Shock Warning d-3

by Michael Walsh

  Devlin looked over at Jacinta, but she was too wrapped up in miracle pictures of marigolds to have noticed anything. The driver’s shaded eyes remained on the road.

  One of the trailing cars, a Mercedes with tinted windows, suddenly sped up and pulled even with the backseat. It drove nearly parallel with them for a bit, then dropped back, as if the driver had decided not to try and pass the Caddy after all. Just as it dropped back, Devlin pointed what looked like an Android at them and pressed the button.

  He glanced down at the screen: a complete image of the inside of the vehicle, courtesy of advanced backscatter X-ray technology that Homeland Security had been developing for a couple of years now. The otherwise-useless DHS was using a less sophisticated version in the roving anonymous vans it had deployed on the streets of major American cities; they could scan both vehicles and pedestrians for weapons and explosives involuntarily, Fourth Amendment or no Fourth Amendment. The CSS had simply “borrowed” the technology and, as the liaison with the cryptology divisions of the armed services, had improved and weaponized it based on a prototype he’d developed for use in the field.

  A third car had joined the pursuit, just up ahead at the intersection with Western. He knew it would pull out in front of them and drive them toward the gas station on the southeast corner, and probably right into the pumps. It would make for a hell of an explosion and a great lede for the evening news, unless he did something about it.

  His Android had also taken an electronic reading of the Benz’s vital systems and had hacked into the onboard computer, which meant he could control the vehicle. Down in New Orleans, he’d taken out that poor snoopy reporter’s car on a race down St. Charles by freezing the engine block, which flipped the car; he’d had to go back and risk his life and his identity saving the guy’s sorry ass.

  No worries about that this time. This was enemy action.

  The car up ahead, a new Jag, was making its move, getting ready to turn left into Third Street.

  The Mercedes was pulling up again in the left lane.

  The other car, a Honda, was inching up behind them, getting ready to give them a push from the rear.

  Seconds now.

  A quick glance at the driver — still impassive. He was in on it. He had to be—

  A hidden partition suddenly appeared between front and back, slowly rising.

  They were almost at the intersection….

  For the first time, the driver turned his head to the right, a little smile playing across his lips.

  NOW.

  In practically a single motion, Devlin thwacked the driver behind his right ear, while at the same time pressing a button on the Android. Its steering disabled and its accelerator torqued, the Mercedes spun out to the left, a guided missile headed straight for the Jag.

  The unconscious driver’s foot slipped off the Escalade’s gas pedal, causing the trailing Honda to smash into the much larger vehicle from the read. The sudden jolt knocked the Escalade forward and into the intersection, just as—

  — the Mercedes broadsided the Jaguar—

  — Devlin fired a single shot into the Escalade’s dashboard control panel, stopping the partition—

  — the Honda rammed them again—

  — the Mercedes caromed off the Jag and back into the intersection—

  — and Devlin swung himself feetfirst into the front seat. The driver had slumped over to the right, blocking the steering wheel. Devlin went over him, his right foot landing on the accelerator, his left foot on the brake.

  He hit them both simultaneously. The big car jerked and tailed off to the right, sliding aside as the damaged Mercedes spun past them.

  From behind, the Honda rammed them again, but this time it wasn’t a clean ram, more a glancing blow, which caused the Honda to spin out to the left, rear first, whipping the front end of the car around and around as it sailed, rudderless, to the northeast, finally colliding with the hulk of the Jag.

  Both cars exploded into flames.

  The Mercedes continued south on Western, past the gas station pumps, running up on the sidewalk and then crashing headfirst into the retaining wall on the other side of the alley.

  And then they were through the intersection and speeding east on Third, as if nothing had happened.

  It would be only a few minutes, Devlin knew, before the sirens would start and the cops and the fire trucks got there. He needed to be far away. He turned at the next side street and dropped down to Sixth again. It was slow going through the side streets, but a zigzag course was the best idea under the circumstances, since the LAPD hardly ever ventured off the main arteries in this part of town. Whatever minor damage had been done to the Escalade would go unnoticed.

  At a safe distance, he stopped the car.

  “Help me, Jacinta,” he said, but there was no response from the backseat. Had something happened to her? Was she dead? No time to worry about that.

  He reached into one of the man’s ears and pulled out an earbud. No wonder he couldn’t hear him.

  Devlin took out the other earbud and held them both up to his ears. There was some kind of music playing, more chanting really. He brought the earbuds closer.

  Music and chanting. The music he recognized. It was Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” sung in Spanish, and the chanting was the voices of a congregation reciting the “Hail Mary” in Spanish.

  Not dispositive. He could have been religious and still one of the bad guys. And he wasn’t blind — he should have seen those tail cars, should have responded.

  Devlin was strong, but the man was big and out cold. He rolled him over the front seats and practically into Jacinta’s lap. She showed no emotion, didn’t move. “Sister,” said Devlin, “you have to help me. At least get out of the way.”

  She did neither. She looked up from her photographs and stared at him, her lips moving.

  “Okay, have it your way.” He managed to fold down half of the backseat and roll the body into the Escalade’s capacious rear compartment. The rear windows were tinted, which was legal in California. With any luck, they’d be downtown shortly. And then he could sort out the problem of the driver.

  He slipped back into the driver’s seat and swung east. They were in the twilight zone between Latino Broadway, Little Tokyo, and Chinatown. The old L.A. downtown, ten times farther from Beverly Hills than New York City.

  At Main Street he turned left. At Second, he turned right and continued down the street, almost to Los Angeles Street and, beyond it, Little Tokyo, until he could duck in behind the old church.

  Not just any church: the Cathedral of St. Vibiana. Second and Main streets. Crippled since the Northridge earthquake of 1994, condemned since 1996. Restored now — not as a church but a community arts center, called, simply, Vibiana. Saints need not apply around here anymore. Especially third-century virgin martyrs. Come to think of it, virgins need no longer apply, either.

  Devlin got out of the car, catching the blast furnace right in the face, stepping over the flopped homeless in their cardboard boxes, their shopping carts parked neatly outside. Everybody had wheels in Los Angeles.

  He turned. Jacinta was nowhere to be seen. It was as if she had never existed.

  And then the doors of the dead basilica swung open and Devlin stepped inside a piece of vanished Los Angeles.

  He knew just how the mammoth felt.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Los Angeles

  The cool interior was a welcome relief from the heat. The Spanish knew what they were doing when they invented California architecture. Space, air, breezeways, and let nature do the rest. Or God. Whichever.

  Earthquakes — well, they were the work of the devil, which is why this particular cathedral had been abandoned in favor of the modern monstrosity up the hill, across from the Music Center.

  God had moved. The new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels sat up on what was left of Bunker Hill, looming over the Hollywood Freeway. There it was, the sacred and profane, back to back and belly to b
elly: That was Los Angeles in a nutshell, no contradiction noted or accepted. Take it or leave it, all or nothing. Mammon Found, Paradise Lost.

  There was no God here. Except for the old altar, everything ecclesiastical had been stripped away, leaving only the cracked walls and rocked foundations of a building that had finally met the California earthquake code it couldn’t survive or finesse.

  No pews, no confessionals. Even the stained-glass windows had been removed; from the side; the cathedral looked like the gap-toothed mouth of one of the bums out on Second Street, who drank Ripple and screamed obscenities at the few civil-service souls who passed by on their way to and from their cubicles and the tacqueria.

  The empty church was as eerie as an AA meeting with no drunks. Funny, he’d thought the conversion to the arts center was long-since complete.

  “Mr. Harris? Mr. Bert Harris?” Male, Hispanic, early thirties — this much he knew without even turning around. “I’m Father Gonsalves.”

  Looking back on it, that should have been the tip-off right there. Father Last Name in a world that had lost both its faith and its surnames. Not Father Tom, or Father Mike or Father Ed. Priests hadn’t used their last names since the Primate was a pup.

  The guy looked straight enough. Black cassock, white dog collar, the usual outfit. Good, firm handshake. Devlin liked that.

  “I don’t know how much Jacinta has told you,” Father Gonsalves began, his words echoing in the vaulted space.

  “Just this,” replied Devlin. He opened his left hand and displayed the rose petal. “Which is, I guess, all I need to know.”

  Father Gonsalves moved toward the altar, the only flat surface other than the floor. Its marble top was pebbled from years, decades, of use. Instead of a chalice, there was a small pile of folders and documents lying atop it.

  “I don’t know how much you know about miracles—”

  “I believe them when I see them, and that’s not very often. As in never.”

  “Good. May I ask if you’re a Catholic?” said the padre.

  “You may. I’m not.”

  “Not anymore, you mean.”

  “Guesstimation or revelation?”

  “Have a look at this, please.”

  It was a computer printout, tens of pages in length. Dates, locations, number of people. Starting in 1900 and running up to the present. Devlin scanned it quickly, his eyes picking out various incidents:

  He handed the pages back to the padre. “Looks like an epidemiological study for some sort of disease. An outbreak of some kind. What was it? Hemorrhagic fever? Smallpox?”

  Father Gonsalves indicated something on one of the pages. “Note particularly the concatenation in Spain in 1931. Ezquioga, Izurdiaga—”

  “Basque country. Just before the civil war. People see things when they’re crazy.”

  The priest shot him an impressed look. “Very good. Zumarraga, Ormaiztegui, Albiztur, Barcelona, Iraneta. All in Spain, within the same year.”

  “A mental illness of some kind? Mass psychosis, brought on by the proximity of war? If you look at the dates—”

  “You’re a data miner, Mr. Harris. You figure it out.”

  Interesting choice of words. “Data mining” was not a term in common parlance. Most people had no idea what it meant. Seelye must have put him up to this.

  He shook his head. “Too small a sample. No way to create an association algorithm. Probably need to use an API…”

  “Let me help you.” Father Gonsalves leafed through the pages, found what he was looking for, pointed—

  “Are you familiar with California City?”

  “North of Lancaster, in the Mojave.” Hell on earth.

  “It will take you a couple of hours to get there. Although at that time of day, the traffic will mostly be coming the other way.”

  Was he for real? Traffic in L.A. ran in all directions pretty much twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. The myth of a “rush hour” that flowed one way in the morning and the other way in the evening was strictly an East Coast import, one of the things displaced people from the wrong side of the Mississippi clung to, like faith, to help them rationalize the irrational world that was God’s country. He’d seen the Sepulveda Pass clogged at 4 A.M., and once sped west on the Santa Monica Freeway on a fine spring day without braking once between downtown and the beach. Miracles sometimes did happen. Just often enough to keep the suckers in the tent.

  “I haven’t agreed to anything yet,” Devlin objected.

  “Sure you have,” replied the priest. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

  They stood there staring at each other. Jacinta was still nowhere to be seen. Father Gonsalves gestured at the floor as he reached for the stack of papers. “I’m sorry, the rectory’s… closed to visitors.”

  Devlin sat on the floor; the seat of his trousers would have to like it or lump it. The padre squatted like a Southeast Asian, rocking back on his haunches. That was a position Devlin had never quite mastered, couldn’t have even had he wanted to. It made him feel like the last refugee not to make it out of Saigon, and he had not yet fallen that low. Not quite.

  “There’s more pictures. Do you want to see them?”

  “Not unless you tell me what this is all about.”

  “Listen to this.” Father Gonsalves closed his eyes and recited from memory. “ ‘Dear children! This is a time of great graces, but also a time of great trials for all those who desire to follow the way of peace. Again I call on you to pray, pray, pray — not with words, but with your heart. I desire to give you peace, and that you carry it in your hearts and give it to others, until God’s peace begins to rule the world.’ She said that. Here—”

  More pictures. Not the desert: green hills, snowy mountains. A church with twin spires. “That was in 2002. Keep looking—”

  A rocky, treeless hillside. Euro-hovels. A million Arabs in mufti, looking up at the sky. Skyscraper windows, sunlight glinting. A saltwater stain on a highway underpass, before which stood a makeshift altar, adorned with candles. And icons.

  “You see? We need—”

  “We?”

  “—to know whether she’s real. Jacinta showed you the pictures from California City.” The pictures in the desert. “Have you ever heard of Juan Diego?”

  He thought for a moment; even though he wasn’t originally from California, he remembered something about a baptized Indian, hundreds of years ago, somewhere in Mexico, who had an encounter — probably peyote-fueled — with a beautiful woman.

  “She gave him roses and told him to go to the bishop in what is now Mexico City. And when he opened his tilma—her image was imprinted on his cloak. We call her Our Lady of Guadalupe. But it’s not that Juan Diego I’m talking about.”

  Instinctively, Devlin looked at the rose petal he was still carrying in his hand as the priest fished a photo out of his stack. A dour bracero, by the look of him, Zapata mustache, floppy hat, holding a rosary. A group of people were kneeling beside him, praying, in the desert. In the background, he could make out a fenced-off area of white rocks with a sign in front of them.

  The floor was even less comfortable than it looked. Devlin rose, brushing off his rump. “Sorry, padre, but I don’t believe in fairy tales, Bible stories, global warming, or the Dodgers’ chances this year.”

  His answer seemed to please the priest. “That’s why we picked you.” He waved the pages as if fanning himself. “A string of negatives and no decisions — exactly the way the church prefers it. As a person of Mexican descent it embarrasses me to say this, but there is no limit to the imagination of superstitious peasants.” He handed Devlin a couple of folders. “The data’s all in here. Mine it”

  Devlin got the picture. “Devil’s Advocate, huh? Debunk and demolish. Scrape the holy mold off the taco, so to speak.”

  “More like Serpent’s Advocate.”

  “Or the Great Red Dragon’s.”

  “You read the Bible.”

  “Only in hotel rooms. Scripture’
s for Protestants.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t Catholic.”

  “You don’t have to be Catholic not to read the Bible.”

  “Armando can drive you, if you’d like.”

  So that was his name. “Armando’s sleeping.”

  “Twenty thousand dollars ought to cover it. Half now, half upon receipt of your… thoroughly mined… report.”

  The padre sprang up from his squatting position and extended his hand. It had a stuffed envelope in it.

  Footfalls echoing, they walked toward the front doors. “One last question,” said the priest, yanking at the heavy wooden portal.

  “Shoot.” The western sunlight hit him right in the eyes.

  “Isn’t it rather hot for that suit?”

  Not a question he hadn’t heard before. Nobody wore suits in Los Angeles anymore, except lawyers and agents, and even the lawyers took off their ties once they made partner, or on Fridays, whichever came first.

  “Since when does hell have a dress code?”

  The doors closed behind him. The bums were still homeless. The Escalade was waiting outside, a passenger door open. He stepped over a couple of prone winos, and wondered how long it would be before he joined them.

  His secure smartphone buzzed. He looked at the screen. A single word:

  DORABELLA

  Oh, Jesus.

  He switched off voice contact and the browser, but left messaging on. Might as well give eternity and redemption his best shot, and yet still stay in touch with the outside world. It was the least he could do. After all, he was on his way to meet the Blessed Virgin Mary.

  There was a map on the front seat, with a location in the desert outside California City circled in red. There was a Polaroid camera, loaded and ready to shoot — extra film, too.

  And one other thing. Actually, many other things: rose petals and hyacinths, all over the seats.

  A voice from the backseat. He looked in the rearview mirror to make sure he was not seeing a ghost. But it was only Jacinta.