by Jenn Stark
“I don’t know much more than what you’ve seen on TV,” Angela said, raising her hands to cut them off. “Honestly, I can’t imagine why I was targeted. There’s been no follow-up, no credible party taking responsibility. There’s nothing in my electronic trail of emails or social media notifications—and they’ve found no trace of the assailants, although it’s obvious that some were taken down during the melee. It makes no sense.”
“It damn well doesn’t make sense,” Randall said, taking his seat at the head of the table. “We’ve all gotten calls about it.”
Angela blinked, glancing first to Trudy Behns, a senior-ranking Democrat, and her unofficial mentor, then back to Randall. “You have?”
“You bet we have,” Trudy answered for Randall, her broad Midwestern accent pitched with unusual strength, as if she was stumping on the campaign trail. Her bluff, open face, clear gray eyes, and no-nonsense helmet of dark brown hair came across as sensible and frank to her constituents—and oddly comforting to Angela. “Randall here, like the good Republican he is, is using it to strengthen his platform on international security threats. While Bob is playing the middle line, like he always does, waiting to see which way the wind blows before laying down his cards.”
Bob Minnick chuckled. “And you’ve been squawking about gun control, rightfully enough,” he said, his gentle tone taking any sting out of the words. Of all of them, he looked the most like what he was: a Southern gentleman with pale, rounded features, a body going only slightly to fat in his middle years, who probably was as comfortable on a porch drinking sweet tea as he was in this conference room. “Members of Congress get targeted. It’s part of the job. But they don’t often get targeted in such a strange way.”
Angela sat up in her chair, unable to fully contain her relief. “So I’m not the only one who noticed how…weird it all was.”
Trudy waved her hand. “I had my people on it as soon as I heard what’d happened, and Randall, I know you did too. They confirmed what you obviously already know, Angela. You didn’t have that stop on your agenda until that morning. There’s simply no way that some aggressor cell was able to mobilize that quickly and get people and weapons in place in a matter of hours through arguably tight security. I’m not saying it was the best security in the world, but we’ve all been doing this long enough that it was probably pretty good. So for some group to stage that deadly a demonstration and then just go poof? There’s something more going on here, and nobody seems to have any answers. Not the local police, not our contacts within military intelligence, no one. There’s been zero chatter from any of the usual suspects, and I don’t like it.”
“I pulled in a couple of favors as well to try to get to the bottom of it,” Randall agreed, leaning forward. “The incident is attracting more attention than an ordinary strike, which is telling in and of itself. But I can only get so far and then everybody goes tight-lipped. And believe me, I’ve been around long enough that I’m not usually the guy they go tight-lipped on.”
Angela nodded, hiding her surprise at Randall’s candor. The Republican committee leader had always treated her with more respect than she honestly felt she deserved as such a junior member of this committee, but it wasn’t as if he’d expressed any partiality toward her. On Randall’s other side, Bob leaned back in his chair, swiveling slightly, a habit of his that betrayed his agitation.
“You want to know what I think is the most interesting part of all this? The terrible video,” Bob said, his fingers rapping the table for emphasis. “We’ve all been caught on video so many times, you’d think we were Hollywood celebrities. You just can’t avoid it. Phones are everywhere. And they were everywhere at that truck rally, I’ve got to believe. But have you seen any of it on TV or streaming on the web? No, you have not. Which, to me, says EMP.”
“EMP?” Trudy was the one who spoke the word aloud, but Angela turned too. That was not what she expected Bob to say in his deep, gentle Southern drawl. “What are you talking about?”
“Something affected every electronic transmission going on at the time,” Bob insisted. “We’ve got reports of the speaker system shorting out, then coming back online. We’ve got lights flickering while those godforsaken internal fireworks went off for the rally. We’ve got a couple of minutes of nothing. Then, all of a sudden, flash bang, we’ve got assailants and a whole hell of a lot of people taking video that mysteriously got scrambled. Hell, no two audience groups are even reporting the same things, to hear the police talk. It goes beyond typical eyewitness screwups to genuine outright confusion. Deliberate confusion, undoubtedly, because what they saw and what their phones said they saw are two different things. That doesn’t smell right to me.”
Angela blew out a long breath. Bob’s theory wasn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. “Well, I hate to speculate along these lines, but Bob does have a point. There was a project we worked on, a theoretical construct only, at the Frost Center. It posited the viability of a localized electromagnetic pulse device that wasn’t intended to take down an entire network or grid, but merely to disrupt the flow of electricity within a highly defined space.”
“To what end?” Trudy asked.
“To bypass security, largely,” Angela said. “Which is why I didn’t really think of it until now for this situation. Security had already been compromised at the rally. Gunmen were on-site. The only effect of a pulse in this situation would be to obscure the actions of the assailants, which, again, doesn’t make sense. They were quite successful in inciting panic, and their assault was deadly. They were all wearing masks as well, so the inference is that they anticipated being recorded or at least seen.”
She tapped her chin, her gaze drifting to the far wall, mapping out the logistics. She couldn’t pace, but she still spoke aloud, and that was enough to order her thoughts. “I definitely was the target. We were cornered at the end, and two of my men died during that assault, while three others were injured. If security hadn’t arrived when it did…” She let the words play out unstated, but that was more for self-protection than any attempt at drama. For all that she’d gotten a weird, eerie feeling of familiarity from these assailants, there was nothing to attach them to the men and women who’d assaulted her all those years ago when she was still a child.
Angela didn’t like thinking of that experience—she prided herself on functioning incredibly well despite having endured that experience, in fact. But there was no denying she still had long-standing side effects from that event she couldn’t quite shake. Her captivity in the metal crate had lasted eighty-seven days, she’d learned later. In some ways, she’d never quite come out of that box.
But despite the downsides, which were legion, there had been some positive outcomes from her childhood trial. Angela had developed the ability to compartmentalize and mask her emotions, as well as conceive and strategize in four dimensions. During her trips to and from her cage, she had mapped out and discarded hundreds of escape routes. It was this ability to focus on how she could escape from the chamber she had only known as the torture room that had helped her cope with her return to normal life. So had her resilience and resourcefulness.
Ultimately, it was the execution of plan #316 that had resulted in her eventual escape, a plan that had devolved into a series of pieces of other discarded strategies when her original calculations proved inaccurate. By then, she’d been able to create alternate solutions on the fly. She almost hadn’t made it, but she’d a plan for that outcome as well. It sometimes shook her how close she’d come to enacting her final termination plan without remorse or emotion. And she’d been only eight years old.
Now she leaned forward, the lines of data in her mind connecting in ways she hadn’t previously anticipated before Bob’s suggestion triggered a whole new pattern, a pattern that seemed so obvious on the surface, it was strange she hadn’t figured it out herself.
“This was a dry run,” she said, her words sharp and certain. “Anyone prominent at that rally would have sufficed. The go
al was ideally to extract the target at gunpoint and sow confusion and chaos. After that, I suspect we’d have been contacted—or some other committee, some other lawmaker would have been. They got the confusion part down, just not the extraction.”
“Which means they’ll do it again,” Trudy said crisply.
“Which means they’ll do it again,” Angela agreed. She slid her glance to Randall. “You were right, Randall, to pound the pulpit on terror threats. Because unless I miss my guess, they’re not going to wait long to get our attention another way.”
6
Gregori closed the file and settled against the wall, mentally reviewing the reports Angela had provided him. He could feel her energy straight through the wall. She and the others might not normally find their agenda given over to one long fraught discussion on a single topic, but that was definitely the case today. The emotions rolling from the room hadn’t varied in their intensity since the opening words were spoken. Anxiety, anger, confusion, fearful doubt… But what disturbed Gregori most was how none of it included the kind of calculation or edginess that humans typically employed when they were being cagey. These politicians all believed themselves on the side of angels, which was particularly ironic given that they were up against demons.
But if none of them were in on the attempt on Angela, how did they figure into this? From everything the archangel had told him and the inference in the typed documents Angela herself had compiled for her file, the junior congresswoman’s role on that committee had been arranged at a very high level. She’d detailed the timeline of her role in government with what seemed to be complete candor from the moment she’d first had an unexpected run-in with a local Democratic party official while she’d been eating at a café in Atlanta near the Frost Center’s offices. The woman had asked quite generally about Angela’s work, then proceeded to float the idea of Angela running for office.
It’d been so out of the blue that Angela had rejected the idea out of hand. The woman had gone off, and Angela hadn’t thought anything more about it for another several weeks. The next time had happened at an event at Georgia Governor Martin Filmore’s house, where he mentioned the possibility of her getting into politics as well. There was a seat coming open in the district where Angela lived, as it turned out. In the governor’s view, the politicians vying for it were ill-informed extremists who were already in trouble with the national party for their incendiary comments.
Given Angela’s family connections—her parents were long-time friends of the governor, and her father had worked for the man during her college years, after he and his wife had retired early—Angela hadn’t felt comfortable simply laughing off the suggestion this time. She’d agreed to think about it.
That was all it had taken to set the wheels of power in motion. Within a few short weeks, Angela had found herself with a campaign committee, a fund-raising arm, and even policy planks listed out on a professionally created website. When she’d been asked point-blank by the media, she’d announced her run—and papers had been drawn up and delivered for her to sign, everything made as easy as possible. She’d recorded all this as if she was watching it happen from afar. It hadn’t been the first time Gregori had gotten this impression about the nature of Angela’s interaction with the world. She seemed almost withdrawn, hidden away, and of course, he could understand that sentiment too well.
But someone was forcing her involvement now.
He recalled her assessment of the recent committee documents she’d been asked to review. It was all very high-level, omitting any confidential information, but after a few entries, Gregori had to agree with Angela that her committee was, well…boring. There was nothing in the paperwork she’d been given to suggest that any sort of legislation would be coming to this particular committee that would tally with Michael’s suggestion of a dark ops operation or deep state conspiracy. Yes, this committee was given over to concerns of federally funded high-tech security and defense programs at the state and local levels, but it mostly seemed to be the repository of every report ever made in a postcrisis action review. As a demon, Gregori didn’t need sleep, but the descriptions of what Angela typically reviewed while sitting in committee damned near put him into a coma.
His keen hearing picked up voices lifting and chairs moving as the committee members finally stood, and Gregori straightened as the door to conference room B opened. Angela exited, her manner brighter, almost eager, her mind fully engaged—and Gregori watched her with renewed interest. A second conference room emptied at the same time, and the politicians all seemed to know each other. Their shared energy felt ordinary, uncharged except for Angela’s heightened interest, and once again, Gregori got the impression that these committee conference rooms were not where the problem was. They should be, but they weren’t.
What was he missing?
“I don’t have anything until six p.m., so we might as well go back to my condo,” Angela said after she broke free of the knot of politicians.
“Is that your typical schedule?” he asked.
She eyed him with some surprise. “On committee days, yes. Why? Do you think I should vary it? There’s been no untoward interest in me in the past four days since the attack at the rally. I don’t believe I was specifically targeted. I was just handy.”
He nodded, letting that go for the moment. He couldn’t exactly tell the woman that the archangel of God had tipped him off about her security needs. Not yet, anyway. “Do you need any materials at your home? If you went somewhere else, would you be missing anything you need to work?”
“No…” She narrowed her eyes. “But I see what you’re doing, and I’m going to overrule you. Joe’s been taking prime on my home security. It’s solid. My condo’s in one of the newest, safest buildings in DC, and I chose it specifically for that reason. Plus, it’s not like I’m alone there. I assure you my security there is very…noisy.”
He didn’t miss her emphasis on the word, but he pressed on. “You learned about it from the governor of Georgia, right?”
She lifted her brows. “Governor Filmore had heard of it being completed after I won the election, yes. But it wasn’t the only place he recommended, just the one that best fit my particular needs. Why?”
Their conversation ended as they repeated the process to go through security. Gregori alerted the limo driver to come around to pick Angela and himself up, noting they had already switched out the vehicle for an SUV at his request. It was slightly more noticeable than most of the other town cars, but its size made his bulk much easier to manage and also positioned him higher, the better to survey traffic. He made no more objection to their destination, but the closer they got to Angela’s DC condominium, the more nervous he felt, until they turned into the parking circle and his anxiety was running at a fever pitch.
Then he realized it wasn’t his emotions he was feeling.
His gaze shot to the driver, but the man’s jitters were based entirely on the level of caffeine coursing through his system after three hours of waiting at a coffee shop. Angela was going through messages on her oversized phone, resigned over whatever she was reading but not alarmed, which left only one other option. The anxiety was coming from whoever they were approaching.
He scanned the walkers on the sidewalk ahead, including those clustered around the entrance to Angela’s building.
“Keep driving,” he ordered the driver, who jerked his gaze to the rearview mirror, his eyes widening.
“What?” the man asked as Angela glanced up. Then her gaze skimmed by him and fell on a couple standing by the front doors of the condominium building, consulting their phones. “What in the world…? Stop the car.”
“Angela—”
“Those are my parents, Gregori. What are they—” She pounded on the back of the driver’s seat. “Stop!”
Her words were so authoritative, the man braked, and Angela was out the door before Gregori could move. A six-thousand-year-old demon, and he couldn’t stop one impulsive human? Why had
Michael ever assigned him to this job?
He exited the SUV as Angela embraced a stately older couple who greeted her, all smiles. They were exactly what he expected her parents to be—tall, patrician, upper middle class, modestly but expensively dressed in summer-weight clothes well suited to the heat of DC. The man swung away from Angela and lifted his hand in greeting—not to Gregori, but to somebody just beyond him, across the street.
And as he moved, Gregori realized the truth.
The man standing in front of him—Angela’s father—was not human, not entirely, anyway. The demon possessing him was doing so with a sophistication Gregori had never seen before. Her mother was similarly possessed, both of the creatures seemingly directed by remote control, their demonic nature subverted beneath a crackle of electrical impulses. And as the possessed couple chatted merrily with Angela, they positioned their daughter with a full-frontal exposure to the building across the street.
Gregori dove in front of Angela exactly as the gunfire started, a strafing run that didn’t spare her parents. There were screams, Angela’s screams mostly, as all three of them fell to the ground, but she hadn’t been wrong about the quality of security in the building. The front doors shot open, and two armed men and an armed woman ran out, one returning a rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire that sounded almost real, but Gregori suspected wasn’t. More likely it was intended to scare away the gunmen without causing further loss of life.
The guards descended on the trio of Angela and her parents and pulled them inside the building. Gregori immediately felt the demon presence shrink back within the couple, whether the beasts were overridden by their fear and pain or they’d somehow been ordered to stand down.