“Your card. If they’ve got OCCINT assets in the field, that’s going to be a red flag to anyone nearby.”
“True. But they’re trying to keep a low profile.” I look both ways before crossing: “I reckon they’ll go through the regular police first, and I trust you did a good job of muddying the trail with that ward—you stole that pickup truck, yes?”
“They were going to install an alien mind parasite on me—what would you do?”
“Probably the same.” I swipe the key card. “Let’s go inside.”
The Motel 6 rooms are basic but adequate, with office desks and broadband as well as TVs and en-suite showers. I’ve just had time to dump my stuff and do basic set-up. I’m installing a ward on the desk beside the pizza box when there’s a knock on my door. It’s Persephone.
“Come in.” She stands on the threshold, clutching her handbag and shifting from foot to foot, edgy as a vampire with toothache. She sidles past me and stalks around restlessly as I close and ward the door. She pays particular attention to the window, and in particular the cobwebby diagrams I’ve sketched across the glass with a conductive pen: distraction patterns designed to slide observers’ attention elsewhere. “I’m still working on the room.”
“Oh, right.” She stares at the pizza box. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Yup.” I haven’t got it wired up to the handy little USB breakout box yet, but it’s adequately trapped for the time being. I gesture at her bag. “Is that what I think it is?”
“If what you expect is a bible and a gun, it probably is.” She plants the bag on the double bed.
“Let’s get this room secured before we discuss anything else,” I suggest, discreetly palming my JesusPhone. (Thaumic resonance: there’s an app for that.) “In case Schiller’s people have got a Listener out for you.”
“Okay.” She reaches into the neck of her blouse and pulls out a discreet chain with a stainless steel cross attached. Before I can stop her she gives the arms a twist, then stabs the ball of her thumb with the tiny knife blade that pops out of the stem like a demented switchblade. “I always carry a concealed athame. It’s not ideal, but it works…Ouch.” I point my phone’s camera at her and fire up the thaumometer and, sure enough, the cross is now pulsing violently. She mutters something in glassy syllables that slide around the edges of my mind, then retracts the blade and drops the concealed ritual knife back down between her breasts. “Deafness be upon us, and inner ears stoppered with wax. Will that do?”
I hate this ritual magic stuff; it just doesn’t come naturally to me, even if I set everything up carefully beforehand—I need a debugger and a proper development environment before I can whip up so much as a hello, world invocation. (Hopefully followed rapidly by a good-bye, world from whatever I just summoned: that stuff is dangerous.) But she’s very good at it. I suppose different people have different aptitudes, but the non-repeatability irritates me—it’s anathema to observational science. I force myself to nod. “What else did you find there?”
“Aside from the Bible? That’s not enough for you?” She shrugs again, then turns it into a low-grade shudder. “Gods, you don’t want to know…They’re believers, Mr. Howard. Pentecostalist dispensationalists—they are saved, but they are surrounded by the unsaved, and they think their master is returning imminently, and anyone who isn’t saved by the time of his arrival is doomed. So they intend to save everyone whether or not they want to be saved, one brain parasite at a time.” The shudder is more emphatic this time round. “They’re also quiverfull—they raise as many children as they can as ammunition for the cause, because they’re not completely sure whether imminent means their god is coming in fifteen minutes or fifteen years. There’s a clinic in town, with a combined maternity unit and spinal injuries ward for the runaways they’ve rounded up.”
“A what?”
“You heard me.” She looks away, avoiding my eyes. She’s the kind of woman who walls away that which makes her angry, presenting an outward appearance of calm; behind it I’m certain she’s furious. “The ends justify the means: we are all to be saved, and it will take a large army to do the saving. As their women can raise larger families than they can give birth to, they use host mothers to make up the numbers. ‘In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children’—they take that as an instruction.”
“Oh ick.” I swallow. “But why don’t they just use the hosts to—” Then I realize why: they want loyal brainwashed storm troopers who’ll fight for the cause in situations where a parasitic faith module would be a liability. (If you try to smuggle one of those giant wood lice into Dansey House or the New Annex, you won’t get very far.) “So they’re raising a little army of brainwashed believers, and they have the mind-control hosts to keep down the rest of us. And they’ve got this clinic”—if it’s real, I feel like screaming, because the picture she’s painting is so vile—“and, uh, what else are we looking at? What are their goals?”
“I don’t know for sure.” She sounds calm. “I planted a worm on their office network but then I had to break out, so I’ve got to assume the exploit is compromised. The Omega Course session went off the beaten track yesterday, and this morning they were forcibly installing parasites on the attendees. I think they’ve decided to bring their plans forward in a hurry. We’re going to have to go back in person if you want to know any more.”
Urp. Time to change the subject in a hurry. “About Johnny. Do you want to contact him, or would you rather I used the tattoo? Get him to—”
She looks at me. It’s a bit like being a nice juicy grasshopper in front of a very sexy mantis. She’s wired on something, and I wonder for a moment if she’s sourced some nose candy, then I realize: this is what she lives for. Field work: that’s why Lockhart was able to get her out here. Persephone is addicted to danger.
“Johnny is coming.” Her lips crinkle into something resembling a smile. “He has a passenger to deal with first.”
“A pass—” I stop.
They say our eyes are windows on the soul, but Persephone’s eyes are more like murky brown pools, utterly impenetrable. Only the muscles around them tense enough to betray her, faint crow’s feet of worry radiating from their corners. “I called him as soon as I closed the door.” She’s not apologizing, merely explaining. “He is meeting old friends. The Black Chamber are having problems operating in Colorado right now. And the Golden Promise Ministries have their own police force who appear to be experiencing no such difficulties. They tried to take him at one of our safe houses. He is joining us as soon as he deals with an, ah, loose end. Maybe later tonight, maybe early tomorrow.”
I swallow. “What kind of loose end?”
“Mr. Howard, Johnny and I are external assets. The whole point of working with us is that you can later swear that you didn’t know what we were doing, that we did whatever-it-is on our own initiative.” She pauses. “Are you sure you want me to answer that question?”
I stare at her. She’s a beautiful piece of work, porcelain skin and not a hair out of place after a day of escape-and-evasion: as beautiful and deadly as a black widow. “I can’t countenance murder,” I say, with a sense that if I’m watching myself from a great distance—perhaps the witness box at the Black Assizes. “Do you understand?”
“Is it murder if it’s another of those? Like the thing you took that from?” She points at the pizza box.