“No visitors!” exclaimed Nisroc cheerfully as he opened the door and then slammed it in Eddie’s face.
Eddie knocked again.
The door flew open again. “No visitors!” exclaimed Nisroc again. He made to slam the door shut but it caught on Eddie’s foot.
“No visitors?” said Nisroc, confused.
“Who is it?” barked Ramiel from somewhere inside the condo.
“My name is Eddie,” said Eddie. “Ederatz, actually. I work for the Mundane Observation Corps. Well, used to.” He held up the six-hundred-page manuscript he was carrying—the first two volumes of his book on the Apocalypse.
“Ooh, literature!” exclaimed Nisroc, grabbing the stack of paper out of Eddie’s hands. The Jehovah’s Witnesses had stopped by earlier in the week, and Nisroc was anxiously waiting the next installment of The Watchtower. He hadn’t expected it to be quite this heavy, though.
“Does this one explain how Earth becomes a paradise after Satan is imprisoned for a thousand years?” asked Nisroc, thumbing through the manuscript. “I had some questions about that.”
“Er,” said Eddie. “It doesn’t actually go into that. But this is just the first two volumes. Maybe Satan is imprisoned in the third one.”
“Maybe?” asked Nisroc doubtfully. This Jehovah’s Witness didn’t seem nearly as confident as the last pair.
“Who is it?” barked Ramiel again.
“Jehovah’s Witness!” Nisroc called back. “Not a very good one though!” He continued thumbing through the manuscript. “Some bad language in here,” he said, shaking his head. “And no pictures. Are you sure you’re a real Jehovah’s Witness? I’d like to see your badge, please.”
“We don’t carry...” Eddie started. “That is, I’m not a Jehovah’s Witness. As I said, I’m with the MOC. I understand that you have an interplanar portal here, and I was hoping to make a delivery.”
“Do we do deliveries?” Nisroc shouted.
“No!” barked Ramiel.
“No deliveries,” said Nisroc, trying to hand the manuscript back to Eddie.
“Just listen for a minute, will you?” said Eddie. “This is a very important book. It’s not quite finished, but it needs to be delivered to the Seraphic Senate now, in case...well, in case something happens.”
“Something?” asked Nisroc. “Like what?”
“I’m not a hundred percent sure. Something that would prevent me from delivering the book. I won’t know if it happens until I finish the book.”
“Uh-huh,” said Nisroc skeptically.
“Look, just send it through the portal. There’s a note on the first page saying to deliver it to the Senate. OK?”
“I guess,” said Nisroc. “Do you have anything with pictures?”
“Sorry,” replied Eddie.
Nisroc sighed and slammed the door.
OK, thought Eddie. At least that’s taken care of. It would probably take a few days for the manuscript to get delivered to the offices of the Senate, and there was a good chance that nobody would ever read it, but at least he had done his best to officially document the goings-on of the past few weeks. Maybe at some time in the distant future it would help someone to make sense of everything that had happened.
It was hard to believe that Heaven had put Ramiel and Nisroc in charge of preventing unauthorized access to the Glendale portal. Of course, anybody who did get past them would have to go through planeport security to get anywhere, so having angels guard the portal was really just a token gesture. Hell, there wasn’t anybody watching the Megiddo portal. The Megiddo portal was pretty well hidden, though, and nearly impossible for anyone other than an angel to get to. Ramiel and Nisroc were presumably there to prevent random civilians from wandering onto Christine’s linoleum and inadvertently transporting themselves to another plane of existence—something that wasn’t a concern in the rocky wasteland of the Jezreel Valley.
Eddie took the cab back to his hotel. This was the last day of his Finch-sponsored stay at the Wilshire, so he would have to find another place to write. Where to write, however, was not as pressing a problem as what to write. It was unclear where the story went after the implosion of the moon. Most importantly, what had happened to Mercury? Was he really gone for good? It seemed like bad storytelling to have him just disappear to some unknown dimension, never to return.
Eddie was still fretting when he was stopped cold in the lobby by a tall, grinning man with silver hair.
“Hey, Eddie,” said the man cheerfully. “Where are you off to this time?”
“Sweet baby carrots,” Eddie gasped. “You’re Mercury!”
“I am indeed. And you are the mysterious Eddie, the fabled Lost Cherub of the MOC, I take it.”
Eddie nodded. Fabled. He liked that. “Where did you come from?” he asked. “I thought you disappeared after the thing with the moon.”
“I did,” said Mercury. “Now I’m back. I have a question for you. Does the name Wormwood mean anything to you?”
“Oh boy,” said Eddie. “OK, I’ll tell you everything I know about Wormwood, but I’ve got some questions for you first.”
“Fair enough.”
They took a seat at the hotel bar. Mercury told Eddie everything that had happened to him since the implosion of the moon. He had spent a day scouring Cork for the legendary Lost Cherub, eventually happening on a bartender who told him that Eddie was staying at the Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles. Eddie frantically took notes while Mercury spoke.
“Incredible,” remarked Eddie. “You lived the last two days over again, but from a completely different perspective. And somehow, without meaning to, you caused things to happen just like they did the first time around.”
Mercury nodded. “It’s like being a character in a book that’s already been written. Unsettling.”
“Tell me about it,” agreed Eddie.
Eddie proceeded to tell Mercury everything he knew about Wormwood, which wasn’t much.
“A portable nuclear bomb,” said Mercury, impressed. “Beats curing cancer, I guess. What’s Lucifer going to do, try to get it through the planeport into Heaven?”
“That would be my guess,” said Eddie. “A conventional—that is, nonsupernatural—bomb wouldn’t set off the automatic countermeasures in the planeport. If he can muscle his way through security, he could conceivably make it through the Heavenly portal. From there, it’s a short walk to the Eye.”
Mercury whistled. “So Lucifer is planning to take out the Eye of Providence. He’s bold, I give him that much. Is Wormwood powerful enough to do it?”
“Ten kilotons,” said Eddie. “A blast that size would vaporize anything within a half-mile radius. If he can get close to the pyramid, yeah, I’d say he could do it. Again, I’m just guessing, but it makes sense.”
“And you didn’t think it might be a good idea to warn your superiors?”
“I just found out about it,” said Eddie. “And my superiors haven’t really been listening to me for a while. In any case, I’m MOC, remember. I’m not supposed to get involved.”
“OK, then,” said Mercury, getting to his feet. “I guess it’s up to me to warn them.”
“Yep,” said Eddie, watching Mercury leave. “Good luck.”
And he meant it, even though he knew Mercury would fail. Wormwood couldn’t be stopped. It was the end of everything.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Dirk Lubbers sat in an uncomfortable folding chair in a cramped, dark apartment that smelled like mildew and stale cigarettes, staring at a flat-panel monitor that was displaying what was perhaps the least interesting television program since Diagnosis Murder.
The monitor was split into six images, each of them a view from a camera that was aimed at Christine Temetri’s condo building. The cameras were themselves marvelous works of twenty-first-century engineering, packing a high-resolution camera, a battery with a two-week charge, and a wireless transmitter into a package no larger than Lubbers’s thumb. They had been hidden in various strategic l
ocations around the condo building the previous days by FBI agents pretending to be cable repairmen and gardeners.
Lubbers took a sip of lukewarm instant coffee from a Styrofoam cup. As unpleasant as his current situation was, it still beat being at a three-man religious revival in the Oval Office. Lubbers had been through a lot in his fifty-nine years—notably a stint in Desert Storm, during which he had been part of an “enhanced interrogation team”—but there were some things that nobody should have to go through, chief among them holding hands with two other men. He shuddered at the memory. It had been an unspeakable relief when he had been shuttled off to Andrews Air Force Base to fly back to Los Angeles.
Lubbers told himself that it had been worth it. Mundane appearances to the contrary, this was the most important assignment of his career. He was going to oversee the delivery of a nuclear bomb to the headquarters of an alien race located in another dimension, eliminating a grave threat to the human race and ending thousands of years of interdimensional tyranny. The moment of truth for the human race was hours away, and Dirk Lubbers was its savior. He cracked his knuckles and gulped some more of the tepid coffee. “How’s the gas leak coming?” he asked the gaggle of FBI agents huddled around a folding table in the next room, clacking away at laptop computers and yammering on cell phones.
“Everthing’s set up, sir. We start going door-to-door in ten minutes,” said one of the agents, whose last name was Gilbert. He pronounced it the French way, Jheel-BAYR. Lubbers called him “Joe-Bear.” He knew that wasn’t the right pronunciation, but nobody was going to make him say Jheel-BAYR. He’d rather hold hands with another man.
“Excellent. Good work, Joe-Bear.”
Gilbert nodded curtly. They had planned a cover story about a natural-gas leak so that they could evacuate the condo complex before launching their assault. Civilians would only get in the way.
Uncomfortably warm in the cramped quarters, Lubbers stood up and removed his jacket, hanging it over the back of his chair. He had taken to wearing a black leather jacket with his FBI badge pinned to the left breast, which had raised some eyebrows among his peers and underlings. Poor bastards, thought Lubbers. They didn’t know what it was like to have the King in your heart.
He walked to the window. The apartment Operation Righteous Anger had commandeered was on the third floor. Through the horizontal vinyl blinds he could see into the window of Christine’s notorious breakfast nook. Not much was going on. He hadn’t seen anything more interesting through the window than a man holding up a can of SpaghettiOs to the light so that he could read the label. After the twenty-sixth time this had happened, Lubbers had instructed his team not to record any further instances in the official report.
Christine’s building was three stories and housed a total of twenty-four units. An open-air hallway ran the length of each floor. There were three other identical buildings nearby. The entire complex was surrounded by a metal fence.
“Sir, we’ve got somebody on monitor three.”
Monitor three. That was the gate nearest Christine’s condo. Ordinarily, a visitor would have to unlock the door with a card key to get in, but Rezon had warned Lubbers that the locks would be no barrier to a BIO, who could manipulate interdimensional energy to perform so-called “miracles.” In fact, about an hour ago one did just that: the FBI had watched as the man brushed his hand over the lock and then pushed open the gate. Lubbers recognized that BIO as the same one who his agents had been tailing in Los Angeles, Ederatz—the one who had written the report that provided so much valuable intelligence. Ederatz had stopped at Christine’s door and spoken briefly to one of the BIOS, the one Lubbers’s team was calling SpaghettiO. Lubbers almost had his sharpshooters take him out, but he seemed only to want to deliver a stack of papers—probably a copy of the same report that the FBI had taken from him. There was nothing in that report that would compromise Operation Righteous Anger, and it was important to keep SpaghettiO and Spike (the other BIO inside the condo) ignorant of the FBI’s presence as long as possible. Blowing Ederatz’s head off outside their front door might just tip them off that there was a problem. In the end, Lubbers had made a judgment call, deciding that there probably wasn’t anything in Ederatz’s head worth blowing it off for. Ederatz didn’t seem like a terribly important BIO. All he did was wander around the city and sit in his room at the Wilshire, banging away at a laptop.
Lubbers examined the feed from camera three. Whoever this fellow was, it wasn’t Ederatz. This guy was a good six inches taller, for one thing, and he had silver hair. Silver hair! He passed his hand over the lock and opened the gate, walking toward Christine’s condo.
“Sharpshooters ready, sir,” said Gilbert.
Lubbers held his breath. What now? If he ordered his snipers to take out the BIO, he’d be firing the first shot in an interdimensional war. It might spook the BIOs inside, inciting them to warn their superiors that the humans were on to them. They might redouble their defenses, making it impossible for Rezon and the SEAL team to get through the planeport.
But what if this BIO was delivering a warning? What if he somehow knew about the plan to invade their home dimension? Then, if he got through, the BIOs might shut down the portal entirely or send a platoon of BIOs through the portal with those anti-bomb things to show the puny humans who was boss.
The worst possible scenario, though, would be firing at the silver-haired stranger and missing. Rezon had told them that a bullet through the skull would incapacitate a BIO for a few minutes. But if they couldn’t get a clean shot, they would just piss him off. He might retaliate by calling down a pillar of fire to level the whole block. And that would be that for Operation Righteous Anger. It’s now or never, he thought.
“They got a clean shot, Joe-Bear?”
“Yes, sir. He’s about fifty feet from the front door, moving north. If we’re going to take a shot, now would be the time.”
Lubbers released his breath. “Take him out,” he said.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Tiamat stood in front of a melamine and particleboard table in a conference room of the Nairobi Hilton, eyeing the black-hooded members of the Supreme Council of the Orders of the Pillars of Babylon. It was the best meeting spot she could find in the area on short notice. So as not to provoke suspicion, the Council members had kept their hoods in their jacket pockets before the meeting, only donning them once they were safely inside the conference room. Admittedly, this defeated the ostensible purpose of the hoods, but the OPB was big on ceremony. The assembled members represented a who’s who of tycoons and political leaders from around the world. They didn’t often meet in public, but these were special circumstances.
“Gentlemen,” said Tiamat, “our time has come.”
Grumbles went around the table. “Your time, you mean,” muttered one man.
“Order!” barked Horace Finch, sitting next to Tiamat. An ill-fitting hood obscured his vision, requiring him to tilt his head back at a thirty-degree angle to see through the eyeholes.
After Finch’s bungled attempt to master time and space by catching chrotons in a glass apple in Kenya, Tiamat had seized control of the organization. Finch had backed her bid to be the new leader, and in return she had allowed him to stay on as her second in command. It was either that or be cast out of the OPB entirely.
Tiamat evoked conflicting emotions among the members of the OPB. On the one hand, it had been her work in ancient Babylon that had formed the foundations of the OPB’s efforts. On the other hand, she had basically ignored the OPB over most of the past four thousand years, laughing at their feeble efforts to uncover the secrets of the Universe. She offered some token support when they embarked upon their plan to build a particle collider beneath Los Angeles during the early twentieth century but abandoned them again when World War II broke out. She never really believed the CCD would work, and she had bigger things to worry about. There was so much suspicion about domestic spies during the war that the OPB had to suspend all of its operations for seve
ral years. And after the war, things were even worse: in the fifties and sixties, sneaking around and attending secret meetings was likely to get one shot for being a suspected Communist. By the time the OPB resumed active operations in the 1980s, the CCD was in disrepair, and areas of the Los Angeles suburbs that the OPB had intended to leave vacant had been overrun by theme parks. Even if they had gotten the CCD to work, they still had not solved the central technical problem: how to store the chrotons once they were generated. The CCD was mothballed.
When Horace Finch announced plans to build another collider, this time in Kenya, Tiamat once again offered token support. As the CCD-2 got close to completion, she had a few of her personal operatives look into its chances of success. She assumed that the OPB would once again be stuck when faced with the problem of how to capture the chrotons. But her spies learned that Finch had a contact in Heaven who had promised him a suitable receptacle for the chrotons. That contact turned out to be Uzziel, and the receptacle was an anti-bomb that had been hidden for millennia inside Mount Mbutuokoti. When Tiamat realized how close Finch was to succeeding, she belatedly offered her wholehearted support. It was not enough, as it turned out. Christine, Jacob, and Mercury had intervened, stealing the anti-bomb and rendering the CCD-2 impotent. Finch had fled the facility, which was then placed under guard by troops under the command of the archangel Michelle. All of the OPB’s work on the CCD-2 over the past twenty years appeared to be for naught. Even if they could somehow retake the Eden II facility from Michelle’s cherubic guard, without another anti-bomb to catch the chrotons the machine was useless. So while the Supreme Council resented Tiamat’s involvement, there was no denying that they needed her. Putting her in charge was an act of desperation, a Hail Mary pass in the last two seconds of the game.
Mercury Rests Page 18
