Even as he thought it, the Concierge was aware of John’s strange eyes fixed on him. He could feel the man, despite being separated by thousands of miles of land and ocean. Despite the fact that this was a video image and not the man himself sitting there, sipping wine, and smiling like a devil out of hell.
The report took a long time. John refilled his glass three times. Zephyr slept on, though once she moaned in her sleep. A sound of deep pain. But John bent and placed his left hand flat across her chest, over her heart, and the sound stopped. She slept on, and now she wore the same strange, enigmatic, inhuman smile as he did.
The Concierge saw all of this and knew, without a single shred of doubt, that he was as damned as they. And yet he did not stop speaking, telling of the plans and preparations, listing the numbers of those who were going to die today. He did not even pause.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE
Nikki Bloomberg sat up so straight and fast that she knocked her coffee cup to the floor. The cardboard cup exploded, sending café mocha splashing everywhere, including over her retro-chic red Keds sneakers.
She didn’t care one bit.
Her entire focus was on the screen in front of her. It was a video clip from last year of a man on a stage addressing dozens of philosophy Ph.D. candidates at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
“Wait a minute,” she said, and tapped some keys to open a second window. The same man spoke at the Ethical Society in Philadelphia. She opened a third window, a fourth, and a fifth. The same man was speaking in all of them. She broadened her search and found him speaking at the London School of Economics and Political Science, at the University of Toronto, at the Australian National University, at the Université Paris. Elsewhere, too. In Germany, Italy, Mexico, Geneva, Beijing.
In all, Nikki found more than sixty speeches the man had given. Sixty that had been recorded and put on YouTube or on the social-media platforms of the various universities. She replayed some of the foreign ones and had to run them back and verify with filters before she was forced to accept that the same man had given speeches in at least thirty-one different languages. All without a translator.
“That’s impossible,” she said aloud.
Nikki opened a search window for the new MindReader Q1 and fed every bit of data into it and hit Enter.
The computer took a microsecond to return seventeen thousand hits. Many, naturally, were duplicates. Many were not. Videos, blog posts, podcast interviews, print articles, chats, and more. All featuring the same man. She ran a pattern-recognition program on him and got a hit with a ninety-eight-percent reliability. She frowned at that, though, because the hit was of Father Luigi Bassano, who had been rector of a small church in Verona, Italy.
Which was impossible, though, because Luigi Bassano’s body had been recovered from a house fire four years ago. The man was dead. Some of the videos, though, were from as recently as last month.
“What the what?” said Nikki. She reran the facial recognition and got the same answer. No other hit was higher than eighty-two percent. This man was Bassano.
Or was he?
There had been an autopsy of the priest, and dental records had confirmed that he was indeed that man.
Except here he was touring the world giving speeches. In each of the videos, this man was talking about a curated technological singularity. A man talking about a forced but inevitable evolution. A man who talked about robotics, nanotechnology, AI, and more.
She snatched up her phone and called Mr. Church to tell him what she had discovered about a man who called himself John the Revelator.
CHAPTER NINETY
“Where are you going?” asked Aunt Sallie.
Mr. Church placed several file folders and the partial box of vanilla wafers in his briefcase. “To the airport. I’m not getting the cooperation we need from the White House, so I’m going to meet Captain Ledger at the DARPA camp. If needs must, I’ll hijack the whole think tank and put them in a room with a MindReader substation.”
“The president won’t like it.”
“Auntie,” said Church, “would you like a bullet-pointed list of the things I can’t be bothered to worry about?”
She sighed. “No, it would be about the same list I have. Go fly the friendly skies.”
She nodded and went away, and as Church finished packing his case he heard her yelling at someone, and it made him smile. He had worked with Aunt Sallie for many years. The history of their covert actions was sewn into the fabric of the history of modern America, and into the history of the world. Presidents and kings came and went, but their fight seemed to go on and on. He had great affection for her, and he was concerned that she was getting old now. She had been badly injured by assassins during the Predator One case, and even though she would likely cut someone’s throat for saying so, she had lost something since then. She was less forceful, less certain of herself. He wondered how soon the day would come when he would have to tell her to step down and step back.
She would fight him on it. And retirement would probably kill her. It turned a knife in his heart, and he brooded on it as he walked slowly toward the elevator. Brick Anderson, his personal assistant, valet, bodyguard, and friend, was waiting for him down in the parking garage. Both of them were big men, though Brick was taller, wider, and wore a SIG Sauer pistol in a shoulder holster over a black T-shirt. A third man, smaller and dressed in the uniform of the Hangar’s security team, trailed behind pulling two heavy metal suitcases and Church’s go-bag of clothes and personal items. Brick opened the rear passenger door for Church and then supervised the placement of the suitcases in the trunk.
As Church settled into the back, he opened his briefcase to take out his cookies, but then he stopped and raised his head. A man sat across from him on the fold-down seat. He was very small, very old, wreathed in wrinkles, with a few wisps of gray hair clinging to his scalp. The man wore the black trousers and shirt of a priest, with a crisp white Roman collar. His gnarled hands were folded in his lap. His eyes were a complex blend of colors that seemed to swirl, like paints that refused to mix or blend.
“Hello, my old friend,” said the priest.
Church closed the laptop and set it on the seat. “Hello, Nicodemus.”
“You look surprised to see me.”
“A bit.”
“Did you think I was dead?”
“I hoped as much. Sorry to know that I was wrong.”
“You know what they say about bad pennies.”
“Why are you here? No, let me guess,” said Church. “Baltimore? South Carolina? Milwaukee?”
There was a thunk as Brick closed the trunk and then a click as he tried to open the driver’s door. The bodyguard tapped on the glass, but Church didn’t reply.
“Those,” said Nicodemus, “are not even the start, and certainly not the end.”
“What’s coming, then?”
Nicodemus grinned with rotting green teeth. Maggots wriggled between the stumps. “Chaos.”
“You’ve been saying that for a long time.”
“I’ve been right about it for a long time,” said the priest. “Surely even you’re gracious enough to admit that.”