The Unification Chronicles

22: New Jer­sey Is The Bomb

Batarel stood on the bal­cony of a demon “com­mon house” in Man­hat­tan, lis­ten­ing to the sounds of the city. It was a upper west side pent­house that had been in the hands of their orga­ni­za­tion since the build­ing com­mis­sioned. In fact, they owned the block, and sev­eral oth­ers nearby. Over the cen­turies, they’d man­aged to insin­u­ate them­selves into every aspect of human gov­ern­ment and com­merce. They exerted influ­ence in thou­sands of sub­tle way every day, all to fur­ther the Mis­sion. They helped facil­i­tate gun run­ning all over the world, but espe­cially in Africa, south­west Asia and Cen­tral and South Amer­ica. They were instru­men­tal in devel­op­ment projects that siphoned water away from vil­lages. They had the ear of nearly every nation in the UN build­ing across town, and told them things about each other that made wars and inva­sions all but irre­sistible. Every­where they went, dis­cord, strife, war and death followed.

All accord­ing to plan.

It was for the humans own good, in the long run. It went back to the old­est human civ­i­liza­tions, agrar­ian pop­u­la­tions just learn­ing the arts of ani­mal hus­bandry. In any pop­u­la­tion, you occa­sion­ally had to thin the herd, weed out the unfit. Omelets, eggs and all that.

And that was why Cho was not allowed to upset the plan. The Mis­sion only worked because the humans thought it was their idea. They thought they were in con­trol. This was an illu­sion that must never be dis­pelled. Of course, there had been thou­sands of such inci­dents through­out his­tory. The secret was too big to think it would never get out. But every such inci­dent was con­tained. In most cases, the unlucky humans sim­ply dis­ap­peared. In a few cases, they’d been dis­cred­ited first or dri­ven mad. But in the end, no one seri­ously believed in demons. Even the Catholic priests were just going through the motions with their exor­cisms, motions his peo­ple had taught them, to keep the humans scared.

This was drag­ging on too long, now. He had to end it. Twice he’d been dis­tracted away from his prey by the more dri­ving need to pro­tect the secret. It wouldn’t do to kill Cho only to reveal him­self to dozens more humans in the process. But now, with that woman Richard­son and her post­ing video of their fights on the inter­net, the world was watch­ing him. A world becom­ing increas­ingly inured to the fan­tas­tic, a world ready to believe. If the secret got out now, online, there would be no stop­ping it. No going back. Batarel had no idea what would become of the Mis­sion then. The sacred trust his peo­ple had held for over ten millennia.

And where were the Oth­ers in all this? Where were the so-​​called angels, the trai­tors to the Mis­sion? He’d been keep­ing an eye out for them as he’d fol­lowed the humans. He would rec­og­nize any of them instantly, just by their walk, or the shape of their heads. No mat­ter how they tried to dis­guise them­selves, a famil­iar­ity borne of thou­sands of years was immutable. He would have known. But he hadn’t seen any of them. He thought, given the high-​​profile media cov­er­age, he would have seen at least a glimpse of one of their lead­ers: Gabriel, Uriel, Azriel, maybe even Michael. But noth­ing. Didn’t they have as much to lose as his peo­ple if the secret got out? Didn’t they need to con­ceal their true nature?

That wor­ried Batarel more than the humans. If the Oth­ers weren’t try­ing on their own to pro­tect the secret, why weren’t they? What was their game? Here in Amer­ica, they could prob­a­bly find ample gullible humans to step in line for them, eager to bend to their unques­tioned author­ity. But surely they didn’t think that sort of thing would work glob­ally? They didn’t think they’d find eager ini­ti­ates in the mid­dle of an African geno­cide, did they? Humans were weak, eas­ily led, to be sure, but there were lim­its. Weren’t there?

“My mas­ter,” one of the slaves had stepped out onto the bal­cony with him. It was a tes­ta­ment to Batarel’s con­cern that he hadn’t heard the human open the door.

“You may speak,” Batarel said.

“We still have no evi­dence of the ones you seek, my mas­ter, but we do have some­thing you might be able to use. If I may be so bold.”

Batarel turned to face him. He was blond, in rea­son­able health. He might sur­vive the night. “And that would be?”

“We found a credit card charge for the FBI agent, Har­ris. He just ordered a pizza in Newark.”

#

“Oh my God this is so good,” Susan said as she bit into the pizza. Jack had ordered it on his credit card, fig­ur­ing no one was watch­ing that yet. It allowed them to con­serve their dwin­dling cash and after eat­ing noth­ing but hotel peanuts since the diner yes­ter­day morn­ing, she was eager to eat some real food.

“Okay, back to work,” Jack said. “We need to fig­ure out how to lure Batarel into a trap. Susan, what have you found out?”

“We still don’t have much. Daniel was right about the address in DC. It was just a stor­age dump, basi­cally. His real address was in Hern­don. The only employ­ment records I could find for him were as a con­sul­tant for a law firm in DC. Looks like they do mostly lob­by­ing work, a lot of con­nec­tions to K street.”

“Well, that fits,” Jeff said. “We know these guys are all about con­trol­ling human events. Makes sense they’d be frig­gin’ lobbyists.”

“Even though he was listed as a con­sul­tant there, he didn’t do much else that left a paper trail. I have no idea where his money came from. His birth cer­tifi­cate lists him as born in Syra­cuse, New York forty four years ago, and then he showed up in DC eleven years ago. No school tran­scripts, both par­ents listed on the birth cer­tifi­cate are dead — “

“How’d they die?” Jack asked.

Susan con­sulted her notes. “Car wreck, twenty two years ago.”

“Inter­est­ing. Any indi­ca­tion that they had kids?”

Susan dug deeper. “Here. An obit from forty two years ago. Their only son, Richard, died sud­denly. Doesn’t say why.”

“I’m sure it was com­pletely inno­cent,” Jack said. “But it does explain how the demons got a birth cer­tifi­cate with no per­son attached to it.”

“This is all fine and good,” Jeff said, “but it doesn’t tell us what we need to know. We know he was using a fake iden­tity, draw­ing off the cof­fers of the demons, who prob­a­bly have more money than the Pope at this point, and work­ing as a lob­by­ist. But none of that tells us how to lure him into a trap.”

The hotel room door exploded into the room with a loud bang, nearly miss­ing Jack. Susan looked to the door­way and saw Batarel stand­ing there, wear­ing another Armani suit.

“I sup­pose,” Batarel said, “you could just invite me.”

#

Shit! Daniel thought. We’re not ready! He scram­bled to pick up as much of the ordi­nance off the bed as he could.

“I don’t think so, Mis­ter Cho,” the demon said, and flipped the bed with one hand. “No cheating.”

“Cheat­ing?” Jeff said. Daniel had to hand it to the guy. He had more defi­ance than sense. “That’s all you demons do, right?”

The demon sighed. “You don’t expect this to be one of those tedious movie fights, do you? With all the snappy pat­ter? I’m really just here to kill you, so if we could get on with that…”

Jack pulled out his sidearm and took aim, but the demon closed the dis­tance between them. In the blink of an eye, he had his hand wrapped around the bar­rel of Jack’s gun.

“I don’t think you’ll be need­ing that,” Batarel said, and ripped the gun out of Jack’s hand before fling­ing Jack at Daniel.

Both men tum­bled to the other side of the bed, and Daniel noticed Jeff was edg­ing for the door. Susan had her cam­era out and was film­ing, her lap­top stowed and slung over her shoul­der. They were ready to run.

Now the Batarel was alone on the other side of the room, he turned to face them. “You might be tempted to run. You’ve run before. You’ve made things very dif­fi­cult for me. So this time I came pre­pared. The moment any of you step through that door­way, my min­ions will cut you down with machine guns. Go ahead, look.”

Daniel pulled the drapes aside and scanned the park­ing lot. Sure enough, the lot was inter­spersed with black-​​clad fig­ures hold­ing rifles, all of them watch­ing the door to the room.

“Why not just shoot us, then?” Jack asked, get­ting back to his feet.

Batarel smiled. “Because, Agent Har­ris, then I wouldn’t have any fun. You’ve all made life damnably frus­trat­ing for me, and I need to work that out. It’s unhealthy to keep that bot­tled up, you know.”

Susan began back­ing past the bed over to where Daniel and Jack stood. “Miss Richard­son, I’ll thank you to stop there. You get to go first. Mostly so the men can watch me tor­ture you, but you do get to leave early.”

“Fuck you,” Susan said.

“From a reporter I might have expected that,” Batarel said, “but I was under the assump­tion you were a good Chris­t­ian woman. Such language!”

Daniel glanced back out the win­dow, then down at his feet. There was a grenade right in front of him, where it had tum­bled off the bed. How do you get a demon to sit on a bomb? He nudged Jack, eyed the grenade, and whis­pered, “Dis­tract him.”

“Hey!” Jack said. “You don’t think I’m actu­ally going to let you do that, do you?”

As Batarel waved the pis­tol, Daniel slumped, appar­ently in defeat. When he stood up, he had the grenade palmed and shifted it behind his back. “Be ready to break for the car,” he whis­pered to Jeff.

“Susan, get back here, now,” Daniel said.

“You’re just drag­ging this out,” Batarel said. “Now we can do this the hard way, or, no come to think of it, there’s just the hard way. Time to die.”

In one slick move, Jack pulled a smaller revolver out of an ankle hol­ster and fired, hit­ting Batarel in the chest. As the demon swung the auto­matic at Jack, Daniel rushed him, and tack­led him to the floor. “Get next to the door!” Daniel said.

Batarel pushed Daniel off of him. “What are you up to now?” he asked.

Daniel held up the pin from the grenade he’d shoved into Batarel’s waist­band, watched the demon’s eyes widen, then leapt for the door.

#

Jack grabbed Daniel with one hand, Jeff and Susan in the other arm and flung all of them out the door and to the ground as the grenade went off, fire and smoke bil­low­ing from the door and now shat­tered win­dow. As he and Daniel expected, the gun­men in the park­ing lot ducked for cover from the fly­ing glass.

“Move!” he shouted. He got them all into a run­ning crouch to the Crown Vic, and then opened the door for Jeff to get in as he fired off a shot at the near­est gun­man. The man went down. Demons must not sup­ply their min­ions with body armor, he thought.

He fired off two more shots from the cover of the vehi­cle, hit­ting one more gun­man and mak­ing the rest duck for cover. In the fire-​​lit park­ing lot, they couldn’t see clearly which of them he was shoot­ing at. The back pas­sen­ger win­dow shat­tered as the side of the car was raked with bul­lets, and then he fired his final shot from the five cham­ber revolver just as Jeff gunned the engine. He jumped into the car and slammed the door.

“Hit it!” he shouted. Jeff floored it and they peeled out of the park­ing space. As Jeff whipped the car around to the exit, Jack looked back to the hotel room and saw a charred fig­ure stand­ing in sil­hou­ette in the door­way. “Shit, even that didn’t kill him?” he said.

The other three looked back as Jeff accel­er­ated, so no one saw the far gun­man step out into the road and level his rifle at them. The man was too slow on the trig­ger, because he only got out one or two shots before Jeff slammed into him, bounc­ing him up and over the car.

“Oh my God!” Susan said, div­ing for the floorboards.

“Hang on, this is gonna be tight!” Jeff said as he whipped the car around the final turn and sped away from the hotel.