“I insist.” Is that an impish gleam behind her shades? “We are not flying out tomorrow, Mr. Howard. Better get a full meal while the meal is to be had.”
“What about trains? Driving?”
“Amtrak runs one train daily to Salt Lake City or Omaha, it takes a day either way, and they insist on checking ID. Driving—it’s possible, but we’d have to cut cross-country and run past those road blocks. I do not advise it: we would be too obvious, even if we didn’t get stuck in a snowdrift and die of hypothermia. If they are infiltrating the general aviation companies, what about the highway patrol?”
I shiver, and not from cold. “You think Schiller’s locked down half the state?”
We slow, and Persephone pulls in at the roadside. “Yes. The real question is how soon he’ll be in a position to extend it to the entire continental United States.”
As she kills the engine I try to force my brain to shift gears. It’s painful. “Back up. You think he’s organized a total lock-down, blocking escape by air and probably by road, because of us? And he’s going to what?”
“It’s not just us, and I have a very bad feeling.” She opens her door and climbs out. I join her on the pavement. “We know he has ambitions.” She heads for the parking meter. “We know he has a powerful sponsor, and a supply of these parasites, and a messianic desire to bring his salvation to everyone. The Omega Course I attended—it wasn’t the first, or even the tenth. He’s been saving the souls of the rich and powerful for many years, working his way up. He must know that the higher he goes, the greater the risk of exposure. So if he is trying to suborn governments at the highest level, he must be nearly ready to move. And now something has just come up that convinced him to bring his plans forward. Possibly us, I fear.”
My stomach rumbles, but I’m not sure I’m hungry. It feels as if Persephone is dredging these fears out of the depths of my own imagination. “He won’t be doing this on a whim. Whatever he’s planning is close enough to completion that he can’t back off and try again later. At the same time, he thinks he can hold the lid down for long enough to—how long can you lock down a city without anyone noticing, anyway? A few hours? A couple of days?”
Persephone shoves quarters into the meter. “If he can conjure up a weather anomaly that matches the weather warning, he might manage a week-long clampdown. And nobody would question what had happened afterwards—especially if we disappear in the middle of it.” Light snowflakes swirl in her misting breath. “Winter is not over yet; there can be savage cold snaps.”
“Where’s he going to get the bandwidth to create an entropy sink that big?” Then my eyes widen involuntarily because I’m having an unwelcome flashback to something that happened more than a decade ago in Amsterdam.
YOU’VE SEEN THE SETTING IN A THOUSAND GANGSTER MOVIES: the unfurnished room in an abandoned house, empty but for the wooden chair in the middle of the floor, centered in a pool of light beneath an electric lantern hanging from the low, paper-peeling ceiling. A man sits on the chair, his arms cuffed behind the back and his ankles tied to the legs.
In the movies he’d be a good guy, a cop or an investigator perhaps. And the figure in the shadows, the interrogator preparing to ask him questions, would be a killer and a thug. In that respect, this scene is a movie cliché.
The interrogator walks up behind the slumped figure in the chair and grabs a handful of hair. He pulls the prisoner’s head back, and with his free hand he smears a ball of cotton wool and baby oil across the prisoner’s forehead.
“You can wake up now.”
The prisoner snorts incoherently, coughs, drools, and twitches as awareness returns in fits and starts. It’s a messy process, never as neat and clean-cut as cinematography portrays. But the prisoner is waking from sleep unnaturally enforced by the ward the interrogator has just erased from his forehead. There’s no concussion or intracranial bleeding to complicate things here.
“Would you like a glass of water?”
The victim coughs again and tries to look round at the speaker. Chooses the other direction. Begins to nod, then stops, suspicious.
The interrogator produces a bottle of water and a paper cup. Still standing behind the victim’s chair, he half-fills the cup. He holds it in front of the man’s mouth and tilts, slowly, taking pains to stay out of his prisoner’s field of vision.
After a moment, the prisoner sucks greedily, gulping down the contents of the cup. There is no Mickey Finn moment, no dramatic double take: it’s just water. The interrogator re-fills the cup and lets his subject empty it once more before he walks away and deposits it at the other side of the room.
“Do you know who I am?” he asks conversationally.
“Yuh”—cough—“you’re in too deep.” Arm muscles tense, come up against handcuffs. “Let me go now and lessee if’n we can sort this out so you get a day in court, huh? Because if you don’t—”
There is a scraping of metal on concrete. The interrogator drags up a chair behind the prisoner and sits, just outside the geometric design sketched on the bare boards around the other’s chair. The prisoner, uncertain, trails off.
“Do go on, son.” The interrogator sounds amused rather than afraid.
“Hss.” There’s an odd undertone to the sibilant.
“You can stop pretending.” The interrogator leans forward. “Because I know what you are, minion.”
The prisoner’s voice shifts: “You should join us. Life eternal awaits the brethren of the chosen, perdition and damnation the apostate. For I am the light and the way, sayeth the Lord—”
The interrogator listens to the godbabble for a couple of minutes. It has a nice stirring ring to it, sonorous phrases honed by centuries of preachers: the shock and awe programmed into generations of believers by their priests. But it falls on willfully deaf ears, for though the interrogator grew up thoroughly churched he has long since shed the naive belief in the trinity and the gospels and the crucifixion and the resurrection and the Church triumphant. He knows the truth, knows the creed of the One True Religion, the nature of its worshipers and what passes for its deities.
Right now what interests the interrogator is the state of his prisoner’s mind. Because it’s certainly not what it ought to be under these circumstances—knocked unconscious and brought round in a situation designed to intimidate, a situation familiar from a thousand entertainments and notorious for ending badly—indeed, the prisoner’s attitude is positively abnormal. A normal reaction might run the gamut from panic, fear, and offers of cooperation, through self-pity and ingratiation to anger, even defiant threats. A well-prepared subject might be grimly committed to silence. But a small-town cop accustomed to the casual exercise of force-backed authority will not be well-prepared for capture and debriefing; he’ll bluster or break. So: first evangelism, then…what?
After a while, the prisoner begins to repeat his offers. The interrogator waits a minute to be sure, then moves on to the next stage: he tosses a small object onto the floor before his prisoner. It’s about the size of a severed human tongue, a silvery banded carapace or husk of chitin, somewhat flattened by repeated encounters with a rifle butt. It sparks and sizzles briefly as it touches the ward. “You can stop now,” he says in a steady tone that gives no hint of his own state of mind. “Just put me through to head office.”
The prisoner falls silent. Then the light flickers.
“Faithlesssss…” There is little humanity in the prisoner’s voice, but an odd sharp clicking as of dozens of chitinous legs tapping against the teeth in a dead man’s jawbone, a buzzing as of the wings of a thousand flying insects.