The Omega Point

1. LUCKY BOY

David Ford had never flown in a private jet before, but it seemed almost inevitable that the superexclusive Acton Clinic would transport its new chief psychiatrist this way. The thing was small and louder than an airliner, but it was also swift and plush, if a bit worn. The sweep of leather was cracked here and there, and the carpet was tight from many steps.

Mrs. Aubrey Denman sat opposite him. She was the board’s representative, all angles and desperation, narrow arms, a neck like knotted rope, her face an archaeology of lifts, so many that she appeared to have been transformed into a waxwork of herself. Her laughter was all sound and no expression. She must be seventy-five, maybe more.

The jet was claustrophobic. There was absolutely no wasted space. In the galley, a cadaverous servant in a blue blazer stood at the ready, his eyes emptied by a lifetime of waiting.

She was so rich that she had not only a plane, two pilots, and a servant, but also the plane was working.

So here he was in this really amazing situation, thirty-two years old and moving straight from his psychiatric residency to a good job in a time when there were no jobs of any kind.

“Dr. Ford, I want to take this opportunity to give you a little additional information.”

They were in facing seats, knee to knee in the compact cabin. “I would appreciate that very much.”

“First, I must apologize about the plane.”

“It’s wonderful, and I’m so grateful for the ride. It could’ve taken days otherwise.”

“This is a fifty-year-old airplane. The only one I have that works. The newer ones—the electronics are ruined, they tell me.”

The sun, of course. Always the damned sun. He noted the implication that she had a number of planes. Extraordinary.

She seemed to brace herself, like somebody bracing for a crash or waiting for an explosion. But when she spoke, her tone was casual, almost offhand. “You do know that Dr. Ullman was the unfortunate victim of a fire.”

Something had opened the position, that had been clear enough. He had not asked, and nobody had explained. “I’m sorry.”

“He was living in the town. Unfortunately, the fire service in Raleigh County has deteriorated. They were too slow.”

It seemed odd to leave information like this to a moment when he was already on his way to the facility, as if the knowledge might have changed his mind. “It was an accident?”

“We assume.”

“Is there anything else I should know? I mean, why are you telling me now?”

“You understand that your quarters will be on the estate?”

“I’ve been told that I have Herbert Acton’s personal suite.”

“Which is one of the most extraordinary interior spaces in this country. In the world, for that matter.”

“That I was told. I’m fascinated. I tried to find pictures online, but—”

“No pictures. We’re not the Donald Trump sort.” She smiled a little. “Mr. Acton met girls in the bedroom you will use. Of course, you’re a bachelor.” Now her face became as hard as flint. “He wasn’t.”

Could she have once met Herbert Acton there? He’d died in 1958. She’d probably been a girl then, a teenager.

She burst out laughing. “It’s just brilliant, you’re going to love it, young man.”

She reached for her drink—they had both been given highballs by the waiter—and as she lifted it to her lips, a blue glow appeared around her arm. She looked at the glow for a moment, then tossed the drink away with a little cry and an electric crackle. David noticed the same glow along his arms, and felt a tingling sensation. He thought, This thing is about to blow up, and his heart started racing. The waiter rushed to pick up the glass, blue fire shimmering along his arms and back.

“Ma’am, it’s Saint Elmo’s fire,” he said. “We’ve got incoming solar energy again.”

She looked pained. “We should have taken the car, Andy.”

“Impossible, Ma’am. Too slow, too dangerous.”

David glanced down at what he supposed was the New Jersey Turnpike far below. There was no sign of movement in the long, gleaming snake of vehicles. He said nothing.

She jabbed the intercom. “What does this Saint Elmo’s fire mean? Is it going to cause a crash?”

“We’re trying a lower altitude.”

“I hate these damned solar flares. It’s hideous, all of it. Hideous.” She twisted about in her seat where she sat, a spidery old creature in silk and diamonds. She looked at him, suddenly as intent as a snake.

“Where’s it all going to end, Doctor, do you know?”

“It’ll fade away eventually.”

“That’s one opinion. But perhaps you haven’t seen this.”

She handed him a document in a beige folder. When he opened it, he saw red classified stamps.

“I can’t read this.”

She waved her fingers at him. “You’d better.”

“I haven’t got a clearance.”

“Don’t you understand, David? That doesn’t matter anymore. All of that’s gone.”

The paper was only three pages long, a quick series of paragraphs. It was from the chairman of the National Security Council, directed to the president.

“Where did you get this?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, young man, read the damn thing!”

According to the paper, the solar system was entering the atmosphere of a supernova—information which was hardly classified. Everybody knew it. But then came a more shocking sentence: “The last time we passed through this cloud 12,600 years ago, debris from the body of the exploded star impacted the glaciers. An area of the great northern glacier, the Laurentian ice sheet, was transformed from ice to superheated steam in under a second. This area was as large as Rhode Island and the impact resulted in enormous icebergs being thrown as far afield as New Mexico. A storm of smaller pieces created the million craters of the Carolina Dells.”

Still, he was not surprised by this. Since the publication of Firestone, West, and Warwick-Smith’s Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes in 2006, it had been a generally known, if debated, explanation for the abrupt end of the Ice Age.

He read on.

“The ice melted so rapidly that the entire North American continent was flooded. In North America, all human life was destroyed. Elsewhere, man survived, and the catastrophe gave rise to all of the world’s flood legends.”

He looked up. She had knocked back his drink. She regarded him out of shadowed, appraising eyes.

“Does any of this ring a bell?”

“Sure. It’s one of the theories about why the Ice Age ended. Why it would be classified, I can’t imagine. It’s been in the news for years.”

“Read on.”

“As our last advanced civilization was being destroyed by the upheaval, scientists made detailed observations of the stellar debris field. They mapped it and found it to be irregular in shape, and it became clear that we would reenter it in another twelve thousand years. But they could not pinpoint the exact date without taking extraordinary measures.

“There is evidence that they created some sort of substance that enabled them to see very accurately into time itself, and actually looked forward into the future to determine the precise moment of reentry.

“Whatever this was, it is why later users were able to draw glyphs of modern military equipment at the Temple of Hathor in Egypt. But more importantly, some truly exotic use of it may be why certain people, such as many of the priestly class in the late Mayan period, simply disappeared. They went elsewhere in time physically.

“So far, our efforts to determine what this was have failed.

“In any case, its use enabled the people of the past, at some very distant point, to make the exquisitely careful observations that pinpointed the precise date that the danger would return. They marked this as the final end of the world.

“However, they also understood that mankind had much history to live before that day came, and they realized that all of their learning centers, clustered as they were along shorelines that would soon be under hundreds of feet of water, were doomed. They created a calendar now called the Zodiac, that measured the ages. This was further refined as the Mayan Long Count calendar, which revealed the exact moment the solar system would re-enter the cloud.

The tone was ponderous with official importance. But there was a problem—it was based on an absurd notion.

“The ancient civilization they refer to—I assume they mean Atlantis? Plato’s little speculation?”

“What do you remember?”

“About Atlantis? Nothing. It was before my time.” His contempt was growing.

“Please keep reading, young man, if you don’t mind.”

As the jet sped on, its old engines blaring, its airframe shuddering, he returned to the document.

“The beginning of reentry was first detected as an increase in cosmic background radiation by Dimitriev in 1997. Then, precisely on December 21, 2012, as the Mayan Long Count calendar suggested, an unusual spike took place. Since then, the density of the field has continued to grow, and all indications are that this will continue, possibly for thousands of years, with unknown consequences. In fact, the solar system is headed directly into the center of the cloud. In a very short time, we will begin to actually see the core of the exploded star, and it will be flooding Earth with radiation.”

This last paragraph had changed his opinion of the document. In fact, he was eager now to know more and flipped the page—and sat staring at the back of the folder.

Mrs. Denman took it from his hands.

“Let me ask you this, David. Do you recall Herbert Acton? Bartholomew Light?”

“I want to know more about this document. Because if this last part is confirmed—”

“It’s confirmed. Please answer my question.”

“Who confirmed it? How?”

“The way you give me the space I need to address that is to answer my question.”

“I know who Mr. Acton is, certainly.”

“But you recall nothing else? No childhood memories?”

“Of Herbert Acton? Mrs. Denman, I was born in 1984. He’d been dead for—what? thirty years or more.”

“Charles Light, Bartholomew’s son?”

David was mystified. “No, I don’t remember him. Should I?”

She reached over and touched his face, drawing her fingers along his cheek. It was an oddly suggestive sort of a thing to do, and David was embarrassed.

“As far as you’re concerned, you were never at the home of Herbert Acton?”

“No.”

She regarded him. “No memory at all?”

He shook his head.

A small, sad smile came into her eyes.

“There were thirty-three families, all associated with Herbert Acton in one way or another. Your family was one of them.”

“My family?”

“Your great-grandfather sold Herbert Acton the land the estate is built on. That connects you.”

“A very tenuous connection.”

“You remember nothing of your childhood?”

“I remember my childhood perfectly well. I was raised in Bethesda. My father was a GP. He was a good doctor and I’ve been trying to be the same.”

“But you don’t remember Charles Light? Or the class? Or Caroline Light?”

“Absolutely not.”

She smiled. “You will meet Caroline, and when you do, I’m sure it’ll all come back to you. In any case, you were hired because it’s time, and you’ve been carefully prepared.”

He absorbed this last and most mysterious statement. When she had originally interviewed him, she had a list of obviously professionally written questions about medical qualifications. Frankly, she could have gotten them from any hospital personnel department, or even a book. He had thought her interview technique a poor one and had doubted her qualifications to select a physician provider for any decent sort of mental health facility. Now he really doubted those qualifications.

He’d also had the sense that his answers didn’t matter to her, and even that she didn’t understand his discussions of patient evaluation methodologies, the uses of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, his thoughts about drugs to be used and dosing, or, frankly, any of it.

No matter this document, whatever it might actually mean, he had no intention of proceeding if anything other than his professional qualifications had gone into his hiring. It was already a sticking point that she’d come to Manhattan Central and found him, even though he wasn’t looking for work. First in his class at Johns Hopkins had been the stated reason.

“If you didn’t hire me on my medical qualifications—”

“You have magnificent qualifications.”

“Who is Caroline Light? What class?”

“Doctor, you will remember.”

“No. I need to know right now or we need to turn around and go back to New York.”

“You have nothing to go back to. You’ve resigned.”

That was true enough. For everyone working just now, there were fifty ready to take his job, and his position at Manhattan Central had no doubt been filled within hours of his leaving.

“What class?”

“You were in a class as a child. On the Acton estate.”

“That’s impossible.”

“That’s what you say now, but you’ll remember.”

“Why would I forget?”

“Because if you had not been made to forget, you might have revealed something about an extremely sensitive matter. Any of you.”

“Any of us? Of who?”

“The class!”

“I don’t remember this class, Mrs. Denman, so I need you to explain it, please.”

“David, the class is now assembled at the clinic. They will appear to be patients.”

“Appear to be? Mrs. Denman, please. What am I getting into?”

“David, when you’re at the clinic, you’ll remember more on your own, and there will be somebody coming soon who’ll help you remember everything.”

If there was one thing he could not handle and had never been able to handle, it was helplessness. He needed to be in control of his life, and that was at the core of his willingness to take this job. He wouldn’t be under control of a hospital administration, he would control one—or so he had thought.

“This is an outrage.”

“Yes, it is, David. I admit it. You were always the only candidate for the job.”

He could not turn back, that was clear. He did not relish ending up on the street just now. The world was starving and there was no recourse. Professionals were clawing for food alongside beggars.

“You’ve lied to me. In effect, kidnapped me.”

“And who’re you gonna call? The FBI?”

He waved the report. “I hope I’m not expected to deal with supply problems and survival issues, because this looks like a horrific disaster. Something way beyond the Acton Clinic.”

“You have been trained to navigate us through this. You are uniquely qualified.”

“I’ve had one class in disaster management. I treat psychiatric disease.”

“You will remember. Trust me on that.”

“Trust you?”

“You must understand—”

“I don’t understand a thing!”

“Shut up, boy!”

“I will not shut up! I don’t understand and I need to understand because you’re dropping me into an incredibly challenging situation and at the same time telling me that I’ve somehow forgotten all the damn rules. Come on!”

The jet shuddered.

“Oh, God,” she said. “I loathe air travel.”

“It’s starting to land, that’s all. What am I supposed to remember?”

“David, let’s please just get through the landing!”

“What in hell am I supposed to remember?”

She sighed. In her eyes he saw something beyond desperation, the expression of an animal that is dying and knows it has run out of options.

But then again, that was apparently the definition of the entire world, if this document of hers was to be believed. Everyone had been assuming that it would be like this another few weeks or months. Surely it would get better.

And surely it would. Earth wasn’t descending into hell… was it?

As they banked, David could see the trees over northern Maryland brushed with fragile early spring leaf, a dusting of green not quite thick enough to camouflage the reality on the ground, of burned-out houses and strip malls, and abandoned vehicles along the roads.

Off to the west, he saw a large estate, a complex of shale roofs in lovely, manicured grounds. He could see figures on the grounds, a man riding a lawn tractor, two others walking along the curving driveway.

“Is that it?”

She jabbed the intercom. “How much longer, damn it?”

“Five minutes, Ma’am.”

She regarded David. “I don’t want to die. Isn’t it odd? An old woman like me. So selfish.”

He wasn’t interested in her anxieties. “It’s human nature,” he snapped, causing her to blink and set her jaw. Well, let her be offended. “I need to get to the bottom of this,” he continued. “Tell me about this class. And if I’m suffering from an amnesia, what was responsible or who? Was I underage? Did my parents consent?”

“Of course they did! Your father brought you to the class.”

“I’m taking this job as a clinician, not a survival expert or whatever it is you expect me to be. I’m a psychiatrist and that’s all I am.”

“Think of yourself as a shepherd.”

“All right. That’s valid. But not a disaster expert.”

“You’re our Quetzalcoatl.”

How tiresome. Since it had been realized that December 21, 2012, actually did have some significance, everyone was an expert on Aztec and Mayan civilization, and their dreary, complicated, and unforgiving gods.

“I am so tired of that stupid fad. Those damn gods didn’t mean a thing.”

“They had meaning.”

“Come on!”

“Not in the way people think, of course. They represent scientific principles that have been lost. Human personality types, hidden powers. But you understand all this. You just need to remember, David.”

“Remember what?”

They came in low over the estate, then banked again, this time quite sharply, resulting in an excellent view of the property.

Behind the shale roofs of what was obviously a very large mansion, stood an austere modern building. The whole establishment was surrounded by high brick walls.

“Is that razor wire on the walls?”

She peered out the window. “Looks like it. We have an excellent security organization. I’m sure it’s there for good reason.”

“I’m sure.”

When they landed, what looked to David like an unusually heavy black car appeared, some sort of Lincoln, he thought. Andy the waiter opened the jet, dropping down the door and lowering the steps. David checked his watch. They’d been in the air for thirty-eight minutes, a journey that would have taken six hours by car, assuming the roads were open. But with all the disabled vehicles around nowadays, it could have easily taken a week, or proved to be impossible.

As they went down the steps, the pilot appeared.

“We need to keep moving,” he shouted over the whine of the engines.

Andy was already putting David’s bags in the trunk. Mrs. Denman had no bags. She was returning tonight.

David gazed off across the airport. There were a couple of Cessnas in tie-downs. The wreckage of two personal jets—newer than this one—lay piled alongside the runway.

“Get in the car!” Andy barked. David realized that he’d taken on a new role. In the air, he was a servant. Here, a bodyguard.

David jumped in. A moment later, the trunk slammed, the pilot returned to the jet and it took off, making the car shake violently as its exhaust hit the vehicle.

“Jesus, they’re in a hurry!”

“There can be shooters,” Mrs. Denman muttered.

“How dangerous is this place?”

She looked at him as if he was some sort of a lunatic for even needing to ask. Andy, now driving, did his job in silence.

“I have two hours. The plane will fly a pattern, then meet me back here. Not a good idea to keep it on the ground.”

“No, I suppose not.”

The car swayed, then picked up speed as it approached the town of Raleigh itself. David had never been here before, but had been told that it was a prosperous and settled community of upscale commuters and local gentry.

By the time they reached the outskirts of the town, the car was doing at least sixty. They accelerated as they went along the main street, tires screaming as they rounded courthouse square.

Buildings raced past on each side as Andy leaned on the horn and they shot through one red light after another.

“What’s going on?”

“We call it ‘running the town.’”

“But—Jesus…”

“There’s a lot of inappropriate resentment.”

At that moment, the car turned and slowed as it began moving, once again, through the countryside. “Cigarette?” Mrs. Denman asked, holding out a pack.

“I don’t smoke.”

She put it away. “Neither do I.” She sighed.

Soon, David saw ahead of them a pair of enormously imposing gates. They were iron and easily twenty feet tall at their peaks. Across the top were four iron finials. On the finials, David recognized gryphons with their eagle’s wings and lion’s bodies, familiar, leering forms from the walls of Gothic cathedrals. Gryphons were guardians of the gates of heaven. Worked into the iron of the gates themselves were images of Mesoamerican deities—which was odd, given the age of this place. In the early twentieth century, they’d hardly been known.

“Are these gates new?”

“They’re original to the estate.”

As they opened and he saw the great house standing off across the rolling, exquisitely kept lawns, he was struck as if through the heart with the most poignant déjà vu.

“You’re as white as a sheet, Doctor.” She put the back of a long, spiderlike hand to his forehead. “No fever, at least, young man. Memory can bring fever.”

“Stop the car.”

“Ignore him, Andy.”

“Stop the car! I’m not taking this job. No matter what, I’m going back to New York.”

The car didn’t even slow down, and as they approached the great redbrick house with its wide colonnade and broad terraces, the sense of déjà vu, rather than fading, became more acute.

“You feel it, don’t you?”

“I feel very strange and I do not want to go ahead with this. I don’t know what’s going on here.”

She laid a hand on his wrist. “Just relax and let yourself feel it. Memory will return.” She leaned back and gave him a smile as broad as a child’s. “You’ll thank me, young man, when you do remember.”

“Just tell me, for God’s sake!”

“You have to make the connections yourself or they’ll have no meaning. No emotional resonance. You need to find your commitment to your mission in your own heart. I cannot do it for you.”

“But you know.”

“I know that the class existed but not what you were taught in it. And I also know that you just this moment remembered being here. It’s written on your face.”

They pulled up before the portico. David opened the door of the car, which was so heavy that it felt like pushing open a safe.

Walking toward the great house, he found himself profoundly drawn to the sense of order and permanence that pertained everywhere. The docile clicking of the lawn sprinklers, the early green of the trees, the grand apple tree just by the south wall in full bloom—it all spoke of a world that elsewhere had already slipped into the past, replaced by the sense of the posthumous that was coming to define modern life.

But it was also part of his past. His own personal past belonged in some way to this place.

Aubrey Denman opened the front door using a fingerprint detector. He’d half expected the great door to be swept open by some sort of butler. Instead, an armed security man in a blazer and tie greeted them. Obviously, his orders were to wait until the fingerprint reader had released the lock.

“Where are the—” David’s voice died. He had been about to ask where the patients and staff were, but the splendor of the room he had just entered silenced him. He found himself looking across a wide hall with a magnificent inlaid floor depicting a hunt in full cry. It was marquetry, and yet not too fragile for a floor.

And, incredibly, he remembered: You slid across this floor in your socks.

The leaping horses and racing dogs in the floor led the eye to a grand staircase that swept upward as if to heaven itself, drawing the eye further, this time to a phenomenal trompe l’oeil ceiling that imparted an unforgettable illusion of a vast summer sky.

You lay on the landing and imagined yourself among the birds.

“Where are my patients?”

“The patients are in the patient wing. Study the records first, Doctor, please. Then meet them.”

“Will they know me? Are they also in amnesia?”

“They’re in a state of induced psychosis.”

He stopped. “What did you just say?”

“For security reasons, this place appears to be a clinic for the mentally ill. Most members of the class are here as patients, their real selves hidden beneath a combination of amnesia and artificial psychosis. Members of the class who are on staff have only the amnesia, and one or two of them, who will guide the others, retain clear memory.”

He turned to her, and on her. “This is totally unacceptable. Who did such a thing to these people? I can’t be a party to it.”

“You can be a party to waking them up, then, and ending the need.”

“This is all insane, the whole thing. Who would ever induce mental illness to conceal somebody’s—what, their knowledge, their identity? Why was it done?”

“The enemies of our mission are incredibly ruthless and they’re going to get more so. If they found the class, they’d kill every single one of them. And you, David, make no mistake. But beforehand they would tear your mind to pieces with drugs and torture beyond anything you can imagine. And in the end, they would obtain your knowledge, amnesia or not.”

Never in his life had he struck another human being, but he was tempted to now, as he found himself coping with a disturbing impulse to shake the truth out of this old lady.

“Who are these enemies?”

“Presidents, kings, the rich and the famous, not to mention the members of the Seven Families who control the wealth of this planet.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“The more you remember, the more you’ll understand. Come with me. My time is short, and I need to show you your office.” She touched his hand. “David, you’ll regain control of your situation and I know how badly you need control; I wrote your personality profile.”

“Wrote it? Where is it? How could you write it?”

“I’m a psychiatrist, David, just like you. I managed the mental health of the class.”

“You did this to these people!”

Her eyes sought his, and in them, brown and hazed, he saw that hunted expression again.

“How did you do it? What method did you use?”

As if in shame, she turned away from him, and he knew that whatever she had done had been traumatic for all involved, including her.

Causing amnesia was a matter of hypnosis and drugs, but to make a person psychotic must be a ferocious process.

“How can they be released from this?”

“I’ll come back, and I’ll release them.”

“When?”

“We’re working on a very exact timeline. But I can assure you that it will be done.”

“Wait a minute. What timeline? I need to know!”

“If somebody who knew that was caught, it would be an incalculable disaster.”

“Caught? Could I be caught? By whom? Who are these enemies? Are they here?” He followed her up the staircase. “Damn it, I want answers!”

She mounted the stairs with the deliberation of a heart patient, her nostrils dilating as she sucked each careful breath.

“The house itself is lived in by staff and service. The patients are in the back, in the new wing.”

“Answer my questions!”

“Time will answer your questions.”

“Too damn late!”

“At exactly the right moment. Now, please focus on this. You’ll meet your staff later, then be introduced to the patients. I want to talk to you about your colleague Marian Hunt before you meet her.”

She stopped before an imposing mahogany door.

“Are you ready?” When she smiled, that expression came again.

The office was gigantic.

“I can’t work in this. It’s ridiculous.”

“Nonsense. You ought to be grateful to be surrounded by all this beauty.”

It was the size of a ballroom, but constructed out of mahogany inlaid with many other woods. A broad bank of windows looked south, another north, and the walls were lined with shelves and shelves of books, all old, all leather bound. An immense Persian rug filled this end of the room, under an equally huge and ornate desk. At the other was a fireplace fronted by a leather couch and wing chairs. In the paneling above the door were two glyphs of Mesoamerican gods, exquisitely carved, their faces glaring and ferocious.

“Who are they?” he asked.

“What principles do they represent? I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“I thought you were an expert on Aztec crap.”

“Thank you. Each of us knows only what he needs to know.”

Unlike the downstairs, he had no sense of déjà vu about this room. He surveyed the library. Every shelf was filled.

“Is there room for my books?”

She pulled down a row of what turned out to be book backs, revealing some empty shelving.

“Your predecessor kept his here.”

“Ah. Is the whole library fake, then?”

“Hardly. There are some extraordinary texts here.”

She handed him a volume with a gold-embossed glyph on the spine. He opened it to magnificent color plates of glyphs, hundreds of them.

“It’s entirely in… what is this? Is it Mayan? Toltec?”

She looked at it. “You’ll have access to scholars.”

“Where?”

“Here. Among your class.”

His only choice, he saw, was to just roll with this. There was no question in his mind that, as a child, he’d been to this house. Certainly, he had seen the downstairs. But what this class was all about, and why the security, he could not imagine—or rather, he supposed, remember.

Or could he? There might be vague memories in the back of his mind of the names of the old gods. But it was also true that their names were everywhere these days. And yet, he recalled other children, and being happy here.

He remembered, also, that there had been an enormous security issue.

“We need to discuss Marian Hunt.”

“Yes. She’s been assistant director here for what, ten years?”

“Since it opened.”

“Then surely she was the ideal choice for director.”

“She wasn’t part of the class. But she doesn’t know that and cannot know it; so as far as she’s concerned, she’s been passed over for a mere boy.”

“If the board doesn’t have faith in her, perhaps she would’ve been better off leaving.”

“Where would she go?”

A question without an answer. Or no, it did have an answer: she would go nowhere.

“Let me show you the surveillance toys,” Mrs. Denman said. “Every patient is available to total monitoring.” She pressed her finger against a discreet fingerprint reader embedded in the bookcase beside his desk. Two more shelves of fake books slid away to reveal a very large screen populated by dozens of small video images revealing what he felt sure would turn out to be every inch of the public spaces in the facility, indoors and out.

She touched a button and new rows of images appeared.

“These are the patient social areas,” she said. She tapped one of the images, which expanded to fill the screen.

For a moment, David did not understand what he was seeing. Then he did, and he was so shocked that he must have gasped aloud, because Aubrey Denman’s bird head snapped toward him, and the expression of fear on her face was almost as appalling as the straitjacket confining the patient.

At Manhattan Central, he’d seen patients under restraint, of course, but not being kept in one of these things. If not illegal, it was certainly a spectacular medical failure.

“I can’t allow that,” he said.

There were three patients in a sunny, pleasant room. Each one had a nurse in attendance, not surprising in a facility that offered the extreme level of care found at the Acton Clinic. But one of them was in this primitive restraint.

“He’s unable to bear… anything. At any moment he’ll just lose himself.”

“Do you know him?”

Her eyes closed, she gave a slow nod, one that communicated a sense of the anguish that her work clearly caused her. “There has been a great deal of sacrifice here, David. Lives sacrificed—the happiness of youth, David—all for the mission.”

“Which is what?”

“David,” she said, “the future. The future!”

She took his hand—snatched it—grasping it as if it was a lifeline in a storm. And suddenly, there came a memory.

He was trying urgently to explain something to a tall man, and to emphasize his point, he had grabbed this man’s hand.

“I told him I couldn’t do it. I told him!”

“But you can, David.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m out of time.”

He would have to keep his questions and his considerable doubts to himself. But he did not agree with her optimism, not at all. How could anybody save anything, given what was coming?

Well, perhaps he had a mentor in her. She was hardly the wealthy old fool she had initially seemed.

“You’ll be back,” he said. It was not a question, and not intended to be one.

“Of course. And I’m always available on my cell.”

“I need to get to know my staff,” he said, “and the class. Who are my classmates?”

“There will be somebody coming to help you. Until they arrive, don’t breathe a word about the class, not a single word.”

“I’m sitting on top of an institution full of people who’ve been spectacularly abused and I’m not supposed to even say anything about it? I don’t think so.” He gestured toward the screen. “What about them, are they members of the class?”

“Two of them. The other is genuinely disturbed.”

“And you did this. It’s appalling.”

“David, we did what we had to. Without security this deep the class would have been found. That must not happen, David, it must not.”

“What’s so important about them? I’m sorry if I sound callous, but I really need to know why, in a world where billions are dying, a small group of people would need to be so carefully protected?”

She closed the control center. “Call a staff meeting, but I’d advise you to move carefully. After Marian, your next order of business will be to meet Katrina Starnes. Katie. She’s your assistant.”

“Isn’t it rather odd that she’s not here now?”

She gestured toward the book backs that concealed the electronic wonders. “She’s not a member of the class. She isn’t allowed access to this system or to know anything about the inner meaning of this place.”

“Which is what? I still don’t understand.”

“No, of course not.”

The moment he had experienced the déjà vu that had convinced him that he had been in this house before, he had made the decision to let this play out. These vague, amnesia-stifled memories he was experiencing were really very strange, and, if they were true, then he was potentially looking at a whole hidden life, and he had no intention of not exploring it.

“I need to know more. A lot more. Are there any records of what we studied in the class? Video? Even just a syllabus. What did we study?”

“I need to leave.”

“Oh, wonderful! Leave me with an insoluble mystery and an institution to run during the worst social collapse since the fall of the Roman Empire.”

“Your memories will come back to you.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Oh, they must! Young man, you see the stakes. They must!”

A moment later, she was heading toward the door of the office. He was appalled.

“What about Dr. Ullman? Was the fire really an accident? Am I in danger?”

For a long moment, she was silent. Then she said, “David, we don’t know. Maybe it was a fire set by resentful townies. Could be. Or it could be something worse.”

“I need to know more!”

“You have your security force and Glen MacNamara is very, very good at what he does. Start there.”

As she spoke, she hurried away across the large room.

“Wait! The fingerprint reader? How do I get programmed into it?”

“You’re already in it.”

“Nobody took my fingerprints.”

“Of course they did—in class. Your fingerprints, your DNA, we have it all.”

She neither spoke again, nor wished him well, smiled—any of it. She simply went stalking off down the hall.

Her hidden timeline was strict, clearly.

“Mrs. Denman, wait! I need help! I need my questions answered!”

Her footsteps sounded on the stairs, quick, clattering away into the silence of the house.

As he heard the enormous car start up outside, he ran down the stairs, but by the time he reached the front of the building, she was already well down the driveway.

He yanked his cell phone out of his pocket and jammed her number in—and got nothing. The damn phone was deader than dead. He glanced up at the spotted, angry sun and threw it down onto the elegant brick driveway.

A moment later, there was a flash, followed at once by a sound so loud that it was like a body blow from a wrecking ball, an enormous, thundering roar.

He had never been close to a large explosion, and so did not know the effects and did not immediately understand what was happening. Then he did.

Shocked, disbelieving, he watched the smoke rising. She had been right and more than right. This place had enemies, and so did he. And he felt sure that they had just taken from him his most important ally.

From behind him, a siren began to wail. No police came, though, no fire department, no EMS. The siren was the clinic’s alert system, and it would be the only siren, because the Acton Clinic was alone. And he was alone, and they were all alone.

Not their enemies, though, hidden, aggressive, and lethally effective. Obviously, they were not alone.