The Apocalypse Codex

9. SPEAKING IN TONGUES

“IT’S IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND GOD’S PLAN,” SCHILLER says, clasping his hands behind his back, chin lowered to his chest, braced against the force of his own wisdom.

“First, we must follow His instructions. Go forth, be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth with souls obedient to His will. Live good lives, obey His rules, be faithful members of His flock, and when the end comes we’ll be safe forever in heaven. That much is clear. But. But.”

He’s pacing back and forth across the stage now. “That isn’t enough.” He stops in the middle of the stage, turns and faces his audience. His expressive face, lit from below, is suddenly shadowed and ominous. “There are one and a half billion Muslims on this Earth. A billion and a half Chinese communists, a billion Indian Hindu elephant-worshippers. One point two billion Catholics, misled by the Vatican. And I’m afraid they’re all going to go to hell if we don’t manage to save them in time. This is a tragedy; the great, besetting tragedy of our age is that at least ninety-five percent of currently living humanity is going to burn in hell. To make matters worse, this is the most populous century ever—there are more than seven billion of us! We know the truth, and the necessary steps to salvation are simple: accept Jesus into your hearts—you’re all Saved, there’s room for you in the lifeboat, but why aren’t we saving them?”

Ray is clearly anguished, Persephone realizes; he believes this stuff with all his soul and all his guts. He believes in the viral metaphor of a bronze-age rabble-rouser from the Levant, as interpreted by his syncretist followers scattered throughout the Roman Empire. He believes in heaven and hell as real, literally existing destinations you can book an airline ticket to. He believes salvation is a deterministic, card-punching exercise in holding faith in the right god; believes that there’s a coming End of Time in which his godhead will return to Earth, reading minds and separating the sheep from the goats. No need to ask why his God might prescribe eternal torture for the unbelievers, no need to engage with the problem of free will—Schiller’s eschatology is either brutally truncated or sublimely simple, depending on viewpoint. One thing it isn’t is nuanced.

Persephone rubs her bracelet uneasily. (WWLJD indeed.) True believers unnerve her, for she has seen the Red Skull in their observances, witnessed the rites of the Cult of the Black Pharaoh, and she knows the abhorrent truth: the things humanity call gods are either lies or worse, alien and abhuman intelligences that promise something not unlike hell but without any heavenly insurance policy. The pre-existing destination for humanity is death. But Schiller doesn’t see it from that angle; in his own way he is an idealist and an optimist.

“Everyone who isn’t square with Jesus is destined to go to hell. That means about seven billion souls at this moment. Golden Promise Ministries was established in 1896 by Pastor William Gantz to honor a promise he made when he first realized the magnitude of the crisis, and I am personally sworn to follow him, unto death if necessary. Our mission is simple: We’re not going to let it happen. We’re going to save every human soul it’s possible to save before our Lord returns. And his return is imminent, within our lives: closer, it could be next year, next month, even next week. So we’ve got to work fast.”

Schiller pauses for a moment to take a sip of water from the glass on his lectern. Persephone glances around the room. Her fellow Omega Course attendees are rapt in the grip of his glamour, mesmerized by his bullshit. She shivers. He’s a powerful speaker. Despite her occult knowledge—for Persephone is fully cognizant of the dismal message of the One True Religion—she’d be in his grip too, were it not for the cross-shaped ward she wears.

“Our Lord Jesus Christ is going to return sometime within our lifetimes. The signs are there before us, the turmoil and decadence and chaos of these last days. The corruption of Western civilization. We’ve formed a team to pray for guidance—the forward observer study group, we call them—and the signs are clear to read: Jesus is coming. Well, short of actively trying to delay him”—Schiller chuckles drily—“we can’t do anything about the timing; ‘For as the lightning cometh from the east and flashes to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.’ But we can do our best to sort out the tribes of man first.

“We need bodies to wage the war for Christ. We can increase our numbers by adoption—you may have noticed the crèches and kindergarten facilities here—and we can raise large families and guide our children to the path of righteousness. If you’re not raising a large family, even if you’re infertile, then you’re not doing all you can for Jesus.

“And we can work on other strategies. Our missions leverage the latest marketing and narrowband consumer targeting protocols to make best use of the internet to reach—”

Persephone discreetly stands and sidles towards the doorway.

She’s taken a seat at one end of the back row, just to make this move possible. And she’s consumed two cups of coffee in the past hour. “I need the restroom,” she quietly tells Julie, or maybe she’s a Christina or a Roseanne—the mousy-haired young woman in a gray maxi-dress who stands by the door.

“Sure thing, ma’am.” The handmaiden opens the door and they duck outside. Behind them, Schiller is rattling on about Web 2.0 communications strategies for evangelical outreach. “If you’d like to follow me?”

Persephone slides into place behind her escort, eyes wide open and scanning the passageways to either side as she is escorted down a corridor and round a bend to a discreetly camouflaged restroom, where her escort leaves her and hurries back to the conference room.

(Which means the clock is ticking.)

Persephone waits out her guide and guard’s departure, then steps out into the hall. Her badge is flipped round, the big red V (for visitor, presumably) hidden as she paces rapidly in the opposite direction from the lecture hall. Three minutes, she thinks. She adjusts the bracelet again: What Would Leeroy Jenkins Do? It’s Johnny’s little joke, dating back to an experiment with World of Warcraft as a global conferencing system for the Network. The intel team that raids together stays together.

This part of the conference center is set up around three lecture theaters and a hall, plus support offices. And it’s a Saturday. It doesn’t take Persephone long to find an unoccupied receptionist’s station, complete with a PC. She does a quick risk assessment. Pros: it gets the job done, and today’s a Saturday, which minimizes the chance of discovery. Cons: her pre-canned excuse won’t work. The pros win. She touches the mouse, thumbs the screen to life, sticks her USB stick in a free socket at the back, then yanks and re-inserts the power cable. The PC’s BIOS isn’t password protected, and it’s the work of a minute to start it rebooting off her memory stick.

While she waits for the PC to come up, she heads back toward the toilet (temporary excuse: I got lost on my way back); but she has to return to the reception station for long enough to log in, fire up the copy of Outlook on the PC’s hard disk, and open her contaminated mailbox.

(Mission accomplished.)

The skin on the back of Persephone’s neck is crawling as she shuts the PC down again. Everything seems to take impossibly long, the animation in Windows moving with nightmare slowness. But finally the job is done. She pulls the USB stick, walks back to the toilet cubicle, and flushes it just as there is a tentative knock on the door.

“Ma’am? Are you all right?”

“Never better,” Persephone says fervently. “Well, aside from breakfast. I’m sorry, I’m just freshening up in here. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

“Take your time.”

When Persephone comes out, the mousy woman is waiting. She isn’t showing obvious signs of anxiety, but the mere fact of her presence is sufficient to put Persephone on alert. They don’t want to lose track of me. She smiles. “Have I missed anything important?” she asks.

“Oh no.” Her escort shakes her head very seriously. “I’m certain Father will take time to help you.” She turns, then pauses, looking over her shoulder. “Follow me, please.”

There’s something oddly affectless about the woman, and it gives Persephone the creeps. But she tags along behind her. After a few seconds Persephone realizes something else: the slight heaviness in her guide’s hips, something about her body fat distribution, her shape in profile. She’s pregnant: not hugely so, but certainly well into the second trimester. Odd, Persephone thinks, but she remains silent and unquestioning until they come to an elevator. “Hey. This isn’t the way back to the hall, is it?”

“No.” Her guide pushes the call button. “Father led everyone to the chapel after you left, so he sent me to show you the way there. He decided to invite everyone to attend holy communion. Wouldn’t you like that?”

Persephone blinks as the doors open. What would a true believer say…? “I suppose so. I mean, absolutely!”

The doors slide closed behind her and the elevator begins to descend. “You sound a bit conflicted,” her guide says guilelessly. “That tells me you need the host in your heart. It’ll make everything better.”

“I guess so.” The elevator stops and the doors open. The guide leads Persephone out into a wide corridor, windowless but lined with illuminated niches holding spotlit stained-glass panels. At the end, the wide double doors gape open. “This way.” They reach the doors and step through. “See, everyone is waiting for you!”

Persephone sees everything, taking in the timeless scene in front of her with horrified eyes: the waiting flock, the guards holding an unwilling inductee before the altar, the pastors and the silver bowl full of things that to her warded eyes are not what they seem to everyone else—

Persephone turns at bay, ready to fight her way to freedom.

IT’S LATE.

I shudder and awaken on my hotel room bed.

As I turn my head fireworks explode in my skull, accompanied by a wave of unbelievable pressure. I have a headache, my tongue feels as if something died on it, and I ache all over. In fact, my body has an eerie not-quite-me-here feeling that I’ve had only a couple of times before, most notably in a dank room under Brookwood Cemetery—a really disturbing sensation, and not one I care for. I figure the headache is the after effect of being given the oneiromantic heave-ho by an angry sorceress; but I can’t account for the not-me feeling. Outside my thirtieth-floor window the sky is slate-gray and angry-looking. (Luckily it’s turned cold outside, and the temperature’s too low for tornadoes. That’s one of the local attractions I really don’t mind missing.) I check the clock and realize with a start that I’ve been asleep for about eight hours.

The bathroom is calling. I stumble through and splash water on my face. One thing leads to another, and ten minutes later (by way of the toilet and a brisk application of my shaver) I’m feeling a little more human, if still somewhat grumpy from the slowly subsiding headache.

I stare at my red-eyed face in the bathroom mirror. What am I doing here? I feel like an eight-year-old who’s been handed a laser pointer and a bag of catnip and told to go amuse the kittens behind the chain-link fence labelled Siberian Tiger Enclosure; my so-called External Assets are off the reservation and halfway to the horizon while I sit here with my thumb up my ass, nursing a dream hangover, with nothing to do but fill out expense accounts while Rome burns.

Pull yourself together, I tell myself.

Once you start managing other people, you can’t control every aspect of how they do their jobs or keep yourself informed on everything that’s going on. I’m supposed to be taking on a managerial role, for very small values of management (Look at me! I’ve got two contractors working for me! Whoop-de-do!) and I should bloody well stop trying to act like an over-stressed prima donna and start doing my job. Beginning with sending Lockhart a brief sitrep, an expenses update, and a revised estimate on when I expect to have something concrete to report—

There’s a knock at the door.

I’m not expecting anyone, the room’s made up, and it’s evening: all this passes through my head before I’m even off the bed.

I’m halfway to the vestibule, the narrow corridor running past the bathroom to the doorway, when I hear a rattle, then the thud of the door coming up against the security chain. For a moment I think I’m hallucinating: in the back of my head I’m hearing the crunching, munching sound of brain cells dying in the skulls on the other side of the portal, their waiting bodies occupied and animated by something blind and segmented and possessed of a vast, unthinking faith.

Possessed. Not human anymore. These aren’t the feeders in the night; I’d recognize those guys anywhere. These are something else. They seek and they save—

(Where am I getting this from?)

“Who’s there?” I ask aloud.

“Hotel security. Open up.”

There’s something wrong with his voice, as if he’s speaking around a mouthful of chopped liver. I mutter a macro in High Enochian, a pre-canned invocation that will open up my inner ear and let me listen again, eavesdropping on what’s left of his mind with a corner of my own consciousness that was only fully awakened last summer, and this is what I get:

A vast and wistful inner peace has stilled the fragmentary thoughts of the once-frightened human vessel. He knows he’s Saved, for he has eaten the blood and the body of Christ—and the host trans-substantiated into something that has in turn eaten his mind. He isn’t alone, he has a companion in arms. They are barely separate individuals anymore, for their hosts bind them together and control them. They’re united not merely by a common mission but a shared hunger for salvation. They want to help me. They’re dying to help me. And they’ve been sent here to help me find a friend in Jesus.

I left my phone and my warrant card beside the laptop on the table, didn’t I? I’m going to have to do this myself, I realize queasily.

“Open up,” says the seeker, its voice breaking into a very inhuman rasp.

I crunch down on them hard and fast, and I feel their savior-damped fears and needs stab at the edges of my mind like shell splinters as I engulf their shattered minds swiftly, a squid reaping a pair of unwary crabs from the seabed.

There is a heavy double-thud from the corridor. My stomach lurches. I feel queasy: bloated and simultaneously light-headed as I unhook the security chain and open the door.

Two men lie on the beige hotel carpet, looking for all the world as if they’ve just decided to take a nap. White shirts, black suits, black ties, like they came to audition for a role in Reservoir Dogs: The Musical. Focussing on the discreet cross lapel pins I see no motion: they aren’t breathing. My bad. I grab the nearest arm and pull; his jacket spills open, revealing a leather holster nestled in his armpit. I pull harder. Corpses are heavy, but I keep dragging until he’s well inside the doorway, then force myself to go back for the other one. I feel numb, like my emotions are wrapped in cotton wool. It’s not as if I murdered them—they barely had enough soul left to keep their bodies breathing and responsive—but I still feel responsible. Most of what was left of their minds was given over to experiencing a weird ecstatic rush of surrender, a feeling of being saved. I don’t think it’s any kind of salvation that Pete the Vicar would recognize, though.

I get the door shut and chained and I’m just about to fire up the corporate intranet and look up the regulations for dealing with the metabolically challenged when the jaws of the nearest stiff begin to open. His cheeks distend and something begins to pulse in his throat—almost as if he’s getting ready to vomit. Except he’s dead. (Actually he’s been soul-dead for weeks, if not months, but that didn’t stop him walking around.) Now it looks as if the death of the body isn’t any kind of obstacle to indigestion. I watch, repelled, as something forces its way out through the corpse’s lips: a pale white head, eyeless, with whiskery antennae, followed by a segmented body with tiny little legs. It isn’t dead, and I can feel its tiny little mind searching—an atom of desperate awareness, eternally hungry, seeking a soul to save—

I rush to the desk and grab the shitty Dell laptop, moving so fast I’m not consciously aware of my actions until afterwards. Then I look at the splattered mess I’ve created, and the bodies, and an abrupt wave of nausea seizes me. I make it to the toilet ahead of the dry heaves, then realize with a sense of near-panic that there are two parasites and I only had the one computer, and now it’s all broken and covered in blood and bits of the giant isopod from hell. (Fucking netbooks; you can’t even use one to beat an alien brain parasite to death without it breaking.)

Luckily there’s a trash can in the bathroom. I carry it back into the hotel room, where the second savior is just pulling its whip-tail free of its deceased victim’s jaws. It leads me a merry chase around the desk for a minute or two, but I have the tongs from the hotel ice bucket, and it does not; eventually I get it in the can, and weight the lid down with one of the missionary’s pistols.

I sit down, breathing heavily. This is not good. Above and beyond the whole self-defense thing—and I’m going to sleep badly over that, even though they were soul-dead to begin with—it opens a giant can of worms. Someone sent these things to…well, given what was on their tiny minds I’m fairly sure they weren’t just going to try and sell me a subscription to The Watchtower. But what worries me is who sent them. It appears Golden Promise Ministries have been alerted to my presence.

Which in turn leads me to wonder: What if my tigers have run into a big game hunter?

IT’S LATE AFTERNOON. THE SKY IS THE COLOR OF STONE AND occasional fat snowflakes drift below the street lights, glistening as they melt before they reach the sidewalk.

Johnny has spent the day patrolling the exit routes he has carefully laid out for Persephone. Tomorrow, if all goes well, he’ll see about dropping in on one of Schiller’s church’s public services; but first it’s his job to ensure that Persephone’s needs are covered.

Each of the rented apartments is kitted out with the necessities for either a short or a long stay: fast food, sterile prepaid mobile phones, a couple of off-the-shelf outfits—weekend-casual and office drag—and medical kits. But that’s not enough. He’s also keeping an eye on the safe houses, checking for surveillance, nosy neighbors, environmental hazards like crack houses and off-duty cops. And he’s checking out each house in turn, driving from one to the next and watching from down the street. Lamplighting, the spooks call it; attending a single safe house is usually rated a full-time job, but Johnny’s got three lamps to tend, in different cities. He’s driven maybe two hundred miles today, back and forth between Denver and Colorado Springs and Pinecrest, and he’s almost sufficiently fucked off with the job to phone that geeky bureaucrat guy and set him to work. (Howard wants to help? Let him.)

He’s driving back towards the safe house in Washington Park when he realizes that he’s being tailed.

It’s not a new sensation for Johnny, but it’s always unwelcome. A crawling on the back of the neck, awareness that there are at least one set of headlights behind him that are keeping their distance—he experiments, taking an exit fast and a right turn on a red light, and the lights follow.

Johnny’s lips peel back silently in something like a smile. This boring legwork is his least favorite part of the job (though he’d rather die than admit as much to the Duchess while she’s depending on him). He’s more than ready for a rumble, though he’s professional enough not to seek one out while he’s on a job, but if someone asks him for one—Got you, my son, he thinks at the lights in his mirror, and looks for a suitable location.

He passes an alleyway between two shuttered brick-and-steel shops in a block that shows little sign of night life. Half a mile later Johnny circles and turns back towards it, slowing. He indicates in plenty of time, then noses into the alley and kills his lights. His vehicle is a stick-shift pickup with a big block engine, selected specifically for its ability to carry out maneuvers like the one he’s about to pull; and he’s already disabled the airbags and the reversing light. Johnny believes in living dangerously.

There are lights in his mirror, approaching. Still rolling forward, Johnny slams the truck into reverse, guns the engine, and smokes the clutch. The truck lurches to a standstill and rolls backwards without stalling. It’s got enough torque to haul a ten-ton trailer; the clutch is probably glowing cherry-red. There’s a crunch, more felt than heard, and he lets his headrest absorb the impact. Then he’s out of the cab and into the alley before the engine stops.

He finds the driver of the crunched car beating back the airbag and struggling with his door, swearing. Johnny tuts admiringly as he scans the passenger seats and the alleyway for spectators; the pickup’s trailer hitch has done a real number on the radiator of the tail car—a Neon, now bleeding out between a pair of overflowing dumpsters. He yanks on the door handle with his left hand, holding his weapon where the driver can see it. “Hands on top of the wheel,” he says, taking care to speak clearly and loudly. “Where I can see ’em.”

The driver freezes, an expression of profound disgust on his rabbitlike face. “Jesus, Johnny,” he whines, “whatcha have to do that for?”

Johnny squints at the driver. “Patrick?” Sixty-something, with white receding hair and a salt-and-pepper beard, he’s a dead ringer for a certain former associate of the Network. Johnny takes a step back—ensuring his knife is out of range of a quick grab—glances up and down the alleyway, then turns back to the driver. “Small world, mate.” An old and unwelcome memory prompts him: “Show us yer tongue.”

“Yer wot?” Patrick looks genuinely perplexed.

“Like this.” Johnny sticks his tongue out at Patrick, rolls it. “Do it. Now.”

“Sure.” Patrick looks disgusted, but does as he’s told; his tongue is clearly normal. “What’s that about, for the love of God?”

Johnny sighs. “Why were you following me?”

“I just saw you drive past and recognized—”

“No, Pat. I don’t have time. Listen, I’m doing you a favor just letting you talk. But I don’t have forever. Tell me the truth, okay? Who are you working for?”

Patrick’s fingers tighten on the steering wheel. For a moment, under the shadows cast by the street lights, he looks a century older than his age. “The Nazgûl.”

Johnny wears a couple of small wards in a leather bag on a cord round his neck, tucked under his check shirt. One of them should—just over ninety-four percent of the time, to within two standard deviations—prick him when someone is lying to him with malice in mind. It is quiescent in the face of Patrick’s quiet despair. “Well, mate, this is yer lucky day.” Johnny lowers his knife.

Patrick’s eyes widen. “I don’t understand. What’s with waving that thing at me if you’re not—”

“Case of mistaken identity: we’re not the only players in town.” Johnny scans the alley again. “Tell you what: let’s you and me go somewhere an’ catch up on the news over a cup of tea. It’ll be just like old times again. You on, mate?” Patrick is, in truth, not exactly the rumble Johnny was looking for. His pulse slows, adrenaline rush receding.

“What about me car? That’s me wife’s wheels you fucking minced.” The airbag is deflating slowly; Patrick slowly eases out of the driver’s seat, wincing. “Jesus Mary, my fucking knee…”

“Wipe the steering wheel and leave it. You’ve got triple-A? You can call it in as stolen later. Do me right and I’ll front you the dosh for repairs.”

Patrick raises his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Okay, Sarge, you win.” That was Johnny’s tag in the Network: it brings back a rush of memories, not all of them welcome. “You’re not angry with me?”

Johnny shakes his head. “Climb in the cab. Front seat.” He walks round the pickup, opens the driver’s door. “The Nazgûl. You freelancing? Expensing?”

Patrick climbs up into the high cab slowly, wincing. “They’re paying Moira’s medical bills.”

“How is she?” Johnny asks, checking his mirrors and turning over the engine. He’s never met Patrick’s other half, but it’s the right question to ask when you’re building trust prior to a debrief.

“Cancer.” Patrick’s voice is flat. “’Ad it for three years. You know ’ow it is over here.”

“Jesus, Pat.” The truck jolts forward with a screech of fiberglass and metal. Johnny sees Patrick wince, checks the rearview to ensure the Neon’s bumper isn’t still fouling the tow hook. “Why didn’t you go home?”

“She’s got family on this side of the pond.” Patrick closes his eyes. “Like I said, the Black Chamber offers a generous medical insurance package. Even for stringers.”

Johnny reaches out sideways without taking his eye off the alley and takes Patrick’s left wrist. It’s bony, the skin loose as a chicken carcass; he rotates it, glances sidelong at the symbol tattooed there. It’s quiescent right now. He lets go. “Jesus, Patrick,” he says softly. “How long?”

“Two years. It was that, or bankruptcy and no high-quality chemo for Moira.”

Johnny does not want to hear this, so he leans forward, scanning, as he guides the big truck down the narrow alleyway. Putting a human face on the oppo is never welcome: it feels like staring into a bathroom mirror and seeing a skull. Learning that an old workmate has taken the Dark Mark—signed on as a freelance stringer for the Black Chamber’s mind-riders to spy through—is harsh; that he’s done it for the love of a good woman is all the worse, like a moral bullet to the kneecap.

At the end of the alleyway there’s a car park and a row of dumpsters. Johnny slides the pickup round and out towards the street exit on the far side. Pulling out into the traffic he asks, “What do the Nazgûl want with me, Pat?”

There’s a pause. Then, “Mister McTavish. What are you doing in Denver?”

The voice is Patrick’s, but it speaks with a Midwestern twang quite unlike his Northern Irish tenor. The other ward around Johnny’s neck is suddenly choking and hot, gripping tight; there’s a pale violet light in the cab, coming from the vicinity of Patrick’s wrist.

“Cut that out: I’m not your bitch.” Johnny’s hands clench the wheel, but his mind is abruptly calm. He’s got his rumble; the potential for collateral damage is simply an unwelcome addition.

“You are on our soil. Under normal circumstances that makes you my bitch.”

“You want to talk to me, get a fucking cellphone.” Johnny pauses. “What precisely do you mean, normal circumstances?”

A laugh forces itself out of Patrick’s larynx, followed by a wheezing series of coughs. “You will tell us who sent you here.”

“Nobody sent me.” Johnny slows, seeking a parking space. He’s acutely aware of the sleeping, hungry knives holstered inside his jacket, a million miles from the hand that grips the gear stick.

“You are here with your mistress, Persephone Hazard, who is inside the Omega Ministries’ compound.” The creature that animates Patrick’s body speaks assertively. “This we know. Eight hours after your arrival, an agent of the British Special Operations Executive also arrived in Denver. You were observed together.”

Johnny pulls over, kills the engine, and switches off the lights. He turns to face Patrick’s body. “Why are you telling me this?” He demands. As he turns, he palms a small item from beneath the steering column. “Who are you?”

“We are Control.” The amber glare of the street lamps casts deep shadows across Patrick’s face, but not so deep that Johnny can’t see the faint fluorescent trails writhing in the empty gaze. “The unblinking, red-rimmed eye, as Peter Jackson frames it. We see everything we look for. Usually.”

Johnny waits. The pressure on his ward is oppressive: he can feel it around him, as dark and implacable as the waters of the Challenger Deep, a chilly, soul-crushing dread.

“But we cannot see your mistress. And now that we know where to look, we cannot see inside the Omega Ministries’ domain.”

“You’re having trouble seeing—” Johnny stops. (The Black Chamber is having trouble with remote viewing? Is there some grit in the unblinking panopticon gaze? Or a detached retina?) “What do you want?”

“We want. Co-operation. Yours, mostly. Freely given.”

Johnny chuckles nastily: “Fuck off.” His grip tightens on the item he palmed. Control has got Patrick. It’s a dilemma. Usually he wouldn’t think twice about doing the necessary, but there’s no telling what happens to the mount after the rider departs. “You’ve got assets. Use them yourself. Like I said, I’m not your bitch.”

There is a pause. “Normally we would. And we’d deal with you later.” A longer pause. “First we could not see within the Omega Ministries. Now the area of darkness is growing. Colorado Springs is closed to us. Denver is dimming. Our hands are numb and cannot grip.” Control’s tone is chilly. “Are you Born Again, Mister McTavish? Are you willing to bend your neck to the yoke of Raymond Schiller’s master?”

“Are you telling me you’ve lost your grip?”

“That depends on the meaning of the word ‘lost.’” For a moment Control sounds uncertain. “We are experiencing difficulty conducting operations in north-central Colorado. There is an unnatural storm system to the north that formed overnight, a weather bomb. Flights are diverted, road checkpoints are established. The FBI office in Denver reports that all is quiet on the western front, but pools of darkness expand and the gripping hand is paralyzed.”

The pressure on Johnny’s ward relaxes a little, and he takes a deep breath. “You think Schiller is to blame? What’s he doing? Begun one of the great summonings?”

“Find out, Mister McTavish. Write us a letter, a full and frank report, or tell your friend O’Donnell here. Either way: inform us, let us know what you discover. Be of use to us and we will have no reason to take exception to your presence in our backyard. You have three days. Use them wisely.”

Of an instant the oppressive sense of dread vanishes. Johnny lashes out, pulling the compact taser just short of Patrick’s sallow face. It’s not his favorite weapon, but it’s safer—probably. For an uncertain moment he wonders if he’s making a deadly error. But the faint glow in Pat’s eyes has gone; he slumps forward against his seat belt, then begins to shake and twitch uncontrollably.

Johnny safes the taser hastily, then flips it around, using it as a wedge to separate Patrick’s teeth: the fit only lasts a few seconds, but by the time it’s over Johnny has crossed a line in his own head. Sometimes people do good things for bad reasons, and sometimes people do bad things for good reasons. He isn’t sure which this is yet, but he’s hoping for the former.

PERSEPHONE GLANCES SIDELONG AT HER MOUSY GUIDE: bellwether, she thinks. The scene is crystal clear. The guards holding the struggling sacrificial victim down wear black wind-cheaters emblazoned with the oracular runes FBI. They’ve got sidearms. There are another twenty congregants—everyone from the course, and a few besides—and the church pastors. Heads are turning. Behind her, a windowless tunnel. Fire doors. Her heart skips a beat as she takes a short step backwards. “Sorry, honey,” she says to Roseanne or Lisa or whoever her guide is, and punches her over one kidney: the woman stumbles into the underground chapel as the struggling victim rams his forehead into his guard’s nose in a classic Glasgow kiss. The other FBI man sidesteps his follow-through kick sharply and is already pulling a pistol as Persephone skips back two steps and slams her elbow into the glass cover of the fire alarm.

The doors slam shut as the siren winds up to a screech. The emergency lights come on, illuminating the route of her sprint.

She makes it up to the first floor in a breathless run and barely breaks stride as she hits the crash bar on the fire exit. The door opens, and she finds herself on one side of the church, on a concrete path winding between deep-frozen snow piles around the side of another windowless building. She trots to the end of the path, then cuts back to a fast walk, composing herself, trying to look unobtrusive. Don’t draw attention. Icy cold, she’s working on her evacuation route. At least sixty seconds before they fan out and start looking for me. The prisoners…she winces. But they’re the least of her problems. She’s blown her cover. What was going on in that chapel was worse than anything even Johnny had feared. Better warn him as soon as possible, before I use the safe house and wheels. Just in case.

The church complex sits at one side of a street. Opposite it squats a two-story building, low and wide, with glass windows through which she can see brightly colored posters on the walls. There are desks and chairs: perhaps it’s a primary school or kindergarten. It’s Saturday, though. Persephone trots across the street, round the unfenced side of the school, and up the wooded slope behind it. There’s snow on the ground which will show her tracks—very bad. She can hear alarms now, and a quick glance shows her the other fire doors opening, people spilling out. She turns to ignore them and slides her shoes off—the two-inch heels are no good off the beaten track—then breaks back into a run.

Elapsed time: two minutes. She’s past the school, coming up behind another building. It’s three stories high with a complex spaghetti-work of gas pipes and ducts behind it, just like a hospital or clinic. A big diesel generator and an enormous tank of fuel sit in readiness behind a chain-link fence, but the rear approach is clear and there are windows at ground level. A couple of them are open. She darts towards them, keeping low and using available ground cover—of which there is much, for the trees come almost all the way up to the building.

Observe, orient, decide, act: words to live or die by. Right now, Persephone is disoriented—on the run, cut off. It’s time to go on the offensive, work out where she is and what’s going on, then get the hell out of this trap.

Unlike Mr. Howard from Capital Laundry Services, she’s seen the things in the silver salver before and knows exactly what they are, and by extension, the unplumbed depths of the cesspool in which she has so abruptly found herself treading water. And her day has just gone from normal to nightmare in sixty seconds.

PICTURE THIS: IT’S EARLY AFTERNOON IN A BLANDLY CORPORATE hotel room in downtown Denver. There are two corpses lying on the floor in the middle of the room. An upturned bathroom waste bin sits on the floor nearby, its former steed’s handgun holding it down. It rattles from time to time as the complaints department within expresses its opinion of the accommodation. I am sitting in the desk chair, drained by my exertions—both physical and mental—and taking a few minutes to assess my options.

Here’s my situation: the bad guys know where I am. This is obviously undesirable. So this is my plan (which is mine, what I invented all by myself): I am going to run away, very fast. Simples!

There are minor complications, of course. First, I’m going to have to notify Lockhart, Hazard, and McTavish. Especially the latter two. Both of whom hung out a big Do Not Disturb sign last time I called them.

Second, there are the two corpses. Housekeeping are going to be very unhappy, and I don’t think tipping high will cut any ice. I feel a bit sick whenever I think about what I did to them. They were, once upon a time, thinking, feeling human beings; by the time they came knocking on my door there wasn’t much left inside them—understatement: they were little more than zombies that hadn’t begun to smell—but that doesn’t make me feel any better. I want to know for sure who sent them, and why.

(And when I find them I want to give the bastard who wrecked their minds a piece of my mind.)

I generally try not to jump to conclusions, but I’m willing to wave my little pinkie in the air and swear that they’re not from the Black Chamber. The Black Chamber isn’t big on Christianity. In fact, they treat it as a character flaw among their employees. Given that I’m over here to ride herd on an investigation into the Golden Promise Ministries, being doorstepped by a pair of armed Christian missionaries is all but definitive. So, I’m working on the assumption that Schiller sent them and that there’s more to GPM than meets the eye.

Thirdly and finally, there’s the thing in the bin—the complaints department. I don’t know exactly what it is, but a quick look in Dead Guy #1’s mouth—quick because I don’t enjoy throwing up—shows that it’s empty: nothing inside but a nub of scar tissue at the back of his mouth. And unless I’m suffering from auditory hallucinations, he did ask me to open the door. So the logical deduction is that the thing in the bucket is some kind of hideous parasite that does double-duty among the Jeezemoids; talk about speaking in tongues.

I need to know what they’re capable of. So I’m going to have to contain it, bind it, and see what, if any, control one of these parasites can exert on a victim.

(Yes, I’ve seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I never imagined I’d find myself having to deal with an outbreak, but there’s a first time for everything.)

First things first: call Lockhart. I reach for the hotel phone and punch in my special calling-card number.

“Hello, Garrison Fitzhugh estate agents. We’re sorry, but the office is closed right now. Opening hours are 9 till 5, Monday to Friday. Please leave a message after the beep…”

Of course it’s closed; it’s 8 p.m. on a Saturday evening back home. I clear my throat. “This is Bob Howard. I’m in Denver and I want to talk to someone about a problem with my property. I can’t contact the tenants and I just had a call from Environmental Health, who seemed to be upset about an infestation of giant wood lice”—there’s no codeword for “alien brain parasite” so I make one up on the fly—“so anyway, I’m not sure how long I can fend them off. Please call back.” I hang up. Hopefully that little zinger will rattle Lockhart’s cage.

I’m busy doodling an intricate design on the inside of last night’s pizza box lid with a conductive marker pen when the phone rings.

“Bob.” It’s Lockhart. “Sitrep, now.”

“This is a hotel phone line.”

“Are you in public?”

“No—”

“Sitrep. Now.” Going by his tone of voice he is just slightly stressed.

I tell him about the MIBs and the slater from hell that’s scritching at the inside of the trash can. Phone codecs are designed to filter out the gaps between spoken words, but I can hear Lockhart’s blood pressure rising all the way from London. When I finish, he’s silent for a few moments. Then he lets me have it: “Your mission is over. I want you to book the next available flight out of the United States and fly home immediately. Between now and departure, go to ground.”

“What about—”

“Bring the parasite if you can, but be ready to destroy it if anyone tries to interfere.”

“I meant Hazard and McTavish—”

“Mr. Howard.” He’s clearly making an effort to sound calm, which is scary under the circumstances: “Let us be quite clear, your part of this operation is over. You’ve been compromised and there has been an abduction attempt. You’re on a reconnaissance mission, not a search-and-destroy; that’s sufficient justification for us to start making direct enquiries into the, ah, situation that certain outsiders were poking their noses into. It’s also sufficient justification for you to run like hell and not look back, don’t you think? It will be much easier for us to make those enquiries if you are on hand to file an eyewitness report, instead of filling a shallow grave somewhere in Colorado.”

“Are you telling me to ditch BASHFUL INCENDIARY?”

A moment’s hesitation: “Not exactly, Robert. But you told me they went to ground, and it seems to me that they are eminently capable of looking after themselves. I understand your natural loyalty, and it does you credit. If you can notify them that the operation is terminated, without risk to yourself, then you may do so. But it is impossible to over-emphasize the risk management aspect: we want you back here in one piece, and that is more important than anything else you can do in the field.” Lockhart pauses again, as if someone is feeding him instructions. “I want twice-daily verbal reports and I want to see you in person within twenty-four hours. Is that understood?”

I stare at the phone as if it’s grown bat wings and fangs. “I understand,” I say. I understand that you’re telling me to leave the two contractors you made me responsible for to die in a train wreck, is what I manage to keep back. You cold bastard, you.

“Good. Call me with an update tomorrow.” The line goes dead.

I stare at the phone and stifle the urge to scream obscenities. It passes quickly enough, anyway: unprofessional, unproductive, and might attract unwanted attention. Nevertheless, my opinion of Lockhart has just taken a nosedive. Loyalty is—has to be—a two-way street in my line of work. This isn’t a painful but basically survivable workplace situation like a lay-off or downsizing: Persephone and Johnny are out there right now, being stalked by walking corpses with parasites for tongues and heads full of revelation. If I don’t do my damnedest to see them to safety, what does that say about me? Sure, Johnny is an over-muscled asshole with a disturbingly easy-going attitude to killing, and Persephone is just plain disturbing (a bizarre chimera, half sexy Eastwick witch and half KGB hit-woman)…but I feel responsible.

So I take a deep breath and go back to urgently doodling on the pizza box.

Summonings and containment grid, field-expedient, 101: if the thing you’re trying to contain is pallid, has too many legs, and is about the size of a human tongue, a pizza box will do just fine. More to the point, I really want it to be locked down properly before I try using the tattoos to call Persephone or Johnny—it’s a trophic eater, which means if it isn’t securely contained when I call it’ll be all over my frontal lobes like grease on a hamburger before I can say “oh shit.”

I’m thinking on the fly, here. (Although now that I’m in middle management I think I’m supposed to call it “refactoring the strategic value proposition in real time with agile implementation,” or, if I’m being honest, “making it up as I go along.”) Revised plan: box up the complaints department, pack my bags, and go straight to the airport. All that’s left is to call Persephone and Johnny, then pull the eject handle, get the hell out of Dodge City before it’s too late, go home, and hide under the bed for a week of gibbering reaction time.

I finish doodling on the inside of the box, and collect a handy cable from my travel electronics kit. It’s got a couple of pointy contacts; I stab these through various points on the diagram, and plug the other end into my JesusPhone. OFCUT does the rest, and I gingerly transfer the live summoning grid to the carpet in front of the bin.

The complaints department sets up a horrendous racket as I slide the grid under it. Then it stops, abruptly. I’m half-expecting a blue flash and a vile smell, but no such luck: looks like I’ve successfully contained it. I raise the bin gingerly, ready to slam it down if the many-legged monstrosity makes a bid for freedom. The thing is tightly curled in the middle of the grid, which is shimmering faintly—for all the world as if it’s held in place by magic cling-film. Great; all I have to do now is refrain from dropping it.

I disconnect my phone, close the pizza box, and stuff it in the bottom of my go-bag. Then I massage my forehead and steel myself, anticipating pain. I pinch my arm over the relevant tattoo and go knock on her frontal lobes.

***Busy.***

She’s aware of me and she’s got the blinds turned down—I’m picking up nothing about her environment, just an icy half-amused, half-angry awareness that pursuit could show up at any moment.

***I know,*** I send. ***I’ve been ordered to bug out. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, get the first plane out, and run like hell.***

She doesn’t seem to be surprised. My heart sinks.

***I think you and Johnny should get out right now,*** I add.

***Why do you think that?***

***Bad guys sent a wet team for me. They’re possessed, some kind of parasite.***

***I know.*** She sends me a glimpse of my pizza-box horror, trapped writhing between silver tongs in some kind of ritual. My stomach flip-flops. ***I’m on the run; they were going to plant one of those things on me. I blew my cover. It’s possible it was blown before I started, though: they may have tagged me right from the start, in London. Then saw me and Johnny and made the connection from him to you.***

***I got a heads-up that the local police and security agencies are compromised and presumed hostile,*** I tell her. ***I warned Johnny about it.***

***Understood. Keep your distance. I’ll call Johnny in due course to plan our exit. I’ve got to go now.***

And just like that she cuts me off.

I quickly shave and dress in my all-purpose suit—I may have to bluff my way past some desk pilots in the very near future and it doesn’t hurt to look like a civil servant—and stuff one of the pistols in a pocket. Then I shovel the rest of my crap into the case and head for the lobby, leaving the Do Not Disturb sign hanging on the door handle.

Next stop: the airport.