Mercury Rests (22 page)

The obvious thing to do would be to head straight to Eden II and try to get the anti-bomb back before Finch could activate the CCD. The problem with that idea was that Finch was in cahoots with Uzziel, which meant that Eden II was probably guarded by cherubim. Mercury would have a hard time getting past them. And even if he did somehow get into Eden II and find the apple, it
would be crazy to try to sneak it past Finch’s guards. The slightest jolt could set the anti-bomb off. If a bullet hit the apple, or Mercury dropped it, or any of a hundred other things went wrong, the anti-bomb would detonate and wipe out human civilization. No, it was better to leave the anti-bomb to Christine, Jacob, and the other Mercury. If everything transpired the way it had the first time around—and that seemed to be the way things were going—then by tomorrow night the other Mercury would be on his way to the moon with the glowing red apple in his hand.

It was too late to save the moon, but Mercury could still do something about Wormwood. Or could he? He still had no idea what Wormwood actually was. If he showed up in Heaven now, yammering about some ill-defined threat to Heaven, would anyone even listen? And without more specific information, what could they do about it? Not to mention the fact that the other Mercury was still in custody, so he’d first have to explain why there were two of him—and who knows how his presence in Heaven would affect the other Mercury’s timestream. Maybe Uzziel would never send him to retrieve the Case of Pestilence. Then he’d never be captured by Gamaliel and brought to Eden II. He’d never be able to fly the anti-bomb to the moon. So by warning Heaven about Wormwood now, he might not only fail to prevent the destruction of Heaven, he might actually sabotage his own attempt to save the Earth.

Mercury let loose a scream of primal frustration. He wasn’t used to having to deal with potentially catastrophic results of his decisions, let alone worrying about retroactively screwing up decisions he had already made. It was enough to drive a cherub bonkers.

Still feeling a bit sore, he floated gently into the sky, looking for any clue as to which direction Christine had gone. He saw nothing. Turning back toward the mountaintop, he surveyed the
gruesome scene on the plateau. The charred bodies of the tribal elders lay in an eerie circle around the remains of the altar. The lava flow seemed to have bypassed them completely.

He noticed something odd among the remains and flew in closer. One of the bodies appeared lighter than the others—not only lighter skinned but also strangely uncharred by the lightning strike. Gamaliel! He was still unconscious!

Mercury landed next to Gamaliel and looked him over. He was bruised and burned, but already mostly healed. Mercury knew from direct experience that Gamaliel wouldn’t be back to a hundred percent for several hours. Even an angelic nervous system took a while to recover from a hard reboot. Mercury realized what he needed to do.

He picked up Gamaliel and slung him over his shoulder, then leaped into the air, heading toward the Megiddo portal.

A few hours later, he reached the rocky promontory that marked the portal. Gamaliel flitted in and out of consciousness, mumbling incoherently. He couldn’t seem to figure out where he was or what had happened. Mercury pulled the Sharpie from his pocket and wrote across Gamaliel’s forehead:

A TOKEN

Then he wrote across his cheeks:

OF GOODWILL

Finally, he scrawled his signature across Gamaliel’s chin:

~MERCURY

He dragged Gamaliel’s limp body onto the portal. Within a few seconds, it had disappeared. Well, thought Mercury. That would keep Gamaliel out of trouble for a while. At least until that bastard Uzziel lets him go.

After disposing of Gamaliel, Mercury made his way to the port city of Haifa, where he knew of a charming bar that served some decent local beer. He needed to sit and think for a bit and plot his next move.

His next move turned out to be sixteen bottles of that very same local beer, which was better than he remembered. It was good to sit and rest for a while. He was still a little sore from his fight with Gamaliel, and lugging the big jerk a thousand miles on his shoulders hadn’t helped any. He had been sitting at the bar for a good three hours when “L.A. Woman” by the Doors came on the radio.

Are you a lucky little lady in the city of light
Or just another lost angel...city of night
City of night, city of night, city of night, woo, c’mon

The lyrics triggered something in his memory. Hadn’t Job said something about a lost angel? Yes, Mercury thought. He said something about a lost angel who somehow gains control over the Wormwood. Mercury had thought it was more metaphorical nonsense, but maybe there really was a lost angel somewhere who held the key to the mystery of Wormood.

An idea struck him. He made a call to Perpetiel via Angel Band.

Mercury!
Perpetiel exclaimed.
I thought Uzziel had you in custody. What are you doing on the Mundane Plane?

Perp still hadn’t fully caught on to the whole time-travel thing, evidently.

No time to explain
, replied Mercury.
Hey, do you remember that old story about the cherub who got misplaced by the MOC?

Something of an urban legend
, said Perp.
A bureaucratic snafu causes an MOC agent in Ireland to get assigned to report on the demise of the Ottoman Empire. His reports are never received, and for hundreds of years he languishes in Ireland, forgotten by his superiors. Eventually they realize the mistake that they’ve made and sweep the whole thing under the rug. The cherub is exiled on the Mundane Plane, and all records of his existence are expunged by the MOC. Officially, he no longer exists.

Do you think there’s any truth to it?
asked Mercury.

Seems unlikely, although stranger things have happened,
replied Perp.

Any idea where this cherub would be located, if he did exist?

According to the story, he was stationed in Cork, Ireland
, said Perp.
He’s known as Eddie, the Lost Cherub. That’s about all I know. Oh, and that a three-inch tie never goes out of style.

Thanks, Perp.

Eddie the Lost Cherub. Could he be the lost angel from Job’s story? It was worth looking into, particularly since Mercury didn’t have any other leads.

Lucifer gazed out the window of his suite in the Watergate Hotel, smoking a cigar and sipping at a snifter of brandy. Far below him small boats moved almost imperceptibly along the glassy surface of the Potomac.

He could hardly believe how well things were going. His bet on Dirk Lubbers was paying off big-time. Lubbers had just the right combination of raw ambition and blind devotion to duty to make him the perfect agent for Lucifer’s diabolical schemes. He was like G. Gordon Liddy all over again—minus the prostitutes on the houseboat.

Lucifer had also correctly calculated that President Babcock would accede to Lubbers’s understanding of the situation. Babcock, like all dogmatists, feared more than anything else the possibility that someone was going to come along and pull out one of the bricks making up the fragile edifice of his belief system. It was far easier for Babcock to buy Lubbers’s notion that the “BIOs” were just highly advanced alien creatures who posed a threat to national security than to rethink his conception of angels as benign spiritual beings who unquestioningly did the bidding of God Himself. The two men were practically stepping over each
other to prove their devotion to the cause. Only one small matter remained to ensure the destruction of Heaven.

He heard the door open behind him. “Tiamat,” said his servant Azrael. Lucifer smelled her honeysuckle perfume even before he saw her reflection in the glass. He turned to face the demoness, smiling cordially. “Would you care for a drink? Azrael will be happy to get you something.”

“I’m fine,” said Tiamat coolly. “I’m a very busy woman, Lucifer. Why don’t you tell me why you called me here.”

Lucifer nodded. “I apologize for making you come so far. I’ve got some pressing business in town that requires my constant attention. Business that I think may benefit you.”

“Oh?” said Tiamat. “What’s that?”

Lucifer took a drag from his cigar and blew a puff of smoke into the air. The smoke seemed to briefly form itself into a mushroom cloud before dissipating. “I’m launching an assault on Heaven,” said Lucifer. “The Eye of Providence will fall.”

Tiamat stared at him, her eyes wide. “You have finally lost it completely,” she said. “You can’t take out the Eye. You would be destroying the source of the angels’ power. Not just the angels in Heaven, all of them. That includes you and me, Luce.”

Lucifer shrugged. “I have a backup power supply. But what do you care?” asked Lucifer with a smile. “Weren’t you going to be the absolute despot of time and space?”

“Hilarious, Lucifer,” growled Tiamat. “Now if you’re finished insulting me...”

“You misunderstand me!” protested Lucifer. “I’m not insulting you, I’m offering you a way to get your plan back on track. A way for you to retake Eden II, to get control over the Chrono-Collider Device. So you can run your little experiment to capture the...what were they called?”

“Chrotons,” said Tiamat coldly. “Eden II is under constant guard by three hundred armed cherubim. If I get within twenty miles of that place, they’ll string me up.”

“How many demons do you have under your command?”

“All told? Around two hundred. It would be suicide to attack Eden II with those kind of odds.”

“Hmm,” replied Lucifer. “What if I could tip the odds in your favor ? Supplement your ranks a bit?”

Tiamat regarded him skeptically. “Just how many demons are we talking about?”

Lucifer downed the rest of his brandy. “I was thinking all of them,” he said.

Tiamat was momentarily speechless. “
All
of them? But you must have—”

“Six-hundred and sixty-six combat-trained demons,” Lucifer said. “Will that be enough?”

“I...I should certainly think so!” exclaimed Tiamat. “But why? Why would you give your entire legion? What’s the catch?”

“No catch,” replied Lucifer. “I won’t be needing them for my assault. I’ll be taking a more covert tack. What I need is a diversion. I want to draw the Eye’s attention to Minas Tirith while I carry the Ring to the crack of Mount Doom.”

“You want to do what with whose crack?” asked Tiamat, baffled.

Lucifer
tsk
ed. “You know, for the fake author of a line of books that rip off Tolkien left and right, you sure don’t know much about
The Lord of the Rings
.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Frodo and Sam stealthily carry the One Ring to the crack of Mount Doom while Gandalf and the men of Gondor occupy the Nazgûl at Minas Tirith.”

“Still not seeing the connection,” said Tiamat impatiently.

Lucifer sighed in exasperation. “You distract Michael with an attack on Eden II while I sneak into Heaven and nuke the Eye.”

“Oh!” replied Tiamat. “So you want me to take the brunt of Heaven’s wrath, is that it?”

“Precisely,” said Lucifer.

“Why would I do that?”

“Why wouldn’t you?” asked Lucifer. “What difference does it make to you what I’m doing while you execute your assault? You said yourself that I’m crazy to think I can destroy the Eye. Which means that I will probably end up in prison, and you can keep my demonic horde for yourself. And even if I succeed, what is it to you? Once you’ve done your chroton thing, you’ll possess the ultimate power in the Universe. You won’t need the Eye anymore.”

“You don’t believe for a second that I’m going to succeed,” said Tiamat.

“Of course not,” said Lucifer matter-of-factly. “I think this whole thing with the Chrono-Collider Device is a colossal waste of time. Just like you think that I’m nuts for trying to destroy Heaven. But you need my demons, and I need a diversion. So what do you say?”

Tiamat threw her head back and laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks. “You really are the most cynical angel ever to fall out of Heaven,” she said. “You’re going to offer to help me even though you are certain I will fail, and you want me to help you even though I’m certain
you
will fail. All right, then. You’ll have your diversion. When can I get the demons?”

Eddie spent the next several days after Cody’s murder feverishly writing the second volume of his book, covering the events up to the destruction of the moon. He no longer felt like he had any choice in the matter. The story was unfinished, and it needed to be told. If finishing the story brought about the end of the world, then so be it. That was none of his concern.

It did bother him, though, that the world might end before anyone had any chance to read his masterpiece. Ideally, he would wait till the whole thing was finished before releasing it to the world, but if what Cody and Cain had said was true there might not be a world to release it to. He decided to hedge his bet by delivering the first two volumes of his saga to the Heavenly authorities before things got too far out of hand. He had them printed out at the Jiffy Print downstairs and then took a cab to Christine’s condo. He walked up and knocked on the door, which was answered by the pleasant but dim-witted cherub Nisroc. Nisroc and his counterpart Ramiel had been assigned to guard the portal against any unauthorized intrusions.

“No visitors!” exclaimed Nisroc cheerfully as he opened the door and then slammed it in Eddie’s face.

Eddie knocked again.

The door flew open again. “No visitors!” exclaimed Nisroc again. He made to slam the door shut but it caught on Eddie’s foot.

“No visitors?” said Nisroc, confused.

“Who is it?” barked Ramiel from somewhere inside the condo.

“My name is Eddie,” said Eddie. “Ederatz, actually. I work for the Mundane Observation Corps. Well, used to.” He held up the six-hundred-page manuscript he was carrying—the first two volumes of his book on the Apocalypse.

“Ooh, literature!” exclaimed Nisroc, grabbing the stack of paper out of Eddie’s hands. The Jehovah’s Witnesses had stopped by earlier in the week, and Nisroc was anxiously waiting the next installment of
The Watchtower
. He hadn’t expected it to be quite this heavy, though.