“I thought they weren’t offering that item for preview.”
“They are not,” said Setrakian. “But we have to try. This is my absolute last chance. At the very least, it will give Vasiliy the opportunity to observe their security.”
Zack looked at his dad and said, “Can’t we do the James Bond security stuff instead of getting on a train?”
Eph said, “ ’Fraid not, little ninja. You gotta go.”
Nora said, “But how will you all keep in touch and connect afterward?” She pulled out her phone. “This thing is just a camera now. They’re toppling cell towers in every borough.”
Setrakian said, “If worst comes to worse, we can always meet back here. Perhaps you should use the ground line to contact your mother, tell her we are on the way.”
Nora left to do just that, and Fet went out to start the van. Then it was just Eph and Zack, the father with his arm around his son, facing the old man.
“You know, Zachary,” said Setrakian, “in the camp I was telling you about, the conditions were so brutal that many times I wanted to grab a rock, a hammer, a shovel, and take down one, maybe two guards. I would have died with them, for certain—and yet, in the searing heat of the moment of choice, at least I would have accomplished something. At least my life—my death—would have meaning.
Setrakian never looked at Eph, only the boy, though Eph knew this speech was meant for him.
“That was how I thought. And every day I despised myself for not going through with it. Every moment of inaction feels like cowardice in the face of such inhuman oppression. Survival often feels like an indignity. But—and this is the lesson as I see it now, as an old man—sometimes the most difficult decision is to not martyr yourself for someone, but instead to choose to live for them. Because of them.”
Only then did he look at Eph.
“I do hope you will take that to heart.”
The Black Forest Solutions Facility
THE CUSTOM VAN in the middle of a three-vehicle motorcade pulled to a stop right outside the canopied entrance of the Black Forest Solutions meatpacking facility in Upstate New York.
Handlers from both the lead and trailing SUVs opened large black umbrellas as the rear van doors opened and an automatic ramp was lowered to the driveway.
A wheelchair was rolled out backward, its occupant immediately surrounded by the umbrellas and quickly shuttled inside.
The umbrellas did not come down until the chair reached a windowless expanse among the animal pens. The occupant of the wheelchair was a sun-shy figure wearing a burka-like habit.
Eldritch Palmer, watching the entrance from the side, made no attempt to greet the occupant, but instead awaited its unveiling. Palmer was supposed to be meeting with the Master, not one of its wretched Third Reich flunkies. But the Dark One was nowhere to be seen. Palmer realized then that he had not had an audience with the Master since its run-in with Setrakian.
A small, impolite smile curled the edges of Palmer’s lips. Was he pleased that the disgraced professor had shown the Master some disgrace? No, not exactly. Palmer had zero affection for lost causes such as Abraham Setrakian. Still, as a man used to being president and CEO, Palmer didn’t mind that the Master had been shown something in the way of humility.
He chastised himself then, admonishing himself to never let these thoughts enter his mind in the presence of the Dark One.
The Nazi removed his coverings layer by layer. Thomas Eichhorst, the Nazi who had once headed the Treblinka extermination camp, arose from the wheelchair, the black sun-coverings piled at his feet like so many sloughed layers of flesh. His face retained the arrogance of a camp commandant, though the decades had worn away the edges like a fine acid. His flesh was smooth as a mask of ivory. Unlike any other Eternal Palmer had ever met, Eichhorst insisted on wearing a suit and tie, maintaining the bearing of an undead gentleman.
Palmer’s dislike for the Nazi had nothing whatsoever to do with his crimes against humanity. Palmer was in the midst of overseeing a genocide himself. Rather, his distaste for Eichhorst was borne out of envy. He resented Eichhorst’s blessing of Eternity—the great gift of the Master—because he coveted it so.
Palmer then recalled his first introduction to the Master, a meeting facilitated by Eichhorst. This had followed three full decades of searching and researching, of exploring that seam where myth and legend met historical reality. Palmer fin
ally tracked down the Ancients themselves, and finagled an introduction. They turned down his request to join their Eternal clan, refusing him flatly, even though Palmer knew they had accepted into their rare breed men whose net worth was significantly lower than his. Their unqualified scorn, after so many years of hope, was a humiliation that Eldritch Palmer simply could not bear. It meant his mortality and the surrender of all that he had accomplished in this pre-life. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust: that was fine for the masses, but for Palmer, only immortality would do. The corruption of his body—which had never been a friend to him—was but a small price to pay.
And so commenced another decade of searching—but this time, in pursuit of the legend of the rogue Ancient, the seventh immortal, whose power was said to rival any of the others. This journey brought Palmer to the craven Eichhorst, who arranged the summit.
It occurred inside the Zone of Alienation surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine, a little more than a decade after the 1986 reactor disaster. Palmer had to enter the Zone without his usual motorcade support (his unmarked ambulance and security detail), the reason being that moving vehicles kick up radioactive dust, laced with cesium-137, so you don’t want to follow any other moving vehicles. So Mr. Fitzwilliam—Palmer’s bodyguard and medic—drove him alone, and drove fast.
Their meeting took place after nightfall, of course, in one of the so-called black villages surrounding the plant: evacuated settlements that dotted the most blighted ten-square-kilometer area of the planet.
Pripyat, the largest of these settlements, had been founded in 1970 to house plant workers, its population having grown to fifty thousand at the time of the accident and radiation exposure. The city was fully evacuated three days later. A carnival had been built in a large downtown lot, set to open on May 1, 1986: five days after the disaster, two days after the city was emptied forever.
Palmer met the Master at the foot of the never-operated Ferris wheel, sitting as still as a giant stopped clock. It was there that a deal was struck, and the Ten-year Plan set into motion—with the Earth’s occultation designated as the time of the crossing.
In return, Palmer was promised his Eternity, and a seat at the right hand of the Master. Not as one of his errand-boy acolytes but as a partner in apocalypse, pending his delivery of the human race as promised.