“Grandaddy—”
“What she told you is a labrys, a two-sided axe. It can build you up, or tear you down. Some are told they’re not ready, and they fail. Others are told they’re not ready and they work harder. So which are you, Gabriel? Which is Remiel? Children destined for failure because you believe a Grigori who refuses choices and perches on a fence? Or men who take on the burden, who prosper under that burden, and literally help save the world?”
I shrugged. “She said she is neutral, like Switzerland. That Grigori are simply watchers. They are not to act.”
“In World Wars that are not truly wars of the world, in our terms, Switzerland and other countries may remain neutral. But this battle, Gabriel . . .” He shook his head. “This battle is for humanity and the hereafter.”
I squinted at him. “Don’t you have to be dead for the hereafter? Can we avoid the dead part?”
“‘Hereafter’ means after here. Later. In the future. At a time that is not now.”
“You mean the battle is about what happens later.”
“The battle, if won, means we will have a ‘later.’ We will have an after that is here.”
And thus here I was, approaching the End of Days and discussing semantics with a seraph. “Okay. No neutrality when the world may end. Or at least our version of it. So, what, you figure you can talk Greg into surrendering her neutrality because you need every single angel on the payroll? Is it Greg specifically, or all the Grigori? If it’s the latter, what happens to Shemyazaz? He’s a Grigori.”
Grandaddy’s tone was dismissive. “Shemyazaz is fallen. Shemyazaz is Lucifer’s.”
“He says he’s here to kill Lucifer.”
“Shemyazaz isn’t capable of killing Lucifer. He is a fallen angel, Gabriel. He gave over his soul to Satan. He is the devil’s pet. And Ambriel, by interfering as she is—which I must remind you is not being neutral—is getting in the way.”
The grays. The grays, she’d said, not the blacks, or the whites. “Angels live among the grays.”
“Not anymore,” Grandaddy said.
I stuffed my hands in my jacket and felt the flash drive. It would be so easy just to hand it over, to surrender complexities and simply stick with ‘Go thou and battle demons.’ And not get involved in internecine warfare among the angels. Easier just to trust the man who’d meant so much to me.
In my pocket, I turned the flash drive in my fingers. Part of me wanted to approach the subject, part of me wanted to forget it altogether. “Well, what about Cassandra, then? Why do you want her?”
That changed the look in his eye. “She told you about Cassandra?”
“I rescued Cassandra, Grandaddy. I picked her up from the ground after an assault. I have a little something invested in her. So, why do you want her?”
Grandaddy’s eyes flickered a little. “Cassandra is mad.”
“So what does a seraph want with a madwoman?”
He maintained a fairly even tone in his voice, but now his eyes were angry. “In dreadful times, people may believe the wrong things. The wrong people. Drákon: The dragon. Thirío: The beast. And pséftikos profitis: The false prophet. All mislead.”
Dragon, beast, false prophet. Triple-six, written in water on wood. “And you believe Cassandra is the false prophet?”
He said it with infinite simplicity. No thundering from the mount. No roar of rage. Just a quiet, “We take no chances.”
“So you’re not certain of it.”
“We take no chances.”
“Ambriel may be right, then, and Cassandra plays no part in this. She’s just a collateral nutcase.”
Grandaddy said nothing.
I nodded. “You take no chances.”
“Can it be afforded, at the End of Days?”
I fingered the flash drive that Greg had begged me not to give to him, to the man I had always trusted more than my own father.
Sleeper agents. Assets in abeyance. That could apply to so many, in all the shades of gray. Apply to Remi. To me. And I had a flash drive and a feather that apparently meant a great deal to Greg.
Grandaddy said, “I trust you to do the right thing, Gabriel. I made you for it.”
And so he had, mentoring me, grooming me for battle. I searched his eyes for the truth. I knew this man. I barely knew Greg at all.
He stood tall and formidable, as he had that day on the mountain when he allowed us to see the suggestion of massive wings. Greg had called him chief of the guardian angels.
I didn’t have to give him the flash drive now. I could view it for myself, decide then who should have it.
“Yessir,” I said. “I will do the right thing.”
He didn’t fly away. He left no feathers. He simply turned away from me and walked back out the open door.
I stood on the dance floor for long minutes, trying to figure out what I was. Then I removed the flash drive from my pocket. Possibly it could tell me what I was and what I was to do. But first?
First, close the door. Pour whiskey. Swallow ibuprofen.
A nap would be good, too, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I patted myself down: revolver, both knives, phones. The only thing left lying on the floor was my pride, but that I could deal with. Well, at some point; right now it was a little tender.
If the flash drive was so important and now entrusted to my keeping as its pros-something—protector; English was easier—it was about damn time I stuck it into a computer and viewed the data. I mean, it could be a list of all the sleeper agents—angelic or demonic—in the country, or the world itself; and photos, and dossiers, and possibly blueprints of a dam we were supposed to blow up, or maybe of the Japanese-owned highrise in L.A. that would be compromised come Christmas, saved only by the skin of Bruce Willis’s feet; or, for all I knew, the video of the original ending of Thelma and Louise, where they didn’t drive off the rim of the Grand Canyon.
I jogged up the stairs, pulled out my phone to text Remi again and fill him in—and discovered the screen had more cracks than my vertebrae on a bad day. Also, the phone part of it was just flat broken.
Okay, I still had the iAngel phone. I called him, but received no answer. I did skip the whiskey, but in the bathroom I swallowed two ibu tablets and stared at my face in the mirror a moment.
I affected a drawl to mimic Remi, “‘Son, you look like you were rode hard and put away wet.’”
Back in the common room I sat down, booted up the computer. A physical examination of the small flash drive in its closed silver metallic case offered no answers as to why Greg felt it was so vital—it certainly lacked the charisma of WWII’s Enigma encryption machine—or why I wasn’t supposed to show it to anyone, least of all Grandaddy.
Just as I was about to slide one of the buttons to release the connector and insert the drive, I hesitated. This computer was perfectly ordinary, capable of presenting information as prosaic as ads for various items made in China under the guise of an English-sounding company name. And at times this computer presented us with an angel-operated dark web, providing vital information via photos and text, not to mention missions, and answering limited questions with obfuscation.
Greg planted doubts about Grandaddy. He planted doubts about her. If she were not on the fence but was playing a long game, the drive she’d given me could very well fry a network vital to the war. I was no computer nerd or geek. I didn’t know various ways of doing assorted bad things on the internet, other than knowing it could be done. As an eight-year-old I’d heard all about Y2K and the potential for world domination when the clock ticked over for the new millennium—except it turned out to be a total bust.
Then again, the drive contained a microUSB connector in addition to the 3.0. I could insert it into my phone—except, yeah, my phone was broken. Which left the angel phone,
also plugged into whatever celestial network the computer used.
Well, they were angels. Probably they had a heavenly Geek Squad on call for repairs. I plugged the drive into the desktop’s port.
Zero. Zip. Nada.
And then her photo came up on the screen: long, wavy blond hair, ice-blue eyes, strong features and a straight nose.
No, not a photo. “Cassandra?”
She looked stricken. She spread a hand on the screen. The monitor was so clear I could see the pads of her fingers. Pads of fingers that lacked the whorls of fingerprints. “Gabe!”
“Where are you? Where’d Greg stash you?”
“I am here. I am here.”
“Where is here? Some kind of safehouse?”
“Here! I am here!”
I shook my head. “Cassandra—listen, I think we’ve got a language issue. Greg—Ambriel—has taken you somewhere safe. I’m apparently your angel-appointed protector. You can tell me.”
Now she spread both hands across the monitor. One she smacked on her webcam over and over again. “I am here! Inside! I am in the labyrinth!”
“What labyrinth?”
“All the lines. All the colored lines.” She smacked the webcam again. “The labyrinth! The way to talk to you. The way to provide . . . data’? To tell you what I see! I will . . . overwrite? Yes, overwrite—the bad prophecies. To provide correct data.”
I stood up so fast the task chair rolled hard into the table and fell over. “You’re inside the internet?”
“I am here,” she said, and took her hands away.
It wasn’t a webcam. It wasn’t the ordinary internet, or even iAngel.
I was absolutely horrified. “Cassandra . . .”
“Protect me,” she said. “Be my prostátis.”
I couldn’t move. I could summon no other word. I could only stare at the woman on the screen. The woman in the screen.
The woman reduced to data stored in a modest little flash drive with two USB connectors.
I finally rediscovered language skills. “Cassandra—do you know if you can be moved? If you—the you that’s in the thing I plugged into the computer—can you be transferred into additional devices?” I knew I wasn’t getting through to her. “Are you stuck in the drive, or can you put yourself into different computers and phones?”
“I am in the—thing. The thing.”
“The drive.”
“The data thing. Only there.”
“We can contact you if we insert the USB drive into any device?” I tried again. “If we insert ‘the thing’ into any device, we can reach you?”
“I am wherever the thing goes.”
I nodded. I felt sick to my stomach. “Can you contact us? If you need us?”
She shook her head wildly. It wasn’t a ‘no’; it was an ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’
An odd bit of memory floated into my brain, a disembodied voice asking the first of many questions in times of computer confusion; the question that frustrated so many: ’Is the computer plugged in?’
“Okay,” I said. “Listen, you must get a message to Greg—to Ambriel. Can you do that?”
She stared at me like a deer caught in the headlights. Except she wasn’t seeing me, I didn’t think. Well, maybe she was. I didn’t know what kind of tech existed among the angels. But I would certainly ask Greg the first chance I got.
I tried another way. “Can you give Ambriel my data? If I type or text—scratch that.” I thought a little further. “If I give you words, can you remember them? Can you tell them to Ambriel?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” A little relief came with that. “Tell Ambriel to call me. She knows what that means. Tell her I have many questions.”
She nodded jerkily, clearly not quite certain what I meant.
And then I cast aside compunction. I had to make sure Greg understood how serious I was. So I used what I had. I used what she feared could harm her in the wrong hands to force a response. “Tell her this exactly—exactly, Cassandra. Say: ‘I have your feather.’”
This time her nod was of comprehension.
“Tell her that my data is: ‘I have your feather,’ and ‘call me.’”
She began to speak again, then a wave of pain passed across her face. She set both hands to her head and squeezed her eyes closed. I wanted to yell questions for Greg, things like: “Do you know if this is safe? Do you know if this will harm her? Don’t tell me to protect her if this is going to harm her!”
A safehouse. I’d thought perhaps Greg would stash her in a safehouse, not in a flash drive!
A prophecy was of no use if it couldn’t be passed along in advance of the events. We needed tech that would allow Cassandra to initiate texts on her own.
“Cassandra—if you’re in pain, you need to shut down.” I rephrased. “You need to rest.”
She lifted her head and looked at me in shock. “I can’t see all—can’t see all.” She sucked in a breath. “Remi!”
The only phone I had was iAngel, beside the computer. I grabbed it, pulled up the screen, hit Remi’s icon.
Zero. Zip. Nada. Not even a voicemail greeting.
I turned away and took one long step, then swung back. I initiated Eject Media, plucked the drive out of the USB port, stuck it into an interior jacket pocket and zipped that closed.
Hospital. Last place he’d been. And I had wheels.
In my room I swapped out BDUs for leather bike pants, grabbed gloves and helmet, thundered down the stairs and snatched the back door open, took the two steps, another two strides—and found a manilla envelope taped to the bike saddle.
Ohnonononono.
Remi had been with Kelly at the hospital.
Mary Jane Kelly, Jack the Ripper’s number five.
I ripped open the envelope, found the message on the back of the photo.
‘My name is Iñigo Montoya. You keel my puppy. Prepare to die.’
“No-no-no,” I said blankly.
I knew what the Ripper had done to the Mary Jane Kelly of 1888. I’d seen the photo of a woman he very recently had carved up. And now he had our Mary Jane.
I took a breath, held it, turned over the photo.
Not Mary Jane.
Remi.
Alive in the photo, but written in red were the words: ‘Come and take out the trash.’
After a moment of paralysis I yanked the angel phone from my pocket, fished out the flash drive—and just barely stopped myself from inserting the microconnector. Plugged in, Cassandra would be using the OS of the magic phone and thus extending herself into the angel network. Cassandra was data, not a microprocessor. If she accessed the angel phone OS, Grandaddy could track her.
Damn Ambriel for making me question his motives!
I crammed phone and drive back into a pocket, fired up the bike and took off like a bat out of hell.
Burner phone. Burner phone. Any phone—so long as it could take the Cassandra drive right now as it was and didn’t need an external On-The-Go adapter. That could come later.
I prevented myself from speeding by the application of sheer willpower because being pulled over would delay me even more. But it was minutes only before I pulled in to the Harley shop, and then I was off the bike before it settled firmly on the repaired kickstand.
The kid was in the shop wearing stained overalls, working on something with a sound system blaring. I went in underneath the rolling door, walked right up to him, scared the daylights out of him as I clamped a hand on a shoulder.
“Gotta use your cell!” I shouted, miming fingers to ear. “Emergency!—sorry, please—”
Kenny was wide-eyed, mouth working, but he nodded jerkily, slapped a pocket, showed me a greasy hand and a panicked expression. I shoved my hand down into the overall pocket and pulled the phone out, t
ook the flash drive from my jacket, prayed it wouldn’t fry the phone. I could buy him another cell—what I didn’t want is for any part of Cassandra to be damaged or to get into the telephone provider’s network. I hoped, too, it had an internal OTG, or I’d have to go buy an adapter and I didn’t have the time.
I walked away from the kid hastily, pressed the power button, waited for the home screen. When it came up I inserted the C-type microconnector.
Cassandra was now a heaven-built device with her own autorun.exe program. But I didn’t know if she realized that. I doubted it. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.”
The screen flashed blinding-bright, went to black.
“Nononono.”
It came back up, and I saw one ice-blue eye filling the screen, staring at me.
“Cassandra. Cassandra, please—can you tell me anything about Remi? Where he is? Anything at all?”
The eye withdrew. I saw both eyes now, pupils spreading to fill the iris. Black black eyes.
“Cassandra—”
“Sun goes down,” she said. “Sun goes down—sun goes down—sun goes down—”
The screen flashed again, went black.
I set the phone’s edge against my brow, feeling empty and scared and helpless, and on the verge of sudden tears. “I don’t need to know when. I need to know where!”
Kenny had come up. He hung back a little, but was on the edge of my space. He rocked a little from foot to foot, staring at the phone I had pressed against my head.
He’d said, “Head bunged up.”
Phone bunged up, I thought. I pulled the drive, slid the connector inside the little case and handed him the cell. Thanked him, made to pull out my wallet but he shook his head hard and took a big step back. I put out my hand to shake his, but he wouldn’t do that, either. His was too greasy. I smiled at him, and for the hell of it said, “By any chance, do you know what ‘Sun goes down’ might mean? Besides the sun setting, I mean.”
The kid with the bunged up head stared at me like I was an imbecile. “Sunset Crater.”
I felt a chill sweep over me. I was an imbecile.
Remi was maybe twenty minutes away.
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