The Keepers of the Library (8 page)

“So I was told. Hawkbit rings no bells.”

Will was trying to be polite. “There was a girl who spent over half an hour online with my son three days ago sitting on this chair, and you’re telling me you can’t remember who it was?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you, Mr. Piper. If it were a book, perhaps I’d remember it. I’m not nearly as good with people.”

Will pulled out a picture of Phillip. “This is my son. Have you seen him?”

She shook her head.

“Annie, give Mrs. Mitchell one of your cards. If you see him around here, please call her right away.”

The librarian nodded like a bobblehead doll. “He’s a handsome boy, isn’t he?”

T
hey walked the short distance to the Black Bull Hotel and checked into side-by-side rooms. A prearranged hire car, a Ford Maltese, was waiting for them at a charging stand in the car park. Annie suggested that Will have a bit of a rest but he brushed off the suggestion and told her to meet him in the lobby in fifteen minutes.

He sat down on the thin mattress. The patterned red carpet and the burgundy walls made him queasy. He could hear Annie, muffled through the thin wall, opening and closing her wardrobe.

He fished his phone from his pocket. He’d never gravitated to NetPens. His phone was basic; there was little commercial demand for the old models anymore. All it was good for was phone calls, texts, and basic Web browsing on a small, antiquated LCD display. No unfurling screens, no 3-D or gesture commands. He used the keyboard to type a short text to Nancy: he’d hooked up with MI5, he’d arrived in Kirkby Stephen, nothing to report yet.

They spent the rest of the afternoon canvassing. First stop was the local police station, an unmanned office administered from Kendal. A community patrol officer whom Annie had called earlier unlocked the door and offered to put on the kettle. Annie presented her credentials to the young man who seemed over the moon to be involved in a Home Office case. The officer helped them copy a stack of photos of Phillip emblazoned with the police phone number, then he joined them, walking the streets and squares of Kirkby Stephen, leaving the pictures off at pubs, cafes and local businesses and asking passersby if they’d seen the boy.

Officer Brent Wilson, tall and lean, chatted amiably and gave a running commentary of his patch. “It’s a nice little town,” he said. “Quiet-like. The occasional problem, of course, but it’s usually the same bad actors over and over. You get a call-out t’ a certain address, you know precisely what’s going t’ transpire. Mostly, it’s th’ economy that causes the problems. Hit us hard here. The 9 February business, but I expect you know more about that than I! Jobs’ve dried up. People are listless, depressed-like. More drink. More drugs. Worst off, we’ve had a bunch of youngsters, some as young as thirteen, hanging themselves. They leave the most pitiful messages
behind. It’s like an epidemic.” He sighed, his voice trailing off, “Oh well.”

Will knew the story. The same thing was playing out in towns and cities in America, and from what he’d read, the rest of the world. The Horizon was coming. It was weighing hard, and the vulnerable weren’t coping. For his part, he was determined to ignore February 9.
Que sera, sera
was his public posture on the Horizon.
Fuck it
, was his private one.

At dusk Will and Annie made their last stop of the day at Kirkby Stephen Grammar School, a small secondary school at the edge of the town with fewer than four hundred students. The headmistress received them sympathetically and let them post the photos on the community bulletin board and in the library. Hawkbit? A local wildflower, wasn’t it? And that was all she had to offer.

Will was dragging. Annie told him she’d be fine on her own and urged him to have some food in his room and a good rest but he was too old-school for that, and besides, he thought she was treating him geriatrically. He insisted on joining her for dinner in the Bull’s restaurant.

The dining room was dimly lit. It smelled of beer. Only three tables were occupied, and the waitress went through the motions as if drugged. Will kept trying to check her pupils to confirm his suspicion. The meal was some kind of pasta affair pulled from the deep freezer. He ate it automatically, more interested in the bottle of French wine, which wasn’t half-bad. He was medically cleared to drink in strict moderation but moderation for him was a squishy concept. Splitting a bottle of wine was moderate enough, he reckoned.

Annie wasn’t keeping pace. It seemed to Will she
wasn’t going to get off more than a single glass. He playfully asked about it.

“When we’re in the field, we’re considered on duty twenty-four/seven. One drink with dinner’s generally allowed, but that’s it, I’m afraid.”

“Seems Puritanical,” he said. “More of an American attitude.”

She laughed at that. “I haven’t been in the Service long enough to learn which rules can be bent. Better to follow the straight and narrow.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever come across a straight line,” Will said, putting back the rest of his glass and reaching for the bottle. “So why’d you decide on this line of work?”

“It seemed rather exciting on the face of it. Important work and all that. It was this or the City—all my brothers went into finance—and I’m afraid I would have been bloody awful at making money.”

“That makes two of us. Apparently you weren’t one of your generation who used the Horizon as an excuse to slack off.”

“No, but a lot of my school friends did. Many of them seem exceedingly pleased with themselves, I must say. Cracked the code and all that. The worker bees keep all the essential goods and services operating right till the end while they party like there’s no tenth of February.”

“If that’s what the code says, it’s pretty depressing, not that I’m intolerant of hedonism. I’ve been a practitioner most of my life.”

“You never worked again after the Doomsday case?”

“I was close to my twenty years of government service. They pensioned me early to get me off the stage. Got pulled back into things a year or so later, went public with the Library as a survival mechanism, then settled into permanent retirement.”

She tapped her fingertips together pensively. “Can I ask you something? I’ve always wondered—and we even had a module on this at school—whether your personal motivations extended beyond the personal safety of you and your family. I mean, did you have a philosophical or moral viewpoint about the public’s right to know what an elite element of the government already knew?”

It was a question Will had publicly fielded over and again when he’d done his book tour years earlier. At the time, he’d articulated a high-minded position about the rights of an individual to know what their leaders knew, that people had the absolute right to the knowledge that their date of death was predetermined. He left it to wiser men than him to decide whether an individual ought to know his or her own death date. He said he was ultimately supportive of the decision of a presidential commission that stated that individuals and society as a whole would be best served if the dates remained closely held and subject to strict safeguards to protect individual rights.

Now he was a little drunk and as tired as he’d been in a long time. “You want to know why I blew the whistle on Area 51 and the watchers? You really want to know?”

She did.

“Because those fuckers really pissed me off.”

Back in his room, he stripped and collapsed on the bed. He was woozy but had the presence of mind to do his nightly heart check. He placed the Heart-Check cup on his chest and waited for it to issue an audible report.

Heart rate 74. Normal Sinus Rhythm. No action required.

He grunted, put the cup away, and shut off the light.

Tomorrow they’d repeat the exercise of handing out Phillip’s photo in the nearby towns of Appleby and Sedbergh. Then they’d hit up smaller villages. What else could they do?

Through the wall, he heard Annie getting ready for bed.

In the old days—

I
t was almost pitch-dark. The moon was out but it was shrouded in cloud, a diffuse ruddy disc high in the night sky. Without illumination all he could do was run and stumble, get up and run and stumble again.

Nothing in his life had prepared him for this. The fear was like curare, gradually paralyzing his legs; he had to struggle to keep the muscles pumping.

The terrain was uneven and treacherous. It had rained earlier, and the heavy grass was slick as ice, particularly on the slopes. He steered by gravity. Every time he found himself going uphill, he corrected course.

Level is good, he thought.

Uphill is bad.

The hills led to wilderness and isolation.

The flats were more likely to lead to a road.

He stopped to catch his breath and listen.

The wind whipped past his ears. Beside that, all he could hear was his own shivering. He wasn’t dressed for a February in these parts and he’d gotten thoroughly drenched from the wet grass. Otherwise, it was quiet. Completely quiet. He felt for his NetPen. It was still in his pocket despite multiple tumbles. He had no idea if it had a charge, no idea if he’d get a signal.

It
had
to work.

He trotted again, wanting desperately to make further progress before daring to stop to use the mobile. How long had he been running? A half hour? Longer?

Blinding pain!

He’d run into something hard and unyielding and it put him down. His knees hurt, and he tasted blood in his mouth.

He felt the obstacle with his hand. It was a low stone wall, and he’d rammed it hard enough to make his teeth hurt.

He picked himself up and carefully climbed over the waist-high structure.

Then he heard something behind him. A voice in the distance. He was sure of it.

He crouched behind the wall and looked over it from the direction he’d come. There was a distant streak of bluish light.

Then he saw dark shapes moving slowly toward him.

He wanted to get up and run again, but his knees hurt, he was exhausted and he was too scared.

The shapes got closer.

He closed his eyes.

Baaaaa
.

From the blackness, a sheep emerged.

He put his hand out, unafraid of the comforting touch of woolly warmth, but the animal stopped dead in its tracks before being joined by more beasts. The sheep halted their advance and stared at him. Then the flock, as one, slowly and cautiously retreated.

On the other side of the wall there was another voice. Two men calling out to each other. “Th’t weh,” he heard in the distance. “Aye, th’t weh.”

He pulled the NetPen from his pants pocket and held his breath while he pushed the
ON
button. It glowed red: only seconds to minutes of battery life.

Unfurling would drain power.

“Send emergency beacon,” he whispered into the unfurled pen.

“Recipient?” the pen asked. He lowered the volume.

“Will Piper.”

“Attach a message?”

“Yes.”

“Dictate message,” the pen instructed.

T
he chime was light and melodic and wouldn’t have awakened Will if he’d been sleeping soundly. But the alien mattress, the stuffiness of the room, and his incipient jet lag contributed to fitful sleep.

He blinked awake and tried to pinpoint the source of the insistent tone.

His mobile phone.

It sounded like the tone from a text message but it didn’t extinguish: it kept chiming.

He reached for the device on his nightstand, touched the screen, and read the message:

He sat upright, breathing hard, and touched yes.

I
t was four in the afternoon at Groom Lake. Roger Kenney was at his workstation six floors below the parched desert floor, getting ready for the afternoon exodus, the ritual known as the Strip ‘n Scan, where every employee had to undergo a high-tech strip search to make sure the database never left the premises. Of course, that hadn’t stopped a genius like
Mark Shackleton from beating the system back in 2009 with a plastic thumb drive up his rear end, but the scanning technology was foolproof now.

With an alert, a window opened on his wall screen.

The screen announced: Priority Alert. Significant activity on Surveillance File 189007, Will Piper.

Kenney looked up, mildly interested. He’d put up a routine data-collection matrix on Piper when he learned the FBI had requested MI5 liaison assistance about the disappearance of his son. He did it on the off chance it had something to do with Chinese Doomsday. “I’m a thorough son of a bitch,” he liked to tell his people. “You want to get ahead in this world: walk like I do, talk like I do, act like I do. I’m not arrogant, people, I’m just right.” Besides, there were few people on the planet Kenney hated more than Will Piper. He hadn’t pulled the trigger on Malcolm Frazier but he might as well have. Any legitimate excuse to spy on him was welcome. And you never knew. One thing might lead to another. The thought of a reckoning was more than appealing.

“Display file,” Kenney commanded.

A sat-map came up of undulating green terrain devoid of man-made features except for a web of stone walls. The middle of nowhere.

“Play audio file.”

It was a boy’s voice, a tight, frightened voice in a half whisper.

Five minutes later, Kenney was in Admiral Sage’s office, replaying the intercepted transmission.

“What does he mean by the Librarians?” the admiral asked.

“No idea, sir. The term isn’t in our databases.”

“I don’t like it.”

“No, sir.”

“You did good by putting a screen on Piper. Good piece of lateral thinking. The history of Area 51 has taught us that with Will Piper, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”