“Does Jesus know what I am?” He pushes.
“Jesus says you are of the line of the Masters. The prophet’s son. Jesus says God wants you by His side when He returns to earth. The elder says you are to help open the way of the Lord.”
Johnny leans back, skin crawling. He’s got a lot of planning to do before they make it to the church on time. Normally he’d call up the chinless wonder on his tattoo hotline, but this close to so many supernatural parasites would be a spectacularly bad idea. So he’s got a bunch of planning to do, starting with, how to take best advantage of the besotted cymothoan host’s crush on his lineage—an unexpected bonus of his occult ancestry, born of a line of men who go down to the sea in boats and commune with the things of the deep. On the other hand, he knows from long experience what Persephone will expect of him, and how she is likely to react. All that’s in question is how to terminate Schiller’s operation and get out of this rat trap alive.
After an hour of tense boredom, driving through a twilit blizzard behind an endless trail of brake lights, Johnny’s chauffeur takes a gently graded exit from the interstate and turns onto a wide, straight boulevard. Squat, windowless stores and warehouses punctuate the desolation, snow already humped up before them. Traffic, however, is surprisingly heavy, and most of it is going the same way. Finally it begins to bunch up in a queue of turn signals, all heading for the same side road. It’s the gateway to the New Life campus: an airport terminal served by sky pilots. It’s large enough to have its own internal road network, and the parking attendants, bundled up in heavy winter coats, are working overtime to direct the churchgoing throng to the different parking zones.
Johnny’s driver does not head for the regular parking. After a brief word with one of the attendants he turns down a side road and drives around to the back of a building the size of a cinema multiplex. There’s a loading bay, fenced off and guarded by cops, bundled up in cold weather gear and stamping their feet to stay warm. One of them holds up a hand.
“O’Neil, FBI.” The missionary holds out an ID badge. “Special guest for the reverend.”
“Let me see.” The window beside Johnny retracts, admitting a flurry of snow and a scalpel-sharp breeze. The cop glances at him, incurious. “Okay, go to bay two. I’ll call ahead.” His voice is rough and glottal, his cheeks slightly distended. Johnny gives no outer sign that he recognizes the host inside the officer’s mouth.
The missionary nods, then drives towards the designated parking spot. It’s inside the fence, behind a motorized gate. The engine stops. “Follow me, sir? I am to bring you to his holiness. We must hurry: the feasting of the body and blood of Christ is about to begin.”
15. BLACK BAG JOB
WE’RE DRIVING THROUGH SNOW DESCENDING IN THICK, BLANKETING sheets across the street so that Persephone must follow the tire tracks of other cars and trucks. Overhead, the sky has darkened to the color of unpolished iron, gray-black with a hint of rust when the snowfall lightens enough to see it. We’re heading for darkness at noon. The trees are sodden mounds of white, rearing up out of the twilight around us as we drive uphill, along a narrowing trail through the outer fringes of a forest.
Seen with my eyes closed, it’s a very different picture. The patterns in the darkness (random firing of nerves in my retinas) glow oddly greenish, following the curves of the landscape. But beyond the hills ahead of us there is a waterfall of light, greenish-blue—a bilious tint I’ve seen before in the phosphorescent gaze of walking corpses—fountaining into the sky in a vast geyser of unconstrained power. Something has ripped a hole in the fabric of reality, and a chaotic flux of raw information is bleeding in through it. I know it’s not an artifact of my eyesight because the glowing patterns don’t move when I turn my head. It’s unpleasant to watch, so much so that after a minute of staring at it I have to open my eyes again.
“There is a fence and a gate coming up in a quarter of a kilometer,” Persephone warns me. “There are probably cameras. If you have any useful ideas…?”
“Pull over,” I say. This is where some of the tools I signed out of the armory back home might come in handy.
Persephone stops the car, and I rummage in my go-bag. It takes me a while to find what I’m looking for: a small pouch containing a wizened, stumpy gray claw, and a cigarette lighter. I rummage around some more and come up with a small, battered tin: an electronics geek survival kit stuffed full of wires, diodes, capacitors, and bits’n’pieces. The breadboard is already configured, just waiting for me to connect the miniature Hand of Glory to it via a cable clip and plug in a nine-volt battery, then light the thing. I unroll the grounding strap and plug it into the dashboard cigarette lighter. “All set.”
“Neat,” Persephone observes warmly. “I didn’t know they came that small.”
“Ever wondered why there are so many one-legged pigeons around Trafalgar Square?” You don’t really need a hand from a hanged murderer to make one: like so many pre-modern magics, there’s plenty of room for optimization tweaks. I hook up the battery. “Once this lights off we should be good for about three to five minutes of invisibility. But it smokes and stinks of burning rotted pigeon, and if you turn up the aircon too high you’ll risk blowing it out.”
“When you’re ready.” She fiddles with the climate control, redirecting the warm air towards our feet and turning up the fan. Then she drives on.
I don’t need to be told: I flick the lighter and set fire to the mummified claw. It fizzles and sends up a plume of acrid, smelly smoke, and a green LED lights on the board. “Three minutes.”
Persephone doesn’t answer. There’s a fence alongside the road, three meters high and topped with rolled razor wire—casual visitors clearly not welcome. We follow it around a curve and then there is indeed a gate in the fence, overlooked by a pole with what might be the black plastic dome of a CCTV camera on top. Right now it’s buried under a shroud of snow. Luckily for us, the gate is open. Maybe they just couldn’t be bothered shutting it, with all the traffic to the church? I hope that’s what it is. Otherwise, we’re in big trouble.
Persephone turns through the gate, onto a single-track road that is almost entirely covered in snow. There’s an unpleasant lurch as the back wheels let go, but she calmly turns into the skid and regains control before we end up in the ditch. Then we’re driving up the path to the compound, albeit slowly, following the almost-buried tire tracks.
“Let’s hope we don’t run into anyone coming the other way,” I opine.
“We won’t.” She sounds very certain. “They’re all in the New Life Church or the compound ahead. This is Schiller’s big day. That tells me.” I blink and see what she’s nodding at. It’s just around the next hillside.
I reach into my bag and rummage around for the camera, pull it out, and hit the power button while pointing it at the floor and keeping my finger well away from the shutter release. It pings a cheery tune as it boots, then the screen darkens for a few unpleasant seconds. I’m about to swear and pop the battery compartment—I think it may have crashed—when Pinky’s lethal firmware comes up, showing a live view of my kneecaps with an angry red gunsight superimposed. Eek! I turn it off hastily. Okay, so it takes ten seconds to boot from cold to full readiness. That’s a lot longer than the ordinary camera firmware takes. I should have driven out of town and found somewhere discreet to practice with it before relying on it in a hostile situation, but it’s too late for tears now.