Three Days to Never by Tim Powers

Rascasse sat back in one of the two captain’s chairs and with his open hand rolled his Bic pen across the flat newspaper in front of him.
    â€œLieserl Marity came out of hiding in order to die,” he said formally, as if he were dictating a newspaper photo caption.
    â€œIn effect,” agreed Paul Golze. He sighed and audibly shifted his bulk in the other captain’s chair, probably passing from one ear to the other the telephone that was connected to the modified CCS scrambler. “A Moira Bradley called the hospital at twelve forty-five—she’s one of the next of kin. And at six-ten a cop from San Diego called too, a detective, asking about Lisa Marrity. Nobody else, no press.”
    By the interior lights glowing over the seats and fold-out tables at the front of the bus, Rascasse was working on the Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle. Without looking up, he said, “I think we should get that cop.” His French accent made the last word into something like coop or cope.
    The Vespers radar dish at Pyramid Peak near the Nevada border covertly monitored all telephone communications that the NSA bounced off the moon, and swastika and Marity were two of the hundred high-specificity words the Vespers computer was programmed to flag. Tonight these two had occurred in the same conversation, and one of the technicians at the compound outside Amboy, all of whom had been on full alert since shortly after noon, had telephoned the New Jersey headquarters as soon as the correlation was noted and transcribed, and the New Jersey people had called Rascasse.
    Paul Golze spoke into the telephone: “Read me the entire conversation, slowly.” He began scribbling on a yellow legal pad.
    Stretched out on a couch by the dark galley in the back of the bus, Charlotte Sinclair paid wary attention to the two men at the tables ten rows forward.
    Charlotte had lost both eyes in an accident, but she could see through the eyes of anyone near her.
    She was tensely amused whenever one of the two men looked at the other; they were such opposites, physically—Rascasse tall and straight with close-cropped white hair, Golze slouchy and fat and bearded, and always pushing his stringy black hair away from his glasses.
    Charlotte wondered if she would be able to sleep.
    She had lit a cigarette to kill the spicy smell of the thing they called the Baphomet head, but the smoke irritated her eyelids, and she crushed it out in the armrest ashtray.
    Instead she reached under the seat and lifted out of her bag the bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon, still reassuringly heavy, and twisted out the cork cap. A mouthful of the warm liquor dispelled the incense-and-myrrh smell perfectly, so she had another to work on dispelling the memory of the thing as well, and then corked the bottle and tucked it beside her under her coat.
    It had been three years now since Rascasse had picked her up in a poker club in Los Angeles and she had begun working for the Vespers, but she still didn’t know much about the organization or its history.
    The thing they were looking for now was apparently invented in 1928, but the Vespers had supposedly been pursuing it under other forms for centuries. Before the advances in physics during the twentieth century, it had been categorized as magic—but so had hypnotism, and transmutation of elements, and ESP.
    Rascasse had told her once that the Vespers were a secret survival of the true Albigenses, the twelfth-century natural philosophers of Languedoc whose discoveries in the areas of time and so-called reincarnation had so alarmed the Catholic Church that Pope Innocent III had ordered the entire group to be wiped out. “The pope knew that we had rediscovered the real Holy Grail,” Rascasse had said, nodding toward the chalice-shaped copper handles on the black wood cabinet behind the driver’s seat. “We lost it during the Church’s Albigensian Crusade, when Arnold of Citeaux destroyed