“Then so be it.” The Auditor looks at Lockhart. “Gerald. When called upon, you will give an account of the inception of this operation, the direction of the external assets, and the status of Agent Howard as their monitor, and a concise report about what they found. You may mention the motivation for this operation, but should not identify the participants in the black bag job. You may discuss material classified under GOD GAME color codes freely—the Black Chamber will already be fully aware of their content—but may not refer to those codewords directly. Do not discuss McTavish’s background unless the Black Chamber show prior cognizance of it. If you wish to vary these constraints you may request it of us, but not in the presence of the other party. Am I understood?”
Lockhart swallows. “Yes, I think so. Am I to negotiate?”
“No.” The Auditor peers at him over his spectacle frames. “That’s Angleton’s job. He knows what we’re dealing with.” He puts down his pen. “I wish we had time to send out for a longer spoon, though…”
“I THINK THEY’RE ONTO US,” I SAY.
I have been sitting in the passenger seat for the past hour, as Persephone flogs the rental coupé down the interstate in weather only a homesick penguin could love—it’s so cold I’m shivering inside my anorak just from looking out the windows—when I realize what’s going on.
“Where?” she asks, instantly focussed.
“Not in sight right now.” I pause, and glance down at the pizza box. “But we keep passing cops on the shoulder with light bars going. Every ten minutes or so. If you knew you were tracking someone on this highway, wouldn’t that be how you’d do it if you had the resources? Station observers every five to ten miles to radio in a sighting, instead of putting a car on their tail which they might spot.”
“That would work.” Persephone glances at me. “If they knew we were here.”
“Yes, well.” I tap the pizza box. She swears loudly and swerves. “It shouldn’t be able to talk. I put wards on this box that are strong enough to gag a death metal band. But if it’s found some kind of back-channel—”
Persephone isn’t listening to me: she’s chanting something in a tonal language that makes the hairs on my arms stand up, and her eyes are shut. I’m about to make a grab for the steering wheel—we’re beginning to drift out of our lane—when she turns her head to the box, then turns sharply frontwards and opens her eyes again. “Merde.”
“Yes?”
“It is leaking. Bleed-through in the Other Place.”
“The other—” Oh. That’s one of the things about ritual magicians; they use visual or tactile metaphors instead of nice standard well-defined terminology. The Other Place, the astral plane, the land of dreams—it’s not a real place like, say, Walsall. But it’s a metaphor for a mathematical abstraction, a manifold containing an n-dimensional space where everything is the product of geometrical transformations, including mass and energy and time. Leakage between dimensions occurs there: it’s how we summon demons from the vasty deep, communicate with aliens, and try to extract our tax codes from the Inland Revenue. And if she says it’s leaking—“I should have grounded it there, too?”
“That might not have worked.” Her fingers are white on the wheel. “It has an astral body: separate the two and it’ll probably die. It’s connected to something in the distance off and to the right. Like a spiderweb. I think it’s in the compound near Palmer Lake. Which is the next turnoff.”
Signs blur towards us, warning of a junction: turn right for the Air Force Academy. Without indicating, Persephone crosses lanes and brakes hard, dragging us into a sharp turn before merging with a main road below the grade of the interstate. “Hey!” I say.
“We’re going to Palmer Lake,” she says firmly, “to pay a visit to the Golden Promise Ministries compound while Schiller’s people are attending their revival show. Besides, it’s lit up like a lighthouse in the Other Place.”
“But the church service—”
“Is fuel for Schiller’s invocation, yes, but do you think he’ll have set up the major summoning itself in the middle of a mega-church?”
It’s like arguing with a madwoman, except she’s not mad. “But he might have—”
“No. He hasn’t had the free run of the mega-church until very recently. If he had, he wouldn’t be using it to attract new victims. They’d already belong to him.”
It’s hard to argue with her logic because it fits the pattern that’s emerging, but I really want her to be wrong. A few months back, Mo came home in meltdown after closing down CLUB ZERO in Amsterdam—a circle of cultist fanatics (from this neck of the woods, now that I think about it) who’d decided to summon up something unpleasant. The venue for the summoning was a deconsecrated Lutheran chapel, but the fuel was the kindergarten on the other side of the road. Linked by a path through the Other Place—exactly the MO Persephone is proposing. I really want Persephone to be wrong about this.
“If he’s got the summoning grid set up in his own compound, then there’ll be a connection via the Other Place to the church,” I reason aloud. “This is the shortest route to Schiller. Bypasses his muscle, too.” I’m whistling past the graveyard at this point, you understand. “As long as he hasn’t already woken the Sleeper.”
“The Sleeper.” She takes her eyes off the road ahead long enough to spare me a sharp glance. “What exactly do you know about it?”
I look at the pizza box on my lap. The complaints department is quiescent, locked down by occult manacles. “It’s not human. Dead but immortal. Sleeps in a temple on a high plateau, surrounded by a lovely necromantic picket fence constructed by a genocidal maniac more than ninety years ago. On a planet that’s definitely not in our neck of the woods, if not in our universe.” I shiver. “It’s sometimes known as the Opener or the Gatekeeper.” I know more about it than that, but I’m not sure how much Persephone knows and I don’t want to provoke my oath of office again.
“That’ll do,” she says absent-mindedly as she wrestles the car through a sharp left turn onto a narrower street where the snowfall is outpacing the traffic’s ability to turn it into slush. “You’re mostly right, although I hope your analysis is wrong. Disturbing the Gatekeeper would be bad. Not so much in its own right, but because of what’s on the other side of the gate.” With that encouraging sentiment she hits the gas again; the wheels spin for a few alarming seconds, then we’re back on course.
We haul ass through snow-capped suburbia for a few silent minutes. Side roads with scattered houses roll by every few hundred meters. I stare at the pizza box in my lap, nervous and upset and simultaneously keyed-up. The thing inside is in communion with its master: they’ll know we’re coming. It’s probably a directional beacon, too. But by the same token, I ought to be able to use it to probe what’s going on ahead. If I dare to shut down part of the firewall I’ve built around it and stick my head up against it, of course. That option does not appeal.
I’ve been keeping my mind inside my own head ever since the incident back at the hotel, because to say I don’t like my new-found proficiency at soul-sucking is a bit like saying that cats don’t like swimming. But there may be no alternative, if I want to try spoofing our location.
I take a deep breath. “Persephone. Your map. Can you show it to me?”
She chuckles grimly. “All you need to do is open your eyes, Mr. Howard.”