I stick the car in a short-stay car park and head into the terminal, looking for the British Airways desk. It’s the regular cattle market of check-in areas and retail concessions, leavened by more public art and shopping than usual for an American airport; there are a lot of delays flashing on the departure board, probably the better to cause the punters to part with their money, and the concourse is heaving with bewildered-looking travelers. I must have hit rush hour or something. It takes me a while to get oriented and home in on the desk. “Good evening,” I start, then lay what I hope is a winning hand on the counter: my return open biz-class booking, a passport with a diplomatic visa, and the Coutts card. “I’ve been called back to London at short notice. What can you do for me?”
The clerk on the other side of the counter is clearly perturbed. “Would you mind waiting here for a minute, sir? I’d like to fetch my manager.” Oops, not good. Any one of those cards should be sufficient to trigger a bowing and scraping reflex. I nod, and while her back’s turned I pull out my wallet and palm my fourth and final card, just in case. The skin on the back of my neck is itching: every time an airport cop walks past I have to forcibly suppress the urge to stare.
A few seconds later she’s back, with an older BA staff member in tow—this one wearing the kind of uniform suit that says “management.” “Excuse me, sir,” she says, assertive with a side order of London accent that’s barely been here long enough to go native, “I’m told you need to rebook a ticket?”
I smile at her without showing my teeth. “Not exactly.” Open passport, display visa. “Head Office want me home on the next available flight. I was hoping to rebook my ticket”—tap finger on full-fat business class booking confirmation—“or, failing that, perhaps you could arrange something? Via corporate?” Wave platinum card. Her eyes are tracking my fingers but her expression is saying something else.
“I’m really sorry, sir,” she says, looking as if she means it, “I’d love to sort you out, and normally it wouldn’t be a problem, but all departures are grounded as of an hour ago.”
“What?” I can’t help myself.
“It’s the incoming weather system. There’s a huge storm coming down from Canada and it’s threatening to drop twenty or thirty inches of snow on us overnight; as if that isn’t enough, there’s a tornado warning out. It’s a weather bomb. They’re still landing inbound flights, but nothing’s going out before tomorrow at the earliest, and between you and me I reckon the airport will be closed until early afternoon, if not all day, if that ice storm is as bad as they’re saying.”
I show my teeth, but keep my warrant card back. “Are you sure? Is it possible to charter a bizjet? Just to one of the main hubs, I mean, not all the way to Heathrow.”
She’s shaking her head. “I’m sorry, sir, but nothing’s moving. They’re even grounding the traffic news helicopters. It’ll be the rescue and air ambulance services next. Never seen anything like it. If you want, I can—let’s see, I can bump you to first class standby on the next available flight, and if you leave your cell number with me I can—”
I shake my head. “Don’t worry,” I say. “I’ll drive out.” And I gather up my papers and leave before she can get started on arguing me out of the idea because I’m afraid she might be right: driving through an apocalyptic ice storm in a convertible isn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done.
However, I do not get a chance to maroon myself in the Rockies in the middle of a blizzard.
It’s not for want of trying, but as I drive out of the airport the snow is beginning to fall. I turn on the windscreen wipers and headlights and turn east, out along the interstate. Traffic is surprisingly light in both directions. Then, after about five miles the traffic begins to thicken up and I see flashing lights ahead. A couple of highway patrol cars are drawn up across the road, light bars strobing, and the cops are out with illuminated batons, waving cars over to one side for an inspection—
No, it’s an off-ramp. I slow, going where I’m directed. They don’t wave me over, but keep pointing around the curve of the cloverleaf. More cops. Another diversion. I realize what’s going on just before I hit the next cloverleaf. There’s nobody behind me, so I slow and wind down my window.
The cop with the light waves at me, then points on in the direction of the on-ramp back onto the highway in the direction of Denver.
“What’s happening?” I call. (Just another guy in a suit driving a mid-range coupé: not a target.)
“Road’s closed,” he yells. “Git moving.”
I have no desire to stop and argue with the Colorado highway patrol, so I just nod and keep rolling. The air outside my bubble of rental luxury is frigid; I roll up the window and accelerate back up to highway speed, thinking furiously.
Once upon a time an intelligence officer said, Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. I’m not an idiot: I can see the pattern here. First I was doorstepped by the opposition, then I was ordered to scram; meanwhile all flights out of Denver are grounded by an anomalous ice storm, and the cops are closing the roads out of town. Is Schiller really that powerful? The evidence suggests he might be: Lockhart says he has the FBI and local cops in his pocket, and I’m having bad dreams about the Sleeper. Maybe that last one is a coincidence, but if I were a betting man I’d put money on the other stuff being pieces of a really unpleasant jigsaw. I’ve seen anomalous bad weather before, triggered by a greater invocation—
Oh. Oh shit. I do so very badly hope I’m wrong about this.
IT’S LATE AFTERNOON; THE SHADOWS ARE DRAWING IN.
Persephone drives away from the back roads of Pike National Forest without looking in the rearview mirror. Her knuckles are white on the steering wheel. She doesn’t un-tense them until she hits US85 and sees the long chain-link fence and open spaces of the Air Force Academy unwinding to her left. She’s badly rattled: angry and shaken. It’s an unpleasant sensation, familiar from her half-forgotten childhood, and one she has carefully structured her life to suppress. I fucked up, she realizes coldly. Schiller’s people are on the ball, and if she hadn’t cut and run she’d be in that chapel even now, gulping down the choking wine like blood as the host holds unholy communion with her brain. It’s anybody’s guess whether Johnny is still free; she’s torn between the urge to contact him immediately and warn him, and the fear that she’ll catch him in the middle of a ruck and spoil his aim. Either way it’ll have to wait until she’s far enough from her pursuers to stop for a few minutes.
She forces her emotions back under control as she drives, performing the comforting rituals of scan and evasion with eyes wide open for any hint of pursuit. The sky is gray, almost yellowing, promising bad weather. As the miles unroll behind her, her pulse slows to normal and her grip relaxes slightly. She chews over the day’s events, trying to make sense of them. The church compound and the clinic in the hills, the ghastly combined spinal injuries and maternity ward, the rite of holy communion with unholy parasites, born again in control of their victims’ nervous systems. They’re all parts of a vile jigsaw puzzle, but she has a distinct sense that she’s missing something. “What are they trying to achieve?” she asks aloud. “What does Ray think he’s doing?”
Normally she’d be asking these questions of Johnny. She punches the hub of the steering wheel lightly.
“What did he say…” Why aren’t we saving them?
Schiller clearly believes his own spiel. And he’s a man with a mission—literally as much as figuratively. “Let’s assume he’s serious,” she murmurs to herself. “He believes his God is coming back to ring down the curtain on the day of judgment imminently. He knows he’s saved, but most people are going straight to hell. And let’s also suppose that he isn’t just a sociopath milking a money machine. He’s making all that money because he’s got something to spend it on. He’s going to want to”—her eyes widen—“save everybody, by any means necessary.” She glances sideways by long force of habit, taking in the passenger seat, em
pty but for an open handbag holding a book and a gun.
Traffic is thickening ahead; for a while she focusses on the brake lights. The exit for Fort Carson comes into view—nearly there. During a slow patch she pulls out the book, lays it in her lap, and steals glances at it as she pushes her way into the right-hand lane, eyes scanning for exit 141. The clouds are darkening, and occasional snowflakes are hitting her windscreen. The book is a bible, of course. Leather cover, gilt trim, heavily thumbed, with numerous bookmarks poking out like angry porcupine spines near the back cover. “Revelation. Figures.” The exit sign slides into view and she takes the exit ramp as fast as she can, then turns north to lose herself in the dusty tree-lined suburbs of Colorado Springs.
There is a quiet residential street, fronted by trees that separate tidily maintained houses at hundred-meter intervals. A relatively small church with a stone-clad steeple anchors one end of the stretch. Persephone drives past it a short distance, then parks. Swallowing bitterness at the back of her throat, she lifts her left leg and rips the blister plaster from the back of her ankle to reveal a temporary tattoo.
***Come in, Johnny.***
There’s an acrid choking stink at the back of her throat, garlic mixed with stale vomit. Persephone gags, feeling muscles spasming, legs pumping. ***Not now, Duchess. Got my hands full.***
“Shit.” She drops the link into his head, eyes streaming with the burning itch of an allergic reaction. Tear gas? She thumps the steering wheel, angry at her inability to help him. Johnny is up to his eyeballs, the man from the Laundry is bugging out—not without good reason, she admits—and the Golden Promise Ministries is something far worse than they had any reason to suspect back in London. Neither a money machine nor a mere front for occult cultists: it’s shaping up to be an enormous clusterfuck. If she had any common sense she’d follow Mr. Howard’s advice, collect Johnny, and get out of town.
But she can’t shed that childhood nightmare. Can’t forget the young woman’s eyes tracking her from the bed, trapped in a prison of her own flesh.
Sticking plaster: nail file: a transient pain. To her (immediately suppressed) surprise she’s seeing through Howard’s eyes. Clearly he isn’t terribly experienced at this mode of communication. He’s driving, through falling snow on an interstate. She has a sense of confusion and building worry, even anxiety. A road sign looms out of the murky twilight: DENVER. He’s driving back towards Denver?—that doesn’t make any sense—
***Hello again.***
He’s noticed her. Noticed her and let her think he hadn’t. Watch yourself, Persephone reminds herself.
***Got problems. Johnny’s in trouble.***
***That’s not the only problem.*** Howard’s anxiety is infectious. ***The airport’s closed by this damn storm, and the highway patrol have blocked Interstate 76. They’re diverting all traffic back into town. I’m going to try Interstate 70 to Kansas City, but I’ve got a bad feeling about this.***
***What storm?***
***There’s a really scary weather system coming down from the north. It blew up overnight without any warning. They’re talking about most of a meter of snow in the next twenty-four hours or so. Can you spell Fimbulwinter?***
***Can’t be. You’re completely cut off?***
***I won’t know until I’ve tried the other routes, but I think so. What’s your situation?***
***I’m parked up in Colorado Springs. It’s not snowing here yet. Johnny’s in trouble and I think at least one of our safe houses has been burned.***
She bites her tongue, about to raise a delicate topic, but Howard beats her to the punch.
***Tell me where you are and I’ll come and pick you up. Then we can go find Johnny and get the hell out of here together.***
***Agreed,*** she sends, squashing her instant burst of relief.
Then she settles down to wait, and opens the Bible to the first of the bookmarked pages.
11. THE APOCALYPSE CODEX
A DOOR IN A DARKENED HALLWAY: TO EITHER SIDE OTHER doors open onto rooms with front-facing windows. A grenade, fizzing acrid fumes from both ends, has just crashed through the window of the day room to the left and is spinning around on the floor like a dying hornet the size of a coke can. Then something heavy slams against the front door, nearly but not quite strong enough to take it off its hinges.
What do you do if you’re Johnny McTavish?
You close your eyes.
Johnny braces himself facing the front door, shuts his eyes, and puts his hands together as if in prayer. Between them he cradles a tightly folded sheet of rice paper. Within its folds sits a small RFID chip, pasted to the middle of a design inscribed upon it in conductive ink.
He feels a familiar presence at the back of his head, just as another crashing impact sends the door flying open. Johnny pulls his palms apart. ***Not now, Duchess, I’ve got my hands full.*** The silence is broken by the hissing of the gas grenade.
Johnny takes a step backwards, and opens his eyes—still holding his breath.
The door hangs open and the fully expanded paper chain lies on the hall floor. Of the attackers there is no visible sign—the paper chain has done its job. He stoops, picking it up gingerly by both ends, then runs forward through the open entrance, holding his breath as he passes the day room doorway (through which a thin mist is drifting). There’s nobody out front, but a crew cab pickup with blacked-out side windows and a boxy cargo container on the load bed is drawn up on the street. Glancing sideways, Johnny darts past the pickup, pausing only to bend and slash at the tires. Then he jogs towards his own wheels, not looking back.
(Johnny expects there to be a second pair of operatives around the back of the safe house, and he’s got maybe thirty seconds before they stop waiting for the prey to come to them and storm the house in search of their fellows—but by then Johnny intends to be gone.)
The chain sags heavily on the passenger seat as he climbs in and starts the engine. Revving, he slams the truck into second gear and pulls out without lights. As he leans forward over the wheel there’s an unwelcome and familiar metallic rattle from behind him. For a moment he’s livid with indignation: What do the fuckers think they’re doing, shooting in a residential neighborhood? Then he clocks it as a hopeful sign—they wouldn’t be hitting his tailgate if they were firing on the move—and rams the truck into third. There are no more bullet impacts; he brakes hard, takes a left without signaling, checks his mirrors, and finally turns on his lights when a passing car flashes its high beams at him. It wouldn’t do to get stopped by the traffic cops, not with what’s sitting on the passenger seat…
The paper chain rattles, like the echo of an occult manacle that immobilizes a pair of angry ghosts. But these two aren’t ghosts yet, and it’s already starting to ripple and distort; there isn’t a lot of power in the ward, and sooner or later it’s going to degrade, at which point the two game beaters trapped inside it are going to get out. When that happens, Johnny intends to be ready for them. It wouldn’t do to find out the hard way that they’ve got more tear gas grenades where that first one came from.
The downtown Denver safe house has been burned, which means—if the opposition are halfway competent—that the other two are also compromised. On the other hand, it’s a weekday evening, there is a light snowfall, and suburbia beckons. Johnny drives, looking for a certain kind of street, one with too many For Sale / To Let signs, too few lit windows and parked cars, unkempt lawns, foreclosed mortgages: the stench of neglect and decay. It’s not easy, to be sure, because real estate agents like to hide such signs (they pay landscapers to mow the lawns of empty houses) but he has a nose for the wild places and, presently, he finds a side road where half the street lights are dead and the potholes are unfilled. Slowing, he inspects the houses to either side as he drives. He’s after a specific type of vacant property—one with boarded-up windows and a backyard to park in, unobserved by neighbors.
“Just like that caper in Barcelona, Duchess,” he mutters to himself as he pu
lls over, checks for passers-by, then does a three-point turn and drives into the yard of the house he’s selected. “Had a bad feeling about that one, too.”
The snow in front of it is unswept, pristine; the windows boarded over. He rummages in the back of the cab for a laminated card proclaiming Big John’s Real Estate Services, lays it on the dash—often the simplest covers are the best—and heads for the front door.
The lock is easy. Once inside, Johnny pulls out a compact LED lantern and closes the door behind him. The house is dark and chilly as a pub toilet after closing time: the electricity is shut off and there’s a smell of mildew in the air. It’s just right for what he’s here to do. So many of the significant events of his career take place in rooms like these, cold and abandoned. He goes through into the combined kitchen-dining room. There’s junk strewn all over, and dust. A row of open cupboard doors gape at him like broken teeth in a screaming mouth as he kicks shattered crockery and rotting junk mail aside to reveal the wooden floor. He sets the LED lantern down on a countertop. Working fast with a can of spray paint he scribes the circle, joins the lines, and sketches the necessary sigils. He dumps the paper chain in the middle of the new grid and it jitters, the echo of a ram slamming into a door; working in haste he kneels outside the incomplete grid and links it up to a wire-wrap circuit board and a battery.
The folded chain of rice paper men jerks and jumps for a moment, casting long shadows from the lamp. Then it snaps. Johnny steps to one side so that his shadow is not cast across the circle, and draws both his knives. The heavies in the circle will probably have handguns, and Johnny isn’t carrying. On the other hand, the heavies in the circle were dumb enough to go in through the front door. From where they’re standing, an instant ago they were storming into a dim hallway; suddenly they’re in near darkness in the wrong place with a glowing violet circle around them that they somehow can’t bring themselves to cross—
The Apocalypse Codex lf-4 Page 20