12. WITH A BIBLE AND A GUN
THERE’S A MOTEL 6 JUST OFF I-25, SOUTH OF DENVER. THE rental satnav directs me to it, and there are no highway patrol roadblocks; we reach it around eight o’clock. I head for the front desk. “Hi. I’d like to rent a couple of rooms for tonight? Singles.”
“Sure thing.” The middle-aged clerk barely looks up from her laptop screen. “Can I see your ID, please?”
I glance around to ensure we’re alone, then slide my warrant card under her nose.
“Wait, that’s not a—” There’s an almost audible clunk as the card gets its claws in behind her eyeballs and her jaw sags.
“Our papers are in order,” I explain to her. “Two single rooms please, for Mrs. Smith and Mr. Jones.”
“That will be—” Her eyeballs slowly unkink.
“Cash.” I shove a pre-counted stack of greenbacks at her. “The banknotes are correct.” She’s still drooling over the warrant card. I wait for her to wake up enough to make the money disappear then pull the card back.
“Let’s see.” She fiddles with her terminal and the room card reader. “You’re in 403 and 404. Have a nice day.”
I hand Persephone the Forbidden Room card and keep Room Not Found for myself. She looks at me oddly. I shake my head and walk towards the door—block 4 is across the car park. “Yes?” I ask once we’re outside.
“Your card. If they’ve got OCCINT assets in the field, that’s going to be a red flag to anyone nearby.”
“True. But they’re trying to keep a low profile.” I look both ways before crossing: “I reckon they’ll go through the regular police first, and I trust you did a good job of muddying the trail with that ward—you stole that pickup truck, yes?”
“They were going to install an alien mind parasite on me—what would you do?”
“Probably the same.” I swipe the key card. “Let’s go inside.”
The Motel 6 rooms are basic but adequate, with office desks and broadband as well as TVs and en-suite showers. I’ve just had time to dump my stuff and do basic set-up. I’m installing a ward on the desk beside the pizza box when there’s a knock on my door. It’s Persephone.
“Come in.” She stands on the threshold, clutching her handbag and shifting from foot to foot, edgy as a vampire with toothache. She sidles past me and stalks around restlessly as I close and ward the door. She pays particular attention to the window, and in particular the cobwebby diagrams I’ve sketched across the glass with a conductive pen: distraction patterns designed to slide observers’ attention elsewhere. “I’m still working on the room.”
“Oh, right.” She stares at the pizza box. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Yup.” I haven’t got it wired up to the handy little USB breakout box yet, but it’s adequately trapped for the time being. I gesture at her bag. “Is that what I think it is?”
“If what you expect is a bible and a gun, it probably is.” She plants the bag on the double bed.
“Let’s get this room secured before we discuss anything else,” I suggest, discreetly palming my JesusPhone. (Thaumic resonance: there’s an app for that.) “In case Schiller’s people have got a Listener out for you.”
“Okay.” She reaches into the neck of her blouse and pulls out a discreet chain with a stainless steel cross attached. Before I can stop her she gives the arms a twist, then stabs the ball of her thumb with the tiny knife blade that pops out of the stem like a demented switchblade. “I always carry a concealed athame. It’s not ideal, but it works…Ouch.” I point my phone’s camera at her and fire up the thaumometer and, sure enough, the cross is now pulsing violently. She mutters something in glassy syllables that slide around the edges of my mind, then retracts the blade and drops the concealed ritual knife back down between her breasts. “Deafness be upon us, and inner ears stoppered with wax. Will that do?”
I hate this ritual magic stuff; it just doesn’t come naturally to me, even if I set everything up carefully beforehand—I need a debugger and a proper development environment before I can whip up so much as a hello, world invocation. (Hopefully followed rapidly by a good-bye, world from whatever I just summoned: that stuff is dangerous.) But she’s very good at it. I suppose different people have different aptitudes, but the non-repeatability irritates me—it’s anathema to observational science. I force myself to nod. “What else did you find there?”
“Aside from the Bible? That’s not enough for you?” She shrugs again, then turns it into a low-grade shudder. “Gods, you don’t want to know…They’re believers, Mr. Howard. Pentecostalist dispensationalists—they are saved, but they are surrounded by the unsaved, and they think their master is returning imminently, and anyone who isn’t saved by the time of his arrival is doomed. So they intend to save everyone whether or not they want to be saved, one brain parasite at a time.” The shudder is more emphatic this time round. “They’re also quiverfull—they raise as many children as they can as ammunition for the cause, because they’re not completely sure whether imminent means their god is coming in fifteen minutes or fifteen years. There’s a clinic in town, with a combined maternity unit and spinal injuries ward for the runaways they’ve rounded up.”
“A what?”
“You heard me.” She looks away, avoiding my eyes. She’s the kind of woman who walls away that which makes her angry, presenting an outward appearance of calm; behind it I’m certain she’s furious. “The ends justify the means: we are all to be saved, and it will take a large army to do the saving. As their women can raise larger families than they can give birth to, they use host mothers to make up the numbers. ‘In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children’—they take that as an instruction.”
“Oh ick.” I swallow. “But why don’t they just use the hosts to—” Then I realize why: they want loyal brainwashed storm troopers who’ll fight for the cause in situations where a parasitic faith module would be a liability. (If you try to smuggle one of those giant wood lice into Dansey House or the New Annex, you won’t get very far.) “So they’re raising a little army of brainwashed believers, and they have the mind-control hosts to keep down the rest of us. And they’ve got this clinic”—if it’s real, I feel like screaming, because the picture she’s painting is so vile—“and, uh, what else are we looking at? What are their goals?”
“I don’t know for sure.” She sounds calm. “I planted a worm on their office network but then I had to break out, so I’ve got to assume the exploit is compromised. The Omega Course session went off the beaten track yesterday, and this morning they were forcibly installing parasites on the attendees. I think they’ve decided to bring their plans forward in a hurry. We’re going to have to go back in person if you want to know any more.”
Urp. Time to change the subject in a hurry. “About Johnny. Do you want to contact him, or would you rather I used the tattoo? Get him to—”
She looks at me. It’s a bit like being a nice juicy grasshopper in front of a very sexy mantis. She’s wired on something, and I wonder for a moment if she’s sourced some nose candy, then I realize: this is what she lives for. Field work: that’s why Lockhart was able to get her out here. Persephone is addicted to danger.
“Johnny is coming.” Her lips crinkle into something resembling a smile. “He has a passenger to deal with first.”
“A pass—” I stop.
They say our eyes are windows on the soul, but Persephone’s eyes are more like murky brown pools, utterly impenetrable. Only the muscles around them tense enough to betray her, faint crow’s feet of worry radiating from their corners. “I called him as soon as I closed the door.” She’s not apologizing, merely explaining. “He is meeting old friends. The Black Chamber are having problems operating in Colorado right now. And the Golden Promise Ministries have their own police force who appear to be experiencing no such difficulties. They tried to take him at one of our safe houses. He is joining us as soon as he deals with an, ah, loose end. Maybe later tonight, maybe early tomorrow.”
I swallow. “What kind of loose end?”
“Mr. Howard, Johnny and I are external assets. The whole point of working with us is that you can later swear that you didn’t know what we were doing, that we did whatever-it-is on our own initiative.” She pauses. “Are you sure you want me to answer that question?”
I stare at her. She’s a beautiful piece of work, porcelain skin and not a hair out of place after a day of escape-and-evasion: as beautiful and deadly as a black widow. “I can’t countenance murder,” I say, with a sense that if I’m watching myself from a great distance—perhaps the witness box at the Black Assizes. “Do you understand?”
“Is it murder if it’s another of those? Like the thing you took that from?” She points at the pizza box.
“If—” I stop and force myself to take a deep breath. “If they’re possessed, that changes things. But. Minimum use of force necessary to achieve designated goals. Can we agree on that?”
She looks at me oddly. “Of course we can. Who did you think I am—Murder Incorporated?”
“One can never be too sure,” I mutter. “Sorry, sorry, I had to ask.” (Because I have dealt with people in the past whose main criticism of Murder, Inc., would be their messy inefficiency.) “Where were we?”
She sits down on the bed, cross-legged. “Motives. I don’t know for sure, but I’ve made some inferences, and then there’s this damned book.” She glances at the Bible.
“What do you think Schiller’s trying to achieve?”
“Besides the usual?” Her laughter is an abrupt bark of released tension. “Well, he’s clearly set on converting the entire planet. Isn’t that enough for you?”
“I need to know what he’s trying to achieve in the short term. Through the Prime Minister.” My arms are crossed and I’m leaning against the wall and not making eye contact: defensive body posture redux. “That’s my core mission, as I see it. It’s why we’re here. We can admit that the mission’s a wash and bug out, but if so, that’s not going to help the, the victims.” The women in the maternity unit. The pithed, god-struck men in black with their tongues half-eaten. “Come on. What do you know?”
“I don’t.” She looks frustrated. “Perhaps Johnny will have something…”
“And if not?”
“We can go back in if you dare.” She cocks her head to one side. “There are ways. Let’s say…Johnny runs into the Pinecrest police. You have a host, and so does he. We kill it and shell it, then you and he stick your tongues in them and pretend to be police, and I’m your captive. I have a glamour to provide cover against shallow inspection, and—”
“If you think I’m putting that thing in my mouth, alive or dead—”
“That’s a shame.” She stares at me with those huge, darkly unreadable eyes. “It’s a low risk approach. If we make them come after us we hand them the initiative.”
I take a deep breath. “Any other options?”
“Oh yes.” She nods at the field-expedient pentacle and its inmate sitting on the desk. “That was just the direct approach. There are indirect ones. We could try to hook up that thing and snoop on whatever or whoever powers it, to learn where it comes from. Feed it misinformation, tell it where to go to find us.”
I think for a moment. “I’ve got another idea. Is there any significant risk of them finding us here, if we stay overnight? Other than following Johnny?”
“I don’t think so. You warded this room well, I sanitized the path to your car…” She thinks for a moment. “What preparations do you need that will take so long?”
“I’ve got to phone a man about a book,” I say. “I need an hour to do some admin work. Then how about we go get some dinner? It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Lend me the car keys in the meantime?”
I chuck the keys her way. “Use them wisely.”
* * *
AFTER PERSEPHONE LEAVES I SIT DOWN AND THUMB THROUGH the back end of the Bible, trying to get a feel for the page count. I decide I can discount the first couple of chunks; a quick google confirms that the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocrypha look like standard factory spec. They might have been tweaked and tuned under the hood, but I don’t have time to do more than check the table of contents. The Books of Enoch, however, aren’t part of the standard trim level package, or even the deluxe leather upholstery option with sports kit: they’re the biblical equivalent of the blue LEDs under the side skirts and the extra-loud chromed exhaust pipe. And when I get close to the end we’re off the Halfords shelves and into nitrous oxide injection territory, complete with a leak into the cabin airflow. Using my JesusPhone I find a listing of the Books of Enoch on the interwebbytubes, but it sure as hell doesn’t include chapters with titles like “The Book of Starry Wisdom,” “The Second Testament of St Enoch,” and—most intriguingly of all—“The Apocalypse Codex.”
The bumper bonus extra features aren’t particularly long, they only run to about eighty pages. But they’re typeset differently, in a different layout, and the footnotes and glosses don’t match up with anything in the front three-quarters of the book. So I place the Bible on the desk, shine the work lamp on it, and pull out the JesusPhone. Then I start photographing and flipping pages. Autofocus and five megapixels mean that just about any pocket camera these days is the equivalent of a flatbed document scanner, and a quarter of an hour later I’m stitching a bunch of image files together and converting them into a PDF. I run it through an OCR package and quickly check that it doesn’t mention certain unmentionable keywords (it doesn’t: it’s not that kind of occult text), then I take a deep breath, and do something deeply illegal and, much more importantly, quite possibly unforgivable.
I stick the PDF of the page images on a public file sharing site, then I phone Pete and Sandy at home.
Ring-ring. Ring-ring. Ring. “Wha, who—Bob? It’s one in the morning! What’s up?” Sandy sounds confused and as befuddled as I’d be if you woke me in the wee hours with a phone call. I scrunch up my eyes and wish that I believed in a god I could pray to for forgiveness.
“Sandy, is Pete awake?”
“Yes, but is it an emergency?”
“Sort of. Can I talk to him, please?”
“Hang on.” There’s a muffled noise, as of a phone being passed from one hand to another.
“Bob?” It’s Pete. He doesn’t sound very awake.
“Pete? Can we talk privately? I’ve got a problem.”
“What sort of—of course. Hold on.” There follows a period of muffled thudding as, presumably, Pete disentangles himself from his bedding and leaves Sandy to go back to sleep. “There, I’m on my own. I assume this couldn’t wait for morning?”
“It’s sort of urgent.” I pause. “What I’m going to say mustn’t go any further.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die: you know what I do for a living, right? Pastoral care a speciality, spiritual care, too, although I guess that’s not what you’re looking for…”
There is an eerie pins and needles prickling at the back of my tongue. I am going to have to watch what I say very carefully: my immortal soul is very much in danger, and I’m not speaking metaphorically. The consequences of betraying my oath of office are immediate, personal, and quite hideous.
“You’ve probably guessed that, uh, I’m not allowed to talk about my job. But that it’s a bit different from what I’m required to lead people to believe.”
The hair on the back of my neck is all but standing on end, but the ward doesn’t clamp down on me—yet. To some extent it’s driven by my own conscience, by my own knowledge of wrongdoing. And as I’m not actually planning on betraying any secrets, I still have a clean conscience. But. I’m wearing saltwater-soaked shoes and walking alongside the third rail.
“I’ve recently come into possession of an interesting document, and I badly need a sanity check. Unfortunately, the only person I know with the right background to give it to me is you.”
(Which is entirely true: while the
Laundry can probably cough up a doctor of theology with a security clearance and a background in Essene apocalyptic eschatology, it might take them a couple of weeks. Whereas Pete wrote the dissertation and I’ve got him on speed dial.)
“A document.” He sounds doubtful. “And you want a sanity check.” And you got me out of bed at one in the morning.
“It’s a, a non-standard biblical text. Not your regular apocrypha. I’m having to do due diligence on people who are, uh, believers. I’d normally write them off as your regular American evangelical types, but they aren’t reading from your standard King James version. And it’s kind of urgent: I’m meeting with them in the morning.”
“You’re meeting with—” I can almost hear the audible clunk from the mechanism between his ears as his brain jolts into gear. But you work in computer support in a civil service department, he’s thinking. And almost certainly putting two plus two together and getting five, which is just fine by my oath of office, if not my conscience…“Okay, I think.”
“I’ve got a PDF of a scan of the variant bits of their Bible,” I say. “Mostly it’s the King James version plus a bunch of standard apocrypha, but this stuff is entirely different. I’m going to email you a link to it as soon as I get off the phone. It runs to about eighty pages. If you can take a peek and email me back, what I need to know is: If you start out from a bog-standard Pentecostalist position and add these extra books, what does it do to their doctrine and outlook? What do they believe and what are they going to want to do?”
“That’s horribly vague! I—” He swallows. “You really want an opinion from me?”
“Pete.” I pause, feeling like a complete shit. “You’re the guy with the PhD in whacked-out millenarian sects from the first century, right? Work could probably put me in touch with someone else, but they’d take weeks. And I’ve got to do—business—with these people tomorrow.”
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