The Unification Chronicles

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

Ahem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 Vows

Daniel Cho stood in the cold San Fran­cisco breeze and stared at the graves of his family.

It had been three months since they died, and yet this was the first time he’d been able to get back home to visit. And even then, he wasn’t here on per­sonal time, but instead here on a mis­sion, or an op, as Jack called them.

He’d spent the last three months train­ing, going through a rig­or­ous boot camp with Dante Hicks, the team’s “triple C” — Communications, Com­mand and Con­trol — spe­cial­ist. Jack and Sandy, the two war vet­er­ans on the team, had run them ragged and drilled with them over and over the kinds of sit­u­a­tions they would face, so that when they got there for real, every­thing would be on automatic.

Only Daniel knew all too well that there was no way to pre­pare for this. Not really. They were hunt­ing demons.

The world had changed since Susan’s rev­e­la­tion about the exis­tence of a thou­sands of immor­tals, beings split into two camps we had come to think of as angels and demons. That these immor­tals had manip­u­lated and guided the devel­op­ment of human soci­eties, pulling the strings behind the scenes for longer than recorded history.

The demons had tried to stop them, of course. And when they couldn’t reach Daniel, they went after his fam­ily. Two demons had entered the apart­ments above the neigh­bor­hood gro­cery store that had been the fam­ily busi­ness, snapped his father’s neck and then raped and mur­dered his sis­ters while they forced his mother to watch. They recorded the whole thing on video and released it to the web. Daniel got to see his mother die as the Cho Gro­cery burned to the ground. There was no doubt what hap­pened, no doubt at all.

Daniel was con­vinced that the deaths of his fam­ily were his fault, ulti­mately. He had pro­voked this immor­tal con­spir­acy into act­ing when he kept pur­su­ing the truth behind a dead man walk­ing away from a fatal wreck. He had killed the immor­tal in ques­tion him­self, fling­ing him into a vat of molten steel in Beth­le­hem, Penn­syl­va­nia. Of course they would respond. Why didn’t he see that com­ing? Not a day had gone by since that Daniel didn’t blame him­self for their deaths.

Now, at least he was ready to make a dif­fer­ence. As he stood alone in the ceme­tery, he was already dressed in the black mil­i­tary fatigues worn by most of the mem­bers of the Cru­sade. It was a loose orga­ni­za­tion, sprung up in the wake of the rev­e­la­tion. They had no lead­ers, and each team was autonomous. There was no way for the demons to track them or dis­rupt them. The Cru­sade against the demons had learned from the best, al Qaida and other ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions that the demons, iron­i­cally, had sup­ported for so many cen­turies. And now it was time foot fight fire with fire. To take the fight to that enemy.

Most of the demons had gone to ground after the rev­e­la­tion. Some changed their iden­ti­ties, some con­tested the rev­e­la­tion, tried to declare them­selves fully human. Some­times it worked, some times it didn’t.

But the demon they were after now, the demon they’d come to kill, was brazen. He admit­ted what he was and went to ground, start­ing a series of bomb­ings him­self that had the area in shock.

Offi­cially, he was human, just a domes­tic ter­ror­ist. The gov­ern­ment was still deny­ing the exis­tence of demons. But Jack had heard through back chan­nels, old friends in the FBI, that Rufariel had already killed two of the teams sent to cap­ture him. The FBI wasn’t pre­pared for this. Not as long as they believed they were fight­ing a human.

Daniel knew better.

---

Susan Richard­son was in a hurry. She was in the back of a cab, rac­ing across mid­town Manhattan.

And by rac­ing, the cab was speed­ing for half a block, screech­ing to a halt, weav­ing around traf­fic, try­ing to build up speed again, wav­ing some more, et cetera. It was slowly dri­ving Susan insane.

She had a broad­cast to do, dammit. Night had fully fallen in New York, and she was sup­posed to be live on the air at eleven.

The car screeched to a stop, and Susan flung a wadded up twenty at the dri­ver. “Get­ting out here!” she shouted as she jumped out of the cab. She hitched her lap­top bag tight on her shoul­der and started pow­er­walk­ing east, in the direc­tion of Rock­e­feller Cen­ter, and the stu­dios of Fox News.

In truth, her new life felt a lit­tle sur­real to her, even with full acknowl­edg­ment of what she’d been through since June. If any­one had told her in May that six months later she’d be a New York Times best­selling author and have her own show on America’s biggest cable news net­work, she’d have laughed in their face. Then asked for some of what they were drinking.

But here she was. Her book, The Rev­e­la­tion: Proof That Angels And Demons Walk Among Us was still sell­ing out. Her show didn’t have O’Reilly or Beck rat­ings — yet — but it was on later, oppo­site brain-​​numbing late night talk­shows on the major net­works. She’d move up. Choos­ing to do a story on Daniel Cho had been the best deci­sion of her life.

Susan blasted past a knot of home­less on and , get­ting a firmer grip on her bag and veer­ing out of arm’s reach as she did. She checked her phone. Four­teen mes­sages from her pro­ducer ask­ing where she was. She pecked out a quick “OMW” on the key­board and broke into a jog past the grid­locked cars.

Not that every­one believed her report­ing, she reminded her­self. She still had a long way to go to get to what she wanted. She was going to be the next Glenn Beck, the next Rush Lim­baugh. Her agent was still nego­ti­at­ing the deal for a nation­ally syn­di­cated radio show, but had made it clear to Susan that before that was real­is­ti­cally going to hap­pen, she had to break into the main­stream. Her fol­low­ers were a vibrant and vocal minor­ity, but still a minor­ity just the same. Too many peo­ple were still in denial of the truth, no mat­ter how much proof she’d provided.

The gov­ern­ment wasn’t help­ing, of course. Not con­tent to let his flunkies trash her, even Pres­i­dent Cruz him­self had said on national TV that there was no such thing as immor­tals, that Susan’s ros­ter of demons was just a pub­lic­ity stunt. She’d been tempted to start a rumor that Ricardo Alessan­dro Cruz was him­self a demon, given that a quar­ter of the nation already believed the Miami-​​born politi­cian had really been born and raised in Cuba as a sleeper agent. But no, that would have been coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. Ther­a­peu­tic, but coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. The truth was on her side, and that should be all she needed.

In fact, the truth was why she was run­ning late today. An old man had con­tacted her through her web­site and said he’d had some­thing she should see, some­thing the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment had so far been able to keep off of YouTube. She found him in a run down apart­ment in , the place smelling of borsch and old sweat. He showed her a video clip that had been smug­gled to him by rel­a­tives in Rus­sia, and Susan had rushed to get a copy on her USB drive. She texted her pro­ducer that she’d be run­ning late, and to leave the first seg­ment of the show open that night. She had a surprise.

It was great, but first she had to get there. Susan darted across , flip­ping the bird at a cab that nar­rowly avoided hit­ting her, and saw the out­lines of 30 Rock in the dis­tance. Almost there. Let’s see the Cruz admin­is­tra­tion deny this, she thought.

---

Night had fallen in San Fran­cisco, and still Daniel stood motion­less at his family’s graves. He heard a famil­iar thwup­ping of rotors behind him, the wind shift­ing as the black UH-​​60 Black­hawk heli­copter he didn’t have to turn and see set­tled down behind him.

He heard a sin­gle set of foot­falls walk up behind him. Must have left Sandy and Dante in the chop­per, Daniel thought.

With­out a word, Jack Har­ris stopped next to him, stand­ing at a respect­ful parade rest. Jack had been an Army offi­cer in Iraq before he’d been an FBI agent, and some things never changed.

After a minute or so, Jack spoke. “I’m sorry we didn’t get you out here sooner.”

“The mis­sion comes first,” Daniel said. It had been one of the first things they’d all agreed to. The Demonic Cru­sade they were a part of was a move­ment, not an orga­ni­za­tion. Some things, like their gear and travel, was bankrolled by the Archangel Uriel, or more specif­i­cally one of his shell cor­po­ra­tions, but they had no lead­ers, no hier­ar­chy. Jack was the de facto squad leader in com­bat, but that was because of expe­ri­ence rather than author­ity. They all bought into the mis­sion, that the demons had to be exter­mi­nated, and the gov­ern­ments of the world weren’t pre­pared to do that. Daniel believed that. But that didn’t mean he had to like it.

“Still,” Jack said, with­out adding any more. There wasn’t much to say. Daniel’s fam­ily hadn’t had a funeral for him to miss, as they all deemed that too entic­ing a tar­get for demons to go after Daniel as well. They were ded­i­cated to fight­ing the demons, but it wouldn’t be on the demons’ terms.

“We’ve got a lock on . Tracked him to a ware­house in . But we don’t know how long he’ll — ”

Daniel turned on his heel and strode towards the chop­per. Jack didn’t fin­ish his sen­tence and followed.

It was time to kill a demon. The first they’d located since fin­ish­ing their train­ing. The first of many.

The mis­sion was on.

---

“Where the hell have you been?” Marty asked Susan as she raced across the studio.

“Doing my job,” she said as she tossed the USB flash drive to him. “Get that ready to broad­cast on my cue.”

She sat down at her anchor’s desk in front of the cam­era, just a few min­utes before eleven. The makeup artist, who had been chas­ing her since she walked in the door, hur­riedly tried to make her look like she hadn’t just run across mid­town Man­hat­tan. It was a los­ing bat­tle, and he harumphed at her until she shooed him away.

She got her notes set in front of her, includ­ing the ones she’d scrawled in the cab, then looked up to see Marty wav­ing wildly at her. He held up a count. 3… 2… Showtime.

“Good evening,” she said into the cam­era. “I’m Susan Richard­son and this is Demonwatch.”

The red light dis­ap­peared off Cam­era 1 and lit over Cam­era 2. She turned to face it.

“Tonight we’re going to lead with some break­ing news, a sur­prise the pow­ers that be don’t want you to see. In my book,” she knew Marty would be fast enough to put up an over­lay of her book cover and a link to her web­site where peo­ple could buy it, “I revealed that one of the demons wasn’t hid­ing at all, but run­ning a first world coun­try right out in the open. I revealed that Vladimir Putin had once been known as Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler, the inspi­ra­tion for Drac­ula. And that he had, in fact, been Grig­ori Rasputin before the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion of 1917.”

Back to Cam­era 1. “The Russ­ian gov­ern­ment, of course, has flatly denied these alle­ga­tions. The Cruz admin­is­tra­tion here in our own coun­try has denied these allegations.”

Marty cut to a clip of Pres­i­dent Cruz. “I’ve met Prime Min­is­ter Putin sev­eral times, and there’s noth­ing demonic about him. He is a heck of an ath­lete, though.” The pres­i­dent chuck­led, laugh­ing off the mere thought that a world leader could be an immortal.

Back to Susan. “Tonight have star­tling footage to show you, recently smug­gled out of Rus­sia. The pow­ers that be don’t want you to see this, but you deserve the truth. I’m obliged to warn you, how­ever, that what you’re about to see is graphic and disturbing.”

She nod­ded almost imper­cep­ti­bly at Marty, and he played the clip she’d spent the after­noon and evening track­ing down.

The clip was jumpy and ragged, clearly taken from a cell phone and covertly. The Russ­ian Prime Min­is­ter was clearly vis­i­ble, walk­ing across an air­port tar­mac sur­rounded by aides and per­sonal secu­rity, pri­vate jets vis­i­ble in the back­ground. One of the secu­rity men looked directly at the cam­era, nod­ded, and see­ing the ver­i­fi­ca­tion he was clearly look­ing for, drew his weapon and shot Putin in the head, point blank.

The other secu­rity men tack­led the shooter, but the cam­era­man kept his cell phone pointed at Putin. The Prime Min­is­ter had dropped, of course, when half his skull blew off, but even as the shooter was wres­tled to the ground, the cam­era­man caught Putin’s head vis­i­bly knit­ting itself back together. The cam­era­man was pushed back by secu­rity along with the other aides and exec­u­tive per­son­nel. The audio was shout­ing in Russ­ian along with sta­tic and rustling sounds as the cameraman’s phone was jos­tled in his cloth­ing. The view swung away sharply, show­ing empty tar­mac with the open plains of Siberia in the back­ground, then back to Putin, whose head was nearly reassembled.

The Russ­ian Prime Min­is­ter gasped a huge lung­ful of air and rose to his feet, his hair grow­ing out of the newly reformed skin. He walked over to the scruff and shouted some­thing in Russ­ian. One of the secu­rity men not hold­ing down the shooter unhol­stered his pis­tol and handed it to Putin, who shot a sin­gle round into the orig­i­nal shooter’s fore­head. Just as he started to turn towards the cam­era, the video stopped.

Marty pointed at Susan, indi­cat­ing that the cam­era was back on her. “What you’ve just seen,” Susan said, “is hid­den cam­era footage prov­ing, with­out a doubt, that Vladimir Putin is in fact an immor­tal demon. We ask our friends in Rus­sia to do what’s right and take their coun­try back from this God­less mon­ster. And we ask our own Pres­i­dent Cruz to finally acknowl­edge the threat immor­tals pose to our own free­dom and secu­rity, before some­thing like this hap­pens here.

“We’ll be right back.” The net­work cut to commercial.

Tonight, it begins. All the prepa­ra­tion, all the energy, all the antic­i­pa­tion gets paid off at mid­night. NaNoW­riMo 2010 begins.

And I was ready, excited even. Then my cri­tique group told me what they thought about my out­line for Cru­sade.

They didn’t hate it, under­stand. But I got a resound­ing MEH when it came to Daniel’s and Susan’s char­ac­ter arcs. We’ll get to Susan in a minute. Let’s look at Daniel first.

Daniel starts the story look­ing for revenge, pay­back for what hap­pened to his fam­ily, to him. Over the course of the book, he grows as a leader to the point that he, rather than Jack, leads the assault on Hell. The prob­lem is that when the angels show up and wipe out the demons — a lit­eral deus ex machina—Daniel’s just a bystander.

The sug­ges­tion I got from the group, which fits in with what I was doing so well I kinda feel like a schmuck for not see­ing it myself, is that before the assault Daniel gives Uriel an ulti­ma­tum: if the angels don’t step up and do some­thing to fight the demons, he will. Not only does this mean we can have Gabriel tell Daniel they were fol­low­ing his lead — a nice coun­ter­point to Gabriel try­ing to hunt down rev­o­lu­tion­ary leader Daniel in the next book — but it also sets in motion events that could explain the demons killing Uriel in retal­i­a­tion. So this works and will be incor­po­rated into the over­all outline.

Susan, how­ever, remains a prob­lem. I put my cards on the table and told them how Susan ulti­mately redeems her­self in book three when she becomes the mar­tyr of the resis­tance. The response: “So we’re sup­posed to believe she’s -capa­ble of crit­i­cal thinking…”

Ow.

One sug­ges­tion was that I down­play her evan­gel­i­cal ide­al­ism and make her a more brazen careerist. That makes her choices a lot more believ­able, espe­cially regard­ing Phillips.

Another sug­ges­tion was to make her Joan of Arc. To have her believe that she is cho­sen by God, that help­ing the angels is her calling.

I actu­ally think both of these work, so long as I go back and rewrite her in Rev­e­la­tion. For the first time, Susan’s arc — across all three books — is becom­ing clear. She grew up in a strict evan­gel­i­cal envi­ron­ment, but put that aside when she got into jour­nal­ism. Since col­lege she’s been an oppor­tunist, doing what­ever she could to make a name for her­self. She helped Daniel in Rev­e­la­tion because it was in her own self-​​interest. She wasn’t nearly as sym­pa­thetic as she appeared. And then, after the motel in Arling­ton and def­i­nitely after Bal­ti­more har­bor, she real­ized holy crap demons are real. She stuck with the story because she knew it would make her career. Basi­cally, Susan in Rev­e­la­tion needs to be less sweet and more of a bitch.

In Cru­sade, this con­tin­ues as she keeps milk­ing the rev­e­la­tion for every­thing she can. When she sees what Phillips is doing, she wants to ride that wave. This preda­tory rep­u­ta­tion also helps explain why Phillips at first wants noth­ing to do with her. He knows his own kind when he sees it. And of course, in Cru­sade Susan plays a not insignif­i­cant part in stok­ing the fear and para­noia that ulti­mately destroys civ­i­liza­tion as we know it.

By the time the angels approach her and ask her to be their spokes­woman — keep in mind they own the media, lit­er­ally by this point — she not only sees it as a way to sal­vage and even advance her career, but also as God’s call­ing for her. She digs into the job with zeal and is will­ing to look the other way when she gets wind of rumors that the angels might have a dark side. As evi­dence mounts she gets even more deter­mined to stay the course and put down the lies of the resis­tance. Then Daniel makes sure she gets evi­dence she can’t deny, some­thing so hor­ri­ble that she lit­er­ally has a “come to Jesus” moment.

And it is in that moment that every­thing crys­tal­izes for Susan, that she real­izes what God really needs her to do. She bar­ri­cades her­self in her broad­cast stu­dio and broad­casts both the evi­dence and her own plea for peo­ple to join the resis­tance. And she keeps it up until Michael breaks through and lit­er­ally rips her head off on live TV.

So now we see Susan’s story as an ambi­tious rise to power over three books. She redeems her­self at the end, but redemp­tion comes at a hor­ri­ble price. It’s an old story, but there’s a rea­son why it’s told over and over again. Mix­ing her story in with the over­all tale might work nicely.

Ha! Take that, Den­ver Fic­tion Writers.

Susan Richard­son is by far the most dif­fi­cult, com­plex char­ac­ter in the Between Heaven and Hell tril­ogy. I agree with my cri­tique group that I, by and large, whiffed in Rev­e­la­tion and totally got her char­ac­ter wrong. In revi­sions – sched­uled for Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary – I expect to have to rewrite just about every scene that she’s in. Add that to rewrit­ing every scene Asemiel is in as well to remove his POV, and that’s like a third of the gor­ram book.

So I’d like to get Susan nailed down in my mind before I start writ­ing Cru­sade. But here’s my prob­lem. In order to feel real, every one of your char­ac­ters should be a part of you, share a facet of your personality.

Other than being a fel­low mam­mal, I really have noth­ing in com­mon with Susan Richardson.

Okay, that just might be hyper­bole. Slightly. After all, we’re both Cau­casian, we’re both writ­ers, we’re both Amer­i­cans (although her vision of what it means to be an Amer­i­can is a lot closer to Toby Keith and Glenn Beck than it is to mine). We’re both from Col­orado, although the cul­tural dif­fer­ences between Den­ver and her Col­orado Springs can be vast. And the writ­ing – jour­nal­ism, in her case – is a dri­ving force for her, a key motivator.

The prob­lem is that I totally don’t under­stand her other moti­va­tions, and what those mean for her world­view. She hon­estly, lit­er­ally believes that some­day, prob­a­bly soon, Jesus is just going to rap­ture her up to Heaven, à la the Left Behind books. She knows down to the core of her being that an invis­i­ble man in the sky is watch­ing her every move and judg­ing her. And that she can call in favors from Him. And that Fox News is telling the God’s hon­est truth.

Per­son­ally, as a lib­eral athe­ist, I have trou­ble see­ing into her mind. It’s a fail­ure on my part, cer­tainly, of both empa­thy and cre­ativ­ity. But I know real writ­ers, “big boy” writ­ers like Stephen King with Mis­ery’s Annie Wilkes, can do this. They can see into a mind that is noth­ing like theirs and report back faith­fully what it’s like in there.

Part of the issue is that there’s a fine line between authen­tic­ity and par­ody, and I’m afraid I’ll too often end up on the wrong side of it. Susan may be an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian and an author­i­tar­ian fol­lower, but she still has to be sym­pa­thetic enough for the reader to give a crap about what hap­pens to her. So how do I write about a woman who idol­izes Jesus, Ronald Rea­gan and Ayn Rand in such a way that it doesn’t come across as snippy contempt?

And yes, I under­stand how con­de­scend­ing it sounds even to ask the ques­tion. I’m not say­ing my phi­los­o­phy or pol­i­tics are “cor­rect” and hers are not. I’m just say­ing I don’t under­stand how she can think that way. I know real peo­ple do, and many of them are smarter than I am. I just don’t get it.

But I have to. If I’m going to write Susan cor­rectly, I have to get it, and soon. How about this:

The core of Susan’s char­ac­ter is her author­i­tar­ian sub­mis­sion to Church and Nation on one side, and her jour­nal­is­tic and career ambi­tion on the other. These two moti­va­tions often con­flict. She feels like she has to trust the gov­ern­ment (at least the Repub­li­cans) at the same time she has to inves­ti­gate them. That she should accept the tra­di­tional gen­der role of home­maker and mother at the same time she’s putting that off to fur­ther her career. I think she feels a lot of guilt, and a fair amount of inse­cu­rity. And the only thing she’s found that keeps those con­cerns at bay is the very thing that makes them worse: the work. If she stays busy enough – and since the end of Rev­e­la­tion she’s been very busy indeed – she doesn’t have time to hear the voices of her par­ents in her head telling her to find a nice boy, set­tle down and give her life over to God. She’s dri­ven enough that the voices stay away, mostly, but when they come back they make her feel dirty, like she’s turn­ing her back on herself.

The rev­e­la­tion not only shot her career into the stratos­phere – to the point where she’s now OMG WORKING IN THE SAME STUDIO AS BILL O’REILLY – but also rein­forced her reli­gious doc­trine. The nan­otech­nol­ogy is just the means by which God makes the angels and demons immor­tal. It doesn’t mat­ter. What mat­ters is that angels and demons are REAL and she has met them. She has fought in real life, deadly strug­gle with demons, and helped to kill one of them. She has met and worked with a real archangel, Uriel. The fact that he’s not cur­rently return­ing her calls is beside the point. He’s an archangel. He has impor­tant things to do.

So at the open­ing of Cru­sade, she’s liv­ing in New York and work­ing for Fox News, anchor­ing a late evening (think­ing the 11pm east­ern times­lot) show from Rock­e­feller Cen­ter. Her church is a new one that branched off from other evan­gel­i­cal protes­tants after the rev­e­la­tion, one that accepts angels and demons as real, flesh and blood immor­tals and proof of God’s work on Earth. Susan’s job is to keep up on the demons, tell her view­ers who to look for, which hellspawn are still out there, try­ing to pass for human. In her tele­cast in chap­ter 1, she outs Vladimir Putin as a demon who had been, in pre­vi­ous iden­ti­ties, Vlad “Drac­ula” Tepes and Grig­ori Rasputin.

So where does she go from there? While a cer­tain minor­ity of Amer­i­cans believe her, most do not. Most peo­ple think the rev­e­la­tion was a pub­lic­ity stunt, and the pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion has been more than happy to back that up. Pres­i­dent Ricardo Cruz him­self has said that the immor­tals “some in the media” have been the­o­riz­ing about sim­ply do not exist. Sen­a­tor Tim Phillips of Texas has been using the demons as a stump issue, and she would gain a lot of vis­i­bil­ity and cred­i­bil­ity to her cause if she could get him to talk to her. But he’s ignored her early entreaties to come on her show.

So what do you think? Is that a solid enough foun­da­tion to start the book?

30: The Hunt Begins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lou sput­tered.

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

He was the angel of death.

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

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

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

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

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

“Be my guest.”

Daniel trudged back to his chair and sat down.

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

“Again?”

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

“Wardrobe notwith­stand­ing.”

“I know you’re tired,” Jack said.

“That’s an understatement.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, yeah.”

“Go to hell, Jack.”

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

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

“I begged you not to watch that video.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I refuse to believe that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jack stood up and walked to the door.

“Wait,” Daniel said.

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

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

Daniel stood up. “I’m in.”

29: Rev­e­la­tion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Gone.” The word tasted like ash.

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

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

“How?” Daniel said.

“Well, we’re going to finish — “

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

“It’s a start,” Jack said.

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

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

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

#

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

“Let him go?” she said. “What if — “

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

28: The Bur­den of Proof

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

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

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

“I think we’re safer where we are.”

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

“Great day in the morn­ing,” Jeff said.

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

#

This is out of con­trol, Jack thought.

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

“Well, Cap­tain Sandarski — “

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

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

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

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

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

“Any­thing useful?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Would you be?”

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

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

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

“No, you didn’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let’s move.”

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

“No. Why?”

“You’re slow­ing down.”

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

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

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

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

“Who are you?” the man whispered.

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

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

“Sir, I can’t see you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Susan screamed.

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

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

“Behind — “ the mul­lah said.

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

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

The man slumped over. He was dead.

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

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

“Holy shit, what is — “

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” Jeff said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

27: Some­thing Old, Some­thing Older

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

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

“And the hel­met?” Daniel asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure.” She aimed where he directed.

“Zoom in on that. What do you see?”

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

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

“Okay,” he said, “stand back.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you see?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s locked,” he said.

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Uh…”

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

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

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

Damn, Dante thought. “Really?”

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

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

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

“And?”

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

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

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

“What’s a luminescent — “

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Pre­cisely.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

“I’m sure there is,” the demon said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

26: The Lost Gospel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They always did, accord­ing to you.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Cap­tain Sandarski — “

“Thank you, sir.”

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

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

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

“Holy shit, that was real?”

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

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

“And this tem­ple in Najaf?” San­darski asked.

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

“Adam. As in — “

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

“Yeah, I remem­ber hear­ing about that.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Huh,” San­darski said.

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

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

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

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

“Mul­lah Has­san Moham­mad,” Jack said.

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

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

He tried to go back to sleep.

#

“Okay, LT, here we are,” Sandy said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sad­dam did it,” Sandy said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You speak Ara­bic?” Susan said.

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

“Use­ful skill to have,” Jeff said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’re pretty sure,” Jack said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sorry,” Daniel and Jack said in unison.

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

“Sir? How many?”

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

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

25: Turn­about Is Unfair Play

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

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

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

“Pah!” Kyung-​​Soon said.

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

Mary screamed.

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

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

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

No…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel…

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

“Any last words?” he asked.

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

“Our Father, who art in heaven,

Hal­lowed be thy Name.

Thy king­dom come.

Thy will be done,

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And for­give us our trespasses,

As we for­give those who tres­pass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from evil — “

“Yeah, about that,” the man said.

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“LT?” Daniel said.

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

We warned you.

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

Some­one was in his house. Some­one other than him.

He looked at the screen again.

We warned you.

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

He heard a foot­step, behind him.

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

Oh, this can’t be good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Would you care to try again?”

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

The fucker didn’t fall down.

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

A demon.

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

Stan nod­ded.

“And you know why I’m here?”

Again, Stan nodded.

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

Stan nod­ded and dropped the pistol.

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

His neigh­bors heard noth­ing when Stan started to scream.