The Apocalypse Codex

14. APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA

IT’S 11 A.M. AND THE FIRST TRICKLE OF CHURCHGOERS ARE arriving at the New Life Church for today’s extravaganza organized by the Golden Promise Ministries. Pastor Bob Dawes is up front on the stage in the big sanctuary, fronting a team—there’s a light Christian rock band to get the audience energized, a couple of fire eaters with some fun parables to get across, and a bunch of other distractions to keep the audience focussed while the show builds up momentum.

They’ll have help, of course: among the fresh meat will be sitting about five or six hundred of the Saved, those who have already entered fully into the doctrine of the holy ministry and who will live forever in His Glory when the light bringer returns. They’re primed to cheer and clap at the right points; nothing will be allowed to fall flat.

It’s been a huge project to bring forward at very short notice. Schiller’s people have dropped everything, thrown themselves at the job to bring in food and refreshment stands, mobile catering kits, and a mountain of supplies. When you’re getting ten thousand warm bodies through the door you’ve got to keep them fed and irrigated. Luckily New Life expect thousands to show up for peak draws; they’ve got the sanitation and toilet arrangements to handle it, and the first aid support. They’ve had advertising airtime playing every hour for the past couple of days on all five of Colorado Springs’ Christian radio stations—begging, borrowing, and blackmailing to buy up airtime at short notice—and less frequently on the talk and music channels and the Christian stations with coverage in Denver; all this on top of the continuous roadside advertising campaign they’ve been running for the past few months. The message is urgent: “Get off your couch and dance with Jesus!” Ray has personally authorized a million-dollar spend on this project at very short notice, and another million on the support infrastructure.

They’ve even rearranged the main sanctuary for it, brought in additional seating, and laid down red carpet runners on all the aisles.

It is the most expensive birthday party Alex Lockey has ever been invited to. Only he isn’t going to be taking time to enjoy the scene—as security chief he’s going to be spending the whole session in the control room. Ah well. The Lord will provide, he thinks ironically as he waits for Ray to finish with makeup.

“Not too glossy, hon,” Ray tells Judy, his makeup girl. “I need gravitas. Most of these people don’t know me well yet.” His eyes turn to Alex. “The missionaries. Any word?”

“Yes. They’ve found Elder McTavish. He’s en route.” He pauses. “There was some trouble with a spy working for the Operational Phenomenology Agency, but he’s been dealt with. McTavish led our men to him.” And a good thing too, he keeps to himself. There’s no room for loose cannon stringers in this operation. If head office were to get wind of what’s going on here before the Sleeper awakens it could cause any amount of trouble.

“Excellent.” Schiller does not smile—not while Judy is working on his forehead with a brush: the artist is not to be disturbed—but his satisfaction is palpable. “McTavish will not yet be fully committed. Don’t let him see the others after you take them in.”

“I certainly won’t, sir,” Alex assures him. “If you don’t mind…?”

Leaving the presence of his master, Alex walks around the periphery of the sanctuary. The huge church is filling up slowly, and there’s chatter among the families as they queue for the best unreserved seats; ushers from GPM, uniformed in blue smocks, are directing them towards aisles where their arrival will cause minimal disruption. Some of them clutch burgers and burritos with their bibles, hot from the booths outside. The food is free, for as Ray puts it, a full stomach is a great way to get the undecided to sit down and listen to the good news.

Alex’s two-way radio buzzes. It’s Deputy Stewart in the control room. “We need you up here now, boss,” he says. “We’ve got a situation developing.”

“Check. On my way.” Alex ups his pace. It wouldn’t do to let any unwanted interlopers kick up a fuss on the Lord’s new birthday.

Not long now, he thinks. His captive host agrees: Soon we will be reunited with the Lord. Alex basks in its warm glow of joyful anticipation. Strange to think that such a—his mind flinches from the next word—alien-looking thing could be such a source of love and consolation. But it is, and thanks to his wards his own mind is intact enough to appreciate the irony. And when you’ve worked for the Nazgûl for as long as Alex has, you learn to look beyond surface appearances.

AT THE EXACT MOMENT THAT LOCKEY IS BEING PAGED BY SECURITY in the New Life Church’s control room, it’s coming up on 6 p.m. in London. In a dingy office block above a row of shuttered shops, somewhere south of the river, most of the windows are dark, for it is far into overtime territory in a time of spending cuts. But in one particular meeting room—windowless, in the interior of the warren of narrow puce-green corridors and beige-carpet-tiled offices that make up the New Annex—the lights are burning late.

Approach the meeting room by way of the corridor and you will see that the door has no windows, and is identified only by a name plate reading M25. There’s a strip of lights above it, like a miniature horizontal traffic signal. Right now the red light is flashing.

There’s a battered boardroom table in the middle of the room. Eight chairs—equally battered, castoffs from Human Resources—are scattered around it. Someone has furnished it with a large black velvet tablecloth, chain-stitched with intricate designs in conductive silver thread using a sewing machine that is stored in a secure vault room when not in use. A couple of ruggedized boxes full of electronics sit at one end of the table, attached to the cloth by alligator clips and to a wheeled, voltage-regulated battery pack by fat cables. The door is not merely shut, or locked, but barred: physically and by means of less obvious but more lethal wards. These are not the only precautions against unwanted eavesdropping—only the most obvious ones.

“Tell me,” the Senior Auditor leans forward, “precisely how long ago Howard was supposed to report in.”

Gerald Lockhart clears his throat as he checks his wristwatch: “I was expecting him to be here by now,” he says mildly. “I delivered the scram instruction at eight fifteen p.m. yesterday and authorized him to use any means necessary. He should have had sufficient time to make a connection by now.”

The Auditor—sixty-ish, male, distinguished-looking, with gold-rimmed half-moon bifocals—exchanges a significant look with his colleague—female, late forties, with the twin-set-and-pearls look of a House of Lords apparatchik. She delivers the next question pointedly: “What is the communication situation at present?”

Lockhart grimaces as if he’s just been asked to swallow a live toad. “In a word, poor. Phone calls are not connected. Email is not downloaded. SMS messages are not delivered. To determine whether this was specific to our people, I tried contacting various businesses in Colorado. Denver and Colorado Springs and all points between might as well have dropped off the map. The last information I could independently verify was that there is an anomalous snowstorm sweeping down the Rockies, that all flights in and out of those cities and their environs are grounded, and there’s some kind of problem with satellite phones.”

The female auditor makes a note on her pad. “Have you enquired through formal channels yet?”

“No.” Lockhart stares down his nose, refusing to be intimidated. “As I already noted at the last oversight meeting, local law enforcement is believed to be compromised.”

“Have you contacted the Black Chamber, directly or indirectly?”

Lockhart takes a deep breath. “That’s what we’re here to discuss. The answer is ‘no,’ by the way. Not without your authorization.”

The male Auditor speaks again: “So we have established a baseline for this situation.” He looks at Lockhart sharply. “Denver. Tell me about its geography.”

“Geography? It’s on a plateau.” Lockhart shrugs. “West of it, everything goes crinkle-cut. East, it slopes gently down to the Mississippi.”

The fourth occupant of the meeting room finally speaks. “A plateau.” His tone is wintry.

“Thank you, Doctor,” the female Auditor is snippy, “unless you have anything to contribute…?”

“Yes, it’s a plateau,” Lockhart snaps waspishly. “With a couple of cities in the middle, and a big temple. The parallels to the layout of a certain other plateau in a location formerly subject to regular photorecon overflight did not pass me by, James.”

Angleton nods. He rests his elbows on the arms of his chair, fingers steepled; beneath the harsh fluorescent light from the ceiling tubes, his face looks sunken, cadaverous. “I see.” He turns to stare at the auditors. “You are aware of APOCALYPSE CODEX?”

The male Auditor nods. “That is the document that…” He glances at Lockhart.

“Yes,” says Lockhart, surly at having his work exposed to hostile eyes and critical minds. “The one that was copied during the black bag job at Schiller’s hotel. And that Howard so casually emailed to an uncleared social contact—” His icy disapproval is profound.

“The, ah, doctor of divinity,” Angleton notes with relish, “whose thesis was a study of variant Essene apocalypse cults.” He returns Lockhart’s glare with a blandly satisfied expression. “Do we have one of those on payroll? I seem to recall Donald Hiller retired nearly twenty years ago without any decision as to a successor being made. How long would it have taken us to locate and vet a suitable consultant if Howard hadn’t cut the Gordian knot?”

“But he shouldn’t be—”

“Mister Lockhart.” Angleton leans forward like an angry rattlesnake: “You picked Howard because he can think outside the box and improvise solutions in the field. And you sent him out into the field to support BASHFUL INCENDIARY and JOHNNY PRINCE, without showing him the PRINCE dossier or explaining the relationship between Hazard and McTavish and our organization. You are the one who decided that the best way to evaluate his performance under stress would be to handicap him in that respect. You chose your cake. And now you are complaining about the flavor?”

“Dr. Angleton!” The female Auditor sits up. “If you please.” She glances at her colleague. “Should we action HR about this external contact?”

“Hmm, I don’t think so. Not yet. A vicar.” The other Auditor picks up a pen and twirls it between his fingertips. “Too public a figure. Background checks only, for now. We can reel him in if he begins to ask uncomfortable questions.”

“So.” The female Auditor raises a hand and starts ticking off finger joints: “Mahogany Row suggested BASHFUL INCENDIARY and JOHNNY PRINCE investigate a location that has unfortunate resonances with GOD GAME BLUE, not to mention PRINCE’s background. Howard was sent to monitor them and provide top cover while they were underground. He acknowledged a scram instruction but is now overdue, and there appears to be a communications blackout over most of populated Colorado. However, he transmitted documentary evidence that confirms GOD GAME VIOLET. The anomalous meteorological conditions suggest that GOD GAME YELLOW is in effect, either now or imminently. INCENDIARY and PRINCE are also unaccounted for. Is that a reasonable summary?”

Lockhart runs a hand through his thinning hair distractedly. “Yes.”

Angleton peers out across a bony cage of interlaced fingers. “The black bag job,” he says smoothly. “It was deniable, yes?”

Lockhart bristles. “It was a journalist from the News of the World, if you must know. He bribed a cleaner. We used a cut-out in the Met to suggest he investigate Schiller—Freaky Fundie Preaches Polygamy at Number Ten, that sort of thing.” He shrugged. “Our friends at the Doughnut were good enough to send us his cameraphone contents. Totally, utterly hands-off, you may rest assured.”

“Ahem.” The Senior Auditor interrupts. “I’d like to get back to the situation in hand, which has evidently spiraled out of control in the last day. Thank you for drawing it to our attention.” He glances at his colleague. “Do you think we have time to send this back up the ladder to board level? Will it keep overnight?”

Her expression could chill liquid nitrogen. “No.” She glances at her watch. “If there’s any risk whatsoever that Schiller is attempting to raise the Sleeper I think we should act immediately on our own cognizance.”

Lockhart looks as if he’s about to say something, but freezes at a glance from Angleton.

“This isn’t a regular external operation anymore,” the Senior Auditor tells Lockhart, not ungently. “Nor is there any need for it to remain so. You can let go, if you want. A more collegiate protocol is called for.”

“Collegiate?” Lockhart pales. “But Hazard and McTavish are at that level.”

“He’s talking about the reciprocal monitoring provisions of the Benthic Treaty,” Angleton points out. “Someone has to tell the Black Chamber. Stands to reason, old man.” Angleton looks at the Auditors. “Well?”

“Doctor Angleton.” The older Auditor pauses to push his bifocals up the bridge of his nose. “I believe you have dealt with those entities in the past. Would you mind…?”

“What? Right here and now?” Angleton, normally imperturbable, for the first time sounds taken aback.

“Can you suggest a reason not to? As this is a matter of some immediate urgency…”

Angleton looks round. “Well, we should ward the documentary evidence first. Anything that’s not cleared for sharing under these admittedly irregular circumstances. And we should ward ourselves thoroughly. And have suitable backup in place to contain any hard contact. Otherwise, no.”

“Then so be it.” The Auditor looks at Lockhart. “Gerald. When called upon, you will give an account of the inception of this operation, the direction of the external assets, and the status of Agent Howard as their monitor, and a concise report about what they found. You may mention the motivation for this operation, but should not identify the participants in the black bag job. You may discuss material classified under GOD GAME color codes freely—the Black Chamber will already be fully aware of their content—but may not refer to those codewords directly. Do not discuss McTavish’s background unless the Black Chamber show prior cognizance of it. If you wish to vary these constraints you may request it of us, but not in the presence of the other party. Am I understood?”

Lockhart swallows. “Yes, I think so. Am I to negotiate?”

“No.” The Auditor peers at him over his spectacle frames. “That’s Angleton’s job. He knows what we’re dealing with.” He puts down his pen. “I wish we had time to send out for a longer spoon, though…”

“I THINK THEY’RE ONTO US,” I SAY.

I have been sitting in the passenger seat for the past hour, as Persephone flogs the rental coupé down the interstate in weather only a homesick penguin could love—it’s so cold I’m shivering inside my anorak just from looking out the windows—when I realize what’s going on.

“Where?” she asks, instantly focussed.

“Not in sight right now.” I pause, and glance down at the pizza box. “But we keep passing cops on the shoulder with light bars going. Every ten minutes or so. If you knew you were tracking someone on this highway, wouldn’t that be how you’d do it if you had the resources? Station observers every five to ten miles to radio in a sighting, instead of putting a car on their tail which they might spot.”

“That would work.” Persephone glances at me. “If they knew we were here.”

“Yes, well.” I tap the pizza box. She swears loudly and swerves. “It shouldn’t be able to talk. I put wards on this box that are strong enough to gag a death metal band. But if it’s found some kind of back-channel—”

Persephone isn’t listening to me: she’s chanting something in a tonal language that makes the hairs on my arms stand up, and her eyes are shut. I’m about to make a grab for the steering wheel—we’re beginning to drift out of our lane—when she turns her head to the box, then turns sharply frontwards and opens her eyes again. “Merde.”

“Yes?”

“It is leaking. Bleed-through in the Other Place.”

“The other—” Oh. That’s one of the things about ritual magicians; they use visual or tactile metaphors instead of nice standard well-defined terminology. The Other Place, the astral plane, the land of dreams—it’s not a real place like, say, Walsall. But it’s a metaphor for a mathematical abstraction, a manifold containing an n-dimensional space where everything is the product of geometrical transformations, including mass and energy and time. Leakage between dimensions occurs there: it’s how we summon demons from the vasty deep, communicate with aliens, and try to extract our tax codes from the Inland Revenue. And if she says it’s leaking—“I should have grounded it there, too?”

“That might not have worked.” Her fingers are white on the wheel. “It has an astral body: separate the two and it’ll probably die. It’s connected to something in the distance off and to the right. Like a spiderweb. I think it’s in the compound near Palmer Lake. Which is the next turnoff.”

Signs blur towards us, warning of a junction: turn right for the Air Force Academy. Without indicating, Persephone crosses lanes and brakes hard, dragging us into a sharp turn before merging with a main road below the grade of the interstate. “Hey!” I say.

“We’re going to Palmer Lake,” she says firmly, “to pay a visit to the Golden Promise Ministries compound while Schiller’s people are attending their revival show. Besides, it’s lit up like a lighthouse in the Other Place.”

“But the church service—”

“Is fuel for Schiller’s invocation, yes, but do you think he’ll have set up the major summoning itself in the middle of a mega-church?”

It’s like arguing with a madwoman, except she’s not mad. “But he might have—”

“No. He hasn’t had the free run of the mega-church until very recently. If he had, he wouldn’t be using it to attract new victims. They’d already belong to him.”

It’s hard to argue with her logic because it fits the pattern that’s emerging, but I really want her to be wrong. A few months back, Mo came home in meltdown after closing down CLUB ZERO in Amsterdam—a circle of cultist fanatics (from this neck of the woods, now that I think about it) who’d decided to summon up something unpleasant. The venue for the summoning was a deconsecrated Lutheran chapel, but the fuel was the kindergarten on the other side of the road. Linked by a path through the Other Place—exactly the MO Persephone is proposing. I really want Persephone to be wrong about this.

“If he’s got the summoning grid set up in his own compound, then there’ll be a connection via the Other Place to the church,” I reason aloud. “This is the shortest route to Schiller. Bypasses his muscle, too.” I’m whistling past the graveyard at this point, you understand. “As long as he hasn’t already woken the Sleeper.”

“The Sleeper.” She takes her eyes off the road ahead long enough to spare me a sharp glance. “What exactly do you know about it?”

I look at the pizza box on my lap. The complaints department is quiescent, locked down by occult manacles. “It’s not human. Dead but immortal. Sleeps in a temple on a high plateau, surrounded by a lovely necromantic picket fence constructed by a genocidal maniac more than ninety years ago. On a planet that’s definitely not in our neck of the woods, if not in our universe.” I shiver. “It’s sometimes known as the Opener or the Gatekeeper.” I know more about it than that, but I’m not sure how much Persephone knows and I don’t want to provoke my oath of office again.

“That’ll do,” she says absent-mindedly as she wrestles the car through a sharp left turn onto a narrower street where the snowfall is outpacing the traffic’s ability to turn it into slush. “You’re mostly right, although I hope your analysis is wrong. Disturbing the Gatekeeper would be bad. Not so much in its own right, but because of what’s on the other side of the gate.” With that encouraging sentiment she hits the gas again; the wheels spin for a few alarming seconds, then we’re back on course.

We haul ass through snow-capped suburbia for a few silent minutes. Side roads with scattered houses roll by every few hundred meters. I stare at the pizza box in my lap, nervous and upset and simultaneously keyed-up. The thing inside is in communion with its master: they’ll know we’re coming. It’s probably a directional beacon, too. But by the same token, I ought to be able to use it to probe what’s going on ahead. If I dare to shut down part of the firewall I’ve built around it and stick my head up against it, of course. That option does not appeal.

I’ve been keeping my mind inside my own head ever since the incident back at the hotel, because to say I don’t like my new-found proficiency at soul-sucking is a bit like saying that cats don’t like swimming. But there may be no alternative, if I want to try spoofing our location.

I take a deep breath. “Persephone. Your map. Can you show it to me?”

She chuckles grimly. “All you need to do is open your eyes, Mr. Howard.”

“But I don’t—” I stop. No more excuses. The inner eye, the vision thing, that’s what let me know there were monsters on the other side of the door, isn’t it. That’s how I saw the feeders under Brookwood last year.

“You’re a necromancer, Mr. Howard, not just another button-pushing computer nerd. That’s why they sent you here with me. You have the aptitude for ad hoc invocation and control. I think you would be extremely powerful, if you get over your squeamishness. It makes you as useful as a heart surgeon who faints at the sight of blood.”

I stifle the urge to swear at her. Instead, I close my eyes as we tear down the highway towards Palmer Lake and the turnoff for Schiller’s compound, and force myself to gaze inwards. There is a sudden shift of perspective as the world changes. And then I see—

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TABLE SITS AN ANTIQUE ROTARY-DIAL telephone. It dates to an age when telephones were made of wood and brass, crowned with the royal crest of George the Fifth’s Post Office. A separate speaking horn carved from yellowing bakelite or some other more organic substance hangs by a hook from its side, connected by a length of cloth-wrapped wire.

Four people sit at one side of the table: Angleton, Lockhart, and the two Auditors.

The phone sits in the middle of an elaborate double ward, concentric Möbius loops of eye-bending power wrapped around its base. There is no sign of a power source or telegraph wire connected to it. Nevertheless, the audience watch with abated speech as Angleton carefully lifts the speaking horn and dials a series of digits.

“Hello, I’d like to speak to Overseas Liaison, please.” He leans across the table, placing his ear close to the speaker. “Yes. This is Angleton. I am calling on behalf of SOE on official business. I would appreciate an immediate conference call with a representative of your Internal Affairs department. This concerns current events in Colorado Springs and Denver.” He waits for almost a minute. “Yes, that is correct. As I said, we would like to discuss this matter with you—oh very well.”

He hangs up the speaking horn and sits back, arms crossed.

“Well?” asks Lockhart.

“They’ll call us back.”

“Really.” The female Auditor’s lips are a thin line. “This is preposterous—did they give any indication as to how long they would take? We have an operation to run—”

Silently, without any fuss, the walls of the meeting room dissolve. The conference table extends, doubling in length, but the far side is ash-gray and the three figures that sit behind it are indistinct shapes, shrouded in cloaks and cowls of black mist, their faces in shadow.

Angleton, clearly unimpressed, nods at the new arrivals. “Good evening. Can you identify yourselves?”

There is silence for a few seconds. Then the leftmost of the wraithlike figures nods, a slight inclination of the cowl that hints at a skull within. “I am Officer Black. This”—a band of mist that might conceal a hand, or some other, less human limb, gestures to its right—“is Officer Green. And I have the pleasure of introducing Patrick O’Donnell, formerly of the Hazard Network, subsequently one of our freelance informers, now deceased.”

The phantom limb stretches alarmingly past Officer Green and flips back the hood covering the wreckage of O’Donnell’s head.

Lockhart swears very quietly—but not so quietly that he escapes notice.

Officer Black emits a dry chuckle. “Remember our service motto? ‘Death is no escape.’ Now, who are you?”

Angleton points at Lockhart: “This is Officer Blue. And you can call these two”—he gestures at the two Auditors, who are watching, rapt—“Officers Red and Yellow.” A mirthless smile wrinkles the corners of his eyes but reaches no further. “You have a problem. We have a problem. And I think it’s the same problem.”

Officer Black folds his arms. The drape of the fabric suggests extreme emaciation. “However, your agents within the Continental United States are illegals, under Title 18 of the US Code—‘gathering or delivering defense information to aid foreign government,’ not to mention Title—”

“Bullshit!” Angleton snaps. “As you well know, the UKUSA Treaty exception takes precedence. What’s sauce for the goose will do for the gander.” He clears his throat. “And before you continue with your next point, we felt it necessary to act immediately. In the absence of evidence that your assets in the warded zone had not been turned by the opposition, and because of certain other considerations, we could not go through the bilateral coordinating committee. Your late colleague’s presence here”—he nods in the direction of O’Donnell’s ghostly wreckage—“suggests that we were right to do so. The situation is deteriorating by the hour, so I suggest we discontinue the bluster and concentrate on ways of preventing a meltdown.”

Officer Green’s hood twitches, but he—or she, or it—passes no comment. Officer Black, however, appears to be considering Angleton’s words carefully. Finally he nods. “Would you care to summarize your understanding of the situation?”

Angleton pointedly looks for the chief Auditor’s permissive nod before he speaks. “We are dealing with a particularly dangerous cult: Christian millennialists who are reading from some extra books in their Bible. They set up shop in Colorado Springs and have extended their influence through Denver and Colorado in recent years, but they were under our radar until very recently because of the resemblance to ordinary evangelicals. Our interest was triggered”—he glances sideways for permission to proceed—“by their missionary activity in London, and specifically by what appeared to be an attempt to suborn members of our highest level of government.”

Officer Black nods again. “Was your concern justified?”

“Yes, I think so.” Angleton laces his fingers together in a bony pile upon the tablecloth. He frowns thunderously. “Our officers secured a copy of the Bible used by the Inner Circle of the Golden Promise Ministries. Its apocrypha provide a recipe for performing a Class Five Major Summoning, and a theological imperative to do so. It’s a necromantic ritual, like most such pre-modern operations, and prodigiously wasteful—completely unoptimized. The body count just to open the portal is in the hundreds; to actually bootstrap the target entity to full immanence it’s in the double-digit millions. Oh, and there’s worse: Pastor Schiller has got his hands on a fertile tongue-eater, and is using its spawn to conscript and direct bellwethers. We ordered our assets to scram, but this morning they confirmed that they’re having difficulty evacuating and there are indications that Schiller is proceeding with the second stage of the summoning, the build-out. Hence this call.”

The Senior Auditor, who has been watching with an expression of distant amusement, takes Angleton’s silence as his cue. He abruptly raises his right index finger and points it at Officer Green. “I command you to speak,” he says mildly.

The robed and shadowed figure’s response is remarkable: it quivers spasmodically, shrinks in on itself, then expands back to original size, emitting a burp of foul-smelling bluish smoke as it does so. A hacking, emphysemic cough follows, which goes on for a long time. Finally, a thin piping emanates from the depths of its hood: “Fuck you!”

Angleton raises an eyebrow at the Senior Auditor, who shakes his head. “Ancient history.” He looks back at Officer Green. “I do not approve of your presence at this table. Explain yourself immediately!” He turns to Officer Black. “Your choice of colleagues does not incline us to trust your bona fides,” he adds icily.

Lockhart, who has been watching the exchange from the sidelines, leans back in his seat and fans himself, looking faintly aghast.

“I don’t work for you anymore, Michael,” Officer Green quavers. “Not this century, you bastard.” He stretches out an arm, lays a hooklike claw on the other side of the illusory shared table; it appears horribly burned. Then he raises his other claw and pulls back his cowl, to reveal a thing of horror.

The Senior Auditor looks at him evenly. “To betray your oath of office was your decision, not mine.” He looks at his colleague, who is shaking her head, appalled: “I don’t think there’s any point continuing with—”

“Please wait.” Officer Black speaks. “This will be investigated.” His tone is much less self-assured. “You are correct in your inferences about the Golden Promise Ministries. More to the point, they have raised a ward against us around a substantial part of central Colorado—from south of Colorado Springs to north of Denver. Your people appear to be able to move freely across it because it was programmed to detect our sigil of office. Which is highly suggestive of an internal rogue element, but that is not your concern; Internal Affairs will investigate in due course. That is not all, however. Yesterday an artificial weather system blanketed the area, and all flights are grounded. They have also suborned the highway patrol, the Denver police department, and the local FBI office.”

“What about the military?” asks the female Auditor. She leans forward intently. “Aren’t there any units within the area that can intervene?”

“No. The only major installation within the zone is the Air Force Academy.”

“Well, can’t you use them? Arm the students and—”

“The Academy is under investigation for discrimination against non-evangelicals,” Black says dismissively. “The faculty and student body must be presumed hostile.”

“So you’re locked out of the area,” Angleton muses. “I take it O’Donnell here was your last remaining asset in Denver?” O’Donnell’s shade nods. Something grayish-pink peeps briefly at the world through the shattered eggshell of his skull. “If our people can deactivate the ward from the inside, how well positioned are you to follow through?”

Officer Green pipes up: “We have assets sleeping in place.” He grins, heat-cracked ivory flashing in a carbonized jaw. “You are not the only soul-eater, Doctor.”

The female Auditor clears her throat. “We want our people back. Preferably alive.”

Officer Black looks at her. “If they survive, we will not prevent them leaving.”

“Forgive me for saying this, but your people have a reputation for not playing well with allied—”

But she is talking to a blank wall, for Officer Black has vanished into the Other Place from which he came, taking his horror show companions with him.

“Well, I think that went reasonably well, all things considered!” The Senior Auditor remarks to the suddenly small and dingy room, as he reaches for the water carafe to fill a tumbler with a hand that is only very slightly shaky.

Angleton shakes his head. “Longer spoon next time,” he murmurs.

The female Auditor is visibly frustrated. “They’re relying on our assets to do their dirty work, and they won’t even guarantee safe passage!”

“Then they’d better be up for the job, hadn’t they?” Lockhart shows his teeth. “Mahogany Row sent them—except for Doctor Angleton’s secretary, of course. Who is not without resources of his own.”

“One may hope so.” Angleton reaches for the table water. “But I admit I wasn’t expecting him to have to deal with a challenge of this magnitude so soon.”

ANOTHER PROBLEM WITH GODHEADS, JOHNNY REFLECTS, IS that they can’t quite understand how anyone could not believe their shit. (He knows this because he started out as one, although he lost his faith before his balls dropped.) Consequently, they have immense difficulty in grasping, at an intuitive level, that someone who used to be one of them might no longer be completely in tune with their ideology.

Here he is, sitting snug in the leather-lined baseball catcher’s mitt of a luxury-trimmed Suburban, surrounded by fake walnut veneer and cup holders and power sockets, staring out at a blizzard through tinted windows. Up front a godshattered man in black with a cymothoan parasite in place of his tongue wrestles with the power steering. (At least it isn’t one of the hypercastrating variants, Johnny notes with relief; those things give him the cold shudders.) It is apparent that Schiller’s people have caught up on their research: they’ve worked out who and what Johnny is, which is why they’ve switched from shoot-on-sight to the velvet-glove treatment, like it was all a bad mistake and they want to kiss and make up. It’s that damned summoning recipe from the Book of Apocalypse, of course. If Schiller popped out of nowhere then it follows that he may be short on willing elders to help with the ritual.

But it’s also fairly clear that although Schiller’s people know what he is, they don’t understand where he’s coming from. It’s like something out of quantum mechanics: you can know where something is, or where it’s going, but not both at the same time. Yeah, that’s it, he thinks as he stares out at the swirling blanket of snow: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, as applied to dead gods.

Fuckwits.

“How long have you been Saved?” he asks the missionary.

There is no immediate reply, and he’s about to ask again when the husk speaks: “Three years.”

Johnny is impressed. Either Schiller’s found some way to slow down the parasite’s growth or the man has a very strong mind indeed. (Had a very strong mind.) “How did it happen? If you don’t mind me asking.”

The missionary slowly steers the big SUV around a tight curve, peering out through the windscreen wipers as they batter huge slabs of melting snow away from the glass. It’s mid-morning, but the light is gray, fading towards twilight. “Before I was Saved I was in the FBI. I’m a back-office forensic specialist, not an agent. Jack—he’s our station chief—invited us all to an after-work service one evening, said it’d change our lives. I was…lost…didn’t believe him, kind of resented it. But you don’t piss off your chief over nothing, and I had nothing else on, so I went.” The vehicle rocks slightly as it aquaplanes through slush. “I was scared for a few seconds, at communion, but they had my back. And then everything was all right. Jesus came into my soul and now everything is wonderful.”

Just like a heroin addict describing his first fix, thinks Johnny. “What does Jesus tell you about me?”

“You’re of the prophet’s line,” says the missionary. “You are one of the Elect.” He falls silent for a while. “Jesus says he needs you, for the seed of the elders of the elect is holy.”

Well fuck me, Johnny thinks ironically, with a flashback to his dad’s lessons, punctuated with blows from the tawse: For the priests of the Lord are of the house of Levi, and what are we if not the guardians of the holy seed? That particular beating had been over suspected masturbation, something dad seemed to have a peculiarly superstitious dread of; it had been one beating of many, mostly undeserved. There had been no denying the terror and glory of the Lord in the McTavish household, or the old man’s ability to bring home a trawler with a net full of fish every time he put to sea and prayed, or the fits and the babbling, and—when Johnny was thirteen—the coming of age ceremony, the service of dedication at midnight on a spume-blown rocky beach, attended by representatives of the distant branch of the family who could no longer stray far from the ocean or pass for human.

“Does Jesus know what I am?” He pushes.

“Jesus says you are of the line of the Masters. The prophet’s son. Jesus says God wants you by His side when He returns to earth. The elder says you are to help open the way of the Lord.”

Johnny leans back, skin crawling. He’s got a lot of planning to do before they make it to the church on time. Normally he’d call up the chinless wonder on his tattoo hotline, but this close to so many supernatural parasites would be a spectacularly bad idea. So he’s got a bunch of planning to do, starting with, how to take best advantage of the besotted cymothoan host’s crush on his lineage—an unexpected bonus of his occult ancestry, born of a line of men who go down to the sea in boats and commune with the things of the deep. On the other hand, he knows from long experience what Persephone will expect of him, and how she is likely to react. All that’s in question is how to terminate Schiller’s operation and get out of this rat trap alive.

After an hour of tense boredom, driving through a twilit blizzard behind an endless trail of brake lights, Johnny’s chauffeur takes a gently graded exit from the interstate and turns onto a wide, straight boulevard. Squat, windowless stores and warehouses punctuate the desolation, snow already humped up before them. Traffic, however, is surprisingly heavy, and most of it is going the same way. Finally it begins to bunch up in a queue of turn signals, all heading for the same side road. It’s the gateway to the New Life campus: an airport terminal served by sky pilots. It’s large enough to have its own internal road network, and the parking attendants, bundled up in heavy winter coats, are working overtime to direct the churchgoing throng to the different parking zones.

Johnny’s driver does not head for the regular parking. After a brief word with one of the attendants he turns down a side road and drives around to the back of a building the size of a cinema multiplex. There’s a loading bay, fenced off and guarded by cops, bundled up in cold weather gear and stamping their feet to stay warm. One of them holds up a hand.

“O’Neil, FBI.” The missionary holds out an ID badge. “Special guest for the reverend.”

“Let me see.” The window beside Johnny retracts, admitting a flurry of snow and a scalpel-sharp breeze. The cop glances at him, incurious. “Okay, go to bay two. I’ll call ahead.” His voice is rough and glottal, his cheeks slightly distended. Johnny gives no outer sign that he recognizes the host inside the officer’s mouth.

The missionary nods, then drives towards the designated parking spot. It’s inside the fence, behind a motorized gate. The engine stops. “Follow me, sir? I am to bring you to his holiness. We must hurry: the feasting of the body and blood of Christ is about to begin.”