Angel City (34 page)

“You saw the bottom line.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your thoughts?”

“Confused, sir.”

“Because?”

He was listening to her voice, analyzing her.

“Officer, I would appreciate it if you did not appraise the significance of your words before speaking. It only muddies the communication process between our species.”

“Yes, sir. I'm having a hard time accepting the results.”

“Please elaborate.”

“It seems to confirm your suspicion that she wasn't impregnated by the enemy.”

“Can you find room in the data for any margin of error?”

“None,” she said.

“Indicating?”

“According to the results of the light scan, Madame Taylor's son is normal. He's an ordinary human being.”

“And this is why you find it difficult to accept the results. You believe the boy to be special, unique.”

“I know he is, sir.”

“Would this be an emotional reaction because of what it would imply if he is an ordinary boy?”

She felt her throat constrict with anger.

“Yes, sir. And if I may say, cutting them loose would be . . .”

“Would be what, Officer?”

“Evil, sir.”

“Walking away is the most terrible and necessary part of our job. Too often, most assuredly. I understand why, as a human being, you would find walking away from them to be evil. But that's the way it is in paradise.”

“Not for me, sir.”

“I beg your pardon, Officer?”

“I will not leave them. Not after Portland. Not after they saw him.”

“The saxophoneman, you mean.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Officer, you are aware that our kind, including those bound by oath to us, are forbidden to interfere in the manner or time of anyone's death.”

“Yes, sir, I'm very aware of it. I'm also aware that if the light scan is accurate, then HQ will pull all protection from Madame Taylor and Max.”

“And you will choose to stay with them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Knowing full well that we will wipe your memory of all knowledge of us, and the truth of existence in this place. You will be returned to one of them.”

“Yes, sir.”

Officer Jannsen watched Inspector Gobet watching her. One of those showdown moments wherein the inspector waited for the next word to be spoken to determine the manner of a subject's thinking. Waiting for it, Officer Jannsen had another thought.

“These aren't the real results. You've intercepted the real results and sent HQ a fake.”

She watched the inspector light and inhale from one of his hand-rolled cigarettes with the gold filters. For a moment, she considered the oddity of working in the service of ancient beings from an unknown place; beings mankind called angels, and all of them exhibiting what humans would classify as a serious drug habit. She watched the inspector exhale.

“For the moment, let's say I seem to have mistyped a few numbers,” he said.

Officer Jannsen remembered her conversation with Inspector Gobet ordering the light scan in Portland:
Our operations in protecting
Madame Taylor and the child are based on the assumption
she was raped and impregnated by the enemy . . . cannot go
into details . . . need confirmation on the boy's status, one way
or the other.
An ordinary boy, not conceived by the enemy, but not conceived by an ordinary man. That left one option.

“You discovered Max was conceived by one of your own kind,” she said. “That's the confirmation you were looking for in the light scan.”

“That was the primary possibility. But after reviewing the genuine results of the scan, and the case file of the Lausanne job, I'm ruling out that possibility as well.”

“Sir, there are no other possibilities of conception. Not for the human beings.”

“Outside the realm of the legends and myths of men, you mean.”

“Sir?”

She watched Inspector Gobet draw deeply from his cigarette and allow himself a moment of pure radiance before continuing to speak.

“‘Who, by procreation, is the primal father of truth? Who created the course of the sun and stars? Through whom does the moon wax and wane? These very things, and others, I wish to know.'”

She knew the words. From the Ushtavaiti Gatha of Zoroaster. She wondered at the connection. Religious mystic, prophet, priest from the Bronze Age. Born anywhere from Azerbaijan to Iran, lived anytime from the sixth to second millennium
BCE
. She'd studied him at university in Comparative Religions. Monotheist, dualist, articulated the concept of free will amid the creation. Good thoughts, good words, good deeds, would transform the material world into . . . paradise. And she remembered some required reading. John Malcolm's
History of Persia
in 1815. He had a line about Zoroaster. Born of an immaculate conception by a ray of the Divine Reason.

“With all due respect, sir, what are you saying?”

She listened as the inspector spent the next hour walking her through the real results of the light scan. She heard the words—
conceived of light
,
evolution
,
dream catcher
,
enemy knows
,
traitor in HQ
,
lockdown
—and when the inspector was finished with all his words, she signed off.

She sat very still for a few minutes, till she realized the guard manning the desk would know the inspector had already signed off the bird. And he'd remember the Quiet Room wasn't for being quiet, it was for receiving bad news. Officer Jannsen breathed calmly and hit the switch to open the door. She stepped out of the room.

“All members of the detail have returned to the compound and checked in?”

“Yes,
Chef
.”

“What about in Grover's Mill?”

The guard tapped a few keys on his computer, took a few seconds to read the information on screen.

“Everyone is on site.”

She took a calming breath.

“Pass the word: Stay put, it's going to be bumpy for a few seconds. They're amplifying the time warp to level one. Nobody gets in or out.”

III

H
ARPER BLINKED.

He was still in coach 17 of TGV 9261 to Lausanne. Crossing through the hills of Burgundy toward Dijon now. Passing farms, fields of cows, thick woods at three hundred kilometers per hour. Then it all went black as the train ducked into a long tunnel. Then there was a shudder and a ripping of light as another train passed in the opposite direction, heading to Paris. He felt his heart race, and he felt sick again.

“Easy, boyo, it's just the bloody train.”

He pulled his eyes from the dark, took refuge in the glow of overhead reading lamps throughout the train car. The sleeping Chinese gentleman who'd been snoring next to him: gone. The American couple on their way to take the waters at Leukerbad: gone. The husband left his newspapers scattered over the table. Maybe he was being nice. Maybe, being a Yank, he expected someone else to toss them in the trash. Harper looked around the train car. Everybody else in place, with one new addition. A woman sitting across the aisle, facing him. Young, blond, wearing a dark brown hooded shearling sheepskin coat. There was a string of beads hanging from her right hand, and she was swinging it this way and that way, and the beads made tiny clacking sounds each time they wrapped around her index finger. There was a scent in the air, something familiar. Had to be coming from the beads, Harper thought. His eyes zoomed in. A string of 108 beads made of Tulasi wood.
Japa mala
they were called . . . Hindu prayer beads used in the recitations of mantras or in evoking the names of gods. Which might have been what the young woman was doing. Except as her lips rattled off silent words in rapid succession, she was staring straight at Harper. At least it seemed she was; hard to tell. Her eyes were hidden behind a pair of tortoiseshell Ray-Bans. The train emerged from the tunnel and into the light. The young woman stopped chanting, stopped swinging her beads.

“Did I scare you?” she said.

Harper straightened up as a message kicked in from the depths of his own reptilian brain:
Must not die now.
He worked his options with bandaged hands and a right arm in a sling. Weren't many. Lunge ahead, ram his elbow into her throat, and break her windpipe topped the list.

“Depends,” Harper said. “Where did everyone go?”

She nodded to where the Chinese man had been snoring.

“Him? He's in the café car drinking beer.”

Harper nodded to where the American couple had been.

“What about them?”

She took off her Ray-Bans, clipped them to the collar of her T-shirt. Harper scanned her eyes; they were clean.

“The Americans? They're in the café car, too. They're drinking tea.”

Harper relaxed, sat back in his seat. “Right.”

“I'm Karoliina. I'm from Tampere. It's in Finland, in the middle bit. I'm on my way to Montreux to meditate. You?”

“I live in Lausanne.”

“I got that. From the American lady. What I wanted to know was what you're going to do in Lausanne.”

Harper analyzed her voice. She was telling the truth. She spoke English with a Scandinavian postal code. He tried to shift gears on the manner of her thinking.

“I didn't know the Paris to Lausanne train made a stop in Finland,” Harper said.

“Ha, ha, you're funny. I just flew in from the States last night, got on the first train this way. There's an ashram close by there. It's in Les Avants.”

“Is that where you're going?”

“Depends. Ever heard of Locomotora?”

“Interesting name for an ashram.”

“It's not. It's a post-rock band from where I live in Tampere. There's a lot of post-rock bands there. But they're the best. They're the ones who know the real deal, the big scoop.”

“You don't say.”

“I just did.”

She gave the beads another go this way, then that way. Her lips reciting whatever words they were in rapid-fire silence. Then:

“If you're wondering what I'm doing, I'm praying.”

“For who?”

“For you.”

“For me?”

“That's what I said. I was up in first class and got bored. I went to the café car to see if there was anyone interesting. I was told to look for someone interesting on the train. I got your story from the American lady. It sounded
really
interesting.”

“My story?”

“About your accident in Paris. Hit by a bus, she said. She thought you were such a nice British gentleman. Very polite and reserved, didn't talk much. I've never met anyone hit by a bus before, so I came looking for you. I thought I'd pray for you. I do that a lot. I look for people I can pray for. I saw you and said to myself,
That guy needs my prayers.
You should check out Locomotora. The band, I mean.”

“How did you know I was the interesting chap you were looking for?”

“How hard is it to find a guy who looks like he's been hit by a bus and is sitting in coach seventeen of the TGV 9261? You know, you're lucky.”

“So the American lady kept telling me,” Harper said.

“I don't mean the bus.”

“No?”

“No. I mean I found you just in time. Your aura was surrounded by the Five Poisons.”

“Sorry?”

“Ignorance, Pride, Attachment, Jealousy, Anger. They were all floating around you. I chased them away.”

“Cheers.”

“
Olet tervetullut.
That means—”

“You're welcome.”

“You speak Finnish?”

“Picked up a few words here and there.”

She did her bead-flipping thing, recited her magic words to herself. Then, still staring at Harper, she stopped. She leaned across the table.

“
Tiedän kuka olet.
Do you know what that means?”

“Sure.”

“What's it mean?”

“It means ‘I know who you are.'”

She nodded approvingly. “Pretty good.”

Maybe she was one of the sensitive ones, Harper thought, able to sense the presence of his kind on Earth. Or maybe she was just barking mad with a capital
B
. And so what? The two were not exclusive of each other and were often complementary. Didn't matter, really. What mattered was the odds of their lives crossing by chance were working out at 35 mill to 1.

“I know what you're thinking,” she said.

“What's that?”

“You're thinking this isn't an accident. You and me on this train. Right here, right now. But you don't know what it is. That's what you're thinking.”

“You don't say.”

“There you go with that ‘you don't say' stuff. Is that one of the rules for your gang? Never tell anyone who you are?”

Harper stared at her.

“Sorry, what's your name?”

“Karoliina. From Tampere. It was a sign, wasn't it?”

“Define ‘it.'”

She leaned over the aisle and tapped her finger on the front page of the
Daily Mail
. The photo of the comet with the understated headline, “What the Hell Was That?!”

“You saw it, didn't you?” she said.

“So did a couple million other people.”

“Billions, but I know what it really means.”

“You do?”

“Tietysti, etkö?”

“Sure, I know what it means. It means a piece of a comet named Giacobini-Zinner burned up upon entering the Earth's atmosphere.”

“Says who?”

“An eminent astrophysicist from Oxford. At least he will.”

“When?”

“Tonight. He's giving a lecture at l'Académie des sciences in Paris. It'll be in all the papers tomorrow. Along with some impressive supporting data from EPFL.”

“What's EPFL?”