The Messiah Choice (1985) (26 page)

"Art Cadell," the doctor explained, "does not exist. It's one of several hundred names used to identify the origin of anyone just happening on a place like this. We verified that MacDonald gave it in conversation to Miss Montagne, so she must have given it to you. The only question left is whether she gave it voluntarily or involuntarily."

The soup had some effect, and she began to feel a little better inside. She wasn't dumb, either, and the implications of all this were most interesting. If they checked on the origin of Cadell, they had to check with MacDonald himself—and they would hardly use long distance communications, which went by satellite these days, to do it. Not if they were on the other side.

"She gave it to me," Maria told him. "I don't know any way to prove that, though. We escaped together, but she didn't come all the way. She's waiting for a rescue now, I hope, but she won't wait much longer."

"Indeed? Why don't you tell me your story? All the details?"

She managed a slight smile. "How do I know which side
you're
on?"

"Fair enough. You don't. And, the fact is, we've expected company here for some time, but not of your type. We felt the place was compromised, but we wished to see who or what would show up or what sort of surveillance would be placed on it. I've been spending the summer here, just waiting and incidentally finishing up my book on unique south Caribbean value systems. Not, I don't hesitate to say, soon to be a best seller, but it will save my chair at Northwestern. We'd almost given up hope that this would pay off at all, and now here you are. I'd say you should tell us what the whole story is simply because you have no choice. Either we are friends who can help you, or we are enemies in whose power you now are and who can get anything from you we wish by other means, or, if you're no use, we can simply shove you out the door, naked, penniless, on a remote little island with a population of under four thousand and a per capita income of about eight hundred dollars a year. So, let's hear the story."

And she told him, starting with her arrival at the Institute, and she spared nothing in detail, not even her encounters with the Dark Man and her fear-induced conversion to his use. He broke in only occasionally, asking a question or two, but mostly let her speak her piece. He was particularly interested in anything she could give him on the Dark Man himself, which was very little.

Angelique's transformation fascinated him, but he did not question it. He was, however, quite concerned about the thrust of the attack on her core identity.

"They are trying to reduce her to the basic primitive— emotional, not rational, living half or more in the metaphysical realm. Her lack of real life experience makes her very vulnerable to this sort of thing. When they break her, they then plan to slowly build her back up the way they want her to be. I am, however, apprehensive at the ease of her escape when she is so central to them. I fear that this may not be a victory so much as part of the process."

"Ease! I'll tell you, it wasn't easy!"

"But it was. A complex like that would have constant watches on someone so important. Now consider the result. She has been forced more and more into using the metaphysical—
their
way—

to survive, and every time she does she becomes more and more like them. She has killed—not only under their control, but of her own free will—and thought nothing of it. After years of powerlessness, she has felt the heady wine of physical and metaphysical power.''

"Then—it was all for nothing?" Maria felt crushed by the idea.

"Perhaps. Perhaps they have overplayed their hand. They are quite adept at doing that, believe me. Until now, we have been relatively powerless, helpless onlookers. This is the break we prayed for, but it is a dangerous game. She is the key to their plans, and she is now exposed."

Maria felt a surge of energy. "Then—you'll rescue her?"

"We will try, of course. You see, we still operate under a handicap in that we don't really know their ultimate goals, only that she is a key player in their scheme. Whoever controls her controls something of the game. She will not only have to be gotten, she will have to be removed far from here as quickly as possible. Think of it as a game of chess. Both sides are playing, their side is winning, but there is only one queen. They have elected to jeopardize that queen in the hopes of greater gains. Our highest percentage move is to remove the queen from play, thus making their winning strategy impossible."

"Doctor—can you tell me this? Is this really some kind of black magic, some horrible thing from the supernatural, or is it science gone mad? Are we dealing with men and machines whose power and knowledge is so great that they fool themselves as well as us? Or is this truly the devil's own work?"

"I wish I knew. Both God and the devil have been quite content to work through humans most of the time, so the answer to that question may in fact be irrelevant. Many definitions of magic are based upon the idea that magic is anything the onlookers do not know or understand. The line is not clear, and we argue about it constantly, but the truth is that they can do what they claim to be able to do. They can materialize monsters to kill, they can bewitch and curse, and they can change the aspects and affect the wills of other people. Give me the identity of the Dark Man, and perhaps I can give you an answer. Perhaps." He paused a moment. "How do you feel?"

"Lousy," she told him. "But I am up to whatever is necessary."

He nodded. "Good girl. Now—could you find your way back to where you left her?"

The question startled her. Until now, she had never thought of this not inconsiderable problem.

"I—I don't know. I
shouldn't
be able to, but somehow I think I might. I can't explain it, and I can't know if I'm right until I do it."

He nodded again and glanced at his watch. "It's now close to one in the morning. Dawn is about three hours away. Use the time to gather what strength you can. Paula has found something for you to wear—not much, I fear, and probably not quite the right size, but it's a slip-on dress that will give you a little protection." He got up. "I must go out and make some preparations. We've had something set up on a contingency basis, if only to move you rapidly away, but now we have to activate it. We should leave as soon as possible."

After he left, she got up, and discovered just how weak she really was. Still, with Paula's help, she made it into the bathroom. She wanted to shower if she could, to wash off the last of the sweat and grime and sand, and she managed it. Standing there, toweling herself off, she looked at herself in the mirror. She was tanned unevenly but quite darkly, and there were spots where flecks of dead skin were peeling off. The spell had held; it was still a young, pretty face that stared back at her, the face of a teen-ager.

If only they could somehow win, the mirror promised a whole new life, a total new chance. For the first time she realized that the spell was more specific, more personal, than a mere gift of youth. This was the face and body that she'd had the day she'd made her terribly wrong choice on what to do with her life. This was Maria just before the Fall.

Neither the doctor nor Paula would be coming. A couple of big, black, musclebound men rowed her out from a point well north of the town and took her in silence to the looming hulk of a good sized fishing trawler. The crew looked native and the dominant language of the decks was Spanish, but she was ushered into the cabin area and came face to face with a big, bearded white man with long hair and weathered skin. A huge black man sat off in a corner drinking coffee. He hardly glanced at her as she entered.

"If you're the nurse, you
have
changed," the bearded man said genially. "Please—take a seat at the table here and get comfortable. We've met before. I'm Greg MacDonald."

She stared at him wonderingly, and it took several seconds before she could see that it was indeed the detective. "You're a wanted man," she noted. "Am I supposed to trust you?"

He grinned. "Not any more than any other man." He grew more serious. "Look, here's a chart of the entire area between Allenby and Bessel. I want you to look at it and tell me as much as you can from the point of your escape through all you can remember."

She stared at the map and saw the great number of tiny islands that lay in the way, but her mind seemed oddly clear. "We came around the island here, and then headed away due north until the place was completely out of sight."

He looked and nodded. "Good choice. The big antennas can't turn and see that close in that direction, let alone shoot anything. O.K., so we go north to about
here,
then what?"

"We—we made a sweeping turn to the southwest and headed—
oh!
There are
dozens
of islands along there! But we didn't see or hit any until the one we stopped at!"

"That's O.K. Now, you say you found a sheltered anchorage. Was it right on course when you hit the island, or did you have to go around it a bit?"

She thought a moment. "We went—right, along the coast a little. But it wasn't very big. It was a slip in the rocks, nothing more. We had to grab on to tree limbs and hanging vines to get up on the island itself."

He stared at the map, then beckoned a big black man with a thick moustache dressed in a formal shirt and striped gray pants. Clearly he was an officer of the ship. "Well, Senor Garcia?

Think you can pick the spot?"

The man looked at the chart, then reached under it and pulled out a large set of bound maps, each a blowup of part of the area covered by the larger chart. He flipped through, then said,

"There, I think." His accent was heavily Spanish, but it was impossible to tell the country. "It almost has to be this tiny one here—San Cristobal. The name is bigger than the island."

"Senor Garcia is the navigator," MacDonald explained to her. "Sorry to be so short with introductions, but we're on a tight schedule here. Look at this and see if it seems right."

She looked. Blown up to the scale of this map, and looking down, it was impossible to tell, but she saw that there was one tiny area that was shaped very much like her tiny slip, and the profile chart indicated a table top topography with rock sides. "It might be. I can't be sure, but it's got everything."

"I will inform the captain," Garcia told them. "We will not be able to lay in close there, so it will have to be done with the dinghy."

"How long until we get there?" MacDonald asked.

"Perhaps two hours, perhaps a little less. After five, certainly."

He whistled. "That's cutting it close. We may wind up doing this in daylight."

"Then I had best get started," Garcia responded, and was gone, leaving them alone in the cabin.

MacDonald sighed and got up. "Want some coffee? I sure need some. A good stiff belt after, but coffee right now."

"No, thank you. I'm still weak and my stomach's upset." She paused, hearing the engines begin to rise in pitch, and feeling as well as hearing the increase in their throbbing speed. The windows rattled rhythmically with the
thrum! thrum! thrum!
of the engines.

He got his and sat back down. "Rook couldn't give me more than the bare outlines. Mind filling me in on the story again?"

She didn't. "Uh—but what's this rook?"

"Chess piece. He's King's Rook. I'm Queen's Knight. I'm afraid you became Queen's Pawn One."

"Who's the king, then?"

He grinned. "That would be telling. They have their Dark Man, we have our King. I wish King had the powers the Dark Man had, but he's strong enough—I hope. Now, I want to know everything, starting with just what happened on that island while I was still there."

She told him, describing the terrible rites in the meadow, the tremendous power of the Dark Man and just how convincing he could be, the whole works.

He took it all in. "Tell me—did you ever see Sir Reginald with the Dark Man?"

"I never saw him at all, except occasionally in the dining hall or the library, going from one place to another. Why? Is
he
the Dark Man?"

"I don't know. He's the instigator, the man who started all this, that's for sure. What we don't know is whether or not he's still in control of it, or whether he just
thinks
he is. Go on. You were about to tell me about Angelique."

And she told him of the nightly forays, the terrible things they were made to do, and of the final transformation of Angelique and the spells that still bound her. And when she finished he pounded his fist on the table in anger, making the whole cabin shake.

"Damn
them!" he said in anger and frustration. "That poor girl. So we're going after somebody who's forced to look and think like a naked, stone age woman. Great!"

"She still knows it all. She might not be able to find the words for it, but she knows who she is and how she came to be that way and she'll know us, too. She hates the Dark Man. I think she'd do anything to defeat him. And, somehow, I get the feeling that as bad off as she is, she still feels better that way than the way she was. We can't know what kind of hell those seven years without feeling, without being able to move more than her head, but with the heart and mind of a young and smart girl, was like."

That sobered him. "Yeah, maybe you're right." It was trading one sort of hell for another, that was true, but there were always degrees of Hell.

"I'm not proud of my part in all of this," she told him, "but maybe somehow I can help make it right now."

"Yeah, well, don't let your guilt get to you all that much," he told her sympathetically. "I don't see how you could have done much else under the circumstances. This is a rough crowd, the most dangerous maybe that anybody's ever faced, and they're ready to spread out way beyond their current little base."

"And you—what of you during that time? They said you were dead."

"They knew better. I should have been, that's clear. I'll never know if they just built a good strong little building there or whether it was the fact that it was a church that stopped the thing.