Blood Of Angels (40 page)

The Mayflower was barely open and Hazel hadn't arrived for work. Instead there was a girl with platinum blonde hair, a tattoo and a tongue piercing. And attitude. In depth. I assumed this was the Gretchen who was currently withstanding some of Lloyd's good loving. He was welcome to her. Even getting her to pour coffee was uphill work.

We settled into a booth in back. Unger put his hands on the table in front of him. 'No sign of your friend?'

'No,' I said.

'I'm very sorry to hear that. But to be honest I'm here to talk about other things.'

He pushed a piece of paper across the table towards us. John and I read it:

It is our day. We are in America, but we are not Americans. We are in Europe. We are not European. We are not Asian, Arab, African: we are not Christian, Moslem or Jew. We are the real humans. It is time to teach the way.

'Another coded spam mail?'

'Sent out at six a.m. this morning. Book-coded out of the Koran, no less.'

'Messianic, but so what? Carl, I'll be honest right back at you: Nina is my priority.'

'Yesterday afternoon a bomb went off in a sports store in a mall in California.'

'We heard. What about it?'

'They have a suspect on video but he's disappeared. A rich kid from the Valley. His name is Lee John Hudek.'

John stared at him. 'Hudek?'

'I take it the name means something to you?'

'Ryan, not Lee John. Ryan Hudek is mentioned in files I got from the house of a real estate developer called Dravecky.'

'Whom you killed.'

It was odd seeing Zandt caught off guard. 'How do you know that?'

'I didn't for sure. Just an educated guess. A few other people have died this year in suspicious circumstances, men whose names I knew from unusual contexts. I had a theory someone was going around whacking people they believed to be senior Straw Men. True?'

John didn't say anything.

It was my turn to stare suspiciously at Unger. 'Seems to me you know a hell of a lot more than you were letting on when we last met.'

'My job is to get information, not give it out. Only thirteen people in the world know the full story on this right now. We're not trustful of others. Me especially. My father and grandfather were killed over it.'

'Who's "we"? If the CIA know…'

'It's not the Company,' he said. 'Like the FBI, they're too heavily compromised to involve.'

'Okay, so who
is
"we" then?' I said, irritably. 'Carl, this is going to go a lot faster if you stop only responding to direct questions.'

'I'll get to that,' he said. He looked at Zandt. 'I've been trying to talk to you for a while. You're hard to track down.'

'Tell me about it,' I muttered.

John did not exude openness. 'Why do you want to talk to me?'

'First help me trust you,' Unger said. 'All I know is you're a friend of Ward's, you used to be a good homicide detective and now you're a dangerous man to get the wrong side of. I've seen the autopsy report on Dravecky.'

John considered, then reached in his pocket and pulled out two plastic bags. They looked like the things scene-of-crime people used to collect evidence in. Both contained small and undistinguished-looking objects. I picked one up. Could just be a lump of earth, though it had a few threads of strong colour in it. Blue, green.

'There are stone structures in New England,' John said. 'Usually described as root cellars. The contents of those bags came out of one in Massachusetts.'

'Is this to do with this Oz Turner guy?' I asked.

John nodded. 'I got him to take me to the first one ever found, up in Webster County. It was lost for a very long time, almost immediately after it was rediscovered, and is far less tainted than the others. Some of the photographs that disappeared from his website were pictures I took that day. When I went to see my contact in Richmond about the bone we found out in the woods here, I also got him to tell me what he could about the contents of these bags.'

I picked up the second one. 'This looks like a scrap of bone too.'

'It is. From a skull.' John looked at Unger. 'Can you tell me what's in the other one?'

'It's a small lump of copper,' Unger said. 'Mined out of the Great Lakes region, a couple thousand years before the birth of Christ.'

'Oh for God's sake,' I said. 'Not you too.'

'Yes,' John said, ignoring me. 'The bone's also very, very old. And human. I didn't have time for radiocarbon dating.'

I was beginning to feel like the dumb kid in the class, which I don't enjoy. 'And so why are these things in a root cellar?'

'Because it was never a root cellar,' Unger said. 'None of them were. They're ancient burial chambers.'

'By "ancient", you mean what?'

'Some are only five, six centuries old. Others go back a few thousand years or more. They're where key leaders of the Straw Men have been laid to rest.'

'What?'

'I don't think it's that simple,' Zandt said. 'I believe they also interred their victims in them. A collection, an exhibit. A work of art. Then finally the murderer would be laid to rest with the remains of a lifetime of kills.' He looked at me. 'You remember that place we found south of Yakima? That was similar. And I found a reference in a journal to an archaeological site in Germany: a collection of bodies buried about ten thousand years ago, arranged in an orderly pattern. It's possible that even some of the more innocuous-looking ancient burials may be the same: instead of chieftains being buried with servants so they can have staff in the afterlife, like everyone thinks, it's serial murderers and their victims.'

'Why?' I asked. 'Staking ownership to the area? We bury our dead here, so it's ours?'

'Probably, but not just that,' Unger said. 'If you plot the distribution of the chambers in New England it looks like they were placed to circumscribe certain areas.'

'They thought they were creating some kind of force-field around their strongholds? A wall of blood?'

'Something like that.'

'Are you kidding me?'

'Serial killers have similar rituals today, from what I gather. This is just the idea raised to a way of life.'

'Now make me trust you,' John told Unger. 'I thought I was the only person who knew this kind of thing about the Straw Men. If I'm wrong, tell me what you think you know.'

'Okay,' Unger said. 'But you're just going to go with it because I don't have time to give you chapter and verse, or dull stuff like proof. You've just got to believe what I'm telling you.'

I put my head in my hands, and just let the man talk.

'Fast version,' Unger said, taking and lighting one of my cigarettes. 'As you doubtless know, the last ice age ended a bit before 11,000 BC. End of the big freeze — the planet is finally a comfortable place to live again, and the human race can afford the luxury of culture. Over the next five thousand years we started knocking the world into shape. We got the farming thing going. There was trade, communication, we pulled ahead of the Neanderthals for good. That's why you find bits of ancient cultures in unexpected locations all over the Earth: they're not anomalies, that's
the way it was,
a pan-global civilization. Every culture in the world has a legend of this halcyon period: the Garden of Eden, the Dilmun, the Airyana Vaejo, the Dreamtime. But there have always been men and woman who were different, and they coalesced into a power that was the precursor of the Straw Men. Around 6,000 BC they decided to attack the key global centres of culture. Their ambition was astounding. They said: "We hate this new world order, and we're going to fuck it up." It took them five hundred years and happened over the entire planet, taking one land mass after another, like killer ants.'

'They took over the
whole world
?'

'No. They didn't invade. They didn't want dominion: they wanted everyone else dead. They just destroyed and moved on. The thing about the Straw Men is that they will never, ever stop — and bear in mind these are people who
individually
can be sick beyond belief. You want to know what the last battle with the Straw Men was like? Think Hieronymus Bosch and multiply it by the Holocaust. They torched our cities and lands with such efficient
horror
that this era gave rise to every culture's myths of hell. This reversal of millennia of civilization was so traumatic that its memory eventually got tangled up with other epoch-ending events — like the flooding at the end of the last Ice Age, the previous worst thing in human history. That's why the Atlantis legend ends in deluge, for example — and note Noah's Ark here too — and also why the Atlantis story got mistakenly placed back in time to around 11,600 BC, when sea levels rose catastrophically all over the world. You take this and add memories of volcanic and asteroid conflagrations over the millennia (hello, Sodom and Gomorrah) and it all gets spun into an era-spanning disaster myth. The defeats the Straw Men inflicted on the rest of the world were so appalling and conclusive that they came to be seen retrospectively as the work of the gods — a punishment for not living right. The world has spent the last
eight millennia
coming back from that apocalypse. By three, four thousand years ago we'd got them on the back foot again, and they retreated into the shadows. In
Timaeus

-
the first recorded version of the Atlantis "old ones" myth — Plato talks about "mountain copper". He says it coated the walls of the city, made up the pillars on which their rules were inscribed. Almost like it's a defining characteristic. And why?'

'The prehistoric Great Lakes copper mines,' John said.

'Exactly. It's a confused reference to the fact the Straw Men had gone on to establish their mines in the US, the place they claimed for their own. Right fact, wrong era

— because remember Plato was writing around 400 BC, a couple thousand years after the mining had started here, and a whole five thousand after the war. The two were already getting muddled. Come on, Ward — this stuff is there in plain view. What's the name given to the body of water that kept a safe distance between Europe and the Straw Men's lair? The
Atlantic.'

'That's a coincidence. Or a…'

'There are no coincidences. Most of the world's myths, right down to vampires and werewolves and demons, are attempts to comprehend this endless fight — to remind us there are people who move against us in the night, who stalk us with deadly intent. Christ didn't literally cast out demons. That's merely code inserted into the Bible logging the fact that the Church was formed to help keep the Straw Men at bay: to form a wall against the
real
demons, the people who are all mankind's enemy.'

There was a pause while I attempted to absorb all this. 'So I'm guessing you don't actually work for the CIA after all.'

'No, I do. It's as good a way as any of plugging into the global underworld. But it's a cover, yes. I work for the Masons. I unofficially liaise with the Bohemian Grove Organization and try to keep the peace with the Jesuits from time to time. The point of
all
these people, even the Bilderberg Group — though they are indeed globalist scum these days, and are sort of running the world behind everybody's backs — is stability. And the most important thing is they don't even understand that's what they're for. Each one of them
thinks
they're just in it for the money and the power — but the combined effect, and the original point of the whole structure, is to form a barrier against the Straw Men.'

'So even the guys in the conspiracy don't know what the conspiracy is really about?' I shook my head. 'Fabulous.'

'They don't
have
to know. It just has to
work.
You can't undermine something you don't know is going on. Like Heraclitus said — yes, he was one of us — a hidden connection is always stronger than an obvious one.'

I looked at Zandt. 'The great thing about Carl is he makes you sound positively level-headed.'

Zandt sat staring at the table, looking like someone who was finally being vindicated, albeit to an extent he hadn't anticipated. 'I don't hear anything I can't believe.'

'John, you'll believe anything.'

Unger gripped my shoulder. 'Ward — do you think it's a coincidence that the Roman Empire officially adopted Christianity just as it was losing its grip? Of course not. It was a deliberate handover, negotiated by the Emperor Constantine and his mother. The Roman Catholic Church was created to carry forward the structural legacy of the Roman Empire, just as they'd taken over from the Greeks and the Egyptians before them. It was organized by the dominants of its time, as the European Union was created by the hidden rulers of ours. Like all human institutions the Church curdled and went bad eventually, but in the beginning Paul — the biblical Paul, of course, not your brother — saw the potential of a Jewish rebel's teaching as a tool for international organization: and he got it
right.
Centralized power, extending out through smaller and smaller units that put a priest in every town, reporting back to mission control. The Catholic Church shaped Europe for the next fifteen hundred years, kept it vigilant for signs of the Straw Men. The Masons grew out of the Knights Templar, one of the enclaves who stepped into the breach when the Church started to fade in the back straight. The Church was still powerful enough to fuck up the Templars, using the pretext of the Cathar Heresy, so they covertly reconfigured into the Masons — and are still in business eight hundred years later. Almost no Masons today know the organization is more than a back-scratching club: only three members of the 33
^rd
Degree understand its original purpose. The on-going pissing match between the Masons and the Church is because both were set up — in different times and by very different people — to combat the same menace. The Church had a nice long ride and got fat on the proceeds: it doesn't want to yield the reins to anyone, which is how come the West has had five hundred years of internecine crap between the two. The world only has room for so many hidden elites, when they're competing for the same hearts and minds and money — and especially when they've
forgotten why they exist in the first place.
Yes, the Masons are part of it and Bilderberg too, along with the Trilateral Commission and the Bank for International Settlements and La Defense and el-Rashjid and Yom Pek and others which hopefully you haven't even
heard
of. One person from each of these knows the truth, along with three Masons. We are what stands between this world and the Straw Men.'