Blindspots Page 24
"Dad..." Gabriel leaned in close.
She spoke again, and it sounded like him. Like Atticus. His voice at last, ripping through Alexa's, asserting itself, mocking him. "You don't have a clue. You think it's over."
A grunting sound that passed for laughter. And then her head flopped back and lolled to the side. She toppled over and lay motionless.
Gabriel stood up, hanging his head but watching her still, as if expecting the night-vision sight to pick up the spirit leaving her body, to see it emerging, then coiling like a snake and fixing him with its red eyes before devouring itself.
17.
The storm continued to rage for another five hours, dumping three more feet of snow over northern Vermont before finally, exhausted and rightfully proud of its work, the clouds broke just in time for the sun to set over the slate blue dunes, the drifts blanketing the hills and frosting the mountains.
The plows began their work, and the roads gradually opened again. The cleanup crews worked all night on downed power lines and frozen generators. Daedalus operated, still in the dark, until the next morning when finally, help began to arrive. Cell phone service came on again around three in the morning, and the calls started going out.
Daedalus operated, but just barely. Patients and staff alike were clamoring for answers to questions that went ignored.
In that time, the short time he had before the authorities arrived, Gabriel got a lot done.
Fortunately, he had very qualified help. Virisha Velanati, Indra's sister, had returned before dusk; and she brought friends. Men who cleared away the dead, including her poor brother, keeping the bodies in the garage, where it was cold like a morgue. Soon, there would be a flood of questions, investigations. Inquiries.
Monica was safe, other than suffering the trauma of being struck with a Taser; the same for Jake. Kaitlin's bullet was removed at the infirmary and she was stitched up and resting.
After ascertaining the health of the three patients he was most concerned with, Gabriel assigned his most trusted aides to watch over them, to keep them in his office and tranquilize Monica only if necessary to prevent her from harming herself. Assured of their safety, he went back to the vault. He opened the files, then accessed the video and audio recordings, and found what he needed.
The words. The technique. The way Alexa did it. He watched and listened, over and over. Her session with Franklin in the infirmary had been caught on tape, and if he enhanced the volume he could just make it out. And thanks to her paranoia, and the bugging of Gabriel's own office with a camera and recorder, he was able to listen in on Jake's regression.
Confident finally that he had it, he left the vault, looking ruefully first at the section from the Books of the Dead, the giant hieroglyphics poised in ancient defiance, unrepentant to the last.
Then he went upstairs, and fighting the vile taste at the back of his mouth, he took his patients under. Dug deep, as Alexa would have said. He found and forced entry into that part of themselves his father had violated, trespassing into their sacred cores. For Monica it wasn't too difficult to just remove the implanted suicidal suggestion that Alexa had left inside her mind. But for Kaitlin he struggled, having to stop and start several times, and eventually taking more than two hours. He wandered around the structures erected by his father, but in the end, he found the locked vault in her mind. The initial implant, the hourglass.
And he helped her destroy it. Freed her at last. Cured her.
But in Kaitlin he found something interesting and unexpected: that she and Jake shared some kind of past-life, built-in attraction toward each other. It hadn't been fostered there by his father as it had with the others – this compulsion to recognize and obsess about each other.
He had to conclude, in this case, it was something different, something more powerful than anything one could create by pure intention. And the look on their faces as they gazed at each other now was proof enough of something just as miraculous. When they had been brought here before, in 1976, they had been drawn to each other, had fallen in love… and it was something that crossed over two more lifetimes, still just as strong – perhaps because it was an unfulfilled, prematurely broken love the first time.
A different kind of unfinished business, Gabriel thought wistfully.
He sat now in his office, with three candles burning, one for each of his guests. Monica stood near the windows, looking out, marveling at the first sunrise she'd seen in two days. Jake and Kaitlin sat on the big leather couch, holding hands, looking into each others' eyes as if they thought the dream would abruptly end if they glanced away.
Gabriel picked up the walkie-talkie and held down the speaker button. "Virisha? Are you ready?"
"Yes. I'm in the vault. Tell me when."
He released the button and looked around the room. "It's up to you three. It's your lives we're talking about."
"Our past lives," Jake said with a loopy grin. "So… not really ours."
"And I say we let them rest," Kaitlin whispered. "I don't want to know any more."
Monica looked away from her reflection in the window. "What do you think, Doctor?"
Gabriel took a breath. He needed sleep, that's what he thought. But there was still so much to do. "I think this is too big a decision for me. The files are there, the links… indisputable, I believe. If you want to know about yourselves… I can't stand in the way."
"No," Monica said. "Screw it. This is the life we have. The people in those files... They had their shot. It's our turn now."
Jake raised a fist. "Right on, sister."
"Then we're in agreement?" Gabriel asked. After each one nodded, he pressed the button again. "Virisha? Burn it. Destroy everything down there. Including the artifacts."
Her voice crackled back to them.
"With pleasure."
#
When Virisha came back up to the office, nearly an hour later, Jake and Kaitlin turned to her enthusiastically.
"We need your help for one more thing," Kaitlin said.
Jake looked down at his boots. "But first – we're so sorry. Again. About your brother, about everything, and—"
She smiled. "Don't feel sad for him. He often told me how he knew, from an early age, that this was to be his last life. His last turn at the wheel. I always laughed, of course. So did my brothers. He was Indra. Always with his head in the stars. But… now I believe him."
"I do too," said Kaitlin.
Jake coughed to break the mood. "But here's what we wanted to know. I saw the bang-up job you did for Kaitlin on her new passport and stuff, and I was wondering…"
"Ah."
Jake blushed. "I've got this little problem with the law. And, you know…"
"I do." Virisha smiled. "We'll take care of it. You'll have a new identity by noon."
"Sweet."
"No problem. But tell me, anywhere in particular you want to live? I'll create the driver's license for you that way, and—"
"No," Jake said. "Nowhere special. We…" he glanced back to Kaitlin's eyes. "We were thinking of maybe moving to Central America. Get a nice place in Belize or something."
"Somewhere," Kaitlin added, "without a lot of faces to look at every day."
#
After another cup of coffee, Gabriel decided to head downstairs and prepare his staff for the arrival of the authorities. Time to test his leadership. Whether Daedalus would survive or not wasn't his biggest concern, and yet to lose it now would be like a final blow, the last laugh of Atticus Sterling.
No, he would fight for it. Alexa would take the fall, rightfully, for everything that happened here tonight. Only, the whole truth could never be known. He took a deep breath and prepared to leave the room, when someone took his hand in hers.
"I was thinking," Monica said quietly. "You might need some help around here. For a little while at least."
His smile broke free. "Technically, you're still a dangerous woman. Under the judge's ruling, you have to remain here in my care."
"No, they don't. Although, with your history and what you've been through, you could be an invaluable asset to this facility. A sympathetic ear, someone who could help me connect with the patients and understand their suffering, and—"
"I accept," she said, squeezing his hand tighter.
Gabriel found himself responding, drawing strength from her touch.
"Good," he said. But before he closed the door behind them, Jake stuck his head through. "Uh, doc? You've still got some unfinished business, don't you?"
Wordlessly, Monica and Gabriel both nodded.
Jake smiled. "Then don't forget. Find a way to end it. Make sure it's over, that he, she – whatever – isn't coming back again."
Gabriel's palm started to sweat, and he knew Monica could feel his tension. She turned to him, looked into his eyes, and as the door closed and they were left alone in the hall, he found himself bending down to meet her lips.
When they broke away, Monica blinked and said, "Let's go. I've got some ideas on what we need to do."
"We have time," he responded.
"I don't think you want to wait."
"You're right," he said. "One thing, at least, that I share with my father. I don't like unfinished business."
EPILOGUE
Boston, Twenty-Two Years Later
M'buru Alfonsen made his way across the cemetery on a brisk October afternoon. He had on a threadbare hooded sweatshirt and a pair of ripped jeans he had owned for the past six years, bartering for them off a tourist back in Uganda.
He was a long, long way from home. But he couldn't help it. Last year, on his twenty-first birthday, something amazing had happened. A series of undeniably powerful dreams, accompanied by a compulsion: an urgent, uncontrollable need to come here. To Boston.
To this cemetery. To this mausoleum, the very one in his dreams.
He had done bad things, very bad things to get here. He had been a religious boy growing up, from a strict Catholic family. He had lost two brothers and a sister to malnutrition and disease. He had nothing, and his parents, old and weak themselves, needed him to beg the streets, to work where he could, doing whatever he could, to bring them food.
But after the dreams, he had no choice but to leave his parents to fend for themselves; he started on what he knew would be a long and desperate trip. He had stolen. Beaten and robbed people. He did things he would never think of again, but finally, he had made it here. All that effort to wind up at this place of death.
What could be calling him here?
To this single brick, this off-color brick in the tomb of this man – Silas Berger, dead for over a hundred years. This brick, set about waist-high. He knew from his dream that he needed to push the three bricks around it in succession, then push and pull back the brick itself.
He did so, and it released with a hiss, grinding slowly out from the others. He brought it back, looked down into the hollow space, and reached for the tiny thing lying inside.
An old business card, the paper browned and aged. With a cool breeze on his face and dry leaves crackling along the headstones, he read the words right next to the engraved image of an hourglass. Those words made no sense to him, but he recognized the second line as an address.
Someplace in Vermont.
#
Monica waited with a pounding heart for the elevator doors to open. Five flights down from her office, she was finally at the lobby.
The doors opened and she came out into glimmering sunlight sparkling off the polished marble floors. She walked gingerly, favoring her left leg as her arthritis was acting up today. As far as pain went, though, this was nothing. She had suffered much worse.
"Mrs. Sterling," said the receptionist upon seeing her. "He's right over there, in the lounge."
Mrs. Sterling. She never got tired of hearing that. And after years of hearing it, years of living with the freedom of sight, years spent recapturing and reliving her lost life with a man who adored her, she finally felt like she had become Real.
There was a point to life, the everyday struggle to go on. To pick yourself up, lift your head, and to look to the future with hope.
"Thank you," she told the receptionist. "Go and find Dr. Sterling. He's probably in the library again. Find him and tell my husband that the person we've been expecting has arrived. Dr. Sterling will know what that means. Tell him to meet us up in my office."
Monica opened the door to the lounge and greeted her visitor. The young man with the scared, haunted eyes. She nearly wept at the sadness and confusion she saw in his face.
"Hello," she said. "I see you found our card."
"Yes," he answered, glancing around nervously. "But… I do not understand."
Monica smiled and shook her head. "You don't need to. Come." She put her arm around his shoulders, and led him out into the hall. "Come up to my office. We'll talk for a bit. I want to hear about your life. And then, I want you to listen to me. To my voice."
"Why?"
"Believe me," Monica said, her eyes cold and determined. "You'll like what I have to say."