The Unification Chronicles

I’m mak­ing progress on Cru­sade, which cur­rently stands at 4223 words. I’m a bit off the NaNoW­riMo pace of 5,000 words before today, but I can catch up pretty eas­ily. That fact that some of my writ­ing bud­dies are already over 10,000 DOES NOT BOTHER ME AT ALL. REALLY.

Ahem.

The good news is that what I’m writ­ing is sur­pris­ing me with how good it is. I’ll let you be the judge as soon as I get chap­ter 2 fin­ished, of course, but this is com­ing out much bet­ter than what I had in my head. So if the really good stuff comes slower than the aver­age stuff, I’ll take that.

Any­whoosle, my friend Robin, who has always been uneasy with Susan Richardson’s char­ac­ter, sent me an inter­est­ing arti­cle yes­ter­day and said it reminded her of Susan. To sum­ma­rize, it pos­tu­lates that a big rea­son female Tea Party can­di­dates like Sharon Angle, Chris­tine O’Donnel and yes, even the orig­i­nal Mama Griz­zly her­self, Sarah Palin have lost is that there is an inher­ent con­tra­dic­tion between what they say and who they are.

The main prob­lem with Mama Griz­zly can­di­dates is that they present a con­tra­dic­tion, lay­ing claim to fem­i­nism while denounc­ing most fem­i­nist ideals. Sarah Palin, with her pecu­liar genius, cre­ated the term Mama Griz­zly to ratio­nal­ize this con­tra­dic­tion. The Mama Griz­zly could be ambi­tious with­out being fem­i­nist, could be fierce with­out being threat­en­ing, because her fem­i­nist means are in ser­vice of anti-​​feminist ends.

And that really does sum up the Susan that has always existed in my head. I’ve missed the mark sev­eral times now, off on either side, try­ing to pin down her mix of Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tivism and jour­nal­is­tic ambi­tion. But this dri­ves home that my mis­take with Susan was only look­ing at her char­ac­ter within each book rather than over the whole tril­ogy. From that larger per­spec­tive her char­ac­ter just pops. She ini­tially helps Daniel and escapes the FBI with him because she’s after the story. If need be, she can just claim later she was a hostage. After the motel room in Arling­ton, she’s scared, but more deter­mined than ever to get the story. Bal­anc­ing her ambi­tion against her fear works all the way through killing Asemiel.

But when she meets Uriel, we start to see her reli­gion reassert itself. Espe­cially if Uriel pulls her aside and asks her to doc­u­ment the trip to Iraq. The Joan of Arc bit starts here, slowly build­ing through the third act of Rev­e­la­tion and all of Cru­sade. She’s the cho­sen of God to bring the mes­sage of the angels to human­ity. By the time we start Jihad she’s totally bought into this, and it will take some­thing spec­tac­u­lar from Daniel to make her see the truth.

Basi­cally, I’ve finally rec­on­ciled, in my mind any­way, how she can be a sucker for the angels and still be a tough as nails reporter.

And speak­ing of the angels, some­thing occurred to me about them, as well. The angels have spent the last few cen­turies accu­mu­lat­ing absolutely mas­sive wealth and cor­po­rate power. I pointed out to Josh the other day that while it pre­tends to be a grass-​​roots move­ment, the mod­ern Tea Party is funded by a rel­a­tively small hand­ful of bil­lion­aires. And in the UC uni­verse, the angels own the billionaires.

So while the angels are fund­ing para­mil­i­tary squads of demon hunters like Team Jack, they’re also, way, way behind the scenes, dri­ving the “grass-​​roots” people’s revolt that Phillips taps into. One of the things I’ve always thought was a silly defense of the sec­ond amend­ment is that we need guns to pro­tect against a tyran­ni­cal fed­eral gov­ern­ment. It’s silly because even if you have fully auto­matic machine guns, they have tanks. And bombers. And nukes. They win.

But what if it wasn’t the fed­eral gov­ern­ment ver­sus mil­lions of “Joe the Plumber“s? What if it was really the fed­eral gov­ern­ment ver­sus the pri­vate sec­tor. The National Guard ver­sus Black­wa­ter. Then it starts to look like a real fight. And that’s what we have in Cru­sade. When the time comes for the demons’s ulti­mate vic­tory of chaos over order, they never stop to think where where the chaotic pawns got all that artillery.

Until it’s too late, that is. When the angels, in brand new and gleam­ing white pow­ered armor sim­i­lar to but not the same as the armor all the immor­tals had pos­sessed milen­nia ago, descend into Hell and start slaugh­ter­ing demons, Gabriel is going to point that out to Lucifer. Where did you think all this came from? And then, in mir­ror to John telling Phillips that his ser­vices were no longer required before snap­ping the senator’s neck, Gabriel will tell Lucifer that his ser­vices are no longer required, that the angels can take it from here.

The pol­i­tics and moti­va­tions in this book are com­plex, but if I can pull it off, it’ll be a bet­ter book than Rev­e­la­tion.

29: Rev­e­la­tion

The Iraqi Air 737 touched down at Frank­furt Inter­na­tional a lit­tle after 3 AM local time. Daniel, Jack and Susan grabbed what lit­tle they had and trudged down the cen­tral aisle. Daniel had the scroll and hel­met in a carry-​​on gym bag, and for­tu­nately air­port secu­rity at Bagh­dad had been will­ing to accept a thou­sand dol­lars US to pre­tend they’d never seen the arti­facts leave their coun­try. Things in that coun­try were get­ting bet­ter, but not very much. Cor­rup­tion was still the rule of the day.

None of them had slept on the trip up, even though they were all beyond exhausted. They also hadn’t talked, even though they had adjoin­ing seats. Any time one of them seemed to start, it was all too obvi­ous that the most vocif­er­ous mem­ber of their team wasn’t with them. Daniel felt like he couldn’t even look Susan or Jack in the eye. But they had to go on, or Jeff’s sac­ri­fice would be mean­ing­less. They owed him that, to see this through.

As soon as Daniel stepped off the jet­way, he saw a famil­iar face. The blond hair and high, Nordic cheek­bones weren’t out of place here in Ger­many, nor was the expen­sive designer suit. But there was some­thing about the way Uriel car­ried him­self that set him apart any­way. He was still an archangel, even if he was wear­ing Armani.

Next to Uriel stood a dumpy guy with a scruffy beard and a “Frodo Lives” T-​​shirt. Daniel didn’t rec­og­nize him, but the guy was wav­ing at them.

“Dante,” Jack said from behind Daniel, sound­ing both puz­zled and relieved. “What the hell are you doing out here, kid?”

“Long story, sir,” Dante said. Uriel was lean­ing against a col­umn in the ter­mi­nal and still hadn’t moved or said a word. Daniel sup­posed he didn’t have to, he’d brought a human to do that for him.

“A story that has some­thing to do with our friend, here, I guess,” Jack said, motion­ing to Uriel.

“Your friend,” Uriel said, “the good Mis­ter Hicks, fell in with the wrong sort of peo­ple in Wash­ing­ton,” Uriel said.

“The kind of peo­ple who aren’t peo­ple?” Jack asked.

“Some­thing like that,” Uriel said. “I thought, given all the ser­vice he’s pro­vided to this endeavor, that I should keep an eye on him.”

The angel turned to address Daniel. “You have the arti­facts, Mis­ter Cho?”

Well, just get right down to it, Daniel thought. No how are you, or hey, what hap­pened to the old guy that was with you. “Right here,” he said, heft­ing the gym bag.

“Unortho­dox method of trans­port­ing such trea­sures, but any port in a storm, I sup­pose,” Uriel said. “And I trust you’ve seen their… capacity?”

“Yes,” Daniel said. They’d given the scroll a quick once over on the way to the air­port, where Sandy had dropped them off. Given that it was writ­ten in a lan­guage none of them could read, there wasn’t much to do with it. And putting on the hel­met again would have drawn too much atten­tion. Once they got out of the tun­nel sev­eral blocks away from the mosque, Sandy radioed for help and com­man­deered a Humvee to get them the hell out of Najaf as quickly as possible.

“Very well, then,” Uriel said. “Fol­low me.”

He strode away, and Daniel turned to look at Susan, give her a “can you believe this guy” look, but she was doing exactly as she was told, unques­tion­ingly obe­di­ent. Daniel sighed and followed.

Uriel took them to a limo wait­ing out­side, then to a hotel near the air­port. They checked in under assumed names and took the ele­va­tor up to the pent­house suites, which the archangel had reserved for them. Daniel tossed the gym bag on the bed and headed for the shower. He had about a thou­sand years of dust and blood to wash off.

#

Daniel stepped out of the bath­room, tow­el­ing off his hair and wear­ing the new clothes that had been left for him. He felt more human, but he was still exhausted, an—

Susan was cry­ing. She was sit­ting one of the couches, bawl­ing her head off. The rest of them, except Uriel, looked suck­er­punched. Daniel felt the same. He still couldn’t believe Jeff—

“Oh, Daniel!” Susan said as she saw him, ran up and crushed him in a hug. “I’m so sorry!”

Sorry? He gen­tly dis­en­tan­gled him­self. “Is this about Jeff?” he asked.

That just set off another round of cry­ing, and Susan retreated to the couch. Uriel started to say some­thing, but Jack waved him off.

“Daniel,” Jack said, “you bet­ter sit down.”

Daniel took a seat in the suite’s expan­sive liv­ing room. “What’s going on, Jack?”

“We got some bad news while you were in the shower. When Susan logged on to try to upload her video, we found out that the demons have hacked the website.”

“So this is about hack­ing?” Daniel was miss­ing some­thing here.

“No, Daniel.” Jack took a seat across from him. “They posted some videos of their own. We should have sus­pected this after they tried to kill Dante, it’s my fault we didn’t — “

“The attack on Mis­ter Hicks was well after the events — “ Uriel said, but Jack cut him off again.

“Daniel, they posted video of how they tor­tured and killed Susan’s edi­tor…” Jack trailed off, but Daniel could see he wasn’t done. “And your fam­ily. Your par­ents and sis­ters are dead. I’m sorry.”

Daniel felt like all the air dis­ap­peared out of the room. He couldn’t breathe. Every­thing was start­ing to go gray. It couldn’t be true, could it?

“I don’t rec­om­mend watch­ing the video,” Jack said. “It’s pretty graphic. But we’ve ver­i­fied that it’s real. They’re gone.”

“Gone.” The word tasted like ash.

“When they couldn’t find us, they went after any­one close to us,” Jack said. Susan and I don’t have liv­ing par­ents any­more, and I never got mar­ried. And you know what hap­pened to Jeff’s wife and why he didn’t have any kids. Susan’s edi­tor and your folks were all they could find.

“We’re going to get them, Daniel. You have my promise on that.”

“How?” Daniel said.

“Well, we’re going to finish — “

“We’re post­ing a video on the inter­net?” Daniel said. “That’s how we’re going to ‘get’ them? We’re going to take them down with fuck­ing YouTube?”

“It’s a start,” Jack said.

“It’s a fuck­ing joke!” Daniel said. “They’re d — dead, and it’s my fault. It’s my fault again. It’s my fault they’re dead…”

“Daniel, you know that’s not true,” Susan said.

“It is true!” Daniel said. “I couldn’t fuck­ing let it go, and now they’re dead. My m — mom, dad, Leah and Mary, it’s all my fault.” He got up and stormed out of the room.

#

“Let him go,” Jack said. Susan couldn’t believe it.

“Let him go?” she said. “What if — “

“He won’t leave the build­ing,” Uriel said. “I have secu­rity in place. And you, Miss Richard­son, have a job to do.”

Susan nod­ded, and turned back to her lap­top. “How am I sup­posed to post the final install­ment if I can’t log in?” she asked. They’d already dis­cov­ered that not only had the demons killed Stan, but they’d also taken down the New Amer­i­can Cen­tury website.

“I might be able to do some­thing about that,” Dante said. He opened his own lap­top, signed into the hotel wifi and set to work.

For the next few hours, Susan poured every­thing she’d been through along with every­thing she knew about writ­ing into telling the tale of what they’d uncov­ered in Iraq. She gave Jeff the hero’s treat­ment he deserved, and metic­u­lously laid out the case for the exis­tence of the immor­tals. Once they were home and save, she’d turn over the scroll and the hel­met to aca­d­e­mics who could ver­ify their authen­tic­ity, but she wanted the story to stand on its own. And she thought it did.

“Okay,” Dante finally said. “I wasn’t able to regain con­trol of the site, but I did the next best thing. I copied the site lay­out from a cached copy and built a new blog that looks just like it. I won’t have the archives, but it’s the same thing oth­er­wise. Then I hacked the DNS to redi­rect newamericancentury.com from the old IP address to our new IP address. I’ve got you set up on the new blog, Susan, so give it a try.”

Susan wasn’t sure she under­stood all of what Dante just said, but she clicked the favorite to her blog upload panel any­way. To her sur­prise, it came up, and she was able to log in. As Dante said, there were no old posts, but she got to work any­way upload­ing the edited video and her story.

An hour later, it was done. The story was out.

#

The next morn­ing a 767 landed at Rea­gan National Air­port from Frank­furt. The first peo­ple off the jet­way were Uriel, Jack, Dante, Susan and Daniel, fol­lowed by the rest of the first class pas­sen­gers. Jack flashed his FBI badge to get them all past Cus­toms, and they moved unac­costed out to a wait­ing limousine.

“This feels weird,” Daniel said. He was still stunned by the deaths of his fam­ily, but it had set­tled into more of a dull ache over the last twenty four hours. He’d passed a stress thresh­old, and just couldn’t feel much of any­thing any­more. But that didn’t stop the ratio­nal, log­i­cal side of his brain from ask­ing questions.

“I know,” Susan said. “I still feel like a fugitive.”

“Totally unnec­es­sary,” Uriel said as they piled into the limo. “You are under my pro­tec­tion. All charges against you have been dropped, and the gov­ern­ment is even set­tling all the prop­erty dam­age claims out of court to keep things quiet.”

Daniel wasn’t nearly as sur­prised as Susan was about the reac­tion thus far to her story. While it had been a run­away hit with the media, video being rebroad­cast on all the major cable net­works both in the US and around the world, the US gov­ern­ment had already declared it to be a hoax, insist­ing that there was no such thing as angels and demons, that it was all inter­net spe­cial effects. Daniel knew that was the only stance they really could take, if they wanted to pre­serve any author­ity at all, but Susan was crushed. She’d been hop­ing for real, last­ing change.

Daniel knew that the only times things changed, it was for the worse.

Before he knew it, the limo slowed to a stop in front of Daniel’s apart­ment. “You will find things cleaner than you left them,” Uriel said. “The demons ran­sacked your apart­ment when you left the coun­try, but I’ve had a clean­ing crew restore every­thing to normal.”

“Thanks,” Daniel said, reach­ing for the door.

“What are you going to do, Daniel?” Susan said.

“I’m going to try to get my old life back,” Daniel said, and stepped out of the limo.

27: Some­thing Old, Some­thing Older

Daniel looked into the alcove. It held two small altars, each carved from a sin­gle block of black stone. On one altar was a scroll cas­ing. On the other was a bronze hel­met. Both looked very, very old.

“The scroll,” Moham­mad said, “tells the story of the great war of the angels, the fall of Lucifer and how the angels and demons came to walk among us. It is writ­ten in ancient Baby­lon­ian, and accord­ing to myth is only a trans­la­tion of a far older work handed down in clay tablets, which itself was tran­scribed from oral tra­di­tions. No one knows how old the story really is.”

“And the hel­met?” Daniel asked.

“It is one of the few remain­ing angelic arti­facts. It is the hel­met of an angel killed in the great war.”

Daniel was trans­fixed by the hel­met. It looked bronze only at first. The more he looked at it, the more trou­ble he had in deter­min­ing what metal it was actu­ally made of. The color was a dark gray-​​green, mot­tled with age. “May I exam­ine it?”

“They are both yours now, Daniel Cho. By order of the archangel.”

Daniel picked up the hel­met. It was heav­ier than he expected. He looked inside, and imme­di­ately saw why. Not only were the walls of the hel­met thicker than usual, but the hel­met was padded with some kind of poly­mer. As he turned it in the light, he saw… No, that was impossible.

“Susan, bring your cam­era over here. Does that thing have zoom?”

“Sure.” She aimed where he directed.

“Zoom in on that. What do you see?”

“It looks like a cir­cuit board,” she said. “Like the moth­er­board on my laptop.”

Micro­cir­cuitry, Daniel thought. In an ancient angelic hel­met. How much had Uriel not told them?

“Okay,” he said, “stand back.”

“Whoa, there, sport,” Jeff said. “What do you have in mind? You’ve got that look on your face.”

[make sure we hear the story of Jeff’s wife and his search for her mur­derer ear­lier in the story, so it informs Daniel’s sense of vengeance later]

“I’m just going to try it on,” Daniel said. “It’s a cou­ple dozen cen­turies old, right? My lap­top bat­tery doesn’t last four hours.”

“I don’t think this is such a good idea, Danny.”

“Jeff, we need to know every­thing we can about these things, right? And besides, would Uriel have sent us after this if it was dangerous?”

“Prob­a­bly no worse,” Jeff said, “than the Holy Grail, the golden fleece, Prometheus’s fire…”

Daniel looked at Susan. “You get­ting this?” She nod­ded, keep­ing the cam­era on him.

“Okay,” he said. He looked down at the hel­met again, raised it up and put it on his head.

As soon as it was steady, he heard a soft “thwup” sound and felt some­thing soft close around his throat. The sounds of the room faded instantly to noth­ing, only to come back up slightly dif­fer­ent, like they were being run through a dig­i­tal fil­ter. The eye holes went black, and then faded back to trans­parency. Super­im­posed over his field of vision, Daniel could see var­i­ous read­outs float­ing in the air around him. The char­ac­ters were for­eign to him, but they look old, like the Sumer­ian or Baby­lon­ian writ­ing he’d seen in muse­ums. Despite the seal around his neck, he found he could breathe nor­mally, although the dusty smell of the room was com­pletely gone. The air was clean and cooler than the room air on his body.

“Daniel?” Susan said. Her eyes were huge.

“What do you see?” he asked.

She jumped at the sound of his voice. “The — the eye holes are black and have a matte fin­ish, like you have black stones in there. You can see?”

“I can see fine,” he said. He decided not to try to explain the heads up dis­play yet. “What else?”

“Your voice is loud, like a bull­horn. It’s been processed, too, sounds deeper than normal.”

Daniel chuck­led. “The voice of God,” he said.

“I wouldn’t call it that,” Susan said, “but that’s the effect.”

Daniel turned his head and looked at Jeff. He saw that the Mul­lah behind Jeff was pray­ing to him­self. “Well,” he said, “they clearly have bet­ter bat­tery tech­nol­ogy than Dell.”

“You’re a riot, Danny. Now take that blasted thing off.”

Daniel reached up and put his palm to either side of the hel­met and tried to lift it off. It didn’t budge so much as a mil­lime­ter. “Uh oh,” he said.

“It doesn’t come off?” Susan said. “How are you going to eat?”

For that mat­ter, Daniel thought, what hap­pens if the power gives out and the air fil­tra­tion stops work­ing? He was about to sug­gest she give it a shot when they heard a loud bang from above. Dust rained down from between the stones in the ceiling.

The mul­lah reached into his robes and pulled out a pis­tol. “You will wait here,” he said, and stepped out the door, clos­ing it behind him. Jeff ran up to the door and tried the knob.

“It’s locked,” he said.

#

Dante Hicks shut down his PC and pre­pared to leave the office. It was early after­noon, but there was no one around to miss him. The rest of the office had either already left early to get a head start on the week­end, or they were already on vaca­tion. June was quiet month in fed­eral ser­vice, or at least it was sup­posed to be.

He slung his lap­top bag over his shoul­der and walked past the ele­va­tor to the stair­well. He’d been try­ing to get in shape for a while, and given the recent events with Agent Har­ris he fig­ured now was as good a time as any. Some pretty weird shit was going on, and he wanted to be ready for it.

Actu­ally, Dante had been dream­ing about some­thing like this for… well, pretty much his whole life. He always thought his life would be cool, like the stuff he grew up watch­ing on TV. But when he grad­u­ated from MIT and thumbed his nose at sev­eral cor­po­rate job offers to get a job with the FBI, he found it couldn’t be more unlike the X-​​Files. Hell, it wasn’t even as excit­ing as Bar­ney Miller. At least until this week.

Now, he was at ground zero of some­thing big. Some­thing he didn’t have to embell­ish over beers with Ran­dall. In fact, he hadn’t even told Ran­dall about the nanites. Those were the weird­est of the weird, and he wanted to puz­zle it out him­self a lit­tle more.

As he walked down the stair­well to the bio­labs, he thought he heard a weird echo of his foot­steps. It stopped when he stopped, so he wasn’t being fol­lowed, but it sounded… different.

I’m prob­a­bly just para­noid, he thought. All this stuff is get­ting to me.

He exited the stair­well and rounded the cor­ner to the labs. He badged in and saw that Shel­don, the lab tech he’d given the blood sam­ple to, was the only one on duty here as well. Noth­ing cleared out like DC on a beau­ti­ful sum­mer day, he thought.

“Mis­ter Cooper!” Dante said. “How’s it hanging?”

“The answer will require fur­ther exper­i­men­ta­tion to ver­ify repeat­able results,” Shel­don said. Dante felt a wave of depres­sion. Not only did he get the joke, he rec­og­nized that it was a joke. He needed to hang out with non-​​geeks more often.

“Are you like­wise seek­ing to escape the sink­ing ves­sel?” Shel­don asked.

“Uh…”

“I refer to our roden­tine cowork­ers, and their efforts to leave the build­ing as though it were a ship at sea tak­ing on water.”

“Gotcha. Actu­ally, I’m on my way out. I was won­der­ing if you’d dis­cov­ered any more about that blood sample.”

“You mean apart from the fact that it con­tains nan­otech­nol­ogy far in advance of any­thing com­mer­cially repro­ducible today? Or per­haps apart from how each nanite appears to derive power from no dis­cern­able source. I’m afraid I haven’t had much time to look into the mat­ter, as I’ve got sev­eral dozen algae blooms to cultivate.”

Damn, Dante thought. “Really?”

“Of course not, you fool. I was employ­ing sar­casm. I’ve been spend­ing every wak­ing moment in a thus far futile attempt to dis­cern the work­ings of the nanites. I swear, you Comp­Sci types can’t take a joke.”

“That’s, uh, great, Shel­don, but what else have you found?”

Shel­don walked around a lab table, motion­ing for Dante to fol­low him. Dante was again struck by how the bio­chemist moved with short, pre­cise motions, like a bird. “I put the blood into a growth cul­ture,” Shel­don said. “Tried to grow it like any other cel­lu­lar material.”

“And?”

“It reacted accord­ingly to the growth matrix,” Shel­don said. “But as the red blood cells increased in num­ber, so did the num­ber of nanites.”

“Really?” Dante asked. “Where did they come from?”

“The luminif­er­ous ether, Dante,” Shel­don said, sound­ing annoyed.

“What’s a luminescent — “

“The either,” Shel­don said, “the back­ground medium in which New­ton thought all mat­ter existed. It was another sar­cas­tic remark. I can see I’m going to have to dumb things down a lit­tle with you. Engi­neers.” He har­rumphed and con­tin­ued. “The nanites are capa­ble of repro­duc­ing on their own. It’s impos­si­ble to tell exactly how with­out greatly increased mag­ni­fi­ca­tion, but it’s clear that they are capa­ble of draw­ing car­bon atoms out of their envi­ron­ment and build­ing new ver­sions of them­selves, estab­lish­ing an effec­tively unlim­ited supply.”

“So if you had these in your blood…” Dante said.

“You would not only be effec­tively immor­tal, but the mech­a­nism by which you became immor­tal would be in and of itself inex­haustible. You’d live for­ever. Or at least until the sun goes red giant, at which point — “

“And you said the nanites had no effect in other blood samples?”

“None at all. I don’t know how such sim­ple machines could store such pro­gram­ming, much less process and exe­cute it, but they have no reac­tion to cells that don’t con­tain the DNA of the orig­i­nal sam­ple. Ponce De Leon would have found this dis­cov­ery intensely frustrating.”

“The means to eter­nal life, but it’s not trans­ferrable,” Dante said.

“Pre­cisely.”

Behind them, Dante heard a sin­gle pair of hands clapping.

He turned around and saw two men in expen­sive suits stand­ing at the entry to the lab. He hadn’t heard them badge in. One of them was clap­ping, slowly. The other was clos­ing the blinds over the one win­dow into the lab.

“Who are you peo­ple?” Shel­don demanded. Dante knew the tech didn’t appre­ci­ate peo­ple intrud­ing on his territory.

“I would think,” the clap­ping man said as he stepped for­ward and stopped the applause, “that you’d be happy to see us.” The man’s accent was faint, and Dante couldn’t tell if it was British or Australian.

“And why would I be happy to have you intrude on my lab?”

“You are study­ing the blood of immor­tals,” the man said. The other man qui­etly moved to the other end of the lab, and Dante noticed that just like that, he and Shel­don were pinned in. No way to get past the men other than going through heavy lab equipment.

“I’m sorry,” Dante said before Shel­don could reply. “You must have us con­fused with some­one else. I was just ask­ing my friend here about some gun­shot residue.”

“No you weren’t,” Shel­don said. “I would never stood to run­ning GSR tests.”

“Shut up, Shel­don,” Dante said, as qui­etly as he could.

“Get out of my lab!” Shel­don said. “Do not make me call security!”

The man smiled. “You won’t call secu­rity on us. For one thing, that would imply that the secu­rity guards were still alive.”

The other man, the one that hadn’t spo­ken, pulled some­thing out of his suit jacket. It was a small dig­i­tal cam­era. Dante thought it was prob­a­bly sim­i­lar to the ones Richard­son had used to record her videos. He started film­ing them, being sure to get him, Dante and the other demon in the shot.

Demon. Dante knew what they were now. He could see it in the way they moved, a grace­ful econ­omy of motion borne of cen­turies of prac­tice. The one who had spo­ken reached out, took a grad­u­ated cylin­der and smashed the end of it against the lab table.

“That is expen­sive lab­o­ra­tory equip­ment!” Shel­don said. “I’m going to see that you pay for that!” The poor guy still had no idea what was really going on.

The end of the cylin­der was now a jagged point, a more expen­sive but no less lethal ver­sion of a bro­ken beer bot­tle. The demon held it out in front him.

“Please,” he said, “resist. It will make this take longer.”

#

Jack jumped through the hole in the side of the mosque blown open by the demons. He had a flamethrower from the Humvee, and a ban­dolier full of grenades. He knew nei­ther would do much against the demons long term, but he should be able to do enough dam­age to slow them down. Hope­fully enough to extract Daniel, Jeff and Susan and get the fuck out of there.

Sandy and his men jumped through behind him, sim­i­larly armed. Sandy had an RPG that might pack enough punch to kill one of the bas­tards, though Jack wasn’t sure. Batarel had a grenade shoved down his pants and was on their asses the next day.

The inte­rior of the mosque was a study in high end destruc­tion. The demo­li­tion guys knew their busi­ness, and Jack sup­posed that fit. They’d prob­a­bly been prac­tic­ing since the inven­tion of black pow­der. The upside was that they left a pretty clear trail behind them. The hole in the wall opened into a smaller tem­ple, and with another explo­sion on the other side into the main hall. Jack saw bread­crumbs made of dust, shards of mar­ble, and ash lead­ing down a side cor­ri­dor. He sup­posed when you were immor­tal, you didn’t have to wait for the blast to clear.

“Come on!” he shouted to Sandy and his men, and ran down the cor­ri­dor after the demons.

#

Dante grabbed a Bun­sen burner, turned it on, and threw it at the demon. It caught on the feed tube and fell to the floor less than half way to him.

“Impres­sive,” the demon said. Great, Dante thought. Not only is he going to kill me, he’s going to stop to make fun of me first. Why don’t we just go back to high school gym class and get it over with?

“There’s, uh, more where that came from,” Dante said.

“I’m sure there is,” the demon said.

“Why are you doing this?” Shel­don screamed. Poor guy was still look­ing for logic.

“We’re clean­ing up a mess,” the other demon said, behind Dante and Shel­don. “Batarel was an idiot, and let this get out of hand. So it falls to us to clean up the loose ends.”

“I won’t tell any­one!” Shel­don said.

“You already have,” the sec­ond demon said. “Which is why you have to die.”

Shel­don started to sob, but Dante wasn’t fin­ished. He went over every­thing he knew about these guys in his head. They were just as human as he was, apart from the nan­otech­nol­ogy that kept them eter­nally healthy. They bled. They could be killed, if he could do enough damage.

He broke out his best William Shat­ner impres­sion, com­plete with hand ges­tures. “Look,” he said as he sur­rep­ti­tiously pulled of the rub­ber hose from the gas noz­zle the Bun­sen burner was attached to, “there has to be,” wav­ing his other hand like a mad star­ship cap­tain, “a way,” grab­bing the igniter with his other hand, “we can make a deal.”

“That’s the worst Cap­tain Kirk I’ve ever seen,” Shel­don said.

The demon stepped for­ward again, forc­ing Dante to retreat, then calmly reached over and turned off the gas. “Your kind is trou­ble, Mis­ter Hicks. You’re too clever for your own good. Curios­ity killed the cat.”

“Actu­ally,” Dante said, “I’m pretty lazy. You know, the early bird may get the worm, but the sec­ond mouse gets the cheese.” He was bab­bling now, say­ing any­thing he could to stall them. Give him time to think of something.

“I think we’re done with the chit chat,” the demon said. “It’s time to end this.” The demon took another step for­ward, and his head exploded with a sharp crack.

“Agh!” Shel­don screamed behind Dante. “Another one!”

Dante turned and saw a blond man stand­ing at the door to the lab with a hunt­ing rifle. He looked vaguely familiar.

The remain­ing demon actu­ally hissed at the new­comer. “Back off, Uriel! This is none of your concern!”

Uriel? The angel Jack had talked to? He’d seen him, briefly, on one of Richardson’s videos. Dante looked down and saw the first demon’s head reassem­bling itself. Damn, that’s unnerv­ing, he thought.

“Step away from the humans, Zagiel,” Uriel said, walk­ing into the room and keep­ing the rifle trained on the stand­ing demon. “They are under my protection.”

The demon, Zagiel, stepped away from them, towards Uriel. “You should not inter­fere in our deal­ings, angel.”

Uriel smiled. “The rules are chang­ing, Zagiel. I would think demons above all would embrace change.” He fired, and the bul­let struck Zagiel in the chest, knock­ing him back.

“Come on,” Uriel said to Dante and Shel­don. “We need to get you some­where safe.”

“Safe?” Shel­don screamed. “We’re in the Hoover Building!”

“Yeah,” Dante said, hop­ping over a table towards the angel. “And so are they.”

He looked back to see Zagiel pulling him­self back to his feet, and the other demon also try­ing to stand, head mostly recon­structed and hair grow­ing back out at a vis­i­ble speed. Spooky.

“Oh, very well,” Shel­don said, and scram­bled to fol­low them.

“Get behind me,” Uriel said, back­ing to the door­way. As Dante ran past, he saw the angel pull a grenade out of a pocket and pull the pin. Dante thought of all the gas pipes in that room. Aw, shit, he thought.

As soon as he and Shel­don were in the hall­way, he tack­led the bio­chemist to the ground.

“What the deuce?” Shel­don had time to say before Dante felt the angel fall on top of them and the room went up.

24: Briefed by an Angel

Daniel and Jeff were shoved into the back of one squad car, and Susan and Jack were in another. Daniel slumped back in his seat as they pulled away from the steel mill. He had no idea where things would go from here, or there would be any demonic reprisals for Batarel’s death — surely los­ing one of their mem­bers per­ma­nently wasn’t a com­mon occur­rence — but for now, he was actu­ally glad things were out of his hands. The next step wasn’t his to make, and that was a wel­come change. The last week — had it only been a week? — had been enough stress to last him years.

He watched the build­ings of Beth­le­hem slide past out the win­dow. For­tu­nately, the cops in the front seat weren’t the talk­a­tive types. They got one call on their radios, some­thing Daniel only barely heard. The rest of the trip went by in silence.

Then the cops pulled to a stop not at a police sta­tion or munic­i­pal cour­t­house, but rather an upscale office complex.

“That doesn’t look like a jail to me,” Jeff said.

“Yeah, I noticed.”

“No talk­ing!” said the cop rid­ing shot­gun. He and his part­ner got out, and opened the back doors. “Come on, get out.”

Jeff and Daniel got out of the car and saw the sec­ond squad car pull up behind them. In a few moments, Jack and Susan, both still hand­cuffed, were next to them again.”

“Let’s go,” said the cop, and ush­ered them inside.

The build­ing looked and smelled new, Daniel thought. They were hus­tled over to the ele­va­tors, and taken up to the top floor. The cops led them down a hall­way and into an unmarked office. They stood in front of a receptionist’s desk with no receptionist.

A tall blond man in a suit came out to meet them. “Thank you, offi­cers,” he said. “Please remove their hand­cuffs.” All four of them were uncuffed.

“And I believe there was a cam­era?” the man said, and one of the cops handed over Susan’s video camera.

“Excel­lent,” the man said. “Thank you, again, offi­cers. That will be all.”

The four uni­formed cops exchanged looks and left with­out a word.

Daniel turned to Jack. “Your doing?” he asked.

“No,” Jack said. He looked just as puz­zled as Daniel.

“Please,” the blond man said. “All will be explained. If you will come with me?”

With a shrug, Jack fol­lowed, and the rest of them fol­lowed Jack. As they walked down the hall, Daniel noticed that the offices were nice, but bland. There didn’t seem to be any­thing to indi­cate cor­po­rate iden­tity, nor did any­one seem to be there other than their blond benefactor.

The man led them into a well appointed con­fer­ence room. “Please, have a seat,” he said. “Can I get any­one any­thing? Water, soda?”

“No thanks,” Jack said. “I think we’d really like to know what’s going on.” They all took seats around the con­fer­ence table, the blond man sit­ting at the head of the table.

“Of course,” he said.

“Don’t get us wrong,” Daniel said. “We’re glad not to be in jail, but…”

“Yes, I under­stand. This must be very jar­ring. Per­haps we should start with intro­duc­tions. I know who you are, obvi­ously. I’ve been fol­low­ing your exploits for some time now.”

“And you are?” Daniel said.

The man nod­ded. “I am the Archangel Uriel.”

#

Susan couldn’t help it, but her mouth dropped open. “Uriel?” she said. “The angel who stood at the gates of Eden with a flam­ing sword? That Uriel?”

“Archangel,” Uriel cor­rected. “And I don’t recall a flam­ing sword. Some­thing prob­a­bly got lost in translation.”

Susan gulped. Was this really the same being she’d read about in Sun­day School?

Uriel started play­ing back the video from the cam­era. They could all hear Daniel and Batarel on the cat­walk, even the things Batarel didn’t intend to be over­heard. “Excel­lent work, Miss Richard­son,” the archangel said.

“Thank you,” she said. She felt her cheeks warm, and was sure she was blush­ing. “Please call me Susan.”

“Very well, Susan.” He stopped the play­back as Batarel started scream­ing, and put the cam­era down on the table.

“We are very impressed with your work, all of you,” he said. “I can’t remem­ber the last time any­one killed a demon, and I can remem­ber a very, very long time. I’m rel­a­tively sure it has never been done by human hands. You all achieved an accom­plish­ment today unique in the his­tory of your race. You should be proud.”

“Thanks?” Jeff said.

“I’ve been mon­i­tor­ing your progress,” Uriel said. “Even before today, you had already achieved much. No one who has stum­bled upon the secret has ever lasted as long as you did. Part of that, I attribute to demonic over­con­fi­dence, assum­ing Batarel could han­dle this on his own with­out fur­ther assis­tance. But equal mea­sure must go to you. Such tenac­ity is to be rec­og­nized, and rewarded.”

“Rewarded?” said Jeff. “What are we talk­ing about, here? I got an RV to get out of impound.”

“How long have you been mon­i­tor­ing our progress?” Jack asked before Uriel had to deal with the embar­rass­ing question.

“Oh, since the begin­ning,” Uriel said. “I knew about Mis­ter Cho’s dis­cov­ery as soon as the demons did. Our strug­gle is very old, and there are really no more secrets among us.”

“Wait,” Daniel said. “You knew what I was going through the whole week and you’re just step­ping in now? What kind of angels are you?”

“Daniel,” Susan said, but Uriel was will­ing to fend for him­self. Susan still couldn’t believe she was in a room with such a being. It was imper­ti­nent to ques­tion him or his motives.

“We’re the same angels that have guided your race from the begin­ning. But the key word there is guided. We don’t gen­er­ally inter­vene in human affairs directly. If we did, your achieve­ments wouldn’t be your own. We just help you stay on the path.”

“That’s all fine and good, but he was try­ing to kill us!” Daniel shouted.

“Daniel!” Susan said. “Don’t raise your voice to — “

“It’s all right, Miss Richard­son. I com­pletely under­stand Mis­ter Cho being upset.”

Daniel rose out of his seat. “Upset?”

“Please, Mis­ter Cho, be seated.” When Daniel didn’t sit imme­di­ately, Uriel added, “Please.”

Daniel sat down, and said nothing.

“Yes, Batarel was try­ing to kill you. As he has killed thou­sands of humans. As the demons do, suc­cess­fully, every other time in human his­tory their secret has been dis­cov­ered. Don’t you see? That is pre­cisely why I inter­vened. Because this time, he didn’t kill you. You killed him. You have proven your­self worthy.”

Daniel slumped back in his seat, and Jack ges­tured for him to set­tle down.

“Worth of what, sir?” Jack said. At least he, Susan thought, was show­ing the proper deference.

“Our assis­tance. Cur­rently, you have only Miss Richardson’s pho­to­graphic evi­dence. This is exem­plary, but every­one at this table knows that mere video is no longer proof of any­thing in a dig­i­tal age. If you’re going to prove the exis­tence of the demons beyond a doubt, you need more. I can pro­vide you with some, and direct you to the rest.”

“Why are you doing this?” Daniel said. Susan was tempted to haul off and smack him, if she didn’t think that would be dis­re­spect­ful to the archangel.

“Mis­ter Cho, I believe we cov­ered that.”

“We cov­ered why you’re step­ping in now, rather than when we really needed you,” Daniel said, glanc­ing at Susan, prob­a­bly to see if she was going to inter­rupt him again. She only glared at him.

“But I still don’t under­stand why you’re help­ing us in the first place. Don’t you have as much to lose as the demons if we prove that immor­tals exist?”

“No, Mis­ter Cho. We are not demons. We are not cor­rupt­ing the human race. We are your shep­herds, as we have been since the dawn of time.”

“Then why haven’t you revealed your­selves before now?”

“It is only now that you have proven your­selves worthy — “

“No,” Daniel said, inter­rupt­ing an archangel, “I get why now is the right time to reveal the demons. I want to know why you have kept your­selves a secret, all this time. Why not reveal your­selves and leave the demons out of it?”

“Danny, maybe we shouldn’t look this par­tic­u­lar gift horse — “

“It’s a fair ques­tion, Mis­ter Frankel,” Uriel said. “The answer, Mis­ter Cho, is sim­ple. Times have changed.

“When humans were still largely agrar­ian, as they have been for most of recorded his­tory and before, reli­gion formed the basis for com­mu­ni­ties, com­mu­ni­ties the basis for nations, and nations the basis for soci­ety. In such an envi­ron­ment, it was more effec­tive for us to work behind the scenes, allow humans to try new things, with only our hand guid­ing the priests, who in turn guided communities.

“In the past few hun­dred years, the fab­ric of soci­ety has begun to unravel. Peo­ple no longer believe as they once did. Even the ones who say they do often act in com­plete oppo­si­tion to their sup­posed sacred beliefs. And some among the angels have come to real­ize that the time for belief as a form of — “

“Con­trol,” Daniel said.

“ — guid­ance, Mis­ter Cho, may be pass­ing. The trend has been build­ing ever since Galileo, and it is clear. The belief of the twenty first Chris­t­ian cen­tury is in fact, in sci­ence. Skep­ti­cism is the new reli­gion. And so if human­ity requires proof to accept our guid­ance, we will, at last, pro­vide such proof. But we will do so on our terms, in such a way as to con­trast our good inten­tions against the cor­rup­tion of the demons.”

“You know what they say about good inten­tions,” Daniel said.

“Daniel!” Susan said. “I’ve had it with you! Why can’t you just accept what Uriel’s telling us? Why do you always have to be such a pain in the ass?”

“Please, Miss Richard­son, it’s all right. Mis­ter Cho’s skep­ti­cism, his sus­pi­cion, is exactly why we’re hav­ing this con­ver­sa­tion at all. Mis­ter Cho is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the human race as a whole, I’m afraid. If I can’t con­vince him, then our cause is lost.

“So here is what I am offer­ing. I will offer what pro­tec­tion I can, but sadly that is prob­a­bly less than you think. Our orga­ni­za­tion left fight­ing behind mil­len­nia ago, unlike the demons. Your true pro­tec­tion is knowl­edge, and shar­ing that knowl­edge with the world.”

He pulled a small USB thumb drive out of his coat pocket and slid it across the table to Susan. “Con­tained on that device is a data­base. This data­base con­tains the name of every angel and demon, along with the var­i­ous human iden­ti­ties every one of us has assumed through­out recorded his­tory. A com­plete record of our doings in your world, and of the demons as well. I encour­age you to pass it along to your col­leagues in the press, Miss Richard­son, so that they may begin check­ing it against your own his­tor­i­cal record.”

From another pocket, he pulled out four envelopes, and passed them out to each per­son at the table. “In these envelopes are papers estab­lish­ing new, tem­po­rary, iden­ti­ties for you all, which should allow you to travel and evade the demons for a while. They also include air­line tick­ets from this city’s air­port to New York, and from there to Baghdad.”

“Bagh­dad?” Jack said. “What’s in Iraq?”

“Buried under an ancient mosque, likely for­got­ten, is a scroll. This is the Lost Gospel Of The Angels, a work that doc­u­ments our his­tory in far more detail than any of your sur­viv­ing holy books. It tells the story of my peo­ple, how the demons actu­ally fell from Grace, and the war between us. Authen­ti­cate not only its con­tents but the antiq­uity of the doc­u­ment itself, and ver­ify the infor­ma­tion con­tained in the data­base, and you will have all the proof the mod­ern world requires.”

Uriel stood up. “A map to the mosque is included in your paper­work. Now, if you’ll excuse me, we all have work to do. There is a car wait­ing for you down­stairs. The dri­ver will take you some­where to pro­cure you all a change of cloth­ing, and then escort you to the air­port. I wish you good luck.”

The archangel held the door open for them as they exited, and then saw them to the ele­va­tor. He was smil­ing as the ele­va­tor doors closed.

#

Three hours later, Jack sat with the other three in JFK Inter­na­tional Air­port, wait­ing for their flight to Bagh­dad. The ter­mi­nal wait­ing area was at least half filled with sol­diers clad in BDUs. I guess they’re still going with com­mer­cial trans­port for a lot of the deploy­ments, Jack thought.

Susan was tak­ing advan­tage of the air­port wifi to upload the last video. “Are you sure that’s wise?” Jack said.

“What do you mean? I’m still using onion rout­ing. No one will know where we are.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Jack said. “I’m wor­ried that the demons will see this as an escalation.”

“You mean,” Jeff said, “as opposed to killing one of their own, which they almost cer­tainly already know about?”

“It makes me uncom­fort­able,” Jack said. “I saw war­ring tribes do this sort of thing in Iraq. It always invited reprisals.”

“Jack,” Susan said, “we’re under the pro­tec­tion of the angels now. Noth­ing can touch us.”