Rogue (2 page)

“What's wrong, dear boy,” said Franklin, meeting Will's eyes with a restrained but reproachful look, “is that such a simple, reductive, dare I say childlike philosophy leaves out all the gray, the in-between, the place where men who learn to actually think for themselves get to decide how to live by their own rules.”

The car stopped, and the panels silently slid open in front of Will.

“And that's where most of the interesting things happen,” said Franklin.

“Where's Will?” asked Brooke, just entering the suite.

Nick looked up from his three hundredth push-up. “Dinner with Old Man Elliot again.”

Nick flipped to his feet and toweled off, pumped, covered with sweat, and grinning at her like he couldn't help it. He couldn't really. Brooke, as usual, looked effortlessly flawless—outfit, accessories, hair, just a hint of makeup, every aspect of her presented self put together like a perfect recipe.

“He's spending an awful lot of time over there,” said Brooke as she set down her backpack on the table, then pulled out an appointment book and started writing in it, absentmindedly twirling a stray strand of her golden curls. “What about Ajay?”

“He's still over at the Crag, too, working late, organizing those old whatchamacallit—archives.”

“Ar-
kives,
not ar-
chives.
You put
chives
on a baked potato.”

“
You're
a baked potato,” said Nick, still grinning at her.

Brooke shook her head and laughed, then took a longer, more admiring look at him. “Whatever training program they've put you on is doing wonders for your bod. And absolutely zero for your brain.”

Nick turned a chair around and sat across from her, resting his chin on his arms. “Since you're so deeply into playing camp counselor, don't you want to ax me where Elise is?”

“Ax you? All right, I'll
ax
you. Pray tell.”

“No clue,” said Nick, drumming his fingers. “Why you want to know where everybody is all the time?”

She gave him one of her patented looks of exasperation. “Can't I be curious about my friends?”

She picked up the black phone on the table and punched the lone button. When the operator picked up, she asked, “Would you page Elise Moreau and have her call me, please?”

“What's today's date?” asked Nick when she hung up.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“You've got your calendar right there in front of you, snowflake. What's today's date?”

“August seventh,” said Brooke.

“Oh, that's right,” said Nick, snapping his fingers. “It's National Be Curious About Your Friends Day.”

She gave him a longer look, and for a moment a flash of malice showed through, before she covered it over. “There must be some way I can unknow you.”

“Keep dreaming, darlin'.”

Nick watched Brooke as she went back to writing in her book, his smile falling off when she stopped looking his way; then he stood up and moonwalked toward the kitchen, glancing at the wall clock.

“May I offer you a refreshing beverage, Brooksie?” he asked.

“A water would be fine, thanks.” Facedown in her book.

“One H-two-O, coming right up.”

Ajay slid the last box across the floor, landing it precisely in the only gap in a long row of boxes stacked neatly against the back wall of the circular tower room.

He closed his eyes, put his hands to either side of his skull, and pressed gently. This seemed to help alleviate the pressure that built up during these extensive memorization sessions. Unfortunately, it did nothing for the even sharper headaches that sometimes woke him in the middle of the night.

You're building new neural pathways at extraordinary rates of speed and density
. That's how Dr. Kujawa had described the phenomenon to him after the tests they'd recently run.
And “pathways” doesn't begin to do this process justice; you're building superhighways.

When Ajay looked in a mirror recently, he'd noticed his eyes appeared to have grown larger. His pupils had also become less sensitive to light, almost as if he welcomed it now, because it allowed him to keep them open wider and longer and to see more. He found that he was
hungry
to see more. Most alarming of all, the last time he'd tried on an old baseball cap, the fit was decidedly tighter than he remembered.

He'd decided it was best not to think too much about these things.

Ajay looked at his watch, then hurried to the east-facing window. He peered down at the path leading toward the shore past the graveyard and quickly spotted two figures moving along:

Will and Mr. Elliot.

Ajay widened his eyes, focusing in on them as he'd learned to do, details accumulating and enhancing the image.

He saw Will glance back toward the tower, reach his arm back, and raise it behind the older man.

Two fingers.

“Good golly, Miss Molly,” whispered Ajay in alarm.

He quickly moved to retrieve the knapsack he'd hidden in one of the boxes. Looked at his watch again: 6:50. Ten minutes before Lemuel Clegg would arrive to bring him his dinner.

He removed his small school pager from the bag. The one he'd modified to avoid detection by the school's server network.

“Sensing that he might be less receptive to the actual narrative, Lemuel Cornish never told Thomas about what his father and the Knights had found down here,” said Franklin as the doors slid open again. “My father never heard a word about it.”

Franklin led Will out of the elevator into a narrow corridor. They hadn't descended all the way to the bottom. This was a level Will had never seen before, built in a style decades newer than the ones in the old hospital, freshly painted, with portraits on the wall, men in nineteenth- and twentieth-century dress who he assumed must have been prominent members of the Knights.

“What kind of a man was he?” asked Will.

“Lemuel? Practical. Levelheaded. He understood only too well how his father had lost his way. That Ian's obsession with what he'd uncovered under these grounds owed more to passion, or madness, than reason. You see, after his initial enthusiasm, Ian gradually became convinced that he'd made a dreadful mistake, that this lost city needed to be sealed off, buried for all time.”

“I take it Lemuel didn't see things the way his father did,” said Will.

“He was a much more balanced man. Lemuel adopted a curious but cautious approach to the ongoing investigations. It was his idea, for instance, to install those great wooden doors at the mouth of the tunnel. Not to seal anything off, although he let his father believe that was the reason, but simply to prevent any unwanted or accidental entrance.”

“Do you know who carved those words on them—
Cahokia
and
Teotwawki
?”

“We don't know exactly when he put the first one there, but we believe carving those words on his son's doors was among the last things Ian Cornish ever did.”

“But why did he call it Cahokia? You know about the one in southern Illinois, right?”

“Oh, yes, the Native American archaeological site. Vast mounds of earth, laden with artifacts, evidence of an earlier civilization. French explorers stumbled onto it over three hundred years ago. It's a state park now, complete with guided tours and a souvenir shop, although it wasn't anything close to that organized back in Ian's day.

“But after he paid a visit there, Ian apparently came to believe that his discovery here and that one to the south were part of the same vast underground network of cities. Not a Native American one, mind you, but an even older civilization that the Others constructed long ago beneath the entire Midwest. A conclusion that, in Ian's declining mental state, he believed supported the idea that they had once been Earth's dominant species. Which he in turn interpreted”—he paused and chuckled as he turned to Will with a twinkle in his eye—“as evidence of their desire to take over the world a second time.”

“So that's what the second word on the door is about, then,” said Will. “You know what that one means, right?”

“Teotwawki. Oh, yes, an acronym:
the end of the world as we know it
. More ravings, but sadly, so it proved to be for Ian. At that point, he had been confined for some months to a padded room here at the Crag, judged a danger to himself. Then he escaped one day and fled down into the tunnels. That's when he carved those letters on the doors with a knife he stole from the kitchen. And then Ian used that same knife to take his own life.”

Will paused for a moment. He'd stood in that exact spot, not so long ago. He closed his eyes, sent himself back there, and for a moment touched the overwhelming aura of the poor man's terror and desperation. He shuddered as it ran through him; then he quickly shook it off.

“What about the statues of the soldiers in the tunnel? Did Ian put those there, too?”

“Yes, another folly of Ian's that Lemuel tolerated enough to indulge, even after his father was gone—one soldier for every American war. Sentinels, Ian called them, standing guard against what he feared might one day emerge from down below. I hope you can see by now that poor Ian had some exceedingly strange ideas about
what
he'd found. But he'd also grown far too unstable to come close to realizing exactly
who
he'd found.”

“But Lemuel did.”

“Oh, yes. And he was also perceptive enough to realize that in order to make the most of it, the Knights would need the help of someone in our family going forward. An ally from the next generation who would appreciate the magnitude, dare I say the magnificence, of what all this could lead to.” Franklin glanced over and smiled at Will again. “That's why he came to me.”

“But you were just a student here then, weren't you?” asked Will, confused.

“I was twelve,” said Franklin.

He stopped before a set of double doors and took out the porcelain key.

“But you see, I was very much like you, Will. I'd discovered the tunnels during my own explorations when I was still in short pants. A boy needs his adventures, doesn't he?”

“I guess so, sir.”

“And not unlike Ian Cornish, I found that something down in those caverns spoke to me as well. Not a voice, per se, but a feeling, an emanation that radiated intelligence, mystery, and the promise of something titanic. It was irresistible to my imagination. So I kept venturing back down below, a little deeper each time, until I finally made it to the doors. And that day, as I emerged from the tunnels, I found Lemuel waiting for me.”

“Was he angry at you?”

Franklin chuckled. “He tried to make me think so. But after we spoke for a while, he sensed we were kindred spirits. My curiosity was handsomely rewarded. Lemuel began taking me along with him on his trips down below—beyond the doors—showing me, a section at a time, the enormity of what they'd found.”

“You never told your father about this?”

“It was a secret only Lemuel and I shared,” said Franklin, raising his eyebrows mischievously. “Just as all this will be ours.”

He inserted the key into a large rectangular keyhole and turned it. Will heard the lock yield, and Franklin softly pushed the doors open.

A dimly lit carpeted room waited inside. Sleek, spare furnishings, a few expensive-looking works of modern art on the wall. Two leather wing-backed chairs.

Someone was sitting in one of the chairs, turned away from the door; Will saw a thick-soled, old-fashioned black shoe splayed out to the side on the floor but couldn't see the person's face.

“Until one day Lemuel asked me to share our secret with one of Father's colleagues, a faculty member here at the Center, one of my instructors, who'd also taken an interest in me. A man who they knew would appreciate what they'd discovered even better than I.

“You see, Will, from our inception in antiquity, the Knights have excelled at conducting what we would call today ‘deep background' on people who are of interest to us. And they couldn't have been more right about this man, or me, for that matter, or the whole situation. It's no exaggeration to say that this pairing became the turning point in our history.”

Franklin walked into the room. A sickly sour smell hung in the air, medicinal and threaded with a hint of rot. Will felt a shiver of fear root him to the floor. He forced his legs to carry him forward after his grandfather, toward the man in the chair.

“I'd like you to meet him, too, Will,” said Franklin, turning to face him once he reached the other side of the chair.

Will saw an ancient hand rise from the arm of the chair to beckon him closer. Sallow skin hung off the bones, spidery fingers trembled as they waved, fingernails looked like thick yellowed talons.

“Will…this is my mentor, Dr. Joseph Abelson.”

When Will finally saw the man's face, he nearly keeled over.

The pager buzzed quietly in Nick's pocket as he reached for a water bottle. Screened by the fridge's open door, he quickly slipped out the device and glanced at the message screen.

Go time.

“Holy crapanoly,” whispered Nick.

He dropped the pager back in his pocket and took a deep breath as he unscrewed the top of the water bottle. He took a small vial from his other pocket and unscrewed the top. He squeezed the rubber stopper on top, filling it, then drew out the glass vial and squeezed again, emptying the colorless contents of the vial into the water. Nick replaced the cap, pocketed the vial, and grabbed another bottle for himself.

“Here you go, Brooks.”

Brooke never looked up as Nick set the bottle of water down on the table in front of her, took a seat across from her, cracked open his own bottle, and drained half of it in a single swig.