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.

30: The Hunt Begins

“Assis­tant Direc­tor Gottlieb’s office,” Stacy said.

“Hi, Stacy, it’s Jack. Can you put me through to Lou?”

Lou’s sec­re­tary low­ered her voice. “You out of your frickin’ mind call­ing here? Lou’s really pissed, Jack.”

“I know, Stacy, but offi­cially, I still work for the guy. I’ve been back in coun­try for a week and I need to report in.”

“Your funeral,” she said, and put Jack on hold. Lou picked up just a cou­ple sec­onds later.

“Do you have any idea,” he said, “what the fuck you’ve done, Jack?”

Prob­a­bly bet­ter than you do, Jack thought. “Apart from uncov­er­ing an ancient conspiracy — “

“Spare me, Jack” Lou said. “No one gives a shit but you and the whack­a­dos you’ve fallen in with.”

“The media doesn’t seem to agree with you, Lou.”

“We’ll have the media under con­trol soon enough. They’re champ­ing at the bit now, but they’ll fade in time. Six months from now, every­one will have for­got­ten you and your lit­tle rev­e­la­tion. The only rea­son you and the rest were allowed back on US soil was that deny­ing you entry would have lent cred­i­bil­ity to Richardson’s story.

“You’ve always been an ide­al­ist, Jack. You have no idea how the world really works. It’s not like your bud­dies in the mil­i­tary. This is the real world. You have to be flexible.”

“And by flex­i­ble, you mean sell me out to demons?”

Lou laughed, an angry lit­tle sound. “Call ‘em what you like, Jack. They hold the power, and the rest of us do what we’re told. Sides don’t mat­ter, Jack. Get past the names and it’s all the same.”

Keep talk­ing, Jack said. He glanced over at Dante, who spun his fin­ger in the air. Keep going.

“I thought you were a patriot,” Jack said.

“Jack, I would think you of all peo­ple would under­stand. There are no patri­ots. There are sur­vivors, and there’s you. I’m a survivor.”

Dante gave Jack a thumbs up. Time to pull the plug.

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am to hear that,” Jack said. “And you may as well call off the agents you have con­verg­ing on my loca­tion in Sil­ver Springs. The one you’ve traced this call to? I’m not actu­ally there.”

Lou sput­tered.

“I called to ten­der my res­ig­na­tion,” Jack said. “Well, mine and Ana­lyst Hicks. We’re both going to be pur­su­ing other opportunities.”

“You bas­tard,” Lou said. “You can’t quit. You’re fired.”

“What­ever helps you sleep at night, Lou. And don’t bother clean­ing up after your­self. Agent Hicks pig­gy­backed off this call into the FBI net­work and down­loaded the secu­rity tapes of you allow­ing in those two demons, along with footage of what they tried to do in the lab. We’ll be releas­ing those to the media presently.”

Lou said noth­ing, but Jack enjoyed the shade of red he knew that his now for­mer boss’s face must be.

“So long, Lou. Pray to what­ever god you actu­ally believe in that you don’t see me again.”

#

Susan tabbed over to see look at the lat­est traf­fic stats again. New Amer­i­can Cen­tury, now under her con­trol, was blow­ing up. Dante had set up the new blog on a server that scaled to incom­ing traf­fic demands, and the hits just kept going up and up and up.

In a way, deny­ing her story was the best thing the gov­ern­ment could have done for her. For some rea­son, the pub­lic had been con­di­tioned to believe the oppo­site of what their elected rep­re­sen­ta­tives told them. So when they were told by Peo­ple In Author­ity that this was all a hoax, that demons weren’t real, then the pub­lic believed the Susan was indeed on to something.

She was still writ­ing fol­low up arti­cles, analy­sis and reply­ing to thou­sands of com­ments. Uriel had assured her that she was safe against any direct reprisals from the demons, and she had no rea­son to doubt his word. So she sat in her apart­ment and rode the wave for all it was worth.

She made sure to star all the requests for inter­views in her inbox. Now that she was safely back in the US, all the major net­works wanted to get her in stu­dio for on-​​camera inter­views. Susan felt it was a great oppor­tu­nity to test drive the net­works and see where she wanted to land when all this was over.

She jot­ted down a note to call Daniel later. She knew he was still griev­ing for his fam­ily, and she needed to cheer him up. She shouldn’t be the only one to ben­e­fit from what they’d gone through.

#

Daniel sat in his apart­ment and stared. He wasn’t star­ing at any­thing in par­tic­u­lar, just the way the end table butted up against the wall. He had a day’s growth of beard on his chin, and was wear­ing the same clothes he’d worn the day before, the clothes he put on after that shower in Frankfurt.

His boss had assured him his old job was wait­ing for him, but to take his time. He didn’t want Daniel to rush into things before he was ready. Daniel knew that his boss was hes­i­tant to take him back at all, and that the angels had leaned on him. He could hear it in his voice. The same tone peo­ple used when talk­ing to the men­tally unstable.

But wasn’t that what he was, now? What he’d been for quite some time, if he was hon­est with him­self? He knew how ridicu­lous it sounded. That he, who trained to be a healer, would be fol­lowed around by death? Not his death, but the death of any­one near him, any­one whose life he touched. It wasn’t what he wanted. But it was what he was.

He was the angel of death.

Daniel shook his head. I really am tip­ping over the edge, he thought as he got up and walked into the kitchen for another beer. It was only mid-​​morning, but he told him­self the sun was over the yardarm somewhere.

He heard a knock on the door as he was walk­ing back to his recliner. The sound star­tled him because it was unex­pected. He’d expected to be over­whelmed by paparazzi when he got home, but things had been oddly quiet. No one called to bother him. No one camped out in front of his apart­ment. He sup­posed he had the angels to thank for that, but he wasn’t in the mood to thank any­one for anything.

He walked over and opened the door. He saw Jack stand­ing in his door­way, once again dressed in his “G-​​man” black suit. He only needed a fedora to com­plete the look. Over Jack’s shoul­der he saw a black Crown Vic con­tain­ing Sandy and Dante, both sim­i­larly attired.

“Jack,” he said. He kept his voice neutral.

“Daniel, it’s good to see you,” Jack said. “Do you mind if I come in?”

“Be my guest.”

Daniel trudged back to his chair and sat down.

Jack walked in, shut the door. “Daniel, we need your help.”

“Again?”

“More like still,” Jack said, tak­ing a seat on the couch across from Daniel. “I’m not with the FBI anymore.”

“Wardrobe notwith­stand­ing.”

“I know you’re tired,” Jack said.

“That’s an understatement.”

“And I know you would rather go the rest of your days with­out see­ing another immor­tal, but we need you.”

“We, in this case, being you, Sandy and Dante out in the car?”

“Among oth­ers,” Jack said. “Geez, what I’m about to say still sounds ridicu­lous, even to me. But you’re one of the few peo­ple who would under­stand. We’re cre­at­ing a task force to take down the demons. We’re going to hunt them down and destroy them, every sin­gle one of them.”

Daniel raised an eye­brow. “You and what army?”

“We’re build­ing an army,” Jack said. “That’s why I’m here. I want you on my team.”

“You want me to fight even more demons, on purpose?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Go to hell, Jack.”

Jack’s head dropped. “Daniel, I know what you’ve been through. I was there.”

“Were you?” Daniel said. “Were you in my fam­ily home in San Fran­cisco when the demons burned it to the ground with my fam­ily still in it? Were you there when they raped my sis­ters? When they made my mother watch?”

“I begged you not to watch that video.”

“I’m an alba­tross, Jack. I’m the angel of fuck­ing death. I’m a doc­tor who not only man­ages to kill his patients, I man­age to get any­one killed who’s dumb enough to get close to me. You don’t want me on your team.”

“Yes, I do, Daniel. We’re plan­ning on four man units, small and nim­ble. Each man will fight, but we’ll also have other mis­sion sup­port spe­cial­ties. Sandy is ordi­nance and pro­cure­ment, I’m intel­li­gence, Dante’s triple C. We need a medic. And I hap­pen to know some­one who’s not just a tal­ented trauma sur­geon, but also is the only known human to kill one of these bas­tards. You flipped Batarel into the steel in Beth­le­hem, not me. You know how to fight the demons.”

“Pass,” Daniel said, and took a swig of his beer.

“Dammit, Daniel, we can’t take no for an answer!”

“That’s what you’re get­ting, Jack. I’m done with those fuckers.”

“What about your fam­ily? Don’t you want revenge?”

“Hell yes, I want revenge. But I’m also smart enough to know I won’t get it. Batarel was a fluke, Jack. You can’t kill these things. Not consistently.”

“I refuse to believe that.”

“You can refuse to believe a lot of things. They’ll still kill you.”

“Then at least I’ll die fight­ing for some­thing I do believe in. And I believe in free­dom. Until the demons are gone, the human race won’t be free.”

“We never were, Jack. You were okay with it when you didn’t know.”

“Dammit, I know now! I can’t let this go!”

Daniel smiled. “How does it feel? Now you know why I ran, why I didn’t just pipe down in that police sta­tion, admit to what they said I did.”

“Fuck you, Daniel. Maybe you aren’t who I thought you were. Enjoy being your angel of death.”

Jack stood up and walked to the door.

“Wait,” Daniel said.

Was that it? Was it that sim­ple? Was destroy­ing the demons why he was here? [insert some­thing ear­lier in the book with Daniel’s mom about God’s pur­pose]. Maybe his mother had been right. Maybe every­one did have a des­tiny. And maybe this was his.

“What,” Jack said. It wasn’t really a question.

Daniel stood up. “I’m in.”

29: Rev­e­la­tion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Gone.” The word tasted like ash.

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

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

“How?” Daniel said.

“Well, we’re going to finish — “

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

“It’s a start,” Jack said.

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

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

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

#

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

“Let him go?” she said. “What if — “

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

28: The Bur­den of Proof

“How the hell are we sup­posed to get out of here?” Jeff said. Daniel didn’t know, and the hel­met wasn’t show­ing him any other secret doors, assum­ing it could do that. He couldn’t even read the ancient text on the display.

“Maybe we’re not sup­posed to get out,” Susan said.

“Look, missy, I know the sounds of com­bat when I hear it. And Mohammad’s lit­tle pea shooter and gonna do did­dley against mil­i­tary firepower.”

“I think we’re safer where we are.”

“Because an angel sent us here?” Jeff asked. Susan didn’t have to answer; they could see it in her face.

“Great day in the morn­ing,” Jeff said.

“Let’s not panic,” Daniel said, notic­ing how both Susan and Jeff jumped a bit at his ampli­fied voice. “Jack and Sandy are upstairs, I’m sure they have this under control.”

#

This is out of con­trol, Jack thought.

They were at the end of a long stone cor­ri­dor, just above an ancient stair­well. Every time they tried to enter the stair­well, some­one below shot at them. And it had to have been a demon, because it didn’t seem to care about the grenades they dropped past it. Two of Sandy’s men were also engaged in a rear hold­ing action against a band of — Jack wasn’t sure what they were, really. They were assist­ing the demons, but they were human. Sandy’s men had shot enough of them to ver­ify that. But they still had Jack pinned down with no way for­ward and no way back until rein­force­ments arrived to take care of the demonic sym­pa­thiz­ers. What a world.

“Well, Cap­tain Sandarski — “

“Sure,” Sandy said, “throw that back in my face now.”

“ — what do you, in your infi­nite tac­ti­cal wis­dom suggest?”

“Well, we could pour napalm down the stair­well,” Sandy suggested.

“A. You don’t have any napalm,” Jack said. “And B. Even it worked, it would either kill my friends down there or trap them behind a wall of fire we couldn’t get through.”

Sandy nod­ded. “Yeah, it’s not what you’d call a per­fect plan.”

“Any­thing useful?”

“Well, if you’re gonna tie my hands like that…”

“Right,” Jack said. “We need a decoy, some­thing for them to shoot at while we descend.”

Sandy looked back behind them. “Like, say, a dead body?”

Jack looked where his friend was look­ing, back towards the sym­pa­thiz­ers. “Yeah, that might work. Damn, son, all this time in the desert’s made you a cold-​​blooded son of a bitch.”

“I’ll take that as a com­pli­ment,” Sandy said. On his orders, his men forced the issue with the sym­pa­thiz­ers, push­ing them back as though the sol­diers were retreat­ing. The enemy resisted, but not much. Jack fig­ured they thought they were win­ning, that the sol­diers were going to leave their demon mas­ters alone. Once they got as far as the first body, Jack darted in and dragged it back to the stair­well. The sol­diers fell back, cov­er­ing him.

“Okay,” Jack said. “We only get one shot at this.”

“You don’t think they’re dumb enough to fall for it twice?” Sandy asked.

“Would you be?”

“Hey, I was dumb enough to join the Army, so I’m prob­a­bly not a good test case.”

“Exactly,” Jack said. “Okay, as soon as Habib here moves, we chase him. Let them shoot the body, and then we over­whelm the shoot­ers. You guys have zip ties, we can use those to dis­able them. Got it?”

“Have I told you,” Sandy said, “just how much I missed work­ing with you?”

“No, you didn’t.”

Sandy nod­ded. “There might just be a rea­son for that.”

“Go!” Jack shouted, and pushed the cadaver down the stairs, start­ing it off as ver­ti­cally as he could.

Jack and the sol­diers fol­lowed the body, scream­ing at the top of their lungs. As expected, the body was pinned to the wall by gun­fire, and as the lone demon guard­ing the stair­well stepped for­ward, Jack hit him with a fly­ing tackle that would have made his high school foot­ball coach beam with pride. He smashed the demon into the stone wall, and in sec­onds they had it face-​​down on the floor and hog-​​tied with zip ties. They also ripped a rag off the increas­ingly bloody cadaver and shoved in the demon’s mouth as a gag. Jack had to admit, Sandy’s men were well trained.

“Okay,” Jack said, absurdly qui­etly con­sid­er­ing the cacoph­ony of the gun­fire and strug­gle. “Any­body dead?”

All the sol­diers checked them­selves, and they con­firmed that they were not dead.

“Good,” Jack said. “Let’s keep it that way, shall we?” He grabbed the assault rifle from the floor, and reversed the taped together banana clips to ensure he had fresh rounds. He’d count them later, if they lived.

“Let’s move.”

#

Daniel was start­ing to worry about his air sup­ply. He didn’t know how long the bat­tery in the hel­met was going to hold out. But no mat­ter how hard he pulled on the sides of the thing, it wouldn’t budge.

“Here, let me take a look at that,” Susan said. “Jeff, hold the camera.”

“While we’re at it,” Jeff said, “why don’t we just put on a pup­pet show?”

Daniel saw Susan reach up and take hold of the hel­met. She yanked upwards. “Whoa whoa whoa whoa!” Daniel said. “You’re gonna take my head off!”

“No I’m not, you big baby. Pipe down.” She felt around on the hel­met, on top, around the back, down the front. When she ran her fin­gers just under the jaw­line, Daniel heard a faint pop, then felt the padding recede. The dis­play pan­els retracted and his hear­ing returned to normal.

Susan lifted the hel­met off his head, then held it in one hand while she straight­ened his hair. “There. Not so bad.”

He took the hel­met from her and looked into her eyes. “Thank you,” he said.

She was just inches away. “Any time,” she said.

“Ahem!” Jeff said. They both jumped, back­ing away from each other. “I’d sug­gest you kids get a room, but the prob­lem is, see, we have one. And we can’t get out of it.”

“Right,” Daniel said. “Well, let’s look around again. Maybe there’s another way out of here.”

Jeff handed the cam­era back to Susan. “I think I got some great footage of the stones in the ceil­ing, just now,” he said. “Just sayin’.”

#

Jack crept through the dark cor­ri­dors under­neath the mosque. The place was a labyrinth, and he had no idea where this Mul­lah Moham­mad had taken Daniel, Jeff and Susan. He knew they were down here, and he knew demons were down here. It would be bad enough if he was play­ing hide and seek with enemy troops, try­ing to find Daniel before they did. But given that if he found the demons first he couldn’t kill them while they could pretty eas­ily kill him…

“You hear some­thing, LT?” Sandy whis­pered behind him.

“No. Why?”

“You’re slow­ing down.”

“Sorry.” Jack picked up the pace again, creep­ing towards the next inter­sec­tion in the stone cor­ri­dors. It was just about pitch black down here, and they’d avoid­ing using the sol­diers’ lights so as not to give away their posi­tion. They were lit­er­ally blind. He ran his hand along the wall, try­ing to move as qui­etly as pos­si­ble and fil­ter out the minis­cule sounds of the sol­diers clos­ing ranks behind him from what could be demons in front of him. He was also on the look­out for any light sources that—

His hand reached the end of the wall and touched warm flesh.

Jack snapped his hand back and whipped his rifle around, hit­ting the light he held along­side it.

“Turn that off, you fool!” a robed cleric hissed in thickly accented Eng­lish. Jack killed the light. The man seemed to have come from a side tun­nel that branched back the way they had come. Given the half a sec­ond Jack had been able to see it, anyway.

“Who are you?” the man whispered.

“Jack Har­ris,” Jack said. “I’m look­ing for — “

“Daniel Cho, yes, I know. I’m actu­ally look­ing for you. The archangel said you’d be with them. Quickly, fol­low me.”

“Sir, I can’t see you.”

Jack felt the cleric’s hand grab his, and guide it to flow­ing fab­ric. “Grab my robe. Quickly, now!”

“Yes,” another voice said. “Quickly. We’re all very eager to meet your guests.”

Lights snapped on and Jack was momen­tar­ily blinded. As his vision cleared, he saw three demons in Bedouin robes, all hold­ing AK-​​47s on them. Before he could say any­thing, Sandy opened fire on all three, straf­ing them with him M-​​16. The demons returned fire, and Jack dove for the mul­lah, hear­ing the man cry out as Jack drove him to the floor.

“Go, Jack!” Sandy said, and con­tin­ued fir­ing on the demons. He couldn’t kill them, but the bar­rage of lead kept them from advancing.

Jack scooped up the mul­lah and ran the way the man had come. The mullah’s voice was ragged, and Jack was pretty sure the guy had been hit, but they had no time to stop and check. He could hear Sandy and his men cov­er­ing their retreat, falling back behind them. As the mul­lah directed him first one way, then another, Jack quickly lost track of where he was, the sound of Sandy and his men buy­ing them time grew more indis­tinct. This bet­ter be worth it, Jack thought.

Finally the man stopped Jack by a door, and fum­bled for a key. Jack took the key, slick with the mullah’s blood, and fit­ted into the door. It swung open on a dimly lit room con­tain­ing his friends.

“Get inside,” the mul­lah said. “Now!”

Jack heard foot­steps clos­ing on their posi­tion and swing his light and rifle up, but it was only Sandy. He was bloody and limp­ing from what looked like a hit to the thigh.

“They’re right behind me,” Sandy shouted. “Go!”

Jack bolted into the room, push­ing the mul­lah in front of him, Sandy right on his heels. He turned and helped Sandy move the heavy door.

“Don’t close that!” Jeff said. “It — “

The door slammed with a hol­low thud, and Jack almost imme­di­ately heard pound­ing on the other side.

“can’t be opened from this side,” Jeff said.

“As long as they can’t open it from that side for a while,” Jack said, “I’ll take that.” He turned to Sandy. “Your men?”

Sandy shook his head. It was all they needed to say.

“Okay,” Jack said. “Looks like we have a few minu — “

Susan screamed.

Jack looked over and saw that the mul­lah had slid to the floor, leav­ing a wide, wet streak of blood on the wall behind him. He was hit bad, much worse than Jack thought.

Daniel was already kneel­ing down next to him, try­ing to stop the bleed­ing. His hands moved with steady assur­ance and expe­ri­ence, the prac­ticed motions of a trauma sur­geon. But Jack had seen enough bat­tle­field casu­al­ties to know it was already too late.

“Behind — “ the mul­lah said.

“Save your strength,” Daniel said. “Don’t talk.”

The mul­lah grabbed Daniel by the shirt. “Behind the altars,” he said. “The vision of — “ he coughed, blood spat­ter­ing from his lips, “of angels will point your — “

The man slumped over. He was dead.

“The vision of angels?” Jack said. “What the hell does that mean?”

Daniel ran across the small room and grabbed an ancient hel­met off one of two small altars set off in an alcove. “This,” he said. He put the hel­met on and Jack saw the eye holes close off, replaced by two flat black con­vex lenses.

“Holy shit, what is — “

“Quiet,” Jeff said. “Danny, go look behind the altar.”

Daniel walked over to the alcove and began exam­in­ing the walls behind the altar. “I see it,” he said. His voice was loud and deeper than usual, almost boom­ing. “The read­out in the hel­met is show­ing me a hid­den door, super­im­pos­ing it. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d never find it.”

Daniel pushed in on the stones and a small sec­tion behind the altar moved away, maybe two by three feet. It wasn’t much of an escape hatch. “There’s a tun­nel here,” Daniel said.

“Daniel,” Susan said. “It’s pitch black. I can’t see a thing.”

“I can,” Daniel said. “Clear as day as far as the helmet’s concerned.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Daniel goes first, since he can see what’s going on. Then Susan, then Jeff.”

“No,” Jeff said.

Jack turned to the old man. “What do you mean, no?”

[In the sec­ond draft, have this hap­pen after they find they can’t shut the door behind them]

Jeff took the AK-​​47 away from Jack. “Get a move on,” he said. “I’ll hold them back as long as I can. I remem­ber a thing or two about fir­ing from cover.”

Daniel took the old man by the shoul­ders. “Jeff, you don’t have to do this.” The soft words sounded odd with the helmet’s boom­ing amplification.

“Yeah, I do, Danny. You have to get this story out. It can’t be lim­ited to con­spir­acy nuts like me. You have to make peo­ple believe. You can do it. I know you can.”

The door cracked, and Jack could tell the demons were break­ing through. Jeff started shoo­ing peo­ple into the tun­nel. “Go on, get mov­ing! I’m gonna hole up behind these altars and buy you all the time I can. But it won’t mat­ter much if you don’t get the hell out of here!”

Jack watched as Daniel, then Susan, then Sandy climbed into the tun­nel. He clapped Jeff on the shoul­der. “Thank you.”

“Just look after him, okay?” Jeff said.

Jack nod­ded and scut­tled into the tun­nel. He’d gone maybe ten meters when he heard Jeff open fire.

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.

26: The Lost Gospel

Daniel snapped awake again when the Humvee hit a bump in the road. Look­ing back over his shoul­der, he saw it wasn’t so much a bump as a hole. Or a crater.

He’d been try­ing to sleep as they moved south, but the road con­di­tions, lack of any mean­ing­ful shocks or sus­pen­sion on the mil­i­tary vehi­cle and the heat kept wak­ing him up. He was pretty badly jet­lagged. To him it was still the mid­dle of the night, not late morn­ing. And he really hadn’t had a good night’s rest in a week, so that made it even worse.

And of course, there was also the fact that Jack wouldn’t stop talking.

“Hey, check this out!” Jack said from the front seat of the Humvee. He’d put a copy of Susan’s data­base on Jeff’s lap­top, and had been dig­ging through it while Susan did her own dig­ging in the other Humvee.

“What’s that?” Daniel said. He noticed the sol­dier sit­ting next to him in the back seat looked far less uncom­fort­able than Daniel felt. How do they do that?

“Sandy, you know how we keep report­ing Said Hamza dead, and then find him alive again have to retract list­ing him as dead?”

“I told you, call me Cap­tain. Yeah, he’s the Al Qaeda in Iraq num­ber two guy.”

“Turns out there’s a good rea­son,” Jack con­tin­ued. “He’s a frig­gin’ immor­tal. We prob­a­bly are killing him each time, but the bas­tard just won’t stay dead!”

“Shit, LT, you mean to tell me some of the bas­tards in Al Qaeda are these immor­tals of yours?”

“From what I can see, they’ve got demons placed in the IRA and Tamil Tigers, too. A lot of work in Cen­tral and South Amer­ica. And yeah, they get around the Mid­dle East.”

“They always did, accord­ing to you.”

“Wait a minute,” Daniel said, lean­ing for­ward. “You’re say­ing the demons have been key play­ers in — “

“In every war, rev­o­lu­tion, junta and ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion down through the ages. They were in the Cru­sades, on both sides, it seems. They were in Nazi Ger­many. They were in Stal­in­ist Rus­sia. Hell, it says here Rasputin was a demon. No won­der they couldn’t kill the bastard.”

“All this time, they’ve been walk­ing among us — “

“Stir­ring up trou­ble,” Jack said. “Any­where you find blood and death at human hands, they’re not far off. You stum­bled into the biggest secret of all time, Daniel.”

San­darski swerved the Humvee to avoid one of the larger craters, then said, “And you really believe this, LT?”

“Cap­tain Sandarski — “

“Thank you, sir.”

“Cap­tain, I’ve seen one of these things with my own eyes, and met one of the angels per­son­ally. Accord­ing to Susan, the angel that stood at the gates of Eden with a flam­ing sword. I’ve tried and failed too many times to kill a demon to think they’re any­thing other than real. You saw the videos I sent you.”

“A lot of the men thought those were a joke, LT. Hol­ly­wood spe­cial effects.”

“Untouched, Cap­tain. You saw on those videos what I saw with my Mark One eye­ball. They’re real. The one we fought, Batarel, was impaled, beheaded, blud­geoned, elec­tro­cuted, blown up, shot — and I mean I emp­tied a whole clip into the bas­tard, should have died from lead poi­son­ing at the very least — and it wasn’t until Daniel there tossed him into a vat of molten steel — “

“Holy shit, that was real?”

“That’s the kind of dam­age it takes to kill these things, Cap­tain. Napalm might do it, or white phos­pho­rus. The lab rat back in DC told me they’ve got tiny machines run­ning through their bod­ies, fix­ing dam­age down to the cel­lu­lar level as fast as it hap­pens. They can heal from almost any­thing. You have to hit them so hard there’s noth­ing left to rebuild, and you have to do it fast.”

“Well, shit,” San­darski said. That about summed it up for Daniel.

“And this tem­ple in Najaf?” San­darski asked.

“The Mosque of Imam Ali,” Jack said. “One of the most holy Islamic sites. Shia think Noah and Adam are buried there next to Ali, the third caliph.”

“Adam. As in — “

“The book of Gen­e­sis Adam, yeah,” Jack said. “Sad­dam damn near destroyed the place back in ’03 — “

“Yeah, I remem­ber hear­ing about that.”

“And it’s been rebuilt a few times over. But accord­ing to Uriel — “

“The angel you were talk­ing about? Won­der if he remem­bers Adam.”

“Accord­ing to Uriel, there’s a secret soci­ety inside all the Abra­hamic churches that knows the truth about the immor­tals, but believes them to be what they say they are.”

“You mean,” San­darski said, “you believe in these things, but you don’t think they’re demons?”

“Would a bib­li­cal demon have had trou­ble with molten steel?” Jack asked. “Should have been like going home, brim­stone and all that. I never saw horns or a tail, and Uriel didn’t have any wings I could see. They’re immor­tal, and I don’t doubt they’re where the leg­ends of angels and demons came from, but I don’t think they have any­thing to do with God.”

“Huh,” San­darski said.

“So any­way, huh!” Jack said has they hit another hole in the road. “Can’t you keep this thing level?”

“At the speed you want, LT? Con­sider your­self lucky the ride’s as smooth as it is.”

“Any­way, this secret soci­ety has hid­den arti­facts all over the world. In the mosque, there’s sup­posed to be a scroll with proof of immor­tal exis­tence. It’s been kept there for cen­turies, and kept a secret even though the place had been destroyed and rebuilt a bunch of times even before Saddam.”

“It’s a rough neigh­bor­hood, I’ll give you that,” San­darski said. “So who do you talk to when we get there?”

“Mul­lah Has­san Moham­mad,” Jack said.

“Hope he’s still there, LT. Not a place you want to hang out if they decide they don’t like us.”

Daniel sat back as the two men stopped talk­ing. The desert and small vil­lages sped past his win­dow. He was in Iraq. On the way to a holy mosque. I don’t even have a pass­port, Daniel thought. He looked again at the sol­dier in the back seat, who still hadn’t said a word, and San­darski. Jack trusted them, and he trusted Jack. He hoped they were good hands.

He tried to go back to sleep.

#

“Okay, LT, here we are,” Sandy said.

Jack looked out the Humvee win­dow at the Mosque of Imam Ali. They were just west of the city of Najaf, and the sun was behind the mosque, scat­ter­ing light around the golden dome that tow­ered above the two story struc­ture. It was a lot big­ger than Jack expected, and there were dozens, maybe hun­dreds of peo­ple scat­tered around the complex.

“Let’s go,” Jack said, and opened the door.

Daniel hopped out after him, and he saw Susan and Jeff get out of the other Humvee with the rest of Sandy’s men. The locals looked curi­ously at the sol­diers, but Jack didn’t see much hos­til­ity in their eyes. He sup­posed after seven years, they were used to Amer­i­can troops.

Not sure I’d ever feel the same were our posi­tions reversed, Jack thought.

“You want us to go in with you?” Sandy said.

“No, just hang tight out here. I don’t want to insult them by bring­ing guns into a mosque.”

“Sad­dam did it,” Sandy said.

“And look how things turned out for him,” Jack said. “We’ll be right back. It shouldn’t take long.” He motioned to the other civil­ians and they walked into the mosque.

Jack walked up to the first per­son he saw inside who looked like they worked there and said in Ara­bic, “I’m look­ing for Mul­lah Hus­san Mohammad.”

“I am sorry, there is no one here by that name,” the man replied.

“Please, I beg your par­don,” Jack con­tin­ued in Ara­bic. “We have come a long way, and were told to seek a Mul­lah Hus­san Moham­mad here.”

“I am most sorry. I can­not help you.” The man walked away.

“Well,” Jack said in Eng­lish, “that didn’t get us anywhere.”

“You speak Ara­bic?” Susan said.

“Badly,” Jack said. “I picked it up the last time I was here.”

“Use­ful skill to have,” Jeff said.

“Only if we can find some­one who knows some­thing. Come on.”

He walked down the cen­tral aisle of the main cham­ber, look­ing for a mul­lah who might know more. He saw a man in mullah’s robes talk­ing to the man Jack had just spoke to. They both looked over at him, and then the mul­lah clasped the man on the shoul­der and dis­ap­peared down a side cor­ri­dor. The man fol­lowed him.

Jack picked up his step and tried to fol­low, only to watch as the door to that cor­ri­dor shut just as he got there. He tried the knob and found the door locked.

“Something’s going on,” he said. “They’re duck­ing us.”

Jack looked around, and it looked like there were fewer wor­ship­pers than there had been before. He had to be imag­in­ing that.

“Can I be of ser­vice?” a voice behind them said in accented English.

They turned and Jack saw an old man in a thread­bare suit. He didn’t look like one of the priests or their sup­port staff. “Maybe. We’re try­ing to find Mul­lah Hus­san Moham­mad. We’ve come from America.”

“So has every­one else, these days,” the man said. “My name is Afif Ibn Ghalib. I’m the for­eign attaché for the shrine. I help aca­d­e­mics and other vis­i­tors who are not wor­ship­pers. And since none of you appeared to be here to pay your respects to Ali, I thought per­haps I could help.

“But I’m afraid there is no Mul­lah Hus­san Moham­mad here. I’ve been work­ing for the shrine for decades, and I can’t remem­ber such a man ever work­ing here. Are you cer­tain you’re in the right place?”

“We’re pretty sure,” Jack said.

“Why do you seek this Mul­lah Moham­mad, if I may ask?”

Before Jack could answer, Daniel stepped in. “We were sent to retrieve a scroll. A very old artifact.”

“I see,” Ibn Ghalib said. “And you are?”

“My name is Daniel Cho. This is Jack Har­ris, Susan Richard­son and Jeff Frankel. I was under the impres­sion we were expected.”

“I see,” Ibn Ghalib said again. “Well, I’m not sure how I can help you. Who did you say sent you?”

Just loud enough for Ibn Ghalib and the other three to hear, Daniel said, “We were sent by the Archangel Uriel, Mul­lah Mohammad.”

The man nod­ded, and seemed to age another twenty years before Jack’s eyes. “I see,” he said again, with far more grav­ity. “I knew this day would come, but I prayed to Allah that I would not live to see it. Come with me.”

He turned and led them down another hall­way to a stone stair­case, and then pro­ceeded down. As they fol­lowed, Jack whis­pered to Daniel, “How’d you know he was Mohammad?”

“While you were talk­ing to him,” Daniel whis­pered back, “the other wor­ship­pers were qui­etly ush­ered out. Even though he seemed calm, his pulse rate, which I could see by his jugu­lar, was rapid, indi­cat­ing he was much more agi­tated than he appeared. And he only showed up after you asked for him by name. Seemed like a solid guess.”

“You must have been hell on wheels in an oper­at­ing the­ater,” Jack said.

Daniel just looked at him. It occurred to Jack that he still didn’t know why Daniel quit being a surgeon.

“Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I’m deaf,” Moham­mad said in front of them. He led them out into a nar­row, low-​​ceilinged stone pas­sage­way, thick with dust.

“Sorry,” Daniel and Jack said in unison.

Moham­mad led them into a small room, which appeared to be empty. He walked over to the stone wall and pushed in on a stone, mov­ing it about an inch. Then he stepped over a few feet and pushed another. He pushed seven total when they heard a deep rum­bling. Dust shook loose from the walls as the far wall receded as one piece, then moved aside, expos­ing a small alcove.

“Behold,” Moham­mad said. “The Lost Gospel of the Angels.”

#

Sandy was stand­ing guard out­side with the men. He saw the usual traf­fic pat­terns, pretty much what you’d expect to see at a holy Mus­lim shrine. It was start­ing to get dark, and he knew the heat of the day would fade quickly. He was going to have a hard time keep­ing warm if they didn’t hurry—

Some­thing tripped an alarm in his mind, some­thing in his periph­eral vision. He looked over and saw a group of men who didn’t seem to be all that dif­fer­ent from any of the other tra­di­tion­ally dressed pil­grims to the mosque. They wore long flow­ing robes, and—

And if you didn’t know what to look for, you might not see the weapons and explo­sives they were concealing.

“Sergeant, radio Camp [what­ever is clos­est to Najaf] and have them send rein­force­ments,” Sandy said.

“Sir? How many?”

Sandy did a quick cal­cu­la­tion on what the men he saw could do if they really had as much sem­tex as he thought they did. “All of them.”

[In this chap­ter, make Jack wait out­side and observe the approach­ing demons. Inside, give Jack’s dia­logue, minus the Ara­bic, to Susan or Jeff. That way we avoid mak­ing Sandy a POV char­ac­ter. Never see­ing a scene from inside his head is vital to his reveal in the third act of Cru­sade to be one of the Grig­ori. Also, have him ask Jack in the Humvee if the data­base lists all the immor­tals, and have Jack explain that there are 200 demons, part of some­thing called the Grig­ori, that are listed only by their true names, but with no human identities.]

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.

24: Briefed by an Angel

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, I noticed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course,” he said.

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

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

“And you are?” Daniel said.

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thanks?” Jeff said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel rose out of his seat. “Upset?”

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

Daniel sat down, and said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

“Mis­ter Cho, I believe we cov­ered that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Con­trol,” Daniel said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.