyrch,
Gwir Dduw o Wir Dduw ...
CHAPTER TWO
AT NOON ON A hazy English Friday — that same Friday on which Matt Clark was driving his rental car from Delaware to New York City — Dr. Jonathan Foster, director of the University of Bradford’s Institute for the Study of Society, closed the door behind him as he stepped into his college rooms. He placed his briefcase on the floor beside his antique roll top desk, crossed into his sitting room, and snapped on the television. He hoped he was in time to catch the BBC interview with Cambridge theologian and historian Meredith Lancaster.
Foster hated meetings in which he was not the chair; they could run late and often did, placing him in the position of asserting his authority to end a meeting at which he was merely ex officio, or enduring the wasted minutes to the bitter end. Having just endured, he was in ill temper. He would be doubly so if he had missed the Lancaster interview. Turning the volume high enough to be audible from the scullery, he quickly put on a pot of tea, then returned and stood in front of the screen.
He was rewarded a moment later when Lancaster’s introduction began. As the host provided background on the timing for the interview, a second camera framed Lancaster’s face. His pale blue eyes focused, steely and unblinking, on his host. He seemed unaware of the cameras, though Foster was certain that Lancaster, veteran of many years of television interviews, was fully aware that the live camera was his. Lancaster’s mouth traced the relaxed, poised smile of the famous and handsome, of the public figure confident that he was not merely famous and handsome, but compellingly telegenic under all circumstances. As the introduction drew to a close, Lancaster provided his viewers with his familiar lift of the chin, signaling his preparedness to illuminate, to enlighten, and to reassure.
Lancaster had begun to speak, his baritone voice resonant, completely in charge of his audience: both the interviewer himself and those countless fellow countrymen viewing from TV sets throughout Great Britain. “Yes ... yes, I do think that, when we make our full disclosure in the appropriate venue, Christians and non-Christians alike will be led to a somewhat altered view of who our Lord actually was, and of how we should come to understand Him. Most certainly we will experience a shift in our understanding of early Christian history, particularly as it developed here on this great island. I’ve no doubt that this will be, to some, unsettling at first, but I ask simply that our viewers at home and in the workplace ...” — here Lancaster leaned toward the camera, smiling gently, looking earnestly into the lens, expressing with great effect his sympathy for the fragility of his audience’s belief system — “... trust me. Each one of you understand how loathe I would be to introduce anything whatsoever that ... that ...” — here he appeared to search for precisely the right phrase — “... that might somehow be construed so as to seem to ... to diminish our Lord, and our sacred history and traditions.”
Lancaster sat back in his chair while his interviewer probed further. Again came the characteristic lift of the chin, the confident smile, the steady gaze, and the power of the blue eyes to make contact with the television viewers. “No ... no, I’m afraid I cannot yet go further in disclosing the full nature of the discovery. I can only say that soon ... quite soon, in fact ... we will be ready to announce the date, time, and location of the full revelation, if I may use that word. You may all rest in assurance that it will have been worth the wait.”
With that, Meredith Lancaster crossed his legs and relaxed in his chair, rewarding the viewers with his most ingratiating smile, satisfied that he had again piqued the curiosity of the faithful, the unfaithful, the anti-faithful, and the religiously uninterested alike. It was, as always, exactly what he had wanted from the interview. He had controlled his host and his message from the first moment, and had closed the session when it pleased him to do so.
Foster switched off the television, smiled to himself, and shook his head in wonder. The man was a master. An absolute master. Still standing motionless just in front of the darkened TV screen, Foster’s smile faded as he pictured Lancaster’s televised gaze — unblinking, steady, intimate — and the televised smile — warm, welcoming, self-assured — in contrast to those very features as Foster himself had so often experienced them from close range. From very, very close range.
He turned away from the quiescent television, and crossed the room to his desk. Seating himself, then leaning down to open his upright briefcase, Foster reached inside and removed a sheaf of papers, spreading the papers before him on the desk’s massive writing surface. Most of the material related in one way or another to his upcoming retirement ceremony. He half-absentmindedly looked over the material, noting the most recent changes, his eyes moving rapidly from one announcement, agenda, or text to another, nodding his head occasionally in satisfaction. Some of the festivities and encomiums seemed, he had to acknowledge, a trifle overdone, but one could certainly appreciate the eagerness of the College Visitor to celebrate the career of one universally regarded as the institute’s modern-day savior.
It had seemed clearly the result of divine intervention nearly three decades earlier that he — then the institute’s deputy director — had been spared death in the Great Disaster, as he and his colleagues from that era had christened it. Divine intervention, certainly, though in retrospect Foster had to acknowledge that his response in the immediate aftermath had been too sanguine.
He brought easily to his memory, for perhaps the several hundredth time, that long-ago day when he had stood in the morning silence of Magdalene College Chapel at Cambridge and, still a young man, had listened to an equally young Meredith Lancaster recount for him in hushed tones the story of the previous night’s events. Both Lancaster and Foster himself had been scheduled to ride the late train from Yorkshire to Cambridge with their allies in their secret battle to replace the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer with something radically new, The Anglican Book of Community Service.
The new book had represented an exciting change. Its text would have subtly, yet forthrightly, updated the language and the emphasis of the worship services and prayers so that the faithful would have been led to a clear recognition of the full range of charitable obligation falling upon those who wished to honor the Christian traditions. And it would have sought discreetly to ignore out of all existence such primitive concepts as heaven, hell, resurrection, sin, salvation, eternal life, and the like, except as imaginative and, certainly, enriching metaphorical constructs.
Attempting such changes through regular ecclesiastical channels would, in all likelihood, have proven fruitless, and, in any case, would have been altogether unnecessary. Arrangements were quite in order to accomplish the thing in Parliament, thanks to the established nature of the Church of England. Lancaster, Foster, and ten other prominent scholars, politicians, and churchmen had operated for several years in complete secrecy, or so they had thought. And so they had been surprised to find themselves opposed, within days of their first public statements, not by any sort of officialdom, but by an even smaller band of unstable and unbalanced individuals who deemed it their business to confront the movement by methods that were, in some ways, just as forceful, secretive, and unconventional as their own. The Parliamentary outcome had become suddenly less certain.
In any case, on the very eve of the day that might conceivably have marked their final triumph, the train had been somehow derailed and all ten of their colleagues had gone to their deaths. At least, that was how it appeared to the authorities. As Lancaster had explained to Foster that morning in Magdalene Chapel, the bodies of their colleagues had not actually been found. Their rail car, having been reserved just for their group, had been the last on the train and, unlike the cars ahead, had actually plunged all the way down the embankment and into the swollen river that ran alongside the tracks just at that point. They had apparently managed to escape the rail car, but had been swept downstream in the flood waters so rapidly that their bodies were never found. An incomprehensible thing. But there it was. And, without the ten, which included all the senior members of the group, the chances of moving forward successfully with the coup shrank to nothing.
It had clearly been through divine intervention, then, that Lancaster and Foster, both by far the youngest members of the group, had been spared. They had been sufficiently detained at a meeting at the institute that they missed the death train’s departure. Since the dead included the director and one other key fellow in the Institute for the Study of Society, Jonathan Foster had been asked to rebuild the institute from the ground up. And he had done so with the sort of deft purpose and political dexterity that had made him, he knew, the envy of all those who perhaps had stronger ideas but less of the craft that could bring those ideas to complete organizational fulfillment. Yes, the modern-day savior. That was how he was thought of. And with good reason.
Foster had known then that this would be the turning point of his life. From the first moment he had received the staggering news from Meredith Lancaster on that morning after they had been driven to Cambridge by automobile, he had sensed divine intervention in the whole conflict and, even then, in its outcome, disappointing though that outcome seemed both to Lancaster and to himself at first. The more he had thought about it, the more fully Foster had realized that the whole shaping of the institute would now rest with him. There would be no new prayer book — no Anglican Book of Community Service — but, at least, he would have on his resume the rebuilding of a quite visible academic community. It was a less dramatic call to service, but also less controversial. And it certainly had its own kind of importance.
And so it had in fact happened. No statue in his honor had yet been proposed, admittedly, but plenty of time for that, once he assumed his role as Director Emeritus, presiding sagely and with more effect than most would be aware, from a position both behind and above the new director. The new appointee to the post was, after all, an amiable enough chap, but one in rather obvious need of direction from the esteemed savior of the institute.
His thoughts lingered ... and then he sighed ... knowing that his mind would not be allowed to close the story there, even in imagination. Foster shut fast his eyes and awaited the inevitable. And it arrived. The fairy tale began to deteriorate. He took a deep breath. Knowing what would come now, he pushed his chair away from his desk, and slowly leaned forward until he held his face in his hands, elbows propped on knees. For the ten thousandth time — for no day had passed for almost thirty years without a visitation regarding this portion of the tragedy — he saw in his mind Meredith Lancaster’s then-young face, appearing at his hotel door in Cambridge within days of the Great Disaster, the final action of the Cambridge War. He saw as if it were yesterday the rapid transformation before his eyes of that handsome countenance, as it had confronted him in his private hotel suite: the pale, steely eyes beginning to shift continuously as if directed by automata; the warm and welcoming features dissolving into repeated grimaces in satanic imitation of a human smile; the then-dark goatee, its irregular contours exaggerating the strange fluctuations in Lancaster’s freshly sinister visage; the lift of the chin coupling arrogance with furtiveness in a complex and confusing manner. And then the threats had come, spoken by Lancaster’s lips but in a voice strangely unlike Lancaster’s own voice, ordering Foster to continue his plans to rebuild the institute with himself at the center. Then, again, commanding Foster to accept the fact that henceforth his chief authorities would be “spiritual” authorities.
“I find your manner of speaking rather ... ah ... overbearing, Meredith,” Foster had replied. “But I will say, regarding your allusion to spiritual authorities, that, in the light of these astounding developments, I have indeed come to appreciate the providential aspects of all this, and am quite willing to entertain the likelihood of divine influence. ...”
“Silence! Fool!” Lancaster’s alien voice had shouted. “You have been saved from the Disaster by my Masters for their purposes. They, partly through me, will develop your agenda for the institute. They, with my assistance, will arrange for you to become a wealthy man as the years pass. They, served and aided by me, will provide you with your vision for the rebuilding of the organization. Simply know that your orders, whether penned by my hand or not, will come from those who fully intend to establish their domination over this planet once and for all, and who will kill you ... or worse ... at a moment’s notice, should you hesitate to carry out the program with which you will be provided.”
Lancaster’s faux voice had by then risen to an inhuman screech. “Do you understand this, you miserable wretch ... you moronic cipher ... you insipid ass?”
Foster recalled for the ten thousandth time the terror that had overcome him in that interview as he saw the young academician transformed before his eyes into an agent of ... he could only call it Evil, despite his previous disbelief in anything that could be imagined as an “anti-Divine force.” He remembered afresh the sense of overwhelming heaviness that had come upon him as that “conversation” had continued on into the night, feeling again in memory the crushing weight upon his head and shoulders that had forced him literally to his knees, and then to the floor, prostrate. His disbelief had, he knew, been fractured beyond repair in those minutes, there having been absolutely no recourse available to him ... not logic, not reason, not previous experience of any kind.
He recalled — again for the ten thousandth time — how, after Lancaster’s departure that night, he had searched for escape. He remembered his tortured admission to himself, well after midnight, that up until that evening he had in fact believed in nothing except, as a result of his survival of the Disaster, some vaguely formulated idea of destiny, and even that only because it flattered and suited him. And now he called once more to his mind, knowing that he had no choice but to do so, his desperate collapse as morning had approached, his falling again to the floor in the hotel suite in submission to ... nothing that he could conjure in his imagination. And he remembered still again how, as dawn had broken on that decisive morning, he had admitted to himself with an inconsolable finality that, with belief in an actual, tangible, irrefutable Evil having been forced upon him, and, having no protection of the sort afforded his believing colleagues from a creative, redeeming goodness that, even if “real,” he could not believe in, he would have no defense — none — against this threat to his very existence. His life, he sensed, was over, just at the moment that it would seem to the English public to be at its true beginning. He had seen — no, more than that by far — had felt Evil itself. He had been given certainty that this reality existed and had been physically present with him ... and he knew that he could not believe in any antidote ... any cure ... any personal, active, countervailing force.
And now, at his desk, once again, as had been the case each and every day for nearly three decades, Jonathan Foster felt the nausea rising. He rose swiftly, left the room, and, for the ten thousandth consecutive day, was sick.
His hatred for himself was infinite.
On an uncomfortably warm, threatening Monday morning in Cambridge, three days after Meredith Lancaster’s television interview, and the same three days after Matt Clark, sitting in his parents’ living room an ocean away, had fixed his eyes on a print of King’s College Chapel, Jonathan Foster stepped from the train and paused to assess the overcast skies above him. Shortly before daybreak, Meredith Lancaster had summoned him, as he had, when it pleased him, for nearly thirty years. Foster had perforce responded, as he had, when thus summoned, for the same interminable span of time. He had swiftly instructed his assistants at the institute to cancel his day’s agenda, had packed an overnight bag with accustomed dispatch, and rather easily had found a seat on the 8:12 to Cambridge.
Foster loved Cambridge, and since, even with his train’s tardy arrival there, he had well over an hour until his meeting with Lancaster, he resolved to enjoy the time as much as he could. Excising the approaching appointment from his mind with modest success, he walked north from the station toward city center, turned left onto Downing Street, then right onto King’s Parade. As he walked, he distracted himself from thoughts of Meredith Lancaster by encouraging history to play through his mind, solemnly imagining the old “presences” — Wren, Milton, Newton, Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, Inigo Jones — and stopping to gape, like some ordinary tourist, he thought to himself, at the late-Gothic magnificence of the university’s signature, King’s College Chapel. He stopped briefly in two bookshops, then, feeling the first tentative raindrops of what might become a downpour at any moment, purchased an umbrella with a distinctive dark-grain handle from the men’s store on the corner. Then, with a start, seeing his appointment time almost past, he walked purposefully, anxiety building in his stomach, past Trinity and St. John’s Colleges, doing his best not to interfere with, or be struck by, the bicycles swarming around him from all directions. He hastened miserably across the bridge over the Cam and turned right into the arched entrance to Magdalene College. When he reached courtyard center, he turned briskly left, aware that perspiration was already beginning to work itself through his patterned shirt. Foster pulled open the courtyard door to the college chapel, strode to its interior entrance, and glanced at his watch. He was nearly five minutes late for his rendezvous with Lancaster.