“But it says to leave them in Grand Rapids where the police can find them.”
“I think it means the bomb,” offered Scalzi. “We’re supposed to leave the bomb where the police can find it.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Konrath. “Why would he want the police to find the bomb?”
“Beats me,” said Izbazel. “Why did he ask me to shoot him in the knee?”
None of them knew the answer to that one.
“We’ll just leave the bomb at the spot marked with the X,” said Izbazel. “If the police find it, it’s none of our business.”
They all agreed this was a sound plan.
“What does ‘destroy after reading’ mean?” asked Nisroc.
“I think it means the numbers on the bomb,” said Izbazel.
“What do the numbers mean?”
“Beats me,” said Izbazel. “But we read them, so I guess we’d better destroy them.”
“How?” said Nisroc. “That’s permanent marker. He should have put some nail polish remover in the envelope.”
There was general agreement that it would have been a good idea for Zion Johnson to provide them with nail polish remover if he was serious about them destroying the indecipherable markings on the bomb. Fortunately, Nisroc came up with yet another brilliant idea: wiping down a nuclear bomb with gasoline. It took a fair amount to completely obliterate the markings, but they knew that Zion Johnson would want them to be thorough.
Once the bomb was completely clean and drenched with highly flammable liquid, they put it back in the stolen army vehicle and got back on the road, headed for Grand Rapids, Michigan. Things were going well for Chaos Faction for a change.
Chapter Nine
San Francisco; August 2016
Suzy regained consciousness on a couch that she gradually realized was inside the apartment of the strange man who had demanded to sample her margarine. The place was a mess, littered with newspapers, magazines and fast food containers. A few feet from the couch sat a small balding man who looked to be about forty. After a moment, Suzy recognized him as Gary Rosenfeld, the former Washington Post reporter. He sat at a small desk, tapping away at a laptop, apparently oblivious to her.
Suddenly remembering the hidden thumb drive, Suzy sat up and looked around feverishly for her purse. She needn’t have worried: it was at the foot of the couch, with the margarine tub still inside. As she removed the lid to inspect the contents, the man she had met earlier walked into the room.
“Oh, hi,” he said cheerily. “Do you want some bread with that?”
She ignored the man, turning toward Rosenfeld, who hadn’t taken his eyes off his laptop screen. “Excuse me,” she said. “Are you Gary Rosenfeld? The reporter?”
Rosenfeld didn’t stir.
“Don’t bother,” said the other man. “He’s in the zone. Can’t hear you. I’m Eddie, by the way. Sorry about earlier. Sometimes I get a little crazy being cooped up here all day. Did you say you wanted bread?”
“I don’t want bread,” Suzy said. “I came here because of this.” She reached into the margarine and dug around until she found the thumb drive.
Eddie regarded her with a look of horror as she held up the device covered in yellowy goo. “Why would you do that?” he asked.
“Figured nobody would look in the margarine tub.”
Eddie shuddered. “What’s on it?”
Suzy began unwrapping the cellophane. “Information on Project Brimstone. It’s the—”
She jumped as the thumb drive disappeared from her fingers. Rosenfeld had grabbed it from her and was greedily inserting it into the side of his laptop.
“You said the magic word,” said Eddie.
“Apparently,” said Suzy, watching Rosenfeld tapping his fingers impatiently on the desk as he waited for the files to come up. “So what’s your deal? Do you guys run the website together?”
Eddie sat down next to her. “BitterAngels dot net? Yeah. Well, it’s mostly Gary. I write a little, but mostly I just help out.”
“What happened in the stairwell? Was that an example of you ‘helping out?’”
Eddie shrugged. “You could say that.”
“Seriously, how did you do that?”
“Levitation,” Eddie said. “Minor miracle. All angels can do it. Watch.” He held out his hand and the margarine container floated up from the coffee table where Suzy had set it.
“How are you doing that?” she asked. Her tone wasn’t so much awed as accusatory, as if Eddie were pulling something over on her.
“Manipulation of interplanar energy,” he answered.
“Bullshit.”
Eddie smiled. “Watch.”
The lid popped off the container and a glob of margarine emerged from the tub, slowly forming itself into a vaguely humanoid shape. Eventually she realized that it was the likeness of a young child, standing on some sort of pedestal. As Suzy watched, the figure sprouted wings—and then another, much smaller appendage. As she stared, open-mouthed, the appendage began to emit an arc of yellowish effluent into the tub.
“Ew,” Suzy said, aghast at the image.
“It’s a cherub,” said Eddie.
“It’s revolting,” said Suzy.
Eddie frowned. “I thought it was pretty good. He’s a friend of mine. His name is Perpetiel.”
“Keep your friend out of my margarine.”
Eddie shrugged and the figure melted back into the tub.
“What is this crap?” asked Rosenfeld suddenly, tabbing through the contents of the thumb drive. “There’s nothing new here.”
“What?” said Suzy, who instantly forgot about the miraculous work of margarine sculpting she had just witnessed. “That’s top secret stuff! I know it doesn’t spell it out in so many words, but it’s pretty obvious that they’ve resurrected Wormwood. The program intended as damage control for Wormwood became a program to build another bomb! Brimstone is just Wormwood Two!”
Rosenfeld shook his head. “Tell me something I don’t know. Let me guess, the whole thing is run by angels who have infiltrated the government and are using their miraculous powers to keep everybody in the dark.”
Suzy looked from Rosenfeld to Eddie to the margarine tub and back to Rosenfeld again. “Um, no?” she ventured.
“Ah,” said Rosenfeld, with a knowing smile. “So you’re still in the dark yourself. You’ve glimpsed the machine, but you haven’t figured out who’s running it yet.”
“I read some of the stuff on your site,” said Suzy. “So I know all about your ‘angel’ theory…”
“You just witnessed the spontaneous formation of a peeing cherub statue from a tub of margarine,” Rosenfeld interrupted. “How do you explain that?”
“I also saved her life in the stairwell,” said Eddie proudly.
“I’m still processing that,” said Suzy. “I’ll grant you that something unusual is going on here.”
Rosenfeld laughed. “Unusual, right. Here’s the deal: a while back, probably around 2002, Lucifer started assigning demons to infiltrate the U.S. government in Washington…”
“Whoa,” said Suzy. “Lucifer? Like, the Devil?”
“Correct. Satan himself. You’ve read the Bible?”
“I saw the movie.”
“All right, well I’m going to assume you’re familiar with the basic mythology. Lucifer rebelled against God and took a bunch of angels with him. Those angels became demons. Really, it’s just a bureaucratic distinction; it’s not like they grow horns and bat wings or anything. Demons are just angels who aren’t doing their assigned job. OK?”
“OK…”
“So Lucifer has been wreaking havoc on the Mundane Plane—that is, on Earth—for thousands of years. Some time in the past ten or fifteen years, he started assigning agents to infiltrate the U.S. government.”
“Agents,” repeated Suzy. “You mean demons.”
“Correct. Fallen angels. Lucifer’s agents kept a low profile for the most part; at first he wa
s more interested in collecting information than actively influencing policy. But then he found out about Wormwood, and hatched a plan to get Babcock to use the bomb against Heaven.”
“He did what?”
“It’s complicated. The point is, the bomb blew up in the hub that connects Earth to all the other planes. So all the angels and demons on Earth are now stuck here, probably forever. Lucifer was apprehended by Heavenly authorities, so now there was this whole intelligence apparatus inside the U.S. government that had no one running it. A headless monster, if you will.”
“So who’s running Brimstone, if the monster has no head?”
“Somebody stepped in to fill the gap,” said Rosenfeld. “Another angel.”
“Like, a bad angel?”
Rosenfeld sighed and looked at Eddie.
“She didn’t start off bad,” Eddie said. “In fact, I always kind of liked her. I think she probably had good intentions when she took over for Lucifer…”
“She?” asked Suzy. “The angel is a woman?”
“Her customary appearance is that of a little girl,” said Rosenfeld. “Her name is Michelle.”
“Michelle?” said Suzy. “That doesn’t really sound like an angel name.”
“You probably know her by the male version of her name, Michael.”
“Michael? You mean…”
“Right, the archangel,” said Rosenfeld. “General of God’s own army.”
Suzy thought for a moment. “Are you sure you aren’t just imagining all of this?”
“Are you sure you didn’t just imagine a cherub peeing in your margarine?”
“No,” Suzy said. “Actually I’m not. It occurs to me that maybe I hit my head in the stairwell and I’m hallucinating all of this.”
Rosenfeld nodded. “One way to find out.”
“What’s that?”
“Fall down the stairs again. This time Eddie won’t catch you.”
She looked at Eddie, who smiled and held up his hands innocently.
“OK,” said Suzy. “I’m going to provisionally accept that you aren’t completely full of shit. But your story doesn’t hold together. If Lucifer has been around for thousands of years, why did he just start infiltrating the U.S. government a few years ago? Wouldn’t he have done his best to get agents in every major government, starting centuries ago?”
“He did,” said Eddie. “How do you think the Holocaust happened? You don’t get millions of people to close their eyes to something like that without some demonic influence.”
“To answer your question, though,” Rosenfeld said, “we don’t know why he didn’t infiltrate the U.S. on a large scale before now. He did have quite a bit of influence over some policies—we think that he had something to do with dropping the bomb on Nagasaki, and probably the internment camps during World War II, for example. But there was never any major effort to get demons into positions of importance in Washington before now. The few agents that Lucifer did have in the capital were all corrupted humans, which leads us to think that there may have been some kind of shield around Washington that prevented demons from entering. But whatever was keeping the demons out, it’s gone now. The place is completely overrun.”
“But this Michelle, the archangel, she’s in charge now, right? So that’s good?”
Rosenfeld sighed. “From what Eddie tells me, Michelle has mostly been on the right side throughout history. But now her biggest enemy, Lucifer, is out of the picture, and she’s cut off from Heaven, so she has no one to point her in the right direction. Eddie’s theory is that she’s trying to create Heaven on Earth.”
“And… that’s a bad thing?”
“Michelle is all about control,” Eddie said. “You can’t create paradise if you give people freedom to screw it up. So she’s going to keep looking for ways to increase her control—over the United States, and over the world as a whole. So far she’s been pretty subtle about it, but she’ll use fear if she needs to.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” replied Rosenfeld, “that her turning Brimstone into Wormwood Two is a very worrisome development.”
“Well, we agree on that much,” said Suzy. “Is there any way to stop Brimstone before they finish the bomb?”
Rosenfeld chuckled. “Not without going back in time,” he said.
“Wait, what?” said Suzy. “Are you saying…?”
“They’ve done it. According to my sources, the bomb already exists. God knows what they’re planning on doing with it. Hey, what’s this?” Rosenfeld was looking at something on his screen.
“What?” asked Suzy. “I didn’t have time to look through it very closely.”
“It’s a PowerPoint presentation that seems to have been saved in the wrong directory. The rest of the stuff in there is all technical crap, but this is higher level strategic stuff. Some kind of briefing for the higher-ups.”
“Anything interesting on it?” asked Suzy.
“Hmm,” replied Rosenfeld. “Mostly buzzwords and bullshit. But hey, check this out. The slide labeled ‘Areas of Concern.’”
Suzy and Eddie peered over his shoulder.
There was only a single bullet point on the slide. It read
· Mercury—Milhaus, TX?
“What’s Mercury?” asked Suzy.
“Mercury isn’t a what,” said Eddie. “It’s a who. But I thought he was gone, exiled on another plane.”
“Well, somebody thinks he’s in Milhaus, Texas,” observed Suzy.
“But if that’s true…” started Eddie.
“What?” asked Rosenfeld, who was apparently as much in the dark on this one as Suzy.
“Then we may have a chance to stop Michelle before things get out of hand.”
“How?” asked Suzy.
“Well,” said Eddie. “It isn’t completely true that nobody knows why Lucifer didn’t infiltrate Washington before this century.”
“What are you talking about, Eddie?” demanded Rosenfeld. “What haven’t you told me?”
Eddie shrugged sheepishly. “I never mentioned it before because I never thought we’d see him again… but I’m pretty sure Mercury knows how the demons were kept out of D.C.”
Chapter Ten
The English Moor; Spring, 1773
Angels and demons have fought with each other for control over the course of history since Lucifer first made an unauthorized appearance in the Garden of Eden. This struggle is rarely overt; it occurs almost entirely behind the scenes, unnoticed and unrecorded, save for the tireless efforts of the Mundane Observation Corps. In some cases the machinations of Heaven or Hell are so subtle that it’s difficult even for a seasoned member of the MOC to determine who is working for whom, or what exactly they are trying to accomplish. Double agents and subterfuge abound, on both sides. The byzantine nature of the Heavenly bureaucracy also complicates matters; occasionally an MOC agent has found two different branches of Heaven to be working at cross purposes, such as when Apocalypse Bureau had assigned several agents to stoke the fires of the Crusades at the very moment Morality & Scruples were doing everything they could to get everybody in Christendom to just calm the hell down and think things over.
Sometimes one side or the other will achieve what appears to be a decisive victory only for the pendulum of history to swing dramatically the opposite direction. Heaven fought long and hard to bring about the ascendancy of Rome, for example, only to have the Republic devolve into a corrupt, despotic regime. Lucifer, working to corrupt Rome from within and urging the barbarian tribes on the borders to attack, eventually got his wish when the great city itself was sacked and the Empire dissolved. But Lucifer was powerless to stop the spread of Christianity and the diffusion of new ideas and technology throughout Western Europe that eventually led to the Renaissance and the Reformation. Good follows evil and evil follows good, and it isn’t always clear which is which—even to the angels and demons who fighting for one side or the other.
Such was the case in the British co
lonies in North America toward the end of the eighteenth century. It was generally agreed in both Heaven and Hell that the acquisition and settlement of the American territories had been a positive development for the British Commonwealth. Heaven thus tended to assign its agents with the purpose of assisting the colonists in their efforts to subdue the new land and thereby increase Britain’s hold on the continent. Lucifer, being opposed to positive developments on principle, did everything he could to wreak chaos with the situation. He wanted to see the nascent settlements devolve into chaos and cannibalism, and to make Britain regret ever staking a claim in the New World. Or, at the very least, he wanted to see France or Spain take the lead in the new continent. The French and Spanish were still in love with the idea of a centralized, autocratic authority. They loved their Popes and their Kings—and Lucifer loved them too, because they were so much easier to manipulate than those damned British assemblies and parliaments. Sure, occasionally you’d get stuck with an incorruptible pontiff like Gregory or a strong-willed and well-intentioned king like Frederick II of Prussia, but for the most part autocrats were pretty easy to control. The main advantage for Lucifer, of course, was that he had to corrupt one man instead of a hundred. Ever since the advent of parliamentary government in England, he’d had half his field agents running back and forth across the English countryside to whisper in the ear of some minister or other. It was exhausting.
So when Lucifer saw the possibility of sowing a rift between the colonists and the mother country, he took full advantage. Initially a full-scale revolution seemed unlikely; Lucifer hoped only to incite King George III into strong-arming parliament to pass some particularly onerous laws affecting the colonies. He would then encourage the colonists to overreact, preferably by rioting and maybe lynching a few British soldiers. The Brits would react by clamping down even harder on the rights of the colonists. And as an added bonus, once a precedent had been established for denying rights to certain subjects of the British Crown, the same principles could be applied elsewhere—even within England itself, and Britain would be well on its way back to an autocratic form of government.
Mercury Revolts: (Book Four of the Mercury Series) Page 7
