Forced Perspectives Read online

  The sock was stiff, and he grimaced and wiped his hand on his damp shirt as he crossed the street to his car.

  Maybe Harlowe, for all his insectile cleverness, had no way of tracing Castine or Vickery besides the sock. Or even if he did, maybe they would have the sense to flee L.A. very fast and far, right now. Without those two, Harlowe’s Singularity project would surely fail, and Agnes Loria would not lose her identity—even if losing it was what she wanted. In that case, Ragotskie would be fortunate in having failed to kill Castine!

  He peered back over the top of the car as he unlocked the door. He didn’t see Taitz or Foster, and he exhaled and relaxed as he got in.

  But Castine and Vickery might hang around. How much did they know? They might have, they probably had, plans of their own. They might even want to approach Harlowe, in some mutually secure location.

  Ragotskie’s face was cold with the realization that he might have to kill Castine, or Vickery, after all.

  The thought nauseated him.

  They had driven away west with the man in the plaid jacket. Luckily Ragotskie’s car was facing that way. He could drive west a few blocks and find a place to park, and then try to make the sock pendulum do its trick.

  CHAPTER THREE:

  Is Supergirl Thirsty?

  Lateef Fakhouri steered his rented Nissan around the curled onramp onto the northbound 405 freeway, and he was troubled by the way he had handled the pair of fugitives. He had dropped them off at the Delta departures terminal, but he had very little confidence—none, in fact—that they would actually buy tickets and fly to some distant city. He really should have detained them, somehow.

  His present posting with the Ministry of Antiquities was temporary; ordinarily he was employed as a clerk in the research division of the General Intelligence Directorate, in a branch office in Lazhogli Square in Cairo, and his duties until recently had consisted mainly of cross-referencing reports of illegal tunnels between Sinai and Gaza. But while tracing the origins of some wooden ushabti statues looted from a tomb in Saqqara, he had come across a disturbing, decades-old file—it was marked as property of the State Security Investigations Service, which had been shut down shortly after the 2011 revolution. The SSI had purged most of its records in the turbulent days before its official dissolution, but this file, labeled Austria, 1855, had somehow escaped the hasty shredding of files.

  Some of the papers in the file had been very old, having to do with the gift of a number of Pharaonic antiquities to Archduke Maximilian of Austria in 1855; those items had eventually found their way to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, but notes in the SSI file indicated that one particular item, designated Ba: World Soul: Restricted, had disappeared between the initial indexing and a later inventory conducted in 1862. The item was described as a fired clay panel of Third Dynasty hieroglyphics, four or five thousand years old. A report dated 1922, badly translated from the French, indicated that the artifact had been destroyed in Paris, but noted—with evident disapproval—that a Norwegian Egyptologist had photographed it beforehand.

  Lateef Fakhouri had been ready to consign the file to the vast records archive at Heliopolis when he noticed newer pages on blue-lined notebook paper tucked into a pocket at the back of the file. These proved to be handwritten notes made by the assembler of the file, an SSI agent named Khalid Boutros, who had died in the 1990s.

  According to these notes, Boutros had become concerned about the Norwegian Egyptologist’s photograph of the lost artifact after viewing some—Fakhouri had had to read the words twice—some coloring books published in Los Angeles in 1966. A page cut from one of the coloring books was paper-clipped to Boutros’ notes; printed on the page was a complicated stylized design, and in the margin someone had written, in blurred and faded ball-point ink, Acid test, Cinema Theater, Hollywood, February 25 ’66.

  From the description in the 1855 transfer index, the SSI agent Khalid Boutros had known that the clay panel of hieroglyphs had originally been taken from a particular tomb in Saqquara, the ancient necropolis twenty miles south of Cairo, and he had driven out there in 1967. According to his notes, Boutros had spent two days picking his way among the weathered walls and tumbled stones of the necropolis until, in a sand-clogged corridor near the pyramid of Djoser, he had found the recessed rectangular patch that the clay panel had once occupied. It was high up on a shadowed wall, and Boutros had piled up stones to reach the spot. A corner of the missing panel had still been clinging to the wall, and from the state of that fragment Boutros had somehow come to conclusions that impelled him to fly to Los Angeles.

  The only notes which might have referred to that trip, and which apparently concluded the file, were a few words scrawled on the back of the last sheet of lined paper: Chronic egregore, neutralized by Nu hieroglyph, and below that, Saqqara fragment inert, as of 31/10/68. In Christian cultures, 31/10 was All Hallow’s Eve—Halloween.

  And behind the last page of notes was a photograph of a hieroglyph depicting three pots, three wavy lines, and what appeared to be a bracket laid on its side like a table. On the back of the photograph someone, presumably Khalid Boutros, had scrawled NU.

  Fakhouri had looked up the word “egregore,” and found that it was used in Eliphas Levy’s book Le Grand Arcane, posthumously published in 1868, to describe ancient quasi-angelic beings dangerous to mankind; though in the writings of the later Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the term referred to a kind of group-mind, arising from a number of strongly aligned individual human minds but existing independent of them, autonomous—a new and superior category of being.

  For a week Fakhouri had brooded on the enigmatic old file, and then he had done two things.

  First, he had put an aluminum ladder in the back of his car and driven south to the ruins of Saqqara, and, following Khalid Boutros’ old account, had found the section of wall from which the ancient panel had been taken. He had to roll aside the stones Boutros had stacked there fifty years earlier in order to set up his ladder. Crouched with a flashlight at the top of it, Fakhouri had seen the fragment of fired clay that remained on the wall, as Boutros had described; but when he touched it, his hand sprang away. It was vibrating, and as hot as a pan over a high flame. Anything but “inert.”

  Then, back in his office, Fakhouri had put through an official research request for any recently published American coloring books, especially any that might originate in or around the city of Los Angeles. The request must have struck the consulate and embassy staffs as peculiar, but there had been no indignant replies.

  While waiting for results, he had dug out some research volumes on the gods of ancient Egypt, and found that Ba, represented in hieroglyphs by a hawk with a man’s head, wasn’t a specific god, but was a “world soul”—something analogous to a magnetic field or carrier wave—that defined, and even permitted the existence of, gods. And Nu, he learned, was the oldest of the ancient Egyptian gods, and was likewise more of a force than a person—it embodied profound absence, lack of form, the ultimate welcoming void. It was represented by the sea.

  And when a bundle of new coloring books had eventually been delivered to his office, he’d found in several of them the same intricate, stylized pattern that Khalid Boutros had found in the coloring book from 1966. These new coloring books, in both English and Spanish, were apparently aimed at adults, consisting mainly of diagrams of people sitting yoga-style or standing with spread arms and rays emanating out of their heads, but the mysterious pattern occupied the first and last pages. These coloring books had been printed in 2017 by a company—ChakraSys Inc.—that was located in Los Angeles.

  Fakhouri had noticed that the many curved and straight lines in the center of the repeated pattern formed the profile outline of a hawk with a spike-bearded human head.

  After he had put all the flimsy booklets away in a desk drawer, he had tried to recall the profile outline—and it seemed to him that it had differed, in some lines, from the illustrations of the Ba hieroglyph he had seen in the
reference books. And he was obscurely glad that he had not stared at it for more than a few seconds.

  The patchwork data he had assembled so far was troubling:

  A variant depiction of Ba, the World Soul, on a hieroglyph panel—restricted, eventually destroyed, but photographed some time before 1922—appearing decades later in coloring books in California, in connection with some enterprise—some egregore?—that Boutros had believed he had stopped in October of ’68 by somehow using the contrary Nu hieroglyph. And Boutros had confirmed the closure of the affair to his own satisfaction by again visiting the wall in Saqqara from which the panel had originally been taken, and finding the remaining fragment of it reassuringly “inert.”

  Saqqara fragment inert, as of 31/10/68

  Boutros had stopped it then, at any rate.

  But when Fakhouri had recently touched the fragment on the wall in Saqqara, it was hot, and vibrating—no longer describable as inert. And now the image-concealing pattern was again appearing in coloring books printed in Los Angeles. Whatever phenomenon it was that old Khalid Boutros had discovered and stymied in 1968—Ba: World Soul: Restricted—Chronic egregore—it was evidently happening again.

  Nobody in the General Intelligence Directorate was likely to take these vague and outlandish suspicions seriously, so Fakhouri had told his chief that he had discovered some possible irregularities in the “King Tut: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh” exhibit at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, and requested a temporary transfer to the Ministry of Antiquities, which had organized the exhibition. The transfer had been approved by both agencies, and Fakhouri had been assigned to the Los Angeles Egyptian Consulate.

  And he had begun his investigation by tracing the source of the new coloring books—ChakraSys Publications.

  When the pearl-white Ford pulled into the parking lot and slowed, and then stopped fifty yards away from the back side of the ChakraSys building, a boy who had been sitting beside a bicycle in the shade of a camphor tree stood up and got on the bike and began pedaling across the hot asphalt. His gray hoodie was thrown back, and the wind fluttered his uncombed black hair.

  Within the last half hour, three U-Haul trucks had driven into the lot and backed up to the rear entrance of the ChakraSys building, and people were carrying desks and lamps out and wrestling them up the ramps of the trucks.

  The boy halted his bike by the rolled-up driver’s side window of the Ford. This car had driven into the parking lot several times over the last couple of days, and had always parked this way, far from the ChakraSys building but in a position to watch it.

  The window buzzed down, and the boy noted for the first time that the man behind the wheel had a moustache and black hair—perhaps he was Hispanic too.

  “Can I help you?” the man said in a harried tone.

  “You’re afraid of them,” the boy said, “but you watch.” The man just blinked out at him in evident confusion, and the boy went on, “I watch them also.”

  “Them? What them?”

  The boy nodded toward the U-Haul trucks.

  “Uh . . . ” The man scratched his nose. “So why is it that you watch them?”

  The boy squinted speculatively at him, then said, “I mean to stop them. I think you do too.”

  The man laughed weakly. “How have they offended you?” He raised one hand and flipped his fingers toward Venice Boulevard. “Go home, young bey.”

  The boy sighed and glanced at the trucks. “They mean to make a monster, did you know that?”

  “A monster.” The man sighed, looking at the trucks. “You could say so.”

  “And Simon Harlowe’s people killed a man I loved, who knew about them and tried to fight them.” The boy braced one foot on a pedal, ready to ride away quickly; then pulled at the back of his hoodie, and when the fabric over his right pocket was drawn tight, the raised outline of a pistol was visible. “I want to finish my friend’s work, and avenge him.”

  The man recoiled in the car seat. “Ach, so many guns here! Even a child! And Simon Harlowe is not in that building now—he is off pursuing two people he wants for his, his monster. Go home, forget this, leave it to others . . . and throw that thing away.”

  “My home is wherever I am. What people?”

  The man laughed again, no more strongly than before. Perhaps to himself, he muttered, “Two people who drove a taco truck to Hell, and came back, in this mad country. Go away now, boy.”

  The boy nodded. “Sebastian Vickery and Ingrid Castine.”

  The man was staring intently at him now, and twice he opened his mouth and closed it without saying anything. Finally he asked, “Who are you?”

  “Santiago.” The boy went on, “I watch and carry messages—I keep track of things. Vickery and Castine owe me money, they are not for Harlowe’s monster.”

  “And you know—you know?—about Harlowe, ChakraSys, what they are doing?”

  Santiago nodded solemnly. “I know what my friend told me, and what the freeway gypsies say.”

  After a moment of hesitation, the man waved toward the trucks and spoke quickly: “Harlowe is obviously moving his base of operations, and I need to follow them. But—ya allah, saa’edni!—how can I get in touch with you?”

  Santiago recited the number of one of his disposable phones, and as the man scribbled it on a receipt from the console, the boy asked, “And who are you?”

  “Oh—it is best that you don’t know. What you—”

  “I won’t work with someone whose name I don’t know.”

  The man looked at him and laughed in surprise. “But how can you know I’ll tell you my real name?”

  Santiago waved toward the ChakraSys building and the people carrying furniture into the trucks. “You work against the Harlowe pulgas, so you are like my friend, who they killed. And he was honest.”

  The man barked one syllable of a laugh. “A street urchin compels me! Well, so be it, inshallah.” Carefully he said, “I am Lateef Fakhouri.”

  Santiago nodded. “Call me if you think you can help me in this.” He nodded, then stepped up on the pedal and rode away from the car toward Venice Boulevard.

  Sebastian Vickery and Ingrid Castine, back in Los Angeles! Santiago wished his surrogate father had not been killed—old Isaac Laquedem would have known what to do here.

  At the airport, Vickery and Castine had waited inside the Delta terminal until their enigmatic rescuer had steered his white Nissan back into the flow of traffic. When the car had disappeared in the one-way current of taxis and shuttle buses, they had walked to the International terminal, got into a taxi there, and asked to be driven to MacArthur Park. They didn’t speak during the twenty-minute ride except to make absentminded small talk; Vickery remarked on the resemblance of several downtown L.A. office buildings to rocket ships, and Castine noted that modern cars all used to look like computer mouses and now all looked like trendy athletic shoes.

  At the street on the west side of MacArthur Park, Vickery told the taxi driver to halt a few car-lengths short of his old Saturn, which was still sitting where he’d parked it, and he looked around before opening the taxi door; but he didn’t see anyone in a dark windbreaker or red suspenders. He stepped out onto the pavement and paid the driver.

  “At this point,” he said to Castine as she climbed out and hurried with him toward the Saturn, “I think we may have lost our friends from Canter’s. Neither of us can have anything as big as a GPS tracker stuck to us, and a radio frequency tag’s only good for a hundred yards or so.”

  “I don’t have a tag on me,” she said. “You think I wouldn’t notice one?—stuck on, I don’t know, the rental car’s key fob?”

  He opened the Saturn’s passenger-side door for her. “It might be the fob itself,” he said. “You should throw it away. For all I know, they can—”

  “What happened to you, there,” she interrupted, “just before that guy pulled a gun on us? It was like you were blind for a few seconds.”

  “Get in. I—I h
ad a vision of the old house. Spontaneous, obviously I wasn’t trying to see by echo vision when it happened. It just—”

  He paused and looked past her. A teenage girl who had been riding a bicycle down the sidewalk had braked to a sudden stop six feet away, and visibly shuddered. She mumbled something, then said clearly, speaking to no one, “ . . . to Canter’s in her rented Honda. We could have taken her blood pressure any time.”

  The girl shook her head as if to clear it, then glanced around and gave Vickery and Castine an embarrassed smile, and pedaled away.

  Castine stared after her for a moment, then got into the car and pulled the door closed, and Vickery hurried around and got in on the other side.

  “You’ve got a billfold or something?” he asked as he closed the door and quickly started the engine. “For ID and credit cards?” When she tapped her jacket and nodded, he went on, “And a return airline ticket, I assume. Why didn’t you stay at the airport?”

  He had backed the Saturn out of the parking slot and now clicked the engine into drive and accelerated north toward Wilshire Boulevard.

  Castine was facing him, and her eyes were wide. “She was talking about me, wasn’t she? My rental car is a Honda.”

  “Yeah, I think she was. Damn.”

  “Like she was talking in her sleep!”

  Vickery turned right on the boulevard, driving now along the curve of Wilshire between the north and south expanses of the park, with the lake on the right. “I should loop around and get you back to the airport, fast,” he said. “Why the hell didn’t you stay there, after Omar Sharif dropped us off? You’ve only got trouble in L.A.”

  Castine slumped in her seat and looked straight ahead. “Oh shut up, can’t you? My flight’s not till tomorrow.”

  He rocked his head back and forth as if her answer settled the question.

  “And Omar Sharif is dead,” she added. She pulled a keyring from her pocket and began sliding the single key off the ring.