The Book of Air and Shadows

women exchanging embraces. They did not really resemble each other physically, but both presented to the world the same air of solid particularity. He couldn’t imagine anything really changing either of them: Carolyn and Amalie, what you saw was what you got, although Amalie was honesty incarnate and Carolyn lied like a snake. Had Carolyn been blond, he concluded, they might have been two sisters, the good one and the bad.
    A short flight on a tiny powerful Learjet, the pilot uncommunicative, efficient, moving his craft through angles eschewed by mild commercial aviators. Midflight, Rolly got through to her children, or so Crosetti imagined: she did not share but sat damp-eyed, staring out at bright whiteness. But she let him take her hand.
    Landing at some Midlands airport whose name Crosetti never caught, they were met by Mr. Brown of Osborne, dressed in yellow coveralls and work boots. Mr. Brown conducted them to a white Land Rover painted with the insignia of the Severn Trent Water Board. On the motorway he explained the plan: go right in, bold as brass, find the thing, if it were there to find, drive off. Another plane waited near London to take them back to New York. Crosetti asked him if he knew what they were after.
    “Not me,” said Brown, “no need to know, I’m just the help. There’s a rental van behind us with all the equipment and a couple of lads to run it, ground-penetrating radar, resistivity gear, the lot. If there’s a well there they’ll find it. We’ll all do the digging, I expect.”
    “This is pretty expensive, all this,” Crosetti observed.
    “Oh, yes. Money no object.”
    “And you’re not curious?”
    “If I was the curious type, sir, I’d be long dead,” said Brown. “That’ll be Warwick up ahead. We’ll be able to see the castle in a bit.”
    It rose white above a line of trees, hung there for a while, and then vanished when the road dipped, like a vision in a fairy story. After some driving through anonymous suburbs it appeared again on their left, huge, looming over the river.
    “Not like Disneyland, is it?”
    “No, that’s the real thing,” said Brown, “although Tussaud’s have tarted it up like mad. Still, there’s real blood soaked into the stones. A horrible time, of course, when that was the last word in military technology, but still…”
    “You would’ve liked to live back then?”
    “On occasion. A simpler time: someone got on your nerves, say, you put on your tin suit and chopped away at ’em. Half a sec, I think we’re just on our mark.” He pulled over to the side of the narrow road they were on and consulted a large-scale ordinance survey map, then folded it and turned the Land Rover into the ditch on the right and down a track through a grove of oak and beech.
    “There’s gear for you in the van,” he said as he got out. “It’s important to look authentic and official.”
    Crosetti and Rolly went to the rear door of the van, which opened to reveal an interior that included a steel table, tool racks, long steel pipes, ladders, rigging gear, electronic equipment, and two men, who introduced themselves as Nigel and Rob, Nigel owlish and bespectacled, Rob broad-shouldered and gap-toothed with a tan buzz cut. They handed out yellow coveralls and boots and yellow hard hats with lamps in them. Crosetti was not surprised to find that the boots and the coveralls fit him perfectly. Carolyn reported that hers did too.
    “Osborne seems like a very efficient outfit. Does it make you nervous to learn that they have both our shoe sizes?”
    “Nothing surprises me anymore,” she said. “What are they doing?”
    “I have no idea,” said Crosetti.
    They watched the two men roll a four-wheeled cart made of steel pipe out of the van, and Crosetti was conscripted into off-loading various pieces of heavy electronics and car batteries from the van and lifting them onto the cart.
    “By the way, what
is
all this?” he asked Rob.
    “It’s a ground-penetrating radar set, absolutely top drawer. It produces a picture of the subsurface from a few feet to a hundred feet down, depending on the soil. We should get good penetration here. It’s Triassic sandstone.”
    Nigel said, “Unless there’s a clay intrusion.”
    “What if there’s a clay intrusion?” asked Crosetti.
    “Then we’re fucked, mate,” Rob answered. “We’ll have to go to resistivity, and we’ll be all week.”
    “You both work for Osborne?”
    “Not us,” said Nigel.