Three Days to Never by Tim Powers Page A

all of our possessions at Carcassonne.” When Charlotte had dutifully made some derogatory remark about theCatholic Church, Rascasse had shrugged. “Einstein suppressed it too, after rediscovering it in 1928.”
    Another time Rascasse had told her that in the 1920s the Vespers—called the Ahnenerbe then—had worked with Adolf Hitler, and had even provided him with the swastika as an emblem; though Rascasse had added that the group’s core had never been interested in the screwy Nazi racial philosophies, but had only hoped to use Hitler’s government to fund their researches. The association had apparently not worked out, and long before the Ahnenerbe had been incorporated into the SS, the core members had stolen the archives and left Germany and taken on, or possibly reassumed, the name Vespers. Golze said Vespers was a corruption of Wespen, the German word for wasps, though Charlotte liked to think it referred to the French term for evening prayers. Rascasse himself was French, and probably old enough to have been active during the war, but she had never been able to figure out when he had joined the Vespers.
    Their researches had to do with the nature of time, and her payment for working with them was going to be derived from that.
    But “researches” probably wasn’t the right word, except in a historical-detective sense—they weren’t hoping to discover how to manipulate time, but to rediscover work that had already been done toward that, work that had subsequently been lost or hidden or suppressed.
    In these three years Charlotte had seen them pursue a number of leads—clues that took them to private European libraries, and odd old temples in India and Nepal, and remote ruins in Middle Eastern deserts—all of which had proved to be dead ends. Rumored scrolls or inscriptions were gone or had been misleadingly described, alchemical procedures proved to be too obscure to follow or did nothing, and disembodied Masters turned out to be disembodied imbeciles, if not complete fabrications.
    It had been Charlotte herself who had obtained the one solid lead for them: She had got access to a secret archive in New Jersey, and had stolen several files of papers that contained information about a woman who had been living under a false name in Southern California as recently as 1955, a woman who had at one time had possession of some sort of potent artifact. Charlotte hadn’t been told all the details, but it had been this discovery that had led Rascasse and his team here to Los Angeles to work with the California branch of the Vespers.
    A mouthful of bourbon heated her throat now as she banished the memory of what she had done to get access to that archive.
    Charlotte didn’t think Rascasse and Golze had truly believed the old woman’s device still existed; certainly they had assumed she must have died years ago. But at noon all the Vespers electronic Ouija boards had shaken into activity, with ghosts anxious to know if they still had identities—this and a careful study of the day’s seismological charts convinced Rascasse that the device had been activated and used.
    He had immediately got the Vespers remote viewers busy trying to triangulate its location; and after an hour they had narrowed it down to somewhere in the Los Angeles area.
    Then the old woman’s gadget had reportedly moved east, at about 1:30—the viewers couldn’t be precise, since the device had not been activated at the time—and so Rascasse had rounded up Golze and Charlotte and set out in the bus toward Palm Springs.
    At one point on that long drive a gong had sounded from the cabinet behind the driver’s seat, and the cursor on the electronic Ouija board above the cabinet had been bouncing like the virtual ball on a Pong game, lighting up random letters and numbers. Charlotte had faintly heard the thing in the cabinet moaning.
    After a quick, whispered argument with