by Jon Steele
“That’s how you were awakened?”
“Fuck no. I was awakened after my form OD’d ten years later. But knowing I was already qualified as an angel made it easier to accept what I was when Boz and Monsieur Gabriel came knocking at my door.” Krinkle took another hit. “What were we talking about?” he said.
“Inspector Gobet knows who snatched Madame Taylor’s child.”
“Oh, yeah. Gobet said to tell you: He thinks he knows who snatched the child, and so do you.”
“Me?”
“That’s what he said.”
“How am I supposed to know who the hell he is?”
“Because you saw him during the cathedral job,” Krinkle said.
“I saw a lot of faces during the cathedral job.”
“There’s one that Gobet rates as a high-value face of interest.”
“Who?”
Krinkle dropped his boots from the desk. He leaned forward and folded his hands on the desktop like a loan officer from a high street bank about to deliver bad news.
“When you see the lad with the lantern on your timeline, you always see him in silhouette unless someone pronounces his name. And from what you’ve told me, you always see him going over the railing of the belfry and falling through the sky. He ends up dead on the esplanade of Lausanne Cathedral.”
“What about it?”
“Marc Rochat didn’t go over the side alone.”
The sound of the lad’s name sent Harper ripping back through time. Then he was in the belfry the day the cathedral job went down. All the bells ringing and the timbers rocking and humming. Him on the floor bleeding out, barely alive. Seeing a battered Marc Rochat pinned against the timbers surrounding Marie-Madeleine, held in place by a dark form with long silver hair. The lad screaming at the form.
“Non, Maman was an angel, the detectiveman told me! And he said I’m the same as him, too! That means if he can kill you, I can kill you!”
Harper can’t see the form’s face, but he hears its voice.
“You want to kill?” it sneers. Then it pulls a killing knife from its belt and rams the blade deep into Rochat’s stomach. “This is how you kill.”
Rochat shudders as the steel twists through his guts. He turns his head, his eyes watching Marie-Madeleine swing from side to side, feeling her voice vibrate through the timbers and into his body.
“Don’t cry, madame, it’s my duty,” Rochat tells her.
The form rips the knife from Rochat’s guts.
“Uhhh!” Rochat collapses to the floor. The form slowly raises the knife over Rochat’s neck for the death cut.
“I bring you forever death!” it cries.
A woman’s voice screams. “Marc!”
Harper sees Katherine Taylor cowering in the timbers, reaching for Rochat. Rochat looks at her. “Be not afraid,” he tells her . . . and he pushes down on his crooked legs and bursts up from the floor and smashes his fists into the form’s throat, forcing it back toward the railing and over the side. Rochat pushes the form away and he opens his arms like perfect wings . . . falling . . . till he smashes onto the esplanade, the light slowly fading from his eyes. The bad guy’s form ends up splayed on a spire beneath the belfry as if run through by a brave knight’s lance, his entrails like bloody strings snapping in the wind. Harper sees the aquiline face, the long silver hair, the unmoving and lifeless silver eyes.
Harper blinked.
He was back in the office of Arctic X, staring at the roadie behind the desk.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Harper said, “but the form bearing that face of interest is well bloody dead.”
“Welcome to paradise, brother, land of the angels and home of the strange.”
Maybe, maybe not, Harper thought. One thing for sure: Someone with the power to create hell on earth had come this way, and he wanted it to be known. Maybe. Harper looked at Krinkle.
“That would require him being more than the ordinary, renegade bad guy out to rule the world we tagged him to be.”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Getting a visual ID confirming the guy Marc Rochat took over the side was the same guy who passed through this place somewhere in the neighborhood of midnight, three nights ago.”
A blue light skipped across the window next to Harper. He looked outside, saw a four-by-four truck with warning lights mounted on the roof making the turn from the main airfield onto taxiway H. The truck’s halogen headlamps sliced through the bitter cold night like wraithlike things. The truck slowed coming onto the apron of Arctic X Air Services. It stopped next to Krinkle’s bus, and a man in a parka got out of the truck with a clipboard in his hand. Harper saw the writing on the truck’s door: HOMELAND SECURITY MOBILE UNIT. The man with the clipboard looked at the bus, then around the apron. Harper saw the man’s face in the glow of the hangar’s high bay lights. The man was confused. He opened his parka, took out a flashlight, and pointed it at the blacked-out windows on the bus. Harper saw the man’s uniform and gun.
“Someone is here,” he said.
Krinkle got up from the chair, walked to the window, and saw the man walking toward the hangar.
“Agent Kerr. He’s our visual confirmation guy. He was on duty the night the child was smuggled through this place. If Gobet is right about us being played, then our face of interest is hidden somewhere in that man’s head.”
“Eyes or brain?”
Krinkle shrugged. “Eyes would be easier. The brain means tracking through six hundred miles of neurons. I’m betting what we’re looking for is hidden in his brain, somewhere along the calcarine fissure of the occipital lobe.”
“Got it.”
They lowered their eyes and looked at the floor.
• • •
Four minutes and nineteen seconds later, the man was standing at the threshold of the kicked-open office door. His SIG Sauer P229 was drawn and panning an empty office. He reached for the radio handset clipped to his coat, pressed the transmit key.
“Anchorage Operations, I have a possible four-five-nine at Arctic X Air Services. Request police backup.”
There was no response.
“Anchorage Operations, come in.”
He looked inside his coat to check the radio on his belt.
“No one can hear you.”
The man looked up. He saw Krinkle relaxed in the chair behind the desk, then Harper on the leather settee at the other side of the office. Both of them looking at him now, both of them puffing on electronic cigarettes. The man raised his weapon to fire, but Krinkle already had the palm of his right hand in the man’s eyeline.
“Dulcis et alta quies placidæque simillima morti.”
The man froze in place. Krinkle lowered his own hand, looked at Harper.
“See, that’s the problem with law enforcement in this country. There’s an entire generation of people with badges and guns who think if they don’t kill someone at least once in their friggin’ life, then it hasn’t been a life worth living.”
“We broke into the place, kicked open the office door. And when we let him see us, he didn’t see two altar boys.”
“There is that.”
Krinkle got up, walked to the frozen man, and pulled the gun from his hand. He stepped back and ejected the round from the firing chamber and the ammo clip from the handle. He tossed the things onto the floor. He walked slowly around the man, studying him.
“We need him conscious and upright to do what we got to do. But he’s not a half-kind, he doesn’t have their innate sense of balance. It’s going to take him thirty seconds to snap out of it.”
“So if we wake him up too quickly . . .”
“He might fall flat on his face and knock himself out. Neither of us has clearance to touch him. We’d be screwed.”
“Maybe you should have thought of that before you put him under.”
The roadie looked around the office, pointed to the brass coatrack next to the door.
“Get that,” Kri
nkle said, walking back to the desk
“You’re not going to hang him up?”
The roadie pulled the chair from behind the desk. It was on wheels, and he guided it just behind the frozen man.
“No, I’m sitting him down, that’ll be upright enough. I’ll ease the chair into the back of his calves to bend his knees, you hold him in place with the base of the coatrack. We’ll wake him up and he’ll sit right down.”
As bizarre as it sounded, it was a solution, Harper thought. He grabbed the coatrack, flipped it around, and set its base against the frozen man’s chest. Krinkle eased in with the chair.
“No, hold it,” the roadie said.
“What now?”
“I put him under, so I have to wake him up. Here, give me the coatrack and you hold the chair.”
They made the switch, and in position with the coatrack tucked under his left arm with the base against the frozen man’s chest, Krinkle said, “I wave, you push.”
“Go ahead.”
The roadie waved the palm of his right hand before the man’s eyes. The man began to come around. Harper eased in with the chair as Krinkle held the man in place. Miraculously, the man was set in the chair. He sat dazed and confused for a bit until focus returned to his eyes. When it did he looked like he would piss himself.
“What the . . . ?”
Krinkle was looming over him, coatrack in hand. The roadie dropped it with a bang, and the man jumped with fright. Krinkle stuffed his hands into the pockets of his denim overalls.
“Hi there,” the roadie said. “Mind if I call you Dick?”
“What?”
“You’re Agent Richard Kerr of Homeland Security. I’m trying to be friendly.”
The man looked behind him and saw a grubby-looking Harper holding the chair. Then he saw his P229 and ammo clip on the floor. The man looked at Krinkle again. “I came to process a flight,” he said.
“Yeah, we’re it. But there’s no flight. We just needed to talk to you.”
The man nervously eyed the roadie up and down. “Are you going to kill me?”
Krinkle realized with his hands in his pockets and his peacoat pulled open, the man had gotten a glimpse of the kill kit strapped to the roadie’s sides. Krinkle quickly closed his coat.
“Oh, shit. You know what, Dick? I’m great behind a microphone talking to millions of human souls at once. You should tune in sometime. Just go on the Internet and look for the last radio station on planet Earth. But I apologize. I’m so garbage at one-on-one interviews. I’m going to turn it over to Brother Harper now. He’s better at this whole apparition thing.”
“Who?”
Harper circled around him, stood enough distance away so the man would not feel threatened. He slipped his gloved hands into the pockets of his coat. Harper’s ragtag appearance was not reassuring.
“That’s me. Relax, we’re not going to hurt you. The fact is, we’re in the same line of work.”
“You’re with a security agency?”
“That’s right.”
“Which one?”
“The one no one is supposed to know exists or ask questions about. Am I clear?”
The man calmed a little and nodded.
“Good. We’re on a case. There’s a missing child involved and there’s not a lot of time. We think the child came through here three nights ago around midnight. You were on duty that night. We’d like you to identify a particular face for us.”
The man shook his head.
“Yes, I was on duty, but there was no flight out of Arctic X. I can prove it, there would be records.”
“We’re not questioning your job performance, agent. And we did check the records, and you’re right: No flight was listed coming through Arctic X that night.”
“Then why . . . ?”
“Because there was a flight that came in around midnight three nights ago, and you saw it.”
“I wouldn’t have forgotten something like that.”
“It’s not about forgetting, agent, it’s about something you’ve seen that the bad guys left in your head for us to find.”
“What?”
Harper stepped closer to the man.
“Be not afraid, mate. Look into my eyes, listen to the sound of my voice.”
ii
Two hours and ten minutes later, the man was put under again and his reloaded P229 was returned to his hand. His consciousness had been reconnected to the moment in time he arrived at the threshold of the kicked-in office door, saw no one inside, and radioed for backup. Everything since had been wiped, and he’d been primed to repeat the radio call in fifteen heartbeats. Given he was under, his metabolism had slowed to one breath and one heartbeat per minute. That gave Harper and Krinkle enough real time to get back to the bus and gone.
The man would come around and he would radio in and repeat his call that he’d stumbled on a possible four-five-nine at Arctic X Air Services. Arriving police officers would call it a bungled, third-rate burglary. Till one detective would notice something odd on the workstation monitor. That oddity would lead to the uncovering of serious criminal activity involving bank fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion on the part of a dozen well-known corporate honchos who passed through Arctic X. Agent Richard “Dick” Kerr would be hailed as a hero. That’s how Krinkle explained it to Harper back on the bus as the world spun beneath its wheels.
“I’m telling you, Homeland Security will make him Employee of the Month,” Krinkle said, settling down at the console and getting ready to kick on the reel-to-reels and broadcast to the millions of human souls tuning in. He stopped what he was doing as if he’d hit a thought head-on. He looked at Harper. “Suppose he might be a little confused wondering why he’s sitting in the chair instead of standing in the doorway?”
“Maybe,” Harper said. “Not like we had a choice to fix it.”
“No, we didn’t.” The roadie kicked the bottom drawer under his console and it popped open. “Time for some of the inspector’s single malt.”
“Orders?” Harper said.
“Fuck no. I’m just thirsty. Aren’t you?”
“Sure.”
Harper pulled out the bottle of Galileo, grabbed the coffee mugs, and poured healthy measures. He set one mug on the roadie’s audio console and carried his to the front of the bus to have a look at the stars. He drank and felt something gnaw at his guts. He reviewed his timeline, looking for anything he may have missed.
He had found the face of interest hidden in the occipital lobe of Agent Kerr’s brain, right where the roadie said it would be. It was buried in a twenty-second clip of the man’s memory left by the bad guys. Harper uploaded the clip into his own eyes and let it run. He was seeing the world through the POV of Agent Kerr’s eyes.
Around midnight; a cold wind blowing in off Cook Inlet.
Two black Gulfstream G650s sitting on the apron of Arctic X Air Services and lights from the hangar washing over the scene. Four men in black leather jackets next to a metal container on the ground. In Kerr’s eyes they are just four men; Harper makes them for goons. The container is open, and Kerr is looking down at a meter-long wooden pole carved with depictions of stars and moons, bears and eagles. It’s topped with an oval-shaped head bearing an Asian-looking face. It’s what they wanted him to see.
Then a paregoric voice wrapped in a Russian accent: “Are you satisfied with your inspection of the artifact?”
Kerr looks up, sees a tall man with long silver hair, eyes covered with dark glasses. He asks the tall man to remove the glasses for a visual identification and looks down at his own hands. They’re open, if holding things that are not there. But he sees something. Passports, must be.
Kerr speaks: “Excuse me, how do you pronounce your name, sir?”
The tall man takes off his dark glasses and reveals his silver-colored eyes.
“Komarovsky. My name is Komarovsky.”
The clip ends on a freeze-frame, and Harper sees the silver eyes he had seen in the cathe
dral job staring back. Harper added it up: Komarovsky wasn’t just another bad-guy chief; he was the one. The betrayer of the creation, the source of evil in paradise. He was undead, he was all-powerful, he had Katherine Taylor’s child and he wanted Harper to know it. Lines of causality began to intersect in Harper’s eyes. Then came a wave, then came a flood. Then the lines ricocheted like bullets, slamming into one another and creating a singular density of mass that sucked in all there was, all there would be. “Fearful sights and great signs” didn’t begin to describe it. If Komarovsky succeeded, it would be the end of everything.
“Bloody hell.”
That’s when Krinkle shook Harper. Told him to get out of Agent Kerr’s head; told him it was time to get their skates on and get back to the bus. Message on the roadie’s cell phone:
FLASH TRAFFIC
RDP: +E821-65CFR+
EX: DRAGON6/SUTF
EYES ONLY: MAGIC BUS AND BLUE LIGHT
SUBJECT: LIFE STATUS/PATIENT
ASTRUC AWAKENED. RETURN TO BASE.
SIXTEEN
i
Karoliina touched the timbers surrounding Marie-Madeleine. She felt the ancient wood reverberate with the great bell’s voice. Marie had just rung for six o’clock in the evening. All across Lausanne people were on their way somewhere. Karoliina watched them, listened to the sounds of their voices and footsteps. Some made their way to bus stops, some to Metro stations; some walked through alleyways, some crossed bridges. Karoliina noticed a curious thing about the people she watched. Coming to the crest of a hill or finding an opening between buildings with a clear view of the world, they stopped and stared. Out there was the silver-gray lake and the shadowy mountains that cradled its shores. Above it all was the leaden sky now glowing firelike by a sun cutting through the clouds and hovering above the horizon for long minutes. The Earth rotated on its axis a few degrees more, the sun disappeared, and the people continued on their way. Karoliina wondered if they realized they had received a blessing.
She pulled the hood of her sheepskin over her head and walked clockwise around the belfry. She checked the shadows in the exterior alcoves of Palais de Rumine, then down on Place de la Riponne. All clear. At the north balcony she could see down into the old city, where people gathered in the cafés along Rue Cité-Devant. At the end of the narrow road the twin turrets of Château Saint-Maire were set against the gathering dark. In medieval beforetimes the château overlooked the main gates into the city. And in those days le guet de Lausanne called the hour every hour. When he did, the guards at Château Saint-Maire would answer, “Rien à signaler.” All is well.