The Unification Chronicles

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.

22: New Jer­sey Is The Bomb

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

All accord­ing to plan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You may speak,” Batarel said.

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

“How’d they die?” Jack asked.

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

“Inter­est­ing. Any indi­ca­tion that they had kids?”

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fuck you,” Susan said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

21: Reunion

Jack slowed down once I-​​95 became the New Jer­sey Turn­pike. The track­ing device he’d slipped under the fender of the Crown Vic had a rel­a­tively short range, and he didn’t want to over­shoot it. He was halfway across Newark before the receiver began to blink softly on the seat next to him.

Got ya, he thought, and pulled off the high­way. A few min­utes later he was parked in the lot of a dingy motel. They were smart. The place was far enough off the high­way that a nor­mal search never would have come out this far to find it.

He was across and two cars over from the Crown Vic. The motel room doors faced the park­ing lot, so he’d see which room they came from if they came out to the car to get any­thing, or if they tried to leave. They weren’t slip­ping past him again.

A lit­tle more than half an hour after he arrived, one of the doors opened and he saw Richard­son step out of it. She was fol­lowed closely by Frankel, and they seemed to be argu­ing about some­thing. Richard­son kept try­ing to leave, and Frankel kept drag­ging her back, and ulti­mately ush­ered her back into the room. There was no sign of Cho.

Well, we have to start some­where, Jack thought. If he had his phone, he’d call the front desk and have them patch him through to the room num­ber. But if he had his phone, he’d be back in DC by now. He just hoped the place didn’t have a back door.

He got out of the car and made sure his weapon was tucked away securely in his shoul­der hol­ster. He didn’t want to spook them, espe­cially not now. He walked down the park­ing lot away from their room, and then crossed over to approach hug­ging the front wall. He stopped just out of range of the peep­hole and knocked on the door.

“Man­age­ment!” he said.

Richard­son answered the door, which wasn’t chained. He flashed his badge and held the door open with his foot. “FBI, Miss Richard­son. We really need to talk.”

#

Daniel stag­gered back to the hotel. Sure enough, he’d found a bar that was open this time of day, and as it turned out, Mis­ter Jack Daniels hadn’t cared what time it was. He was sure, now, that he could talk Susan and Jeff into run­ning. There was just no point in try­ing any­thing else. Bet­ter to take their chances on the road, then run into…

He had some dif­fi­culty work­ing the lock on the motel door. Stu­pid things were so hard to—

The door opened by itself. That was spooky. Jeff and Susan were sit­ting next to each other on the edge of the bed. Just sit­ting qui­etly. Good, Daniel thought. It’ll make it eas­ier to talk to them. Only, if they’re both sit­ting there…

He stepped into the room, and the door shut behind him. The FBI guy stood there, by the door, and said, “Wel­come back, Mis­ter Cho.”

#

Susan couldn’t believe how bad they’d screwed this up. She never should have let Daniel walk out like that, no mat­ter how much Jeff said that “he just needed his space.” Now giv­ing Daniel his space had got­ten them all arrested. And this wasn’t going to jail to pro­tect a source, an hon­ored jour­nal­is­tic tra­di­tion. This was get­ting dumped into Gitmo and for­got­ten. Her eyes started to well up, but she steeled her­self. She would not let this bas­tard see her cry.

She wasn’t sure if that last part was directed at Agent Har­ris or Daniel.

“Now that you’re all here,” Har­ris said, “I’d like to talk with you about what’s been going on. Just a talk. That’s all. I’m not here to arrest anyone.”

“No,” Jeff said, “you’re just going to shoot us and dump us in a cement mixer. This is New Jersey.”

It looked like Agent Har­ris sighed. “With all due respect, Mis­ter Frankel, I’m not going to shoot you. If I were going to shoot you, I would have done it last night when you left me with that… thing. Not to men­tion a lovely after­noon with two Rottweilers.”

“Yeah,” Jeff said. “The Rot­tweil­ers were my idea.”

“Believe it or not, Mis­ter Frankel, we’re on the same side.”

“I’m gonna have to call bull­shit on that one, Agent.”

“Bull­shit!” Daniel chimed in from the other bed, where he’d been lying face down since he came in. To drive the point home, he raised his hand in solidarity.

Now Agent Har­ris def­i­nitely sighed. “I was ordered to return to Wash­ing­ton this morn­ing, yanked off this case. My boss wants to put together an anti-​​terrorist man­hunt and scour the East­ern Seaboard look­ing for the three of you. And if that hap­pens, they’re likely to shoot first and ask ques­tions later.”

“Then why are you here?” Susan asked.

“Because I’ve seen things I can’t explain, Miss Richard­son. I know by now that none of you are ter­ror­ists. You have been guilty of some extremely poor judg­ment, espe­cially Mis­ter Cho, here, but in the grand scheme of things you’ve done noth­ing wrong.”

“And yet, folks want to shoot us,” Jeff said. “That’s comforting.”

Agent Har­ris cleared his throat. “Miss Richardson’s arti­cles and videos have been very, very effec­tive,” he said. “I expect she’ll have job offers from all the major net­works wait­ing on her home answer­ing machine if she sur­vives this.”

Job offers? Susan thought. Wait, if I sur­vive this?

The agent con­tin­ued. “The videos she has posted online have been picked up by all the major net­works, run ²⁴⁄₇. The arti­cles have been reprinted by the major press syndicates.”

“I’m sure Stan charged a hefty fee for that,” Susan said.

“The point is you guys are major news now. But how you’re per­ceived isn’t uni­ver­sally pos­i­tive. Some of the net­works are spin­ning this as a mod­ern day Bon­nie and Clyde, say­ing you killed those Bal­ti­more police offi­cers. They’ve got pub­lic opin­ion riled up, and I think you all know what this coun­try thinks of ter­ror­ists. Give the media another few days to whip this, and you won’t be able to go any­where in Amer­ica with­out being rec­og­nized and turned over to law enforce­ment, assum­ing you’re not shot on sight.”

How did I not know about this? Susan won­dered. Then it hit her. Stan. She was get­ting most of her infor­ma­tion from him, and he damn sure wasn’t going to tell her any­thing that might slow down or stop the reports com­ing in. Was every­one she knew a bastard?

“So you’re here to bring us in? Safely?” Jeff said.

“Actu­ally,” Har­ris said, “no.”

“Then I think I need to repeat Susie’s ques­tion. Why in the blazes are you here?”

“I’m… off the reser­va­tion, so to speak. I know what’s chas­ing you. You’ve made sure of that. I’ve emp­tied two clips into that thing, not count­ing rak­ing it with machine gun fire in Bal­ti­more, and I can’t drop it. It’s not human.”

“Yeah,” Jeff said. “We know this. Wel­come to the party.”

“Do you know what it is?” Har­ris asked.

“You wouldn’t believe us if we told you,” Jeff said.

“It’s a demon,” Susan said.

“It’s a what?”

“A demon,” Daniel said into the com­forter. It sounded like “ah eee mmm.”

“You mean,” Har­ris said, “like with horns, and a pitchfork?”

“You really don’t know any­thing, do you?” Jeff asked.

Har­ris grabbed a chair from next to the dresser and sat down. “Explain it to me.”

Susan lis­tened while Jeff gave the agent a cap­sule sum­mary of the immor­tal con­spir­acy. To his credit, Har­ris didn’t inter­rupt or make any dis­parag­ing remarks while Jeff went on and on about stuff nor­mal, think­ing peo­ple had been told were just crack­pot the­o­ries. He just sat and listened.

Finally, when Jeff wound down, Har­ris said, “Interesting.”

“That’s it? Inter­est­ing?” Jeff said. “I just laid out the biggest secret con­spir­acy run­ning the world, explained it was in the hands of unkil­l­able immor­tals, and all you have to say is ‘interesting’?”

“Well, yes, it is inter­est­ing. Espe­cially if you know what I know, that you appar­ently don’t.”

Jeff lost the smug expres­sion on his face. If Susan had learned one thing about the old man by now, it was that he couldn’t bear for some­one else to know more about his pet sub­jects than he did. “And what’s that?”

Har­ris leaned back in the chair, mak­ing him­self com­fort­able. “We ran some tests on the blood we col­lected from this ‘Batarel’ back in DC, in the park­ing lot where Daniel beheaded him. We found the blood infused with tiny par­ti­cles we couldn’t quite make out. So we had a sam­ple exam­ined under an elec­tron micro­scope, and do you know what we found?”

“Please don’t say pixie dust,” Daniel said, rolling over on his side so he could see the con­ver­sa­tion. He looked like he was start­ing to sober up.

“May as well be,” Agent Har­ris said. “The par­ti­cles are called nanites. They’re tiny machines, built from the atoms up. They seem to con­stantly mon­i­tor every cell in an immortal’s body, and repair dam­age as quickly as it hap­pens. This seems to work just as well for injuries, like being shot or beheaded, as it does repair­ing the cel­lu­lar dam­age of aging. The nanites make sure the immor­tals never age, never get sick, never stay injured for very long.”

“I’ll be damned,” Jeff said. “Nan­otech­nol­ogy. I never even con­sid­ered that.”

“No rea­son to,” Har­ris said. “Since we can’t do it yet. The nanites in Batarel’s blood are gen­er­a­tions more advanced than the best stuff we can make today.”

“So how’d they get it? Aliens? Wait, are the immor­tals from the future?”

“As long as they’re not from planet Zeist, I don’t care,” Daniel said, crawl­ing off the bed. “I just want to know if we can kill this one.”

“I think we can,” Har­ris said.

“We?” Jeff said.

“Yes, Mis­ter Frankel. We. That’s why I’m here, why I’m telling you all this. I want to help. I need to… to see this through. I’m stak­ing my rep­u­ta­tion the line here as well, clear­ing my own name along with yours. We need to prove what Batarel is, that he and oth­ers like him exist, and bring the whole damn thing out into the light. And frankly, Mis­ter Cho was right back in Bal­ti­more. We’re all safer with it dead than chas­ing us.”

Daniel stood up. “If you’re going to help us, you’re going to have to start call­ing me Daniel.”

“And you’ll call me Jack.” They shook hands.

#

They spent the bulk of the after­noon com­par­ing notes, and Jeff made sure Daniel had a never end­ing sup­ply of cof­fee. The more he talked to Jack, the more his fatal­ism from the morn­ing began to fade. He still wasn’t sure they’d sur­vive the attack, but he was start­ing to believe that while run­ning would only delay the inevitable, at least if they took a stand it would be over, one way or another.

“So then,” Daniel said, “the key is to hit him with more dam­age than the nanites can heal.”

“Exactly. Unfor­tu­nately, we don’t know what that thresh­old is, and there’s no way a blood sam­ple is going to tell us that, even if I still had access to my resources back in DC. I hope it’s some­thing short of being vapor­ized at a nuclear ground zero, but we just don’t know.”

“Hey,” Jeff said, bring­ing Daniel another cup of cof­fee, “I just thought of some­thing. When Danny chopped off Batarel’s head, how’d he got get it and put it back on? The brain shouldn’t have been able to con­trol the body if we’re just talk­ing about lit­tle machines.”

“Unless those machines can talk to each other, coör­di­nate their actions,” Daniel said. “It would have to be wire­less, obvi­ously, so I don’t see why such com­mu­ni­ca­tion would be lim­ited to just inside the skin.”

“So,” Susan said, “it’s not enough even to chop him up. The pieces would just reassemble.”

“No, we’d need to inflict full body, cat­a­strophic dam­age,” Jack said.

Jeff tapped on his steel leg. “How about a land mine? Or a grenade? Some­thing to dis­mem­ber him and burn the pieces.”

Jack nod­ded. “That might work. But it would have to be close. He’d prac­ti­cally have to be hold­ing the damn thing. I saw a lot of explo­sive muni­tions dam­age in Iraq — “

“Just like I did in ‘Nam,” Jeff said.

“ — and any­thing short of direct con­tact would leave too much of him intact. How do we get him to basi­cally sit on a bomb?”

They were all quiet for a moment. No one had any ideas. In fact, some­thing else was nag­ging at Daniel. “For­get the bomb, how do we meet him on our terms at all? I’ve kind of con­sid­ered it inevitable that he’ll find us even­tu­ally, but if he ambushes us, we’re screwed. The only way we’re going to fight him and live is if we lure him into our trap. And so far, we’ve been pretty bad at that.”

Jack nod­ded. “Drown­ing him in Bal­ti­more and elec­tro­cut­ing him in Philly were good ideas, just poorly executed.”

“Hey!” Jeff said.

“No,” Daniel said, “he’s right. We fucked up both times and were lucky to survive.”

“In order to lead Batarel to us, on our terms, we need to con­trol how he finds out where we are. And to do that, we need to know more about him,” Jack said. “Susan, can you get online here?”

She opened up her lap­top. “Sure can. Wifi is just about the only perk this place has.”

“Good. We need to start build­ing a file on Richard Hen­driks. I know you’ve done the basics, but I might be able to help open a cou­ple doors you don’t have access to, like his social secu­rity records. Let’s find out how Batarel was mak­ing his living.

“Jeff, Daniel, while we’re doing that, I want you guys to go out to my car and bring in every­thing I have in the trunk. Be care­ful, it’s live ordi­nance.” He tossed Daniel the keys. “Let’s get mov­ing. I’d like to at least have a lead on him and a trap ready to lay before dark.”

20: Call It Off

Jack tow­eled off his hair, the hotel bathrobe scratchy against his skin. It wasn’t the Ritz, but it would do. He still wasn’t sure what he saw the night before. Two nights, now, really, he’d seen Hen­driks do things that couldn’t have been real. Seen things right out of a Hol­ly­wood block­buster. And yet, they hap­pened. Right in front of him. Right.

He sat down on the edge of the bed just as the phone rang. He checked the time before he answered. It was six AM. Who was work­ing in the Hoover build­ing this early?

“Har­ris,” he said.

“Agent Har­ris, I have some news,” Dante said. “The lab guys have made a break­through on those par­ti­cles in Hendriks’s blood.”

That got his atten­tion. “Shoot.”

“Sir, have you ever heard of nanotechnology?”

“I’ve seen a cou­ple sto­ries on the news. Tiny lit­tle machines, right?”

“In gen­eral. Nan­otech is about machines built from the indi­vid­ual atoms up rather than carv­ing down. So far, all we’ve been able to do with it has been in mate­ri­als sci­ence, tiny tubes or balls made of car­bon atoms.”

“So the par­ti­cles in Hendriks’s blood are these tubes?”

“No sir, they’re not.”

“So why did you bring it up?”

“Sir, the par­ti­cles in the blood are nanites, or nanoma­chines, but they’re far more advanced than any­thing ever doc­u­mented. Who­ever built them, they’re not shar­ing, sir.”

“So, the Chi­nese, maybe?”

“No sir. Agent Har­ris, these machines are decades, maybe cen­turies, ahead of what our best sci­en­tists can do. I have no idea where they came from.”

“What do they do?”

“The lab Is still test­ing, but they seem to be involved in cel­lu­lar maintenance.”

“In Eng­lish, Dante.”

“Sorry, sir. They mon­i­tor for and repair dam­age and aging at a cel­lu­lar level.”

“Mean­ing what, exactly?”

“Sir, these are immor­tal­ity machines. They kill viruses imme­di­ately, as well as invad­ing bac­te­ria. They repair the effects of age on the blood cells.”

Immor­tal­ity. “Dante, what would the effects of these machines look like in a person?”

He heard Dante gulp, even over the phone. “Just what we’ve seen in Richardson’s videos, sir. Wounds would heal almost instantly. The sub­ject would never age, since the cel­lu­lar dam­age that causes aging would be fixed as soon as it hap­pened. A human with these infused in his blood would be almost impos­si­ble to kill.”

“Almost impos­si­ble?”

“Well, I’ve been think­ing about that, sir. If this is why Hen­driks can do what he does, there are ways around it.”

“Like what?”

“Over­load the sys­tem, do more dam­age too fast for the nanites to han­dle. A grenade might work, some­thing to make him explode and burn the pieces. We’re still test­ing for other ways. How­ever the nanites work, we haven’t fig­ured out yet how they com­mu­ni­cate with each other to coör­di­nate their efforts. If you could block that…”

“I see, Dante. Thanks for the tip.”

“There’s more, sir.”

“What?”

“The nanites don’t seem to be trans­fer­able. We dumped some of them in a con­trol blood sam­ple, and they didn’t acti­vate. They only work for Hen­driks. We think there might be a marker some­where in his DNA that the nanites key on, but until we sequence it…”

“Gotcha.”

“Sir, this means Cho was telling the truth all along. That Hen­driks really did walk away from that accident.”

“I know, Dante. But I still have to catch him. If for no other rea­son, than to pro­tect him. Keep me informed.”

#

“Hold still, you big baby,” Susan said.

“I said I’m okay, Susie!” Jeff pulled away from her, try­ing to dodge the hydro­gen per­ox­ide she was using to clean the gash on his lip from the stock of the shot­gun the night before. Daniel lounged in an arm­chair across the dingy motel room from them, wait­ing for the painkillers to kick in and make him not want to just cut off his left arm.

They’d gone north again after the fight with Batarel, ulti­mately end­ing up here in Newark, New Jer­sey. Out the motel room win­dow he could see just a piece of the famous Man­hat­tan sky­line across the river, behind Jer­sey City. The sun was com­ing up over the Atlantic, throw­ing the city into sil­hou­ette. They were now in a met­ro­pol­i­tan area con­tain­ing over twenty mil­lion peo­ple, and this time they were hop­ing that Batarel wouldn’t be able to find them. At least, not today. They cer­tainly weren’t look­ing for him.

“There!” Susan said. “Done!” Daniel saw that Jeff had a lit­tle but­ter­fly suture hold­ing the cut on his lip shut. Susan turned to him. “Daniel? You okay?”

“I’ll be fine, Susan.”

“Not if you take another beat­ing like that, you won’t.” He fussed over him for a few sec­onds, mak­ing sure there really wasn’t any­thing she could do before she sat down on the other bed and fired up her lap­top. She plugged the cam­era into the side of the lap­top and started doing her thing.

“So,” Jeff said, “what’s our next step?”

“As far as I’m con­cerned,” Daniel said, “there isn’t one. I’m done.”

“Done?” Jeff and Susan said in uni­son. In stereo, where avail­able, Daniel thought. He might need some stronger painkillers.

“Yeah,” Daniel said. “Done. We can’t beat him. We can’t kill him. It’s time to cut our losses.”

“And how do you think that’s gonna work, Danny?” Jeff said. “He still wants you dead. He’s going to keep coming.”

“In a city this big, he can try to find me. I’ve dropped every­thing and started over before. I can do it again. It’s like the Wit­ness Pro­tec­tion Program.”

“Daniel,” Susan said. “I don’t want to start over. I make my liv­ing being vis­i­ble, talk­ing to peo­ple. I’ve spent years build­ing a name in this business — “

“Susan, you’re a blog­ger. Change your name and write about cats. He’ll never find you.”

“That was mean,” Susan said.

“Don’t you peo­ple get it?” Daniel said. “He’s immor­tal. He’s going to kill us if we keep fight­ing him. He almost did kill you last night, Susan. If that FBI agent hadn’t shown up when he did, you’d be a red smear under a Philadel­phia power sta­tion, and then how would you have reached your read­ers? Séances?”

“But he did show up, Daniel. We are still alive.”

“For now,” Daniel said. “And that’s con­tin­gent on mak­ing sure Batarel never finds us. The next time you see him, it will be very haz­ardous to your health. Con­sider that my pro­fes­sional med­ical opin­ion.” Yeah, def­i­nitely time for some stronger painkillers. Or just a hell of a lot more of the ones he had. He wished he still had a pre­scrip­tion pad.

“Daniel, I want you to think about some­thing,” Jeff said. “Do you think Batarel’s act­ing alone? Do you think he’s the only one of his kind? We’ve got another day, two at the out­side, to bring him down before this gets strung out too far for him to con­tain it.”

“What the hell are you talk­ing about?”

“He’s a demon, Daniel.” Daniel noticed Jeff was call­ing him by his given name, not “Dan” or “Danny.” Prob­a­bly thought that would make Daniel take him more seri­ously. All the while talk­ing sui­ci­dal non­sense. That was a good try, though.

“Yeah? We know that, Jeff.”

“There are thou­sands of demons. Hun­dreds of thou­sands, if not mil­lions, of their human min­ions. Are you going to avoid all of them, every day, for the rest of your life? Because that’s what you’re talk­ing about.

“And even if you can, and I can, what about Susan? After all she’s done for you, are you just going to give up on her? Throw her career away?”

Daniel jumped up out of the chair. “You don’t fuck­ing get it! The next time we see Batarel, we are dead! Do you under­stand dead?” He stormed out of the hotel room and slammed the door behind him.

#

[In revi­sions, estab­lish before this scene that they can track Jack by GPS via his cell phone, not the car. The FBI was going to put in-​​dash GPS into the cars, but due to bud­get cuts they just got GPS-​​enabled phones and dash­board mounts.]

Jack was packed and just tying his shoe when his phone rang again. He picked it up and answered with­out looking.

“What’s up, Dante?”

“I’m very dis­ap­pointed in you, Jack,” Lou said. Aw, shit…

“I’m sorry, Lou. I know it’s tak­ing longer than — “

“Jack, you haven’t been online yet this morn­ing, have you?”

Uh oh. “No sir, I haven’t. Last night didn’t go very well, and — let’s be frank, yes­ter­day as a whole didn’t go very well, and I thought a good night’s sleep — “

“Richard­son posted another one of her videos this morn­ing, Jack. You’re in it. In kind of a star­ring role.”

Come to think of it, Richard­son did have one of those lit­tle dig­i­tal cam­eras. “Sir, I can explain — “

“My phone has been ring­ing off the hook this morn­ing Jack. I finally had to tell Stacey to hold all my calls.”

You mean the calls you were mak­ing her take to begin with? You never answer your own phone, you old wind­bag. “I’m sure that’s an incon­ve­nience, sir — “

“Do you know who’s been call­ing me, Jack?”

“I wouldn’t haz­ard a guess, si — “

“I’ve got­ten calls from the Hill, of course, but they were already mad at you. I’ve got­ten calls from all the cable net­works. They’re rebroad­cast­ing Richardson’s video now, so it’s not just the geeks on the inter­net who can see this. I’ve got­ten calls from Direc­tor Mueller, Direc­tor of Home­land Secu­rity Janet Napolitano — “

I know who the god­damn direc­tor of DHS is, you idiot, you don’t have to say her full name…

“ — White House Media Chief Robert Gibbs, pretty much every­one but the pres­i­dent him­self. And do you know what they all want to know?”

“Sir, I — “

“They want to know what the hell is going on, Jack. Only I can’t tell them. Because I don’t know. I don’t know what one of my most dec­o­rated agents is doing in Philadel­phia ter­ror­iz­ing some poor civilian’s dog. I don’t know how said agent ended up on a video­tape recorded by a sus­pected ter­ror­ist, and yet hasn’t reported an arrest of the same ter­ror­ist. I don’t know why I’m even pay­ing you at this point!”

Jack said noth­ing. Frankly, any­thing he said would only make the sit­u­a­tion worse.

“So here’s what we’re going to do, Jack,” Lou con­tin­ued. “You are going to return to Wash­ing­ton imme­di­ately. We are going to mobi­lize a DHS task force to track down and appre­hend Cho and his com­pan­ions, and you are going to explain to Direc­tor Mueller why this has been fucked up so terribly.”

“Sir, I have infor­ma­tion from Ana­lyst Hicks — “

“Ana­lyst Hicks,” Lou sneered. “You’re sup­posed to be a fed­eral agent, Jack. The ana­lysts sup­port you, not the other way around.”

“But these new findings — “

“Oh, I’m well aware of Hick’s col­lab­o­ra­tion with the lab rats. I’ve had him report­ing to me on the hour, try­ing to see just what it was you were so inter­ested in. And frankly, Jack, it’s bull­shit. All this talk about nano-​​whatsits and immor­tal­ity, it’s all stuff for those losers who put on pointy ears and go to con­ven­tions when they’re not in their mother’s base­ments. It’s a mis­take, and I’m sure the lab will cor­rect their ini­tial analy­sis shortly.”

“But what Hen­driks did, last night — “

“Agent Har­ris, when did you get the impres­sion this was a con­ver­sa­tion? I know any­one can do Hollywood-​​style spe­cial effects with a lap­top. I don’t believe the video any more than I believe the lab results. And frankly, Agent Har­ris, any more than I believe you. Now get back to Wash­ing­ton on the dou­ble! That’s an order!”

Lou hung up before Jack got a chance to tell him to go fuck him­self. Instead, Jack just stared at the phone. Of course Lou didn’t under­stand. He’d been a desk jockey his whole career, a polit­i­cal ani­mal. And polit­i­cal ani­mals sur­vived by main­tain­ing the sta­tus quo.

A quote came to him from yet another inter­net video. The sta­tus was not quo. He knew it, but he would never be able to con­vince Lou. There was noth­ing more he could do to get the FBI involved in this.

He tossed the phone down on the bed. It would be found by house­keep­ing, and hope­fully returned to the FBI. But it wouldn’t relay his GPS posi­tion back to head­quar­ters. Once he walked out that door, he was on his own.

He walked out the door.

#

Daniel walked down the street away from the motel, pass­ing gas sta­tions, con­ve­nience stores and pawn shops. They just didn’t get it. They couldn’t fight a demon, and they had been stu­pid to try. Now all they’d man­aged to do was piss him off, and get the FBI on their col­lec­tive asses.

And that’s the other thing. He’d just wanted Susan to tell his story, then get on with her life. And Jeff, he’d never even asked to help. And yet now, here he was again, with other people’s lives in his hands. Exactly what he didn’t want. Never wanted again.

They were going to die. That was almost a given. Their only hope at all was to dis­ap­pear, to give up every­thing about their lives, to start over, stay off the radar and never, ever attract atten­tion. Jeff may be a kook, Daniel thought, but he’s been right about the demons. So he’s prob­a­bly just as right about their net­work of “minions.”

As he walked, Daniel stud­ied the peo­ple around him, shuf­fling about their daily lives. How many of them secretly wor­shipped immor­tals? How many of them did so openly, but called them angels rather than demons. Jeff hadn’t gone into that part of the secret soci­ety, but Daniel fig­ured if one really existed, so must the other. Were they out there? Watch­ing him? Had he ever met an angel and just didn’t know it? After all the demons didn’t have horns or smell of brim­stone. They just never died.

No, it wasn’t fair, espe­cially to Susan. He felt like shit drag­ging her into this. But how was he sup­posed to know? How was he sup­posed to know that the only way for her to sur­vive being sucked into his prob­lem was aban­don­ing every­thing she’d ever worked for and hid­ing like a mouse for the rest of her life? All he’d wanted was the truth about what hap­pened at that crash on M street, and that’s sup­posed to be what reporters are all about, right? Find­ing the truth?

Daniel was a smart guy, or at least thought of him­self that way. He’d breezed through col­lege and med school. He was sup­posed to be able to fig­ure out a way out of this. A way to give Jeff and Susan their lives back. A way to avoid liv­ing every day in fear for the rest of his life. But he just couldn’t see it. What did you do if some­one who wants you dead also turns out to be unstop­pable and unkillable?

You ran, that’s that you did. You ran like a rab­bit. You ran like Daniel ran from Oak­land, like he was still running.

Daniel checked his watch. It was just a quar­ter after nine in the morn­ing. Screw it, he thought. It’s New Jer­sey. They’ve got to be serv­ing alco­hol somewhere.

19: Elec­tro­cu­tion in Philadelphia

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

#

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

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

“Noth­ing here,” Jeff said.

“Noth­ing here either,” Susan said.

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

“Cho.”

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

“Batarel.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

“Drop the weapon freak!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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