Magic Time: Ghostlands Read online

  The first one—she found it for Shango—had been innocuous enough, an order form printed from her website requesting a number of fine garnets and inquiring about volume orders and discounts.

  “Signed by Anthony St. Rivers,” Shango observed, as if this were significant.

  Mama Diamond filled the order and wrote to Mr. St. Rivers advising him that she didn’t ordinarily fill high-volume orders—she was a retailer, not a distributor; her stock was carefully assembled to meet the average needs of her typical customers, and she was reluctant to draw down too much inventory for fear of disappointing her regulars. (She could, of course, have accepted St. Rivers’s orders and simply filled them through a distributor at some extraordinary markup and after a long delay…but that didn’t seem quite honest.)

  She had gotten back a nice note from St. Rivers, mentioning he would refer her to his other friends and compatriots across the country. St. Rivers had further ordered a modest selection of raw and cut stones—opals, tourmalines, more garnets—and thanked Mama Diamond in a courteous fashion.

  The orders continued to arrive with some regularity from St. Rivers and his well-heeled friends. Mama Diamond was intrigued enough that she’d mentioned St. Rivers to an importer, Bob Skarrow, at a gem-and-mineral trade show in Phoenix.

  Skarrow rolled his eyes at the mention of the name. St. Rivers had contacted him, too, and when he couldn’t fill his entire order—“It was frickin’ ridiculous in volume alone”—St. Rivers and company had gone in turn to Skarrow’s sources, and it was skewing the entire market in semiprecious stones, driving up prices and creating spot shortages.

  “What do they do with all these stones?” Mama Diamond had asked.

  But Skarrow didn’t know. He’d had a couple of phone conversations with this St. Rivers (always with St. Rivers, not Skarrow, placing the call, the number invariably blocked), but St. Rivers wouldn’t say anything about that.

  Skarrow said the man’s voice was papery thin and cultured, an old man’s voice, with the faintest wisp of an accent, Spanish maybe or Mexican or Cuban, as if he’d planted roots here a long time but had hailed once from an alien land.

  “Best guess in the trade is, they’re working on some kind of optical device,” Skarrow had concluded. “Like they used to use rubies for lasers. But that’s just speculation.”

  Mama Diamond had let it go at that. Shortages, price-gouging, and overblown crises were an unavoidable part of the gem trade. “Apart from regular small orders from St. Rivers,” she told Shango, “that’s the whole story.”

  Shango nodded thoughtfully.

  “Now,” Mama Diamond said, “suppose you answer me some questions.”

  Shango asked Mama Diamond if she would be willing to walk with him to the train depot—if she felt well enough.

  Oddly enough, she did feel well enough. She had this hazy, dreamlike memory that Stern had press-ganged her into a great deal of unwilling physical labor alongside the corpse-gray, distorted little men who made up his work crew. The pain was still there, throbbing in every joint. But she felt a peculiar energy, too. All that adrenaline flowing in her veins, she supposed. The giddy aftermath of fear.

  And at the very last, amidst the steam hiss of the soul-damned train firing up again, Stern’s words coming distant and watery to Mama Diamond in memory or imagination.

  “Home…then Atherton.”

  Emerging with Shango from her dinosaur-bone house onto the porch, Mama Diamond spied her bent-birch rocker, the Tom Clancy novel still there under the canteen, pages restless in a dry wind. It can stay where it is, Mama Diamond thought. I’m through with that book.

  They walked together slowly on the unshaded side of the street. The wind was brutal again today, bulling down the cross lanes like the propwash from an old DC-3. Mama Diamond wore her old slouch hat to keep her head warm, atop the pageboy she had affected since she was five (hell, one hairstyle should last a lifetime). Shango, God bless him, wore a fedora.

  “Suppose you start,” Mama Diamond suggested, “by telling me how you came to be here.”

  “That’s a long story.”

  “I have time on my hands.”

  Shango began with stark simplicity: how he had come out of the navy to work for the Secret Service; his role at the White House before the Change; how President McKay had confided to him the likelihood that the clandestine Source Project was the root and center of the Change; how McKay had sent Shango along with Deputy Chief of Staff Steve Czernas to find the lost agent Jeri Bilmer, who might just have had the key to it all.

  Then things got really interesting.

  Later, upon reflection, Shango told himself it was because Mama Diamond comported herself like a woman who’d had no company but her own for far too long. Shango understood about that. He’d had more experience with loneliness than most folks.

  But he had unburdened himself like a Mafia don at last confession.

  Before his return to Washington, Shango told Mama, he had found the pitiful remains of Jeri Bilmer and her even more pitiful list, the roster that told nothing more than the names and former addresses of the scientists at the Source Project—perhaps complete, probably not, certainly not including the support personnel who might or might not have been dead by that time.

  Shango had not succeeded on his own in achieving this objective. He had been helped at the end by the odd quartet of travelers from New York whom he had chanced upon when he had helped save the most erratic of the four from murderous attack. Herman Goldman, whom Shango had rescued and who in turn had used his remarkable powers to help Shango locate Bilmer’s remains…and then reveal to him that President McKay was dead.

  Was it that knowledge that finally coaxed Shango to violate his oath of office, to reveal what he had sworn only to share with McKay? Or was it rather a growing empathy with the band’s leader, Cal Griffin, on his quixotic mission to save his abducted sister and challenge a force that had only overturned an entire planet?

  Fools’ errands were something Shango understood, too.

  Whatever the motive, Shango had shared all he knew about the Source Project with them, in the hope—probably equally foolish—that it might turn the tables just enough to save their lives.

  Shango knew full well he had come to the crossroads and chosen. To turn his back on what he had been, what he had prided himself on being. To become visible again.

  For eight years, Shango had worn a black suit like his personal armor, earpiece wire coiling off into his collar, wrist handcuffed to the briefcase that would fall away to an Uzi at a moment’s notice.

  But most of all, he remembered that feeling….

  Unseen, unobserved, unremarked upon.

  Clouding men’s minds.

  One time, when Shango was just a beanpole of a kid in a tumbledown, squalid neighborhood of New Orleans where no Nielsen company or Harris Poll ever asked anyone’s opinion, his father had brought home some beaten-up cassettes he’d scored at a swap meet—odd behavior, to be sure, for the old bastard usually hoarded every penny for beer and escape. But it turned out this was release of a different kind, for when Dad himself had been a kid he had fled not into liquor and a feigned, desperate gaiety but rather the deco dreams issuing from the hand-tooled fine oak cabinet and glowing amber eye of the Atwater Kent. Now he wanted to relive it and—incredibly, uniquely—share it with his children.

  The tapes were of an old radio show, ancient even then, from the thirties. Shango had recognized the voice emanating from the cassette player—it was that old fat dude from the commercials (“No wine before its time…”). But this wasn’t hokey or a fast hustle. It was simply wonderful.

  Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men…

  The Shadow knows.

  A man who could not be bought or swayed or corrupted, who stood for one pure, clear ideal, who could go anywhere, do anything…

  Because he could cloud men’s minds.

  So they couldn’t see him, didn’t know he was even there. Until
he struck and struck hard, setting everything right.

  Sometimes it’s just like a penny dropping into a slot, a lightbulb going on…and you know you’ve found that one right thing to give your life over to.

  Shango studied and trained, entered the Naval Academy on an athletic scholarship, busted his ass getting his grades into the stratosphere, spent four years in Naval Intelligence working up to lieutenant commander, brushing up against all manner of government operatives.

  All preamble, so he could apply to the one organization where he truly belonged.

  Why do you want to join the Secret Service? the form had asked. And of course he had not said, Because I want to be the Shadow, stupid.

  What followed had been a grueling year at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia, augmented by specialized training in Beltsville, Maryland. After that, five years’ duty in the New Orleans and Chicago field offices, working criminal investigations, identity theft, protective intelligence, proving himself outstanding, exemplary, without error or peer.

  Until finally, he was selected for the elite, the Presidential Protection Division.

  Where at last Larry Shango could fully become the Shadow.

  The invisible man, the one no one saw, silent as a radio switched off, always—literally—shadowing the Big Man, numero uno, President of what was once laughingly called the United States.

  Not so United anymore, and as for the President, well…if there was a heaven—a belief Shango’s mother had so fervently believed and Shango himself so fervently fled—McKay was there. And if not, at least McKay’s worries were over.

  Which was hardly the case with Larry Shango. Since his moment of decision around the campfire with Cal Griffin and friends, Shango had been visible indeed on his rambling See the USA sojourn, more often than not in someone’s crosshairs. The long highway might as well have been paved with broken bones for all the damage he’d been forced to inflict with that ten-pound sledgehammer slung across his back.

  It was a way to fill the time at least, to sometimes actually convince himself his life had a purpose…or at least hadn’t run out of steam.

  But at night, camped in some high redoubt, his back to the rockface, carefully calculated to be secure against attack, he’d long for even a brief return to what he used to think of (though naturally never actually said) as his Power….

  Funny, because now all sorts of people had all kinds of power, way beyond what that funky old Shadow could ever have cooked up.

  But Shango had stayed achingly unchanged—human, mortal, ordinary. As ordinary as any man who had walked his path and seen what he’d seen.

  Griffin and his companions were probably dead by now, having gotten nowhere near the Source.

  As Shango himself had failed.

  But that was long after their meeting around the campfire. Initially, Shango had ignored Goldman’s warnings. He’d had an obligation—and more than that, a personal need—to verify that his Commander was indeed dead, that Shango had in fact deserted and condemned him (even if McKay himself had ordered Shango away).

  On the grounds of the White House, beside the fountain and rose beds as Goldman had predicted, Shango verified that General Christiansen of the Joint Chiefs had seized power, and that McKay and his wife, Jan, and even their dog, Jimmy, were dead, murdered.

  That had been the second crossroads, as Shango had been forced to choose—vengeance, or some other engine to drive his life. He chose the one remaining task he knew McKay would want him to fulfill—to find and safeguard the life of their son, Evan, if he could.

  So Shango set off for Bar Harbor, Maine, where the boy had been vacationing with his uncle and cousins and a detachment of Secret Service agents. That had been one hairy journey, traveling overland through some of the densest and most desperate regions of the eastern seaboard. Factionalism had run riot. Rumors abounded that the President was dead, and it really hadn’t been possible to keep that soundbite a dirty little secret (even in a world that no longer had sound-bites). No one seemed to know the whereabouts and condition above- or belowground of the Vice President, so the position of head of state devolved to the Speaker of the House. Christiansen had somehow managed to sew up—or lock down—Senator Mader’s allegiance, or at least compliance, and thus declare martial law. But it was hotly disputed, and various National Guard units recognized widely divergent authority—if any at all. Pockets of civil war, civil disobedience and uncivil acts of every stripe were the order of the day.

  The only thing to be thankful for—and it was precious little—was that munitions no longer worked.

  But on the other hand, dragons flew and could shoot fire.

  Shango arrived at Bar Harbor ten days late, to find that a contingent of Christiansen’s men had already tried to kill the boy there, as if he were the lost Dauphin or Anastasia or Bonnie Prince Charlie. The team of Special Forces assassins had overpowered and dispatched Jan McKay’s brother, her nieces and nephew, and all but one of the Secret Service agents.

  Although bleeding her life out from internal injuries, agent Jaime Mintun had gotten the boy as far as Bangor, where a sympathetic older man and his wife had kept the boy hidden in a big sprawling mansion behind a spiderweb iron gate until Shango had arrived and convinced them of his friendly intentions.

  Mama Diamond and Shango came to the decaying railway depot, and she led him into the equally decrepit cafeteria—refurbished for tourists once long ago—where they sat at a dusty table.

  Mama Diamond had cleaned out the kitchen here shortly after the Change, had dumped the rotting perishables into an arroyo well out of town and swabbed the floors and walls with ammonia to kill the stench. With the doors closed against the breeze, it was another pleasant place to spend time. Or at least it had been. The black train, the dragon, had tainted it.

  “Where’s the boy now?” asked Mama Diamond.

  “With my aunts and sisters and cousins outside New Orleans,” Shango replied. “Oh, he’s got a different name now and looks a whole lot different. If any of Christiansen’s men decide to come after him, well, those old swamp-rat relations of mine know how to vanish into the bayou. And I suspect not even black-op hit men—or dragons themselves, come to mention it—would go in there without considerable trepidation.”

  “But that put you back at square one,” Mama Diamond noted.

  Shango nodded. “I could wall myself behind some fortress and spend the rest of my days raising turnips and fighting off monsters. Or I could put myself in the middle of it, like those folks I met, Griffin and the rest. Head for the Source and see if I could undo some of the badness…or at least learn if McKay’s suspicions were right, if it really was the origin of all this misery and upheaval.”

  Shango was looking straight ahead, talking to himself as much as to Mama Diamond. “All I had was that rain-spoiled list of scientists’ names….”

  But it was a start.

  At the Latter Memorial Library on St. Charles in New Orleans, remarkably still intact and in full operation, Shango researched the names. He discovered that a preponderance of them were in allied fields of chemistry, molecular engineering and—most particularly—analysis and application of gemstones for use in laser technology and quantum physics research.

  Specifically, Shango found that a number of the Source scientists were previously engaged in studies utilizing a variety of gemstones to focus energy and alter its proton and electron signatures, with the aim of splitting and recombining it in fierce new forms. One obscure article even hinted at the theoretical notion of exploiting these properties to harness great amorphous energies from other dimensions in space-time.

  What enormous quantity of gems—and what bottomless purchasing power—might it have taken to accomplish this, Shango wondered, if indeed those at the Source Project were responsible for summoning the raging forces that had punched into this world and overwhelmed the planet?

  McKay, in the brief interview by the fountain that sweltering summ
er day right after the Change, mentioned that the Source Project had been kept hidden even from him, a black box operation whose existence and funding were squirreled away in any number of secret cubbyholes, spread out between CIA, DoD, NSA….

  Returning to the environs of D.C.—or what was left of it—Shango paid a call on Reynolds Darden, an old friend in accounts receivable at the sprawling National Security Agency complex at Fort George Meade, Maryland. Childhood friends since the frenetic days in the New Orleans projects, Shango had done him a favor once, engaging in a brief conversation with a boyfriend of Darden’s sister, a man with a past full of wreckage and excuses. After that little talk with Shango, Mr. Significant Other booked a flight to Adelaide and didn’t come back.

  “What’re you looking for?” Darden asked, eyes glinting behind owlish bifocals.

  “I’ll know it when I see it,” Shango said. But he knew where to start—with any purchase order that bore the name—or anagram of the name, or false name derived from some biographical detail—of any of the Source Project scientists.

  It had taken weeks of grueling, tedious effort, but at long last Shango found it: a list of purchase orders from a number of gem shops scattered across the middle of the country. No single quantity large enough to raise eyebrows, but in the aggregate one shitload of semiprecious stones…

  The majority of the orders were from Anthony St. Rivers, who naturally proved not to be on any department’s payroll records. But applying certain historical allusions and a little creative translation, Shango found he could resolve the name readily enough into…

  Marcus Sanrio.

  Of course, he knew that didn’t make it so.

  In the old world, the one with the Internet and cordless phones, the next step would have been a snap. But in the new one…

  Shango hit the road again to talk to the rock hounds, find where they had shipped the purchases. When he found the shops still standing, their owners in residence, he perused their files, and learned that most of the purchases were sent to various letter drops, P.O. boxes, elusory safe houses designed to make the path circuitous, impossible to trace.