The Unification Chronicles

Let’s hop in the Way­Back machine and head back to 1994. I was still in the Air Force, work­ing at the Pen­ta­gon, and inspired by a renais­sance in SF sagas on TV — Baby­lon 5, Deep Space 9 — I’d been work­ing on my own sprawl­ing space epic, try­ing to get it all right in my head. It was big, and I was try­ing to make sense of it. The back­story went back a long way, dozens of mil­len­nia, involv­ing an ancient race of pro­tec­tors called the Guardians and a sin­gle hive mind of humanoid telepaths known only as the Neme­sis. After months of run­ning in cir­cles, I decided to put it aside and write some­thing else.

I’d recently been turned on to Christo­pher Golden’s Shadow Saga, which I still think are the best vam­pire books out there, and I’d read almost exclu­sively hor­ror in high school, so I fig­ured, why not write a hor­ror novel as a change of pace. I came up with an idea where our myths and leg­ends about angels and demons were based on real, flesh-​​and-​​blood immor­tals that had walked the Earth since the begin­ning of the human race, manip­u­lat­ing human devel­op­ment for their own rea­sons. That devel­oped rather quickly into Between Heaven and Hell, and I was well on my way to writ­ing my first actual novel.

But then, about ten chap­ters into the book, some­thing weird hap­pened. I’d never really given much thought to where the immor­tals came from, why they were the way they were. And as I wrote, it dawned on me I knew exactly where the immor­tals came from. They had been put here by the Guardians after the Guardians altered part of the Neme­sis to sup­press the telepa­thy. Humans were an off­shoot of the Neme­sis, and the immor­tals had been left behind as the shep­herds, installed with the Guardians’ own love of order. After a while, the brain­wash­ing failed in some of the immor­tals, and they reverted to a devo­tion to chaos as the only way to improve, the Neme­sis phi­los­o­phy. And thus explained the angels and demons.

I wasn’t writ­ing a com­pletely unre­lated hor­ror novel as a change of pace. I was writ­ing a pre­quel to my space opera, one set on present day Earth. But it was still sci­ence fic­tion, and still part of the over­all tale.

I want to stress that this wasn’t a con­scious deci­sion. I had no inten­tion of con­nect­ing the two sto­ries, and had set out to delib­er­ately avoid Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles for a while. But the story had a bet­ter idea.

Folks, don’t be afraid to lis­ten to the story. It will tell you itself where it’s going. And in some cases, like I dis­cov­ered with UC, it won’t let you go even if you try to walk away and do some­thing else.

Yes­ter­day was actu­ally fairly pro­duc­tive, and if it were not for my own hubris, I’d be pretty proud of myself. I got 2,075 words writ­ten, includ­ing a tense yet funny scene with Dante, my probably-​​needs-​​to-​​be-​​renamed hacker char­ac­ter, and a lab tech with a place­holder name of Shel­don Cooper try­ing not to get killed by demons. You guys will see the first draft for that posted on the 13^th. I also got some final tweaks done to the Rev­e­la­tion out­line and split the Cru­sade out­line into three acts. I’ll have an arti­cle for JeffKirvin.net next Mon­day about the sacred and dreaded three act struc­ture and why you really can’t get away from it, no mat­ter avante garde you may think you are.

I didn’t get as much done yes­ter­day as I wanted, though, because I still have some bad habits to break. Notably, Big Bang The­ory and Cas­tle. I didn’t even really have to watch Cas­tle, because I knew it would be in my Hulu queue this morn­ing. I ratio­nal­ized it because not only is it an awe­some show with one of my favorite actors, but it’s a show about a best sell­ing nov­el­ist. As for Big Bang The­ory, one of my minor char­ac­ters in the chap­ter I was writ­ing was loosely based on Shel­don, so I had to watch, right? For research. Yeah.

Oh, and I took up the hour after Cas­tle watch­ing the local news tell me how our sub-​​zero Fahren­heit weather can kill you in under an hour while I down­loaded the unabridged audio­book of Stephen King’s Under the Dome to my net­book and synced to my iPhone. All 32 hours of it. Aw yeah. Hey, I sat through Atlas Shrugged unabridged, and this has got to be better.

Hubris. I agreed with Josh that I’d start writ­ing Cru­sade this Thurs­day while he started the first book of Pan­theons. So now I have a hard dead­line for Rev­e­la­tion. I’ve got three chap­ters, about 10,000 words, left to write, and only today and tomor­row to do it. And my day job to deal with. And it’s my mom’s birth­day tonight, so there will be cake over at my sister’s.

If I may quote Nicholas Cage from “The Rock”, “I love pressure…”

8: Leads

Daniel ran his hands under the water in his motel room sink and then splashed his face and ran his fin­gers through his short dark hair. He hadn’t slept well, but thank­fully he didn’t remem­ber much from his dreams. He checked his watch. It was time to get mov­ing. He needed to find out as much as he could about what Hen­driks was really doing in that house before the police tracked him down. He was hop­ing he could prove that Hen­driks wasn’t really dead, even though he knew from his own expe­ri­ence that wasn’t true. It was pos­si­ble he really was los­ing his mind. And if he ended up in a place like St. Elizabeth’s, so be it. But he was going to find out every­thing he pos­si­bly could first.

He donned a Wash­ing­ton Nation­als ball cap and cheap sun­glasses he’d picked up in a con­ve­nience store the night before. It wasn’t much of a dis­guise, but it would have to do for now. He stepped out into the mid­morn­ing DC sun and real­ized he’d have to get a change of clothes some­where. It was going to be another hot one, and the jeans and T-​​shirt he was wear­ing weren’t going to get any fresher.

He took the bus eigh­teen blocks to the library, and set­tled in behind one of their inter­net ter­mi­nals. He chose one near the wall, and had a rel­a­tively clear view of both the entrance and the win­dow to the out­side. If the cops fig­ured out where he was and came after him, at least he’d have a lit­tle warning.

The first thing he did was search for any art or antiq­ui­ties thefts recently, first in the DC Metro area, then widen­ing his search to the entire east coast when that turned up noth­ing. Get­ting noth­ing there, he widened again to the entire United States, Europe, and finally looked for any­thing recent glob­ally. Noth­ing. Where ever Hen­driks got all that stuff, he either bought it qui­etly on the black mar­ket or he’d had it for a long time. Daniel even searched for thefts match­ing par­tic­u­lar items he could remem­ber, and came up blank again.

So that was a bust. He checked local news and blogs to see if there was any news about either Hen­driks or him, and felt his blood run cold when he saw the first head­line in the list.

IS THERE A TERRORIST HIDING IN YOUR BACK YARD? By Susan Richard­son, New Amer­i­can Century

He opened the arti­cle and read it quickly. This was a lot worse than he’d thought. He remem­bered the older cop yes­ter­day say­ing some­thing about the PATRIOT act, but he’d been more wor­ried about not going to the loony bin than what the cop was actu­ally say­ing, and then once he’d been on the run it kind of faded into back­ground. But this, this was bad. The FBI was look­ing for him, sus­pected him of God knew what.

Daniel real­ized two things in quick suc­ces­sion. He was run­ning out of time, as the FBI was prob­a­bly already watch­ing for cer­tain pat­terns of search key­words. If they’d already noticed him, it wouldn’t take them long to back­track the IP address of the com­puter he was using and trace it to the library. He also real­ized that if he was going to get much fur­ther in this, he’d need an ally. Maybe Ms. Richard­son was look­ing for a scoop.

He clicked the Home link in the arti­cle and checked out the New Amer­i­can Cen­tury site as a whole. Looked like a typ­i­cal right wing rag to him, the kind of thing that the lit­er­ate frac­tion of the Fox News audi­ence might read. Far from his first choice, but if he could win her over, sup­port from such a reporter might actu­ally carry more weight than the lib­eral journos he’d known back in Stand­ford. If Richard­son believed he was inno­cent, when her job was to fan the flames of fear, then he really must be inno­cent. At least, that’s what Daniel hoped.

The only snail mail address listed on the site’s Con­tact Us page was a post office box in Alexan­dria. He knew that would belong to the owner or edi­tor, this Stan­ley Winchell, not to Richard­son. That meant he had to go the riskier route of email­ing her and set­ting up a meet­ing, know­ing he wouldn’t be able to check to see if she agreed or pre­vent her from going right to the cops. But he had to do some­thing, and every sec­ond he stayed on this com­puter increased his chances of tip­ping off the FBI.

He copied down her email address and jumped over to Hot­mail. He cre­ated a new account with them, sim­i­lar to the one he used for all his likely spam sources, and emailed her from there.

From: InnocentMan0042@hotmail.com

To: Susan@newamericancentury.com

Sub­ject: I have a tip about your arti­cle yesterday

Body: Ms. Richard­son, I am the doc­tor you men­tioned in your arti­cle about the sub­ject of an FBI inves­ti­ga­tion. I would like to meet with you to tell you my side of the issue, but obvi­ously I can’t call you or even check to see if you reply to this email. I will be out­side Sec­ond Story Books in Dupont Cir­cle at 2pm today. I’m wear­ing a Nation­als hat and sun­glasses. Please come alone, I assure you I’m no threat to any­one and just want to clear my name.

He hit send and logged out of every­thing. He walked casu­ally out of the library and caught a bus uptown. He had just enough time to get to Dupont Cir­cle and set up a good place to observe before 2 o’clock.

#

Susan stared at her email with her mouth hang­ing open. He had no idea if this was true, and a quick search for InnocentMan0042@hotmail.com showed no hits. She couldn’t prove the email address was Cho’s, but she was rea­son­ably sure it didn’t belong to any­one else before today. So either Cho really was try­ing to con­tact her or some­one was play­ing her. The only way to test it was to show up and see for herself.

She thought about call­ing Stan, see­ing if he could arrange some pro­tec­tion. She thought bet­ter of it. Bob Wood­ward didn’t have body­guards when he went to see Deep Throat. She was a big girl, and she knew how to take care of her­self. Besides, Dupont Cir­cle was a crowded place pretty much any time of day. Lots of busi­ness peo­ple dur­ing the day, and a thriv­ing gay club scene at night. What­ever hap­pened to her, she could at least be sure there would be plenty of witnesses.

She grabbed her lap­top and shoved it in the lap­top bag that dou­bled as her purse. She wanted to get there early. This could be the biggest story of her life.

#

“Agent Har­ris, I think we have something.”

Jack walked over to the tech in the Hoover Fed­eral Build­ing. “What do you have for me, Dante?”

“Sir, I was tapped into Google like you asked, and I found a clus­ter of searches meet­ing your key­words. I traced the IP address to a library in SouthEast.”

“Inter­est­ing. Did you have time to set up the remote viewing?”

“No sir, he logged off too fast.”

Damn, Jack thought. He’d been hop­ing that they could not only find Cho, but dig­i­tally look over his shoul­der and see what he did on the inter­net. If they’d had enough time, they could sit here and record a video of every­thing on Cho’s screen for as long as he was logged in. “Do you think he knew he was compromised?”

The tech shrugged. “I doubt it, sir. We caught him log­ging on to Hot­mail just before he dropped con­nec­tion. We might be able to pull some­thing from there.”

“Get on it, then. If he was set­ting up a meet with an accom­plice, I want to know who, where and when.”

7: Con­spir­a­cies

Jeff Frankel took a sip of his cof­fee and turned back to his lap­top. The cof­fee was strong, as truck stop cof­fees usu­ally were, and that was just the way Jeff liked it. He scratched his scruffy beard and started read­ing again. It was amaz­ing how many peo­ple were blind to what was really out there.

“I gave birth to an alien love child,” one head­line read. Hmph, Jeff thought. Like that’s news any­more. When he’d taken his RV through New Mex­ico last year, Jeff had noticed that you couldn’t swing a cat in that state with­out hit­ting a human-​​alien hybrid, espe­cially the closer you got to Roswell. Damn things were tak­ing over down there, thicker than the damn Mex­i­cans. Sign of the times, he thought. They damn sure weren’t keep­ing the crash in ’47 a secret anymore.

He moved his news­reader on to the next story as he took another bite out of his bagel. “An angel saved me when my car went in the lake.” This one he doubted, but not because of the angel. Jeff knew with­out a doubt that angels were real. He’d seen them him­self, in the Army over in ‘Nam first, then years later here in the states. He could rec­og­nize them on site now, he knew their tricks. There was a way immor­tals car­ried them­selves that always gave them away to some­one who was really look­ing. Even walk­ing down the street, mind­ing your own busi­ness, you had a dif­fer­ent atti­tude if you knew you couldn’t be killed.

But in Jeff’s expe­ri­ence, angels didn’t inter­act with humans much, at least not with­out an ulte­rior motive. They had their own agenda, and they didn’t have time to pull some white trash out of her car. A demon, sure, a demon would jump in there just to make sure she suf­fered when she died, but an angel, no, they wouldn’t give her a sec­ond look.

He scanned the rest of the head­lines. Another Big­foot sight­ing in Wash­ing­ton state, which shouldn’t even be news any­more. Damn things were a men­ace and hadn’t been endan­gered in decades. He’d almost hit one with his RV four years back. He saw more angel and demon arti­cles, of vary­ing believ­abil­ity. Some of them could have been legit­i­mate, but too many had that woolly-​​headed reli­gious aspect to them, like the angels glow­ing or hav­ing wings. That was all bull­shit. They were just immor­tal, that’s all. The grand­daddy of all ancient secret soci­eties, mak­ing the Masons and the Illu­mi­nati, as annoy­ing as those orga­ni­za­tions could be, look like the damn 4-​​H club by comparison.

He switched over to his Twit­ter client and checked the chat­ter. Most of it was the same old bull­shit there, too. How was he sup­posed to get the mes­sage out with all this crap drown­ing him out? Shit.

He replied to a few tweets, then posted one of his own.

Still headed to DC. Saw a Jer­sey Devil root­ing in a dump­ster last night as drove down in to MD.

And another.

Any­one seen a real demon recently? They seem to have gone to ground.

It was a shot in the dark, really. Even if peo­ple replied, their leads usu­ally didn’t pan out. But every so often, he got lucky. He had over a thou­sand fol­low­ers, and he knew he reached more than that because he got retweeted so much and because he tried to make his tweets keyword-​​friendly so they’d turn up in searches. The inter­net was the great­est boon to peo­ple like him in recorded his­tory. It made it eas­ier than ever to com­mu­ni­cate with other searchers, to rip away the veil of secrecy the para­nor­mals used to hide from every­day peo­ple. They wouldn’t be able to hide for much longer.

He went back to his news reader and started check­ing local blogs for DC, since that was where he was going. Right way, at head­line lept out at him.

IS A TERRORIST HIDING IN YOUR BACK YARD?

He clicked through to the arti­cle and started to read. It was sen­sa­tion­al­ist fluff, but there was a ker­nal of truth behind it. There usu­ally was. But the truth wasn’t what the writer of the arti­cle thought it was. He didn’t know if this Doc­tor Cho was a ter­ror­ist or not, though this Richard­son girl sure made him sound like one. But what inter­ested Jeff even more was the crash where Cho had been taken into cus­tody. A crash where a dead body walked away. But Jeff knew that wasn’t just a dead body. It was an immor­tal. A demon, prob­a­bly. Angels were more careful.

Very inter­est­ing indeed, Jeff thought. Well, now he had more rea­son than ever to go to DC. He fin­ished his bagel, downed the rest of the cof­fee and shuf­fled out to his RV.

#

Batarel pulled into the semi-​​circular dri­ve­way in a rich north­ern Vir­ginia sub­urb of the Dis­trict. He was dri­ving a bor­rowed Ford, well below his usual pref­er­ence, but it would take time to estab­lish a new iden­tity. Cho had screwed up so much by call­ing atten­tion to him, and from what Batarel had wit­nessed at his for­mer home last night, the annoy­ing whelp wasn’t going away.

Which was, after all, the point of this meet­ing. He didn’t often meet his supe­ri­ors in per­son, pre­fer­ring to work alone and on his own resources. It was the way of his peo­ple. Once a cen­tury or so some­thing hap­pened that threat­ened to expose them to the humans, and when it hap­pened it needed to be discussed.

He walked to the door and rang the bell. A human opened the door, and imme­di­ately dropped its gaze when it rec­og­nized him for what he was. “I am here to see Zagiel. You will take me to him.”

“Yes, my lord.” The human kept its eyes low­ered and led him up the stairs to the sit­ting room. Batarel had been here once before, back in the 70s, to help coör­di­nate with the hostage sit­u­a­tion. The orga­ni­za­tion had got­ten more ambi­tious with multi­na­tional oper­a­tions in recent decades, given how well that one had turned out. They were con­fi­dent they could achieve their goals with­out goad­ing the humans into nearly destroy­ing them­selves like the débâ­cle in Cuba.

The human opened the door and def­er­en­tially stood aside as Batarel strode in. Zagiel was seated near the win­dow of the plush library, sip­ping a clas­sic British tea ser­vice. Batarel knew his boss had been active in the British Empire, and main­tained a lot of the habits he’d devel­oped, at least in private.

“Hail, Zagiel,” Batarel said as he took a seat.

Zagiel took another sip of tea and then put it down on the table with great delib­er­a­tion. “This could not have come at a more inop­por­tune time, Batarel.”

“I’m not happy about it myself, but it needs to be dealt with.”

Zagiel crossed his arms and man­aged to look stern. “The angels are prepar­ing to move against us.”

“Those dod­der­ing old fools are of no con­cern. They lost their influ­ence over the humans a long time ago.” As the demons made a point of chang­ing with the time and the angels stuck to the dogma they’d used for mil­len­nia, he often thought of them as old even though he knew they were all exactly the same age as he was. None of them know pre­cisely how old that was, but they knew it was all the same.

“You under­es­ti­mate them at our mutual peril.”

“And you worry too much.”

“I am your supe­rior. Wor­ry­ing is part of my job. A part you make all too large by your care­less actions.”

“I was com­ing to see you at the time, and in a hurry because of your con­stant wor­ry­ing about — “

“We are not going to waste time lay­ing blame, Batarel,” Zagiel said, try­ing to regain con­trol of the con­ver­sa­tion. “We need to address the sit­u­a­tion at hand.”

“The sit­u­a­tion is that para­medic, Cho. He saw me leave the scene, and he won’t let it go.”

“You allowed him to see you leave the scene.”

“What was I sup­posed to do, Zagiel? Wait for them to take me to morgue, and then just walk out of there? Or maybe sit up on the autopsy table, tell them that I’m feel­ing much bet­ter and take my leave? I was as dis­crete as possible.”

“Batarel, I know you far too well to believe that. Dis­cre­tion has never been your baili­wick. And if it were just Cho, well, then this would be a much eas­ier prob­lem to solve. In the old days, we could have just removed him and life would have gone on. But Cho has set in motion a series of events that threaten our orga­ni­za­tion. We can’t just kill him now. It would pose more ques­tions that it would eradicate.”

Batarel took a deep breath. He knew he’d have to be care­ful in how he phrased this. “My lord, I believe I may have a solution.”

Zagiel smiled. “You believe, Batarel, that you can talk me into killing the human anyway.”

Maybe Zagiel was right. Maybe sub­tlety wasn’t really his strong suit, Batarel thought. “I know you’re con­cerned about the reporter, Richard­son, and the inter­fer­ence of the FBI.”

“Word trav­els fast in the dig­i­tal age, Batarel. You know that as well as any of us.”

“Which is why we should focus on mak­ing that our advantage.”

Zagiel took another sip of his tea. “Go on.”

“I’ve been involved in our internet-​​based efforts for some time now. I know how word spreads on the human net­work, and I believe we can direct both the reporter and the FBI into sup­port­ing our cause, albeit unwittingly.”

“And how, exactly, would that be done?”

“A new twist on an old tac­tic,” Batarel said. “We dis­ap­pear Cho and destroy him, just like we have always done to humans who learn our secret acci­den­tally. But then after­wards, we plant evi­dence to make sure both the reporter and the FBI think he got away from them. Lead them to believe that Cho is still out there some­where, plot­ting what­ever nefar­i­ous acts of ter­ror­ism we want. He can be far more valu­able to us as a decoy than he is dan­ger­ous to us alive.”

“inter­est­ing,” Zagiel said. “In order for this to work, though, you’d need to be very thor­ough. You’d have to make his dis­ap­pear­ance con­vinc­ing. There can be no signs of strug­gle. It has to appear that he escaped them.”

“My lord, I’m supremely capa­ble of this. It’s what I do. I can even set up false trails online lead­ing back to him, and suit­ably dis­guised to give the impres­sion that they weren’t sup­posed to be found. Bank trans­ac­tions, orders from his han­dler in North Korea, every­thing we need to make him pub­lic enemy num­ber one. And because we’ll dis­pose of him, they’ll never find him. And never stop look­ing for him.”

“Mean­ing ulti­mately, this serves our cause.”

“As does every­thing, my lord. The laws of the uni­verse itself serve our cause. This is merely, as the humans put it, mak­ing lemonade.”

Zagiel nod­ded. “Go, you have my approval. But make it look good, Batarel. This must be convincing.”

“I know of no other way, my lord.”

6: Leg­work

“I don’t like this, Sal.”

“Christ, Mick, it was your idea.”

The two men stood out­side the precinct house lean­ing against their unmarked squad car, wait­ing for the FBI to show up. They’d sent over the brief­ing infor­ma­tion yes­ter­day after­noon, but the Spe­cial Agent In Charge wanted to talk to them in per­son. “Why does he need to meet us? Aren’t the Fib­bies sup­posed to be all about run­ning their own inves­ti­ga­tions? Every­thing was in the file.”

Sal took a long pull off his cof­fee. “Mick, if you had read that report, would you take it at face value?”

“Hmph,” Mick said as a black sedan with barely not­i­ca­ble fed­eral fleet num­bers on the back fender pulled into the park­ing lot. “There he is.”

Sal stood up and away from the car as the agent parked, but Mick stayed glued to the squad car fender. Sal knew the younger cop still bris­tled at the feds, but he’d wanted to run this as a ter­ror­ism case. Too late to back out now.

The agent got out of the car, and looked exactly how Sal expected. He was in his for­ties, thin and weath­ered, some­where between Clint East­wood and Scott Glenn. He wore a black suit, white shirt and a plain black tie. May as well have been a uni­form. The agent crossed over to them in long, pur­pose­ful strides.

“You detec­tives Durante and Ware?” he asked.

Sal extended a hand, which the agent shook. “Sal Durante. This is Mick Ware.”

“Spe­cial Agent Jack Har­ris,” the agent said, and flashed them his fed­eral ID. “Good to meet you both, detectives.”

“So, Agent Har­ris,” Mick said, “what brings you out here this morning?”

“I read your report last night,” Har­ris said. “I have to admit to being a lit­tle sur­prised that a lone para­medic was able to escape a Wash­ing­ton DC police precinct house.”

“We had no rea­son to con­sider Cho a threat at the time of his escape,” Sal said. “He was not restrained.”

“I under­stand,” Har­ris said. “Would you gen­tle­men mind giv­ing me a lit­tle tour? I’d like to fol­low his route as much as pos­si­ble, get a sense of what we’re deal­ing with here.”

Sal nod­ded, but Mick still hadn’t moved. “Come on, Agent Harris.”

“Please, call me Jack.”

Mick jumped up off the fender and headed for the front doors. “Come on, Jack,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”

They walked in the front doors and went bypassed the metal detec­tor that civil­ians and sus­pects had to go through. Fol­low­ing Mick’s lead, they took a right, then a left around the cor­ners to the inter­ro­ga­tion rooms.

“This is it,” Sal said where they stopped. Har­ris walked in to the room and took a care­ful look at the walls, the table bolted to the floor, the chairs. He pointed to the secu­rity cam­era in the cor­ner by the ceiling.

“You have footage of this room from yes­ter­day?” he asked.

“Yes, we do. We have Cho on cam­era from the moment he entered the precinct house until the moment he exited,” Sal said.

“Good, I’ll need to see that later.” Har­ris walked to the end of the room fur­thest from the door, and care­fully chose a posi­tion slightly off center.

“So, Cho was stand­ing right about here, correct?”

Sal nod­ded. “Yes, he was. He’d started back­ing towards the far wall when I men­tioned St. Elizabeth’s.”

“The men­tal hos­pi­tal,” Har­ris said, more in con­fir­ma­tion than a question.

“Yes. As soon as the uni­forms came in, he dropped into some kind of mar­tial arts pose.”

“Accord­ing to my research,” Har­ris said, “Cho’s a sec­ond degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. The peo­ple who taught it to him in San Fran­cisco prob­a­bly learned it them­selves in Korea.”

“Research?” Mick said. “You just got the file last night.”

“And I’ve had to work quickly, Detec­tive Ware. If Daniel Cho really is a ter­ror­ist, every hour lost could cost lives.”

“So any­way,” Sal said, try­ing to move things along before his part­ner took more offense than he already had, “he waited until the offi­cers moved on him.”

“And they all moved in at once?”

“Yes, they were try­ing to cor­ral him.”

“I see,” Har­ris said. “So once he got past them, then what?”

Sal noticed Mick giv­ing him a look like “Is this guy for real?” He shrugged and said, “Yeah, the only think left between him and the door was me.”

Har­ris took sev­eral steps for­ward until he was near the door. “Detec­tive, could you show me where you were standing?”

“Why don’t we go watch the tape?” Mick said.

“I’d like to get a feel for it myself first if I could,” Har­ris said. “It helps to put myself in the suspect’s place, to walk in his foot­steps. You see things that way you don’t see watch­ing from the out­side perspective.

“For exam­ple,” Har­ris con­tin­ued as Sal took his appointed place in front of the door­way, “I can see that from Cho’s point of view, if he could get past Detec­tive Durante here he would have an open hall­way going both ways. I can see by the pat­terns of the lights in the hall­way that there are no nearby obstruc­tions or turns, plenty of space for him to build up some speed.”

“Huh,” Mick said.

“So Cho rammed me with his shoulder — ”

“Like a foot­ball player?” Har­ris asked.

“Yeah, exactly. He just dropped a shoul­der and knocked be backwards.”

“And once through the door, then what?”

Sal stepped back into the hall­way, approx­i­mat­ing his much more rapid exit of the room the day before. “He looked both ways,” he said. “Then he bolted to the left, towards the entrance.”

“Were there any offi­cers in this hall­way at the time?

“No, not in here. The only ones nearby were in the room. But one of the uni­forms, Wal­ters, did get out of the room in time to give chase.”

“Inter­est­ing.” Har­ris jogged down the hall and around the cor­ner. Sal looked at Mick, shrugged, and then they followed.

Har­ris was stand­ing in the hall­way, fac­ing the admit­ting desk. “And from here, what hap­pened?” he asked.

“Cho shouted that some­one had been hurt, and needed help. He got all the uni­forms in front of the door to run past him, and he got the admit­ting offi­cer to call for an ambu­lance. While they were dis­tracted, he just ran out the door.”

“Inter­est­ing,” Har­ris said again. “Well, I don’t sup­posed we should be sur­prised that a for­mer ER doc­tor can think fast on his feet.”

“By the time we cleared up the con­fu­sion and got every­one turned around, there was no sign of him out­side. We think he hailed a cab or jumped on a bus, but we really have no idea where he is.”

“Thank you, Detec­tives, this has been enlight­en­ing. I think I’d like to see that secu­rity footage now.”

Sal shrugged. He didn’t want to admit it, but he was glad Har­ris was tak­ing over the inves­ti­ga­tion. What­ever he was see­ing about Cho, Sal hadn’t seen it, wasn’t sure he wanted to see it. He’d stick to nor­mal, every day mur­ders and bur­glar­ies, thanks. Ter­ror­ism was above his pay grade. “Sure, Agent Har­ris. Right this way.”

#

Morn­ing cof­fee in hand, Susan sat down at her lap­top and logged on to New Amer­i­can Cen­tury. Her arti­cle was still the most recent post, right at the top of the page, and it already had over two hun­dred com­ments. Susan allowed her­self a lit­tle squeal of pride. That many com­ments meant she had touched a nerve. Peo­ple were talk­ing about her story. Only a small frac­tion of peo­ple who read a story actu­ally com­mented on it, so she knew it had been read even more widely. On a hunch, check tabbed over to Digg.com and sure enough, the link to her story was being passed around out­side the New Amer­i­can Cen­tury site itself. Peo­ple who maybe had never even heard of the site were read­ing her arti­cle this morn­ing. Her name was out there.

She checked her email, and her inbox was flood­ing. Sev­eral of the mes­sages were from Stan, but she also got mes­sages from friends, col­leagues, for­mer sources… and one from a Spe­cial Agent Jack Har­ris, Fed­eral Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion. She checked the head­ers on that one, and it looked legit, com­ing from actual .gov mail servers. The FBI wanted to talk to her about this story? Susan won­dered if they knew already how she’d got­ten the infor­ma­tion, and decided she was bet­ter off not get­ting back to them right away. If they wanted to hit her with a National Secu­rity Let­ter or some other kind of gag order, she’d be sure to make them work for it.

She had to find this Doc­tor Cho. She reviewed what she knew about him. He moved to DC recently, and was work­ing as a para­medic. Given that the crash was on M street, she decided she could safely restrict her search to para­medics work­ing in the Dis­trict itself rather than includ­ing sub­urbs in Mary­land and Vir­ginia, at least at first. She also knew that he was on the run. If he was smart, he would have his cell phone off and avoid using credit or debit cards. He’d also stay out of the high rent parts of town, min­i­mize his expo­sure to var­i­ous pri­vate secu­rity cam­eras. It was too easy for the cops to get that footage, and com­put­ers were get­ting fast enough to search for a spe­cific face, even a spe­cific gait in a walk­ing crowd.

So he’d be off the grid and lay­ing low. But why? If he stayed in the metro area at all, what was he try­ing to do? Why would he be stay­ing in the metro area if his cover was blown? Susan could think of two rea­sons. One, he still had a mis­sion to com­plete, and he’d have to do that sooner rather than later. So he’d be work­ing on blow­ing up what­ever he was here to blow up before they caught him. Unless, two, he wasn’t a ter­ror­ist at all and was try­ing to clear his name. Either way, he wouldn’t be lying low for long. He would have to go on the offen­sive, one way or another. Susan’s job was to fig­ure out where he would go and beat him to it. Because if she should get an inter­view with a ter­ror­ist, that would make her career. If she could get an inter­view with an inno­cent man accused of being a ter­ror­ist, that was almost as good. But she had to find him first.

She set­tled in and brought up Google Maps. It was time to go to work.

5: Dreams and Nightmares

As she did a final spell check, Susan put on her head­set and called her editor’s Skype number.

“You’re late,” Stan said.

“I know, but I have some­thing you’re really going to like. I just posted the draft.”

“Hang on,” he said. Stan insisted that every­one on New Amer­i­can Cen­tury posted their sto­ries to the con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem as drafts, so they wouldn’t be seen by the site’s read­ers. Only after he approved them did they move into “pub­lished” sta­tus and were vis­i­ble by the pub­lic. He also insisted peo­ple call him when they posted their sto­ries so he could rip them apart in per­son, or as close as you got to that over the inter­net. He said tear­ing a dum­b­ass writer a new one on IM or Twit­ter didn’t give the same warm glow.

“Are you seri­ous with this title? “IS THERE A TERRORIST IN YOUR BACK YARD?” In all caps?”

“Seri­ous as a heart attack, Stan. Read the damn story.”

Stan mut­tered some­thing his fif­teen dol­lar crap­shack mic couldn’t pick up or deci­pher and went silent while he read. This part annoyed Susan even more than the actual cri­tique. They both worked out of their homes, as did all of the other New Amer­i­can Cen­tury writ­ers. The great thing about a blog is that they didn’t need offices, or presses, or trucks. They all wrote from where ever, any meet­ings were online, and most of them kept odd sched­ules. Susan liked being freed of the eight to five office exis­tence that had even become a joke on TV, and she liked mak­ing a liv­ing, if a fru­gal liv­ing, directly from her writ­ing. Sure, she couldn’t afford an apart­ment in the Dis­trict itself and had to take the Metro every­where, but she was a writer, cov­er­ing the vital polit­i­cal issues of the day straight from the nation’s capi­tol. How many of her jour­nal­ism class­mates back in Nebraska could say that?

But the very nature of their online pub­li­ca­tion meant that she should have also been spared the awk­ward silence while her edi­tor read her work and decided if it was good enough. If she was good enough. She’d seen col­leagues fired if they sub­mit­ted more than three “lemons” in a row. Stan Winchell was the final arbiter of their fate, and he was the ulti­mate author­ity on what con­tent made it into the site. He also man­aged all the adver­tis­ing and the exclu­sive subscriber-​​only parts of the site, so he knew bet­ter than they did what the read­ers wanted, but still made Susan feel like she was a six year old read­ing an essay in front of the class. Every time.

“Are you sure about this?” Stan said. “Who are your sources?” He always wanted to know. Susan and her col­leagues were rea­son­ably sure it was so he could give the story to a writer he liked better.

“It’s deep back­ground, Stan. I can’t reveal my sources. Not yet. I’ll have more detail for you tomor­row as the story unfolds.”

“Hmph.” He sounded like he was doing her a favor run­ning it, but Susan knew bet­ter. This was exactly the explo­sive, sen­sa­tional fear mon­ger­ing he dreamed of. But it wouldn’t do for him to act like he wanted it. She decided it was safe to twist the screws a little.

“If you don’t want it, I can pub­lish it on my own blog. Maybe even run it by Drudge.”

“Don’t you dare give that hack a look at this!” he snapped. Stan hated Matt Drudge with a pas­sion reserved solely for those doing so much bet­ter at one’s cho­sen field than one­self. “You post this any­where else and you’re fired.”

“So we’re going to run with it?” Susan asked.

“I have a few tweaks I need to make, but yeah, it’ll be wait­ing in everyone’s RSS feed in the morn­ing, just in time for morn­ing com­mute read­ing. But you’re going to have to fol­low up on this, Susie. This works as siz­zle, but we need to post the steak tomor­row, day after at the latest.”

“Already work­ing on the fol­low up, boss,” Susan lied. “Should have a draft tomor­row afternoon.”

“Good. Talk to you then.” He dis­con­nected the call.

Susan put her head­set down, skipped over to the fridge and opened up a beer. She deserved to cel­e­brate. And in the morn­ing, she would see about find­ing this Dr. Cho.

#

Daniel lay on the motel bed, star­ing out the win­dow at the buzzing neon Vacancy sign. He was in south­east, the part of the Dis­trict that peo­ple liked to pre­tend didn’t exist. The room cost him twenty bucks for the night, and he sus­pected he’d been over­charged. He kept his clothes on and stretched out on top of the thread­bare com­forter on the bed, hop­ing it was cleaner than the rest of the room.

His life had changed so much in less than twenty four hours. He had no idea how that had hap­pened. He was just doing his job.

Only that wasn’t it, was it?

He couldn’t have ignored the acci­dent, that wasn’t his way. He wanted to save peo­ple. He’d always wanted to help. That was why he went into med­i­cine in the first place. Only, what good did that do if peo­ple could just walk away from death? What had he really seen out there? Who was Hen­driks? What was with all the price­less antiques? Why did the cops think—

Daniel fell asleep.

#

He was in the Emer­gency Room again, back in Oak­land. “No,” Daniel said. “Not again.”

The place was in chaos. On the same night as a gang­land shootout, a hotel fire had flooded them with burn vic­tims. They ran out of beds an hour ago, but every hos­pi­tal east of the Bay Bridge was in the same boat, so the patients kept com­ing. He was doing the best he could, dart­ing from one patient to the next, mak­ing diag­noses and direct­ing the nurses. The gang bangers were easy, com­par­a­tively. They just had holes in them. As long as the holes weren’t in any­thing vital, they could be patched up and sent home. If they holes were in some­thing vital, well, they prob­a­bly were going home with less patching.

The burn vic­tims were a dif­fer­ent story. Some, like the woman he just looked at, were minor. She was preg­nant and had minor burns on both legs. He lis­tened to her breath­ing and the baby’s, and they sounded okay. She’d be okay. Only, a voice in the back of Daniel’s mind, sound­ing like a faint echo of his own, screamed that she wouldn’t, that he was doing it again, that it was hap­pen­ing again—

Daniel moved on to the newest arrival, a fire­fighter with burns over three quar­ters of his body. “Stay with me,” he told the man. He checked the man’s eyes, made sure he was con­scious and breath­ing. Blood pres­sure wasn’t hor­ri­ble, all things con­sid­ered, but the swelling was already get­ting out of con­trol. “Start saline,” Daniel told the nurse, “he’s going to need flu­ids more than anything.”

Daniel watched as the man’s limbs con­tin­ued expand­ing before his eyes. “We need to relieve this pres­sure!” Daniel said. “Give me a scalpel!”

A nurse handed him the blade and he started mak­ing long cuts down the man’s limbs, watch­ing as the blood and pus drained from the cuts and allowed the swelling to go down. The man shrieked in agony as Daniel cut, but there was no time for anes­thet­ics even if they had much left to give him.

He was still work­ing on the fire­fighter when the preg­nant woman started wheez­ing. “Some­one get her some oxy­gen,” Daniel said absently as he started wrap­ping the wounds in ban­dages soaked in [what­ever they put on 3^rd degree burns]. He was almost done when he heard the beep­ing of the woman’s heart mon­i­tor change to a steady tone.

“She’s cod­ing!” The nurse behind Daniel scram­bled to wheel around the crash cart.

Daniel rushed over and started CPR. She’d been fine, he didn’t under­stand, it was just minor burns on her legs… The voice in his head screamed and called him an idiot, that it was hap­pen­ing again…

When he opened her mouth to put on the breath­ing bag, he saw it. The blue tinge to her lips should have tipped him off. He should have done his job and checked her throat before mov­ing on to the fire­fighter. Because her throat was black. It was cov­ered in soot.

He con­tin­ued the CPR, but he knew it was futile. The woman’s inter­nal organs, slowly starved for oxy­gen, had already shut down. She’d suf­fo­cated grad­u­ally, major organs going offline one by one until her heart and lungs gave out. He knew there would be an inquest, he could already see the dev­as­ta­tion on her widower’s face, a man whose whole life had crashed, los­ing his wife and unborn daugh­ter in the same night. He knew the preda­tory look in the eyes of the man’s lawyer, and the dis­ap­point­ment on the face of the chief of surgery as he fired Daniel. But all that hadn’t hap­pened yet. Right now, he was still try­ing to pre­vent it, to bring her back, to make it dif­fer­ent this time, dammit…

And there he was.

Stand­ing in the E.R., lean­ing against the wall by the door, was Hen­driks. He still had the gap­ing hole in his chest, but seemed casu­ally unaware of it. He had his arms crossed over the ooz­ing cav­ern of flesh and didn’t seem to notice as his blood dripped off his fore­arms to the floor below.

“That man!” Daniel shouted, point­ing at Hen­driks. “Get him! He can help her!”

No one in the ER heard him, and they kept try­ing to revive the preg­nant woman. Daniel saw that her baby’s vitals had flat­lined now as well.

“No! I am not let­ting this hap­pen again!” He bolted around the table and ran towards Hen­driks. “Get over there and help her, damn it! If you can walk away from this, she can too!”

The more he ran, the more Hen­driks seemed to recede. He wasn’t mov­ing, and turned only to look at Daniel and grin that same grin he’d seen in the alley, and the size of the ER wasn’t chang­ing, but Daniel wasn’t get­ting any closer to him.

“No!” Daniel screamed, tears welling in his eyes. “Not again!”

#

Out­side Daniel’s motel room, the crea­ture that had been known as Richard Hen­driks stood and watched through the win­dow as Daniel writhed on this bed. It would be so easy to kill him now, it thought. It absently rubbed its chest, now fully healed and recon­structed from the unpleas­ant­ness ear­lier in the after­noon. Now that it was whole again, it could just walk into the hotel room and snap the human’s neck. It would be quick, and bet­ter than the human deserved after the tres­pass eariler that evening.

But now wasn’t the time. Batarel had an appoint­ment the next morn­ing to dis­cuss the mat­ter with his supe­rior. Until then, he was only to mon­i­tor, to wait, and to ensure that noth­ing hap­pened to the human. He’d called in a tip to the police in Sil­ver Springs, Mary­land, on the other side of the Dis­trict, clam­ing to have seen Cho. That should keep the police away from the human until Batarel had his orders on how to han­dle the situation.

Batarel’s hands clenched and unclenched, the only [word] he’d allow to his frus­tra­tion. The time would come soon. The human would pay for his sins. It had hap­pened before, and would hap­pen again. The human would dis­ap­pear, and Batarel and his kind would remain a myth.

The time would come.