"Crime Spells" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greenberg Martin H, Coleman Loren L, Weldon Phaedra M., Resnick Mike, Stackpole...)

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“I’ve been able to clean up the image pretty good,” said the computer guy. “Best I can tell, this is old stock film transferred to three-quarter inch and then to disk. A lot of degradation in the transfer. Black and white, silent. Almost looks like newsreel footage, you know what I’m saying?”

Black and white? I could’ve sworn I saw colors: the dirty brown of that bedspread, that girl’s black hair. The blood where she’d bitten her tongue. That green and white thing on the bed. “Let’s see it.”

The thing was no easier to watch the second time around. But the computer guy had been right: black and white.

Hunh. “Can you tell us anything about where and when?”

“Yup.” The computer guy tapped keys. “I’ve isolated a couple items in the room, did freeze-frame, blew ’em up.”

What he brought up were two stills of objects on the bed: one, a triangle protruding into the frame from the right, and the packet alongside the pillow, only black and white now instead of green and white. He zoomed in on the latter with a couple of mouse clicks.

I stared for a few seconds. “Chiclets?”

“Chewing gum?” said Rollins.

“But a very special pack of chewing gum. It’s only two pieces, and what store sells that? Then this other thing.” He did the zoom thing again, and I now could see that the triangle was the bottom third of a box.

I said, “Does that say what I think it does?”

“It does indeed.”

First line: Marl

Second line: 4 CLASS A CIGARE

“Who sells cigarettes with only four smokes a pack?” Rollins asked.

I thought I knew.

The computer guy looked smug. “Before I get to that, there’s one more thing. This is from the guy. That splotch there?”

“Yeah, I thought that was a mole,” I said.

“Not a mole. Let me just enlarge it here… clean it up… there.”

My whole insides went still.

Not a mole. A tattoo. One I recognized.

An ace of spades with a Jolly Roger in the center.

The computer guy said, “The gum and the cigarettes were standard C rations for American soldiers. That tattoo is a copy of a death card, what PsyOps developed during Vietnam and which some soldiers used to leave on the bodies of dead Viet Cong. Here.” More mouse clicks, and this time a webpage came up with a screen, the kind on YouTube. “This is actual footage of something called Operation Baker. Happened in 1967.”

About ten minutes long, the film was silent and consisted mainly of soldiers on patrol, burning a village. Then, at the end, footage of American soldiers putting cards in the mouths of dead Vietnamese.

“Ace of spades,” Rollins said. “Looks like a regular card from a Bicycle pack.”

The computer guy nodded. “Some lieutenant got wind that the ace of spades was some kind of bad luck symbol to the Vietnamese or something. He was wrong, but he contacted Bicycle, and they sent over thousands of packs. Said Secret Weapon right on the pack. Not all units used the same cards, though, and some designs were more popular than others.”

“You know what company that was?” I asked. “In the film?”

“Yeah. Third Brigade. Twenty-fifth Infantry Division.”

“Dickert,” said Rollins.

“And MacAndrews.” Opening my phone, pressing speed dial.

When I got Kay on the line, I said, “MacAndrews… did he have any identifying marks?”

He did.

Thirty minutes later, Rollins was still tapping keys and frowning. “Can’t you go any faster?” I asked.

“Learn to use the damn computer,” Rollins said, though he didn’t sound mad. It was a partner schtick. Just as Adam and I’d had ours. “Okay, it says here that Jolie has several tattoos.”

“Go to Google Images. I want to see them.”

“You want to drive?”

“I like watching you earn your pay.” Pictures winked onto the screen. Obscure tribal signs, a huge tiger on her back, several dragons, a large cross. “The woman’s a walking billboard… There, on her left shoulder blade. What is that?”

“Supposedly, a magical tattoo,” Rollins said, and read. “Says here it’s written in Khmer and is supposed to protect her and her loved ones from bad luck, evil, stuff like that. It’s a… yantra tattoo.”

Bingo. “That’s it, that’s what she’s got.”

“Who?”

“Tell me about yantra tattoos.”

“Jesus, you’re demanding. Hold on, hold on…” A lot of hits on Google. Silence as we read.

Then Rollins said, “This is some funky shit.”

Here was how it worked.

A yantra tattoo had to both adhere to a certain Sanskrit pattern-the yantra-and be coupled with precise muons, chants dating back to the Vedic religion, the historical predecessor of Hinduism, which the monk who applied the tattoo was to recite.

A monk. That old man, Chuon. And those smudges on his forearms and neck: They’d been tattoos.

The actual verses tattooed in special ink were in Pali, the religious language of the earliest Buddhist school, Thervada, or “The Way of the Elders.”

If you believed these things actually worked, there were patterns that might make a warrior stronger, give someone good luck, allow someone to become invisible. Give you superstrength. If you believed in magic.

I thought Sarah Wylde might.

And me? Well.

I had met an angel a year ago. Maybe I was due a visit from the other side.

And I found out one more thing, courtesy of one of Wylde’s papers.

In Cambodia, sleep paralysis has a very specific name: khmaoch sângkât.

Translation: The ghost knocks you down.

Because the people who suffer from this also report seeing demons that hold them down. Another paper suggested that the symptoms were really PTSD; one woman suffered an episode whenever she remembered how soldiers razed her village and killed everyone.

I don’t think it was either-or. Could be both. Could be, maybe, that the old monk had been carrying the girl on the DVD. And maybe now, Sarah Wylde was picking up the slack.

Like she said: Right under my nose.