The Unification Chronicles

12: Mis­di­rec­tion

Jack sat behind his desk at the Hoover build­ing, typ­ing up a report about what he’d seen at the crime scene. He heard a knock at his office door, and looked up to see the hacker kid, Dante.

“What do you have for me, Dante?” Jack said.

“I ran the search of all the local ERs and clin­ics like you asked, look­ing for any­one match­ing Cho’s descrip­tion and his level of injury.”

“And?”

“Only one hit. A clinic down in South­east. The patient’s name was Ronald Chin, and he paid in cash. There’s just one problem.”

Jack leaned back in his chair. “And what would that be, Dante?”

“These clin­ics aren’t com­pletely com­put­er­ized yet, and they tend to record their stuff on paper, then key it in when they’re not busy. Cho, if it was him, left the place a cou­ple hours ago.”

“Why do you look so dis­ap­pointed, Dante?”

“Well, this means we can’t go get him. He’s on the run again, and we don’t know where he went.”

Jack stood up and walked around his desk before lean­ing on the cor­ner. “But Dante, think about what we do know. We know Cho is still in the metro area, and in fact came back into the Dis­trict from Arling­ton. We know we can get the secu­rity video from the clinic, and see if he was there with any­one. And we know what injuries Cho was treated for, which gives us known weak­nesses we can exploit. And what were those?”

Dante checked his notes. “Bro­ken radius and ulna on the right arm, mild con­cus­sion, numer­ous con­tu­sions indica­tive of a brawl of some sort.”

“Okay, so the brawl part we knew, but now we know he has a bro­ken arm. That can be use­ful later. Get me that secu­rity footage, and let’s see who was there with him. If we’re lucky, we might even get a look at their vehi­cle in the park­ing lot. Since we know they’re in the Dis­trict, we can put out a BOLO for that, and start search­ing ATM and other secu­rity footage through­out the Dis­trict until we find them.”

“Yes, yes sir.” Dante scur­ried back to his cubi­cle to start com­pil­ing the video footage.

So, Jack thought, Cho didn’t run away. He got the crap kicked out of him, his arm badly bro­ken in the fight, and yet he’s stick­ing around for more. Why might that be?

Jack sat back at his desk and con­tin­ued his report.

#

Jeff pulled the RV up along­side the row of town­houses as Daniel directed.

“Okay,” Daniel said, “we have to be care­ful. He could have come back by now, and I’d rather not have my ass handed to me again.”

Jeff pumped a shot­gun he’d pulled out of stor­age. “We’re ready. It won’t stop him, but it should slow him down.”

Susan looked wor­ried, but nod­ded. Daniel hadn’t been able to get her to say much about what was on her mind.

“All right, let’s go.” Daniel opened the door of the RV and led them across the grassy cout­yard. It was late morn­ing, and the com­plex was quiet, most of the res­i­dents at work.

Daniel stopped short when he got within sight of Batarel’s town­house, and Jeff actu­ally bumped into him from behind.

“Dammit, Danny — ”

“Look,” Daniel said.

The front win­dow of the town­house dis­played a FOR SALE sign, with a realtor’s logo beneath. Daniel ran up to the window.

“What the hell?” he said. “I swear, this is it. This is where he lived.”

Jeff peered in the win­dow, bal­anc­ing pre­car­i­ously on his one good leg. “Not any­more, Danny. There’s noth­ing in there.”

Susan looked both ways, then pulled a cou­ple paper­clips out of her pocket. “You guys didn’t see this,” she said.

In less than thirty sec­onds, she had the door unlocked and swung it open. “Let’s make this quick,” she said.

“Not that I’m com­plain­ing,” Daniel said as they stepped inside and closed the door behind them, “but do you want to explain that?”

Susan searched the ground floor with quick effi­ciency of move­ment. It was as empty as Jeff said. Every crate was gone, the suits miss­ing from the closet, the chairs and TV removed. The place was dust­less and smelled faintly of cit­rus from the clean­ing products.

“Let’s just say that’s a skill I picked up extracur­ric­u­larly in jour­nal­ism school,” she said. “Peo­ple aren’t always there when you try to get a story, but there are other ways to find the facts you need.”

“That’s break­ing and enter­ing,” Daniel said.

“And it was your idea, so I’d shut up right about now,” Susan said, climb­ing the stairs to the upper floor.

Jeff just shrugged, grin­ning, and fol­lowed her.

The upper floor was just as clean as the ground floor. There was no sign that any­one had lived here, or even stored stuff here, recently. Daniel found the bed­room win­dow through which he’d orig­i­nally come in closed and locked securely. There were no scratches on the windowsill.

“Well, shit,” Daniel said.

“We’re not sunk yet,” Susan said, and trot­ted down­stairs again.

Daniel turned to Jeff. “You have any idea what she’s doing?”

“Nope, but I bet she does.” He fol­lowed Susan.

Daniel stood alone in the upstairs bed­room and tried to process what he was see­ing. In less than 72 hours, his life had gone straight into the dumper, even more than it had, and he’d man­aged to acquire two accom­plices that he had no idea how to take care of or even con­trol. Every­thing was spin­ning into chaos again, and there didn’t seem to be a damn thing he could do about it.

He walked back down­stairs and found Jeff and Susan out­side. Susan was writ­ing the realtor’s num­ber in her notebook.

“I’ve got to get access to a phone, and if pos­si­ble an inter­net con­nec­tion. I need to be able to get online if I’m going to do us much good.”

“Would a pre-​​paid cell work?” Jeff asked.

Susan thought about it. “Prob­a­bly. As long as I didn’t use it too long, and switched to a new one.”

“Wait right here,” he said, and he hob­bled back to the RV.

Susan looked at Daniel. “I know he’s got a lot of junk crammed in that thing, but he can’t possibly — ”

Jeff came back out of the RV, hold­ing a black device in his hand. “I think this’ll do,” he said. He walked over and handed it to Susan.

“Believe that one’s an Indi­anapo­lis area code, if I recall, but it should still work.”

She turned on the phone and said, “Well, it’s got sig­nal.” She dialed the num­ber on the sign.

“Hello? Yes, I’d like to inquire about a town­house you have for sale.” She told the real­tor the address. “I’m mov­ing to DC and it looks like just what I wanted.”

Susan waited while the real­tor looked up the list­ing. “Yes, I’m stand­ing right in front of it. It looks per­fect. I do have some ques­tions about its his­tory, though. What can you tell me about the pre­vi­ous owner?” Another pause. “I see. I don’t know, I’m not com­fort­able buy­ing prop­erty unless I know how it’s been treated — “ Pause again. “No, I don’t think I need a tour just yet. I’ll keep you in mind, though. Thank you.”

She dis­con­nected the call and tried to hand the phone back to Jeff.

“Keep it,” he said. “I’ve got a few more.”

“Thanks,” Susan said. “The real­tor doesn’t really know any­thing about the seller. She said the cur­rent owner is a cor­po­ra­tion, a hold­ing com­pany she’s seen before. They have lawyers show up at the sign­ings, but she’s never seen any­one who works for the actual corporation.”

“So basi­cally,” Daniel said, “we have no idea who owns this place.”

“Who­ever it is, there’s no way to tie them to Hendriks.”

“Shit,” Daniel said, “What do we do now?”

“We find a way to get me online,” Susan said.

“And how — “

“All I need is a cof­fee shop,” Susan said. “I think I’ve got the rest fig­ured out.”

#

Batarel watched the humans walk back across the court­yard, get in to their camper and drive away. He put his car in gear and fol­lowed dis­cretely. He’d been dri­ving for nearly a cen­tury now, and was well prac­ticed in fol­low­ing a human with­out tip­ping them off to his pres­ence. Ironic that a split sec­ond mist­im­ing in that inter­sec­tion started this whole mess. He was in a hurry, and had darted between humans hun­dreds of times. The one time he hap­pened to miss…

The camper bum­bled through lunchtime traf­fic until it pulled into the park­ing lot of a strip mall. Batarel parked and watched the three annoy­ances get out and walk into a cof­fee shop. Really? They’re on the run from me and law enforce­ment, and they stop for a latte? It would be easy for him to call the police and give an anony­mous tip to their where­abouts, but he had his orders. If they dis­ap­peared, the police would keep look­ing. Peo­ple would still be afraid. And fear was, after all, the order of the day.

Batarel turned off his engine and waited. The advan­tage to being immor­tal was that you learned patience early on or you went mad. He could wait. His oppor­tu­nity to remove them from the chess­board would come soon enough.

#

Susan sat down at a table near an elec­tri­cal out­let and broke out her lap­top. After plug­ging it in, she got to work while Daniel and Jeff got the cof­fee. The first thing she needed to do was get online, and this cof­fee shop offered free wifi. All she had to do was agree to their terms of ser­vice with a dummy email address she used for spam. She’d only have to do this once, though.

Once she was online, she fired up Google. Daniel and Jeff came over to the table and Daniel handed her the chai tea she’d wanted. “So how are you going to get online with­out tip­ping off the — “

“Let’s not say that out loud in pub­lic, hmm?” Susan said as she kept typing.

In almost a whis­per, she con­tin­ued, “The first thing I’m doing is down­load­ing TOR and Privoxy.”

“What are those?”

“Damn,” Jeff said. “I shoulda thought about that myself. I’ll be right back.” He got up and hob­bled out to the RV.

Daniel looked more con­fused than ever. “Not really a techie, are you Daniel?” Susan asked.

“I know enough to get by, but it’s never really been my focus. I was more con­cerned with people.”

“I’m con­cerned with peo­ple,” Susan said. “Who do you think I write for?”

“I just meant — “

“I know,” Susan said. “You’re more con­cerned with med­i­cine. Well, skootch in, I’m going to teach you how to sur­vive in the dig­i­tal age.”

Jeff came back in and plugged in his lap­top next to hers, then signed on with his own ID. Susan thought about warn­ing him, then real­ized the cops didn’t nec­es­sar­ily know to be watch­ing him yet. That could come in handy later.

“Okay, the first thing we need to do is set up some basic secu­rity. I’ve already got antivirus, anti­mal­ware and a fire­wall on my com­puter, but I’m still lead­ing with my face, as it were. So we need a way I can com­mu­ni­cate online with­out giv­ing away my identity.”

“But if you’re post­ing to your blog,” Daniel said, “aren’t they going to know it’s you?”

“Iden­tity means mul­ti­ple things online, Daniel. If I posted some­thing right now, they could track that back through the routers on the inter­net to first then inter­net ser­vice provider I was using, then even fur­ther to my phys­i­cal loca­tion. We want to make that infor­ma­tion sep­a­rate from the con­tent so we can hide it.”

“And how do you do that?”

“Actu­ally, it’s not all that dif­fi­cult,” Susan said. “First I down­load and install two free pro­grams. The first, TOR, which stands for The Onion Router, stores each packet of data I send inside mul­ti­ple lay­ers of encryp­tion, like an onion. Pack­ets of data on the inter­net hop from router to router on the way to their des­ti­na­tion, like islands in an arch­i­pel­ago. Using TOR, each step in the jour­ney is indi­vid­u­ally encrypted, so the router at point 3 has no idea where the router at point 1 was. Each step peels off another layer of the onion, and at the des­ti­na­tion the point of ori­gin appears to be the onion router net­work itself. So they’ll be able to see that I’m post­ing, but it will be nearly impos­si­ble to deter­mine where those posts originated.”

“It’s a lot eas­ier than it sounds, Danny,” Jeff said, busily installing TOR on his own lap­top. “If an old dog like me can pick it up, any­one can. I used to have this stuff installed when I thought the men in black were on to me, but even­tu­ally they backed off and I unin­stalled it because it does slow you down a little.”

“The men in black?” Susan said.

“Yeah, those guys that turn up when­ever there’s a UFO sight­ing? Don’t believe that horse­shit in the movies, either. These guys aren’t Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Some folks think they’re a covert gov­ern­ment agency, but I’m half con­vinced they’re aliens them­selves, in dis­guise. I wanted noth­ing to do with them.”

“Okay then,” Susan said. This was why she was wor­ried Daniel seemed to be buy­ing in to Jeff’s angels and demons the­ory. The guy was great and had helped them out a lot, but he was clearly bonkers. This demon expla­na­tion of his was just another pop cul­ture myth. She had no idea what or who Hen­driks really was, and she couldn’t deny what she saw with her own eyes, but she refused to call him Batarel. What­ever he was, he wasn’t a demon out of the Old Testament.

“The other pro­gram is Privoxy, which is a proxy server I can run on my own PC to mask my pres­ence at the appli­ca­tion level. This han­dles cook­ies, DNS lookups and other ‘foot­prints’ I leave online. With this and TOR installed, peo­ple only see what I choose for them to see, and then I dis­ap­pear back into the ether like a ghost.”

“I had no idea,” Daniel said, “that you were such a tech ninja.”

“It’s twenty first cen­tury jour­nal­ism. I have to be able to get the scoop no mat­ter who might be watch­ing me.”

“Okay, one last ques­tion, then,” Daniel said. “Is your edi­tor going to be on board with this?”

Susan laughed. “If there’s one thing Stan hates more than ter­ror­ists, it’s gov­ern­ment agen­cies like the — “ She caught her­self, and in a whis­per again, “FBI. Once he sees the story I sub­mit, he’ll run it.”

“Hey,” Jeff said. “I have one of them lit­tle dig­i­tal movie cam­eras, just plug in USB to your com­puter. You think you can use that?”

Thank God for this crazy old man, Susan thought. “I was going to try to buy a Flip, but if you have one, yes, I can take video with that, post it to YouTube and link it to my arti­cles. That will rock. Thanks, Jeff.”

Jeff beamed. “Pleased to be of ser­vice. Not every­one believes what I tell them, you know. It’s nice to meet up with some fel­low seekers.”

Susan nod­ded, but didn’t reply.

11: Reprisals

Batarel lay face down and man­gled in the motel park­ing lot, designer suit shred­ded by what looked like large tire tracks. His ribs were shat­tered, one of them jut­ting white and jagged through his suit jacket, and most of his skin had been scraped off by asphalt. Even the skull was caved in, wet blood gleam­ing in the lights of the park­ing lot.

Sud­denly, the corpse inhaled. A huge gasp­ing breath expanded the chest, and the ribs snapped back into their places. The caved in skull popped out­ward with a wet suck­ing sound, skin began to creep back over the body. Batarel lifted him­self up to a knee, and moved his jaw back into place with fin­gers that were still bro­ken at odd angles. As they popped back into place, his lips grew back to the point where he could speak.

“That bitch.”

He stood up just as the motel night man­ager ran out into the park­ing lot. “Don’t worry, sir, I’ve called the police and the ambu­lance, we’ll get you — “ The fat human looked at Cho’s motel room. “What the hell hap­pened out here?”

Batarel took a step towards the man, reached out and snapped his neck. The human dropped to the pave­ment and twitched fee­bly. Batarel looked both ways to make sure there had been no other wit­nesses, then walked away into the night.

#

“I think he’s com­ing around.”

Daniel was in a dark place where every­thing hurt. The place smelled like blood and clean­ing prod­ucts, the smell of an Emer­gency Room. But if they took him to an ER, then—

Daniel’s eyes snapped open. “Where am — “

“It’s okay,” Susan said, gen­tly hold­ing him down. “We’re safe. At least for now.” Then, so some­one he couldn’t see, she said, “He’s awake.”

Daniel looked around. Wher­ever he was, it was were cheap road­side knick­knacks went to die. The walls were cov­ered with sou­venirs from just about every state, along with a fair amount of Viet Nam mem­o­ra­bilia. [insert cool Viet Nam bumper sticker here] “Susan?” Daniel asked.

Daniel felt their momen­tum change, and only then real­ized that they were mov­ing. They were in a mobile home or RV, and it was pulling off the road. “Where are we?”

“That, Mis­ter Cho, is a far more inter­est­ing ques­tion than you might sus­pect,” Jeff Frankel, the guy from next door at the motel, said as he walked back to where they were and sat down. Daniel was awake enough to see that he was sit­ting at a small, fold down table in the RV, with Susan next to him and Frankel seated across the table. “How’s the arm?” Frankel asked.

“Huh?” Daniel looked down at his arm, which was swollen and one big pur­ple bruise. “What happened?”

“You damn near got your ass handed to you by an immor­tal, is what hap­pened,” Frankel said. “As far as I know, you’re the only human to have fought one and lived.”

“I ran for help, and found Jeff,” Susan said. “We piled into his RV and came back to get you. When we pulled around, Hen­driks had you by the throat, so Jeff hit him with the RV, knocked him off of you.”

The fog was clear­ing, and the fight was com­ing back to Daniel. So was the pain from his bro­ken arm. “So, he’s dead?”

Frankel leaned in across the table. “What part of ‘immor­tal’ did you not get, boy? Damn thing’s prob­a­bly fully healed and look­ing for us by now. I just pulled off the belt­way into South­East. I fig­ure we can find a clinic to set your arm down there that won’t ask too many ques­tions. Actu­ally, that was Susie’s suggestion.”

“Susie?” Daniel asked.

“You’ve been out a good six or seven hours, Danny. We’ve had lots of time to get acquainted,” Frankel said.

Some­thing occurred to Daniel. “Is that how you knew my last name?”

“Actu­ally,” Susan said, “he knew who we were before we met, he just didn’t know we were us.”

“I must have a concussion.”

“You prob­a­bly do,” Frankel said. “We’ll have them check that out at the clinic, too. I wanted us to have a chat first, make sure we see eye to eye on what’s going on.”

“I’m sorry, Mis­ter Frankel, but I’m not fol­low­ing you. I don’t know what’s going on myself.”

“Danny, I knew when I saw Susie’s arti­cle online the other day that you’d crossed an immor­tal, stepped into a web of decep­tion and con­spir­acy that makes the damn Masons and Illu­mi­nati look like the 4-​​H club. I was headed to DC any­way, but after read­ing that arti­cle I was hop­ing to track you down, join forces like. I’m kind of kick­ing myself that I didn’t real­ize who you were when you intro­duced your­self as Dan and Sue. It wasn’t until I saw the immortal — “

“Batarel,” Daniel said.

“Bata-​​huh?” Frankel said.

“That’s his name. Batarel. He said he was a demon.”

“Huh, let me check on that.” Frankel got up and walked over to a pre­car­i­ously bal­anced stack of books. He rum­maged a bit, and then deftly pulled one out of the stack, blew some dust off of it. “Here we go,” he said. “Dic­tio­nary of Angels, by Gus­tav David­son. Says here that Batarel is one of the two hun­dred fallen angels listed by Enoch. Not in one of the three spheres, though, so he must be fairly low ranking.”

“Daniel fought a demon last night?” Susan said.

“Well,” Frankel said, sit­ting back down, “that all depends on your def­i­n­i­tions. Demons don’t actu­ally have horns and pitch­forks any­more than angels have wings and halos. They look just like reg­u­lar peo­ple, except they’re stronger and faster than we are and you can’t kill them.”

“I’m sorry,” Susan said. “I don’t believe that was a demon. The Lord doesn’t allow demons on Earth.”

“Susie, your dear and fluffy Lord allows a lot more than you think. The immor­tals are just as real as Big­foot, the aliens at Roswell, lake mon­sters, the Jer­sey Devil and the Megalodon.”

“Can we just get to clinic, please?” Daniel asked. He was get­ting woozy again, and the old guy’s talk about Big­foot and Mega-​​whosit wasn’t helping.

“Sure thing, kid. Just sit tight, and we’ll have you fixed up in no time.” Frankel shuf­fled back to the front of the RV and started it up. Over­come by fatigue, Daniel took the oppor­tu­nity to drift back off to sleep. But as he did, he noticed the con­cern on Susan’s face. Some­thing told him the con­cern wasn’t just for him.

#

Jack stood in the morn­ing sun­light, already heat­ing up the pave­ment under the body. He was at a Days Inn in Arling­ton, Vir­ginia, where the local PD had informed him they had a homi­cide involv­ing sus­pects with descrip­tions meet­ing the BOLO he’d sent out the day before.

“You the FBI guy?” A cop in a brown uni­form walked up to Jack. He flashed his ID.

“Jack Har­ris, FBI. But you already knew that, or I wouldn’t be inside the police tape around a crime scene.”

The cop smiled. Jack saw his name badge read MARONI. “Sure, yeah, let’s go with that. Lemme show you around.”

The first thing the cop pointed out was the dead body in the park­ing lot. The coro­ner was prep­ping to ship it off to the morgue. “Stiff is Dwayne Husted, assis­tant man­ager for the motel. M.E. told me the neck was snapped, prob­a­bly by hand. The perp was strong, and prob­a­bly trained in mar­tial arts.”

“My tar­get is a black belt in Tae Kwon Do,” Jack said.

“Yeah, that would do it,” Maroni said. “Any­way, the guy was killed right here in the park­ing lot and left where he fell. No signs that the body had been moved.”

“Any idea why he was attacked?”

“Near as we can tell, he walked in on some­thing. What­ever it was, it went bad in a hurry. Let me show you your boy’s room.”

They walked over a few rooms to an open door and shat­tered plate glass win­dow. “Accord­ing to the clerk work­ing yes­ter­day after­noon, your boy Cho was stay­ing here, and there was a woman with him, a twenty some­thing brunette.”

“Susan Richard­son, the blogger.”

“Yeah, what­ever. Point is, they were both here, and the clerk saw no signs of duress.”

“Richard­son was with him will­ingly?” Jack asked.

“I’m guess­ing the guy was real per­sua­sive. Any­way, they were in here. Around three in the morn­ing, the night desk started get­ting calls about a dis­tur­bance, so the vic came out here to check it out, found the place trashed.”

Jack stepped into the motel room. He could see it had already been processed by the crime lab, with lit­tle tags and mark­ers placed next to all the debris. The room looked like a tor­nado hit it. Mul­ti­ple impacts into the sheetrock walls, bro­ken fur­ni­ture, no piece of glass, even in the tele­vi­sion bolted to the wall, unshat­tered. There was also quite a bit of blood.

“Yeah, you see the blood,” Maroni said. “We’ve got our folks look­ing at spat­ter pat­terns, but it’s pretty clear there was a fight in here, two peo­ple, maybe three. The dam­age is inci­den­tal to the fight, not vandalism.”

As Jack looked at the room, images began to form in his head. He saw two hazy sil­hou­ettes fight­ing, break­ing a table here, slam­ming into a wall there. They were dif­fer­ent sizes, and one of them seemed to get the worst of it, based on the dam­age. “What I see, Offi­cer Maroni, is less a fight than a beat­ing. Some­one got their ass handed to them last night. Only…”

“Only what?” Maroni asked.

Jack knelt down to exam­ine a bloody hand­print in the car­pet. Inter­est­ing, he thought.

He stood up. “You’re sure Cho was here?” he asked.

“Sure as we can be, based on the wit­nesses, yeah. Why?”

“I don’t think he’s your killer,” Jack said. “I think your foren­sic analy­sis will show that Cho was the vic­tim last night — and the source of most of this blood — not the attacker.”

“Then who the hell did all this?” Maroni asked.

“That,” Jack said, “is a very good question.”

#

Daniel looked down at the cast over his arm, black fiber­glass wrapped around plas­ter. It had been sur­pris­ingly easy to get him checked out, and no one seemed to care that he didn’t have his ID on him or check the fake name he gave them. Jeff paid the bill in cash, and they left.

Now he and Susan were sit­ting in a gro­cery store park­ing lot while Jeff bought sup­plies. Susan had been quiet all day, ever since their first dis­cus­sion with Jeff. She was sit­ting up front in the pas­sen­ger seat, star­ing out the win­dow. Daniel had tried to take a nap on the makeshift bed they made by low­er­ing the table down between the bench seats and putting some cush­ions over it, but sleep wasn’t going to hap­pen. He had too many ques­tions. He got up and plopped down in the driver’s seat across from Susan.

“You okay?” he asked.

She didn’t answer for a sec­ond. Then she said, “Okay? Hmm, no. I’m not okay. I’m on the run from a God­less demon that wants to kill me, I’ve missed the dead­line to file a story at my job, which I might not even have any­more, and I have no idea how I’m going to get back to my life. I’m liv­ing like a vagrant in a mobile home, and — “ She started to sob, just a lit­tle, before catch­ing her­self. “No, I’m not okay. You?”

Daniel had to admit he hadn’t really thought about it. In a way, the past forty eight hours were a good dis­trac­tion from what his life had become. He couldn’t say he was enjoy­ing the adven­ture of it all, but he was in no par­tic­u­lar hurry to go back to the limbo he was in. At least he was doing some­thing now, what­ever that was.

“Apart from nearly get­ting killed by Batarel last night, I can’t com­plain, I guess. At least I’m breathing.”

“Please don’t call him that.”

“Call who what?”

“Hen­driks. His name is Richard Hen­driks. He’s not a demon, and his name isn’t Batarel.”

“That’s what he told me,” Daniel said.

“That can’t be true!” Susan whirled on him. “There is no way that man, that thing, what­ever he was, is a fallen angel! There’s noth­ing like that in my Bible! Angels have wings, and dev­ils have horns.”

“You know that — “

“What?”

“Nev­er­mind,” Daniel said. His par­ents were devout Chris­tians, but some­where along his med­ical career, Daniel had lost the faith. He cer­tainly didn’t see any con­flict between what they’d expe­ri­enced and what he learned in Sun­day school.

“None of this is real, any­way,” Susan said. “Hen­driks is prob­a­bly dead, and I bet he was hopped up on some­thing, PCP, crack, to do what he did.”

“Angel dust?”

“That’s not funny, Daniel.”

“Sorry.”

“Think about it,” Susan said. “All we know about this sup­posed secret soci­ety of immor­tals comes from Jeff. Now Jeff’s a nice guy and all, but he’s just as sure about Big­foot and aliens in New Mex­ico as he is about this. The guy’s a coot.”

She had a point. Daniel wasn’t sure how much of the infor­ma­tion that they’d got­ten from Jeff was reli­able. But none of it con­flicted with what Daniel had per­son­ally seen.

“Who’s a coot?” Jeff said as he opened the door behind them and started haul­ing bags of gro­ceries in from the bas­ket next to the RV.

“My edi­tor,” Susan said quickly. “There’s no way he’s going to agree to run this story.”

“We need more evi­dence, is all,” Jeff said as he brought in the last of the gro­ceries and quickly put them away. He seemed expe­ri­enced in liv­ing on the road, and had bought very lit­tle that would spoil any time soon.

On the way to the clinic, Daniel, Jeff and Susan had agreed that they needed to prove that Hen­driks was still alive if they were going to prove Daniel’s inno­cence. At least they needed to prove that he didn’t die in the car acci­dent where Daniel was arrested. They hadn’t agreed on the best way to do this, but it was assumed they’d be using New Amer­i­can Cen­tury to break the news.

Daniel got up and joined Jeff in the liv­ing area, help­ing as much as he could with one hand chang­ing the “spare bed” back into a table. They sat down and Jeff opened up three sodas for them. Susan walked back and joined them, but didn’t look happy about it.

“So I’m think­ing we need to head back to Batarel’s house, sweep the place — “

“Please, don’t,” Susan said.

“Don’t what, Susie?”

Daniel could see her start to explain, but then she slumped in the seat and said, “Nevermind.”

“Okie doke,” Jeff said. “We need to sweep the place for evi­dence, now that we know what he is.”

“What kind of evi­dence are we look­ing for?” Daniel asked. “What would pos­si­bly prove that the house was owned by an immortal?”

“I don’t know,” Jeff said. “But with all that old shit in there, there’s got to be something?”

“Susan?” Daniel asked.

“We may as well,” she said. “I don’t have any bet­ter ideas.”

“Okay!” Jeff said, clap­ping his hands together. “Danny, you ride up front with me, show me how to get there.”

Susan didn’t say a word as the two men walked up to the front of the RV.

As folks have started dig­ging through the time­line and other stuff on the wiki, they’ve noticed par­al­lels to Joe Straczynski’s Baby­lon 5.

1. Two ancient races, one devoted to chaos, the other to order, have been at war for millennia.
2. The war went cold about a thou­sand years ago when the chaos ancients were dri­ven away.
3. One of the ancients is still buried on a for­got­ten world at the edge of the galaxy, wait­ing to be woken up.
4. The most pow­er­ful of the younger races fought in that war a thou­sand years ago, suf­fered hor­ri­ble losses, and reveres the order-​​based ancients as gods.
5. Humans were genet­i­cally manip­u­lated by the order-​​based ancients.
6. Our first con­tact with the most pow­er­ful of the younger races results in a war based on a misunderstanding.
7. The most pow­er­ful of the younger races calls off the war rather than defeat­ing us.
8. The cen­tral human hero is a mav­er­ick mil­i­tary man with a trou­bled past, with ini­tials nearly the same as the author’s.
9. The human hero leaves his peo­ple to go to that for­got­ten world on the rim, seek­ing answers.
10. The human hero, allied with the one of the order ancients, dies fight­ing the chaos ancients.
11. Once the ancient war is over, the younger races turn on each other.
12. The most pow­er­ful of the younger races is nearly torn apart by its own caste structure.
13. The story ends with the for­ma­tion of a new galac­tic gov­ern­ment that should ensure a last­ing peace.

Wow, a baker’s dozen of damn­ing ripoff points. Sure looks like I’m rip­ping off Baby­lon 5. JMS should sue!

Only, really, I’m not.

I’ll admit Baby­lon 5 is a huge influ­ence for me, and UC was, in part, inspired by what Joe was doing on the TV machine. But it was also inspired by Christo­pher Golden’s Shadow Saga, and Asimov’s Foun­da­tion series, and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and well, just about every other epic I’ve ever read or watched.

Because if you dis­till the above points down even fur­ther, you’ll see that what I’m really rip­ping off is the Bible. And Gil­gamesh. And the Can­ter­bury Tales. And the Iliad. And the Odyssey. And Beowulf. Because really, when you get down to it, mythic struc­ture is mythic struc­ture. Seri­ously. Read The Hero With A Thou­sand Faces and The Power of Myth by Joseph Camp­bell. The points above seem so famil­iar because they’ve res­onated to us over and over and over again, down through the cen­turies. They’re cen­tral to human sto­ry­telling, so it’s no sur­prise, really, that Joe and I would end up drink­ing from the same well. Let’s look at a few in particular.

Two ancient races, one devoted to chaos, the other to order, have been at war for millennia.

There are only so many fun­da­men­tal dichotomies you can pull from. Order and chaos didn’t start with Baby­lon 5. And if I’d gone with good ver­sus evil — which I find far duller to think about — would I be rip­ping off Lord of the Rings? Harry Pot­ter? Or the Bible?

One of the ancients is still buried on a for­got­ten world at the edge of the galaxy, wait­ing to be woken up.

Golden’s Shadow Saga did the same shtick with Charle­magne. As have count­less oth­ers. And hey, at least in my ver­sion the ancient in ques­tion is actu­ally a dragon. Y’know. Tradition.

Our first con­tact with the most pow­er­ful of the younger races results in a war based on a misunderstanding.

Remem­ber in the King Arthur mythol­ogy how Arthur and Mordred’s armies were poised to fight, but tried one last time to nego­ti­ate, until a sol­dier raised his sword to kill a snake and the other side thought it was an attack? Again, this is a mythic motif that has repeated over and over again in mul­ti­ple cul­tures. Come to think of it, this aspect of UC is really rip­ping off every sin­gle episode of Three’s Company.

The cen­tral human hero is a mav­er­ick mil­i­tary man with a trou­bled past, with ini­tials nearly the same as the author’s.

Okay, the ini­tials thing I’m def­i­nitely rip­ping off from Baby­lon 5. But as for the char­ac­ters of Jack Kil­lian and John Sheri­dan, they remind me a lot of Pat­ton, MacArthur, and count­less other war heroes in human his­tory. This is a clas­sic arche­type, bor­der­ing on cliché, actu­ally. I should be ashamed of myself.

Actu­ally, let’s look some of Joe Straczynski’s answers when he was asked a sim­i­lar question.

Okay, I’ve just read a bunch more of these…okay, I admit it, you got me…I’m doing Philip K. Dick right down the line…and I’m also doing George Orwell right down the line…and I’m doing Lord of the Rings beat for beat…and Chalker…and…and Cherryh…and I’m doing a vari­a­tion on the Bible, and King Arthur, and the his­tory of Baby­lon, and the Idylls of the King.… What?  What’s that you say?  You can’t be doing all of these right down the line, all at the same time?  Sure I can.  Because there IS no B5.  There’s a blank sig­nal that reg­is­ters in your brain, trig­ger­ing the last thing you read, or the most impor­tant thing you read.  It’s a care­fully rigged US Gov­ern­ment psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare exper­i­ment. I give up. jms

And

RE: “B5 is really X in dis­guise” You’re all right, and you’re all wrong. Is it Lord of the Rings? Dune? The Kennedy story? The saga of Camelot? The Foun­da­tion? A brief his­tory of World War II? The Bible? All these and oth­ers have been broached to me by peo­ple absolutely sure that this was the model for the series. (And, as an aside, this kind of dis­cus­sion gen­er­ally hap­pens only to TV writ­ers; nobody here is doing a panel called “Is Star­tide Ris­ing Really X in dis­guise?” This hap­pens to TV writ­ers because some­how it gets assumed that we haven’t got an idea in our heads that we didn’t swipe from somebody’s book. But that’s another topic for another time.) Baby­lon 5…is a Rohr­sharch test. An ink blot cre­ated by smash­ing actors, arche­types, saga-​​structure, myth and lan­guage against a sheet of paper, fold­ing it, and bash­ing it a few times. When you open it up and look inside, what you see is the saga clos­est to your heart and your expe­ri­ence. Because like all the works men­tioned a moment ago, B5 draws upon the same well­spring of myth, arche­type, sym­bol­ogy, and dime store soci­ol­ogy that feeds all sagas, from the Iliad on through to the present. Writ­ers, sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers in par­tic­u­lar, are like the beg­gar in Aladdin, who offered new lamps for old…we seize myths that have fallen out of cur­rency and recast them in newer guise, dust them off and hope a genie emerges. Our myths, the myths of Tolkien and Homer, of Hein­lein and Mal­lory, are eter­nal; they exchange one name for another, cast off one mask and assume the next. If you per­ceive their pres­ence in Baby­lon 5, it is because we have courted the myth, not because we have echoed one of their names from another place. King Lear van­ishes into Londo, Cas­san­dra peers out from behind the eyes of G’Kar, Gala­had answers to the name Ivanova, the Ora­cle at Del­phi is now wear­ing an encounter suit, and Sir Bede­vere is…well, that would be telling. So you’re all right. And you’re all wrong. Because it’s all ACTUALLY based on the 1967 Young Juve­niles novel “The Mad Sci­en­tists’ Club.” And I’m actu­ally chan­nel­ing Eleanor Roo­sevelt. (For­tu­nately, I already have the wardrobe.) Oh, yes…and I am the wal­rus, coo-​​coo ka choo.… jms

And there endeth the lesson.

10: Friends and Enemies

“Why was it good that I left my phone behind?” Susan said as they watched the fea­ture­less con­crete speed past the train windows.

“How do you think they found us?” Daniel said. “Even cheap dis­pos­able phones can be tri­an­gu­lated by law enforce­ment, and fancy smart­phones like yours can do even bet­ter with built in GPS. Once they fig­ured out you were meet­ing me, it was triv­ial for them to find out exactly where you were.”

Susan felt like a grade A stooge, but she reminded her­self that she wasn’t used to this cloak and dag­ger stuff. She was a blog­ger, not an inves­tiga­tive reporter for the Post. “So now what?” she asked.

“Now I guess we find some­where to lie low and plan our next move. Assum­ing you’re still with me.”

“I pretty much have to be at this point, don’t I? I’m your accomplice.”

“Not nec­es­sar­ily,” Daniel said. They were com­ing up on Van Ness-​​UDC, the third sta­tion past Dupont Cir­cle. Seemed like a good place to turn around. “I’m going to switch trains at the next stop and head back into town. By the time I leave the Metro, I should be well away from any­where they’re likely to be look­ing for me. You and I could part com­pany at a hub, say, Metro Cen­ter, and you can tell the cops I coerced you. I kind of did.”

“You dragged me out of the restau­rant, across the street, where men shot a large gun at us,” Susan said as they got off the train and made their way around to the other side. “I have a bet­ter idea,” she said.

She walked over to the banks of fare card machines and paid cash to two cards. Then she handed one to Daniel and they used them to exit the sta­tion. As they rode the esca­la­tor up, Daniel said, “What was that?”

“They’re prob­a­bly look­ing for peo­ple jump­ing the turn­stiles to get out, and they prob­a­bly have mar­shals flood­ing the Metro sys­tem look­ing for you rid­ing around. They don’t know where you’ll exit, but they know where you’ll be com­ing from. So let’s not be there.” Maybe I can do this cloak and dag­ger stuff, Susan thought.

They sur­faced and Susan hailed a cab. “Do you know Bob & Edith’s on Colum­bia Pike?” she asked. The dri­ver nod­ded. “Take us there, then.”

Daniel got into the cab next to her. “Where are we going?”

“You’re still new in town, right?”

“I, uh…”

“Well, we need to find a place far enough from where either of us live to regroup and fig­ure out what to do next, and I know a place that has amaz­ing waf­fles. You owe me. I didn’t get to fin­ish my corned beef.”

The taxi sped away.

#

After their waf­fles, Daniel and Susan got a room at the Days Inn up the street. It was cheap and it was across the street from a McDonald’s, so it seemed like a good place to hole up for a while. Susan was tak­ing a shower after all the run­ning they’d done, and Daniel was sit­ting in on the bed flip­ping through TV news, try­ing to see if there was any­thing about him when he heard a knock at the door. It was a gen­tle knock, not the pound­ing he expected if it were the cops. He’d paid cash for the waf­fles and for the room, so there shouldn’t have been any way to trace them.

He peered through the peep­hole to see a fish­eye view of an elderly man peer­ing back at him, or at least peer­ing at the peep­hole. The man had a scruffy day’s growth of white beard. Seemed harm­less enough. He opened the door.

“Can I help you?” Daniel asked.

“Hey, how ya doin?” the man asked. “I’m Jeff Frankel, got the room next door. You wouldn’t hap­pen to have any soap, would ya? Man­age­ment neglected to give me any, and I think the bas­tards are hid­ing from me now. If they’d answer the damn room phone I wouldn’t have go over there, but what’re ya gonna do, you know?”

Daniel sup­pressed a grin. “My friend’s tak­ing a shower, so I’ll have to wait until she gets out. Come on in.” He watched as the old guy limped in, and Daniel noticed he had a steel left leg from the knee down.

“Friend, huh?” Frankel asked. “Well, don’t let me interrupt — ”

Daniel heard the water turn off in the bath­room. “No, really, it’s not like that. We — ”

“You don’t have to explain to me, son. I’ve had friends before. Not so much now, you under­stand, but I still get friendly every once in a — ”

“Daniel?” Susan said from the bath­room. “Who are you talk­ing to?”

“Just our next door neigh­bor. Do we have an extra bar of soap?”

“Hang on,” she said. She reached a hand out the door and handed Daniel a lit­tle card­board box con­tain­ing a tiny bar of soap.

“Thanks,” Daniel said, and handed the soap to Frankel. “There you go, sir,” Daniel said. “Enjoy the soap.”

“You have no idea.” They both paused. “Well, any­way,” Frankel con­tin­ued, “I’ll be on my way. By the way, didn’t catch your name, friend.”

“I’m Dan. That’s Sue in the bathroom.”

“You Viet Namese?”

“No,” Daniel said. “Korean, actually.”

“Hmm,” Frankel said. “That was before my time. I only ask because like thank­ing Viet Namese folks for my gov­ern­ment pen­sion. Best thing that ever hap­pened to me.”

“Well,” Daniel said, “if I see any, I’ll be sure to pass that along.”

“Heh! I bet you will. Okay, tell your friend I said hi.” He shuf­fled out the door and out into the park­ing lot.

“Who was that?” Susan said. She was wear­ing a bathrobe and tow­el­ing off her hair.

“Said his name was Jeff Frankel. Weird old guy.”

“So,” she said, sit­ting down on the bed. “We’re kind of hosed.”

“What do you mean?” They hadn’t been able to do much plan­ning at the diner, because the place was packed and they didn’t want to be over­heard. Susan had jumped in the shower as soon as they checked in, so this was really the first chance they had to dis­cuss their situation.

“Think about it. We’re cut off. We can’t get online to look for any­thing. We can’t use any­thing but cash, and we can’t hit an ATM to get more cash. I’m down to around forty bucks. You?”

Daniel had been think­ing about this him­self. “Eighty seven fifty.”

“How far are we going to get on a hun­dred and twenty bucks? Damn those waffles!”

“It’s obvi­ous we’re not going to leave the city. At this point, nei­ther of us can even get a car.”

“The key to clear­ing your name is prov­ing that Hen­driks isn’t dead. Whether he was dead or not is inde­ter­mi­nate at this time. But he got out of that car, you saw him walk­ing in that alley. He’s out there some­where, and if we can find him, the FBI won’t be wor­ried about you.”

Daniel thought about this. “I say we head back to Hendriks’s house and try to find some­thing I missed the first time. Evi­dence that he’s not really dead. Any­more. Shit.”

“I know, Daniel. But we’ll find out the truth.”

#

Daniel woke up in a sweat. He’d been dream­ing again, but thank­fully he didn’t remem­ber the dream. He’d dozed off in the chair by the win­dow while Susan snored qui­etly on the bed.

He’d been amaz­ingly lucky to find her, some­one will­ing to go to such lengths to help him find the truth. She had her own rea­sons for doing it, of course, but he didn’t begrudge her a way to advance her career if she did it while help­ing him. He got up and stretched. No more sleep for me, he thought. He thought about going for a run, but the last thing he needed was a beat cop to rec­og­nize him. Plus, he wasn’t famil­iar with Arling­ton and didn’t want to get los—

The hotel room door exploded into the room, clip­ping Daniel on the shoul­der and knock­ing him to the floor. He pushed it off and looked up into the door­way. Even though the man was in sil­hou­ette, Daniel rec­og­nized him instantly. “Hendriks.”

Hen­driks strode into the room as Susan scram­bled off the bed and looked for some­thing to use as a weapon. “You should have left well enough alone, Cho,” Hen­driks said. “All you had to do was for­get you saw me. It’s hap­pened hun­dreds of times. But you didn’t. You went pok­ing around. And I can’t allow that.”

“Peo­ple know we’re here. They’ll come look­ing for us.” Daniel said.

Hen­driks almost, but not quite, smiled. “No, they won’t. No one knows you’re here. If any­one did, you’d be arrested, or worse. By morn­ing, the FBI will think a group of patri­otic hicks found you and ran you out of town. But it won’t mat­ter much to you by then.”

Daniel stood, and posi­tioned him­self between Hen­driks and Susan. “Any why won’t it mat­ter to me?”

“Because you’ll be dead.” Hen­driks struck, blind­ingly fast, and despite Daniel’s best attempt to dodge, con­nected solidly with the same shoul­der that got hit by the door. Daniel felt tin­gling in his left arm, then it went numb.

Not a good way to start a fight, he thought. “Susan, get ready to run!”

Susan held a lamp out in front of her like it was going to bite her. She didn’t seem to know what to do in a fight.

“Miss Richard­son isn’t going any­where,” Hen­driks said. “You’re both going to dis­ap­pear, and the FBI will waste months look­ing for you.”

“I really wish you’d just shut the fuck up,” Daniel said as he lashed out with a snap kick to Hendriks’s head. The kick con­nected, but didn’t seem to phase the man. That should have knocked him out, Daniel thought.

“Good, you have some fight in you. I was wor­ried this wouldn’t be any fun.” Hen­driks spun around and nailed Daniel in the stom­ach with a round­house kick he barely saw com­ing. Daniel crashed through the front win­dow of the hotel room and into the street.

As Daniel was pick­ing him­self up, he noticed the lamp Susan had been hold­ing come sail­ing out the win­dow after him. Shit, no, he thought and vaulted back into the room.

#

Damn those kids! Jeff Frankel thought as he sat up in bed. He’d half expected, this, and damn it, he couldn’t even go over there and tell them to get a room, because, hello, that’s exactly what they did. But still, did every­one in their twen­ties have to have sex like they were try­ing to break the damn fur­ni­ture? He’d been try­ing to avoid the pound­ing and slam­ming sounds, but there was just no get­ting back to sleep—

Crash!

Wait a minute, Jeff thought. That was glass. Big glass, like a win­dow. He was no longer sure what was going on over there, but damn it…

He strapped on his steel leg and threw on his clothes. He didn’t know what was going on over there, but he was going to put a stop it one way or another.

#

Hen­driks grabbed Susan by the arm and flung her at Daniel, with seem­ingly no more effort than toss­ing a pil­low across the room. She smacked into Daniel before she could even shout “look out!” or some­thing sim­i­larly obvi­ous, and it occurred to her than their sit­u­a­tion had def­i­nitely not improved by find­ing the sub­ject of their search.

“Are you okay?” Daniel asked. It struck Susan as funny.

“I — “

“I don’t know about you kids, but I’m hav­ing a blast,” Hen­driks said. “I needed to blow off some steam, and I just can’t think of a bet­ter way to top off the week I’ve had than to make you both dis­ap­pear.” He shook his head back and forth, as if crack­ing it, loos­en­ing up his shoul­ders. Christ, that was before he warmed up?

Susan started edg­ing towards the door, with­out actu­ally get­ting up. Daniel stood and vaulted him­self at Hen­driks in some kind of mar­tial arts move. He looked good, but Hen­driks met him with a per­fectly timed back­hand that redi­rected Daniel in mid-​​air and sent him smash­ing into the wall.

“Susan!” Daniel said, blood gush­ing from his mouth. “Get help!”

Susan felt like an elec­tric shock went through her, and she bolted upright and ran out the door. As she crossed the thresh­old, she heard Hen­driks laugh.

#

Jeff had just walked out his door when the girl from next door plowed into him. Poor thing looked ter­ri­fied. And that Korean kid had seemed so nice, too—

“Please, help us!” the girl said.

Us?

“What in the Sam Hill?” Jeff said.

He heard the sound of a strug­gle com­ing from the open door and shat­tered win­dow of the motel room. “Who the heck is in there?”

“Please, he’s try­ing to kill us!”

Jeff peered in the win­dow. He saw Dan, the Korean kid, fight­ing an older man with sandy hair and a suit. For a guy wear­ing a suit, he was wip­ing the floor with the kid.

Dan got slammed into the wall, then bounced back on the attack. He ducked under a punch from the guy in the suit, then grabbed the man’s wrist and brought the flat of his palm up to snap both bones of the fore­arm. Well, that oughtta do it, Jeff thought.

And then the guy in the suit smiled.

The guy whipped his bro­ken arm out to his side, and Jeff heard a dis­tinct dou­ble pop as the bones snapped back into place. Then the guy ham­mered Dan with wicked hook from an arm that was sup­posed to be broken.

Holy shit, Jeff thought. I know what that—

“Please!” Sue said, tug­ging on his arm.

“Come on,” Jeff said. “I’ll help you.”

#

Well, that explains a lot, Daniel thought. But he’s so fast! He dropped with the punch, try­ing to roll with the impact to rob it of some of its power, and the roll took him down to the floor and across the room. If he’d stood there and tried to just absorb it, it likely would have taken his head off. A punch from a bro­ken arm.

Daniel rolled back to his feet, only to have Hen­driks lay him out again with a round­house kick. “You don’t get it, do you, kid?” Hen­driks said.

“Depends on what you mean,” Daniel said, more blood spilling out of his mouth when he talked than he expected. “I get plenty of vit­a­mins and minerals.”

“It never ceases to amaze me, you know,” Hen­driks went on, throw­ing another punch that Daniel had to leap for the bed to dodge. The guy was just toy­ing with him now, and Daniel knew it, but he wanted to buy as much time for Susan as he could, and that meant keep­ing the guy talk­ing. If he was lucky, he might even learn the man’s secret before he died.

“Com­pound inter­est?” Daniel said. “Yeah, that’s a bitch.”

“The tenac­ity of your race,” Hen­driks said. “Your abil­ity to joke while star­ing at the end of your brief lives. It’s some­thing my peo­ple have never fully understood.”

“And which peo­ple would those be,” Daniel said, shov­ing the dresser out in front of him. “The Vil­lage People?”

Hen­driks lifted the heavy wooden dresser and flung it aside with one hand. Daniel took the oppor­tu­nity to nail him in the side of the head with a spin kick, then jumped away again before he could retaliate.

“This is what I mean. We’ve lost our sense of humor over the mil­len­nia, and I think we’re poorer for it.”

“I think you’re under­selling your­self,” Daniel said, edg­ing around the room. He almost had Hen­driks where he wanted him. “Maybe all you need is a lit­tle prac­tice. I know a com­edy club that has an open mic night.”

“Do you even under­stand, human, what is going on here? The mor­tal peril in which you find your­self?” Hen­driks, cir­cling to keep Daniel in front of him, had just stepped foot in front of the shat­tered window.

“Really,” Daniel said, “I’d just be happy if you’d shut the fuck up.” He launched him­self at Hen­driks in his best foot­ball tackle and the two of them tum­bled out into the park­ing lot. Colum­bia Pike was quiet this early in the morn­ing, but he heard a dis­tant mechan­i­cal rumbling.

Hen­driks brought up one knee into Daniel’s mid­sec­tion, then extended the leg to kick him back­wards. “I sup­pose you’re right,” Hen­driks said as he got up. “It’s time to end this and go find Miss Richardson.”

“Leave her alone!” Daniel launched him­self in a fly­ing kick, but Hen­driks, now appear­ing more bored than ready to fight, reached out, grabbed Daniel’s leg in mid-​​air and slammed him into the wall of the motel. Daniel slumped to the con­crete, then pushed him­self back to his feet, lean­ing against the wall for support.

“It’s over, Cho. All the bravado in the world won’t save you now. You med­dled in the affairs of the gods, and you must pay the price.”

Daniel threw a punch, which Hen­driks again caught.

“One good turn,” Hen­driks said. He brought the flat of his palm across, snap­ping both bones in Daniel’s fore­arm. “Deserves another.”

Daniel started to slide down the wall, but Hen­driks caught him with one hand around Daniel’s neck. He lifted him back up, and Daniel’s bro­ken arm flopped against the wall. The pain was blind­ing, and Daniel saw every­thing going white. “What… what are you?”

“I would have thought it obvi­ous, Cho. I’m a demon. My name is Batarel. And now, you, Cho, are dea — “

The noise and white light drowned out every­thing as Hen­driks — Batarel — dis­ap­peared from Daniel’s vision with a clang­ing thump. He heard Susan’s voice. “Daniel! Get in!”

Soft but strong hands grabbed him by the shoul­ders and he half stepped, half fell through the alu­minum door­way that had sud­denly appeared where Hen­driks used to be. “I’ve got him!” he heard Susan shout. “Hit it!”

Daniel lurched to the side, heard and another loud thump, fol­lowed by a crunch­ing noise and jar­ring bumps that set off new fire­works of pain from his arm. They were mov­ing, he thought. How were they—

And then, mer­ci­fully, Daniel passed out.

9: Arrivals and Departures

Daniel stood out­side Sec­ond Story Books and tried to look incon­spic­u­ous. It was nearly two o’clock, and he had seen sev­eral peo­ple he thought might have been Susan Richard­son, but no one approached him. The prob­lem was that there was no pic­ture of her on the New Amer­i­can Cen­tury web­site, and he hadn’t had time to try to find her on Google, Face­book or Twit­ter. He had no idea what she looked like, so all he really had to go on was that she was female and would likely be car­ry­ing a lap­top. That described nearly a hun­dred peo­ple within his field of vision at any given sec­ond. He’d picked Dupont Cir­cle because it was a busy place with lots of wit­nesses, but he hadn’t con­sid­ered the down­side in see­ing any­one in par­tic­u­lar com­ing through all the noise.

“Are you Doc­tor Cho?” some­one asked behind him.

Daniel nearly jumped out of his shoes. “It’s okay!” the woman shouted, louder than he’d prefer.

He looked up and down the street to see if they’d drawn unwel­come atten­tion, and see­ing noth­ing alarm­ing, turned back to her.

“Sorry,” he said. “You just star­tled me.”

“I’m Susan Richard­son, from New Amer­i­can Cen­tury. You are Doc­tor Cho, right?”

“Please,” he said, shak­ing her hand, “call me Daniel.”

They stood awk­wardly for a moment, then Susan said, “Well, I’m inter­view­ing you, so I sup­pose the tab’s on me. Want to get a bur­rito?” She motioned towards the Chipo­tle just down the street, and Daniel real­ized he hadn’t eaten since the day before.

“Sure,” he said. “Thank you for see­ing me.”

They walked over and got their orders, not say­ing much else until they were seated across from each other at a metal table in the back of the restau­rant. Daniel took a mon­ster bite out of his bur­rito and said, “Thanks again.”

“Thank you. You know, it’s actu­ally pretty rare that the sub­ject of one of my arti­cles wants to talk to me afterwards.”

Daniel sat qui­etly and smiled between bites. He didn’t know if she was fish­ing for a com­ment about the site she worked for or not, but he decided he was bet­ter off not vol­un­teer­ing any­thing either way.

“Noth­ing, huh?” she said. “You’re bet­ter at this than I thought. Okay, down to busi­ness then.”

She reached into her bag and pulled out a small dig­i­tal recorder. “Okay if I record this?” she asked, already plac­ing the device on the table between them and turn­ing it on.

“Sure,” Daniel said.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m here with Doc­tor Daniel Cho, cur­rently wanted by the FBI as a sus­pected ter­ror­ist.” Daniel was thank­ful she said it qui­etly enough not to draw atten­tion from the other din­ers. “Doc­tor Cho, can you tell me why you’re under suspicion?”

Daniel took a swig of iced tea and looked her in the eye. “I’m not a ter­ror­ist,” he said. “I want to get that on the record up front. I’m also rea­son­ably sure I’m not crazy. But after what I saw yes­ter­day, what I’m still try­ing to find the evi­dence to explain, you might have to come to your own con­clu­sions about my sanity.”

As he fin­ished his bur­rito, he told her the story of his last twenty four hours. The crash, the res­cue, the miss­ing body. The grin in the alley­way. His arrest, and the dis­cus­sion with Detec­tive Durante. Escap­ing the police sta­tion, find­ing Hendriks’s house, and what he found inside. And finally, read­ing her arti­cle about the FBI look­ing for him, and con­tact­ing her to set up this meeting.

“That’s some story,” she said finally.

#

Jeff Frankel pulled his RV off of I395 and into Arling­ton, Vir­ginia. He needed to find a place to set up for the night, some­where with wifi. He put­tered along until he found a motel that fit his needs. After he secured a room, he parked the RV around the cor­ner and set­tled in. The place wasn’t much to look at, but his lap­top told him he was get­ting some­where in the neigh­bor­hood of eight giga­bits down. More than enough for stream­ing video. It would do nicely. It also had easy access to a sub­way sta­tion for him to go into the city the next day. Jeff wasn’t sure how long he’d be stay­ing in DC, but he was off to a good start.

#

“That’s some story,” Susan said, mak­ing sure the recorder was still run­ning. The tale she’d just heard was out­landish, over the top. Either Cho really was crazy, or he was a ter­ror­ist with an absolutely unbe­liev­able cover story. The prob­lem was that Susan couldn’t fig­ure out which it was.

“Mis­ter Cho,” Susan began.

“Daniel.”

“Daniel, that’s…”

“It’s unbe­liev­able, I know.”

“Lit­er­ally. What do you expect me to do with that?”

He sad back hard against the wooden chair. “Hon­estly, I don’t know. I was hop­ing you could tell me.”

“Daniel, let me be frank. You have made some extra­or­di­nary claims here. Extra­or­di­nary claims require extra­or­di­nary evi­dence. And your only evidence — “

“Got up and walked away.”

“Exactly.”

“But what about his house? No fur­ni­ture, just crates and crates of price­less antiques and men’s suits?”

“Obvi­ously a ware­house for some­thing, and a quick pit stop. There’s no way he actu­ally lived there, but that’s beside the point. It doesn’t prove he’d still alive.”

Cho — Daniel — ran a hand through his hair. Susan felt bad for the guy. She knew this wasn’t what he’d been hop­ing for. But as fan­tas­tic as he story was, there just wasn’t much she could use. Even New Amer­i­can Cen­tury had stan­dards. It was a shame. He was kind of cute, in a har­ried sort of way, and if they’d met under dif­fer­ent circumstances…

“Let’s approach this from a dif­fer­ent angle. Why do the cops and the FBI think you’re a ter­ror­ist? I know some of it, but not the whole story.”

Daniel’s head dropped. “You prob­a­bly know more than I do. They never told me why they were bust­ing out the PATRIOT act on me.” Poor guy was beyond the end of his rope, dan­gling from the strands. “What do you know about it?”

Susan didn’t need to check her notes. “You’re first gen­er­a­tion Amer­i­can, and your par­ents are from North Korea.”

“Refugees,” Daniel said. “They snuck into South Korea just before they got mar­ried. They hate Kim Jong Il more than the US gov­ern­ment does.”

“I’m just relay­ing what I’ve heard,” Susan said.

“Okay, sorry,” Daniel said, tak­ing another swig of his tea. “What else?”

“You just moved across the coun­try, you have a job where you have access to emer­gency sys­tems, and you’re severely under­em­ployed. You’re trained as a doc­tor, an Emer­gency Room sur­geon, and yet you’re work­ing as a para­medic. You don’t have many social contacts — “

“Hello, new in town.”

“ — and you hap­pened to be at an emer­gency where you weren’t on duty and some­thing weird hap­pened. You have to admit, Daniel, taken all together it looks suspicious.”

“I’m not a ter­ror­ist. I haven’t done any­thing wrong other than defend myself.”

“Let’s look at the biggest ques­tion, other than the miss­ing body. Why did you leave San Fran­cisco, move three thou­sand miles and get a job so far beneath your cho­sen field?”

“You know all this about me, but you don’t know that?”

“No one at your old job would talk to me. All they’d say is that you were no longer employed at the hospital.”

Daniel sighed. “Well, at least they’re doing that much for me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ms. Richard­son — “

“You’re going to have call me Susan if I’m call­ing you Daniel.”

“Okay, Susan, I was fired from St. Peter’s. I screwed up in the ER and got a preg­nant woman killed. I could have saved her, but I fucked up. Her wid­ower sued the hos­pi­tal, and they fired me.”

“Oh my God.”

“And as you might guess, other hos­pi­tals aren’t enthused about pick­ing up a doc­tor that gets his patients killed. Even if they needed a cut­ter, I’m too much of a mal­prac­tice risk. I stopped look­ing pretty quick.

“Frankly, Susan, they’re right. I’m a fuck up. Stuff like this hap­pens to me whether I ask for it or not. I’ve played it straight my whole life, got good grades, got into a good school, became a doc­tor just like my folks wanted me to be. But it all came crash­ing down any­way. And as I racked up no after no look­ing for a new job as a sur­geon, it hit me.

“Maybe I’m not sup­posed to be play­ing God. When you’re an ER doc, peo­ple expect you to work mir­a­cles. They expect you to look at the dam­age, no mat­ter how cat­a­strophic it is, and make every­thing okay. I can’t make every­thing okay. And I decided I didn’t want peo­ple to look to me for mir­a­cles any­more. I moved as far away as I could, and I got a job as a para­medic. I still get to save lives, I still get to help peo­ple, but they don’t expect me to work mir­a­cles. It was a good job. I was on my way to build­ing a life again. And then…”

“And then you see a dead body walk away from death itself and you won­der what all of your strug­gle has been for.”

The look in Daniel’s eyes nearly broke Susan’s heart. “Exactly,” he said. “That’s it. That’s why I couldn’t let it go.”

Susan wasn’t sure if Daniel Cho was crazy or not. Lord knew the guy had been through enough, it wouldn’t be too hard to believe he finally snapped. But some­thing told her, her reporter’s instincts maybe, that there was still more to this story. Some­thing told her it would be worth see­ing this through, find­ing out where it led. And at the very least, if she could help this poor guy get some clo­sure, she’d feel a lot bet­ter about her­self sit­ting in that pew Sun­day morning.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m in. We need to find out what really hap­pened yes­ter­day and see this through to the end. Let’s get out of here and—

Daniel wasn’t lis­ten­ing to her. He was watch­ing the front door.

#

Jack Har­ris sig­naled to his agents. The last hour had been con­stant activ­ity, but he thought they were ready. They were parked in a van across the street from the Chipo­tle in Dupont Cir­cle, prepar­ing to appre­hend the suspects.

The kid, Dante, was good. Jack thought about hav­ing him trans­ferred to the antiter­ror­ism unit. They needed the best hack­ers they could find. He was able to trace the email Cho sent to Susan Richard­son, a blog­ger work­ing for a polit­i­cal rumor rag here in the city. While they couldn’t read the email with­out get­ting a war­rant and jump­ing through a lot of red tape with Microsoft, Jack was able to pull some strings and get a wire­tap order for Richardson’s GPS coor­di­nates from her phone. As soon as she stopped mov­ing, they pin­pointed her loca­tion to the Mex­i­can restau­rant across the street and moved in.

He had the DC cops posi­tioned down the street in both direc­tions, but not block­ing traf­fic. He didn’t want to tip their hand. He’d lost a ter­ror sus­pect in San Diego by being too aggres­sive. Some of these guys were flunkies, espe­cially the ones from the outer ter­ri­to­ries of the Mus­lim world. If the tar­get was from Oman or one of the for­mer Soviet “Stans”, he wouldn’t have wor­ried. They were ide­o­logues and more con­cerned with their God than with get­ting caught. But the smart ones, the ring lead­ers, the ones from Iran, Pak­istan, Saudi Ara­bia and yes, even North Korea, they watched the signs. They noticed when traf­fic pat­terns, even pedes­trian traf­fic pat­terns, tapered off. So Jack had to approach this qui­etly, with a min­i­mum of dis­rup­tion. He had to assume Cho was a pro, had been taught by pros. He would notice if they started plac­ing men at the exits ahead of time.

Jack watched up and down the street. It was almost time. At exactly 2:50, the cops were going to stop traf­fic going both direc­tions on both M and 19^th. As soon as the last cars passed, Jack and his team would charge across 19^th street and into the restau­rant. The place was on the bot­tom floor of an old town­house, so there was only one way in or out for the cus­tomers. Jack had a plain­sclothes offi­cer watch­ing the employee entrance in the alley, but discretely.

[upon con­sult­ing a gor­ram map, turns out the Chipo­tle on M & 19^th is way too far from both Sec­ond Story and the Dupont Cir­cle Metro sta­tion for my pur­poses. Move them to James Hoban’s Irish Restau­rant, maybe for some corned beef and cab­bage, for the sec­ond draft. Jack need only stop NS traf­fic on 20^th.]

At just a few sec­onds after 2:50, the traf­fic dis­ap­peared on 20^th and Jack flung open the door. “Let’s move, peo­ple!” They darted across the street and into the Irish restaurant.

#

Daniel’s eyes widened as he saw the men bolt into the still crowded restau­rant. “Come on,” he said to Susan, grab­bing her by the wrist and pulling her up.

“What’s going on?” She tried to reach for some­thing on the table [make her voice recorder and her phone the same thing, so she leaves her phone on the table], but Daniel was already mov­ing and tak­ing her with him. She glanced behind her and picked up the pace when she saw the men wear­ing bul­let­proof vests embla­zoned with FBI on their chests.

Daniel ran to the other side of the restau­rant, towards 19^th street. He dragged/​guided Susan by one hand, and tipped over strate­gic tables with the other, try­ing to slow the agents down. Just add dine and dash to my list of charges, offi­cer, he thought. He saw two more through the glass doors to 19^th street, block­ing their escape. Too much to hope for that this would be easy, he thought.

“Plan B!” he shouted, and redi­rected Susan for the kitchen.

“This was your Plan A?” she replied.

They burst through the dou­ble doors and Daniel was nearly over­whelmed with the heat and smell of boil­ing cab­bage. “Just pass­ing through!” he said as he con­tin­ued past the sur­prised cooks and around the cor­ner near a big walk in freezer. Off to the left, he saw what was look­ing for.

They ran through the ser­vice entrance next to a small load­ing dock and out into the sun­light north of the restau­rant on 19^th street. The two agents that had been posi­tioned at the 19^th street entrance had dis­ap­peared, pre­sum­ably inside to give chase.

“We’re not out of this yet,” Daniel said and darted across Dupont Cir­cle itself, nar­rowly avoid­ing a mov­ing van and then a hybrid owner mon­key­ing around with some­thing on their dash­board before run­ning into the tree-​​filled park in the mid­dle of the circle.

“I didn’t ask to be in this in the first place!” Susan shouted. “And we left my phone behind in the restaurant!”

“Good!”

“My ass! That phone cost me six hun­dred bucks! How is that good?”

They ran directly for the Dupont Cir­cle Metro sta­tion entrance, and had just hit the esca­la­tor when they heard some­one shout “Stop!” and then a bul­let whine off of the esca­la­tor hand rail.

“Shit!” Daniel and Susan said in uni­son. They ran down the esca­la­tor, Daniel shov­ing aside any­one stand­ing in the mid­dle rather than to the right. “On your fuck­ing left!” he shouted.

The hit the main plat­form at a run and Daniel was sur­prised that Susan didn’t hes­i­tate when he vaulted the turn­stile. She jumped just after he did, and for once, luck was with them. The train was stand­ing at the sta­tion, but he could hear the auto­mated voice telling peo­ple to stand back as the doors closed.

“Run!” he shouted as they both dove for the last car just as the doors started to close. They both wound up in a tan­gle on the floor as the doors shut behind them and the train picked up speed, mov­ing north out of Dupont Cir­cle Station.

#

“Shit­shit­shit­shit­shit…” Jack mut­tered as he raced down the esca­la­tor only to see the dim and quickly reced­ing lights of the train in the north­bound tun­nel. He ran up to the kiosk in the mid­dle of the turn­stiles and slammed his FBI iden­ti­fi­ca­tion up to the rein­forced window.

“Jack Har­ris, FBI!” he shouted. “Stop that train!”

The ticket taker mum­bled and fum­bled around for a phone, clearly shaken. “Wow, I knew we were crack­ing down on turn­stile jumpers, but — “

“This is a National Secu­rity mat­ter! I need you stop that train!”

“I can’t, sir! You’ll have to talk to my supervisor — “

“Shit!” Jack said and turned away, leav­ing the pan­icked and befud­dled ticket taker alone.

“What should we do, sir?” asked Horowitz, one of his agents. “Get PD to the next sta­tion up the line?”

Jack scratched his head, still try­ing to calm down. He wasn’t going to make good deci­sions if he was upset. Breathe in, breathe out… “No,” said. “Cho’s too smart to get off at the next sta­tion, so the local cops would just be wast­ing their time. Put out an APB with his pic­ture and hers, make sure Metro reports any­one jump­ing a turn­stile to get out of a train sta­tion, and give me a loca­tion on Richardson’s phone.”

“This phone?” Horowitz asked. He held out a sleek black smart­phone. “I picked it up off their table dur­ing the chase.”

“God. Damn. It,” Jack said, tak­ing the phone but not snatch­ing it out of Horowitz’s hand. It wasn’t his fault Richard­son didn’t take the phone with her. And maybe they could pull some­thing use­ful from it.

“Come on,” Jack said. “Let’s head back to HQ and plan our next move.”