Jack lit a cigarette. “All politics are tribal. That’s why we need people to look to the stars. To remember that we’re all in it together on this rock. We need a spiritual revolution. But mark my words: When we do find proof of alien life, the first thing our leaders will ask is, ‘How do we kill it?’”
7
Catherine lay awake in bed, listening to the ocean. The tide was high again, she could tell from the sound of the waves, their rhythmic white noise threatening to lull her to sleep. Parsons and Abdelmalek had stayed up late, smoking and finishing the second bottle, when she used her fatigue as an excuse to turn in early. She was genuinely exhausted, but also hadn’t wanted to give Jack an opportunity to hit on her after his friend retired. She’d learned that Abdelmalek was lodging at the concrete castle for the remainder of the summer; a fact that Hildebrand’s sources hadn’t been aware of but that Catherine hoped might work to her advantage.
While Jack had been disarmingly open about his occult interests, she knew the Iranian was more cautious. She thought if they were going to argue about the risk she posed to their privacy, they would do it now, at the first opportunity, while she was presumed to be sleeping. Her room was situated on the second floor along a balcony overlooking the great room where the men smoked and talked. But Jack kept flipping the record on the gramophone, masking their hushed conversation. Only once did the sharp edge in Abdelmalek’s voice cut through the cloak of music, but his cursing in Arabic revealed nothing of value. Shortly after the outburst, he’d climbed the stairs and disappeared into what she assumed was his own bedroom at the far end of the balcony.
She swept the bed sheet aside and went to the window overlooking the street. The beach was too dark to see in detail, though the white breakers glowed in the light of a partial moon. She imagined the sigil she’d drawn must be washed away by now. She crept to the door, opened it, and gazed across the open balcony at Abdelmalek’s door. No light shone through the cracks, but that didn’t mean he was asleep. Jack’s music continued below, a softer selection for the late hour. Eventually, a solo cello was joined by percussive sounds that didn’t belong to the record. He was building a fire in the grate to warm the damp, drafty house.
Staying awake had been a struggle, jet lagged and coming off a day of exertion and intrigue. Now, hovering in the arched doorway, listening to the sounds from the room below, she felt her eyelids drooping, and realized she had no idea what sort of hours Jack kept. The hypnotic music seemed designed to lull her into a trance. She pinched her own earlobe, digging her fingernail into the soft flesh in an effort to remain alert. If she could outlast Jack, she might use her free-range access to the house to explore his papers and bookshelves. She knew her chances of finding the Mortiferum Indicium out in the open were slim, but she was determined to at least look for it on what might be her only night in the house.
There was a knock at the front door—the sharp rap of the lion’s head knocker—setting her heart rate galloping in an adrenaline-washed instant. The bedroom had no clock, but judging by the tide, it had to be well after midnight.
Knowing that Jack would have his back turned to the balcony while opening the door, Catherine crept across the gallery and ducked behind a potted palm whose tall stalks and flat leaves obscured most of a small alcove where the balcony railing continued beyond the other bedroom. From her new vantage, she could see the stone fireplace between the matching leather couches below, a small blaze of driftwood crackling and casting its wavering light around the otherwise darkened room.
Jack ushered a woman in a polka dot dress into the room, kissing her on the cheek and removing a shawl from her shoulders. Her dark hair was sculpted back from her forehead in a long wave spilling down her back. Even in the dim light, her makeup telegraphed her high eyebrows and full lips across the room, like a child’s drawing of a woman. Jack led her to one of the couches, where she sat and crossed her legs while he poured her a few fingers of pale green liquor from a decanter. She took the glass from him and sipped it. Without a word between them, Jack unbuttoned his shirt and set about preparing the room with the practiced motions of a man engaged in, if not a ritual, a task performed often. He knelt and rolled up the rug in the center of the room to reveal a symbol painted on the floor: A large triangle bounded by a circle, the angles marked with words she couldn’t read, though the alphabet might have been Phoenician.
Jack surrounded the diagram with red candles and set a record of an Afro-Cuban drumbeat spinning on the gramophone. Then—following a quick stop at the workbench—he knelt by the fireplace. In a moment, streams of rich, white smoke flowed from a brazier on the hearth to pool across the floor like dry ice vapor, spicing the air with cinnamon, musk, and a metallic tang.
When Catherine noticed the woman again, she had risen from the couch and shed her dress. She handed something to Jack—her lipstick? He twisted the canister and used it to draw three sigils: one on her forehead, one between her breasts, and one on her navel.
The woman turned away from him, her gaze glancing along the balcony railing, and Catherine froze in place, relying on the tangle of shadows thrown by the palm leaves to conceal her. Jack undressed and lay on the wood floor in the center of the triangle, while the woman drained the glass of absinthe down her throat and set it on an end table.
Jack looked like a man lying in a shallow riverbed, the smoke pouring over him, obscuring his features. His companion knelt in the white stream, straddling him as he began to chant: A ka dua tufir biu.
The woman’s spine undulated with the rhythm of their sex and her voice joined the chant.
The melody, simple at first, gradually modulated and ascended, coiling around the primal drum beat and curling upward in thorns of sound as the syllables changed: Babalon-bal-bin-abaft…
The door beside Catherine’s perch on the balcony creaked open, and Abdelmalek stepped out, wearing a white silk robe. Catherine shrunk back into the dark corner behind the plant and watched him descend the stairs, his voice rising to join the chant. The woman riding Jack showed no sign of surprise at the sound of a third voice joining the litany. Her rhythm continued unbroken as the second man approached. Upon reaching the couple, Abdelmalek stood silhouetted in front of the fire and let his robe fall to the floor. His voice rose above the others, and the chant changed again: Ia! Ia! Shabbathani Cyclothai… Ia! Ia! Shabbathani Cyclothai…Cyclothani, Cyclothani…Lung! Lung! Shabathani!
The woman arched her back and brought her hands above her head, her palms together in a gesture of prayer. Her voice was a core of molten copper at the center of the chant. The voices of the men twined around it forming a frayed sheath that supported but never masked its brilliance. Tendrils of smoke spiraled around her torso and bloomed outward, assuming the shapes of a maelstrom of writhing eels, their howling mouths ringed sharp wisps of smoke, leaving trails of vapor in their wake as they dove and snapped at the air. A crown of spikes coalesced around her head, carved from the same congealing smoke, a bouquet of white hooks blooming down her spine.
Abdelmalek mounted her from behind, straddling Jack’s calves. The vapor hooks broke against his bare chest, reforming with each thrust of the woman’s hips. He reached through the cyclone of eels and caressed her spiked breasts, then hunched forward and kissed her where sweat and smoke pooled around her collarbone.
The delirium of scents gathered in the thick air was shot through with the musk of sex, and Catherine felt her body responding to it, her growing horror laced with faint desire. The chant droned on incessantly, the syllables drilled into her mind. For a fleeting moment, she fought the impulse to blend her voice with the others and descend the stairs as Abdelmalek had until their trinity unfolded to take her in.
Then she swallowed, blinked, and rose from her stiff crouch behind the potted palm to slip through the arched doorway into Abdelmalek’s darkened room.
8
LeBlanc had half a page left in the chapter he was reading when Whittaker tapped his shoulder with a hand like a T-
bone steak, prompting him to look up from his paperback. The big man jutted his chin toward the street. “They have another visitor,” he said, shaking a fresh toothpick out of the little box he kept in his shirt pocket and positioning it just so between his teeth, a sure indicator that he was ready to move. LeBlanc had given up on the prospect of any fresh action at the Parsonage—his partner’s name for the concrete castle—over an hour ago. The appearance on the scene of the redhead at sunset was cause for some speculation, but that had exhausted itself by the time they’d finished their takeout burgers.
Less than a week into their assignment, LeBlanc and Whittaker had reached a mutual understanding that they were not compatible for small talk. Whittaker didn’t seem offended that LeBlanc kept his nose in a book to pass the time they spent in the car, and Leblanc did his best to ignore the sounds of the game on the radio and the peppermint candies his partner crunched between his molars when he wasn’t sucking on toothpicks. He almost wished the guy hadn’t quit smoking. At least smoke was silent. But LeBlanc had to admit he admired the effort, even if it was inspired by the unrealistic fantasy that they were going to find themselves in a long distance foot chase or a fistfight. They carried guns to avoid both possibilities. And anyway, their suspects were hedonists, not athletes.
The first thing the agents had read in Parsons’ file was a poem from the Oriflamme, a journal he’d published to promote the occult order he belonged to until 1946.
I height Don Quixote, I live on Peyote marihuana, morphine and cocaine.
I never knew sadness but only a madness that burns at the heart and the brain,
I see each charwoman ecstatic, inhuman, angelic, demonic, divine,
Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon that brims with ambrosial wine....
The mad scientist might have stamina in the bedroom, but he seemed unlikely to give them a run for their money in the course of surveillance. LeBlanc craned his head to look past Whittaker. They were parked on the corner of Avenue D, pointed toward the beach. The second woman of the evening had exited a taxi on Esplanade shortly after midnight and climbed the stairs to the front door of the castle, less than twenty yards to the south of their stakeout. “Was that Madeline?”
“No. Madeline has better tits. Pretty sure this is Salome. I can tell by the hair.”
“The one who wouldn’t talk.”
“Right. Did you check out her affiliations?”
LeBlanc flipped his note pad open out of habit, even though he didn’t need to read from it. Exceptions had a way of sticking in the memory. He flipped it closed again and swatted it against his paperback. “She was only picked up for hooking once, and that was years ago, when she first came to America. Clean record ever since.”
“So she’s visiting Jack for love, not money?”
“Love or faith.”
“Spell it out, will ya? What is she OTO?”
LeBlanc shook his head. Whittaker hoisted an eyebrow. “Starry Wisdom?”
“Yeah. Long Beach congregation.”
Whittaker whistled around his toothpick. “So a different congregation than Abdelmalek. What do you make of that?”
LeBlanc shrugged. “Maybe nothing. It is a lot closer.”
“Or? You sound like there’s an or.”
“Or maybe Abdelmalek doesn’t want word to get around his own congregation that he’s doing rituals with Parsons.”
“Gotta be a tight knit community, even with the distance. I mean, they got phones, right? How many Starry Wisdom churches are there in America?”
“Not many, and most are in Rhode Island or Massachusetts. But you know California. If it’s a weird church, we’ve got at least two.”
Whittaker chuckled and opened the driver’s side door.
“Where you going, chief?”
“Where are we going. C’mon. Time to play peeping Tom and Jerry.”
“Really?”
“You’re not getting paid to read. What the hell is that anyway? It’s not even in English.”
“The Stranger. It’s a novel. Camus.”
“Gesundheit.”
They approached the castle from the north. The only exterior lights were on the east and west sides of the building, mostly spillage from the elevated patios. Crouching low and stepping lightly, they blended into the shadows along the fence line. Neither man carried a flashlight. They weren’t police, and if anyone (including the police) pressed them on their business, they would have to fall back on fake private investigator credentials or try and buy time by insinuating they were FBI without flashing badges. The irony was that they were federal agents, but the agency they worked for wasn’t supposed to exist, and admitting it did would land them in more hot water than a charge for impersonating law enforcement. Even as agents of SPEAR, they didn’t know what the acronym stood for. Their paychecks came from the Department of the Interior. LeBlanc’s best guess was Special Physics Exploration And Research. Whittaker’s favorite was Shit Pay And Early Retirement, though LeBlanc didn’t care enough to point out that he had the vowels reversed. One thing they agreed on was that if the agency was ever in danger of exposure by documents or gadgets in their possession, their exit strategy was to Sucker Punch Everyone And Run.
The darkened ground on the side of the castle proved mercifully clear of obstacles, but they took it slow, aware that a single piece of debris clattering away from a misplaced foot would be enough to send them scurrying back to the car. Jack’s midnight visitor had been inside for some time when they reached a stained glass window that pulsed with the uneven light of candle flames or a fireplace within. Whittaker laced his fingers together and squatted to give LeBlanc a leg up. LeBlanc’s first instinct was to reject the idea, but he didn’t have a reason his partner would accept, just an aversion to the indignity of climbing the other man only to scuff his hands on the concrete wall and rusty window frame for maybe a quick glimpse of a midnight tryst from a bad angle. He sighed and stepped onto the human escalator. At least Whittaker knew better than to propose that they do this the other way around, much as he probably would have preferred to be the eyes of the operation.
The big man was a stable lift. LeBlanc only wobbled for a single precarious second, and that was owing to his own reluctance to lock his knee and put his full weight down on his partner’s hands. When he committed to the act, he found himself rising smoothly to the height of the arched window. The stained glass depicted yellow flowers against a purple sky, the yellow pale enough that he could discern the basic contours of the room through it. Parsons, visible from the chest up, was undressing. The furniture, floor, and anyone seated were too low to see from this vantage.
“Can you go any higher?”
With a heave and a grunt from below, LeBlanc gained a few more inches. He scrabbled for purchase on the rusty iron window ledge to take some of his own weight, knowing that even his relatively light body would only feel heavier to the other man the higher he had to lift it. But there was nothing he could get a firm grip on, and not enough of the yellow glass to see more than the top of Jack’s bare ass floating in coils of smoke.
“Anything?”
“Yeah, they’re gonna screw. Big surprise.”
With a grunt, Whittaker brought him back down and tipped him onto the weedy ground with what felt like an intentional lack of grace.
“What about the other two? The Arab and the redhead. You see them?”
LeBlanc caught the concrete wall with the flat of his hand to keep from tumbling into it. “No. Just Parsons. Naked already. But for all I could see, they might be having an orgy in there with Howard Hughes and all the neighbors. It's a bad angle. I just got lucky Jack was in front of it.”
Whittaker shifted from one foot to the other, like a cat thinking of jumping for the window ledge. “What do we do? Pick her up for questioning when she leaves?”
“No. She’s loyal to the cause. We’d get nothing out of her and she’d tell them straight away. Come on. Let’s hop the gate and try the patio.�
��
Their prospects from the raised patio weren’t much improved. The big oak door to the second floor interior was locked. Two windows peered out the west-facing wall on either side of the patio overlooking the beach. These were functional casement types, not stained glass, but they were too high, too far out of reach, and too dark to suggest that they might provide a view of the inhabitants. LeBlanc sized them up for a moment. When he turned around, Whittaker had disappeared. It took him a moment to spot the man’s bulk, flat against the castle wall, edging around the side of the building toward another stained window on the south side, with only a thin ledge a few inches wide to support the toes of his Oxfords.
LeBlanc risked a stage whisper. “What the hell are you doing?”
A piece of the ledge crumbled away in a shower of concrete dust and Whittaker’s right leg swung out wide behind him before circling back around and finding a firmer footing a little farther on.
“Frank! Get back here.”
But Whittaker had reached the window, his hands gripping the metal frame, his face so close to the glass that he had to be fogging it with his breath. LeBlanc couldn’t tell what this window depicted, but even if it was the same flower pattern he’d peered through on the ground floor, Whittaker was higher up on this one and had more options. He must have seen something because he was staring with one eye squeezed shut, like a pervert at a peep show.
LeBlanc gave up on coaxing him back and decided to make himself useful as a lookout. He walked a circuit around the patio, scanning the street for neighbors and passers by who might notice the big man clinging to the gray façade and alert the authorities. For the time being, the street and beach were both deserted. He sighed with relief. The last thing they needed was a cop on the neighborhood beat throwing a light on them.
As if conjured by the thought, a light flared up in one of the bedrooms above, dimming quickly like a match after the head is spent. Frozen in place, LeBlanc stared at the window, waiting for a face to appear. When none did, he hurried around the corner to the railing Whittaker had climbed to reach the ledge. The big guy was pressing his ear to the glass now, eyes closed, straining to hear something.
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