The Cardinal ground his teeth in rage. “Useless creature,” he spat at the cowering joker who tried, but couldn’t get up. He turned to the Witness. “Take care of her! Teach her a lesson.”
The smiling ace stretched like a cat. His knuckles made crackling sounds as he clenched his hands into fists. He approached slowly, smiling confidently. Smugly, really. He had a reason to be smug, the Angel thought. He was still the most handsome man she had ever seen.
“Remember the lesson I taught you before,” he said as he approached. “Now it goes further.”
The sudden sound of the van’s horn startled them both. The Angel whirled to see John Fortune behind the wheel, a determined expression on his face, leaning on the horn and bouncing up and down on the seat as the van rolled over the bumpy sward, bearing down on them.
The Angel leaped away just as Fortune slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel. The van sideswiped the Witness. He didn’t even try to get out of the way. There was the thud of metal slamming into flesh and the van flung the Witness twenty feet in the air where he hit the spreading branches of the pecan tree that was nodding over the nearby graves. Branches cracked and broke and fell along with the Witness.
John Fortune wrestled the van to a stop and shouted out the driver’s side window, “Get in! Get in!”
The Angel responded to the panic in his voice. Her first thought was to check to see if the Witness was still alive, and if he was, to kick his ass as hard as she could. But she realized John Fortune was right. They had to get out of there. Fast.
The sliding door on the driver’s side was crumpled inward, but was still holding on the frame. That was good. The van engine’s was idling at such a high rate that it was threatening to sputter out at any second. That would be bad. She reached the passenger’s side door and pulled it open. John Fortune floored the gas pedal before her butt hit the seat. The van slewed around crazily for a moment, then the tires gripped the turf and they headed for the unpaved road running though the cemetery.
As the Angel glanced back she saw Cardinal Contarini crouched behind one of the monuments, shaking his first at them and screeching something in Italian. The joker looked up groggily, a blank expression on his inhuman face. The Witness was still laying under the broken tree limbs on her mother’s grave.
That was close, she thought, leaning back in the seat. She looked at the boy who, beyond denial, was her savior. He was concentrating on guiding the van over the winding cemetery lane, but he glanced back at her.
“See,” he said. “I told you I could drive.”
She smiled at him. His smile glowed back at her like the shining sun. They left the cemetery, hitting the city streets. The van rattled along making alarming sounds as John Fortune cruised at a sedate thirty miles an hour. The Angel realized that there was no way it was going to get them to Branson. It would be lucky if it got them beyond the city limits. She guessed that this situation could be classified as an emergency, and she reached for her cell phone. She hit The Hand’s number on the speed dial.
“President Barnett’s of—”
“Sally Lou!” the Angel said, trying hard to control her voice so that John Fortune wouldn’t get more worried than he already was. “Let me speak with President Barnett—fast!”
“He’s in conference now,” she said in the snootily superior voice that she liked to use on the Angel.
“I don’t care if God the Father Himself is in there planning Armageddon with him,” the Angel said in a tone that made John Fortune stare at her in surprise. “Connect me with him. Now.”
Pleased when Sally Lou connected them without another word, she barely gave The Hand the chance to say Hello before she blurted out their situation. He took it like he took everything else. With calmness and poise.
“Can you hold out for twenty minutes, honey?” he asked sedately.
“Twenty minutes? I don’t—”
“You’re going to have to,” he said just as soothingly. “Twenty minutes. That’s all. I promise you.”
The Angel took a deep breath. She had The Hand’s assurance. Though he was just a man like everyone else and a sinner as well, he had never let her down. In any important sense, anyway. “All right,” she said. “Twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes,” Barnett confirmed. “Where are you, exactly?”
She told him.
“Fine. Get to the highway. Wait by the Yazoo City on-ramp. Don’t move from that spot. Help is on the way. Gotta go make it happen.”
He hung up. The Angel listened to the dial tone than looked at John Fortune, who was gazing at her with a trusting expression.
“Help is on the way,” she told him. Though how in the world it would arrive in such a short time was utterly beyond her.
Peaceable Kingdom: The Angels’ Bower
Ray tried to explain his position as they took the escalator down to the elevator bank in the lobby, but Jerry wasn’t in a forgiving mood. Mushroom Daddy listened with amiable interest while Sascha just listened, as usual.
“It’s not like I lied to you,” Ray said. “Or even wanted to lie. You and Ackroyd made some unjustified assumptions the first time you saw me, and went right on assuming from then to now.”
“And you let us,” Jerry pointed out for the fifth or sixth time. “You let us think you and Angel were working for the government.”
Ray shrugged. “There’s no skin off your nose, is there?”
“No skin off my nose?” Jerry said, just this side of outraged. “It’s a lot different thinking that we were going into this with government backing—or at least governmental knowledge and consent—and then discovering that the ‘government’ in this case was Leo Barnett.”
“Hey,” Ray said, “he was the President once, wasn’t he?”
“Was,” Jerry said. “That’s the operative word.”
Ray shrugged. “Look, you’re an ace. If you call changing your face an ace—”
“I do more than change my face,” Jerry said hotly.
“Yeah, okay, whatever. I’m not saying you’re a deuce, exactly. But you know how it is. The life of an ace is complicated. You can’t tell me you’ve never had a secret or two. Especially if your power is changing identities. Hell, your name’s probably not even Creighton.”
That stopped Jerry cold. Ray was right. Righter than he knew. Jerry’s whole existence was based on shifting identities. On lies he constantly told others. And himself. He was never just plain old Jerry Strauss. Most of the time he was someone else. The Projectionist. The Great Ape. Lon Creighton. Jerry Creighton. Alan Ladd. Butcher Dagon. Everybody but Jerry Strauss.
If Ray realized that he scored, he kept quiet about it. They eventually made it to the elevator bank, and Ray punched the button for the penthouse. The boys were on guard in the corridor. They must have received word of some kind of possible attack, because they had their handguns out and leveled as the elevator doors swished open.
“Hey, man,” Daddy said. “That’s so not cool!”
“Relax,” Ray said to both Daddy and the Secret Service men. “It’s me. You’re safe.”
One put up his weapon with an audible sigh, the other was more hard ass about it. “Well, look what the cat dragged in,” he said, pointing the barrel of his gun to the floor, but not holstering it. “Billy Ray. A blind guy. A hippie—”
“Don’t worry,” Ray said. “I’ll tell them not to kick your ass.”
“We’ve got to see Barnett,” Jerry said. “Is he in?”
“He’s already got company,” the armed agent said doubtfully, “but...”
“I’ll vouch for these guys,” Ray said.
“Even the hippie?”
“He’s undercover CIA,” Ray said quietly as he went on by. The others followed him.