Apocalypse to Go (8 page)

“Good idea.” I grinned at him. “I’ll come take one with you.”

And, as I figured, the logical development from that activity calmed both of us down.

Monday morning arrived too soon, and with it e-mail, the timesink from Hell. When I logged on, I found a ton of it, most of it about administrative details. One e-mail, however, stood out from the rest.

It arrived on my non-TranceWeb e-address from AOS14. “I would very much like to meet with you about a matter of some interest to those you work for. Would you be willing to discuss a link between our respective agencies? We can offer you the police and justice capabilities you lack.” That was all it said. It was enough.

I logged off, got up, and charged into the bedroom, where Ari, dressed only in a pair of baggy gray shorts, was changing into his workout clothes. He caught my mood and took a step back, which put him up against the bedroom wall.

“You bastard,” I said. “You’ve blown the Agency’s cover. You made some kind of report about us to Interpol, didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t.” He sounded perfectly sincere. “They had rumors of your existence before I entered the picture. Why else would they have sent me to your State Department in the first place?”

“They sent you to the State Department, not direct to us.”

“Yes, thanks to the rumors, and where did State send me? Oh, come now! I wouldn’t be here if my higher-ups knew nothing about the Agency. They couldn’t assign me to an entity they’d never heard of.”

“That’s true, but when did the rumors become recognized fact?”

His face never changed, but his SPP winced.

“It’s one thing,” I went on, “to send an agent to a point of contact within the State Department in the hopes said
contact can link him to someone farther along the line. It’s quite another to know all the details.”

“Who says they know all the details?”

“You’re weaseling, Nathan.”

He picked up his T-shirt from the bed and put it on before he spoke. “I’m going downstairs to do my workout.”

I shut the bedroom door and leaned against it with my arms crossed over my chest.

“I can carry you,” Ari said. “If I wanted to just move you to one side, I could.”

“Not if you were ensorcelled.”

He sighed and began to study the pattern on the blue paisley bedspread. I could read a resigned sense of defeat in his Qi as well as his SPP. He looked at me again.

“Will you forgive me?” he said. “I was under orders to file that report. It’s only accessible by two people, the two I phoned about AOS14.”

“One of them told AOS14.”

He blinked a couple of times. “Oh,” was all he said.

I considered what to do next. Step One: raise hell at the Agency, which would raise hell with State, which in turn would raise hell with Ari’s superiors. Step Two: announce I could no longer work with Mr. Nathan, who had proven himself untrustworthy. Step Three: wave good-bye to Ari as he was hauled back to Israel by the outfit he worked for. Step Four: hear that he’d been killed in Iran because he’d returned there to spy for Israel one time too many.

Love really sucks when it gets in the way of your job. I considered what other course of action lay open to me. Step Two would be: hear what AOS14 had to say. I took Step One immediately.

“Okay,” I said. “I forgive you. But after this, I want to know when and where you’re passing intel about me and my Agency. You owe me, Nathan.”

“I realize that.” He hesitated. “Very well, if it happens again, I’ll tell you.” Again, the hesitation. “I had no idea that they would give that report to a third party.”

His SPP told me that about this detail he was speaking the truth. I also had the odd intuition that he, too, was
thinking that love sucked when it got in the way of one’s job.

“Should I go live in the downstairs flat?” For that one brief moment he sounded not weak, never that, but vulnerable.

“No,” I said. “Don’t be a jerk, Ari.”

He smiled and walked over to kiss me.

It took us a while to heal the breach, as it were. Once we had, we got dressed, and he went downstairs to work out. I returned to my computer desk, only to find the landline answering machine blinking. The message came from the realtor who handled the building we leased.

“The neighbors have phoned me twice now,” Mr. Singh’s voice told me. “They complain about graffiti, guns, car thieves, and firecrackers thrown onto the sidewalk. Please call to enlighten me.” He left his business number.

I thought of several jokes about long-distance enlightenment, canned them all, and came up with a good lie when I returned the call.

“The firecrackers were the work of the local teen gang,” I told him. “They’re really mad because we keep removing their graffiti. When Ari caught one at it, he tried to arrest him, but the kid got away.”

“Ah, I see.” Mr. Singh sounded relieved. “Of course, your partner is a police officer. I shall tell the neighbors this. They will be relieved that the gun they have seen is a legal weapon.”

I returned to the day’s business affairs. Although I offered to videoconference with Mr. Spare14, he preferred to leave the discussion in e-mail. After a few rounds, we had arranged a meeting for Tuesday, the next day. I decided that it would be professional courtesy to let Spare14 know that I knew about Ari’s double-dealing. When I asked about including Ari in the meeting, Spare14 answered that he’d be welcome.

“I thought he would be,” I typed. “This way he’ll be able to write up the meeting for his superiors.”

Spare14’s answer came back, “
Peccavi
. Sorry.”

“I have sinned” covered too much ground to be an honest admission. Had he badgered the information out of the
two higher-ups to whom Ari had originally sent his report? Or had he come by it some other way? I’d have to wait to answer that question until we met.

When Ari came back upstairs, I logged off and shut down my computer. The strangest communication of the day arrived at that point, not in e-mail, but on the dead black screen. I’d seen IOIs on a powered-off screen before, but this one came from outside my own mind.

As I watched, the screen brightened to pale gray. A black circle appeared, fringed with seven stylized arrows, four toward the top, three at the bottom: the symbol of an unbalanced form of Chaos magic. The face of a white guy with a shaved head, blue eyes, and an unsettling resemblance to some of my relatives formed in the center of the circle—the entity I called Cryptic Creep. He’d been contacting me against my will ever since we’d moved into the flat. The graffito that so bothered the neighbors, that very same Chaos symbol, was his work.

Although he looked like the O’Brien side of my family, his voice reminded me of no one I’d ever known: high and fluting. I heard it as if it came from outside my mind, but since Ari paid no attention at first, I knew it was a psychic communication. I, however, answered him aloud rather than risk opening up my mental language level to someone I didn’t know.

“Nola,” he said, “you’ve been ignoring me.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Why not? You always deliver the same old message.”

“The message is important, that’s why. Find the Peacock Angel. You know about the good news he brings to the world.”

“I’ve got angels of my own, and their church has been claiming to bring good news for a couple thousand years.”

“For their sheep, perhaps. This angel speaks to the elite few. He’ll speak to you.”

I suddenly realized why I needed those old college notes. “Manichees?” I said. “Valentinians? Sethians? Which flock of sheep do you belong to?”

“Oh, come now, you know better!” He laughed, a dry little mocking mutter, and disappeared.

The circle lingered a moment more, then faded away. I swiveled the computer chair around to look at Ari. He was staring at me with loving sadness.

“Who were you talking to now?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I don’t like him much. That I can tell you for sure.”

T
O MAKE LIFE DIFFICULT
for eavesdroppers, Spare14 and I had arranged to meet outside in Golden Gate Park, but well away from the usual tourist areas. To the west of the museums and the Japanese Tea Garden lie the places that we locals use, a string of small lakes and meadows. We picked a grassy picnic area next to Kennedy Drive, just past Spreckels Lake, which would most likely be deserted on a weekday. I debated wearing a business suit, but since we’d be meeting informally, I eventually decided on trouser jeans and an indigo-and-white print blouse with a v-necked rust sweater over it. I carried a leather shoulder bag, into which Ari put a handful of electronic devices. He also stashed a small plastic box in his shirt pocket and another, larger metal box in the inside pocket of his leather jacket.

“This will let me know if someone’s focusing a listening device us.” Ari tapped his shirt pocket.

“What’s the other one?”

“Two extra clips for the Beretta.”

“Oh.” My stomach clenched. “Are we expecting trouble?”

“I always do. Better safe than sorry.”

As usual, I did the driving that afternoon. When we reached the park, I turned into the greenery on a narrow side road that led to the meadow in question. Since it
needed repaving, I slowed down, and a good thing, too. From the shrubbery at the side of the road a young boy darted out after a soccer ball—right in front of us. I slammed on the brakes. The car jerked to one side with a squeal and the thump of tires on potholes. Ari swore in Hebrew.

“Did I miss him?” I was shaking so hard I could barely speak.

“Miss what?” Ari snapped. “There was nothing there.”

I simply could not believe him. In my memory I could see the boy’s horrified face as the car bore down on him. I unbuckled my seat belt and got out to look. No boy, no ball, no nothing lay in the street except for the skid marks of our tires. Ari got out and joined me.

“You saw something?” he said.

“A kid, yeah, running right in front of us.” I laid one hand at my throat. I could feel the pulse at that spot pounding merrily away. “I thought I’d hit him for sure.”

“Go stand over there.” Ari pointed to the sidewalk. “I’ll park the car.”

I followed orders. Rather than watch his version of parallel parking, I considered what had just happened. If we’d been going fast on a crowded street, I would have swerved right into a nasty accident. I’d seen an image, obviously, not a real boy. The question was its origin—inside my own mind or some kind of sending?

I heard the fluting voice of Cryptic Creep. It came from outside of my own mind, all right, and from a long way away.

I can’t protect you unless you join us. That’s just a sample of what they can do.

“Who’s they?” I said aloud.

You know who must fear you now. Belial’s allies.

“Sure, but who sent the image?”

No answer.

“Did you? Why the hell should I trust you?”

Nothing—no answer, no voice, no presence—nothing. When Ari rejoined me on the sidewalk, he held out the car keys. I shook my head.

“When we leave here,” I said, “you’d better drive. I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Do you think it’ll happen again?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of, yeah. I don’t know anything for sure.”

He nodded and pocketed the keys. As we walked off, he caught my hand in his. I clung to his grasp.

In the midst of the sunny green lawn, Spare14 waited for us on a park bench. I recognized him immediately from the photos of the original Austin Osman Spare. Neither tall nor short, squarely built with a squarish face, he had gray hair swept back en brosse and blue eyes. He’d also dressed casually, in a pair of tan chinos, a blue shirt, and a gray cardigan sweater. A battered old-fashioned leather briefcase sat next to him on the bench. He was feeding stale bread to the birds and squirrels mobbing his feet, just another middle-aged man whiling away some time in the sunshine, or so he appeared.

“He sure looks like the artist,” I said to Ari. “It’s kind of spooky, in fact.”

As we approached, Spare14 glanced up and smiled, then scattered the last of the bread for the flock and stood. He crammed the empty paper bag into the briefcase. He stepped carefully around the feeding birds and walked over to meet us.

“O’Grady and Nathan, I believe.” He sounded British, middle class, mostly. “I’m Austin Spare Fourteen.”

I murmured a “How do you do?” and we all shook hands.

“Doubtless you’re wondering about the fourteen,” Spare14 continued. “It’s a bit difficult to explain, but I’ll try as we proceed.” He glanced around, then pointed to a nearby picnic table. “This seems to be the best we can do for seating arrangements.”

We all sat down, myself and Ari on one bench, Spare14 on the other across the table. He put the briefcase on the bench next to him, then made a tent of his fingers and considered us pleasantly.

“I’m trying to decide how to begin,” he said. “I suppose that bluntness is best. Doubtless you realize that I come from a different though parallel world.”

“I’d suspected that,” I said, “but I couldn’t be sure.”

“In many ways my world is far more technologically than yours, for reasons that are quite complex. For example, I happen to be a clone. When the great artist died, a number of his cells were harvested with permission from his kin. A full line of clones was developed from them over the years. I’m the last, I’m afraid. Genetic material weakens with time. And that is why I am Austin Osman Spare Fourteen.”