A Concealed Universe Read online

  A

  CONCEALED

  UNIVERSE

  The•Book•of•The•Twelve

  ~A•Novel~

  Will S. Hartman

  This book contains adult language, adult situations and violence. It is NOT suitable for anyone under age sixteen.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or any other means without the prospective permission and approval of the author and publisher.

  Copyright © 2018 WillSHartmanPress

  All rights reserved.

  I ISBN-13: 978-1727867596

  ISBN-10: 1727867599

  For you, the reader:

  This book is a fictional journey across many time zones. Honolulu is -6 hours from the East Coast of the United States while Italy is + 6 hours. wsh.

  Goodness [goo d-nis] noun.

  1. the state or quality of being good; 2. moral excellence; 3. kindly feeling; 4. kindness; 5. generosity; 6. moral excellence; 7. virtue; 8. excellence of quality; 9. the best part of anything: essence, strength; 10. a euphemism for God; 11. benevolence, benignity, humanity; 12. worth, value.

  This book is dedicated to all those who have performed a selfless act.

  Thank you! • wsh

  “Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” - Vladimir Nabokov

  The Second Eternity

  “The great dragon was hurled down - that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan.” - The Book of Revelation 12:9

  2:00 AM Thursday

  Western North Carolina

  None of them will look at the unconscious, naked woman lying in Ryan’s iron cage. It’s classic irony, Brooklyn-born Sal Martino thought.

  Forty mercenaries take Ryan’s money, but they don’t want to know who this woman is or why she’s here. She scares them, but they won’t ask because they’re afraid to find out. That’s good. Afraid is how I want them.

  “I can never sleep during an op, and this was a long-ass one. I haven’t slept in days,” he said to the man connecting the woman’s birdcage shaped prison to a stranded steel cable. “In the last thirty-five hours, we grabbed her and her sons from that speck of a Pacific Ocean island and flew ‘bout five thousand miles to bring ‘em here. Like I said, helluva long day.”

  Avoiding a glance downward, the man stopped. “Job well done, yeah? Sal?”

  The wrench turner was a Brit, and his National Health Service teeth reminded him of a piranha.

  “Ryan expects nothing less. When you’re done making that connection, get ready to raise the cage.”

  The Brit glanced over the rocky, North Carolina cliff. “Consider it done. It’s an eight-hundred-foot drop to the bounce on her bum, right Mate? When are we gonna raise her over the edge?”

  “When Ryan wants it done. Sorry to disappoint, Mate.”

  “Sure, Sal. Who is she?”

  “Ah, Hermes.”

  “’Don’t know the bloke, Sal. Sorry.”

  “That means they chose you to ask the question for them. If they’re curious, tell ‘em to ask Ryan.”

  But nobody would. Ryan was a puzzle whose pieces didn’t fit. He’d known that from the day he met him. He’d figure Ryan out, but tonight he needed to get this job done.

  “When you’ve secured the cable, check the winch and generator.”

  Jumping from the cage after another turn of his wrench, the man flashed a piranha smile. “I’ll get that sorted. Me mates say Ryan’s a stone-cold killer. You’ve been decent, so I thought I’d give you that,” the man said as he walked away.

  “Ryan is stone-cold crazy,” he mumbled into a wind that took his voice far into the valley. “I’ve known too many like him.”

  In reply, a distant rumble in the far western sky threw white explosions of lightning from cloud to cloud until they filled its dark, southern sibling. Now linked, those compass points spawned squall lines that dropped a curtain of steely mist below the lowest clouds.

  But the storm’s act was only beginning, and a growing primal scream raced toward him with frightening speed. Bending the valley’s tree-topped contour as if it were fanning a deck of playing cards, its stinging rain passed him by as fast as it arrived. The strength of the wind and water staggered him, but before he could wipe the water from his eyes, another barrage of staccato lightning split the skyline like the staves of a barrel. As if satisfied by its performance, the storm rotated into a tight, black snake and whistled skyward.

  Left in an eerie silence, he turned toward his men and women. Instead, he saw Patrick Shamus Ryan in the blue-black light of the clearing’s far end, a phantom the storm could neither touch nor threaten.

  Ryan looked neither left nor right. “Move the cage over the valley.”

  “He’s death, Sal,” he heard someone huddled in the nearby tree line whisper. “That storm was Satan’s call, and Ryan answered it.”

  ~

  Ryan halved the distance to the cliff’s edge in two strides. Now ten feet away, he looked down on the woman’s free-swinging prison.

  “Are you awake? If so, we can begin.”

  Following his boss through the storm’s debris and downed limbs, he knew it was too soon.

  “The cocktail I injected gives you thirty minutes of conscious sedation, sir. Even if she is becoming conscious, the winds that rogue storm left behind will deaden your voice. Don’t worry – she’ll know she’s floating over the valley when she feels cold metal against her bare skin.”

  He was right, and only a few minutes passed before Andy Travis’ vague stare foreshadowed a curious inspection of this unfamiliar place. She made a first, shy reach for the cage’s sides, but still under the poison’s control, her hands snapped back as if her fingers burned.

  Watching her move onto her haunches, he knew she was trying to understand. She didn’t have that luxury, though, when a snapping gust from the valley floor slammed her onto her prison’s narrow, angled beams. She righted herself on her hands and knees again, but even a feral, infant’s crawl couldn’t find a safe place. Whimpering, she curled her arms over her head and collapsed.

  That was the sign he wanted, and turning to Ryan, he nodded. “She’s ready, sir.”

  At that instant, waves of echoing thunder and another spreading, gray dome – more massive than the first, moved across the entire horizon with a speed his eye couldn’t follow. Seeking an encore befitting its power, a single lightning bolt from the south zigzagged, forked, and stabbed white-hot spikes into the valley floor. Those fiery barbs soon started fires in the tinder-dry trees, and the exploding pine and blue spruce sap sent a sweet odor upward on curling wisps of smoke.

  If the storm wanted to bring Andy back the fire succeeded, and the woman’s terrified yowl mirrored the trapped animal he knew she was. Ryan had no empathy. All he saw was casual indifference.

  “The water, please,” his boss said.

  But the mercenary in jungle green who’d pulled the two-inch fire suppression hose from the road’s standpipe ignored the order.

  “Torturing women ain’t right, Sal, and I ain’t doing it. This ain’t you.”

  A slow move to the Sig Sauer pistol in his shoulder holster was a lethal warning. “You’re walking a line I can’t let you cross, Peter. Pick up that hose.”

  After a wary twitch, Peter kicked the dirt. “After all we’ve been through together, you’d kill me for him?”

  Spitting on the ground in Ryan’s direction, the symbolism was clear. It was as if uttering Ryan’s name was a poison he wouldn’t swallow.

  “Some would, Sal, but you won’t.”

  The challenge was obvious, and seconds of indecision passed before
a deep voice came from the loose, semi-circle under the tree line’s canopy.

  “I will take his place,” a tall, deep umber-skinned man said, pushing to the front of the others. “He is right, Sal. There is no honor in torturing this woman, just as there is no reason for us to kill each other. This disgraces us all.”

  The man’s stony glare weakened him. He should have forced Peter to obey or killed him. Ryan would have respected that, and the forty he’d recruited to work for Ryan would have had a new reason to fear him. But he had done neither. Now he was only a bystander.

  Shifting left, the tall man never took his eyes from Ryan. But the high-pressure nozzle had locked from age and disuse, and the inexperienced man fumbled for what he thought was an eternity until his straining forearms worked the stiff valve open. That was a mistake. When it freed, the hose drenched the cage with an icy flood.

  Ryan’s expression never changed. “Soak her, but don’t kill her. She knows something. I need to know it, too.”

  The mercenary adjusted the torrent, but added to the first blast, even that gentle cascade swung the cage farther over the empty air until gravity snapped it against the cliff’s stony face. That first collision of metal against rock showered Andy with storm-soaked grit and debris. The next three slammed her with the same cruelty, impaling pinpoint shards of granite and glittering crystalline quartz in her body.

  “Stop the water,” Ryan said with an offhand wave. “Let’s see if the pain has loosened her tongue.”

  In symmetry that was almost human, the wind died and the cage slowed to a gentle rhythm. When it stopped, the mud-soaked woman moved to her knees to paw at the needle-sharp splinters piercing her chest, back, and legs.

  In another place and time Ryan’s melodic, Irish cadence would have been friendly. Today, he only heard cruelty.

  “You will need our help, Mrs. Travis. No matter how hard you try, you won’t reach them all.”

  He believed Ryan would give another order, but she broke his control with an upturned hand. When that hand lowered and she stabbed a defiant finger at Ryan, the black cover slid away and a clear night sky returned. The determination on her face was just as pure. The sky’s new clarity had transformed Andy Travis, and she was no longer the victim.

  “You may kill me, but my sons will survive.”

  “Unless you give me The Book’s location, Mrs. Travis, your hand holds nothing. Gentlemen,” Ryan called to the men farther back from the cliff’s edge. “It’s time for the lights.”

  Darkness had shrouded her naked shame until the bright cruelty of 500,000 lumens of white light swept the night away. Blinded, she crawled to the cage’s corner, but even that slight shift restarted her prison’s slow spin. While each roll blessed her eyes with a scrap of saving darkness, the steel cable’s screech and creak signaled her prison’s inevitable return to the bright fire.

  A glance to his left and right told him the men and women standing nearby were uneasy. “You people blame me, don’t you? You believe I agreed to this.”

  “We know this isn’t you, Sal,” the man to his left whispered. “Kill Ryan before it gets worse. This ain’t what you told us it would be. If she dies, it’s our asses, too.”

  “Sure, but then Ryan’s mystery boss will hunt us down. When we’re found, we’ll wish we were dead.”

  Ryan glanced his way, and he wondered if the man heard his black prophecy. But taking a step closer to the cage, his boss’s sole concern was the prey in his snare.

  “Turn the lights down,” the Irishman commanded, and in seconds, their plunge illuminated the pockets of fire still burning in the valley below. “Your children, Mrs. Travis? They will take your place in the cage. You can watch them fall. Now, where is The Book?”

  All sound disappeared in the vision of her children’s deaths. Even the rustling leaves on the cliffside trees were silent as he tried to process the sweet melody in Ryan’s Irish burr. He couldn’t predict the future, but he was sure the unpredictable Ryan would kill her children to get what he wanted.

  “This sadistic shit isn’t getting him anywhere,” he muttered. Then he called out. “We’ll bring her in, sir. Then you can ask your questions.”

  “No need,” Ryan replied in a tone that was as level as it was cruel. “I’ll break her.”

  “No. If you keep this up, she will die. If she does, you’ll never find your damned book.”

  His challenge crossed the line with Ryan, too, and he would pay for his insolence. But if he backed down again, he would lose any respect his men and women had left. He’d been loyal, but Ryan’s cruelty gave his anger supremacy.

  When no answer came, he yelled to the man controlling the winch.

  “Bring her in.”

  ~

  Once the long arm of the winch placed the cage back on the clearing’s wet, spongy turf, he saw the damage. Grime ran in rivulets along the bleeding woman’s back, while the water trickling through her hair had washed the bloody cuts on her scalp a light pink.

  When she swallowed through lips trembling with shock and cold, he took a step to cover her with a blanket someone tucked under his arm. But when she lifted a weak hand to Ryan, he stopped.

  Ryan’s voice was soft. “Your words were meaningless, Mrs. Travis. Your sons will die unless you give me The Book’s location.”

  Coughing once, she motioned Ryan closer. As the man kneeled on the soft grass near her face, she managed to work her jaw against the pain and shock. Then a small smile flickered. It would end it here.

  “Yes, Mrs. Travis?” Ryan asked.

  “Screw you,” she said, spitting in Ryan’s face.

  “Time; that black and narrow isthmus between two eternities.” - Charles Caleb Colton

  35 Hours Earlier

  The First Eternity

  “Death is not the worst; rather, in vain, to wish for death,

  and not to compass it.” - Sophocles

  8:35 AM Tuesday

  Honolulu, HI

  When she was by herself, twenty-nine-year-old Andy Travis could be the person she believed lived inside her, not the wife, mother, or professional she showed everyone else. This morning she was alone and had time – too much time.

  “I wish she’d killed me,” she said to her bedroom mirror’s silent reflection. It was today’s new doctor, the one replacing Dr. Mary. She had spent years with Mary Gould and she trusted her. Mary Gould knew all.

  The unknown was Andy’s strongest trigger and answering this new doctor’s questions drove her to the black leather journal she hid in the locked drawer. Opening it would violate everything she learned in therapy, but sliding the small key into the lock, she didn’t care.

  “Thank God,” she gasped as her tingling fingers brushed the pebble-grained cover she’d worn to gray. A single touch often healed her, but not today. Today, there was no sweet jasmine and pink-tipped, white plumeria outside her window. Today only fear remained, and her thoughts flashed like last night’s dry lightning.

  “I could slow my breathing, but that means locking the past away. No, it’s too late.”

  Convinced that reliving the familiar, horrible images was her only path, her hands flashed through a life of script-filled pages. Right to left and back again she searched until she found the dog-eared page with the torn bottom.

  “Am I punishing myself for living or for not dying?” She didn’t know, but she’d lost count of the times she’d needed these words.

  “There,” she pointed. “Only death will bring me peace. I am . . . No,” she read, trying to avoid the word she’d smudged on a helpless night months ago. “No, not suicidal. I’m secure,” she nodded, “when I force those details into a fuzziness I refuse to remember. There are still times when the coppery smell of blood rises from my mind and chokes my sanity, but even when those images fade and death’s stench disappears, that single night loops and replays.”

  “I survived,” she mumbled in a penitent’s soft whisper, “but survival makes death my only antidote.”

/>   Folding the page’s corner onto its comfortable crease and tucking it back was the first part of her ritual, while clenching the closed book until her fingers ached was its benediction. Any less pressure freed the words to torment her again – she knew that from the days and nights they commanded her to read them a second or third time, so she focused on the pain. Pain always returned her from the horror, but today, her cell phone’s grating beep kept those memories fresh.

  “Mrs. Travis? Andy?”

  The voice was distant, detached. Julie? She’s been my assistant for six? No, seven months. She wouldn’t call if it weren’t important.

  “Julie. Hey, what’s up?”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you at home, ma’am. You sound different. Are you okay?”

  This lie had years of practice. “I’m fine. What’s up?”

  “That group from Malaysia called again,” Julie said with a sigh she knew she was supposed to hear. “Since there’s no other Italianate Architect with a Ph.D. this side of San Francisco, will we take their project?”

  “My doctoral program might resent you conferring my degree before they do. I don’t have it yet.”

  “Yeah, but you will. Everybody at the firm says so.”

  “Great. I’ll send everybody a thank-you-in-advance card. ‘Think they make ‘em? Okay, back to Malaysia. If a bunch of generals with too much money and too little common sense want to build a Sixteenth Century Renaissance villa in Kuala Lumpur, why the heck not? We’ll take every dollar they want to waste. Set up a video conference.”

  Back under her layers of professional veneer, she dictated Julie’s instructions in a steady cadence. “Try for tomorrow with a senior partner – I’d prefer Jake Westin – and block an hour with Melinda and her designers before they sneak off to catch the afternoon waves. I have an appointment this morning, but I’ll be in the office after I drop the boys at daycare.”