On the screen, the time display certifies that this video was shot forty hours after the deadly event. Four days ago. By then, the forensic pathologists had been brought here. At that time, they had been in a nearby lab equipped with autopsy stations, being briefed before going to work.
The scene is the cafeteria that’s been converted into a morgue. Three banks of ceiling lights are operated independently. So as not to tax the portable chillers by adding heat, only one bank of lights is on, the smallest of the three, over the long serving station with its empty food wells. The rest of the room is dimly limned but not dark. Maybe it’s some flaw in the camera lens that makes the scene appear to be underwater, the quality of light reminiscent of that issuing from an illuminated aquarium that hasn’t been kept as clean as it should be. Although still wearing the clothes in which they died, the victims lie beneath sheets, on fifty-five tables. No one is in attendance of the dead.
The first inexplicable development occurs on a table in the middle row of five. The camera that records the moment is mounted on the ceiling, one of three in the room. The shape beneath the shroud is alike to all the shapes on fifty-four other tables. Suddenly the sheet rises, as if the corpse beneath it has attempted to sit up. The white cotton cerement slides away, onto the floor, revealing—nothing. It’s as if the resurrectee vanished in the act of rising. If the sheet hadn’t clearly been covering something, Calaphas might believe a draft and gravity conspired to mimic a ghostly presence. But the sheet hadn’t been lying flat on an empty table; a body had been under it.
The second inexplicable development occurs ten seconds later, at a table just a few steps from the first. Apparently, impossibly, under its own power, a sheet draws back from the face and torso of a victim, a woman in her forties who stares with sightless eyes. Her mouth is open in a silent cry. After three seconds, the shroud flows into place, again covering her. It’s as if an invisible man wanted to confirm the nature of the place in which he found himself and, having done so, respectfully covered the deceased.
The third inexplicable development begins thirty-seven seconds after the first, when the door to the room eases inward, admitting a narrow blade of light from the corridor. No one enters. After three seconds, the door opens wider. The hallway appears deserted. Perhaps the door wasn’t tightly closed and has swung open of its own weight. No. Now it swings shut and remains closed. Durand Calaphas is not a superstitious man, the furthest thing from it, but it seems to him that a specter opened the door, peered out to be sure no one was in the corridor, and then quickly exited the makeshift morgue.
As one who believes this world has no great moment or meaning, that the Earth is little more than a killing ground to be enjoyed by those who have a taste for blood sport, he is not convinced to revisit his philosophy by these ghostly occurrences. Intrigued, he replays the forty-six seconds to exhaustion, straining for an explanation—until he sees a fourth thing that he has repeatedly overlooked.
Because of the poor lighting and maybe because this particular camera produces video of a lesser quality than the others, he needs to review the evidence often before he notices three moments in the sequence when faint, pale plumes manifest out of nothing and quickly dissipate. For a few minutes, they mystify him, but just as he is prepared to attribute these manifestations to glitches in the stream of digital video, he remembers that the morgue is chilled to between thirty-four and thirty-six degrees. The plumes must be exhalations of the resurrectee, who somehow remains unseen by the camera.
Ghosts do not respire. Neither can there be such a thing as an invisible man.
Calaphas’s phone rings. The call is from Hugo Schummer, one of the agents securing research files and overseeing the pathologists who are performing the autopsies. All fifty-four cadavers have been identified. The one project-staff member on the duty roster not yet accounted for is the head of security, Michael Mace.
TAKING A BREATHER
The clouds thicken into a gray plain that in places folds into narrow tectonic valleys where gathered blackness gradually acquires a power that will crack the sky and loose a deluge. In Michael’s current mood, as his thoughts circle around Shelby Shrewsberry and the untimely end that befell that good man, he wonders if the current signs of Armageddon will soon bring the world to the real thing. He also wonders if he can delay the descent of that ultimate darkness with his gift. Perhaps, instead, he might unwittingly be the agent of the final great war and the subsequent Apocalypse.
In Carter Woodbine’s Bentley, he is southbound on Pacific Coast Highway. The elegant car isn’t yet on the National Crime Information Center’s list of stolen vehicles. Michael has planted a data trigger in the NCIC computer system; he will be alerted when the Bentley’s license-plate number appears in that registry, and he’ll immediately remove it from there, and then trace backward to delete it from the files of any city, county, or state law-enforcement agency that provided it to the NCIC. No beat cop or highway patrolman will be looking for these wheels. Besides, the crooked attorney is unlikely to report it stolen and risk that Michael, if apprehended, will explain where he got the four hundred thousand in his possession.
Michael is likewise able to replace Woodbine’s name with his own in the Department of Motor Vehicles’ records, assigning ownership of the car to himself, should he care to do so. If his purpose were theft, he’d clean up the chain of title by invading the records of the automobile dealership from which the Bentley was purchased and replacing Woodbine’s name with his own as the buyer; whereafter, it would be necessary to penetrate the files of the bank through which the attorney issued payment to the dealership and erase evidence of the transaction. All that effort would require a few minutes, but it would be a waste of time. Soon Michael won’t be living under his own name, but rather under a long series of false identities crafted with such attention to detail that they can’t be disproven. He has borrowed the Bentley only for a day or two.
To the right of the highway, empty parking lots lay in service of a wide, deserted beach. The sand slopes but two or three degrees to a sea that takes its color from the sky, as always it does, ash-gray now and with no grace of foam on the chop. A wind has come out of the north to whirl fine sand and paper litter into pale robed and hooded ghosts that haunt the day like the spirits of monks sworn to some strange faith, weaving southward on a fitful pilgrimage.
Michael continues to Newport Beach, cruising along the fabled yacht harbor, past water-view restaurants on the right, with luxury-car dealerships and boatyards on the left. Farther south, in that neighborhood of Newport known as Corona del Mar, a bustling place of busy shops, he turns right off the coast highway into a village of tree-lined streets, where quaint single-story homes have mostly been replaced by large houses in an architectural potpourri.
Ocean Boulevard follows a bluff high above a public beach. On the inland side of the street, multimillion-dollar residences crowd one another on narrow lots. Seaward, a grassy park is punctuated here and there with driveways to houses that are pinned to the bluff with steelwork and concrete pillars. It is to one of these that Michael pilots the Bentley, with no need to consult the sedan’s navigation system.
The home is ultramodern, not impressive from the street, toward which it presents only a dark slate roof, a sleek wall clad in slabs of white quartzite, heavily tinted windows, and three garage doors of brushed stainless steel. Having intruded into the computerized records of a company that facilitates the booking of private homes for vacationers all over the world, Michael knows that the owners of this place, Frederico and Jessica Columbia, are currently enjoying someone else’s spacious apartment in Paris for the next month. The family from Paris, at the moment vacationing in Brazil, will arrive to occupy this house in six days. In five days, a housekeeping service will prepare the premises in advance of the French guests. For four days, the place offers Michael a refuge.