Get Blank (Fill in the Blank) (23 page)

“You know the OTO, huh?”

“Affirmative.”

I pulled my phone from my pocket. It was totally dead. “You mind if I charge this?”

VC took his hands off the wheel, snatched the phone, and plugged it in. He unplugged it immediately and handed it back. I was pretty sure we were going to go rocketing into the twenty-foot culvert that paralleled the freeway, but the car seemed to know where we were going and stayed locked into its lane.

My phone beeped, fully charged. Gotta love Little Green Men technology. I unlocked the screen, saw I had a voicemail, and checked it.

“Jonah, I got your message.” It sounded like a little-girl version of Dracula. I smiled. Oana Constantinescu. She was alive, or was when she had called, which was in the middle of my sewer crawl. “Don’t call back. This phone goes in the garbage when I hang up. I’m alive and safe, but I’m hurt. Four bastards came into my house with guns. It was a hit. You probably know Mina Duplessis is in jail, and you probably know as well as I do that she is innocent. Free her and I bet you will find who tried to kill me. And then I owe
you
one.”

The message ended. I definitely could have used her, but at least she was all right. That helped a little. I saved the message because I’m a sentimental soul. “Oana is still alive.”

“There is verification of that unit’s continued existence?”

“She called last night.”

“Interrogation on the subject of dirt naps?”

“She’s in hiding, VC, and I don’t think she knows any more than we do. It seems to bear out the theory that someone’s after the five of you, though. I figured it was the Whale.”

“Cetaceans are seldom a danger to LAM.”

“No, I meant Vassily Zhu... wait, does that mean whales are
sometimes
a danger?”

“Vassily Zhukovsky has suffered dissolution.”

“Yeah, I know that now. There were others who knew about you, weren’t there?” I thought of what Neil had said, that Stan Brizendine knew I had infiltrated those groups in the Gang of Five and had admired my initiative. If Neil had told his boss about it, there was a chance the others had as well, a group that included Russian mobsters, space aliens, and black ops killers.

I rattled the suspects through my head, but a combination of lack of sleep and various aches and pains from the last two days kept the thinking from bearing any fruit.

On the stereo: loud static with muddy voices mumbling underneath.

I turned to look at VC. He tapped the wheel and bobbed his head like he was listening to music. I could only shrug.

“Hey, you think you could get me something to wear?”

“Affirmative. Suitable togs await beside the prime matter.”

I leaned back between the seats. Sitting next to the coffeemaker and the Genesis Flail, and camouflaged by being the same color as the jet-black upholstery, was a black disc that I would have described as looking like a record album if that hadn’t made me feel incredibly old. I climbed into the back, emptied my pockets onto the seat, then stripped out of my filthy shirt and pants. There wasn’t much modesty to be had when dealing with the Men in Black. VC’s bosses had seen my colon, so what was the point?

The disc was covered in something almost like shrink wrap, but when I drew a finger across it, the stuff split down the path I traced and fell off; when I looked for it later, it had vanished. The disc proved to be layer upon layer of mashed-down clothing. First was the black suit jacket. I peeled it off the top and shook it out into something approaching a garment. Then came the pressed white shirt, the skinny black tie, and the black slacks. The next layer straightened out with a pop. Wingtips. I cast those aside. If Mina couldn’t get me to abandon Chuck Taylor, there was no way Victor Charlie could. Lastly, the black fedora snapped into shape, disgorging a pair of black shades.

I pulled on the MiB uniform. It was a smidge too small, making me look like a hipster government agent, or maybe a Reservoir Dog who had gained a little weight recently. I checked myself in the mirror. Between the hat, the shades, and the black-and-blue nose, I was still pretty unrecognizable. It would have to do.

I scooted back into the front seat.

“You can burn those clothes,” I said.

“Affirmative.”

“No, wait, I was jok—”

The back seat burst into blue-white flame for a split second. When it was gone, so were my clothes. The coffeemaker and the Genesis Flail sat there, unharmed.

“What was that, Chekov’s Flamethrower?”

“The inquiry does not match existing parameters. Abort, retry, fail?”

“What’s the difference between abort and fail? Other than one making a certain kind of person cringe?”

“The inquiry does not match existing parameters. Abort, retry, fail?”

“You’re a blast, VC.”

“Stone cold, Daddy-O.”

The Caddy pulled off the freeway onto Orange Grove, a scenic street connecting the cities of Pasadena and South Pasadena. The section we were on was almost perfectly straight, lined on either side by mansions and apartment buildings. These days it was chiefly famous for housing the headquarters of the Rose Parade, and don’t get me started on how the goddamn Templar keep that thing going.

The Templar, there was another one. That would be the Knights Templar, who claim to trace their origins back to the same group of Crusaders who used to protect pilgrims on the way to the holy land. Whether or not the line is unbroken is immaterial; the important part is that they believe it is, so they’ve kept up the various grudges for which the Templar are infamous.

With all of these enmities, it’s not uncommon that the Templar sometimes feel the need to eliminate someone. Templar hitters could never use guns, though. I swear, they were like the hipster assassins of the Information Underground. No, if they were going to take someone out, it was going to be with a broadsword. You know, like great great great great (etc.) grandpa would’ve wanted.

Remember in
Godfather,
when Michael is going to take out Sollozzo and McClusky? He goes into the can to get a pistol that Clemenza planted for him earlier. I’ve never been Michael, but I’ve been Clemenza a ton of times. This was one of those times.

I knew what I was there to do even without them telling me in so many words. When Richard Colby, the local cheese of the Knights Templar, ordered me to hide a broadsword in the bathroom of the Bonaventure Hotel lobby, I didn’t think he was trying some new terrifying alternative to toilet paper. I knew that these crazy medieval fetishists were going to hack someone up—although I never conclusively found out who. Harbor Patrol pulled an oil drum out of the drink that was stuffed with a dismembered corpse, but there are so many murders in the City of Angels, it’s impossible to know if that was the one.

In any case, I smuggled the blade into the hotel in a guitar case and had to wait in one of the stalls for a good thirty minutes before the bathroom emptied out. Only then did I tuck the sword into the ceiling panels. I never pointed out to Richard that a pistol would have been easier. I could have taped it right behind the toilet tank just like in
The Godfather,
even, which would have been both sensible and classic. No, even then I knew the Templar were maniacs.

VC turned down a side street and pulled over in front of a craftsman mansion. This was Agapé Lodge, headquarters of the Ordo Templi Orientis in LA. It had been a while.

An iron gate and high wall separated the house from the street. As we walked up, a flock of wild parrots flew overhead, screaming like madmen. VC touched the callbox. “Victor Charlie to see Lord Hezebolus.”

The gate buzzed and creaked open. I climbed up the concrete staircase leading to the large porch overlooking green Pasadena. VC followed, shutting the gate behind him.

The porch was a comfortable place to spend an afternoon. Concrete, but decorated with wicker chairs and big cushions, it was clearly a place where people did a great deal of reading. The OTO loved books. It was their best feature. The door was a dark piece of oak, surrounded by a few windows looking into a spacious foyer equipped with a sturdy staircase heading up. I knew what was going to be happening inside, so I steeled myself.

I was about to knock when VC opened the door and wandered in. I followed. The rooms in the front were empty, though the one on the right had a half-finished canvas drying in the corner. The painting depicted Dora the Explorer in such a way that might lead to litigation or, at the very least, a watch list of some kind.

VC kept walking, ignoring the stairway and going down a hallway leading into the back. Doors opened up on either side. I tried not to look. Really I did.

Three people were having acrobatic sex without touching. They had been suspended around the room like Cirque du Soleil really dropped the ball on that one and were sort of moaning and thrashing. They were all in their mid-forties and soft for it.

In another room, a group played Arkham Horror. Okay, that actually looked like fun.

In the next room, there was a seminar on the proper goat-sacrifice procedure. While the instructor, a man who looked almost exactly like Stanley Kubrick, gestured to the obviously frightened goat, a student raised his hand like this was elementary school. It probably was, basically.

In another room, people were smoking out and listening to Phish. I hate Phish.

We emerged into a large back room, where big glass doors looked out onto a wooden patio and an overgrown backyard. VC and I ignored the people having sex back there and stepped outside.

“What now?” I asked my guide.

He was motionless, like someone had hit his switch. I sighed and waited.

A moment later, a rotund man came around the side of the house. He wore a silk robe, gold and embroidered with black roses, a helmet with a pair of real ram’s horns curving around his head, and a pair of flip-flops. Other than that, he was nude. His chest hair was thick and mostly black, covering an impressive gut but failing to hide the gold rings in his nipples. Though there was literally no way he could see his penis—it had long since been relegated to the status of legend for him—I could see it flapping around like a dead duck in the window of a Chinese market during an earthquake. This was Hezebolus, the present Caliph of the OTO and one of my many employers.

“Victor Charlie,” he said in a curiously high-pitched, singsong voice. “You’re here. Thank the gods.” Bolus paused, hands on his hips, standing like Superman if the sun’s yellow rays had turned to pork fat.

“The unit you have requested is present. Temporary Buckaroo awaits the download.”

Bolus looked me over. “Lester?” he ventured.

I thought I might as well play along with VC. It gave me a plausible reason for my duplicity and, besides, I’d played one of these guys in the past. “Affirmative. This unit has multiple designations.”

Bolus nodded. “I had no idea you were so close to the spirit guides before now. I’m impressed.”

“Hubba hubba, Daddy-O.”

“Uh, right. Can I offer you fellows something? Lunch? Wanda?” He raised his voice. “Wanda, guests!”

One of the people having sex in the other room poked her head up. She looked like someone’s aunt. She got up, playfully smacking a chubby hand from her drawn-out body.

“Negative,” I said, trying not to show any fear. “This unit requires information, not herpes simplex.”

Bolus frowned, watching me closely. “Wanda, you can get back to it.”

She dove back in. I figured from the looks of everyone involved, they’d have to stop soon, if only to pick someone up from soccer practice.

“Victor Charlie assured me that you are the... uh... unit to handle this situation.”

“Need more detailed parameters regarding this situation.”

“The information I have. I need to sit down.” Bolus waddled over to a wicker chair and sat. I couldn’t help but imagine what his ass was going to look like when he got up: a giant hairy waffle. I sat down across from him, grateful his gut had swallowed his genitals. He tasted the air like a reptile and said, “There are several groups of Satanists in the southland. For a long time, there were two, the First Reformed Church of the Antichrist and the Order of the Morning Star. The Church worshiped the devil as an expression of ultimate evil. Bad is good, and so on. In the beginning, there was a good theological reason for this, namely that without evil, there can be no good, but they have degenerated into people who do horrible things for no real reason.”

He wasn’t saying anything I didn’t know. In the parlance of the illuminated, this kind of Satanist was known as an Asmodean because of the name they gave to their god.

“The Order of the Morning Star,” Bolus went on, “sees the devil as the real good in the universe. They’re almost Gnostic in a way, recognizing the Old Testament God as the true source of evil. Lucifer rebelled in an attempt to create a better world and was cast out and punished.” Considering the stuff in the Old Testament, it was a little hard to see Yahweh as anything other than a bipolar bully. Didn’t mean I was eager to sign up with the opposition. Well, technically I had signed up to both sides, but with my usual amount of loyalty. Anyway, these kinds of Satanists were known as Luciferians. Always helps to have your terminology correct.

Bolus continued. “For a long time, these two groups existed in relative harmony. Oh, they had their little spats, but it was stable.” You know, like most holy wars. Idiot. I had been on both sides of those “little spats” and there was nothing stable about them. And for all the Luciferian rhetoric about goodness and light, they were just as bad as the Asmodeans. Worse, actually, because at least the Asmodeans were honest about being dicks.

“Until recently,” Bolus sighed. “Now there is a third group, the Sons of the Crimson Gaze. They’re new. I’m not certain where they came from, exactly, but they’re stealing converts from both the Church and the Order at an alarming rate. They’ve even stolen a few from us. I reached out to the spirit guides for assistance, and they sent Victor Charlie to me.”

It was a huge amount of information. It didn’t necessarily explain everything I had seen with Paul’s people, but it all seemed to fit. The heightened security, the ostentatious new digs, the desperation for new power and converts.