The Sons of Heaven Read Online Free PDF

the Plague Club conspiracy. Labienus was far too careful, and anyway there was no need for proof; the Company knew perfectly well that Labienus had been releasing viruses into the mortal population for centuries. Victor had been told to turn up the contacts, the associates, to draw in gradually the edges of the net. Hong Tsieh, whoever he might be, was the real prize this evening.
    Victor forced access to Labienus’s private files and began scrolling through the correspondence file headings, largely out of habit. The texts of the communications were no longer there, of course, cannily long deleted; but one never knew what might turn up. It was, at least, something to do on this miserable posting. Victor had been a mole in Labienus’s organization for just over two centuries now and would gladly have exchanged places with any of the unfortunate residents of Forest Lawn, no matter how transitory their state.
    “Sir?” There was a sharp double knock on the door. “Sendeb reports we’ve located another celebrity.”
    Victor sighed and pulled his attention away from the scrolling dates. “Which one?”
    “Buster Keaton, sir.”
    Victor raised his eyebrows. Early cinema pioneers generally commanded high prices, if they were well known. “You’re sure it’s not Diane or Michael?”
    “It says Buster on the headstone, sir. He’s in great shape, too.”
    “Bring him up here,” Victor ordered. “I’ll notify Sotheby’s tomorrow.”
    He settled back and focused on the dates again. To his annoyance, he notedthat they had sped by more quickly than he had anticipated: all the way back to June 2083. He scrolled up again and then halted.
    There. 15 July 2083. Message from: V. Kalugin. Subject: Concern.
    Nothing else. Victor scrolled ahead with infinite care, into 2084 and beyond, but there were no other message headings from V. Kalugin. He withdrew his consciousness from the files and leaned back, folding his gloved hands in his lap, staring at the wall.
    Vasilii Kalugin had disappeared long ago. He hadn’t been anybody important within the Company, a Marine Salvage Specialist of low rank, but Victor had been searching for him for decades. Kalugin’s wife had asked him to search, and Victor loved Kalugin’s wife, and so Victor had sought Kalugin faithfully. Honorably, too.
    Even so, he had never been able to find a trace of the man beyond a last communication dating from February 2083. Here now was the heading of a message dated four months later, and to Labienus, of all people.
    What had been happening in July 2083? Labienus had been busy, to be sure. That was the summer the Sattes virus had swept through the prisons, and then the armed forces, of the world. Labienus had boasted, since, that that had been his finest hour: he’d managed to eliminate the criminals and the warmongers of all nations in one stroke. The virus had begun in late May in North America. By mid-July it had circumnavigated the globe, crossing Siberia to Kamchatka and then working its way down into Japan …
    Kamchatka? That had been Kalugin’s last known location. He’d been doing something classified in Kamchatka. But here was proof that at the very moment the Sattes virus had hit there, he’d communicated with Labienus—who was responsible for the virus. Had Kalugin found something out?
    Could he have been such a fool as to accuse Labienus directly? Unfortunately, Kalugin
had
been a fool.
    The double knock sounded again. “Sir! We’ve brought him.”
    Victor pushed back his chair. He got up and went out to inventory the corpse of Buster Keaton for the Company’s sales catalogue.

Mont St. Michel, 10 August 2330
    Following the devastating tsunami of 2198, Mont St. Michel had been rebuilt, almost entirely at Company expense.
    Appearances had been preserved—this was France, after all—so the visitor approaching on the air ferry from Jersey might still watch as its fairy-tale spireloomed from the sea mist, as its thirteenth-century