Touchstone by Laurie R. King Page A

invisibility, Carstairs pulled away from the bushes, making a face when a hawthorn caught at his sleeve and snagged a thread loose. He extricated his sleeve, then slid the binoculars into his overcoat pocket and took out his note-book, to write a few words. He capped his pen with a flourish and put the leather journal away, satisfied that all had gone more or less as anticipated.
    Although, he reflected, he hadn’t anticipated being banished by Grey into this primitive wasteland, given over to the slender mercies of the Celtic peasant. He scowled at the standing stone in the field before him. Enormous effort had gone into bringing that rock here, time and sweat and danger to prop it upright, and for what? Here it stood, covered with multicolored blotches of lichen that looked like a skin disease, tipped like a drunk in the direction of the sea, girdled by a black ring where it had served as scratching-post for three millennia of scrofulous cattle.
    But as he tugged on his gloves, he studied the standing stone, and wondered if it might not be a parable. The message of the stone standing in the field was not the absurdity of the labor, but the fact that once the props, ropes, and sweat were cleared away and forgotten, what remained seemed magical.
    As once the props, the chaos, and the behind-the-scenes manipulation were cleared away, the British people would look at their new world, and see merely the magic of its rightness.
    Aldous Carstairs glanced at his wrist-watch, his expression rueful. How on earth was the Machiavelli of the new age expected to pass four hours in this place without being driven to murder?

Chapter Twelve
    S TUYVESANT TRAILED Grey at a distance, letting the man work off the alcohol-fueled anger, watching the small figure stump through the lumpy pasture that he had called a Phoenician village. It was the knee that caused Grey’s uneven gait, Stuyvesant saw—that and the drink: He used his right leg to climb, drawing the left up behind it. Probably the same war injury that had blown him to pieces and—if Carstairs wasn’t just feeding him a line of crap, if Grey’s business with the cigarette case hadn’t been some kind of stunt—had left the officer some pretty strange talents.
    Grey wove a path among the hummocks and walls that lay half hidden beneath centuries of grass and ivy, ferns and bramble, hawthorn and gorse. Twice he clambered over waist-high remains of walls, where the grass showed evidence of regular passage; once he nearly fell; another time he paused to shed his jacket. The buried village ended, but Grey kept on, over a rickety stile and along a sheep-worn path to the top of the hill, where an enormous stone slab protruded from the turf. He climbed onto it and turned his back to Cornwall while he rolled up his shirt-sleeves, then abruptly vanished; Stuyvesant hoped that merely meant that he had sat down.
    Stuyvesant took his time, pausing to examine the exposed stonework, turning occasionally to admire the view. Twice he found himself kneading the back of his neck, as if the hairs there felt some distant marksman settling his sights on an out-of-place Bureau agent, but he could see nothing, and told himself that it was just a memory spilling over from that earlier trench sensation. Much as he had disliked having Carstairs so close, he was finding it equally uncomfortable not knowing where the man was.
    But he told himself not to be childish: If Carstairs wanted him dead, he wouldn’t have had to travel to Cornwall to do it.
    Still, the back of his neck was not much interested in logic, and subsided only when he cleared the ridge and the countryside was temporarily out of sight.
    The stone slab was on the very crest of the hill, surrounded by a nest of brambles and gorse. Between the thickness of the thing and the rise it sat on, he could not see Grey at all. It had to have been put here, Stuyvesant supposed—one of those massive and mystifying prehistoric structures, Stonehenge’s