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 1st, 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.)

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 20th. As soon as the last cars passed, Jack and his team would charge across 20th 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 20th 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 20th 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 20th 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 19th street. The two agents that had been positioned at the 19th 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.

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.

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.

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.  

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 21st 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.

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.

“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 coordinate 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.”

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.

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?