He identified with Tezcatlipoca, El Gato, the night cat roaming and changing, the shadow cat. That's where his nickname came from. Doing his work, he moved like a cat.

But just as he had planned to begin exploring patient and personnel files, he had suddenly been deprived of his ability to leave his room at night.

They'd found out that he'd been off the premises the night Dr. Ullman was killed. Well, yes.

Now this new director and patient turn up just when it was expected that the Acton group would be putting their leadership in place-and here he was, locked up like a monkey in a G.o.dd.a.m.n ZOO!

He twisted on the bed, as uncomfortable as a man in a rack. And that thought took his mind back down a path it loved to go and hated to go, the torture path.

You look down at the guy in straps and you know that he belongs to you. You lay the cloth over his face, adjusting it a little, drawing out the suspense. He turns his head and Billie Fisk gets it between her sweet knees and holds it steady for you. Then you get the pitcher, you fill it in the sink, you hear the echoing drip of the water on the tiles as you carry it br.i.m.m.i.n.g over to the guy's gurney-bound body. It's not a torture chamber or something, it's a men's room with a DO NOT DISTURB DO NOT DISTURB sign from some hotel on the door. Emba.s.sy bas.e.m.e.nt, where else were they gonna go? Their work was illegal on Mexican soil. sign from some hotel on the door. Emba.s.sy bas.e.m.e.nt, where else were they gonna go? Their work was illegal on Mexican soil.

Then you ask your question and you do not wait for the bulls.h.i.t answer, you start your pour. The body of Ramos curves on the board. Stomach sucks in. Legs pulse. d.i.c.k comes up. Feet hammer. Pour and pour. Neck goes from red to purple.

You run out of water. As you are refilling, you ask your question again. This time, he kind of starts in, but you don't listen. You and Billie will work him for an hour, doing maybe twenty pours. When his d.i.c.k comes up this time, you dig your heel into it. You slip and practically fall on your a.s.s. Billie laughs.

Somebody somewhere reviews the video feed, looking for clues in the body language, piecing together bits of words, all of that, working up a report for whoever.

Drug interdiction, that was the mission.

Thing is, why? Why are drugs even illegal? They're good, they do a search-and-destroy operation on the weak.

Never mind, you did your work and now you are here playing crazy, and, you gotta admit, it's just a little too easy to act that way.

She started screaming again, and that was it, she reminded him of too d.a.m.n much. "f.u.c.k this, will you shut her up! Shut her UP!"

"Dr. Claire is with her."

Claire Michaels, that floppy little puppy of a shrink. "She's useless! Get Hunt, get Ford! But shut her up, please."

Was this woman actually one of their leaders, or had her appearance at this time been chance?

h.e.l.l, that screaming was loud-and maybe it was there to cover some other sound that he might hear, like the hiss of the arc furnace they had in the art room. It was disguised as a pottery kiln but there were elements in there that could generate truly extraordinary temperatures.

But for what purpose?

It had to be involved with time, and the CIA's Acton Working Group had determined that Herbert Acton, like certain ancient Egyptians and ancient Maya, had definitely been able to somehow see forward in time. This explained his flawless investments, which statistics could not. As one of the statisticians who had examined them put it, "there isn't enough chance in all the universe to account for this. He wasn't lucky, he was informed."

In other words, he'd been able to see forward in time. This also explained things like the accuracy of the Mayan calendar. It hadn't been constructed forward to December 21, 2012, it had been written backward backward from that date because they had from that date because they had seen seen forward first, then built their exquisite calendar from the top down, as it were. forward first, then built their exquisite calendar from the top down, as it were.

Seeing didn't make a difference now, though. The only thing that would matter to anybody right now was physical movement through time.

So that's what this place had to be about.

If this Caroline was indeed one of their leaders, she had some d.a.m.ned important secrets, there was no question about that.

His mission was quite clear, and he didn't need General Wylie screaming down the horn at him to tell him that he needed to confirm her ident.i.ty and then obtain her secrets by whatever means presented itself. No legalities, that was over and done with.

He had his problem, though, which was his night confinement and his daytime minder.

For the thousandth time, he considered his window. The upper sash, he could get that down a bit, maybe even work his way out. Problem was, there was nowhere to go from the sill. No, the ductwork was his only option. But he needed a blueprint. You couldn't go wandering off through the air-conditioning system of a building this size. You'd be heard. You'd get trapped.

There was a faint beep from his desk. d.a.m.n, he was shut down for the night, and here was Wylie back again.

He went for his radio, but he never got to it, because the next moment something completely extraordinary happened. It wasn't as if he hadn't been expecting it. He had. Expecting any d.a.m.n thing.

What this consisted of was, in quick succession, three flashes that must have been a million times brighter than the sun, flashes that filled not only the eyes but the entire head, as if they had entered every orifice and pore on his body, and penetrated right down to the marrow.

One second, he was going for the radio, and the next the flashes. .h.i.t. They caused an immediate, powerful, and startling hallucination, a form in plumage, grimacing, its face draped in golden chain mail, skulls strung around its neck, its long, black nails slicing toward him, sparking in the air.

In his surprise, he cried out, he pressed himself against the wall beside the bed.

That had been a d.a.m.ned hallucination of his own adopted G.o.d, Tezcatlipoca. But as his eyes adjusted to the sudden change in light, he realized that it was still here, it was real, he could even hear the clatter of its bejeweled robe and the swish of its plumed headdress as it darted its face toward him with the horrible precision of a snapping vulture.

In another instant, though, his revulsion pa.s.sed. It was as if a fire came into his body, lighting up the cells, causing his spirit to dance within him, and it was a dark and b.l.o.o.d.y dance.

With understanding, the apparition faded. He had seen a reflection of his own soul in a very special light, and boy, had he felt it. The energy of the d.a.m.n G.o.d of death had come into him. That had been powerful.

His radio beeped again. G.o.dd.a.m.n them! He turned off his light and opened the drawer. His little Sony was a masterpiece of clandestine technology, its additional circuits smaller than grains of rice. On the surface, it was an ordinary multiband portable. But it also contained this other component, a high-energy single-sideband transceiver and very careful shielding so that it would not be fried by solar electromagnetic energy.

The small display quickly flashed the decoded message. "General warning. General warning to all stations. Atomic clocks have stopped worldwide. Repeat. Atomic clocks have stopped."

Physicists had theorized that such a thing might happen, as the world came to the end of the cycle.

They had gone past the frontier of reality. And at that very moment, the people who ran this place had started something new, some device that emitted light that drove you to face the truth of your soul.

And here was Mack the Cat, trapped in his d.a.m.n room.

The end of time had arrived and what did he have to do? He had to G.o.dd.a.m.n well wait wait!

DAVID FORD'S JOURNAL: FOUR It's now three o'clock in the morning and I have been paging through every book in this library and I have been doing it for five hours, and I will now record the reason. My search was inspired by those last two sentences at the end of the list. The first one was, "What I could not do, you must."

I interpret this to mean that he could not accomplish time travel, but knew that it was possible, and also that it would be, in our era, the only route of survival. But movement through time-literal, physical movement into another time-how could that ever be done?

When I was in college, the great physicist Stephen Hawking announced that he had changed his view of time travel, saying that he had come to believe that it was indeed possible. Last year-G.o.d, how long ago that seems-there was an experiment at the CERN supercollider in Switzerland that projected subatomic particles into the future, which were detected a few millionths of a second later, as they "landed" in time and the rest of the world caught up with them. They had never left time, but rather had moved through it faster than the universe normally allows.

Still, though, can something as large as a human body ever be accelerated like that? Even if this were possible, we'd have to go incredibly far in order to find a world that had healed from the wounds of this catastrophe.

Herbert Acton didn't do it. From my days in the cla.s.s, I remember visiting his grave, which is on this estate. Mrs. Acton took us there, and now lies beside him, I am sure. They had no children. Understandable, knowing the future as they did.

As impossible as acceleration through time sounds, it may be that it has happened before-not to a human being, but to an animal.

A story that might involve time movement appears in a book called, I believe, Hunt for the Skinwalker Hunt for the Skinwalker, by a biochemist called Colm Kelleher. Dr. Kelleher was the manager of the Inst.i.tute for Discovery Sciences, an organization which sought to bring scientific method to the study of unusual events.

One of these events was the sudden appearance of an enormous wolf on a property that had been bought for the inst.i.tute. This property, in Utah, was known to be a hotbed of odd events and sightings of the otherworldly.

When I read the book, I recognized the animal to be a dire wolf. It came up to a paddock containing some goats, in full view of the ranchers, then loped away after they shot at it. It went into some tall gra.s.s and simply disappeared.

Now, the dire wolf was rendered extinct by the catastrophe that ended the last Ice Age. And yet, here it was on this ranch. The scientists were even able to determine its weight by measuring the depths of its footprints in the marsh where it disappeared.

I think that this animal had moved through time, and I think I know why this happened. First, there was something about the place. There must also be something similar here, and this, I think, is crucial to whether or not we will be able to do it. This house was undoubtedly placed here because this spot is, like the ranch in Utah, conducive to such movements. Why, I cannot even begin to imagine.

Second, I believe that, in its own time, this animal was experiencing incredible fear. Its world was collapsing around its ears. At the end of the Pleistocene, most of Utah was flooded along with the rest of the United States by rapid glacial melt. Like now, the solar system was pa.s.sing through the energetic remains of the supernova, and this had brought about a planetary bombardment and the complete, sudden, and devastating ruin of the world.

So given pressure extreme enough and the right conditions, actual, physical movement through time must be possible.

How, I do not know. However, my thought is that the cla.s.s, if it can be brought back to normal, will will know. They will all turn out to have pieces of the greatest puzzle that has ever been: the secret of time, and how to walk it like a road. know. They will all turn out to have pieces of the greatest puzzle that has ever been: the secret of time, and how to walk it like a road.

But, for now, I must leave this part of the doc.u.ment behind. If only the cla.s.s can come into focus before it's too late, maybe we can construct our bridge across time.

I think on this. Come up only with one thought-I have to trust Caroline.

So I go on to the second sentence: "The judgment begins."

What is happening now is, we already know, a repeat of a disaster that happened 12,600 years ago. In that time, the human population of Earth declined by over 90 percent.

After that, there was a long period of silence on this planet. Nothing happened. But then, about seven thousand years ago, heroes appeared throughout the world. The story of the great Egyptian hero Osiris dates from that time, and the stories of India's demiG.o.d Krishna and other brilliant heroes, and civilization starts. Throughout its early years, we see such leaders as Akhenaton and Moses, who was perhaps his son, who bring the idea of the single G.o.d into the world. In the Americas, the civilizing Viracocha appear and, of course, my avatar Quetzalcoatl. Then, to begin the recently ended Age of Pisces, Jesus, who learned his secrets in Egypt and who was born in a most mysterious way.

I believe that these people were not mythological figures but very real human beings, time travelers from the lost civilization, coming forward to bring its wisdom to a new, still brutal era. The ideas of compa.s.sionate life, of the one G.o.d, of the promise of resurrection and the means to attain it-these are what they brought.

Just as their pre-Egyptian civilization was being inundated worldwide, they used their knowledge of time travel to leap forward five thousand years and reinvent human decency and goodness. They left behind new civilizations in the Indus and Nile valleys, in the Fertile Crescent in Sumeria, on Crete and in Central and South America.

Even as recently as the early Christian era, somebody knew of the existence of the great cycles and the periodic harvest of souls, I think, and was consciously directing the construction of civilization from a high perspective, with the objective of making more souls that were energetic enough, and light enough, to enter higher realms.

The energy is the energy of love, and the lightness is a lack of attachment to the physical world.

My reasoning that these cycles were known comes from observation of the Western long count calendar, the Zodiac, which measures the slow movement of the North Pole around a great circle that lasts just over twenty-five thousand years. It is divided into twelve roughly two-thousand-year segments, the houses of the Zodiac.

Like the Mayan Long Count calendar, it marks ours as an age of enormous change, although without that extraordinary precision.

The Old Testament was written during the Age of Aries, the ram, and in the Old Testament, the ram is mentioned seventy-two times, more than any other animal. It is the testament of the ram, written by people who knew very well what they were doing. Similarly the New Testament, which appeared just as Aries gave way to Pisces, the fish, speaks of Jesus as the Fisher of Men. The apostles are fishermen. The earliest symbol of Christ is the fish.

They knew and they understood, and they left this hidden record for the future.

Now we have reached the Age of Aquarius, the water carrier, and he is pouring out his water-that is to say, Earth is becoming unlivable.

During the Age of Pisces, the little fish-mankind-was nurtured in the water-the womb of Earth. Now, however, we are too big for Earth to carry and we are experiencing the violence of birth. As Earth becomes unable to support the little fish, she is ejecting us onto dry land.

Many will die now. Souls heavy with greed and cruelty will be unable to rise and will sink down into the core of the planet-the lake of fire described in Revelation.

In the autobiography of Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, he describes his experience after the ringleaders of this spectacularly evil movement were hanged at Spandau Prison in Berlin. They had been executed in a gymnasium, and he and other remaining prisoners were ordered to clean it up after the process was complete.

Underneath the gallows, they found a scorch mark in the floor so deep that they could not remove it.

Charles Light explained to us that this mark was left by evil souls as they fell out of their bodies and sank into the core of the earth, where they will remain until their evil has been consumed. They will return as the merest sparks of essence, ready to begin the eons-long climb from tiny life to intelligence, or, in some cases, to remain forever a part of the lesser world, never again to be granted the chance at change that being an intelligent creature offers.

The evil descend, the good rise-and then there are the rest of us, the little band of perhaps a million who stay. And what happens to us?

I know that we are intended to build a new world, but I also know that nothing is certain. It is clear to me that we are supposed to escape into the future-to go forward to a time when Earth has healed herself.

Somebody else also knows these things, and they want to escape into the future instead of us, and they are here and they are fighting hard.

I'm exhausted beyond words and I feel sick to see the way this whole affair seems to be going off the rails, but my body has betrayed me with exhaustion, and I've got to sleep.

I fall back on the bed. I reach over to the table and take my gun in my hand, and clutch it, holding it over my heart. I close my eyes.

7.

DEVILS.

A bright light-very bright-brought David's eyes flying open. Before he could think, he had leaped out of bed, but it was gone now and he was blinded.

He stood poised at his bedside, his heart thundering, desperate for his vision to return. When it did, he saw a shadowy form between himself and the window. Instinctively, he stepped back. It didn't move, but he could see in the untidy glow of the auroras that it was something fantastic, feathered, ma.s.sive, radiating a presence he could actually feel, a kind of immediate, spontaneous joy that made him think of the joy of a child, but also another, more fundamental sense of the rightness and balance even of this terrible time, and he seemed to see a deep secret, that the world rides a wire of balance that man cannot break.

No matter how bad things seem, in some deep living heart, the heart of the universe itself, always, all is well.

It was Quetzalcoatl in all his richness and joy.

The emotions were confusing and powerful and the apparition was so real that he drew away from it-and felt, then, the brush of feathers as the thing came right up to him, its eyes infinite pools of kindness, its soft hands caressing him and, it seemed, dipping into his skin as if it was cream, sliding with a quivering, eerie tension, into him. He twisted, he pulled at it, but it drifted between his fingers like smoke, and kept on entering him until it was entirely inside him. Gradually, the whooshing of its feathers was absorbed in the trembling rumble of his heart.

Gagging, his pulse soaring, sweat and tears pouring off him, he retched, then fell against the edge of his bed, then staggered into the bathroom.

He was heaving over the toilet when a cool hand came under his forehead. Shocked, he jumped back and turned-and there stood Katie in white silk pajamas, her hair loose around her face. He tried to say something but had to return to his vomiting, and she held a damp cloth against his forehead as he struggled.

"Let it come," she said, "let it be."

It was, frankly, immeasurably rea.s.suring to feel her holding him and hear the calm in her voice.

Finally, the feeling subsided. He straightened up. "I'm sorry. I-my G.o.d, that light! What was that light?"

She gave him a quizzical look. Not for the first time he saw past her job to the woman, noticing the sensuality of her lips and the seductive directness of her eyes. They were not gentle eyes, but frank ones.

She guided him back into the bedroom. "I think you had a nightmare, David." And also, that was the first time she'd addressed him by anything except "Doctor." She drew him down to his bedside.

"That light-my G.o.d!"

"I didn't see a light. I heard you yelling."

"I hope I didn't wake up the whole house." The medical staff were all on this floor. He did not need to be embarra.s.sed. He did not need to appear weak.