Nexus Point (Meridian Series) (34 page)

       Paul heard the words this time, and his mind
raced through the metaphor, transcribing it all with elements of his own time
theory as Jabr spoke. He remembered Kelly; remembered that awful moment when
they emerged from the Arch, jubilant, and found that their friend was gone,
erased, his life snatched away as time engendered Paradox to balance her books.
“The wolves of misfortune indeed,” he whispered. Still. One hope returned to
him, a slim chance, but one he might gamble on. He looked at the token in his
hand, his Red Arrow, and an idea occurred to him.

       “Is there a very secret place in this
library,” he asked. “A special place, where something might be written that
will last a thousand years in peace?” A melancholy tone pervaded his voice, and
even as he spoke he realized the bleak prospects for his plan.

       “The Archive,” said Jabr. “We have a secret
cache of manuscripts, forbidden to all but initiates. Why do you ask,
Do-Rahlan?”

       “I have a request—a last wish, if you would
be so kind to grant me one.”

       “Anything,” said Jabr, smiling through
tears.

       “Take this token
and
place it in your archive, will you?”

       Jabr nodded understanding. “I would be
honored, Do-Rahlan. There is a copy of the Koran that has been stored here for
two centuries. I am permitted to touch it. I would be honored to bring it now,
and to read to you during these last hours. Will you hear the verse?”

       “Please,” said Paul with a smile. “I cannot
think of a better way to end my days, Jabr. Go and fetch your book, and I will
listen as you read.”

       Jabr was very pleased. His duty as
Mukasir
had been fulfilled! It was his to greet the uninitiated, the unenlightened, and
offer unto them the pathway opened by the Holy Koran. He hastened away,
animated with hope and an energy of great purpose.

       A moment later he returned with an old,
leather bound volume. Its leaves were smooth papyrus, and the edges of the
pages had been painted with gold. He opened the book, with great reverence,
bowing low and whispering a silent invocation as he did so.

       “I will go slowly,” he said, “for the words
are written in Arabic, and I must translate. Hopefully, we will be granted a
last interval of time for the verse to touch your heart.”

       “As God allows,” said Paul. He settled into
the bolster by the wall, closing his eyes and listening as Jabr began.

      
“In the name of Allah, the Compassionate,
the Merciful. All praise is due to unto Him, the Lord of the Worlds, the
Beneficent, the Merciful; Master of the Day of Judgment. Thee do we serve and
call upon for help in time of need.  Keep us on the right path, replete with
the favor of Thy will; not the path set down for those who go astray.

       “This Book, without any doubt, is a
guide to all those who guard against evil. Those who believe in the unseen and
keep faithful in prayer, and those who believe in that which has been revealed
– It is they who are sure of the hereafter. They are on a right course set down
by their Lord and truly, they shall be successful…”

29

Kelly stared
at the King of Diamonds on his terminal, still
struggling with the notion that it might be the mate to the card he held in his
hand. How could this be? Yet the chilling call from Nordhausen about Paul
harried him, and his gut told him something had happened.

       “Paul has traveled in time?” Maeve was
immediately skeptical. “Robert must be off his block. Does he think this 
technology is on sale at Sears or something? We’ve got millions of dollars with
of equipment here, a facility half the length of a city block, an electric bill
that’s astronomical—and that’s even with our own on-site power generation.”

       “I know it sounds crazy,” Kelly agreed. “Yet
add it all up, Maeve. Paul is apparently missing, and something has convinced Nordhausen
that he’s shifted in time. What that may be is anyone’s guess. He mentioned
someone else in that message—Rasil, and it was clear that he didn’t  want the
guy to find out about that phone call. Would you agree?”

       “I’ll give you that, but where was he
calling from?”

       “Let’s find out.” Kelly swiveled quickly in
his chair and keyed several commands. “The calls are being logged with GPS data
riders now—in fact they’ve been tracking cell and satellite phone calls for
years because of this terrorist thing. Let’s see… The corporate account here
allows us to access the GPS data as a security feature. Here it is. The call
originated from these coordinates.” His fingers were a blur on the keyboard and
Maeve instinctively bit her lip, remembering that errant keystroke that sent Paul
and Robert off to the late Cretaceous. “It’s near the Arabian border with
Jordan—Wadi Rumm!”

       “That’s not where the dig was.”

       “No. It’s well south and west of the place
where they found the Ammonite. What was Robert up to here?”

       “Probably trying to slip the thing out of
the country illegally, if I know him.” Maeve folded her arms, a disapproving
frown tugging at her features.

       “I’ll have a few Golems take a look at some
real-time data base servers on satellite imaging.” Kelly was all business
again. “Let’s have them fetch any unusual imagery from the vicinity of these
coordinates.”

       The Golems did not disappoint. In a matter
of minutes they had returned links to NASA and private industry data bases, one
of which had some unusual readings on infrared. “Something was generating a lot
of heat near the source of this call,” said Kelly. “Getting other readings as
well.”

       Maeve sighed. “Alright, let’s say something
is going on there. God only knows what. Let’s give Robert the benefit of the
doubt. God only knows
why
. Let’s say Paul was with him and something
happened to him—perhaps a residual effect of the original time shift.”

       “Right,” said Kelly. “We may be seeing some
kind of after effect that is commonplace. Maybe he’s slipped out of sync and
lapsed somehow. Maybe we didn’t have a good hold on him when we brought him
back.”

       “Why not call Robert back with the redial
feature on your phone?”

       “No, he sounded spooked. I’m as tempted as
you are, but it was clear to me that he did not want to be discovered making
that call. We have to assume he’s in some kind of danger here as well.”

       “From this Rasil?”

       “Right—an Arabic name, if I’m not mistaken.”

       “This is starting to smell,” said Maeve.
“What if someone found out about our first mission and the bad guys are up to
some mischief here?”

       “Terrorists? We re-wrote that whole history.
Ra’id Husan al Din was never even
born
in this Meridian.”

       “True,” said Maeve, “but think for a minute.
We could have never completed that mission without help from Mr. Graves. He was
carrying the vital clues that enabled us to zero in on the incident at
Kilometer 172. Remember how desperate he seemed? His little group of scientists
and researchers in the future were on their last legs. It was all they could do
to get a single man through the shadow cast by Palma so we could use the Arch
from here. And Graves waited seven years in this Meridian to make contact with
us. That’s patience, planning, and real determined intent. Suppose someone else
from that era didn’t like what Graves and his fellows accomplished?”

       “You think the Meridian is being tampered
with by someone in the future?”

       “Obviously! We’ve been sitting here on the
only Arch known to be in existence right now, and then your little Golems start
going crazy and we get a phone call saying Paul has shifted in time. We just
finish locating the probable origin of the variance, at least the temporal
locus. The contamination all begins late June of 1187, right before one of the
most pivotal moments in the history of the conflict between the Western world
and the Muslims. Everything before that time is quietly green on the
chronometer.” Maeve was piecing it all together now, just as she would fashion
her briefing arguments for the Outcomes Committee. 

       “The Golems flag a high variance data file,” Kelly
continued her train of thought, “and we’ve got an image of a token I know Paul
carried with him at all times—right there, near this place called Masyuf.”       

       “Ma-
sigh
-af,” Maeve corrected him
again.

       “Right – exactly where we isolated the
beginning of the Heisenberg Wave. He’s there, Maeve. Thick as thieves with the
Assassins—the prototype for all
our modern day
fundamentalist terror cells. I just know it
.”

       Maeve stared at him, deep in thought. Her 
mind was ticking off details, drawing silent conclusions, the look in her eyes
reflecting her inner states. “I agree,” she said. “Now, what do we do about it?
We didn’t send Paul anywhere. We’ve no pattern signature on him for this jump
and, correct me if I’m wrong, we need that to bring him back. Right?”

       “Generally…” Now it was Kelly who was
working the problem in his head. He took off his baseball cap, and scratched
the back of his neck. “I was moved without a pattern signature,” he said
slowly. “Paul said it was possible if you have an exact location on someone.
That’s how Graves and company pulled me out. They saw my location on the DVD
footage from Paul’s security camera. We talked about it privately afterwards.
Paul seems to think that when someone travels in time their very presence is offensive,
as he termed it, in the new Meridian. Time doesn’t want them there. She’s a bit
like you, Maeve: a place for everything, and everything in its place.”

       “So we get Paradox cleaning up everything
that doesn’t fit after the protective interval of the Nexus fails.” The
implications of what she was saying hit home to both of them. “Which means Paul
could be in trouble—at the brink of complete annihilation, just like you were
before Graves’ people pulled you to safety.”

       “Right…” Kelly bit his lip. “So we’ve got to
try and fetch Paul.” He looked at her, drawing the obvious conclusion to their
thinking.

       “But how?” Maeve returned the obvious
question.

       “We’ve got the Arch on standby and I can
have coordinates set up for the temporal and spatial location of this hidden
archive in thirty minutes.”

       “But Kelly, how will we know Paul is there?”

       “The Red Arrow,” said Kelly with finality.
“It was to be used only in matters of utmost importance. The coming of that
damn King of Diamonds is a sign of grave and present danger. He’s
there
,
Maeve. I’ll bet my life on it. He used the token as a sign to indicate his
geographic location at the moment of greatest danger.”

       “Kelly…” Maeve saw the pain in his eyes but
she had to speak her mind. “That book could have been moved a hundred times in
the last thousand years. Sure, it was unearthed from its final resting place,
but that’s not evidence that Paul was in that archive. He could have dropped
the card anywhere before it got stuck it in that book. See what I’m driving at?”

       Kelly had a frustrated look on his face, but
he put his baseball cap back on and pointed at the screen. “Then we’ll go
look,” he said firmly.

       “What?”

       “We’ll run a spook job and take a peek.”

       “Now you’re not making any sense again,”
Maeve protested. She hated to play the devil’s advocate with Paul’s life at
stake now, but facts were facts, and that part of her who ruled on Outcomes and
Consequences could not overlook these things. “Spook job?”

       “Sorry,” said Kelly. “That’s just my term
for a recon operation. We think we have a good picture of events from the
written history that has accumulated over the years, but we don’t. We only see
the account of a few key writers and researchers—perhaps only 1% of what
actually happened was written about. Sure the big stuff gets a lot of coverage,
but we all know that it’s the little stuff that
really matters. The humdrum moments of inconsequential
time on
the Meridian can hide Pushpoints that set all the big events in motion.”

       “True,” Maeve relented. “I was going to
argue this in the Research Committee, but it seemed to play right up
Nordhausen’s alley, so I didn’t push it. To really know if we’re going to open
the right spot in a Meridian, we have to run a lot of reconnaissance. That way
we could take a look at a situation and see if our research is correct.”

       “Exactly!” Kelly had the fire lit in his
belly now, and he was already walking over to the coordinate module.
“Ninety-percent of our actual Arch time would be short jumps to simply take a
peek at something—spook runs.”

       “Why do you call them that?”    

       “Because on a recon operation we just open
the Meridian for a few seconds—we don’t do a full breaching sequence. The
traveler just appears, like an apparition, if you will, and then vanishes
again. But for that brief moment they should be able to see the milieu we’re
targeting. Then we bring ‘em right back home. I know it may be a long shot,
Maeve but I have to do this—for Paul. I’m going to take a peek inside that damn
archive in the year 1187 and see what’s there.
If
anything, it might give us some clue—or at least confirm if this line is
anywhere close to the mark.”