2 Casu­al­ties Of War

Jack looked out the wind­screen of the Black­hawk as the build­ings of San Fran­cisco sped below them in dark­ness. He was glad Daniel was finally get­ting a chance to find some clo­sure over what hap­pened to his fam­ily, but he hoped the guy would be able to focus on the mis­sion. Rufariel was ruth­less, even for a demon. Jack had known the FBI team that had tried to take him out. Well, he knew them by rep­u­ta­tion. They were pros. None of them made it home.

For­tu­nately, his team had an ace in the hole. The machine was bolted to the floor of the Black­hawk between the cock­pit and where Daniel and Dante sat. It looked like a large indus­trial tur­bine and Jack had no idea how much it had cost. But if Dante’s the­ory about the nan­otech­nol­ogy that made the immor­tals immor­tal worked, it would even the odds considerably.

“30 sec­onds to LZ,” Sandy drawled over the inter­com sys­tem in their head­sets. Through the noise can­ce­la­tion that pro­tected their hear­ing from the rotors, he sounded like he was call­ing up from the bot­tom of a deep well. “Hang on to your butts.”

“Dante,” Jack called. “Be ready to flip the switch the sec­ond we land. We have to catch him while he’s still in range.”

“Yes sir,” Dante said. The hacker had tough­ened con­sid­er­ably since leav­ing his job as an FBI tech ana­lyst, but he was still in the habit of address­ing Jack as a supe­rior, even though every­one on the team were nom­i­nally equals.

“Gonna need you to step up, Jack,” Sandy said, still sound­ing like he was on a lazy fish­ing boat. Jack had been Bob “Sandy” Sandarski’s com­mand­ing offi­cer in Iraq, and he knew that the hairier the sit­u­a­tion, the more relaxed Sandy seemed to be. The oper­a­tive word was “seemed.” Men had dif­fer­ent ways of cop­ing with the stress of bat­tle, and Sandy’s extreme calm was not uncommon.

“Don’t wait for me,” Jack said. He pre­pared for an emer­gency shut­down of the chopper’s sys­tems. They’d have only a few sec­onds, and he didn’t want to ruin their ride.

“Five,” Sandy said. “Four, three, two, touch­down, the crowd goes wild.” The chop­per dropped hard on the roof of a ware­house, and Jack and Sandy were both madly flip­ping switches and shut­ting down every­thing they could as fast as they could.

“Do it, Dante!” Jack said.

From behind him, Jack heard a sharp elec­tric hum and then a WHUMP as the lights went out for blocks around.

Jack was already out of the chop­per. “Go! Go! Go!”

The men ran across the roof in a well-​​drilled line, their weapons ready. Jack fired a round into the door of the rooftop stair­well and kicked it open. They descended into dark­ness lit only by the Maglites strapped the the bar­rels of their H&K submachineguns.

Inside, they fanned out. The ware­house was filled with cargo con­tain­ers, some stacked four high. The tar­get could be between or even inside any one of them. They were on a nar­row metal cat­walk that ringed the ware­house floor below.

“You know the drill, peo­ple,” Jack said. “Look for move­ment, any sign that he — ”

Jack was cut off by the report of a rifle and a bul­let prang­ing off a pipe not six inches from his hel­met. “Down!” he shouted. The men dropped prone on the catwalk.

“Any­one see the muz­zle flash?” Jack asked.

“Neg­a­tive,” Sandy said. “Must have it sup­pressed.” He sounded like he was relay­ing a base­ball score for teams he didn’t par­tic­u­larly care about.

“Shit,” Jack said. They weren’t off to the best start, already pinned down by an as yet unseen enemy. Still, he’d had worse.

He reached into the front pocket of his fatigues and pulled out two flash-​​bang grenades. “Fire in the hole,” he said, his voice echo­ing off the con­tain­ers and ware­house walls. So much for sub­tlety, he thought.

He pulled the pins and flung the grenades in oppo­site direc­tions. They’d just about hit the floor of the ware­house when they went off, loud cracks of sound and blind­ing white phosphorous.

Sandy fol­lowed his lead and dropped flares, cast­ing the ware­house in a flick­er­ing yellow-​​green glow. Wasn’t as good as night vision, but it would do.

Jack started to get up when another shot pranged over his head, fol­lowed almost imme­di­ately by a rifle crack that echoed back and forth until it was impos­si­ble to deter­mine where it had come from. “Dammit!”

Rufariel was smart, far smarter than Asemiel, the demon they’d killed in the sum­mer. He had been, as it turned out, a rel­a­tively low-​​level func­tionary, and had been undone as much by his own over­con­fi­dence as any­thing Jack or Daniel had done. Now demons had the ben­e­fit of warn­ing, of know­ing that humans could actu­ally kill them if they got lucky. It had already hap­pened a few times, cru­saders in Italy, Africa and Korea. Rufariel hadn’t got­ten this far by being stupid.

“Spread out,” Jack said. “Try to sur­round him before we descend to ground level. And hold on tight.” The rest of the team nod­ded, intu­it­ing what he had in mind, and began belly-​​crawling along the catwalk.

Jack pulled another two grenades out of his fatigues. These weren’t flash-​​bangs, though. He pulled the pin on the first one and flung it straight out, let­ting it fall roughly in the mid­dle of the ware­house. It dis­ap­peared behind the cargo con­tain­ers and det­o­nated with a deaf­en­ing thun­der­clap. The con­tain­ers shook and a mix­ture of dust and smoke bil­lowed out the nar­row metal canyon.

Jack read­ied his rifle and squinted through the haze. He was look­ing for any sign of move­ment, any­thing that might be Rufariel try­ing to get away from the heat and con­cus­sion of the blast. He saw nothing.

Take two, then, he thought. He checked to see where the team was. Sandy, Daniel… and there was Dante. They all had set up near long metal lad­ders in the cor­ners of the build­ing that led from the cat­walk down to the floor. He made eye con­tact with each of them in turn, then held up the sec­ond grenade. They nodded.

He pulled the pin and flung it out a bit far­ther, try­ing to drop it down into the next row out from the one he’d hit. The grenade bounced and skid­ded across the top of the con­tainer and det­o­nated just as it veered out over the edge, maybe forty feet above the floor. The explo­sion wasn’t as buffered by the con­tain­ers this time and Jack was flat­tened down to the cat­walk by the overpressure.

He craned his head over the cat­walk and tried to see any sign of move­ment below. The flares were start­ing to sput­ter, and would have to be replaced. He was reach­ing for his last grenade, another flash-​​bang, when he saw just a hint of movement.

Directly below him.

Jack rolled to the side just as the auto­matic fire strafed the cat­walk where he’d been. He saw a glimpse of a fig­ure run­ning in the smoke under the cat­walk, hug­ging the wall of the warehouse.

“I’ve got him!” Jack shouted. “He’s here!” Granted, he couldn’t even hear him­self over the echoes of gun­fire and the ring­ing still in his ears. He pulled him­self up to a crouch, and duck­walked across the cat­walk in pur­suit. Ahead of him, he saw Sandy con­verg­ing on the same cor­ner. He glanced quickly over his shoul­der, just to ver­ify that Daniel and Dante were already on their way down to the floor to cut off the demon’s escape route. This was going bet­ter than expected.

Sandy fired a quick burst down the lad­der, then started to descend, care­fully and with his weapon trained and ready to return fire if nec­es­sary. Jack had him cov­ered, but could no longer see the demon. Some­thing fur­ther into the ware­house had caught fire, and the smoke was obscur­ing his vision.

Sandy reached the bot­tom of the lad­der, and swept around him in a Weaver stance mod­i­fied for the snub-​​nosed MP-​​5 they used, front hand hold­ing the ver­ti­cal grip of the weapon in front of his trig­ger hand. He did a com­plete 360, but didn’t fire. He looked up at Jack and shrugged.

Jack had just started down the lad­der him­self when he heard bursts of weapon­fire on the other side of the warehouse.

---

Daniel heard the shots, almost deaf­en­ingly close, but didn’t see the shooter. It sounded like one of their H&K’s, but he couldn’t be sure it was Dante. He crept slowly along a row of con­tain­ers, his vision flick­er­ing in an out with the dying flares. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a flare, struck it against his leg and tossed it high over­head, look­ing away from the green arc of light until it landed. Unfor­tu­nately, it didn’t do much more than illu­mi­nate the smoke.

He was just near­ing the cor­ner when he heard Dante shout, “I’ve got him!” and fire off a quick burst from his MP-​​5. Daniel ran for­ward and saw Dante crouched behind a wooden crate. The hacker popped up and fired again.

Daniel tracked to where Dante was fir­ing and saw the demon Rufariel, wear­ing sim­ple work clothes rather than the designer suits Asemiel had favored. The bul­lets from Dante’s gun raked up the body of the demon, and Daniel added his own pair of three-​​round bursts right to the demon’s cen­ter mass. Rufariel fell over back­ward from the kick.

Dante jumped out from behind the crate. “We got him!” he shouted. Daniel was about to tell him to get back behind cover when he heard the demon’s voice behind him.

“My turn.”

Daniel dove behind the cargo con­tainer as Rufariel sprayed auto­matic fire first at him, then back towards Dante. Daniel saw Dante duck back behind the crate.

The demon smiled. He aimed at the crate and opened fire. The bul­lets tore through the wood and Dante cried out before he fell scream­ing to the ground.

Daniel returned fire towards the demon, tried to cross to Dante, was who was wail­ing in pain. The demon held his ground and fired a burst at Daniel, who was forced to retreat to the cover of the steel cargo con­tainer, stur­dier cover than Dante’s wooden crate.

He heard a whoosh and saw a bright flash of orange light over the sickly green flares. He peaked out and saw that Sandy had hit Rufariel with the minia­tur­ized flamethrower he kept strapped to his back. The demon screamed and retreated, but didn’t fall.

“Tend to Dante, doc, I got this,” Sandy said, with a bit less than his usual drawl.

Daniel darted over to Dante. “It’s okay. I’m here, we’re going to get you patched up.” He started check­ing Dante for injuries, but it only took an instant to see where the biggest trou­ble was. A size­able pool of blood had already spread on the dirty con­crete floor under Dante’s left leg.

“Hurts…” Dante said between clenched teeth. Even in the yellow-​​green glow from the flares, he looked notice­ably pale. Already going into shock, Daniel thought. Not good.

He pushed Dante back as gen­tly as time allowed and straight­ened the leg, which set off another round of scream­ing. “Stay with me, Dante,” Daniel said, and reached in his pack. He pulled out a small nylon bag which he unzipped to reveal basic sur­gi­cal tools. He first grabbed a single-​​use injec­tor and pressed it to Dante’s neck.

Pfft. The mor­phine went into Dante’s carotid artery. It didn’t seem to make much dif­fer­ence, but that was what Daniel had to work with.

He grabbed some shears and sliced open the leg of Dante’s fatigues with a quick, well-​​practiced motion. The bul­let hole pierced cleanly through the upper thigh, through and through. So on the upside, no slug to dig out. But blood was spurt­ing out of both sides with every beat of Dante’s heart. Red, oxygen-​​rich arte­r­ial blood.

Shit, Daniel thought. Nicked the femoral artery. He didn’t have much time. Dante had a hole in one of the largest arter­ies in the body, and would bleed out in min­utes if Daniel couldn’t stop it.

Daniel reached for a retrac­tor, the steel teeth gleam­ing green. “This is gonna hurt, buddy,” he said to Dante. He got an inar­tic­u­late moan in return. Daniel jammed the retrac­tor into the wound and spread it, open­ing a chan­nel down to the artery. Dante screamed and pounded the con­crete with his fists.

Daniel peered into the wound, wish­ing he had some lig­a­tion to clear the blood out of the way. It looked worse than he thought. The artery wasn’t nicked at all, it was sev­ered and had retracted up the leg. There was no way to get to in the field. “Shit shit shit…” Daniel said as he reached for a tourniquet.

He wrapped the band around Dante’s upper thigh, hip to crotch. It didn’t fit, the dam­age was too far up the leg. He tight­ened it down any­way, which slowed, but didn’t stop the blood flow. Dante passed out, so at least he didn’t have to deal with a thrash­ing patient.

Mak­ing sure the retrac­tor was secure, he reached for (tong thingy) and reached into the wound. He heard Jack’s voice behind him, but couldn’t tell what he was say­ing, and both Jack and Sandy had seen enough bat­tle­field triage to know not to inter­rupt the medic with stu­pid ques­tions like, “Is he going to make it?” They knew ask­ing those ques­tions vastly increased the chance of a “no.”

Try­ing to fol­low the warmth of the blood, Daniel pushed the (thingy) fur­ther up Dante’s leg as he grabbed a clamp with his other hand. There it is, he thought, feel­ing the end of the gush­ing tube. Slip­pery bastard…

He got a grip on the end of the artery and pulled. Even uncon­scious, Dante moaned. The pain had to be unthink­able. He almost lost it, tight­ened his grip, and finally fished out the artery into the open. He clamped it shut, which both stopped the major bleed and kept the artery from retract­ing up the leg again. Hands drip­ping blood, Daniel grabbed his sutures and a nee­dle. Another minute, and he had the artery sewn shut, good enough to move him to a proper ER, anyway.

He quickly checked for other wounds, but mirac­u­lously, only the one bul­let man­aged to hit Dante through the crate. He’d been lucky, all things considered.

Still on his knees, Daniel said, “We’ve got to get him to a hos­pi­tal. Now.”

“Ambu­lance is already en route,” Jack said.

“And Rufariel?”

“He got away. The EMP didn’t work. He was still immor­tal when we hit him.”

“So all of this was for noth­ing,” Daniel said. He slumped, still kneal­ing in Dante’s blood as the sirens approached.

---

Half an hour later, Jack stood with Daniel and Sandy in the wait­ing room of the ER. Dante had been wheeled in for surgery, but they thought they’d be able to save the leg. So far, that was the only good news of the evening.

All three of them were quiet. The two war vets knew any­thing they said would be trite, and Daniel was lost in his own thoughts. Jack felt for the guy, but was also immensely proud of him. He’d saved Dante’s life back there. He knew Daniel had been a gifted trauma sur­geon until a mis­take cost a woman and her unborn child their lives and him his job. And Jack had seen first­hand on sev­eral occa­sions how Daniel car­ried him­self in a fight against immor­tals. He knew the kid would do great, but what he couldn’t pre­dict was how he’d take such an intense setback.

And they hadn’t even lost Dante. Bat­tle­field medics had to be pre­pared to lose patients. You couldn’t save them all. He’d seen this in some medics in Iraq. Gen­er­ally speak­ing, com­bat docs had one of two looks about them. Steely eyed con­fi­dence because they knew they were the best at their jobs and saved the lives of their com­rades, or a glassy, thou­sand yard stare because they’d seen too many of their own die under their hands. Daniel seemed to be tip­ping to the latter.

“Daniel,” Jack put his hand on Daniel’s shoulder.

“Not now, Jack!” Daniel shook it off and stormed out­side. Jack followed.

“Daniel, you saved him. Dante’s going to be okay.” Jack said, keep­ing his dis­tance, but mak­ing it clear he wasn’t going away, either.

Daniel spun to face him. “What if he didn’t? He almost bled out, Jack. They had to replace over half his blood vol­ume on the way here. Another few sec­onds, even, and — ”

“And noth­ing. You saved him. You did your job.”

“And what is that job, Jack? We’ve been play­ing G.I. Fuck­ing Joe for three months, while those things have been run­ning around free, and the first time we try to take one down, he almost kills one of us. What the hell are we doing, Jack?”

“The EMP didn’t work as we expected — ”

“That’s a fuck­ing understatement.”

“ — but that’s okay. We know not to waste any more time try­ing to attack the nanites them­selves. We’ve just learned one more way not to make a light bulb. Trial and error is part of this job.”

“Except that when we fall on the ‘error’ side some­one almost gets killed. We don’t have time to fuck around like this, Jack, and we def­i­nitely can’t afford to spare the bodies.”

“Dante’s still with us, Daniel. He can do most of his job out­side direct com­bat anyway — ”

“Were you even there, tonight, man? Rufariel could have slaugh­tered all four of us and then gone to get a burger. We didn’t even slow him down. He was toy­ing with Dante, Jack. I saw it. He was hav­ing fun. If the demon had really wanted us all dead, we’d be just like your bud­dies in the FBI.”

Jack said noth­ing. The com­ment stung, but Daniel was right. It could have been much, much worse. Instead Jack stood there in the cold night wind, and waited for Daniel to get the rant out of his system.

“This is fuck­ing stu­pid,” Daniel said. “Try­ing to kill the demons one by one, in direct com­bat, what the hell were we thinking?”

Jack didn’t respond.

“No, really, Jack, I’m ask­ing. What were we think­ing? We’d nar­rowly avoid­ing get­ting killed by Asemiel, sev­eral times over, and since then we’ve learned he was the fuck­ing Bar­ney Fife of demons. How in hell did we ever believe that we could take on demons play­ing their A game?”

“Because we don’t have a choice, Daniel. If you have a bet­ter idea, I’d love to hear it. But until you come up with one, fight­ing them one on one is all we can do. We try, we take our chances, be as smart about it as pos­si­ble, and learn from our mis­takes. No one has ever, in recorded his­tory, fought them directly before. We’re the first. So we have to learn as we go.”

“And get peo­ple killed.” Jack noticed that Daniel still had Dante’s blood all over him. We need to have changes of clothes handy, he thought.

“Yeah, Daniel. Some­times we will get peo­ple killed. Some­times inno­cents, some­times one of us. But that’s the price we pay.”

“There has got to be another way.”

Jack was reach­ing the edge of his patience, but hadn’t gone over yet. Every new­bie went through this. To Daniel’s credit, they usu­ally threw up too, after their first real action, but Jack fig­ured Daniel got past that part when he’d been an ER doc.

“Daniel, this is the only way we have. And I don’t need to tell you how vital our job is. You know why we’re here. What’s at stake. You know bet­ter than any­one. With­out the demons, your fam­ily would still be alive and you’d still be try­ing to be invis­i­ble in D. C.”

“Fuck you, Jack. They make you do a psych rota­tion, you know. I know what you’re doing bet­ter than you do. Want me to explain how that kind of manip­u­la­tion works on a neu­ro­log­i­cal level?”

“If it will get you past this and back on track, sure. Go right ahead.”

“So that’s it? You want to just go right back to work in the morn­ing like this didn’t hap­pen? Like Dante didn’t almost die?”

“No,” Jack said. “I want us to go back to work tomor­row morn­ing like Dante didn’t die. Because he didn’t. He’s still alive, and that’s thanks to you. But if you can’t get past this, if you can’t put a close call — and that’s all this was — aside and do the job, then maybe we can’t use you. You’re a gifted medic and a good fighter, and no one has more expe­ri­ence with immor­tals than you, but we need your head in the game.”

“I’ll see you in the morn­ing, Jack,” Daniel said, and stalked away into the night.

1: New Beginning

[Dante Hicks is now Patrick Russell.]Daniel Cho stood in the frigid bay wind and stared at the graves of his par­ents and his sis­ters. It was Sep­tem­ber, three months after their deaths at the hands of the demons. Their estate han­dling had been done remotely because he’d spent the last three months prepar­ing to avenge them. Today was the first day he’d actu­ally been free to visit their graves.

He hardly rec­og­nized the man he’d been when they died. In the last three months, Jack and Sandy had run him and Patrick through a bru­tal “boot camp” to pre­pare non-​​combatant civil­ians for the bat­tle ahead. They’d been whipped into the best phys­i­cal shape of their lives, taught how to sur­vive in wilder­nesses from the Appalachian moun­tains to South­East Wash­ing­ton DC.  They’d been taught how kill with guns, knives and their bare hands. Daniel was the equal now of the best US Army Rangers, and had also refreshed his skills as a trauma sur­geon. Those were skills his team was likely to need, con­sid­er­ing what they’d be fighting.

Demons. Not the horned and pitch­fork vari­ety, but real, flesh and blood peo­ple who, as the result of nan­otech­nol­ogy no one had fig­ured out yet, healed almost instantly, never got sick, never aged. They’d been liv­ing among humans for cen­turies – mil­len­nia – and inter­fer­ing in the devel­op­ment of soci­ety, cor­rupt­ing and poi­son­ing things for their own ends. Wher­ever there was blood, strife, humans killing each oth­ers, there were demons behind the scenes.

Daniel had stum­bled upon their exis­tence and they’d tried to kill him for it. When that didn’t work, they’d killed his fam­ily. But in the end, Daniel and his friends had been able to get the truth out. The demons weren’t a secret anymore.

But nei­ther were they acknowl­edged fact. The demons had caught the col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion of the pub­lic, but the United States gov­ern­ment, along with most of the United Nations, still declared them a hoax. Daniel knew that this was because the demons had influ­ence deep within the gov­ern­ments of the world. Even Jack’s for­mer boss at the FBI had been work­ing for them. Offi­cially, an ancient con­spir­acy of immor­tals med­dling with human his­tory was every bit the wacko con­spir­acy the­ory it sounded like.

Only it was real. Jeff had died to bring the story to light, one of many wacko con­spir­acy the­o­ries he had favored. Only this one was real. The demons existed, whether they were acknowl­edged offi­cially or not.

And they would be hunted. Jack’s team but just one of many the angels had started up in the last few months. The angels still hadn’t, for the most part, shown them­selves. Only Uriel had been seen in pub­lic. But they’d thrown their con­sid­er­able resources behind the human effort to seek out and destroy the demons, once and for all.

Daniel knew the mis­sion was impor­tant. He believed, as Jack did, that human­ity needed to be free. But really, he just wanted to destroy the crea­tures that had taken his fam­ily away from him. He wanted jus­tice. If he couldn’t get it from his gov­ern­ment, he’d take it himself.

“Are you ready?” Jack said behind him.

Jack turned and saw his new boss, both of them wear­ing jeans and leather jack­ets against the fall chill. They didn’t look much like sol­diers. But Jack had fought in Iraq, along­side Sandy, before he joined the FBI. And while Patrick hadn’t been tested under fire yet, Daniel had fought the demon Batarel five times before finally killing the bas­tard, the last time just hand to hand, flip­ping the demon off a cat­walk in a steel plant into a vat of molten metal. So far, he was the only human to kill an immor­tal in all of recorded his­tory. That had to count for something.

Daniel didn’t look back at his family’s graves. “Yeah, boss. I’m ready.”

“Let’s sad­dle up, then.” Jack turned and led Daniel to the UH-​​60 Black­hawk they used to move around. They hadn’t come to San Fran­cisco just so Daniel could say good­bye to his fam­ily. They were hunt­ing. After Susan released the data­base given to her by Uriel with all the names and aliases of every demon, includ­ing their cur­rent iden­ti­ties, most of them had gone to ground, assumed emer­gency backup iden­ti­ties. It had taken a lot of leg­work and Patrick’s com­puter skills, but they found one, liv­ing in the bay area. It was time to take him down.

*

Jack sat in the cock­pit of the Black­hawk, going over the mis­sion details one more time. Sandy was pilot­ing, and Daniel was in the back with Patrick, try­ing to get Patrick’s lit­tle sur­prise ready. While he and Sandy had been teach­ing the young ana­lyst to fight, they’d also been pick­ing his brain about how to kill demons more effec­tively. They couldn’t very well carry around a vat of molten steel every­where they went, so they needed another way to kill some­thing that could heal almost any injury in sec­onds. Patrick had come up with a lot of ideas, includ­ing the one they were going to field test today. Just as soon as they found the demon.

Accord­ing to their sources, the demon, true name of Oznael, was holed up in ware­house down in Hunter’s Point. Seemed as good a place as any to test out their tactics.

Sandy sig­naled him. They were almost at the LZ. Out the port side he saw the blue of San Fran­cisco Bay, gray indus­trial build­ings below and to star­board. They were com­ing in fast.

Jack turned and sig­naled to Daniel and Patrick. They moved to turn off all their elec­tron­ics. Jack started shut­ting down every­thing he could in the cock­pit with­out inter­fer­ing with Sandy keep­ing the bird in the air. They’d have to be quick.

Sandy pointed at a build­ing, started a count­down with his hand. Five, four, three…

The instant the Black­hawk hit the roof, Jack and Sandy scram­bled to shut down the remain­ing elec­tron­ics. They had three sec­onds. Two, one…

Dante hit the EMP and Jack heard a loud pop from the back of the Black­hawk. All the con­trol screens were black. He glanced at Sandy. “Did we make it?”

“Won’t know until we try to start it again.”

Jack shrugged. They had other con­cerns at the moment. “Let’s move, everybody!”

The men jumped out of the Black­hawk, rotors still swing­ing above their heads from sheer momen­tum. They ran for the roof access door, Jack spray­ing the door­knob with bul­lets from his MP5. He kicked the door down and they rode it like a surf­board down the first flight of steps before jump­ing off in the land­ing and con­tin­u­ing down. The stair­case opened out into a cat­walk above a ware­house floor. The lights were off, a side effect of the eletro­mag­netic pulse they’d set off. If they were lucky, the nanites in the demon’s blood would be dis­abled as well.

They fanned out across the cat­walks along the north and west sides of the build­ing. Each man was dressed in black cov­er­alls, com­bat boots and bul­let­proof vests. They wore kevlar hel­mets and could have passed for SWAT offi­cers but for the lack of the word POLICE in bright white let­ters on their vests. Each car­ried an MP-​​5 sub­ma­chine gun, plenty of ammo, grenades, and a light back­pack con­tain­ing the tools of their spe­cialty. Sandy car­ried hand­held napalm bombs and other ordi­nance. Daniel had their med­ical kit, Patrick a com­puter that could con­nect to just about any­thing any­time some­one hadn’t just set off an EMP. Jack’s back­pack held sur­veil­lance gear, and he reached into that pack to pull out a light­weight set of night vision gog­gles. He put them on.

The ware­house flared into a mono­chrome gray, brighter and bet­ter detailed than what he’d been able to make out by eye. He was the spot­ter in this sce­nario, direct­ing the other men towards the tar­get. If they could find the tar­get. The ware­house was full of eighty foot ship­ping con­tain­ers, some stacked five high. A sin­gle demon could hide in here for a long time with­out being spot­ted, espe­cially if he could get into one or more of the containers.

Jack saw some­thing dart off to the side on the ware­house floor. He whis­tled to the men, and pointed. “South­east cor­ner!” he said.

Care­fully, they all started down the metal stair­ways towards the floor. Patrick had formed up with Jack, Daniel was cov­er­ing Sandy. With any luck, they’d catch the bas­tard in a crossfire.

Jack turned and glanced at Patrick. “You sure this is going to work?”

The for­mer FBI ana­lyst shrugged. “In the­ory, it should work,” Patrick said. “The nanites are too small to have any appre­cia­ble EM shield­ing. The EMP should have turned Oznael into just another human being, at least for a while. If we shoot him, he should stay dead.”

“That’s an awful lot of “shoulds”, Patrick.”

“I know, sir.”

They crept down the floor. As soon as Jack stepped down to the con­crete, he heard the dis­tinc­tive chat­ter of an AK-​​47. He grabbed Patrick by the scruff of the neck and threw them both to the floor. Bul­lets ric­o­cheted off the metal stair­case behind them.

“I think he’s on to us, sir,” Patrick said.

“Fig­ured that out, did you?” Jack said as heard answer­ing MP-​​5 fire com­ing from the left. Good, Sandy was already try­ing to pin him down.

He slapped Patrick on the shoul­der. “Come on, Patrick. We have a job to do.”

Patrick cov­ered Jack as Jack care­fully side­stepped around the ship­ping con­tainer where he thought the AK shots had come from. Sandy and Daniel were no longer fir­ing, so they must have lost Oznael too, assum­ing they ever saw him and weren’t just shoot­ing at the sound to drive him back.

“Oznael!” Jack shouted, echo­ing in the vast ware­house. “We know who and what you are. There’s no way out of here except through us!”

“Sir is that wise?” Patrick whis­pered. “Taunt­ing him?”

“If he hides,” Jack whis­pered, “and we have to search crate by crate, it’s much more dan­ger­ous and we have a higher risk of los­ing him. He thinks he’s invul­ner­a­ble still, and is only avoid­ing us because it’s eas­ier to pick us off one by one. If we can make him angry enough to charge us…”

“He’ll run right into the bul­lets, think­ing they won’t harm him.”

“That’s the plan,” Jack said. “Now we just need to flush him out.”

Jack turned on the com­link hooked over his right ear. “Sandy, report,” he said as qui­etly as he could.

“Noth­ing here, boss,” Sandy said. We con­verged on where it sounded like the AK fire came from, but there’s no sign of him.”

“Roger that,” Jack said. He waved for Patrick to fol­low and moved down the aisle between the mas­sive con­tain­ers. Bas­tard had to be here somewhere.

“Oznael!” he said. “You’re not get­ting out of this.”

Jack heard the demon speak behind them, a rough Aussie accent. “I beg to differ.”

Oznael opened fire, and Jack felt a cou­ple of the rounds hit the plate on the back of his vest. Patrick cried out and went down immediately.

“Shit,” Jack said and returned fire. He hit the demon square in the chest with at least five rounds. The demon fell down under the hail of gunfire.

“Medic!” Jack screamed. “Daniel, get over here!” Jack saw a pool of blood spread­ing under Patrick, and it was get­ting way too big.

As he heard Sandy and Daniel dou­ble­time over to him, he saw the demon get­ting back up.

*

Daniel saw Patrick slumped against the side of a con­tainer as Jack leaped over him and opened fire on the demon again. “Sandy, I need some help here!” Jack said.

As Sandy and Jack drove the demon back, Daniel whipped off his pack and tended to Patrick. “Stay with me, buddy,” he said. “We’re gonna get through this.”

“F – First time out,” Patrick said. “And I get tagged.”

“Could have hap­pened to any of us,” Daniel said. He saw that most of the bleed­ing was com­ing from Patrick’s left leg. Daniel took a knife and sliced open the leg of Patrick’s pants. The bul­let had gone deep into his thigh, and the blood com­ing out was bright red, arte­r­ial. Prob­a­bly nicked the femoral, Daniel thought.

“Okay, Patrick, this is going to sting a bit,” Daniel said. He grabbed a clamp out of his pack, and a retrac­tor. “Got to do a lit­tle spelunking.”

“In my leg?”

“Just lie back and think of Eng­land,” Daniel said. “Don’t pass out if you can help it.”

“I’m get­ting dizzy, Daniel.”

Daniel reached in with the retrac­tor and pulled the wound open. Patrick screamed and thrashed.

“Patrick! Keep still!”

“Fuck!” Patrick said through clenched teeth.

There was blood every­where, pump­ing hot over Daniel’s hands. But he could see where it com­ing from. He reached in with the clamp, and closed it over the artery.

“Shit!” Patrick said. “Fuck­ing Christ, that hurts!”

Daniel broke an ice pack and put it over the wound. “Hold that there as long as you can. I’ve stopped the life threat­en­ing bleed­ing, but we need to get you to an OR as soon as pos­si­ble.” He wrapped some ban­dages over the ice pack. “I’ll be right back.”

Daniel grabbed his weapon, jumped up and ran towards the gunfire.

*

Jack emp­tied his clip, ejected it, and slammed another one home. Oznael was off bal­ance from the con­tin­ued gun­fire, but he was heal­ing vis­i­bly. They had him backed up and pinned down, but Jack didn’t see how they were going to keep this going. As soon as they ran out of ammo, the demon would coun­ter­at­tack and it would be over. They needed a lot more prac­tice before try­ing to take one of these things down.

Jack heard another SMG open up behind him, and saw Daniel adding his fire­power. He was fir­ing in three-​​round bursts, focus­ing on the demon’s knees.

“Good think­ing!” Jack shouted. “Sandy, we need some heat!”

Sandy pulled back and reached behind him. He pulled out what was essen­tially a small flare attached to a plas­tic con­tainer of jel­lied gaso­line. It was a slightly more sophis­ti­cated ver­sion of a Molo­tov Cock­tail, in that it used napalm instead of gas or kerosene, but it would do the job. Sandy lit it and tossed it just above the demon. The flare ignited the napalm, which melted the plas­tic and rained down on the demon, In an instant, the demon was cov­ered in fire. Oznael turned and ran, faster than Jack thought pos­si­ble, for one of the ware­house exits.

“Won’t kill him,” Sandy said, “but it will take him out of com­mis­sion long enough for us to evac.”

“Let’s do it, then,” Jack said. Daniel already had a col­lapsi­ble stretcher unpacked and unfolded. They set about mov­ing Patrick to the stretcher as gen­tly as pos­si­ble, and then car­ried him to the near­est staircase.

The first bat­tle in the war against the demons hadn’t exactly been a rous­ing success.

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.

25: Turn­about Is Unfair Play

Kyung-​​Soon Cho smiled and nod­ded as the last cus­tomer left for the night. Shin was stand­ing by the door, smil­ing as well, and locked the door behind the man. He gave a lit­tle wave through the glass, and Kyung-​​Soon almost laughed. Her hus­band seemed so child­like, sometimes.

“Come now!” she said, turn­ing to face her two daugh­ters. They were clean­ing up, Leah was sweep­ing each aisle of their small gro­cery store, and Mary was fronting the shelves, mak­ing the stock look neat and orderly. “We need to get upstairs,” she said. “The news will be on soon.”

“It’s okay, Mom,” Leah said. “If they’d posted another video, I would have got­ten an alert on my phone.”

“Pah!” Kyung-​​Soon said.

“What?”

“You rely too much on your phone. You need to look around more often.” Kyung-​​Soon closed out the cash reg­is­ter and put the drawer in the safe. There would be time to bal­ance it in the morn­ing. She had to get upstairs.

“Come now, you heard your mother,” Shin said. “Let’s go upstairs and see what trou­ble your brother has got­ten into now.”

Kyung-​​Soon didn’t care much for her husband’s flip­pant tone, but she knew it was just his way of deal­ing with the issue. They’d only heard from Daniel that one time, and every other bit of infor­ma­tion about how he was came from the tele­vi­sion news, as they rebroad­cast the videos posted by that woman from Wash­ing­ton. Kyung-​​Soon didn’t care much for her, either, but at least the videos showed that her son was still alive. Right now, that’s all that mattered.

She and Shin shep­herded the girls upstairs, along the rick­ety stair­way that ran along the back wall of the build­ing. They got up to the top floor and flowed into their home. Kyung-​​Soon was proud of what she and Shin had been able to build for their fam­ily. Daniel, Leah and Mary hadn’t had all the newest toys and designer clothes grow­ing up, but they knew they were loved and they got solid edu­ca­tions. Leah was about to start law school in the fall, and Mary was on track to grad­u­ate high school with hon­ors. So how had things gone so wrong with Daniel?

“Turn on the tele­vi­sion,” Shin said, “I want to — “

Mary screamed.

“What is it?” Kyung-​​Soon said just as she saw the answer for her­self. Two men stepped out of their kitchen into the liv­ing room. They were wear­ing expen­sive suits as well as gloves.

“Who are you?” Shin demanded. “What are you doing here?”

“We’re here to send a mes­sage,” one of the men said. He walked up to Shin, reached out his hands and put them around Shin’s neck.

No…

With a crack far too loud for the room, the man let go and Kyung-​​Soon watched her hus­band of thirty-​​two years col­lapse to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

“No!” she screamed, and ran to the man. He back handed her across the face and she fell back.

“Girls!” she said, tast­ing blood, “Run! Downsta — “

The other man, who had walked behind her when she rushed the man who had ki — who had — her mind couldn’t com­plete the thought — the other man had walked behind her and locked the door.

“It wouldn’t be the right mes­sage if we let you go,” he said.

Mary started to cry, and Leah hugged her, telling her it would be all right, even though it was clear she knew as well as Kyung-​​Soon did that it wouldn’t be.

“If your son had stayed out of our busi­ness, this all could have been avoided,” the first man said.

Daniel…

“But now it’s too late,” the sec­ond man said. He took some kind of elec­tronic device out of his pocket, pointed it first at Sh — Shin, then at her, and finally at the girls. It’s a cam­era, Kyung-​​Soon real­ized. He’s film­ing us.

“Any last words?” he asked.

She held her hands together in front of her and began to pray.

“Our Father, who art in heaven,

Hal­lowed be thy Name.

Thy king­dom come.

Thy will be done,

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And for­give us our trespasses,

As we for­give those who tres­pass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from evil — “

“Yeah, about that,” the man said.

#

Daniel pulled the small carry on he’d brought over his shoul­der and trudged out of the Iraqi Air 737. He was already exhausted. They’d flown from JFK to Frank­furt, Ger­many, and then switched planes to fly down to Baghdad.

And now they were here. Almost halfway around the world from his par­ents in San Fran­cisco. Jeff and Susan fell in behind him, and he saw Jack strid­ing ahead like he just got up from a mas­sage and a nap. Daniel had noticed that while he and the other two “civil­ians” had grown more and more ragged over their jour­ney, Jack became more directed, more deter­mined, the closer they got to Iraq. They hadn’t been able to sit together on the flight, so Daniel hadn’t had a chance to ask the FBI man about his excitement.

No, Daniel thought, that was the wrong word. Jack wasn’t happy to be here. If any­thing, he was grim­mer than the rest of them. But there was some­thing there. A focus.

He also noticed that Jack was already on the phone. He remem­bered a com­ment in Frank­furt about Jack call­ing his “con­tacts” when they landed, but who did he know in Baghdad?

None of them had checked bag­gage, so they skipped bag­gage claim and went straight out to the street. Daniel expected to have to take a bus or some­thing to Najaf, where the Mosque of Imam Ali was located. It was a lit­tle over a hun­dred miles, accord­ing to Susan. Too far to take a cab.

Daniel saw Jack stop and exchange salutes with some US ser­vice­men in desert camo. Then Jack hugged one of them, and motioned them over.

“This is Cap­tain Bob San­darski, United States Army. He and his men will be escort­ing us to Najaf.”

San­darski, a burly man in his mid-​​thirties, reached out to shake Daniel’s hand. “You civvies can call me Sandy,” he said with a trace of south­ern drawl. “I’m only going to insist LT here calls me Cap­tain Sandarski.”

“LT?” Daniel said.

“Sandy was a but­ter bar back in ’03, when I was a First Lieu­tenant,” Jack said, adding with empha­sis, “and his com­mand­ing officer.”

“You get one. From now on it’s Cap­tain San­darski, G-​​Man.”

“Let’s get loaded up,” Jack said. “Hand your bags to the sol­diers, and we’ll get a move on. How’s traf­fic today, Captain?”

San­darski adjusted his cap. “Insur­gent trou­bles in Al Hillah,” he said. “Got High­way 8 blocked off both ways. We’re going to take 9 through Kar­bala, should be about three, maybe four hours ride to Najaf.”

“Let’s get a move on, then,” Jack said, ush­er­ing Daniel, Jeff and Susan to the two wait­ing Humvees. “I want to get there before dark.”

#

Stan Winchell switched tabs and checked his site stats again. Frig­gin’ amaz­ing. There was just no sub­sti­tute for vio­lence and con­tro­versy. Espe­cially if peo­ple had to come to his site to get it. He’d had to file a few DMCA take­down notices in the past week, keep the moochers from copy­ing his con­tent and using it to drive traf­fic to their own damn sites. He even made sure to water­mark the video with his site URL so it showed up even with the TV net­works rebroad­cast it, which they just couldn’t resist doing. His site traf­fic had sky­rock­eted this week and it just kept get­ting bet­ter. Ad buys were through the roof, and as soon as he could find some good off­shore tax shel­ters to keep the dough away from Uncle Sam, he was going to have a very good year.

He made a men­tal note to buy Susan a token of his appre­ci­a­tion. A sweater or something.

His other reporters were feel­ing the heat. He could tell. None of them had ever brought him any­thing this juicy. Well, the bar was raised, boys and girls. New Amer­i­can Cen­tury had hit the big time, and if they didn’t—

His com­puter beeped at him. It was his instant mes­sen­ger going off. I thought I had it set to Do Not Dis­turb, he thought. Weird.

He checked the flash­ing win­dow in his taskbar. It was from some ran­dom com­bi­na­tion of let­ters and num­bers, frig­gin spam­bot. He was just about to close it when he saw the message.

We warned you.

“Warned me? What the fu — “ He stopped. Some­thing was dif­fer­ent. Stan spent nearly all his time in his house. One of the ben­e­fits of work­ing from home, at least to him, was that he didn’t have to rub elbows with all the idiots out there unless he chose to, and he rarely chose to. But by nature of spend­ing that much time in his home, he’d grown finely attuned to it, would notice the slight­est change. He’d even put in a bunch of sound­proof­ing so he wouldn’t have to lis­ten to his idiot neigh­bors. And he knew some­thing was wrong. He didn’t need sci­ence poindex­ters to tell him the air pres­sure had dropped slightly, or that the tem­per­a­ture had gone up half a degree. He knew.

Some­one was in his house. Some­one other than him.

He looked at the screen again.

We warned you.

Nah, he thought, I’m just get­ting spooked by my own suc­cess. There’s nobody—

He heard a foot­step, behind him.

Stan turned around and saw a man stand­ing in his liv­ing room. The man wore a designer suit, cus­tom tai­lored from the looks of it. Snazzy, but not osten­ta­tious. And the man was wear­ing sur­gi­cal gloves.

Oh, this can’t be good.

“You don’t take direc­tion very well, do you, Mis­ter Winchell?”

The ques­tion was so out of left field Stan didn’t know how to answer it. He should have told the guy to get out of his house. He should have gone for the gun he kept under his desk. But all he could say was, “Um…”

“Well said,” the man said, and took a step forward.

The move­ment jarred loose what­ever had Stan’s brain in neu­tral. “Get back!” he said. “I have a gun!”

“Yes, your sec­ond amend­ment rights. Please, by all means, get it.”

What the fuck was this guy smok­ing? Stan reached down and grabbed the Smith & Wes­son he kept, loaded, of course, in a desk drawer. His bud­dies at the range pre­ferred Glocks, but he’d be damned if he was going to buy an Aus­trian gun. A good old-​​fashioned Amer­i­can Smith & Wes­son was good enough for him.

“Do you feel bet­ter?” the man asked. “More in control?”

Stan noticed the guy had an accent. Not much of one, but it was there, just behind the words. Sounded… what, Euro­pean? No. That wasn’t it.

“Yeah, now get the fuck out of my house!” Stan said.

The man smiled. “In good time, Mis­ter Winchell. After you are dead.”

“Fuck!” Stan said. He rec­og­nized the accent! It was fuck­ing Ara­bic! He fired the pis­tol, but the first shot went wide, over the guy’s shoul­der. Fuck­ing camel jockey didn’t even flinch.

“Your elo­quence astounds me, surely,” the man said. He still hadn’t gone for a weapon of his own. Didn’t this idiot towel head know what he was deal­ing with? Why is he still fuck­ing with me? Stan wondered.

“Would you care to try again?”

“You bet your ass, Abdul,” Stan said and fired again. This time he hit the bas­tard square, right in the cen­ter mass. Would have been a bull’s-eye on the range.

The fucker didn’t fall down.

In fact, he smiled. The bas­tard smiled! And then it dawned on Stan. Holy shit, this is one of them things Susan’s been film­ing! A…

A demon.

“There it is,” the demon said. “I can see it in your face. You know what I am, now?”

Stan nod­ded.

“And you know why I’m here?”

Again, Stan nodded.

“And, of course, you know you’re already dead.”

Stan nod­ded and dropped the pistol.

“Good,” the demon said. “Then we can begin, and take our time. You have much to atone for, Mis­ter Winchell. One of our kind hasn’t been killed in mil­len­nia. And now you will pay the price.”

His neigh­bors heard noth­ing when Stan started to scream.

23: The Fires of Hell

About an hour later, Jeff pulled into a ser­vice sta­tion near Eas­ton, Penn­syl­va­nia. They’d gone west on US 78, hop­ing to break the pat­tern of going north on I-​​95. About ten min­utes out from the hotel, the car had started miss­ing, the engine surg­ing in an odd way. Fig­ur­ing some­thing in there took a bul­let, they decided to get as far as they could, and it looked like the Lehigh Val­ley of Penn­syl­va­nia was it. They’d lost all of Jack’s weapons and armor, but they still had the sup­plies Jeff had packed in the trunk and of course, Susan still had her lap­top, the cam­era, and a video to post.

Jeff parked the car and popped the hood. Jack and Daniel peered into the engine com­part­ment. There was smoke just start­ing to bil­low up from some­where, now that they’d stopped.

“Oh, that doesn’t look good,” Jack said.

“Nope, not good at all,” Daniel said.

“What do you think?” Jack said. “Engine block?”

“Could be,” Daniel said. “Maybe one of the headers.”

Jeff walked along­side them and looked into the engine com­part­ment. “Do either one of you chuck­le­heads know a damn thing about cars?”

Jack and Daniel looked at each other, shrugged.

“Then step away from the vehi­cle, please!” He stuck his head deeper into the engine com­part­ment. Yep, there it was. Shit.

“Bul­let pierced the radi­a­tor, bounced around a bit, and hit one of the intakes. I can patch it up enough to get us a lit­tle fur­ther, but we ain’t get­ting out of the state unless we replace the engine or swap cars.” The doc­tor and the FBI agent nod­ded sagely, as if they’d been expect­ing that.

“Boys?” Susan said. “Let’s find a diner or some­thing with wifi. I need to get to work.”

Jeff shut the hood and they all fol­lowed Susan down the street. They hadn’t said much in the car, other than Jack’s sug­ges­tion to take 78, and they remained quiet as they walked through the muggy Penn­syl­va­nia night towards a neon sign promis­ing “EATS” and “INTERNET”. Man, truck stops have changed over the years, Jeff thought.

They got them­selves a table next to a power out­let and sat down. Susan had her lap­top plugged in and ready to go before the wait­ress even came by for their drink orders. Every­one ordered cof­fee. It was get­ting close to mid­night, and none of them had slept very well the night before.

Once they were all set­tled in, Daniel started. “Okay, so that sucked.”

Jack gave a sharp lit­tle laugh. “You could say that.”

“How’d he find us so fast?” Jeff asked.

“That was prob­a­bly my fault,” Jack said. “Paid for the piz­zas with my debit card. If their net­work is as far reach­ing as it appears, they prob­a­bly had some­body look­ing for me.”

“I’d put money on it,” Susan said. “They prob­a­bly have bots out on all of us by now.”

“Bots?” Daniel said. “Like robots?”

“Vir­tual robots, but yeah. Once you have access to the VeriSign or some other iden­tity clear­ing house for credit card trans­ac­tions, it doesn’t take much to set up a few auto­mated processes to watch for some­thing spe­cific, one of us using a credit card, say, and set­ting off an alert. I thought about men­tion­ing it at the time, but fig­ured they had no idea to be watch­ing Jack.”

“They’re clearly smarter and bet­ter orga­nized than any of us thought,” Jack said. “And now we’ve learned that the hard way. What do we still have?”

“Just what I have in the trunk of a dying car,” Jeff said. “My lap­top, a hunt­ing rifle, cou­ple of pis­tols, ammo, some blan­kets. Oh and a tire iron should we sink to that.”

“Great,” Daniel said. “Noth­ing like going after an ancient demon with a frig­gin’ club.”

“Espe­cially given that we know bash­ing his head in barely slows him down,” Jack said. “That was a good plan back there, Daniel, way to think on your feet.”

“It bought us one more day, if that. It’s only a mat­ter of time before he finds us again.” The wait­ress brought their food, var­i­ous omelets, and refilled their coffee.

“Still, it was good think­ing. I really expected blow­ing him up to work. I guess we’ve got to kick it up a notch.”

Jeff bit into his omelet. “Good luck with that, Emeril.”

“Besides,” Jack con­tin­ued, “we only had one more day any­way. Espe­cially after Susan posts again. By the way, how much did you get? On camera?”

“Upload­ing it now,” Susan said. “I watched it on the way here. It’s pretty choppy towards the end as we were try­ing to get to the car with­out get­ting shot, but I got a peach of a shot of Batarel stand­ing in the door frame. And I’m sure my edi­tor Stan will be flog­ging this for every cent he can milk out of it. It’ll get around.”

“Good,” Jack said. “We’re going to need that.”

“Why?” Jeff asked.

“Because tomor­row, or later today, depend­ing on how you look at it, is our last shot. After that, our best bet is to turn our­selves in to the FBI. I think I can get you put into pro­tec­tive custody.”

Jeff snorted. “You just saw how deep their net­work of infor­mants goes, their so-​​called ‘min­ions.’ Don’t even try to tell me the feds aren’t compromised.”

“At this point,” Jack said, “I’m inclined to agree with you. Which is why turn­ing our­selves in is such a good idea. It’s the per­fect lure. I have a few peo­ple I can trust implic­itly, help me lay the trap.”

“With us as bait,” Daniel said.

“What bet­ter bait do we have?” Jack asked. “We know Batarel won’t give up. How bet­ter to ensure he attacks on our terms?”

“There’s some­thing I don’t get,” Susan said. “If he’s intent on killing us because he’s try­ing to get us out of the way, make us dis­ap­pear, isn’t it already too late? I mean, every video I post proves their existence.”

“Only to folks like Jeff, Susan,” Jack said. “Peo­ple who already believe. No offense.”

“None taken,” Jeff said.

“To peo­ple who are inclined to believe these things can’t hap­pen, like I was, and Daniel was, until last week, your videos still look like a stunt. Spe­cial effects magic. Most of the net­works are spin­ning them that way. The amaz­ing inter­net prank that has Hol­ly­wood jeal­ous. If we all dis­ap­pear, the whole thing fades away, even now.”

“So how do we prove it?” Daniel asked.

“We don’t dis­ap­pear, for starters,” Jack said. “And we have a bet­ter chance of that in pro­tec­tive cus­tody than we do run­ning around on our own. Even if they have some­one on the inside, they’[ll have to fight their way through a bunch of FBI agents. Safety in numbers.”

“And how do we know you’re not going to just turn us over to your bud­dies in Home­land Secu­rity and ship us off to Gitmo?” Jeff asked, point­ing his fork for emphasis.

“Jeff, are you seri­ous? What about the last twelve hours, man? I’m as far off the reser­va­tion as you are by now. But this is our best shot.”

“I say we do it,” Susan said. “Let’s just get it over with. I’m tired of running.”

“Do it,” Daniel said. “But be care­ful. Make sure you turn us over to the right people.”

“I’ll call my boss first thing in the morn­ing, have him come out here to meet us per­son­ally. And I won’t tell him exactly where to meet us until he gets here. Safe enough?”

“Yeah,” Jeff said. “That should work. I’m still not thrilled to be at the ten­der mer­cies of the FBI, but it beats the alternative.”

“Okay,” Daniel said. “All that’s left now is to find a place to sleep, and then an emer­gency fall back just in case Batarel finds us first.”

“Hey, Susie?” Jeff said. “Can you bring up where we are in Google Maps?”

“Sure, hang on.” After a moment, she turned the lap­top to Jeff.

He moused around for a minute, then said, “I’ve got just the place.”

#

The next morn­ing Jack got up at six, even with­out his phone to wake him up. Habit, the thought. He and Daniel had slept on the floor, ced­ing the beds in their room to Susan and Jeff. They were in a motel across Route 22 from Lehigh Inter­na­tional Air­port, and just down the road from Beth­le­hem Steel, where Jeff thought they could make a stand against Batarel if need be. The nan­otech­nol­ogy in his blood might be able to over­come a grenade, but Jack didn’t see how it was pos­si­ble Batarel could sur­vive being burned/​melted in molten steel. Noth­ing liv­ing could with­stand that.

Jack took a shower and then put on the same clothes he’d been wear­ing for two days. They’d need to get a change of clothes for every­one later, maybe they could dart over to the mall and do that while he was wait­ing for Lou to get here. He snuck out the door, the other three still sleep­ing off the adren­a­line of the night before.

He walked a cou­ple miles down the road, happy for the quiet morn­ing exer­cise. Besides, he wanted to con­serve what few miles the car had left. He finally stopped at a con­ve­nience store, bought him­self some junk food for break­fast and eyed the ancient pay phone mounted outside.

It was an old model, strictly coin oper­ated, no card slot. Hell, he fig­ured he was lucky to find a pay phone at all any­more. Thank God for small towns, he thought. Beth­le­hem was prob­a­bly just big enough to be called a city, but not by much. A lot in this town prob­a­bly hadn’t changed for twenty years or more. Good, that was exactly what they needed. Big enough to hide in, old fash­ioned enough to stay mostly off the grid.

He picked up the receiver and dialed the oper­a­tor. He said he’d like to make a col­lect call, and gave the oper­a­tor — well, the com­puter act­ing as the oper­a­tor — Lou’s direct office line. His boss was sure to be in the office just a bit after seven.

“You have a col­lect call from,” the recorded voice said, then “Jack Har­ris” in his own voice. “Do you accept the ch — “

“Yes!” Lou shouted.

“I’m sorry,” the robot con­tin­ued, “I didn’t get that. You have a col­lect call from…” Jack sup­pressed a laugh for a minute as Lou tried to get the robot to under­stand what he was say­ing. Finally, it sank in and the robot dropped off the call.

“Jack, where the fuck are you?” What was pretty abrupt for Lou, he must be under a lot of pres­sure. Poor guy. Jack won­dered who had tried to kill him recently. Prob­a­bly not an immor­tal demon. Those were rare.

“Good to talk to you too, Lou.”

“Cut the shit, Agent Harris.”

“I have Cho and his asso­ciates. I also have a damn inter­est­ing story about what they’re run­ning from. If you’ve read Hick’s lab reports, you know what I’m talk­ing about. I want all four of us put in pro­tec­tive cus­tody, and I want it done today.”

“What you’re going to do, Agent Har­ris, is arrest the sus­pects and trans­port them back to DC for trial.”

“I don’t think you’re lis­ten­ing, Lou. We’re doing this my way. I’ll explain myself to the direc­tor after the fact if need be. But I want you to fly into Lehigh Inter­na­tional Air­port today and come get us. I’ll tell you where specif­i­cally when you get here. We’re play­ing this safe and by the book, Lou.”

“By the book is you get­ting your ass back to DC as you have been ordered!”

“Not in a pro­tec­tive cus­tody case, and you know this. Don’t fight me on this Lou.”

“I am your supe­rior offi­cer!” Lou was pissed. Jack thought Lou must be in deeper with his neb­u­lous con­tacts on the Hill than Jack thought.

“And I’m doing this by the book, sir. I require the assis­tance of my direct supe­rior to estab­lish pro­tec­tive cus­tody for mate­r­ial witnesses — “

“Sus­pects!”

“ — in a ter­ror­ism inves­ti­ga­tion. Now you don’t want your reluc­tance to pro­vide such assis­tance to become a mat­ter of pub­lic record, do you?”

“Are you black­mail­ing me, Agent Harris?”

“No sir, merely request­ing that you do your job, and by the book. Sir.”

The line went silent, and Jack knew Lou was just stew­ing in being put over a bar­rel. He’d buy the guy a few beers later and smooth it over. After this was all taken care of. Lou would real­ize Jack was just play­ing hard­ball. Hap­pened all the time in DC.

“I’ll be on the first plane out,” Lou said. “Don’t fuck with me on this, Jack.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, sir. I’ll call your cell this after­noon to vec­tor you in. See you when you get here.” Jack hung up the phone.

Hadn’t gone as smoothly as he’d hoped, but the plan was in motion. He started walk­ing back to the motel.

#

“Let’s get a move on, kids,” Jeff said.

They’d packed every­thing into the trunk of the Crown Vic, and Jack took one more look around the motel room. With any luck, this would be the last one they’d see, and their nor­mal lives, plus fed­eral pro­tec­tion, could begin tomorrow.

They walked out to the car, and all breathed a sigh of relief as it started. Daniel was in the back seat with Susan, who was film­ing the whole jour­ney. Jeff handed a cell phone to Jack, rid­ing shot­gun. “Hang on to this, it’s the last dis­pos­able cell I have.”

Jeff put the car in gear and they drove south a cou­ple miles, turn­ing into the park­ing lot of Beth­le­hem Steel. Jeff pulled around to the load­ing docks and parked the car out of the way, but with a clear view of both the entry to the park­ing lot and the open doors of the steel mill. They all hoped they wouldn’t have to force their way in there, but that was all a mat­ter of who showed up first, Batarel or Lou Gottlieb.

“Okay,” Jeff said. “We’re here. You think he’s in town yet?”

“Only one way to find out,” Jack said. He dialed the phone.

Lou picked it up halfway through the first ring. “Hello?”

“Good to hear your voice, Lou,” Jack said. “Flight was okay?”

“Let’s not drag this out, Agent Har­ris. I’m here. Where the fuck are you?”

Wow, still mad, Jack thought. “We’re at Beth­le­hem Steel, around back by the load­ing dock. Do you need directions?”

Lou hung up.

“Huh,” Jack said. “He’s still really angry.”

“Should we be wor­ried?” Susan said.

“I doubt it,” Jack said. “I’m wor­ried, but more because after this I still have to work for the guy. You guys should be okay.”

They sat there and watched the work­ers on the load­ing docks for a few min­utes, as they offloaded steel I-​​beams onto flatbed eigh­teen wheel­ers. “How much do you think one of those weighs?” Jeff said.

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “It’s got to be tons, because they need that crane to move them.”

Finally, they saw a sedan pull around the side of the build­ing and head towards them. It looked like a bland rental, but there was some­thing off about it—

“Get out of the car,” Jack said. “Now. Jeff, pop the trunk.”

They scram­bled out and Jack ran to the back, where he started pass­ing out firearms.

“What’s going on?” Daniel asked. “Is that your boss?”

“Yes, but he’s not alone.”

They peeked around the car and watched as Lou parked the car directly in their way, block­ing any attempt they made to drive out with the whole width of his vehi­cle. The dri­ver side was closer to them, and they saw Lou get out. Jack noticed that his boss was also hold­ing a sidearm, his FBI-​​standard 10 mm automatic.

The pas­sen­ger opened his door, got out, and stood up to face them. It was Batarel. His face was still burned from the explo­sion the night before, but a lot of his hair had already grown back. His suit, as always, was spotless.

“I’m going to need you to turn over the sus­pects, Jack,” Lou said. He was prob­a­bly a good fifty meters away, giv­ing him reac­tion time to get back in the car and ram them if they tried to make a break for it. Also too far away for any kind of accu­racy with a pis­tol shot.

Jack watched as Batarel stepped around the car to stand next to Lou. “What’s going on, Lou?”

“Jack, just do as you’re told for once.”

Jack aimed his pis­tol at Batarel, then hissed to Jeff, Daniel and Susan, “When I dis­tract them, run like hell for that load­ing dock. Got it?”

None of them said any­thing, and Jack wasn’t about to take his eyes off the demons, but he saw move­ment in his periph­eral vision he decided to inter­pret as nodding.

“Jack, this is your last chance,” Lou said. “This doesn’t have to get messy.”

“Look at your pal, there, Lou. It’s way past messy.”

Jack heard sirens. Of course, Lou would have called in the locals. That set­tled it. He took care­ful aim, and fired twice at Batarel. A puff of red mist as the demon was knocked back over the hood of the rental car told him he’d hit at least once.

“Run!” Jack screamed, and they all hauled ass for the load­ing dock. Jack peaked over his shoul­der just once to see Lou already back in the car, prob­a­bly call­ing for more backup, the demon run­ning straight for them, and the first of the local police cruis­ers pulling into the park­ing lots, sirens and lights going.

Why did I even think this was going to be easy? Jack wondered.

Daniel and Susan helped Jeff up on to the load­ing dock, and Jack hur­ried them past the con­fused work­men into the steel mill. One of them, a fore­man by the looks of him, made a half hearted attempt to stop them.

“You can’t go in there!” he said.

Jack flashed his ID. “FBI! Need to bor­row this!”

He grabbed the con­trols of the crane and swung the arm out wide, work­ers duck­ing for cover. The three ton I-​​beam jolted out and hit Batarel square, knock­ing the demon through the air.

“You just killed that man!” the fore­man shouted.

“Don’t worry,” Jack said as he ran into the build­ing, “he’ll get up.”

#

Daniel ran, half guid­ing, half drag­ging Jeff along with him. Susan was still film­ing, aim­ing behind them at the chase as much as she looked where she was going. All Daniel saw around them was gray. Indus­trial con­crete, steel pipes, every­thing gray. But he didn’t need to see what he was look­ing for. As they had dis­cussed the night before, he was fol­low­ing the heat.

They rounded a cor­ner and Daniel heard a gun­shot behind them, and then another in answer. They bet­ter find it soon, because—

There! He saw an orange glow ahead, and the heat increased. They raced into the fur­nace room, and Daniel saw a huge basin in the mid­dle of the room, the source of the glow and the heat. Molten steel. He dragged Susan and Jeff for­ward and shoved them towards a metal stair­case that led to scaf­fold­ing above.

“Get them!” shouted Jack’s boss, what­ever his name was. Jack ran into the room just in front of the cops and scram­bled up the stairs after them.

“Keep going!” Jack said. “He’s right behind me!”

Daniel kept the oth­ers mov­ing. The stair­case opened out onto a cat­walk that went across the room above the steel. Daniel could feel intense heat up here, and saw the steel­work­ers below clear­ing out as more cops entered the room.

Then, across the cat­walk, he saw four uni­formed offi­cers block­ing their way. Jack came right up behind them, more cops and his boss right on his ass.

They were trapped.

“Okay, this could have gone bet­ter,” Jack said.

“That’s not encour­ag­ing,” Daniel said.

“We’re not sunk yet.”

“Could have fooled me.” Daniel saw the cops clos­ing in on them from both sides.

“Let me through!” Daniel saw Batarel push his way between the uni­formed offi­cers behind Jack’s boss, who turned to try to pla­cate him.

“It’s okay, sir, we’ve got them,” he said. “They won’t bother you anymore.”

“I know they won’t,” Batarel said, and pushed past him. “Because you’re going to shoot them.”

“You can’t shoot us!” Susan said, still film­ing, bless her. “Not with all these cops here!”

“All the bet­ter fir­ing squad, Miss Richard­son. “And then we can just dump the bod­ies in the steel. You’ve actu­ally solved my prob­lem for me.”

“Let me take this,” Daniel whis­pered to Jack, and stepped between the rest of them and Batarel.

“Ah, Mis­ter Cho. I think you’ll go last. I want you to suffer.”

“Do these cops know what you really are, Batarel?” Daniel said. “Do they know who they’re work­ing for?”

Batarel walked to within a few inches of Daniel, and Daniel could smell a faint odor of cooked meat. Up close, he could see the burn scar­ring in more detail, and if he con­cen­trated, could actu­ally see it heal­ing before his eyes.

“Of course they don’t, Cho,” Batarel whis­pered. “And they won’t believe you no mat­ter what you tell them. But Assis­tant Direc­tor Got­tlieb knows who I work for. He couldn’t wait to hand you over to me.

“And now,” Batarel said loud enough for the police to hear him, “you will be shot as the ter­ror­ist trai­tors you are.”

“There’s just one prob­lem, Batarel,” Daniel said.

“And what’s that?”

“This!” Daniel said, as he dropped to a crouch and made as if to sweep Batarel’s knees. When the demon lunged to the side to avoid the attack — tak­ing him right up against the cat­walk rail­ing — Daniel came up under the demon, grab­bing him by his suit, and pitched him over the railing.

The demon screamed on the way down before pitch­ing into what looked to Daniel like the fires of Hell. The scream­ing changed into a high keen­ing sound as the clothes flash ignited and Daniel could see the flesh lit­er­ally falling from Batarel’s bones. In sec­onds, it was over. There was noth­ing left.

“I wasn’t sure that would work,” Daniel whispered.

Jack put his gun down on the cat­walk, and motioned for the rest of them to do the same. He turned to his boss.

“You sure you want to shoot us, Lou?”

Jack’s boss was still star­ing into the steel, like he couldn’t believe what had just hap­pened. He appar­ently accepted immor­tal demons run­ning Wash­ing­ton DC, but actu­ally killing one, that gave him pause.

“Lou?” Jack said.

Jack’s boss cleared his throat. “Ar — Arrest them,” he said. “They’ll be remanded over to fed­eral custody.”

The police moved in, and Daniel didn’t resist being handcuffed.

22: New Jer­sey Is The Bomb

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

All accord­ing to plan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You may speak,” Batarel said.

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

“How’d they die?” Jack asked.

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

“Inter­est­ing. Any indi­ca­tion that they had kids?”

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fuck you,” Susan said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19: Elec­tro­cu­tion in Philadelphia

[scene with Jack try­ing to con­vince the Philly PD that no, really, he’s chas­ing a ter­ror­ist, not just assault­ing neigh­bor­hood dogs; cops leave Jack to his own devices]

#

Daniel stood next to the power sta­tion. It was fully night, now, and they had no idea where Batarel was. He should have found them by now.

“Any sign of him,” he said into the walkie talkie.

“Noth­ing here,” Jeff said.

“Noth­ing here either,” Susan said.

Daniel was start­ing to think this was a dumb idea. What made them think they could make an immor­tal walk into a tra—

“Cho.”

He knew that voice by now and it stopped him cold. He was here. But still, Daniel couldn’t see him. He had to be just beyond the edge of the lights.

“Batarel.”

The demon didn’t reply, so Daniel couldn’t deter­mine the loca­tion from the sound.

“He’s here!” Daniel said into the walkie talkie. As soon as he spoke, a knife flew at his head from the dark.

“Shit!” he said, drop­ping and rolling away. He heard Jeff and Susan run­ning towards him just as he saw Batarel step out of the dark­ness. Some­how he wasn’t sur­prised to see that the demon was walk­ing into a fight with them while wear­ing another designer suit.

He heard a bang as he was get­ting up, and saw a bright red hole appear in Batarel’s shirt. The demon didn’t even slow down.

“This is even more pathetic than the last attempt,” Batarel said. “I take it this is an elab­o­rate ruse to elec­tro­cute me? Let me get that out of the way.” He walked over to one of the tow­ers, hopped up to the low­est run, a good ten feet off the ground, and climbed until get to a live wire. Look­ing back down to make sure they were still watch­ing, he reached out and grabbed the wire in his hand.

Sparks shot a hun­dred feet in the air and Daniel heard thun­der­ing bangs from the capac­i­tors behind him. The lights went out, and Daniel could see that all the house­lights were out in all the nearby houses.

Batarel dropped back to the ground, charred and still smok­ing. What was left of his hair was stick­ing straight out, and his suit was in tat­ters. But in spite of that, he was smiling.

“My turn,” he said. He snapped a leg out and caught Daniel in the mid­sec­tion, knock­ing the wind out of him and throw­ing him back­wards a dozen feet.

Jeff brought up a shot­gun and unloaded in the demon’s chest. “Susie, get in the car!” he said. Susan was stand­ing just off to the side, get­ting it all on camera.

The demon grabbed the shot­gun out of Jeff’s hand and hit him across the jaw with the stock. “There’s no need for that,” Batarel said. “You’re not get­ting away this time.”

Daniel rushed him, and fell to the ground again as the demon eas­ily side­stepped him. “We’re not doing this again,” Batarel said. “But I’m not about to make it quick and easy, either. Not after the trou­ble you’ve caused me.”

The demon turned the shot­gun around and aimed it at Susan. Daniel was just ris­ing to his feet when he heard the shot.

#

Jack looked down the bar­rel of his pis­tol, cordite pun­gent in the night air. Instead of drop­ping from the ten mil­lime­ter slug in his back, Hen­driks turned around, almost casually.

“A new face!” he said. “Or, wait, I know you. Didn’t I kill you last night?”

“Drop the weapon freak!”

“Or what, offi­cer? All you’ve done is ensure you share their fate.”

Jack fired again, this time a head shot. The back of Hendriks’s skull exploded in a red mist, and Jack could clearly see through the hole as the man raised his shot­gun in return.

“Oh shit,” Jack said as he dove for the ground. He actu­ally felt the pel­lets pass by over his back.

“Hey, Batarel.” Cho said. Jack looked up to see Cho swing­ing a fuck­ing Samu­rai sword with one hand at the demon, chop­ping off the arm hold­ing the shot­gun just below the shoulder.

“Oh,” Hen­driks said. “You’re going to pay extra for that.”

Jack got back up and shouted at Cho. “Stand back!” As Cho hopped away, he emp­tied a clip into Hendriks’s cen­ter mass. With the man’s back turned, to him, he could actu­ally see the hole in the back of his head seal­ing up. The brain expand­ing to refill the cranium.

What in the holy fuck is this? Jack thought. He’d seen perps on PCP or meth shake off what should have been dis­abling wounds. He’d seen men in Iraq crawl to safety miss­ing limbs. But he’d never seen any­one who could do—

“Head’s up, Agent Har­ris!” Cho said as he swung the sword again, aim­ing to sever the head from the neck. This time Hen­driks ducked, and the sword only caught his hair, skim­ming across the scalp. Hell, Jack thought, even that should have hurt enough to put him down.

From his lower stance, Hen­driks lashed out with a kick that caught Cho squarely in the cast. Cho went down screaming.

The old man had got­ten back up, and lev­eled an auto­matic at Hen­driks. “Susie, I ain’t telling you again. Get in the damn car!” He emp­tied a clip in Hen­driks, which knocked him back just enough for Frankel to get Cho’s arm over his shoul­der. “We’re bug­ging out, girl! Get!”

Richard­son ran past Jack. “Sorry, Agent Har­ris!” she said.

Jack slapped another clip into his pis­tol and started fir­ing at Hen­driks again, just try­ing to keep him off bal­ance. He wasn’t aim­ing for cen­ter mass now, but try­ing to take out kneecaps, hit the shoul­der and spin him around, any­thing to buy time.

Frankel and Cho limped past him. “Much obliged, sir,” Frankel said.

This is, with­out a doubt, Jack thought, the weird­est night I’ve ever had.

He could hear sirens in the dis­tance, faint red and blue lights vis­i­ble in the black­out. “You can’t leave me here with him!” he said. He heard Richard­son fire up the Crown Vic he’d seen com­ing in.

“Sorry, Agent, but we don’t have much choice!” Frankel said, eas­ing Cho into the back seat. “Sounds like help’s on the way, though!”

The door shut, Jack popped another cou­ple rounds into Hen­driks, and the Crown Vic pulled away, lights off and nearly invis­i­ble in the black­out. They were using him, and his gun­fire, as a dis­trac­tion to slip past the police. He had to give them credit, they were resou—

Hen­driks leapt at him and Jack fired another shot as he dodged. But Hen­driks wasn’t attack­ing him. He was just vault­ing over him and try­ing to chase down the Crown Vic on foot. And until they shifted into third, he had a shot at it.

The sirens were much closer now, and Jack didn’t want to try to explain this. He slunk off into the night him­self, going the oppo­site way he’d seen Hen­driks run. No sense tempt­ing fate.

18: Mother and Invention

“Have you seen this man?” Jack asked. He was in a diner just off Inter­state 95, the four­teenth such diner he’d stopped at that after­noon. On the the­ory that they had gone north on 95 from DC to Bal­ti­more, he just kept going north, stick­ing to cities big enough for Richard­son to mask her sig­nal if she tried to upload another video. He was stopped in south Philly and start­ing to think he was work­ing a dead end. Maybe they headed west instead.

“That guy?” the host­ess said.

“Yes, ma’am, the man in this pic­ture.” Who else would I be talk­ing about? Jack thought.

“Yeah, now that you men­tion it, I seen him,” she said. “He was in here with some geezer and a brunette for lunch. Took up a cor­ner booth for two hours, thought we’d never turn that over.”

“He was here?” Great, now it was his turn to ask stu­pid ques­tions. He hadn’t got­ten much sleep.

“Yeah. They took off after the chick started mak­ing a scene, yelling at the geezer. Thought I’d have to sep­a­rate them, but they left just after.”

“Did you see which way they went?”

“Nah, once they went out­side Bert dropped a tray of orders and we had to clean stuff up.”

“Thank you,” Jack said.

“So,” she said. “Is there some kinda reward for information?”

He flashed her his ID. “Just the thanks of a grate­ful nation, ma’am.”

“Yeah, that and a buck fifty’ll get me a cup of coffee.”

Jack walked out the door and was about to call Dante just as his phone rang. It was Dante.

#

“Daniel! Oh my God, son, where are you?”

“I can’t tell you that, Mom. I just wanted you to know I’m okay.”

“Daniel, there were FBI men here yes­ter­day.” Daniel imag­ined her stand­ing in the stock­room of the store she and his father ran in Oak­land. It was just a neigh­bor­hood gro­cery store, lit­tle more than a con­ve­nience store with pro­duce, really, but it had been his home grow­ing up. His fam­ily lived above the store and Daniel and his sis­ters had all spent as much time there as they had in school. That was where his par­ents had drilled into him the unlim­ited promise of Amer­ica, the drive to excel and the work ethic that got him through med­ical school and work­ing as an ER surgeon.

For all the good that did him.

“I know, Mom.”

“Daniel, they said you were a ter­ror­ist.” She nearly hissed the word, pro­nounc­ing it with vehe­mence she usu­ally reserved for Kim Jong Il.

“I’m inno­cent, Mom.”

“Then why don’t you turn your­self in?”

“It’s com­pli­cated, Mom.”

“Pah!” she said. “It’s not so com­pli­cated. You did noth­ing wrong, you turn your­self in. Your father, he wor­ried about you.”

Wow, Daniel thought. Her gram­mar didn’t start to slip unless she was really upset. His mother took great pride in becom­ing flu­ent in Eng­lish, and worked very hard to speak it with­out much of an accent.

“I can’t tell you what’s going on,” Daniel said. “Not yet.”

“Why, Daniel? Why can’t you tell me?”

Because the FBI is almost cer­tainly record­ing this con­ver­sa­tion, Daniel thought. “I wish I could, but it’s going to have to wait until the next time I see you.”

“If you keep run­ning, they arrest you? When do I get to see you then?”

“I’m inno­cent, Mom,” Daniel repeated. “But there’s more to it than that.”

Daniel heard his mother sob, and instantly, his eyes began to well up. Shit, he thought.

“Daniel, please turn your­self in, so you can come home. It wasn’t your fault, that night at the hos­pi­tal. No one blames you. You don’t have to run so far.”

He couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t tell her that he was being chased by more than just the FBI. He couldn’t tell her that an immor­tal mon­ster was try­ing to kill him. He def­i­nitely couldn’t tell his mother, a devout Chris­t­ian, that he was being hunted by a demon from the Book of Enoch. So what could he do?

“I’ll be home as soon as I can,” Daniel said. “I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too, Daniel.”

He hung up.

#

“Talk to me, Dante,” Jack said.

“The tap on his parents’s phone paid off,” Dante said. “He called them.”

“Num­ber?” Jack asked.

“Didn’t tell us any­thing,” Dante said. “It’s a pre-​​paid disposable.”

“Dammit!” Jack said. How many of those did Cho have?

“But we were able to locate it.”

“And you didn’t start with that bit of infor­ma­tion why?”

“He’s in north Philade­phia,” Dante said. “In a res­i­den­tial neighborhood.”

“Any known con­tacts in the area?”

“None, but I’m not sure how much that means. If he was stay­ing with some­one, he could have used a land line.”

“Unless he knew we had a tap on his fam­ily line.”

“He’s a smart guy, sir. He prob­a­bly fig­ured that out. I’m think­ing that’s why he used a disposable.”

“So he’s not still talk­ing to them?” Jack asked.

“No sir, it was a short call. After he hung up he turned off the phone and we lost the lock on his loca­tion. I’m send­ing a tran­script of the call to you by email, and I’ve got the lab going over the record­ing to see if we can pull out any back­ground sounds that could give away what he’s up to”

“Good,” Jack said. “Let me know if he turns on the phone again.”

“Will do, sir.”

Jack hung up the phone and got in his car. He was close, and he was right about them com­ing up to Philly. He could get them today, tonight at the latest.

Only, some­thing had been nag­ging at him all day. What if Cho was right? Jack knew Cho had been right about some of it. He’d seen Hen­driks with his own eyes. Some­thing was going on that he didn’t under­stand. What was Hen­driks? Why was he try­ing to kill Cho? Was Cho right that he, Richard­son and Frankel wouldn’t be safe in fed­eral cus­tody? And how would Jack pos­si­bly explain what they needed to be pro­tected from?

He shook his head. None of that mat­tered right now. First, he had to cap­ture them. What hap­pened after that was for some­one else to decide.

He started the car and pulled into traffic.

#

Batarel checked his face one more time in the hotel bath­room mir­ror. The wound had healed, of course. It had healed before he even left Bal­ti­more. Some­thing still felt… off… some­how. Maybe it was just that that the annoy­ing lit­tle speck of a human had pushed him recently, forced him to regen­er­ate more than he had in a thou­sand years. Well, nearly a thou­sand years. That sec­ond Cru­sade was a bitch.

He ran his hand through gin­ger hair and sighed. Cho had no chance to kill him, but last night had almost been worse. To be cap­tured, and cap­tured with proof of his true nature stick­ing out of his God damn head, that was just too much to risk. It was worse than his death, because it threat­ened the cause. For­tu­nately, no one other than Cho and his com­pa­tri­ots sur­vived to tell the tale, and they’d be dealt with soon enough.

They’d bet­ter be. This was drag­ging on too long, and he wasn’t going to be able to dodge Zagiel much longer.

He strode into the liv­ing room and looked out the wide glass doors at the cityscape of Philadel­phia laid out in front of him. He was in a four star hotel, using one of his spare iden­ti­ties. It felt good to get out of the muck for a while, to treat him­self to a lit­tle lux­ury. He damned well deserved it.

He walked out on the bal­cony, let the sum­mer evening breeze brush past him. He couldn’t quite fig­ure why Cho was giv­ing him so much trou­ble. He’d learned some valu­able lessons from the expe­ri­ence, true. He knew he had to get bet­ter with firearms. He hadn’t really prac­ticed with a hand weapon since the cross­bow. And he needed to get bet­ter at online track­ing. He’d had absolutely no luck thus far in track­ing down Richard­son online, not in any way that would lead to her, and thus Cho’s, phys­i­cal loca­tion. And now he’d been thwarted in Bal­ti­more, he didn’t want to use his con­tacts in the Church here in Philadel­phia. It would not do for him to look weak, and no one talked like priests talked.

He knew they were here. He felt it. They’d stayed in major metro areas so far, never stop­ping for more than sup­plies in small towns or rural areas. They were stick­ing to I-​​95, head­ing relent­lessly north, like they were look­ing for some­thing. He wasn’t sure what that could be, and he was half tempted to let them find it.

But no. This had to end, and it had to be tonight.

#

“Penny for your thoughts,” Susan said.

Daniel was sit­ting on the hood of the car, watch­ing the sun set over west Philadel­phia. The sky was a beau­ti­ful mix of orange, red and indigo above. He turned and looked at her. “Peo­ple always say that,” he said. “But then you have to put your two cents in. Somebody’s mak­ing a penny.”

“Steven Wright,” Susan said. She’d heard that joke before.

“Yeah. Weird how stuff like that stays with us, even in times like this, huh?”

Susan hopped up on the hood next to him. “I’m sorry about the diner this morn­ing. I don’t know why I snapped like that — “

“You snapped because you were exhausted and ter­ri­fied. We all were. Still are, really. It’s okay, I prob­a­bly over reacted.”

“You didn’t. I could have got­ten us caught.”

“Well, you didn’t. And hope­fully, after tonight, it won’t mat­ter.” He reached down beside him and grabbed a pis­tol, one of the ones Jeff bought in Bal­ti­more. He pulled the top part back and it jerked for­ward with a “chickt” sound. He started mess­ing with some­thing on the side of it.

“Do you know how to use one of those?” Susan asked.

“I had a friend in col­lege who was a gun nut. He took me to the shoot­ing range a few times. I know how to fire a pis­tol, but my accuracy’s noth­ing to write home about.” He put the pis­tol down on the side away from her, and then picked up the sword he’d used in D.C. “Speak­ing of writ­ing, how’s that going?”

“I have a draft writ­ten about today and what we’re plan­ning to do. And I’ve got the cam­era ready for tonight, all the space freed up for new footage.”

“Good,” he said, inspect­ing the blade of the sword. “We need this doc­u­mented in as much detail as pos­si­ble. If Batarel isn’t the only one of his kind, the way Jeff says, then we need to know every­thing we can about how to destroy them.”

“Do you really expect to use that?” she said, point­ing to the sword.

“God, I hope not,” Daniel said. “It’s really not designed to be used one-​​handed, and I can’t hold it with my left hand [make sure the break and cast is on Daniel’s left arm]. But it was effec­tive in slow­ing him down a cou­ple nights ago — “

“Oh my God,” Susan said.

“What?” Daniel said. He put the sword down and grabbed the gun again.

“No, nothing’s wrong,” she said. “I just can’t believe that was only two nights ago. Four nights ago I was in my own bed, try­ing to fig­ure out how to track you down for an inter­view. It seems like a lot longer.”

Daniel put the gun down and laughed. “Yeah, and less than a week ago, I was just some nobody para­medic try­ing to dis­ap­pear. Now I’m a nobody para­medic try­ing not to get killed by an immor­tal demon. It’s been a rough week.”

Susan started laugh­ing, and she found she couldn’t stop. Once she started snort­ing, Daniel broke out laugh­ing too, and before long they were both dou­bled over on the hood of the car, try­ing to catch their breath.

Jeff walked up from behind the car, where he’d being going over their sup­plies in the trunk. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

This got Susan and Daniel going again in a whole new bout of laughter.

It was a nice moment. It would be quite a while until they laughed again.

#

“We’ve got him, Agent Harris.”

Jack strug­gled to fit the ear­bud in his ear so he could talk with­out hold­ing the phone up to his ear as he drove. “Where?”

“Feed­ing the GPS coor­di­nates to your car now. He just turned on the phone, but he hasn’t placed a call yet. He’s not mov­ing either. It’s another res­i­den­tial neigh­bor­hood, not far from the other one,” Dante said.

“So they’ve set up a base of oper­a­tions here, but he moved away from it to call his par­ents? Why would he turn it on now and stay still?”

“I don’t know, sir. Looks like you’re about three miles away.”

Jack accel­er­ated and hoped for the best. If he was lucky, he’d catch them unawares. “Talk me in, Dante.”

Dante relayed instruc­tions to him, which matched the lit­tle arrow on the GPS screen in his dash­board. He still wasn’t used to fol­low­ing those and keep­ing his eyes on the road at the same time. The depart­ment just got them six months ago. Finally, Dante directed him onto a res­i­den­tial street.

“He’s four houses up, sir, but that’s about all we can tell. It looks like he’s on the left side of the house, but that’s well within the mar­gin for error in the GPS triangulation — “

“Got it Dante, thanks. Can you get a posi­tion off my phone?”

“How do you think I’ve been direct­ing you, sir?”

“Right. Okay, I’m parking.”

“You’re right in front of the house. My best guess is that he’s in the back yard on the left, but again — “

“Mar­gin of error. Right. Okay, I’m going in.”

Jack got out of the car, strapped on his bul­let­proof vest read­ing “FBI” in huge yel­low let­ters, and then started in. “You’ve got backup vec­tored in on my posi­tion?” he whis­pered into the phone.

“Com­ing in silent, but yes, local PD is on the way. They’ve been briefed on the situation.”

“Who’s the homeowner?”

“Leroy Jenk­ins, no pri­ors. No evi­dence he’s ever even heard of Cho.”

Jack saw that around the left side of the house, there was a six foot wooden fence. The gate was pad­locked. “Pad­lock on the gate, but you say the cell phone is on the other side, right?” he hissed.

“Yes sir.”

“That’s prob­a­ble cause in my book.”

He looked for some­thing to help him climb. The next door neigh­bor had some steel garbage cans on the side of his house. That’ll do, Jack said. He pulled one of the cans over to the fence as qui­etly as he could. He stepped up on to it, then peeked into the back yard.

“Noth­ing there,” he told Dante.

“We’re still get­ting the sig­nal,” Dante said.

“Fine, I’ll get a closer look. How far off is that backup?”

“Five min­utes, maybe.”

Jack really didn’t want to risk los­ing them. “Going in alone. Radio silence until I say.”

He held on to the top of the fence with his left hand, and while hold­ing his pis­tol in his right hand, vaulted a leg up to the top of the fence. He rolled over the top and dropped to the grass on the other side. Care­fully, he stepped around the cor­ner of the house.

Simul­ta­ne­ously, he saw two things. One, he saw the phone, lying alone in the mid­dle of the yard, clearly tossed there. And two, he saw the two Rot­tweil­ers growl­ing at him from the patio.

And of course, Jack thought, they’re not on chains. Thanks, Cho.

#

[Some­how, they lure Batarel to the power sta­tion. Yes, I’m skip­ping a whole scene. I can do that, because this is a rough draft. And rough drafts be slip­pery, pre­cious, slip­pery indeed…]

16: No Harbor

Jack was stand­ing in the Bal­ti­more Police Chief’s office when his phone rang. He excused him­self and stepped out into the squad room.

“Go.”

“I’ve got good news,” Dante said.

“And bad news?”

“Nope, just good news this time. I know we can’t track Frankel’s spend­ing now that they’re using cash, but we can track other things. And one of those other things is boat rentals. Even if you’re pay­ing cash, you have to use an ID for those, and guess who just popped up.”

“Why in the hell would they rent a boat?”

“No idea, but they just pulled out of [what­ever the hell name of that cove was] a few min­utes ago.”

“I’m on it. Call the har­bor mas­ter and but out a BOLO on the RV from the video.”

“Yes sir.”

Jack hung up the phone and stepped back into the Chief’s office. There was no way they were get­ting past him this time.

#

Batarel stood on the pier and looked out over the water. The sun had almost set to the west, and the har­bor was black and still. He knew Cho was out there, and he could think of only one rea­son why they would have gone out for a plea­sure cruise, at night, in eel infested waters. They were try­ing to lure him out to them. Try­ing to make him chase them. Why else, after so care­fully mask­ing their move­ments, would Frankel sud­denly rent a boat in his own name? It was a trap.

Batarel smiled. This was actu­ally turn­ing into an enter­tain­ing hunt.

He stepped onto the boat the Arch­bishop had pro­cured for him, a small speed­boat, black and nearly invis­i­ble against the dark water. He didn’t know what they had planned for him, and he was sure it would be sim­i­larly inef­fec­tive to that stu­pid stunt with the sword, but that didn’t mean he had to lead with his face. He would play their game, but he would play it his way.

And he would win.

#

Daniel sat at the gun­wale the small deck of the skiff, scan­ning the water with the night vision gog­gles Jeff had come back with. So far, he’d seen noth­ing. They were drift­ing in the mid­dle of Bal­ti­more har­bor with their lights on, clear of the ship­ping lanes but still a good dis­tance off shore. They expected Batarel to find them, but they didn’t know how long that would take, or how he would approach. All they knew for sure was that he wouldn’t be able to shoot through the sand­bags lin­ing the gun­wales of the boat, and would have to board them if he wanted to kill them. And as soon as he did that, they’d have him.

“How’s it look, Danny?” Jeff said. He was sit­ting down on the deck, and couldn’t see over the gun­wales to the water. Susan sat next to him. They were straight­en­ing out a large cargo net, and rig­ging the cor­ners to long fiber­glass poles. The plan was sim­ple. Wait for him to board, cover him with the net, fill him full of lead, and then while he was heal­ing tie him up, attach the anchor and heave him over­board. But it only worked if Batarel made him­self vul­ner­a­ble by board­ing their boat.

“Noth­ing so far, Jeff” Daniel said with­out tak­ing his eyes off the water. “Are you sure he knows how to find us?”

“Danny, the immor­tals have agents every­where. They have their fin­gers dug into every aspect of human life, and noth­ing hap­pens with­out their notice. If they wanted to, they could have found out what you had for break­fast the morn­ing before the accident.”

Daniel looked back at Jeff and Susan, and caught Susan’s gaze. He knew about her doubts regard­ing Jeff, and to some extent, shared them. So far, every­thing Jeff at told them about the demons was true. But the guy ram­bled on with sim­i­lar con­vic­tion about Big­foot, gov­ern­ment con­spir­a­cies, alien abduc­tions and every­thing else Daniel remem­bered from The X-​​Files. And appar­ently there was a whole net­work of “seek­ers” out there. It couldn’t all be true. So where was the line? Was Jeff crazy or not? So far, they hadn’t fallen vic­tim to one of his delu­sions, but it was prob­a­bly only a mat­ter of time.

He con­tin­ued his scan of the water. The water was a dark green in the gog­gles, grainy and more choppy because of the dig­i­tal image than the water actu­ally was. It was hard to fil­ter out the dig­i­tal arti­facts from actual waves that might be the wake of Batarel’s boat. He didn’t hear any­thing, no tell­tale buzz of a motor, but he wasn’t sure he knew what to lis­ten for in the first place. And every so often, they were passed by a com­mer­cial freighter that churned up the water and drowned out every other sound.

Right on cue, Daniel saw another freighter com­ing their way, this one mak­ing it’s way in from the Atlantic towards one of the myr­iad piers of Bal­ti­more Har­bor. It was a big con­tainer ship, not nearly the size of an oil tanker, but stacked five high with ship­ping con­tain­ers stem to stern. It would miss them eas­ily, but the wake would rock them a bit. “Here comes another one,” he said.

Jeff and Susan put down the poles and braced them­selves. With their engine off, they were at the mercy of the cur­rents, and the wake of a big ship was an inter­est­ing ride. The ship passed them, and Daniel said, “Hang on.”

The first wave hit them just as they heard the growl of a motor. Daniel tried to raise his night vision gog­gles to see, but the boat was rock­ing too hard. Then they felt a sharp crack across the bow that left them all sprawl­ing on the deck. Some­thing had actu­ally hit them.

Daniel looked up to see Batarel stand­ing on the bow of their boat as the waves from the ship’s wake started to sub­side. “He’s — ” he shouted, then Batarel leaped over the wind­screen and landed admidst them, step­ping solidly on one of the fiber­glass poles.

“Did you really think this was going to work?” the demon said. “You humans are even more pathetic than I thought.”

“We’ve beaten you once already,” Susan said, lev­el­ing one of the hand­guns at Batarel.

“You what?” Batarel laughed. “You igno­rant cow. I’m here, aren’t I? About to end your igno­rant life?”

Susan fired.

The bul­let grazed the demon, but he reached out, grabbed the gun out of her hand any­way and tossed it over­board. “That was your one insult I’ll allow,” he said. “Now it’s time to end this and get on with my busi­ness. You’ve dis­tracted me enough.”

“I don’t think so!” Jeff said as he, hav­ing edged back behind Batarel, chucked one of the sand­bags into the small of the demon’s back. The demon went down to one knee, and Daniel leapt on top of him.

They wres­tled for a bit on the deck. Holy shit, this guy is strong, Daniel thought, as Batarel strug­gled to kick, punch or throw Daniel off of him. It was every­thing Daniel could do just to keep him—

“Arrggghhh!” the demon growled, and Daniel saw one of the K-​​Bar knives stick­ing through his tem­ple, Susan’s hand still on the haft.

“Why won’t you die?” Susan screamed at the demon.

Just then, they were bathed in white light. “What the — ” Jeff said, wheez­ing by the gunwale.

“This is the Bal­ti­more Police Depart­ment!” some­one bel­lowed over a bull­horn. “We have you sur­rounded. Every­one get to your knees with your hands behind your heads.”

“No,” Batarel growled. “I won’t have this. I will. Not. Have. This!” He abruptly stood up, and Daniel was too star­tled by the appear­ance of the police to stop him.

#

Jack was stand­ing in the wheel­house of one of the two Bal­ti­more PD patrol boats, one on either side of the skiff Frankel had rented, and what was left of a small black speed­boat that had appar­ently crashed into the skiff. The skiff was tak­ing on water from a ragged hole in the bow, and there looked like a strug­gle going on down on the deck. They didn’t seem to notice they were sinking.

“What the devil’s going on down there?” asked the police pilot.

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “They were all sup­posed to be together.” Was Frankel an unwill­ing hostage? That’s not how it looked on the video.

Sud­denly one of the sus­pects on the skiff stood up, and, what the hell? He had a K-​​Bar knife stick­ing out of his head. Jack didn’t rec­og­nize the ma—

No, he did rec­og­nize him. It was Hen­driks. The dead guy. Well, that explained the knife. If impale­ment and behead­ing didn’t kill him, what was a hunt­ing knife to the brain going to do?

Appar­ently, make him really angry. Hen­driks started to run and vaulted off of the skiff, bounced off the float­ing wreck­age of the speed­boat and on to the other patrol boat. One of the offi­cers opened fire on him, and—

And Hen­driks punched his fist through the officer’s chest, spray­ing the wheel­house with blood.

“For­get the skiff!” Jack shouted. “Take him out!” Offi­cers on his patrol boat brought their guns to bear and unloaded.

It didn’t even slow him down. Jack watched, futilely unload­ing his pis­tol at the man as he snapped the neck of another offi­cer, scaled the lad­der to the wheel­house in two strides and lit­er­ally ripped the head off the pilot. Then he jumped over the wind­screen onto the bow.

Where the machine gun was mounted.

Jack tried to match him, but landed badly, sprain­ing an ankle at the very least. Hendiks opened fire on his boat in long straf­ing slides, and it was all Jack could do to tilt his machine gun at the engines of the other patrol boat and fire off a quick burst before he was forced to dive off the deck into the chilly har­bor water.

#

Jeff swung the skiff around, painfully aware of its increas­ing list to star­board. They’d be lucky to make it all the way to shore, and he wasn’t sure how far could swim with one leg. He kind of blew his wad on that sand­bag, and was going to be hat­ing life in the morning.

Assum­ing, you know, he was still alive.

They had their lights off, mak­ing them harder to see, and they were run­ning the engine as light as they could. Jeff thought it took a stray bul­let some­where back there, and it was limp­ing along as it was. But Daniel wouldn’t let them make a bee line for shore.

“Almost there,” Daniel said.

The kid was reach­ing out into the water with one of the poles, the net still attached to its tip. He was try­ing to reach the FBI agent, who was float­ing in the cur­rent in a life jacket.

“Grab the net!” Daniel hissed into the dark. “We’ll pull you aboard.” They were nearly a hun­dred meters from Batarel, who seemed to be adrift on the one patrol boat that wasn’t sink­ing. Still within range of his machine gun, but he was still shoot­ing the sink­ing ship and hadn’t found them yet. Jeff had to squint, and sure and hell looked like the demon still had the knife in his head. Note to self, he thought. Stick­ing a knife in an immortal’s tem­ple just makes them really mad. Have to tweet about that.

Daniel started pulling on the pole, and Jeff cut the engine. He grabbed some of the rope and waited. Daniel kept pulling, with Susan steady­ing the pole behind him, until the kid reached over the gun­wale and grabbed the guy. He strug­gled to haul him over the gun­wale, and then they both fell down to the deck, the FBI guy cough­ing and sputtering.

Before the FBI guy could get up, Jeff leaned in and tied his hands behind his back. The fed tried to strug­gle, but he was clearly exhausted from keep­ing his head above water. Jeff had been depend­ing on that.

“Search him,” Jeff said. “I’m going to try to get us to shore before we sink.”

#

Susan watched as Daniel pat­ted down the FBI agent. He pulled out a think leather wal­let and tossed it to her. She caught it with one hand, film­ing with the other. She opened the wal­let and read the ID inside. “Spe­cial agent Jack Har­ris,” she said.

The FBI coughed again. “Yes, that’s me, and you peo­ple are com­mit­ing yet another felony by kid­nap­ping a fed­eral agent.”

“Oh, we’re not going to keep you long, Agent Har­ris,” Daniel said, now check­ing the man for injuries. “But my Hipo­cratic Oath kind of demanded we pull you aboard, didn’t it?”

“Why are you doing this, Cho?” the agent asked. “Why not just turn your­self in?”

Daniel laughed. “Are you seri­ous, Agent Har­ris? Did you see what Batarel did back there?”

“Who?”

“The man you know as Hen­driks. The man you now know isn’t really a man.”

“I know no such thing.”

“Please, Agent Har­ris. You’re an intel­li­gent guy. You have to be, in your job. And you just watch I guy you know should be dead three times over rip some cops apart with his bare hands and sink your boat. What part of that do you need me to explain to you?”

“Hen­driks isn’t my prob­lem,” Har­ris said. “You are.”

“Well, we should all have such prob­lems, Agent Har­ris,” Jeff said. “Right now, our prob­lem is try­ing to get to shore with­out sink­ing, and then try­ing to get out of here before Batarel remem­bers who he was really there to attack.”

“We impounded your camper, you know.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “I fig­ured as much. That’s why I moved every­thing of impor­tance to our alter­nate trans­porta­tion before we set out on the water.”

“You were busy today!” Susan said.

“I’m an old hand at this, Susie. I’ve had to stay one step ahead of these gov­ern­ment jack­booted thugs for a long time. I have con­tin­gen­cies on top of contingencies.”

“So what are you going to do with me?” Har­ris asked.

“We’re going to leave you safe and sound on the dock,” Daniel said, check­ing the ropes to make sure Har­ris wasn’t try­ing to keep them dis­tracted while he escaped, then start­ing to tie up Harris’s legs. “Really, Agent Har­ris, we’re not the bad guys.”

“That’s for the courts to decide,” Jack said. “Right now you’re fugi­tives and per­sons of inter­est in a ter­ror­ism inves­ti­ga­tion. You’ve already done enough that I could drop all three of you in Gitmo and for­get about you forever.”

“You’re not exactly help­ing your cause, Agent,” Jeff said.

“We’re not mur­der­ers and we’re not ter­ror­ists,” Daniel said. Susan was get­ting it all recorded, and just kept think­ing about how amaz­ing this was going to look online tomor­row. “I’m just a reg­u­lar guy try­ing to get back to my reg­u­lar life, and Susan and Jeff were both kind enough to throw their lives out of whack to help me. I already owe them a debt I can never repay. But we can’t turn our­selves in. You saw what we’re up against, what’s hunt­ing us. We’re safer left to our own devices, try­ing to kill it, than we would be with you. We know this, and if you think about it, you will too.”

Susan could see the pier. “We’re almost there,” she said.

“In more ways than one,” Jeff said.

Susan panned the cam­era to look out over the gun­wale, and was shocked to see that the water was only inches away from over­flow­ing into the pas­sen­ger compartment.

“Susie, put down the cam­era, hon, and start pad­dling,” Jeff said. “This is going to be close.”

“You could untie me and let me help,” Har­ris said.

“I don’t think so, Agent Har­ris,” Daniel said. “We’ll take our chances.” He grabbed the other fiber­glass pad­dle strapped to the gun­wale and they both pad­dled as hard as they could while Jeff coaxed every­thing he could out of the motor, which had begun to sput­ter badly.

Susan felt the boat bump up against the dock just as water started spilling over the sides.

“Every­body out!” Jeff said. He scram­bled onto the dock and helpded Daniel man­han­dle the agent onto the dock. Then Daniel turned, took her hand and guided her up just as the water went from a spill to a pour.

Susan pulled up her cam­era and cap­tured the boat’s last moments as it sank into the black water. “Good­bye, Mary Anne,” she said. “Thanks.”

“All right, let’s not get maudlin,” Jeff said. “Danny, check the ropes one last time.”

Daniel knealt down. “They’re tight, but I think he’ll keep the hands,” he said.

“Is that your pro­fes­sional opin­ion, Doc­tor Cho?” Har­ris said.

Daniel smiled, some­thing Susan didn’t see very often. “As a mat­ter of fact, it is,” he said. “Keep in mind what I said, Agent Har­ris. We’re just try­ing to sur­vive. You’re bark­ing up not only the wrong tree, but you’re not even in the right forest.”

“We’ll see about that,” Har­ris said.

“Good­bye Agent,” Daniel said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope I never see you again.”

And with that, Susan ran with Daniel and Jeff into the night.

15: Req­ui­si­tions

Jeff was almost done with his shop­ping. He liked Bal­ti­more, and wished he’d spent more time here over the years. They had the best crabs on the East­ern Seaboard, and he’d had a great lunch before he started shop­ping. He had most of the essen­tials for the plan he and Daniel had come up with while Susan wrote her arti­cle. He had blan­kets, net­ting, rope and a small anchor. He had all of these loaded into a col­lapsi­ble cart he used for shop­ping, and pulled it behind him as he headed to the last shop on his list.

He opened the door to the mil­i­tary sur­plus store and felt like he was home. Olive green and camo as far as the eye could see, along with the smell of beaten, often repol­ished leather.

“After­noon,” said the man behind the counter, fortysome­thing with a beer gut, but still a hint of mil­i­tary bear­ing. Prob­a­bly served dur­ing the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion. Jeff sup­pressed a shud­der. “Help you find anything?”

Jeff pulled his cart up to the counter. “Look­ing for a few things to round out a hunt,” he said. “Pre­fer to stick to what I know.” He didn’t want to be redi­rected to a WalMart.

“Sure thing, old timer. You in ‘Nam?”

“I was. ’67-’70.”

“I’m hon­ored to help, sir,” the clerk said. Jeff had seen these guys and reassessed his assump­tions. The clerk prob­a­bly never served, but not for lack of try­ing, and idol­ized peo­ple who did. He could use this.

“What’s your name, son?”

“Rus­sell, sir.”

“Rus­sell, I need two of the best K-​​bar knives you have.”

The clerk reached under the counter and pulled out two large knives, slightly curved blade on the bot­tom and ser­rated on top. The metal hafts were hol­low, and should con­tain a col­lec­tion of util­ity tools: matches, a wire saw, etc. The hilt was a small ball com­pass. Jeff picked up each blade and exam­ined them in turn. The edges were sharp, and well-​​maintained.

“These will do nicely,” Jeff said. “What do you have in rifles?”

“Over here,” Rus­sell said, and led Jeff over to a rack of “hunt­ing rifles” that were more com­monly used by snipers. Jeff picked through a few of them before find­ing a [viet nam era sniper rifle] that looked to be in good condition.

“I can pick this up today?”

“Yes sir. When’s your hunt­ing trip?”

“We’re leav­ing tonight, so this is kinda last minute,” Jeff said.

“I’m happy to help out, then,” Rus­sell said.

“What about hand­guns? As a last resort.”

Rus­sell looked like some­one just pantsed him. “Well, I have a few, of course, but you couldn’t just buy one. There’s a cool down period.”

Jeff tried to look as con­spir­a­to­r­ial as he could. “I won’t tell any­one if you won’t, Russell.”

“It’s not like that, sir,” Rus­sell said. “I really wish I could help you.”

Jeff looked down, feigned sur­prise and knelt down to tighten his shoelaces, mak­ing sure Rus­sell got a good long look at the steel he had instead of a shin­bone. “Sorry,” he said. “For­got to check the laces on this thing before I strapped it on.”

He stood back up, and saw that Rus­sel had gone pale. “Rus­sell, please. Help a vet out here. We’re hunt­ing black bear. You ever been on a bear hunt?”

“No sir.”

No sur­prise there, he’d prob­a­bly never been more than five miles out of city lim­its. “They can move fast, espe­cially when they’re hurt. I’m an old man, and well…” he knocked his knu­cles against his calf, and the metal­lic clang was uncom­fort­ably loud in the oth­er­wise empty store. “I need backup. In case that rifle doesn’t do the job.”

“Is there any way, maybe,” Rus­sell said, look­ing for a way out, “you could delay your trip for a few days?”

“Rus­sell, my buddy and I have been plan­ning this for a year, and already had to move it up. The chemo’s kick­ing his ass, son, damn that Agent Orange.” Jeff won­dered if he was lay­ing it on too thick, but Rus­sell was eat­ing it up.

“Oh my God.”

“I know. Sam’ll be with the Lord soon enough. Be we wanted to go on one last bear hunt, some­thing to bring back the broth­er­hood we felt in ‘Nam, you know?”

Rus­sell looked over at the shop win­dows as though inspect­ing an ATF inspec­tor to walk in the door any minute. When he looked back at Jeff, Jeff knew he’d won.

“What do you need?”

#

“Make me happy, Dante,” Jack said.

He was in his car, parked in one of the outer lots of Bal­ti­more Wash­ing­ton Inter­na­tional Air­port. Given that they were in Sil­ver Springs when they bolted, he bet Frankel drove them north of the Dis­trict, rather than loop­ing around and going down into Vir­ginia. He’d been watch­ing the YouTube video again on his phone when Dante called.

“I have good news and bad news,” Dante said.

“Dante, you know I don’t need any more bad news.”

“The bad news is that I still can’t find Richardson’s PC, and the bank records I could find for Frankel were yes­ter­day, when he cashed out his account here in DC. Over fifty grand.”

“That’s impos­si­ble,” Jack said. “The PATRIOT act makes it ille­gal to carry more than ten thou­sand dol­lars in cash.”

“He must have sweet talked some­one. He got it all in one lump. They’re cash in hand, and if they live lean, they could stay off the radar for quite a while.”

“That’s not mak­ing me happy, Dante.”

“I do have some good news, though.”

“And what’s that?”

“The lab emailed me their ini­tial find­ings on that blood from the crime scene. It’s weird.”

“Weird how?”

“The blood cells them­selves seem nor­mal. But there are tiny par­ti­cles in the plasma,” Dante said.

“Par­ti­cles? What the hell does that mean?”

“No one knows. They’re try­ing to get time with a SEM to get a closer look.”

Jack ran a hand through his hair. Why did this kid make him feel so stu­pid? “Great. What’s an SEM?”

“Scan­ning Elec­tron Micro­scope. Should give them a look at it at a higher mag­ni­fi­ca­tion than the optics can get to.”

“And how long will that take?”

“They don’t know.”

“So your good news is that there’s some­thing weird in blood that may or not have come from Hen­driks, and we have no idea what it is, why it’s there, if it’s a con­t­a­m­i­nant from the scene, or what it means?”

“I’m a glass is half full kind of guy.”

Jack pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at it for a sec­ond. Then he heard Dante talk­ing again.

“ — you going to be doing?” Dante asked.

“Fol­low­ing a hunch. We know they didn’t fly out of BWI, right?”

“No one match­ing their descrip­tions in the last twenty four hours, no.”

“Then I’m head­ing up to Bal­ti­more. You said if they were in a rural area, they’d be track­able, right?”

“Not nec­es­sar­ily track­able,” Dante said, “but it would be eas­ier to nar­row things down. If we were rea­son­ably sure they were in rural area, we could look at data upload pat­terns and fil­ter out the peo­ple likely to be upload­ing video. With a small enough group to fil­ter through, we might be able to zero in on them before they fin­ish the upload. In a big city, there are sim­ply too many peo­ple upload­ing large files at any given time to rule enough of them out before they drop off the radar again.”

“And would Richard­son know this?”

“Any­one with access to Wikipedia could fig­ure it out pretty quick. If she knows to use the Tor net­work, she’s prob­a­bly bright enough to know about traf­fic pat­tern filtering.”

“So they’re going to stick to big metro areas,” Jack said. “She won’t get online in some Podunk town along the way. She needs the traf­fic of a big city to hide in, right?”

“That makes sense, sir.”

“I’m going to ren­dezvous with Bal­ti­more PD, then. Send them pic­tures of Cho, Richard­son and Frankel, what­ever you have, and ask them to put out a BOLO. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“Because that’s worked so well for us so far?”

“You’re catch­ing on, Dante.”

#

Batarel walked into the Bal­ti­more Basil­ica, inhaled deeply to smell the wood and mar­ble, and strode past red vel­vet pews down the cen­tral aisle. He needed answers, and he knew they could be found here. Mar­ble pil­lars tow­ered to the domed ceil­ing, a paint­ing of Jesus ascend­ing to heaven painted on the dome. He smirked at that. The humans needed their heroes so dearly.

He stood before the wide gray mar­ble of the Altar of Sac­ri­fice, and bowed his head. He didn’t remem­ber where he and his kind had come from. It seemed they had always been here, would always be here. He didn’t believe in any of the human gods. He sup­posed it was pos­si­ble that they had been cre­ated by some supreme being, but hav­ing no mem­ory of it him­self, he didn’t put much stock in it. Instead, his peo­ple had tra­di­tion, car­ried down through thou­sands of years, and they had the mis­sion. The mis­sion was why he was here. It was not their mis­sion alone.

He stepped off to the side, paus­ing briefly to look at the statue depict­ing the Archangel Michael. In truth, the statue looked noth­ing like him. The chin, in par­tic­u­lar, was all wrong. He also found it oddly grat­i­fy­ing that while the Archangel stood over a slain demon — which, of course, looked noth­ing like a demon, either — the statue’s sword had bro­ken off and dis­ap­peared some time ago, and no one knew where it went. Batarel enjoyed the sym­bol­ism, con­sid­er­ing how impo­tent the angels were in the twen­ti­eth and now twenty first cen­turies. Their influ­ence had waned just as his own organization’s had risen, with more and more of the pawns fol­low­ing their way. The true way. The right way. The only way to sur­vive in a hos­tile world.

He con­tin­ued on down­stairs, past the mas­sive red brick inverted arches that sup­ported the tow­ers upstairs, and into the much more pri­vate, much more dis­crete, chapel in the under­church. The walls were mortared red brick, dat­ing back to the found­ing of this human nation. Here he would meet with his contact.

A priest scur­ried up to him. “How may I help you, my child?”

Batarel pulled a card out of his suit pocket. “Take this to the Arch­bishop,” he said. “He’s expect­ing me.”

The priest looked at the card, con­fused. “This isn’t in English.”

Batarel lev­eled a gaze at the inso­lent human, and the priest drew him­self up to his full height. “I will do as you ask.”

The priest hur­ried off, and Batarel ran his fin­gers over the brick arch­ways. They’d held up rather nicely over the cen­turies, he thought.

The Archibishop of Bal­ti­more approached him. “Silim-​​ma he-​​me-​​en,” he said.

“Silim,” Batarel replied. “I require your assistance.”

“You have but ask, my Lord,” the Arch­bishop said.

Batarel stepped into a shel­tered alcove in the chapel, near the orig­i­nal tombs. “Crea­tures of the defiler have entered your city,” he said. “I need you to find them for me.”

“Our resources are yours, as always.”

Batarel handed the Arch­bishop pho­tos of Cho, Richard­son and Frankel. “They are trav­el­ing in a camper, and are almost cer­tainly here some­where. I need only know their loca­tion. Do not allow your scouts to be noticed. If I am to remove this scourge, I must take the beasts by surprise.”

“Of course, my Lord. Is there any­thing else?”

“Yes,” Batarel said, smil­ing. “My usual diver­sion, while I wait.”

“At once, my Lord.”

#

Daniel looked up as the door banged open and Jeff poked his head inside. “Danny!” he said. “Get out here.”

Daniel stepped out­side into the late after­noon sun. Jeff looked exhausted, yet oddly happy, given their sit­u­a­tion. Behind him was his metal col­lapsi­ble cart, filled with what Daniel pre­sumed were all of their sup­plies. The entire stack was cov­ered with blankets.

“Come on, we got to get set up and on the water before dusk.”

“You know how to do this?” Daniel asked.

“Danny, I was sail­ing the [viet namese] river before you were born. Just do what I tell you and we’ll be fine. Get Susie, too. Make sure she brings her lap­top and the camera.”

Daniel turned to relay the sum­mons, but Susan was already step­ping out of the RV, lap­top bag over her shoul­der and cam­era in hand. “Way ahead of you, Jeff. Daniel told me what you have in mind.”

“And?”

“And I think you’re both cer­ti­fi­able, but I don’t have any bet­ter ideas. May as well film it for posterity.”

Daniel grabbed the cart as Jeff led the way to the pier. “How are the bat­ter­ies on that thing?”

“It’s all dig­i­tal, no mov­ing parts. I can record for hours,” she said, point­ing the cam­era at him as he pulled the cart. “Why don’t you tell the folks watch­ing this at home about our plan?”

“Well, it’s pretty sim­ple,” Daniel said. “We’re going to go out on the water, now that Jeff’s been out all after­noon both get­ting sup­plies and leav­ing clues to our where­abouts. If we’re lucky, the clues will tip off Batarel, and he’ll come out to get us. When he does, we shoot him, tie him up while he’s regen­er­at­ing, tie an anchor to him, and pitch him overboard.”

“And if we’re not lucky?”

“Then the FBI gets to us first, and we get to try to explain what’s going on and hope they put us in pro­tec­tive cus­tody. Per­son­ally, I’m not hold­ing out much hope on that score. I’m not going to feel safe until the demon is dead.”

“Okay,” Jeff said as they stepped on to the pier. “You guys wait here. I’ll be right back.” He walked over to talk to the harbormaster.

“Hon­estly,” Daniel said, “if we’re lucky it will be over one way or another tonight. I want to get back to my life.”

“Yeah, I know the feel­ing,” Susan said. “It’s like the last two days I haven’t really been me.

“Do you really think drown­ing him is going to work?”

Daniel leaned against the cart. “We know phys­i­cal dam­age doesn’t do much more than slow him down, so injur­ing him is only a delay­ing tac­tic. If we’re going really take him out, we have to stop the regen­er­a­tion process. And the best way I can think of to do that is to deprive him of oxy­gen. That’s what drown­ing really is. Suf­fo­ca­tion because you can’t process the oxy­gen in the water like you would with air.”

“I keep for­get­ting you’re a doctor.”

“Yeah, well, I’m try­ing to for­get it too.”

Susan turned the cam­era off, and Daniel breathed a sigh of relief. “Daniel, you know lots of doc­tors make mis­takes. You don’t have to — “

“Yes,” he said, grab­bing the cart again. “I do.”

Jeff walked back over to them. “Okay, troops, let’s do this. I got us a boat, the Mary Anne. Lit­tle har­bor scooter, really, just a fif­teen footer, but it should be enough for our needs.”

“Is it a fast ship?” Daniel asked, fol­low­ing Jeff to the slip.

Before Jeff had a chance to answer, Susan replied, “A fast ship? You’ve never heard of the Mary Anne? This is the ship that made the Kessel Run in 3.6 parsecs!”

Daniel broke out laugh­ing, and Susan joined in. Jeff looked at them both like they were crazy, and maybe they were. They were being chased by an unkil­l­able demon, and they’d decided to kill it. It didn’t get a lot cra­zier than that.