Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(20)

“How do you know?”

“I went to see her, just before she died in 1998, at a small convent outside London. By then, Sister Mary Judith was almost catatonic, but every once in a while, she would still mutter the phrase.”

Garfield Kromly rose and started to move toward the door.

“God damn it, Kromly. What did the old woman say?”

Kromly stopped with his hand on the doorknob and turned back toward the vice president.

“‘Dear Lord, the Reaper walks the earth.’”

Once again, Gordon chuckled. “The Reaper, my ass.”

The old CIA man’s eyes narrowed momentarily, then he shrugged and walked from the room. As hard as it was to believe, George Gordon thought he had just glimpsed something he had never expected to see in Garfield Kromly’s eyes: fear.





17


Freddy Hagerman held his breath, every bit of his concentration focused on listening. Nothing. Not a f*cking sound.

But somebody else had just been in here, and he had made sure Freddy found the journal. As his eyes once again locked on the book, Freddy remembered to breathe. After all, he was still alive. Somehow, he thought that if the ghost wanted him dead he already would be.

Steadying the camera, Freddy began to capture the room. He was sorry he hadn’t done this the first time he had come through here, just in case something else had been moved since then. Oh well, he’d spot it anyway when he got a chance to spend some time with the film.

Satisfied, he moved over to the bench where the journal rested. It was a nicely bound book with a soft gray hardback binding. Not wanting to have his own fingerprints disturb any potential evidence, Freddy extracted a kerchief from his pocket. Luckily, he hadn’t gotten around to using it yet. This New Mexico desert didn’t have the Kansas plants that set off his allergies.

He grasped the journal by the edge of the cover and carefully opened it. The first page had a spot for the owner to fill in his name and personal information. In stylized handwriting that filled the block, someone had written two words:

“The Priest.”

Freddy snapped a picture. For the next hour, he stood there, carefully turning page after page, reading and then photographing each one. What began as fascination quickly gave way to shock and then disgust. Within half an hour, Freddy thought he would become physically sick, but he kept at it, changing film rolls as needed, until he was finished.

Straitening, he wiped his damp brow on a sleeve. If he hadn’t already seen the other room and gotten Benny’s report, he would have thought he was being had, that this was some sort of sick joke. This guy Priest had been compulsive in his journal entries, but not in the sense of a normal diary. The journal had started less than a year ago and only covered events that Priest regarded as exciting. The first entry was the strangest.

Priest had apparently been an unwilling participant in an experiment conducted by none other than Dr. Donald Stephenson, the deputy director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Dr. Ernesto Rodriguez. They had injected Priest with some gray fluid, the pain of the process so great that he had regarded it as a quasi-religious experience. The gray goo had given him tremendous healing powers.

The remainder of the journal had described the killing of Abdul Aziz and the capture, torture, and killing of Priest’s female “guests,” all of whom had been dumped down a shallow well on the property.

One thing was very clear to Freddy; the experiment conducted on Priest by Dr. Stephenson had not been an officially sanctioned one. He had been trying to test something derived from his study into the Rho Ship, but that test had gone horribly wrong. The same fluid that had given Priest such unbelievable healing powers had apparently rendered him violently insane, setting loose the darkest desires hidden deep in his psyche, accompanied by feelings of invincibility that led him to act out those needs.

With the handkerchief, Freddy picked up the journal, moved back to the ladder, and began climbing back up. For a moment, the thought that he would find the trapdoor closed brought on a brief bout of claustrophobic panic. But it was still open, exactly as he had left it.

By the time he climbed out into the bedroom, it was clear that the flashlight batteries were dying. It was now hard to see more than a couple of feet to either side of the beam’s central bright spot. Well, that was okay. Only one more thing to check out, and then he’d be out of here.

Freddy exited the house, walked out to his car, and gently placed the journal into his satchel along with the already exposed rolls of film. Then, grabbing a couple of fresh rolls, he began walking toward the spot where the decaying outbuildings stood. A crescent moon had risen and gave forth just enough light that he could make out the dark outline of the barn and what must have been a couple of storage sheds. Next to one of them, Freddy remembered seeing an old well.

As he got closer, he found he didn’t need to be able to see it. The smell led him to it. In the dying light of the flashlight, Freddy could see the circular outline of the rock structure. The beam, which had once supported a pulley, rope, and bucket, lay to one side of the hole. The rope and bucket lay alongside it, the bottom of the latter having long since fallen out.

Freddy leaned over the opening and shone the flashlight down. Shit. People should have been able to smell it all the way from Taos. The darkness swallowed the weak beam of light so that he could only see down the rough rock wall for about a dozen feet.