Writ­ers can be idiots. I know I cer­tainly can.

Until this morn­ing, I had got it in my head that I could revise Rev­e­la­tion entirely and post it to Ama­zon by Hal­loween, clear­ing the decks to write Cru­sade for NaNoW­riMo. In addi­tion to get­ting it off my mind, this would also get Rev­e­la­tion out there mak­ing money. My par­ents got their refi deal for the house, and now it’s time for me to move out and get my own place, and that $1-​​4K from Ama­zon would sure help the mov­ing process. (I have hor­ri­ble credit, and expect to have to pay sig­nif­i­cant deposits.)

Of course, while this might have helped me in the short term, it would have been messy in the long term. Even assum­ing I can get all the exist­ing revi­sions done, my edi­tor still has to do one more pass and I still have to address her con­cern that the story needs more descrip­tion through­out. These things take time.

Then there’s the mat­ter of Sandy. Cap­tain Robert San­darski, Jack’s war buddy, is a major char­ac­ter in Cru­sade. Not only is he “on screen” nearly as much as Daniel, Jack and Dante, but he has an absolutely vital role to play at the Act 3 turn. I should really write all of that and still have the option to go back and change aspects of his intro­duc­tion in Rev­e­la­tion if I need to.

So here’s the new plan. Edit as much of Rev­e­la­tion as I can before Novem­ber, but don’t rush and short­change the work. Also rewrite and flesh out the Cru­sade out­line so I have a solid game plan for NaNo. Then come Novem­ber 1^st, start writ­ing Cru­sade and run it all the way through to the end, even if that – as it did with Rev­e­la­tion last year – puts me well into Decem­ber. Then, and only then, go back and fin­ish the pol­ish on Rev­e­la­tion while I wait for Cru­sade to “cool” enough in my mind that I can revise it objec­tively. If I get done with Rev­e­la­tion and I’m still not ready to revise Cru­sade, I can go back to work­ing on Ghost Ronin, the first book in a dif­fer­ent series.

That’s the smart, mature way to han­dle this. No goofy dead­lines, no dra­matic pres­sure. Just solid, daily sit­ting at the key­board and work­ing. (This feels weird to me.)

Only real dif­fer­ence here is a lit­tle bit of Susan’s inner mono­logue to make her more obvi­ously Chris­t­ian, and Daniel has to coax her over the turn­stile in the subway.

---

8 Arrivals And Departures

Susan made 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.

“Doc­tor 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’s 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. There was a lot of fer­til­izer in the trunk of the Mer­cedes, but there was absolutely no way I was in that car when it crashed.” 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 Irish restau­rant 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 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 20^th. As soon as the last cars passed, Jack and his team would charge across 20^th street and into the restau­rant. Jack had a plain­sclothes offi­cer watch­ing the employee entrance in the alley, but discretely.

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, 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 20^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 20^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 his 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.

They hit the main plat­form at a run and Daniel turned to see Susan hes­i­tate when he vaulted the turn­stile. “Come on,” he shouted.

Susan looked back over her shoul­der at the cops and FBI agents com­ing down the esca­la­tor. She mut­tered some­thing under her breath and jumped over the turnstile.

Daniel grabbed her hand and ran for the train. It 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.”

---

“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 for 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 Diner 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.

Now we start to see some seri­ous changes to the first draft. I’ve com­pletely removed the orig­i­nal chap­ter 7, Con­spir­a­cies, for two rea­sons. The first scene in that chap­ter intro­duced con­spir­acy nut Jeff Frankel, which I’ve moved to Friends And Ene­mies to remove the Big Honk­ing Coin­ci­dence of Jeff com­ing to DC to find Susan and Daniel and just hap­pen­ing to get a hotel room where they just hap­pen to get the hotel room next to him. Now he’ll read Susan’s arti­cle after he meets Daniel, but he won’t put yel­low and bull­dozer together until after the fight starts.

The other scene in the orig­i­nal chap­ter 7 was a con­ver­sa­tion – a con­spir­acy, see where I get my chap­ter titles? – between Asemiel and his boss. Given that we’re shroud­ing the demons in mys­tery and not show­ing any­thing from their POV, that had to go.

The only other change here is that I’m mov­ing Daniel’s story to this chap­ter and start­ing the next with Susan’s reac­tion to it. This is par­tially for pac­ing, par­tially to even out chap­ter lengths.

---

7 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 men­tal ward, or even fed­eral prison, 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. 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 Stan­ford. 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
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. That lib­eral hack 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.”

---

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. You like Irish food?” She motioned towards James Hoban’s Irish Restau­rant just down the street, and Daniel real­ized he hadn’t eaten since the day before. Even corned beef would be bet­ter than nothing.

“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 table in the back of the restau­rant. Daniel took a mon­ster bite of his food 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 her phone. “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 food, 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.

Again, almost no changes to this one. I really like Jack in this chap­ter. His ver­bal tic of say­ing “Inter­est­ing” was an organic devel­op­ment I didn’t plan. It’s just part of how he sounds in my head. The only real change here is that I removed a sen­tence or two from Susan’s scene that makes her less hack­ery. I’m giv­ing the real techie bits, espe­cially the para­noid techie bits, to Jeff in the rewrite, where they fit better.

---

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 the night before, 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 in their primes. 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 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 the PATRIOT act.”

“So he knew this was a ter­ror­ism charge,” Har­ris said, more in con­fir­ma­tion than a question.

“Yes. As soon as we started towards him, 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 we moved on him.”

“And you both moved in at once?”

“Yes, we were try­ing to cor­ral him. Mick was closer, though.”

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

Sal noticed Mick giv­ing him a look like “Is this guy for real?” He shrugged and said, “Yeah, the only thing 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.”

“Inter­est­ing. He didn’t play foot­ball in high school or col­lege. I won­der where he picked that up. 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 Mick 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, every­day 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 squee 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, she 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. 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.

This is the first chap­ter with major changes. We won’t have any scenes from Asemiel’s POV in the rewrite, so I had to find a way to have him lurk­ing out­side Daniel’s motel room and it actu­ally be, you know, inter­est­ing.

---

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 him 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 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 wher­ever, 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 Col­orado 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. Just for a moment she thought about call­ing to tell her folks the good news, then their deaths in a car wreck the year before hit her again. They were with God now, she told her­self, and crossed her heart. She won­dered when she would really accept that and be happy for them. She knew what she’d been taught in Sun­day School, but she still missed them, espe­cially at times like this.

She took another long pull on her beer and looked at the pic­ture of her par­ents on the man­tle. Tonight, she’d relax and enjoy the moment. 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 the 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 fluid 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 clean, dry ban­dages. 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!”

---

Fly Williams was hav­ing a rough night. He had a grand total of fifty-​​three dol­lars in his pocket, which wasn’t nearly enough. He needed a big score, and soon. He was already start­ing to get that itchy feel­ing on his teeth.

He rounded the cor­ner of a cheap motel and saw the answer to his prayers. Dumb fuck whitey in a moth­er­fuckin’ suit just stand­ing there, out­side on of the rooms. He was look­ing in the win­dow, prob­a­bly watch­ing a ho do her busi­ness, and he didn’t seem to notice Fly.

Dig­ging around in his pock­ets, Fly fished out a Camel and put it in his mouth. He kept tap­ping is pock­ets as he approached the suit. “Hey, bro,” he said. “You gotta light?”

As the suit turned to glance at him, Fly pulled the knife out of his pocket. “Your wal­let, phone, and watch, man. Now.”

“Go away,” the suit said, turn­ing back to look at the window.

What the fuck? Fly couldn’t resist at look­ing in the win­dow to see what this dum­b­ass was look­ing at. It was just some gook. By him­self, fully dressed and sleep­ing on top of the bed.

He turned back to the suit. “I don’ think you heard me, man. Gimme your shit.”

The suit ignored Fly, didn’t even look at him.

Fuck this shit, Fly thought, and plunged the knife into the suit’s abs. He expected the suit to fold, drop to the ground. Instead, he just stood there. And looked. At Fly. He finally had the suit’s attention.

Fly took out the knife, slick with blood, and slashed at the suit’s face. He cut a deep gouge across from this suit’s left cheek­bone, under the nose, almost cut­ting off the upper lip, and down the other cheek. Blood streamed freely.

And the suit smiled.

Fly started back­ing up. This was some fucked up shit, here. Suit was on some­thing, not to feel that. Fly knew there had to be eas­ier meat somewhere.

Then, as he watched, the bleed­ing stopped. Just stopped. The cuts started to seal up, the upper lip rejoin­ing the nose. In the quiet of the early morn­ing, Fly could actu­ally hear the flesh reknit­ting itself together, like a wet zip­per. Before he knew it, the suit’s face was com­pletely healed. Not a mark on him.

The suit smiled again, teeth no longer sheathed in blood. The suit’s teeth were white, almost gleam­ing, as he took a step towards Fly.

---

The man who had been Richard Hen­driks opened a Dump­ster and flung the body of the junkie into it with one hand, the corpse land­ing with a dull clang. He closed the lid and walked back to his place out­side Daniel Cho’s motel room window.

He watched. And waited.  

4 Inves­ti­ga­tion

Daniel stood in front of a mod­est duplex apart­ment in Arling­ton. Accord­ing to what he’d been able to find out online, it was the address of Richard Hen­driks, a dead man. The lit­tle court­yard Daniel was stand­ing in was get­ting dark, and he could see that there were no lights on inside. He had paid cash at a gro­cery store for another set of latex gloves. No sense leav­ing fin­ger­prints if he didn’t have to.

He walked up to the front door and tried the door­knob. Noth­ing. It was locked. So was the only win­dow on the ground floor. Okay, Daniel thought, we do this the hard way.

He jogged around the build­ing and sur­veyed the alley behind the row of apart­ments. It was filled with Dump­sters and dis­carded fur­ni­ture. He walked down the alley­way, shoo­ing a pair of din­ing rac­coons, until he got to what he was pretty sure was the back of Hendriks’s duplex. The dis­tance was about right and it was the only one in the row with no lights on.

There were only two small win­dows, high on the wall, at ground level, and nei­ther were designed to open. That was assum­ing Daniel would have been able to squeeze through them any­way. There was what looked like a bed­room win­dow on the sec­ond floor that was open just enough to allow a small breeze.

Daniel looked up and down the alley for some­thing to use as a lad­der. The rac­coons observed him quizzi­cally, but offered no sug­ges­tions of their own.

“You guys are a lot of help,” he said as he spot­ted a longish three-​​cushion couch, minus the cush­ions, that might serve his pur­pose. He dragged it over to the wall and propped it up directly under­neath the bed­room win­dow. He braced it as best he could, and then scaled up it until he was stand­ing on the edge of the arm. The ledge of the bed­room win­dow was just a few inches out of reach. The rac­coons chattered.

“No, really, I’m fine,” Daniel told them. “Go get some pop­corn or some­thing.” He knew what he had to do. He was going to have to jump, know­ing that if he missed, he’d land on the unsta­ble couch and quite likely break or at least sprain some­thing on the way down, and there was really nowhere he could go for help.

As it was, he was exhausted. He’d been run­ning since he got out of the police sta­tion, and by the time he made his cir­cuitous way on foot back to his apart­ment, he saw the unmarked police cars staked out in front of his apart­ment. He couldn’t go home until he could prove that he wasn’t a terrorist.

It had taken him all night to find where Hen­driks lived. He’d real­ized as soon as he got out of the police sta­tion that he had to turn off his phone. The same GPS and cell sig­nal tri­an­gu­la­tion that 911 oper­a­tors used to direct him to emer­gency sites could just as eas­ily lead the cops right to him. And lack­ing a func­tional phone made him almost hand­i­capped in 21^st cen­tury Amer­ica. There was no easy way to look up infor­ma­tion about Richard Hen­driks, no way to call a cab, no way to do much of any­thing . He’d ended up wan­der­ing for hours, chang­ing direc­tions at ran­dom and avoid­ing street cops, until he found a con­sumer elec­tron­ics store that was still open. Inside he’d used the free inter­net access to do a Google search and find out what he needed. Armed with print­outs of Hendriks’s address and how to get there by bus, he let D.C.‘s mass tran­sit sys­tem do the rest. Before that after­noon Daniel had never con­sid­ered how dif­fi­cult it really was to be “off the grid” in the elec­tronic sur­veil­lance soci­ety. Now he knew.

And he also knew that if he fell and busted his ass try­ing to climb into that win­dow, there was nowhere he could go for help that wouldn’t deliver him right back into the hands of the police. Every­thing was net­worked now.

But he had no choice. Even if he’d been con­tent with not know­ing how a dead man could get up and walk away, he still would have been swept up as a sus­pected ter­ror­ist. Com­ing from San Fran­cisco, he thought the police were over­re­act­ing about the fer­til­izer in Hen­driks’ trunk, but things were dif­fer­ent in DC, a city that still remem­bered both the attack of ⁹⁄₁₁ and their own home­grown sniper. They took ter­ror­ism seri­ously here.

Daniel jumped straight up off the arm of the upturned couch, and caught the sill of the win­dow with his right hand, his left hand slip­ping off and back to his side. As he dan­gled by one hand, the couch slipped and tum­bled beneath him, scat­ter­ing the rac­coons. The eight foot drop prob­a­bly wouldn’t hurt him, but he didn’t want to find out. He reached his left hand back up and pulled him­self up level with the sill, try­ing to find a bet­ter grip. The latex gloves helped, but he couldn’t do this for long.

Level with the win­dow, he reached his hand into the open win­dow and got a firm grip on the inner sill, allow­ing him to brace him­self. Then he tried to slide the win­dow open with his other hand. It wouldn’t budge.

Shit, Daniel thought, he must have it blocked by a dowel or some­thing. The del­toid in his right shoul­der was start­ing to burn.

Screw it, I’ve gone this far. He smacked the win­dow frame with the flat of his palm as hard as he could. The glass cracked, and he saw a slight bend in the alu­minum frame. The hit it twice more, until the win­dow popped off the track and crashed to the floor. He could hear the glass shat­ter with the impact.

Add break­ing and enter­ing to the charges, offi­cer, Daniel thought as he hauled him­self up and through the win­dow. He turned around and glanced back out, scan­ning quickly up and down the alley­way. There didn’t seem to be any wit­nesses. At least that much went right today.

He stepped back into the room and looked around. The room was full of wooden crates, stacked neatly in rows. The crates looked and smelled old, the mel­low musti­ness of old wood. Sten­ciled writ­ing on the sides was in vary­ing styles and lan­guages, indi­cat­ing a world­wide collection.

Daniel looked up and down the rows of crates, but saw noth­ing else of inter­est. He stepped out into the hall­way and then into the room across from the one he entered. There were more crates in this room, just like the oth­ers. Dark faded wood mak­ing a grid of the room, with just enough space between the rows for a man to walk down.

Daniel con­tin­ued his search, and found two more bed­rooms on the upper floor, both also filled with pack­ing crates. Where the heck does this guy sleep? Daniel thought. He headed down the stair­way to the ground floor.

The kitchen was stocked, but also obvi­ously a bachelor’s kitchen. There were just a few dishes, a cou­ple of pots soak­ing in the sink, and very lit­tle in the refrig­er­a­tor. It looked like Hen­driks ate out a lot, and didn’t entertain.

The liv­ing room was the only indi­ca­tion Daniel could find that any­one actu­ally lived there. There were a cou­ple of chairs, a widescreen TV mounted to the wall and against the far wall, more crates. The front closet held what looked like Hendriks’s entire wardrobe, mostly designer suits.

Daniel started to think there was no way the guy actu­ally lived here. This was clearly a place for him to store stuff, shower, change clothes and grab the occa­sional bite to eat. Daniel had heard of men who kept places like this to make it eas­ier to keep var­i­ous activ­i­ties from their wives.

Near the front door, he saw a crow­bar lean­ing against the door jamb. He paused and looked back at the crates in the liv­ing room. Why not, he thought. The guy’s sup­posed to be dead, right? May as well see what’s in there.

He grabbed the crow­bar and walked to the near­est crate. It took some doing to wedge the lid off, rusty nails anchored by time reluc­tant to give up their grip. When he finally got the lid torn free, he pulled out the pack­ing mate­r­ial and looked inside.

He saw a large vase or pitcher, fash­ioned from tan clay. Dec­o­ra­tions were painted on the outer sur­face in faded blue dye, show­ing two dimen­sional fig­ures engaged in var­i­ous tasks. His first thought was that the fig­ures looked Egypt­ian, but the more he stared, the older they looked. Off to the side was a faded piece of paper. He unfolded it and saw that it was a bill of lad­ing, dated 1908. The vase was Sumer­ian, and it was real. What was it doing here?

He care­fully moved the crate aside and moved on to the next. The nails screamed as he tore them from the wood, but it wasn’t long before he uncov­ered the sec­ond item, a bronze hel­met. The styling was Greek or Roman, and it too looked authen­tic. Daniel fished around in the pack­ing mate­r­ial and found another slip of paper. It was in Greek, he thought, but he rec­og­nized enough to see that the item was dated to around 480 BC. “This is Sparta,” he thought.

This was get­ting weirder by the minute. Was Hen­driks an art thief? A high-​​end fence? What was he doing with this res­i­den­tial ware­house of ancient artifacts?

Daniel spent the next hour pry­ing open crates upstairs, keep­ing to the rooms away from the cen­tral court­yard since he had to turn the lights on. He found paint­ings, sculp­ture, pot­tery, armor and weapons from every period of his­tory. He stood and stared at the incon­gru­ence of a civil war rifle next to an Ara­bian aba­cus dat­ing back to before the Dark Ages. Ming Dynasty pot­tery next to an ottoman from the actual Ottoman Empire. He even found arti­facts that had to have come from pre-​​colonial Africa, pre-​​conquest South Amer­ica. Ancient maps on parch­ment show­ing a coast­line of Antarc­tica he didn’t rec­og­nize, because it pre­dated the ice­cap. The house was full of price­less items, with no dis­cern­able theme or pat­tern, other than their antiquity.

What the hell was going on here? Daniel won­dered. Where was Hen­driks going in such a hurry when he died? Or didn’t die? Or…

Daniel had to sit down for a moment on an empty crate. None of this made any damn sense at all. He didn’t know what this place was, and rather than get­ting insight into the man he’d seen walk away from death, Daniel had more ques­tions now than when he started. A check of his watch also told him it was three in the morn­ing, and that he’d been awake and on the go for twenty one hours now. It was time to get some rest, attack this from a dif­fer­ent angle tomor­row. Turn­ing off the lights, Daniel walked down the stairs and let him­self out the front door, his gloved hands leav­ing no fin­ger­prints. He’d find a motel room he could pay for in cash and crash until things made sense again.

---

As Daniel walked alone into the night away from the house of a dead man, he was noticed. The man that had recently been known as Richard Hen­driks knelt on the roof oppo­site the town­house and watched Daniel slink into the park­ing lot. He clenched and unclenched his fists, but didn’t fol­low. Instead, he turned around and strode towards the fire escape on the other side of the building.

3 Another Day In The Blogosphere

Susan Richard­son was hav­ing a shitty day. She’d been call­ing around Capi­tol Hill all after­noon, and had noth­ing but a big pile of “no com­ment” for her efforts. It wasn’t fair. She majored in jour­nal­ism. She knew her job.

But it didn’t mat­ter how good she was at it. No, as soon as she revealed that she was call­ing on behalf of New Amer­i­can Cen­tury, every­one lost inter­est in talk­ing to her. So she worked for a blog. Big deal. Print was dying anyway.

Susan threw her head­set down on the desk in her Arling­ton apart­ment and grabbed her keys. Stan was going to kill her. Well, not kill her, but he damn sure was going to yell at her. Blog or print, a dead­line was a dead­line. She had to file a story by mid­night, and Stan didn’t want any more fluff pieces.

Susan walked out of her build­ing and jumped in her car, head­ing for the Pen­ta­gon City Mall. It was a quick shot on the Metro from there under the river into D.C. She needed to be around peo­ple. Impor­tant peo­ple. Peo­ple who could tell her things. In between traf­fic lights she prayed for God to give her a story, anything.

She was sure it wasn’t even that she worked for a blog. The aides and assis­tants that had been stonewalling her all day all worked for pow­er­ful Democ­rats. They didn’t care that the blog she worked for had a .com at the end. They talked to Daily Kos and Talk­ing Points Memo all the time. No, they shut her down because she worked for a con­ser­v­a­tive blog, and they knew she was hos­tile. They knew she wouldn’t take every­thing that they told her as gospel, that she’d check their facts and make sure the real story was told.

It was ridicu­lous, of course, Susan thought as she stretched out on the orange vinyl seat and watched her reflec­tion in the dark sub­way win­dows as they hur­tled under­neath the Potomac river. It went counter to every­thing she’d learned in jour­nal­ism school. Okay, so she went to jour­nal­ism school at Col­orado State, not Har­vard or Yale, but the courses were the same. And they all taught that the press, the fourth estate, was sup­posed to keep the gov­ern­ment hon­est. The press was sup­posed to be adver­sar­ial. It was in all the books.

Susan tromped up the esca­la­tor at L’Enfant Plaza, elbow­ing her way around slack­ers just stand­ing on the right. She burst out onto the D.C. streets, and started think­ing about where to go. There was always good chat­ter in the bars on K street, but some­thing told her tonight wasn’t the night. Instead, she hailed a cab head­ing North. “George­town,” she told the driver.

The cab took her uptown to M and Wis­con­sin, the cor­ner of George­town Park. This was where the 20-​​something staffers on the Hill came to unwind, many of whom had spent the bulk of their col­lege years in the bars and clubs near George­town Uni­ver­sity. Although they were roughly her age, Susan never felt at ease here. The young men and women in these bars were Wash­ing­ton insid­ers, an insu­lar cult of asso­ci­a­tion that she would never pen­e­trate or fully under­stand. But she wasn’t here to talk tonight. She was here to listen.

She stopped in the first bar she saw and ordered a beer. After pay­ing the bar­tender, she took the cold bot­tle in her hand and started wan­der­ing. She con­cen­trated on her hear­ing, and tried to pick up what she could from the crowd around her, hop­ing to pull some­thing juicy out of the din. Please, Lord, she thought.

“So I told her, that’s why horses have sad­dles…” Ug. Next.

“Don’t care who you work for, those are not com­pli­men­tary.” Susan wasn’t sure she wanted the con­text of that one.

“No shit, in the broom closet. He was damn lucky his wife didn’t walk in five min­utes ear­lier.” That one she might try to come back to, but it wasn’t what she was look­ing for.

Susan downed the beer and moved on. She found it at the fifth bar she tried. She was start­ing to get tipsy from the beer, so she would have stopped soon any­way. She was just com­ing out of the ladies room when she heard, “He just ran out of the police sta­tion? A terrorist?”

Ter­ror­ist. Thank you, God. There had to be a story there. Susan pre­tended to read the notices posted on the bul­letin board, look­ing fiercely inter­ested in loser bands play­ing col­lege frat houses.

“You know you can’t say a word about this, right?”

“Dude, who are you talk­ing to.”

“I know, I’m just saying.”

“It’s in the vault.”

“Your vault sucks.”

“Get on with it.”

“Okay, so, and you didn’t hear this from me — ”

“Dude.”

“There was a crash tonight on M.”

“I know, the traf­fic totally bjorked my din­ner date. That’s why I’m here with you.”

“You want me to tell this story or not?”

“By all means, sir.”

“One of the bod­ies disappeared.”

“What, like it went poof?”

“No, it’s just miss­ing. One of the drivers.”

“And he was the terrorist?”

“No, man, let me fin­ish. So this guy, a Korean off-​​duty para­medic stops to help res­cue people.”

“Bunch of sav­ages in this town.”

“You fel­las doing okay?” The wait­ress had just walked up. Susan pre­tended to scrib­ble down some show dates for bands she’d never heard of.

“Another round, please.”

“You bet!”

Out of the cor­ner of her eye, she watched the two young men in the booth next to the bul­letin board check out the waitress’s ass as she walked away to get their orders. Pigs. Then they started talk­ing again.

“Any­way, the body of one of the dri­vers goes miss­ing, and this para­medic goes nuts. He goes chas­ing it down a back alley.”

“He was chas­ing a dead body?”

“No one saw it but him, but he said he was.”

“Dude, you never chase a zom­bie. That’s right up there with the Dou­ble Tap.”

“I am going to pour this beer on your head.”

“Keep going, I’m listening.”

Susan’s hand was cramp­ing up from all the fran­tic scrib­bling, and she was start­ing to won­der if these two frat mon­keys would ever get to the damn point.

“So this guy starts ram­bling about the dead body walk­ing away, the cop takes him in for questioning.”

“For, like, a zom­bie line up.”

“I’m done tak­ing to you.”

“Okay, I’ll be good. Keep going.”

“The cops get the guy down­town and start ques­tion­ing him and the guy goes all ninja on them.”

“Korean para­medic ninja.”

“Dude.”

“I’m just say­ing, they’re overachievers.”

“Who?”

“Ori­en­tals.”

“Dude, you can’t say Ori­en­tals any­more. That’s offensive.”

“To the para­medic nin­jas? I’ll take my chances.”

“How have you not been fired?”

“So the para­medic ninja. What makes them think he’s a ter­ror­ist? Sounds pretty cool to me.”

“Well, that’s the part I’m not sup­posed to talk about. The guy is North Korean — ”

“Do you think they’re all issued track suits and those cool sunglasses?”

“And sup­pos­edly he’s an M.D.”

“He’s a doc­tor? Well then he’s def­i­nitely guilty.”

“If he’s trained as a doc­tor, why would he be work­ing as a paramedic?”

“To meet chicks?”

Susan snapped the lead off her pen­cil. Get to the point!

“And there’s more. He’s a loner — ”

“So are you. Doesn’t count if it’s not on purpose.”

“And he just moved here from San Francisco.”

“So a gay loner para­medic Korean ninja.”

Susan couldn’t take any more. “What hap­pened to him?” she shouted, at just the moment the juke­box was paus­ing between songs. The entire bar stopped to stare.

The frat mon­key who had been telling the story, his spot­less black suit a sharp con­trast to his friend’s kitschy ironic t-​​shirt and jeans, turned to look at Susan. “I’m sorry, what?”

Susan rushed to pull a chair from a nearby table up to their booth. The rest of the bar went about their busi­ness. “My name is Susan.”

The frat mon­key reached out to shake her hand. “Dante. He’s Stirk.”

Like I care, Susan thought. “I couldn’t help but over­hear part of your con­ver­sa­tion, and I was curi­ous. Who said this guy was a terrorist?”

Dante’s face went pal­lid, then blank. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talk­ing about.”

“Please,” Susan said. “It’s com­pletely off the record. I just need to know.”

“Show us your tits,” Stirk said. Susan glared at him.

“I’m sorry,” Dante said. “Both for my friend and for the fact that I really can’t talk about this. It’s a national secu­rity matter.”

“That I’m sure your boss wouldn’t want to know you were dis­cussing in pub­lic bar,” Susan said.

“Miss, you don’t even know who I work for.”

“The FBI,” Stirk said.

Dante spun on his friend. “Why would you tell her that?”

“Hey, man, you’re the one who just con­firmed it. She might have thought I was delib­er­ately lying to throw her off the path. And besides, she’s hot.”

“I swear,” Susan said. “It’s totally off the record. Just background.”

Dante threw a twenty on the table. “Miss, I’ve already said more than I should have.” He shot a stern look at Stirk. “Too many bad influ­ences in my life as it is.”

He got up and edged out of the booth. Susan stood and fol­lowed him out the door.

“Please, I know you’re not sup­posed to say any­thing. But if there’s a ter­ror­ist loose in Wash­ing­ton D.C., the people — ”

Dante stopped short of the curb and Susan almost knocked him into traf­fic. “Are you nuts, lady? Keep it down!”

“The peo­ple need to know if there’s a ter­ror­ist loose in the nation’s capi­tol,” Susan said, much qui­eter but still loud enough to be heard over the happy hour traf­fic on M street.

“The peo­ple know what we let them know,” Dante said, wav­ing furi­ously at a cab. “And right now we don’t know that there’s any­thing to be con­cerned about.”

“That’s not what you told your friend in there,” Susan said.

“That was just two bud­dies talk­ing. Offi­cially, there’s no threat. We don’t even know if Cho — ”

“That’s his name? Cho?”

A cab pulled up and Dante flung the door open. “Lady, you never met me. I have noth­ing else to say.” Then to the dri­ver, “Hoover Build­ing, please.”

Susan watched Dante shut the door and the cab pull away. She ran back into the bar to see if Stirk had heard some­thing she didn’t, or maybe he could give her Dante’s phone number…

But he was gone. The booth where the two men had sat now held three super perky soror­ity types. She was fairly cer­tain they weren’t expect­ing him back.

Susan walked back out to the side­walk. It was get­ting dark, and she still didn’t have much to go on. A last name, eth­nic­ity, occu­pa­tion and the utter and total cer­tainty that nei­ther the police nor the Fed­eral Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion would con­firm or deny any­thing at all. Very thin.

But wasn’t thin what “real” jour­nal­ists always said about blog­gers anyway?

Susan hailed a cab and started writ­ing the out­line in her head. It wasn’t much, but she could spin it, make it tan­ta­liz­ing enough to get people’s atten­tion. Get them to come back the next day for the next arti­cle in the series.

Maybe Stan wasn’t going to yell at her after all.

2 Inter­ro­ga­tion

“I don’t like it, Sal.”

“You never like it, Mick. But we still have to go talk to the guy.” Detec­tive Sal­vadore Durante stood with his part­ner in a dark­ened room look­ing at the sus­pect through a plate of one way glass. The man was Asian, late twen­ties, rea­son­able shape. He seemed well edu­cated, intel­li­gent, and they had ver­i­fied that he actu­ally was a para­medic for a fire house in South­east. He lived in the neigh­bor­hood where the acci­dent hap­pened, and had every rea­son to jump in and see who he could help. There were only two rea­sons to hold him at all.

An allegedly miss­ing dead body and two hun­dred pounds of ammo­nium nitrate fer­til­izer in the trunk of the Mercedes.

“Come on,” Sal said. “Let’s get this over with.” They walked out of the obser­va­tion room and into the inter­ro­ga­tion room next door. The sus­pect looked up when they entered, but didn’t jump or seem overtly nervous.

“Mis­ter Cho,” Sal said as he took a seat oppo­site the sus­pect, “I’m Detec­tive Sal­vadore Durante, and this is Detec­tive Michael Ware. The arrest­ing offi­cer read you your rights, is that correct?”

“I didn’t do any­thing but save that woman’s life.”

Mick remained stand­ing, near the door. “That’s not what Detec­tive Durante asked, sir.”

Sal shot a glance at Mick. Shut up, don’t spook him. “Mis­ter Cho, were you read your rights?”

The sus­pect slumped in the chair. “I was. I don’t need a lawyer, I haven’t done any­thing wrong. I just want to go home.”

“Good, then we can begin. Hope­fully this will be quick.”

The sus­pect leaned for­ward. “What am I being charged with?”

Sal leaned back. “Cur­rently, noth­ing. We’re hold­ing you as a mate­r­ial wit­ness pend­ing fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion. Accord­ing to Offi­cer Fitzsim­mons’ report,” Sal said as he con­sulted the file he’d brought in with him, “one of the vic­tims was miss­ing from the scene, and you seemed highly agi­tated about that.”

“And being agi­tated is a crime?”

“Not as such, no. But look at this from our per­spec­tive. You were the first respon­der, and you acted alone, with­out peers or super­vi­sion. You declared the dri­ver of the Mer­cedes dead on the scene and moved on to the other vic­tims. And yet by the time the ambu­lance and offi­cer Fitzsim­mons arrived, the man was gone, and we found enough ammo­nium nitrate in the trunk to turn a swanky town car into a bomb.”

The sus­pect paled. “Bomb? I didn’t even look in the trunk, I had no idea — ”

“Who are you work­ing with?” Mick demanded. Ah, shit…

“Work­ing?” Cho seemed hon­estly flab­ber­gasted at the question.

“You were rid­ing in that Mer­cedes, weren’t you?” Mick con­tin­ued. Sal glared at him, beg­ging him with his eyes to shut the hell up. They needed to show a united front here, but not like this. “What hap­pened to your part­ner, the driver?”

The sus­pect slumped back again. “I’d never seen that man before in my life. I gave Offi­cer Fitzsim­mons a full report.”

“A report that doesn’t make any damn sense,” Mick said.

“Don’t you think I know that?” the sus­pect said. Then he clammed up again, clearly think­ing bet­ter about say­ing more.

“Mis­ter Cho,” Sal said with another glare at Mick, “we’re just try­ing to find out what hap­pened this after­noon. Let’s go over it from the begin­ning. You heard the crash, called 911, and then what?”

“I started work­ing the scene.”

“Based on your job expe­ri­ence as a paramedic.”

“That’s right,” Cho said. “I’m trained and licensed as a para­medic. So I was doing my job.”

“Only today is your day off, is that right?”

“Yes. I was doing a lit­tle shop­ping when I heard the crash.”

“You were not a pas­sen­ger in the vehicle?”

Cho looked exas­per­ated and pulled at the neck of his t-​​shirt to expose his right shoul­der. “Look,” he said. “If I’d been in that car I’d have a mas­sive bruise here from the seat belt. I don’t have a bruise.”

“Maybe you weren’t wear­ing a seat belt,” Mick said.

“Then I’d be dead!” Cho said, los­ing some of his control.

“Like the dri­ver?” Mick asked.

Cho slumped, dropped his head almost to the table­top. “I can’t explain what hap­pened to that man. It defies all med­ical knowl­edge. Peo­ple don’t just walk away from that. The guy was clearly dead.”

“And on what do you base this?” Sal asked.

Cho snorted. “The fact that he hit the steer­ing wheel hard enough to break it off the pylon and drive the steer­ing col­umn through his chest. They guy was impaled.”

“And there’s no chance he could have been alive, but unconscious?”

“None at all. His heart, lungs, stom­ach, spleen and liver would have been com­pletely destroyed.”

“And in fact you do have the back­ground to make such a diag­no­sis, is that right?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You received your M.D. from Stan­ford four years ago, did your intern­ship in an E.R. in Oak­land, is that right?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“So you’re trained as a doc­tor, an emer­gency room sur­geon, in fact, and you’re work­ing as a paramedic.”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell us why that is?”

“It’s pri­vate, and has no bear­ing on this. I’d rather not get into it.”

Mick took a step for­ward. “We’ll decide what’s rel­e­vant, Mis­ter Cho.”

Sal waved a hand, try­ing to shush his part­ner. “We’ll come back to that if we need to. For now, suf­fice to say that you have both the train­ing and expe­ri­ence to judge whether or not an injury is fatal. Is that fair to say?”

Cho kept a wary eye on Mick, but said, “Yes, that’s fair to say.”

“Excel­lent,” Sal said. “We’re mak­ing progress. So you declared…” he checked the file again, “Mis­ter Richard Hen­driks dead, and moved on to the next vehicle.”

“If that’s the name of the man in the Mer­cedes, yes. I did.”

“How long do you think it was before you came back to the Mercedes?”

Cho figeted in his seat. “I don’t know. Twenty min­utes, maybe.”

“Long enough for you to res­cue the dri­ver of the pickup and the mother.”

“And her baby.” Cho said.

“Yes, and her baby. You did a fine job there, from what I under­stand. Mrs…” Another glance at the file, “Del Toro is expected to make a full recovery.”

Cho relaxed a bit. “I’m glad to hear that.”

“So when Offi­cer Fitzsim­mons called your atten­tion to the empty Mer­cedes, what did you do?”

“First, it wasn’t empty. There was still blood all over every­thing. The damn car was coated with it. Detec­tive, have you ever seen some­one bleed out?”

Sal sat back in his chair, but said noth­ing. Mick took another step for­ward. “That’s none of your busi­ness, sir,” he started.

Sal waved his hand again. “It’s okay, Mick. It’s a fair ques­tion. Yes, Mis­ter Cho, I have.”

“Then you know how much blood is really in a human body. How much can get out, and how much space it can take up when freed from all those arter­ies and veins.”

Now it was Sal’s turn to be uncom­fort­able. “Yes, I know.”

“Detec­tive, the dri­ver of that Mer­cedes bled out. I want you to under­stand that. He was dead. He had a hole the width of a milk jug in the mid­dle of his chest.”

“So then you’re say­ing the body was stolen.”

Cho laughed, a harsh sound in the small room, and ran his fin­gers through his close-​​cropped hair. “No, it wasn’t stolen. That’s my point. It walked away.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Mick said.

“I know how it sounds!” Cho said, pound­ing a fist on the metal table between him and Sal. “God damn it, I’m a doc­tor! I know it’s impos­si­ble, but that’s what I saw.”

Sal flipped through the file again. “Offi­cer Fitzsim­mons was unable to con­firm what you saw. He saw an empty car, and then he saw you try­ing to flee the scene.”

Cho rested his head in his hands. “Shit,” he said. “Look, I know it sounds…”

“Bug shit crazy,” Mick said.

Cho hes­i­tated a moment, then said, “Yeah, I guess that is what it sounds like. But I’m try­ing to help, guys. I’m telling you the truth. I’m telling you what I saw. A dead guy, this Mister…”

“Hen­driks,” Sal said.

“This Hen­dricks, he walked away from a fatal acci­dent. He had a hole in his chest the size of your head, every rib and both col­lar­bones bro­ken, and he got up, dusted him­self off, and wan­dered away. And just before he dis­ap­peared, he…”

“He what, Mis­ter Cho?” Sal said.

Cho ran his fin­gers through his hair again. “He saw me, he turned and looked at me, and he grinned.”

“Grinned?” Sal asked.

“It was like he knew. Like he was get­ting away with some­thing. I ran down the alley to see if I could get a closer look at him, but he was gone. He stepped behind a Dump­ster and just, just vanished.”

“I think I see,” Sal said. “Mis­ter Cho, if you’ll just wait here for a lit­tle while, I’ll see what I can do to make your release as quick as possible.”

Cho slumped back down into the chair again. “Thanks.”

Sal silenced his part­ner with a stern look until they were out­side in the hall­way, the door to the inter­ro­ga­tion room firmly closed behind them. He ush­ered Mick into the obser­va­tion room and shut the door.

“You didn’t hon­estly buy that shit, did you?” Mick said.

“No, of course I didn’t believe it. Dead bod­ies don’t walk away on their own.”

“So we gonna charge him?”

“With what? Look, Mick, if he did take the body, what would he have done with it? I have no idea where the damn thing is, but Cho prob­a­bly doesn’t have it.”

“So we’re let­ting him go?”

“Not exactly. While I don’t think he did it, I don’t think he’s ready to go back out on the street, either.”

Mick looked like he wanted to spit. “He’s the only God damn sus­pect we have, Sal.”

“Sus­pect for what? Seri­ously, Mick, for what? Maybe Cho did some­thing he’s not telling us. Maybe some­one else walked away with the body while he was busy sav­ing that woman and her kid. He did save her life, you know. It’s not like we have some rea­son to sus­pect him of any wrongdoing.

“But the point is that we don’t have any­thing to hold him on, and the guy is clearly not right. Maybe he’s hallucinating.”

“Maybe he’s try­ing to make us think he’s hallucinating.”

“Mick, really, man, you gotta stop watch­ing those mur­der mys­ter­ies on cable all hours of the morning.”

Mick took a deep breath. “Look, Sal, think about this. You read the file on this guy, right?”

“Yeah, so?”

Mick started tick­ing off points on his fin­gers. “So he’s the first gen­er­a­tion Amer­i­can son of refugees from North Korea. He’s highly edu­cated, but work­ing well beneath his capa­bil­i­ties, and has easy access to emer­gency ser­vices. He just moved across the coun­try to the nation’s capi­tol. And what’d his boss at the fire house tell you?”

“That he’s quiet, keeps to him­self, never causes any trou­ble and knows his job, but doesn’t hang out with the guys.”

Mick just looked at Sal, wait­ing for his part­ner to make the connection.

“Mick, that’s nuts. That guy is not a terrorist.”

“Yeah, they said the same thing about McVeigh and Mohamed Atta. You know, before they blew stuff up and killed people.”

“You think every­one is a ter­ror­ist,” Sal said.

“No, just the ones who fit the pro­file. And Sal, this guy’s folks are from North Korea. You know how crazy those fuck­ers are. And he’s com­bat trained.”

Sal glanced at the file. “He has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. So do a lot of people.”

“Sal, that car was a bomb, or on the way to help some­one build one. You don’t haul land­scap­ing fer­til­izer in a car like that. We can’t afford to be wrong about this guy.”

Sal looked back through the one way win­dow. Cho was sit­ting qui­etly, no longer fid­get­ing or impa­tient. It almost looked like he was med­i­tat­ing or some­thing. There was no way Mick could be right, and Sal had heard this shtick before, ever since ⁹⁄₁₁. But maybe…

“Okay,” Sal said. “I’ll grant that you may, just may, have a point. Enough that we should at least get him looked at before turn­ing him loose.”

Just then Mick’s cell phone rang, an obnox­ious hip-​​hop ring­tone Mick seemed to think made him seem cool. “Dammit, Mick, I thought I told you to tell your girl — ”

Mick looked at the dis­play and held up a hand. “It’s Bertrand,” he said. He answered the call.

Sal sighed. Cap­tain Quincy W. Bertrand, their boss. The tallest guy Sal knew who also man­aged to have a Napoleon com­plex. Either that, or the guy was just an asshole.

Mick was nod­ding, even though Bertrand couldn’t see him. “Uh huh,” he said. “Yeah. Okay. Yeah.” This wasn’t good. Sal could tell that Bertrand was on a tear, and the only rea­son he would have called Mick first was that he didn’t expect any back­talk. “Down low. You bet, Cap­tain.” Mick hung up.

“Down low?” Sal asked.

Mick looked sheep­ish, scared and excited all at the same time. “Cap­tain says there has been a change in plans.”

“Plans? We’re still inter­ro­gat­ing the guy!”

“Not any­more. Feds want him. We’re sup­posed to per­son­ally deliver him to the Hoover Build­ing. Tonight.”

“They’re not com­ing to get him?” This was a breach of stan­dard procedure.

Mick should his head. “Bertrand said they want to keep this as quiet as pos­si­ble, don’t want to draw atten­tion by hav­ing a bunch of feds tromp­ing through the precinct. We’re to cuff him, dump in the back of the car, and take him to the Hoover Build­ing down­town. When we get there, we’re to call Bertrand back and he’s going to con­fer­ence us in with feds who will coör­di­nate from there.”

This was damn weird. “What’s with all the cloak and dag­ger bullshit?”

“Sal, Bertrand sounded scared. Not mad, not his usual blowhard self, scared. I knew there was some­thing wrong with this Cho guy. He’s got the fib­bies spooked, and shit’s rolling downhill.”

“And we’re at the bot­tom of the moun­tain,” Sal said. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

---

Daniel bided his time in the inter­ro­ga­tion room. He told the cops every­thing he knew, and now he was think­ing bet­ter of it. They prob­a­bly thought he was crazy. Frankly, if Daniel hadn’t been so rat­tled, he prob­a­bly could have blown it off and avoided so much atten­tion. But damn it, dead guys didn’t just walk away from a fatal acci­dent. And he knew what he saw.

More than any­thing, the grin was what both­ered him. That wasn’t some­one in shock, wasn’t semi­con­scious sham­bling. That grin was the expres­sion of some­one who knew exactly what he was doing, and what it meant.

But what did it mean?

Daniel had seen more than his fair share of death. It seemed he would never get away from it com­pletely. Even now, work­ing as a para­medic where no one expected him to work mir­a­cles, the patients didn’t aways make it to the ER. He saw peo­ple die all the time, and prob­a­bly always would. It was his lot in life.

But what if they didn’t have to die? What if he and every other med­ical pro­fes­sional in the world had just missed the obvi­ous alter­na­tive of get­ting up and walk­ing away from a fatality?

Daniel knew it was crazy. He knew, with both his insticts as a doc­tor and his years of train­ing, that peo­ple didn’t do that. They never did. He could name off all the injuries Hen­driks had sus­tained that would have been instantly or nearly instantly fatal and run out of fin­gers. They guy should have been dead. Peo­ple didn’t walk away from stuff like that.

So what if Hen­driks wasn’t peo­ple? He looked human, and Daniel was all too aware that he had smelled human. The cop­pery smell of blood and death had been all over that car. Even if robots advanced enough to pass for human existed, he wasn’t a robot. And yet…

What could walk away from that kind of dam­age? What looked, smelled and bled like a human, but could walk away from a piledriver right through the chest?

Daniel stood up, started to pace the room. This was get­ting him nowhere. The more he thought about it the cra­zier he sounded, even to himself.

The physi­cian in Daniel’s mind turned on a light bulb. Maybe that’s what this was. Maybe he really was crazy. Maybe he had hal­lu­ci­nated. Maybe Han­driks wasn’t really in that alley and this was all the ter­rors Daniel had seen over the years finally com­ing home to roost.

But if that were true, where was the body? Some­body had to have been dri­ving that Mer­cedes. The dam­age it did to that poor woman’s son was cer­tainly real enough.

The door to the inter­ro­ga­tion room opened. It was the older cop, Durante.

“Mis­ter Cho, we’ve been directed to escort you to fed­eral custody.”

The other detec­tive, Ware, walked in. He did not have his weapon out, but he was armed with a police baton as well as a sidearm.

“Daniel Cho,” Durante said in a loud and clear voice, intended as much for the inter­ro­ga­tion room cam­era as Daniel. “Under arti­cle 6 of the PATRIOT act, I am plac­ing you under arrest as a poten­tial enemy com­bat­ant, pend­ing fur­ther crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion. Cuff him, Mick.”

Daniel took in the room and fell into a Tae Kwon Do ready stance. He’d stud­ied mar­tial arts since he was a child, though he’d always thought of it as more for exer­cise or active med­i­ta­tion than actual fight­ing. Out­side the do jang, he’d never been in a fight in his life. He really didn’t want to start now, but he didn’t want to end up dis­ap­peared in some mil­i­tary prison either.

“Mis­ter Cho,” Durante said, “please don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

Daniel man­aged a half smile. “Please let me go, then.”

Durante and Ware stepped towards Daniel. Am I really about to assault police offi­cers? Daniel won­dered. He was arguably already look­ing at resist­ing arrest, and assault­ing an offi­cer would just extend the jail time, not to men­tion the PATRIOT act stuff.

No, he thought. I have to find out what hap­pened out there, and the trail’s get­ting colder by the minute. I can’t go to jail now. I have to know.

Daniel bent his knees and looked towards Ware’s hip. He drew in his leg and lunged for­ward, slam­ming his shoul­der into the officer’s chest. When Ware tried to sta­bi­lize him­self, Daniel grabbed both his legs and pulled up, drop­ping the man flat on his back. One down…

Durante was block­ing the door, but by this point Daniel had momen­tum on his side. He low­ered his other shoul­der and rammed the older detec­tive, push­ing him out into the hall­way. Not quite Frank Gore, but it’ll do, Daniel thought as he scanned both ways up and down the hall­way, look­ing for the exit.

Both direc­tions ended in blind turns. Too much to hope for that they’d put the inter­ro­ga­tion rooms so close to the front door, Daniel thought, and ran to the left. He heard a breath­less “Stop him!” as Durante strug­gled to recover. He glanced back and saw that Ware was out the door and break­ing into a run.

Daniel tried des­per­ately to remem­ber what he saw of the lay­out of the police sta­tion when he’d been brought in, but at the time he’d been too dis­tracted by Hendriks’s lit­tle dis­ap­pear­ing act and in any case wasn’t expect­ing to have to make a run for it. He spun around the cor­ner and saw the front door maybe a dozen yards away on the left. It would have been no prob­lem at all if it weren’t for the half a dozen uni­forms stand­ing around the admit­ting desk.

“Quick, someone’s been hurt!” Daniel shouted, point­ing back behind him around the cor­ner. The offi­cers ran past him as Daniel angled towards the admit­ting desk. “Call an ambu­lance!” he told the desk sergeant.

As the man picked up the phone, Daniel juked left and bolted out the front door into sul­try D.C. night.

---

Mick handed Sal a cup of cof­fee. They’d searched around the depart­ment, but there was no sign of Cho out­side, and of course all the pedes­trian wit­nesses they’d lined up gave very detailed and com­pletely con­tra­dic­tory accounts of where he’d gone.

“I don’t know why you don’t lis­ten to me,” Mick said.

Sal leaned back in his creaky office chair and downed a gulp of the cof­fee, real­iz­ing it would prob­a­bly just upset his stom­ach even more after that shot Cho gave him to the bread bas­ket. He made a men­tal note to start show­ing up at the gym more. “I did lis­ten to you.”

“Then why wasn’t he in irons to begin with?” Mick asked. “At least handcuffs?”

“Christ, Mick, he was a frig­gin’ para­medic! He saved that woman’s life! How was I sup­posed to know he was dangerous?”

“I’m just sayin, Sal, if you’d trusted your gut, he wouldn’t have hit you in it.”

“He laid your ass out, too,” Sal said.

Sal picked up the file on Cho, looked through it again for any­thing he’d missed. Any­thing that would have tipped him off that Cho was a ter­ror­ist oper­a­tive for North Korea, right under his nose. He didn’t see a damn thing. But there was no mis­tak­ing what happened.

He slammed the file back on his desk. “All right, call Bertrand back and give him the bad news. Cho’s not our prob­lem anymore.”

Wait a minute. Some­thing about yesterday’s post doesn’t make any sense. If I wrote the orig­i­nal draft in six weeks, why do I think I can’t do the revi­sions in three?

I have a lot to do, cer­tainly. I have 56 items on my to do list for revi­sion, not count­ing the stuff already changed in the out­line. But I think I can pull this off.

I’m going to set aside the 30 text files — I’ll get into why I’m using plain text files in another post — I have for the cur­rent chap­ters of Rev­e­la­tion. Then I’m going to cre­ate new text files for each chap­ter in the out­line, con­tain­ing the scenes I have out­lined and the to do items and notes I have from cri­tique. Then every day I’ll copy over the stuff I can still use from the old draft, change what I have to and write the new stuff that needs to go in that chap­ter. That seems like it would be 25 days, but keep in mind the first two chap­ters don’t need changes.

I can totally do this, and it will help get me ramped up to NaNoW­riMo speed by November.

O HAI, Inter­net. I’m back. I know I haven’t posted in a long time, so let me explain… No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

Back in Jan­u­ary, shortly after fin­ish­ing the rough draft of Rev­e­la­tion, I lost both my job and most of my social cir­cle. I retreated into a cozy lit­tle ball of depres­sion, wherein I played a lot of Star Trek Online and not much else.

Fast for­ward ten months. I’ve got­ten a new job, joined a cri­tique group, and let the group get all the way through the first draft. We’re three and half weeks out from this year’s NaNoW­riMo, and I’m get­ting ready to use it to tackle Cru­sade, the sec­ond book in the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles series. Last week I hired a free­lance edi­tor to work on all the UC books, and she’s done her first pass — really her sec­ond, since she’s in my cri­tique group — over the man­u­script, and taken all together I have a good idea of what I need to do in Rev­e­la­tion for revisions.

I had hoped to get the revi­sions done before Novem­ber, so that I could start on Cru­sade with a clear mind, but as the depth of the changes I need to make really sinks in on me, I’ve come to real­ize that just ain’t gonna hap­pen. And that might be for the best, giv­ing me another oppor­tu­nity to go back and adjust things in Rev­e­la­tion if events in Cru­sade require. At best I’ll get the restruc­ture done and the out­line nicely detailed, so I can pick up after the hol­i­days where I left off.

So. What changed? Peo­ple really liked Daniel, Jack, Dante and Jeff. Espe­cially Jeff, which made the on-​​screen death scene I had to write for him espe­cially painful. (Even in the new one, I still don’t actu­ally show him get­ting killed, but I do make it clearer that it hap­pens. Poor old coot.) Even Sandy, who doesn’t even appear until act 3, was a fan favorite. But peo­ple really didn’t like Susan or Asemiel.

Susan needs major work to estab­lish her both as deeply reli­gious — an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian from Col­orado Springs — and as an author­i­tar­ian fol­lower. Bor­row­ing from Frank Miller, Susan always says yes, to any­one with a badge, or a flag — or a cross. This is vital to her role in Cru­sade and Jihad. Vir­tu­ally every scene with her needs some­thing changed.

As for Asemiel — the new name for Batarel, now that I have to give that name to Sandy in Cru­sade—I’ve decided that we shouldn’t see into his head at all. He’ll give away things in dia­logue, but he’ll have no POV scenes of his own. Scenes where he appears alone, as when he’s stalk­ing Daniel, will be writ­ten third per­son objec­tive. We’ll see what it does, but not why he does it. This makes the demons over­all remain mys­te­ri­ous and seem much more badass if you’re not actively reminded that Asemiel pretty much sucks at killing Daniel. It also saves reveal­ing why the demons do what they do over­all until Cru­sade, and allows me to play off of that mys­tery for most of that book as well.

And let’s talk about how badly Asemiel sucks at killing Team Daniel, shall we? In the orig­i­nal draft, we had six fights between Asemiel and Daniel: the hotel room in Arling­ton, the behead­ing, Bal­ti­more Har­bor, Philadel­phia, Newark and finally the steel mill in Beth­le­hem, Penn­syl­va­nia. Six tries for a bad-​​ass demon — more bad-​​ass than orig­i­nally thought, now that I’ve decided one of his for­mer iden­ti­ties was Rasputin — to kill a washed up nobody para­medic. And he fails six straight times.

Worse than that, it gets pretty repet­i­tive there towards the end. There’s no sense of esca­la­tion, rais­ing the stakes with each encounter. By Beth­le­hem the reader just wants some­one to die, and doesn’t much care who. Clearly, this must be fixed.

So I’ve cut the behead­ing and elec­tro­cu­tion. We’re down to four try/​fail cycles, which is as tight as I could get it and still have Jack join­ing Team Daniel before Beth­le­hem be remotely plau­si­ble. We’re mov­ing the grenade inci­dent from Neward to Philly, and hav­ing our heroes con­tinue north from Philly to Beth­le­hem rather than west from Newark. (“North, Miss Teschmacher. North.”) Between that and never actu­ally being privvy to Asemiel’s thoughts, I think that will do the trick.

So here’s the new out­line as it exists today. I’m still miss­ing some chap­ter titles, have combined/​cut/​renamed oth­ers, and I’ll still have to shuf­fle scenes around a bit when I add more Susan stuff.

1. Acci­dent

   • Daniel works the car crash, sees Asemiel walk away

2. Inter­ro­ga­tion

   • Sal and Mick inter­ro­gate Daniel
   • Daniel escapes the precinct house
   • Sal turns the case over to the FBI

3. Another Day In The Blogosphere

   • Susan goes look­ing for a story, finds Dante

4. Inves­ti­ga­tion

   • Daniel breaks into Asemiel’s town­house, finds ancient artifacts
   • Asemiel watches Daniel leave the townhouse

5. Dreams and Nightmares

   • Susan goes over her story with Stan
   • Daniel falls asleep, dreams of the ER
   • Asemiel watches out­side Daniel’s motel room

6. Leg­work

   • Jack goes over Daniel’s escape with Sal and Mick
   • Susan searches for Daniel online

7. Leads

   • Daniel emails Susan re meeting
   • Susan goes to meet Daniel
   • Dante catches Daniel’s online pres­ence, inter­cepts email
   • Daniel meets Susan, tells her the story

8. Arrivals And Departures

   • Jeff arrives in DC
   • Susan talks over story with Daniel
   • Jack and his men move in
   • Daniel grabs Susan and bolts

9. Friends and Enemies

   • Daniel meets Jeff
   • Susan con­sid­ers turn­ing Daniel in
   • Jeff surfs con­spir­acy sites, intu­its who is next door
   • Asemiel attacks (make sure his nose is bloodied)
   • Susan films the attack (she sup­plies her own Flip)
   • Jeff dri­ves up, tells Susan to grab Daniel and get in

10. Post-​​Game Analysis

    • Asemiel kills hotel manager
    • Jeff joins Team Daniel
    • Jack inves­ti­gates hotel room, col­lects blood sample
    • While Jeff is out for sup­plies, Daniel and Susan dis­cuss what they saw
    • Jack learns Daniel didn’t leave town

11. Online, Off The Grid

    • Team Daniel checks out Asemiel’s town­house, finds it vacant
    • Jeff teaches Susan how to get online off the grid
    • Jack sees Susan’s arti­cle, talks to Lou
    • Susan and Daniel dis­cuss her upbring­ing, what she thinks of the demons, Daniel’s plan to drown the demon
    • Jack wakes up to YouTube video

12. Req­ui­si­tions

    • Jeff gets sup­plies and weapons
    • Dante tells Jack about the par­ti­cles in Asemiel’s blood
    • Team Daniel rents a boat, sets the trap in Bal­ti­more Harbor
    • Jack is tipped off to the boat rental

13. No Har­bor

    • Asemiel attacks, gets stabbed in the head
    • Jack watches crazed Asemiel attack the police boats
    • Team Daniel res­cues Jack, leaves him tied up on the pier

14. Rep­ri­mands

    • Intro­duce crown vic
    • Susan posts har­bor video, blows up at Jeff
    • Daniel chews out Susan
    • Lou chews out Jack

15. Call It Off

    • Daniel calls his mom, she tells him God has a pur­pose for everyone
    • Jeff tells Susan about what hap­pened to Rose and Jeremy
    • Dante tells Jack about the nanites
    • Daniel declares inten­tion to dis­ap­pear, storms out when Jeff and Susan don’t agree
    • Lou orders Jack back to DC, Jack leaves his phone behind and walks out the hotel room door

16. Reunion

    • Jack tracks the crown vic to the motel, vis­its Susan and Jeff
    • Daniel comes back drunk to find Jack with Susan and Jeff
    • Jack and Team Daniel exchange infor­ma­tion, Jack joins the team

17. Blowup

    • Team Daniel learns more about Asemiel’s back­ground as Hen­driks, Asemiel bursts in on them
    • Daniel plants a grenade on Asemiel
    • Team Daniel breaks for the exit through the motel park­ing lot
    • Team Daniel pulls over in Eas­ton, PA with a bul­let in the engine, stops for breakfast/​planning, Jeff comes up with steel mill idea

18. The Fires of Hell

    • Jeff and Jack scope out the steel mill, we learn how Jeff became a con­spir­acy nut
    • Jack tells Lou he wants all four of them in pro­tec­tive cus­tody, will give loca­tion when Lou gets to the valley
    • Team Daniel waits at Beth­le­hem Steel, runs when Lou pulls up with Asemiel
    • Cor­nered on a cat­walk, Daniel flips Asemiel into the steel
    • Team Daniel is arrested

19. Dis­ap­peared By An Angel

    • Team Daniel gets led into office build­ing, meets Uriel
    • Uriel tells them they are being “taken off the chessboard”
    • Daniel objects, says the only way for them to be free is to get things out in the open, once and for all
    • Susan objects to Daniel’s impertinence
    • Daniel con­vinces Uriel that it’s time for them to go pub­lic, and on their own terms
    • Uriel offers his pro­tec­tion for them to go to Iraq and retrieve the Gospel of the Angels, hands over database
    • Team Daniel leaves for Baghdad

20. Turn­about Is Unfair Play

    • Demons kill Daniel’s family
    • Team Daniel arrives in Iraq, glide through Cus­toms with Uriel’s help, meet Sandy
    • A demon kills Susan’s editor

21. The Lost Gospel

    • Jack and Sandy dis­cuss the immor­tals, men­tion Grigori
    • Jeff, Daniel and Susan enter Mosque of Imam Ali, Susan through a sep­a­rate entrance
    • Mul­lah Moham­mad shows them the Lost Gospel and the Angelic Helmet
    • Jack notices demons con­verg­ing on the mosque, tells Sandy to call for reinforcements

22. Some­thing Old, Some­thing Older

    • Daniel tries on the helmet
    • Dante checks with Cooper in the lab about the nanites; demons attack
    • Jack and Sandy charge into the mosque chas­ing the demons
    • Dante tries to fend off demons, saved by Uriel

23. The Bur­den Of Proof

    • Daniel won­ders how to get out
    • Jack and Sandy fight their way into the catacombs
    • Susan helps Daniel take off the helmet
    • Jack and Sandy make their way to the cham­ber, demons in hot pursuit
    • Daniel uses the hel­met to find an escape tun­nel, Jeff vol­un­teers to buy time for their escape
    • Jeff holds off the demons long enough for Team Daniel to get out

24. Rev­e­la­tion

    • Team Daniel touches down in Frank­furt, meets Uriel and Dante
    • Daniel comes out of the shower and gets the news his fam­ily was killed
    • Susan posts the final story with Dante’s help
    • Team Daniel lands in DC, Uriel again smooth­ing the way

25. The Hunt Begins

    • Jack (and Dante) resigns from the Bureau
    • Susan starts weigh­ing her job offers
    • Daniel sits in shock in his apartment
    • Jack urges Daniel to join up, Daniel refuses, recon­sid­ers, agrees

Cut scenes from the orig­i­nal chap­ters. Expo­si­tion from these will have to be spliced in elsewhere.

• Jeff reads about Daniel
• Asemiel meets with Zagiel
• Asemiel watches Team Daniel go into cof­fee shop
• Jeff gives Daniel the katana
• Asemiel attacks the RV
• Daniel chops his hand, head off; Team Daniel escapes
  • Daniel tells Susan to call the cops, he’s turn­ing him­self in
• Asemiel recov­ers
  • Blank spots when regenerating
• Jack inves­ti­gates park­ing lot, col­lects blood sample
• Asemiel goes to the Bal­ti­more Basil­ica for help track­ing down Team Daniel
• Asemiel knows it’s a trap, goes anyway
• Asemiel reflects on the Mis­sion, finds out Jack ordered a pizza with his debit card

So we’re five chap­ters shorter and I’m los­ing some of my dar­lings, like Asemiel in the Bal­ti­more Basil­ica. But over­all, I think this makes for a tighter, stronger story. Now the ques­tion is how many of these changes can I make in three weeks, while out­lin­ing Cru­sade at the same time?