***Hello again.***
He’s noticed her. Noticed her and let her think he hadn’t. Watch yourself, Persephone reminds herself.
***Got problems. Johnny’s in trouble.***
***That’s not the only problem.*** Howard’s anxiety is infectious. ***The airport’s closed by this damn storm, and the highway patrol have blocked Interstate 76. They’re diverting all traffic back into town. I’m going to try Interstate 70 to Kansas City, but I’ve got a bad feeling about this.***
***What storm?***
***There’s a really scary weather system coming down from the north. It blew up overnight without any warning. They’re talking about most of a meter of snow in the next twenty-four hours or so. Can you spell Fimbulwinter?***
***Can’t be. You’re completely cut off?***
***I won’t know until I’ve tried the other routes, but I think so. What’s your situation?***
***I’m parked up in Colorado Springs. It’s not snowing here yet. Johnny’s in trouble and I think at least one of our safe houses has been burned.***
She bites her tongue, about to raise a delicate topic, but Howard beats her to the punch.
***Tell me where you are and I’ll come and pick you up. Then we can go find Johnny and get the hell out of here together.***
***Agreed,*** she sends, squashing her instant burst of relief.
Then she settles down to wait, and opens the Bible to the first of the bookmarked pages.
11. THE APOCALYPSE CODEX
A DOOR IN A DARKENED HALLWAY: TO EITHER SIDE OTHER doors open onto rooms with front-facing windows. A grenade, fizzing acrid fumes from both ends, has just crashed through the window of the day room to the left and is spinning around on the floor like a dying hornet the size of a coke can. Then something heavy slams against the front door, nearly but not quite strong enough to take it off its hinges.
What do you do if you’re Johnny McTavish?
You close your eyes.
Johnny braces himself facing the front door, shuts his eyes, and puts his hands together as if in prayer. Between them he cradles a tightly folded sheet of rice paper. Within its folds sits a small RFID chip, pasted to the middle of a design inscribed upon it in conductive ink.
He feels a familiar presence at the back of his head, just as another crashing impact sends the door flying open. Johnny pulls his palms apart. ***Not now, Duchess, I’ve got my hands full.*** The silence is broken by the hissing of the gas grenade.
Johnny takes a step backwards, and opens his eyes—still holding his breath.
The door hangs open and the fully expanded paper chain lies on the hall floor. Of the attackers there is no visible sign—the paper chain has done its job. He stoops, picking it up gingerly by both ends, then runs forward through the open entrance, holding his breath as he passes the day room doorway (through which a thin mist is drifting). There’s nobody out front, but a crew cab pickup with blacked-out side windows and a boxy cargo container on the load bed is drawn up on the street. Glancing sideways, Johnny darts past the pickup, pausing only to bend and slash at the tires. Then he jogs towards his own wheels, not looking back.
(Johnny expects there to be a second pair of operatives around the back of the safe house, and he’s got maybe thirty seconds before they stop waiting for the prey to come to them and storm the house in search of their fellows—but by then Johnny intends to be gone.)
The chain sags heavily on the passenger seat as he climbs in and starts the engine. Revving, he slams the truck into second gear and pulls out without lights. As he leans forward over the wheel there’s an unwelcome and familiar metallic rattle from behind him. For a moment he’s livid with indignation: What do the fuckers think they’re doing, shooting in a residential neighborhood? Then he clocks it as a hopeful sign—they wouldn’t be hitting his tailgate if they were firing on the move—and rams the truck into third. There are no more bullet impacts; he brakes hard, takes a left without signaling, checks his mirrors, and finally turns on his lights when a passing car flashes its high beams at him. It wouldn’t do to get stopped by the traffic cops, not with what’s sitting on the passenger seat…
The paper chain rattles, like the echo of an occult manacle that immobilizes a pair of angry ghosts. But these two aren’t ghosts yet, and it’s already starting to ripple and distort; there isn’t a lot of power in the ward, and sooner or later it’s going to degrade, at which point the two game beaters trapped inside it are going to get out. When that happens, Johnny intends to be ready for them. It wouldn’t do to find out the hard way that they’ve got more tear gas grenades where that first one came from.
The downtown Denver safe house has been burned, which means—if the opposition are halfway competent—that the other two are also compromised. On the other hand, it’s a weekday evening, there is a light snowfall, and suburbia beckons. Johnny drives, looking for a certain kind of street, one with too many For Sale / To Let signs, too few lit windows and parked cars, unkempt lawns, foreclosed mortgages: the stench of neglect and decay. It’s not easy, to be sure, because real estate agents like to hide such signs (they pay landscapers to mow the lawns of empty houses) but he has a nose for the wild places and, presently, he finds a side road where half the street lights are dead and the potholes are unfilled. Slowing, he inspects the houses to either side as he drives. He’s after a specific type of vacant property—one with boarded-up windows and a backyard to park in, unobserved by neighbors.
“Just like that caper in Barcelona, Duchess,” he mutters to himself as he pulls over, checks for passers-by, then does a three-point turn and drives into the yard of the house he’s selected. “Had a bad feeling about that one, too.”
The snow in front of it is unswept, pristine; the windows boarded over. He rummages in the back of the cab for a laminated card proclaiming Big John’s Real Estate Services, lays it on the dash—often the simplest covers are the best—and heads for the front door.
The lock is easy. Once inside, Johnny pulls out a compact LED lantern and closes the door behind him. The house is dark and chilly as a pub toilet after closing time: the electricity is shut off and there’s a smell of mildew in the air. It’s just right for what he’s here to do. So many of the significant events of his career take place in rooms like these, cold and abandoned. He goes through into the combined kitchen-dining room. There’s junk strewn all over, and dust. A row of open cupboard doors gape at him like broken teeth in a screaming mouth as he kicks shattered crockery and rotting junk mail aside to reveal the wooden floor. He sets the LED lantern down on a countertop. Working fast with a can of spray paint he scribes the circle, joins the lines, and sketches the necessary sigils. He dumps the paper chain in the middle of the new grid and it jitters, the echo of a ram slamming into a door; working in haste he kneels outside the incomplete grid and links it up to a wire-wrap circuit board and a battery.
The folded chain of rice paper men jerks and jumps for a moment, casting long shadows from the lamp. Then it snaps. Johnny steps to one side so that his shadow is not cast across the circle, and draws both his knives. The heavies in the circle will probably have handguns, and Johnny isn’t carrying. On the other hand, the heavies in the circle were dumb enough to go in through the front door. From where they’re standing, an instant ago they were storming into a dim hallway; suddenly they’re in near darkness in the wrong place with a glowing violet circle around them that they somehow can’t bring themselves to cross—