Mercury Rises
Page 20
Hammurabi frowned, regarding his ATTACK plan glumly. He knew that Mercury was a master manipulator, but somehow it didn't matter. It didn't matter that Mercury probably didn't believe a word he was saying; what mattered was that Hammurabi believed it. What does it all mean? he wondered. What is my legacy going to be?
"So what do I do?" he asked in desperation.
"I think you need to spend some time reflecting," said Mercury.
"Reflecting?"
Mercury nodded. "You've been all go, go, go ever since you became king. Maybe it's time to just sit and think for a while. With any luck, your purpose will come to you." He added hurriedly, "Just make sure you run it past me before you do anything."
"OK," said Hammurabi. "Thanks, Mercury."
After that, Hammurabi disappeared for three days. Mercury was about to tell Tiamat that he had solved their problem when Hammurabi showed up at his door bearing another clay tablet.
"Check it out!" Hammurabi exclaimed, holding the tablet for Mercury to see. "I call it 'Hammurabi's Code.'"
The tablet read:
WHY CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?
Mercury smiled faintly. "Not really much of a code, is it?"
Hammurabi frowned. "You don't like it? I spent three days on that."
"It's a fine sentiment," admitted Mercury. "But it's kind of whiny, isn't it? I mean, it doesn't sound like something a king would say."
"Hmmm," said Hammurabi. "OK, let me think about it some more."
Hammurabi disappeared for another three days. When he reappeared, he was bearing a tablet that read:
BE NICE TO EVERYBODY
"Wow," said Mercury. It was all he could do to keep himself from telling Hammurabi to go back to conquering neighboring provinces. "It's a bit more assertive, I guess. Still, I don't think that's the stuff that a legacy is made of."
"Well, hell," grumbled Hammurabi. "Then I just don't know. How about 'Treat others the way you would like to be treated'?"
"The thing is," Mercury said, "I like the idea of a code, but I don't think you're going to be able to do this in one sentence. Think of this as the legal foundation for your empire. You're going to need a few more concrete rules."
Hammurabi nodded, wheels turning in his head. "Got it!"
He disappeared for six weeks.
"OK, check this out," he exclaimed upon his return. He handed Mercury two clay tablets, filled with writing. "Ten commandments!"
Mercury looked over the tablets. "This isn't bad," he said. "I like how you establish your authority with this first one. But I still think you need more."
"More?" Hammurabi asked. "Really?"
"Well, for example," said Mercury, "what if slave strikes the body of a free man? What happens in that situation?"
"Well, obviously you'd cut the slave's ear off."
"Hmm," Mercury replied. "Yeah, see, I wasn't getting that from this. I mean, you know it and I know it, but it's not explicitly spelled out in your rules. Or how about this: A man strikes a pregnant woman, causing her to miscarry and die. Then what?"
"The assailant's daughter is put to death, of course," said Hammurabi.
"Again, not really evident from these ten rules," said Mercury, frowning at the tablets. "Like I said, it's a good start, but if this is supposed to be some kind of code of conduct, you're going to need to eliminate some of the ambiguity."
Hammurabi sighed. "Fine," he said, and trudged away.
This time he was occupied long enough for the workers to make significant progress on the latest ziggurat. Tiamat was giddy with enthusiasm, convinced that they were finally building in the right spot---whatever that meant. "A few more years," she could be heard mumbling under her breath. "A few more years."
THIRTY-TWO
"I can't believe stupid Uzziel assigned us to retrieve the stupid Case of Pestilence," Mercury groused. "Doesn't he realize that we're the A-team? I mean, remember that time we averted the Apocalypse?"
He and Christine were resting in a small park in view of the unimpressive, squat building that served as headquarters of the World Health Organization. A cold breeze had picked up, and above the building, dark clouds were gathering.
"Three hours ago, you were overjoyed not to be escorting tourists around the planeport," Christine chided.
"Yeah, well, that was before I had to carry your ass across half of Europe. We nearly got smoked by those F-15s, you know."
"I told you to stay low over Israel, didn't I?" Christine said. "It's not 2,000 BC anymore, you know. They have air defenses now."
"So I've gathered. Anyway, we're here. What's the plan?"
"You're asking me?" Christine asked incredulously. "This is your show. I'm just here as auxiliary support."
"Right," said Mercury. "OK, here's the plan: we go into that building over there, find the Case, and take it."
"Brilliant," said Christine. "Do we know where in the building they're keeping it?"
"According to the intelligence, it should be here on the fifth floor," Mercury said, pointing at a map that Uzziel had provided.
"Security?"
"Couple of guards, maybe," said Mercury. "Shouldn't be a problem. I'll just turn their bullets to chocolate."
"Chocolate? Why chocolate?"
"We're in Switzerland, Christine. Get in the spirit of things."
Mercury set off toward the building and Christine followed. She wanted to yell at him to stop, but surprisingly, she couldn't think of a flaw in his plan. Mercury was right: a few armed guards were no match for a cherub. If the case really was in the building, there was no reason to think Mercury would have any trouble recovering it.
And once they had the Case of Pestilence, they would move on to Famine. War and Death were already back in Heaven's possession, and once Mercury delivered the remaining two, the Apocalypse would officially be averted---assuming that Uzziel did his part by neutralizing the threat of the anti-bomb in Africa.
"OK," said Mercury, as they neared the building. "You'd better wait here. I don't want to take any chances."
"Wait here?" protested Christine. "Why did I even come along, then, if I'm not even going to go inside the building?"
"Auxiliary support," said Mercury. "Just wait here. I'll be back in a jiffy."
Mercury disappeared inside the WHO building, and Christine waited anxiously on a bench some fifty feet from the entrance. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and Christine felt droplets of rain on her face.
Retrieving the Case will be a piece of cake for Mercury, she told herself. On the other hand, she thought, it would have been a piece of cake for any angel---a realization that prompted the question: why hadn't it been recovered before now? Uzziel could have sent any old cherub---even that moron Nisroc---to get the Attaché Case of Pestilence. Why hadn't he?
Paging through the dossier, it was fairly clear why the Case of Famine hadn't yet been retrieved. It had been sighted at the headquarters of a small biotech company in South Africa, but had disappeared after the hubbub with the runaway corn. The company, which bore the unwieldy name AfroGeniTech, was privately owned, but was suspected by the M.O.C. to be a front for one of the big Western biotech firms. The section of the dossier speculating on the current whereabouts of the Case of Famine had mysteriously been redacted with a black marker almost beyond coherency, but Christine's eyes were drawn to a brief note in the margin. It read:
EH?
"My God," she whispered, looking up from the dossier. But her pondering was cut short by the sight of two figures striding toward the building. "Oh shit," she mumbled, and did her best to bury her face in the dossier.
There was no doubt about it: it was Izbazel and Gamaliel, two very bad demons. She had been under the impression that the two had been through a falling out, but now apparently they were working together again. When Christine first met them, they had been working for Lucifer, but then it turned out that Gamaliel was secretly working for Tiamat, Lucifer's chief rival. The fact that Izbazel and Gamaliel were together ag
ain meant...what? They were both working for Lucifer? Or they were both working for Tiamat? Or, God forbid, Lucifer and Tiamat had teamed up?
The two cherubim passed Christine by without a glance, disappearing into the WHO building. They were evidently not after her. Presumably they were here for the Case of Pestilence. Or Mercury. Or both.
I have to warn Mercury, she thought.
Christine had pulled her hair back for the flight from Israel,11 which was probably part of the reason Izbazel and Gamaliel hadn't recognized her. She removed her sunglasses from her purse and put them on. Not much of a disguise, she thought, but she didn't have time to come up with anything better. She took a deep breath, got to her feet, and walked boldly to the door.
Pretending to be enthralled by something on the screen of her phone, she went through the revolving door and strode into the lobby. Standing some ten yards directly in front of her, facing the elevators, were Izbazel and Gamaliel. As she came in, their heads turned to face her, and for one sickening split-second she forgot entirely how to breathe, walk, and keep her heart beating. Her mind went completely blank with fear.
But in the next instant, they turned back to face the elevators, and momentum carried her into her next step. Her heart started beating again, and once she had managed to take three more steps without collapsing into a quivering pool of jelly on the marble floor, she started breathing again. Altering her course to avoid the elevators, she walked to the door behind the reception desk labeled "STAIRS."
The door swung shut behind her and she sprinted up the stairs to the fifth floor. She had to get to Mercury before he got on the elevator with the Attaché Case.
The door opened to a nondescript hallway lined with doors marked only with numbers. She recalled from the intelligence dossier (which she had stuffed into her purse) that the case was supposed to be in room 501. She was at 521 now, and the numbers decreased down the hall. Rounding a corner, she came upon the elevators, and it occurred to her that she didn't know whether Izbazel and Gamaliel were simply waiting in the lobby for Mercury to return, or whether one or both of them were on their way up to intercept him. She hadn't had the time or the presence of mind to determine whether the elevator's UP button had been lit up.
515, 514, 513. She ran down the hall, on a quest for the door that read 501. A few yards past the elevators, she heard a sound that nearly made her forget how to walk again.
DING!
"Oh no," Christine gasped. The hall went on for another fifty feet: there was no way she could get out of sight before the cherubim emerged from the elevator.
She tried the nearest door. Locked. She tried the next door: also locked. Behind her, she heard the doors sliding open. Sweat was now pouring down her face, blurring her vision. Looking desperately down the hall, she spied a door that seemed to be asking, "SO?" She wiped the sweat from her eyes and looked again. The door's placard read: 507.
Launching herself at the door, she pulled down the door handle and shoved. It belatedly occurred to her that if the door had been locked, she probably would have knocked herself unconscious, but mercifully it opened. She fell inside and the door swung closed behind her.
For some time she lay facedown on the cold vinyl floor, breathing as quietly as she could without passing out from lack of oxygen. At last she got up and surveyed her surroundings.
She was in a supply closet, dimly lit by fluorescent light. Boxes of staples, Post-it notes and other office supplies filled the metal shelves that lined the walls. One shelf was taken up entirely by metallic briefcases that superficially resembled the Four Attaché Cases of the Apocalypse. Clearly these were not the actual Cases; they were slightly smaller and the corners were more rounded. To allay her suspicions, she opened one of them, finding only a molded foam insert that seemed to be designed to hold test tubes. Presumably the cases were intended for transporting scientific samples. The actual Case of Pestilence was probably still in room 501.
Taking a deep breath, Christine very slowly opened the supply room door and peeked out into the hallway. It appeared to be deserted.
She stepped into the hall, her heart pounding in her chest and her hands shaking with adrenaline, and walked to the last room on the floor, marked 501. As she reached to pull the handle, the door swung open and a tall figure stood before her, holding a silvery briefcase.
"Hey, Christine!" he said cheerfully. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't one of us going to wait downstairs?"
"Mercury!" she gasped breathlessly. "Gamaliel...Izbazel..."
Mercury's brow furrowed. "Wait, I know this one. List three cherubim, from smartest to dumbest."
"They're...here!" said Christine. "You...didn't see them?"
"Nope," said Mercury. "Nobody up here but us chickens. Seriously, this whole place is full of chickens. It's weird."
"They must still be downstairs," Christine said. "You can't go down there. I think Uzziel set us up."
"Uzziel working with Izbazel and Gamaliel? Seems unlikely. It would be like Sammy Hagar fronting for Van Halen."
"Sammy Hagar did front for Van Halen," Christine said.
"No shit?" replied Mercury. "Well, then we could be in serious trouble."
"What are we going to do, Mercury? If Uzziel has gone bad, you'll have no chance to redeem yourself. He's probably pinning more crimes on you as we speak."
"Hmmm," said Mercury. "Maybe. But we can always go over Uzziel's head. We just need some leverage."
"Leverage?"
"We can't just go to the Courts and charge Uzziel with treason. We need to give them a reason to listen to us."
"The Attaché Cases of the Apocalypse."
"Right. We stick to the plan. We've got Pestilence; now all we need is Famine. We bring those to Heaven and they'll have their matching set back. They'll have to listen to us. Of course, first we have to get out of here."
"Yeah, about that..." Christine said, peering down the hall. "I think I have an idea."
THIRTY-THREE
Eden Two was contained within a geodesic dome constructed of glass and steel, soaring at its zenith to the height of a thirteen-story building. Inside the dome was a rain forest that housed some ten thousand different species of plants and animals. Eden Two was, by all accounts, an impressive feat of engineering and zoology, a phenomenal waste of money, and almost certainly the most elaborate work of camouflage ever devised.
Finch's private jet landed on an airstrip that had been constructed about a mile south of the dome. Jacob was ushered by two armed men into a Lincoln Navigator that sped across an asphalt road toward the dome. The driver parked the Navigator in a garage nestled among several other plain concrete buildings a short distance from the edge of the dome, and the men escorted Jacob to an elevator that plunged more than twenty stories underground. Beneath the floor of the dome, a circular tunnel, some fifteen miles in circumference, had been constructed. The men left Jacob alone in the control room, without explanation.
Jacob experienced a sense of déjà vu. A bank of monitors displayed the views from cameras placed along the perimeter of the tunnels. Below the monitors was a vast array of complex controls. In place of vacuum tubes and reel-to-reel tape drives there were microprocessors and flat panel displays, but other than these superficial differences, the whole setup was eerily familiar. The only difference between this facility and the one under Anaheim was that the control room here was in the center of the collider. Four doors, one in each wall, led to hallways that branched out in opposite directions to the circular collider tunnel. The collider itself seemed to be identical to the one that had almost collapsed on him earlier in the day. "It's just like the one in Los Angeles," he murmured to himself.
"To the centimeter," said a high-pitched male voice behind him.
Jacob turned to see a small man with a thick head of silvery-gray hair. He recognized the man as Horace Finch, the twenty-sixth richest man in the world.
"Why?" asked Jacob.
"Why what?" replied Horace Finch.
"Excellent questions, all," replied Finch, taking a seat across from Jacob. "To adequately answer them, I need to go back about four thousand years."
"Oh," muttered Jacob bitterly. "And I was afraid it was going to be a long story."
"Do you know what a ziggurat is, Jacob?"
"Step pyramid," replied Jacob. "They built them in ancient Babylon. They were probably monuments to dead kings or places to worship the gods, like the pyramids in Egypt."
"Correct," said Finch. "Except for the last part. Do you know what the name Babylon means?"
"You know," said Jacob, "I don't mean to be overly critical of your storytelling, but this would probably go faster if you didn't stop to ask me leading questions all the time."
"Babylon means 'gateway to the gods," Finch went on. "The founders of Babylon chose that name because they intended to use the ziggurats to connect to a higher plane of existence. The idea was to focus a mysterious form of energy on a portal that would open to the higher plane.
"It was a sound idea, but they failed. Political instability, infighting among the ruling elites, natural disasters...all of these factors conspired to prevent them from finishing the array of ziggurats that would have allowed them to break through the veil of our reality. Some say that the gods themselves intervened to keep the Babylonians from succeeding. You can hear echoes of this notion in the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis."
Finch quoted: "Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.' But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The LORD said, 'If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.' So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city."