Hellblazer 1 - War Lord (7 page)

Bahktiar said something in Farsi, and then in English added, “I tell them let you go. We have called the chieftain of the valley, we have radio—he will take you and find the truth . . .”

“Chieftain! Local gangleader you mean,” Constantine muttered, heading down the hillside.

~

Constantine had been trudging along the dirt road for four, maybe five miles. He’d walked through the little valley and a ways beyond it. With any luck, he was heading toward the sea. But his feet were aching, stomach complaining, making him nostalgic for an out-of-body experience. It occurred to him that he was in a place where the Caspian tiger yet roamed—and he had no idea how far he was from Rasht. Might take a couple of days to walk there.

He’d come here in the dark of night, months ago, sleeping in the back of a sheep rancher’s truck. He had almost no sense of the lay of the land. “Here is monastery,” the farmer had said, and that was that.

The road was edged with outcroppings of volcanic rock, the occasional stunted tree; from time to time, small streams from snowmelt dashed by, sometimes crossing the road. Apart from the streams and the distant brown form of a wild burro cropping a patch of grass, the only movement came from a pair of vultures, wheeling far overhead. He was increasingly hungry—daydreaming of coming upon a farmer, perhaps carrying some of the local cheese and olives for lunch. There was a pomegranate tree, and that one might be a pistachio, but neither was fruiting.

A wild gerbil scuttled under the arching root of the pistachio tree and peered fretfully out at him. “I’ve heard the local people eat gerbils,” Constantine told the animal. “I didn’t ask what was in the stew at the monastery. But I’m not one for raw meat. So relax . . . crikey, I’m reduced to talking to rodents . . . I’ll be the hermit who lives with the wild gerbils . . .”

The gerbil stared at him with beady eyes, then looked down the road, and ducked back into its den.

Constantine strode broodingly along, his emotions in turmoil. He’d made a kind of specialty of adapting to unexpected situations, to sudden changes—but after a long stay at the monastery, he’d seen his spiritual master shot dead, had been shot at himself, accused of complicity with murderers, and now he was afoot in a country where his legal status was extremely dicey. He felt like a cat tumbled about in a clothes dryer. Could things get worse?

They could: a U.S. Army surplus jeep pulled around the curve ahead. It looked to be Vietnam War-era in its green cammie paint, and it was brimming with armed men. It started past, then braked, wheels screeching, and backed up beside Constantine, pluming dust that made him cough. Five large, bearded, turbaned, and bristly browed men in paramilitary togs got out and pointed their AK47s at him.

“You gents lost?” Constantine asked. “Need directions?”

“English, get in this jeep,” said the biggest one. “You will come and answer questions.”

“Always preferred to ask the questions,” Constantine said. “Never good at answering them. C-average at best. Any clue as to the topic?”

“I do not know what is questions.” The man grinned, his teeth brown from
kif,
and pointed his rifle at Constantine’s head. “If you are preferring, I can kill you now.”

Constantine got into the jeep.

Tel Aviv, Israel

“Did you arrange for the old sheikh to be eliminated?” Morris asked, looking at the hazy Tel Aviv morning. A fine view from up here.

“Which sheikh would that be, Phil?” Trevino asked. His Italian accent was slight but unmistakable. “Ah! The blue one? I did, yes—I did. It was reported to me just before you came—he is dead. One shot. Muhadar is very good.”

Trevino poured Morris some more coffee, being careful with the delicate white china. A tall man with a thick head of white hair, dark, bruised-looking eyes, and a receding chin, Alfonse Trevino was a defrocked Roman Catholic bishop, at ease with Morris, whom he’d known for some years. The two men were seated at breakfast on the penthouse balcony of Trevino’s Tel Aviv hotel—the costliest suite in the costliest hotel in town. The Servants of Transfiguration paid for the hotel, after all, and the SOT had accumulated nearly forty billion dollars, counting the Krugerrands, the platinum, and the diamonds, and not counting the uranium mine.

Morris was a little younger—an American, as always in a cream-colored Brooks Brothers suit. A former televangelist, Morris was short and wiry, his black hair slicked back, his gray eyes flat, his lips a straight line in a tanned face marred by a wine stain. He was a wealthy man; he could have had the wine stain removed, but the port mark on his cheek was shaped roughly like a scimitar, which had significance to Morris. His tie tack was a single gold Christian cross.

He sipped his coffee and gazed out at the humming city. The sparkling blue Mediterranean, palm trees pacing the beach; a group of synagogues with gleaming white domes; nearer were the hotel high-rises and the architectural bristle of business eminence: Microsoft, Cisco, AOL, IBM all had imposing facilities here. Amusing to think that these graceful, proud skyscrapers would all come crashing down, probably to fall one into the next like so many dominos, when the Great Disclosure came about.

“We embellished the event quite skillfully, I believe,” Trevino said. “The sniper’s car was stolen from an American embassy in Turkey. Eventually it will be traced back there. The mullahs will be able to blame the CIA. Of course, they wanted the Blue Sheikh dead for years; only his support amongst the local people, and his avoidance of politics, kept him safe.”

“And the CIA,” Morris observed, “will blame the mullahs. The man we used, after all, was with Fedayeen-e-Iran, before he was expelled.”

“Yes. It’s all but a small part of the design, of course. But one likes everything neat. It will be necessary to have the assassin killed, I think. Perhaps we will make it appear that the Mossad did it . . .”

“Did anyone see the shooting?” Morris asked. It was indeed a small matter. But he was detail oriented.

“Yes—some sort of British spiritual seeker. We don’t have his name yet. Someone at the monastery radioed to the local warlord. As this warlord is in our pay, I have asked him to pick the man up. He could be MI6, after all. We have a number of projects in that area that MI6 would be interested in. The sheikh may have known about them.”

“Someone British. Well. Have him interrogated. Thoroughly.” He toyed with a slice of toast and chuckled. “ ‘Local warlord,’ you say. Funny, the people who get that title. Like mistaking a lion’s flea for the lion.”

Trevino cleared his throat warningly. He instinctively shied away from mentioning the great powers, except in a ritualistic context. Morris saw it differently. It was not as if the War Lord would come before he was ready. Every piece would have to be in place, every proper note precisely sung, before he would be set free again. That was God’s will.

“I wonder if it was not a waste to kill the Blue Shiekh,” Morris remarked, after some moments of listening to the honking, the rumbling of the city. “Such power. If he could have been brought to heel . . .”

“That one—never. He was a rogue agent of the Ground of Being. He would not understand what we’re about. He would have been brought into opposition against us. He had to be removed from the board. And in the Hidden World, he will be occupied with bliss.”

Morris looked up from spreading marmalade on a triangle of toast, but decided not to reproach Trevino for the use of diabolic terminology. The “Ground of Being,” the “Hidden World”—to Morris, anyway, this was the language of occultism, ergo the language of Satan. There was only Heaven and Hell after death, as far as Morris was concerned. “This orange marmalade with the little bits of peel in it—it’s so bitter. I can’t get used to it.”

“It comes from England. The British like things bitter or bland. Little in between.” Trevino looked at his watch. “I expected to be called to the meeting by now.”

“Adverse winds,” Morris said, dabbing his lips with a napkin. “Coggins’s plane was delayed. But he’ll be here. Is everything arranged in Carthaga? Any problems with the CIA? They have a station in Carthaga . . .”

“The CIA? No. ‘The Company’ is totally fuddled. They have no idea what we’re about. The president tells them as little as possible, of course—they know nothing about the great plan. Nor the British. ‘The Firm,’ at any rate, has almost no operatives in Carthaga . . .”

“A shame we can’t use a ready-made war, like Iraq.”

“Not for the consecration of the seed-heads. No. We need something fresh.”

“By the way—this table, this balcony—it has all been swept?”

“I have antibugging devices about me always. Don’t worry, Phil. Even the Mossad is without a clue what we’re about. They have almost no one in Carthaga—there is no one to oppose us there. Scarcely anyone has even heard of that little postage stamp of a country. The first stage will come off immaculately—ah!” His cellphone was chiming. He took the tiny instrument from a pocket and put on a pair of glasses so he could read the text message on its even tinier screen. “I see that Coggins has arrived. The meeting is called; we’re to be there in an hour and a half. I have time to shave and change. I see I also have a call from our man in Iran. Probably asking what to do with the Britisher.”

“The Brit?” Morris yawned. Jet lag was a bitch. “Once they wring him dry, see that they kill him. And see to it they do it fairly soon.”

4

MERCURY RISING

A little south of Rasht, Iran

T
he smoke-wreathed minarets of Rasht were just in sight when Constantine, sitting between two gunmen in the backseat of a jeep, made up his mind to do something highly risky, quite possibly stupid, and with a good chance of being fatal.

He was fairly used to making that kind of decision. This time it came when the guy with the brown teeth, nattering to his heavily armed pals, used the Farsi word for
kill
while looking at Constantine. Not a good sign.

Constantine was still feeling weak after days of fasting—and after journeying so far out of body he’d nearly been unable to come back. His latent psychic abilities had grown somewhat over the years, but his capacity to read minds was still uneven at the best of times—local conditions, his own condition, and the mental ability of his subjects affected it. Right now he wasn’t picking up much from these thugs, maybe because they didn’t do much thinking. You can’t read what isn’t there. He sensed only a general air of malevolence. The rifles and their seizing him were no proof of anything—people in this part of the world carried rifles the way people in Manchester toted umbrellas, and suspicion was a way of life here. But Constantine was sure of it; he had to escape from these bastards before they got him behind locked doors, or he’d never come out alive.

It wouldn’t be long before they got to those locked doors. They were roaring down a potholed two-lane asphalt road at about sixty-five, top speed for the old jeep. “Only some minutes more, Little Satan,” Brownteeth said. He was driving, turning to leer over his shoulder at Constantine. “And we are there. Special warehouse we keep for just such as you. Not crowded. Plenty room for you. Some bars, a chair, some concrete floors, some bloodstains, eh? Good for Little Satan! You have made this kind of questioning many times, with your MI6.”

“What’s this Little Satan stuff, then?” Constantine asked.

“You are from England, no?”

“Oh, that’s right. America is Big Satan and the UK is Little Satan. And we think of Syria as Little Asshole and Iran as Big Ass—”

He didn’t get the rest out—the man on his left cracked him on the side of the head with the muzzle of his gun.

Constantine’s head rang with the blow, and a little blood started down from his temple, but in a way he had needed the wake-up call. Pain called up strength in Constantine—and he had to get some strength back into him, to carry out his plan.

Me risky, stupid, probably fatal plan. What the hell. Nothing’s perfect.

Weakness or not, he was going to need to tone up his psychic energy field for this. He closed his eyes, sat up straighter—difficult to maintain the right posture with the jeep bouncing around on the bad road—turned his attention away from the throbbing in the side of his head, extended his focus first to his body as a whole, then to the body’s energy channels. He used his attention to tune those channels, as the pulses in light are tuned by a ruby to a consistent frequency, and then opened a channel at the top of his head, an increased receptivity to the finer energy flow from the cosmos itself. He drew power down from the cosmos—he was not able to get much of that power now, just enough—and used it to increase the strength of the energy field around his body. He was aware that the men seated on either side of him were stirring in their seats; they felt uncomfortable without knowing why.

When he felt himself ready, Constantine opened his eyes and focused them on the back of Brownteeth’s head. He consolidated his energy field further—using a technique the Blue Sheikh himself had taught him—and projected an invisible pseudopod, stretching his energy field out to encompass the driver. He saw the man shiver. Contact.

He maintained the contact with one part of his attention, with the rest focusing his mind’s eye, forming a clear image, sending it through the psychic pseudopod and into Brownteeth’s brain . . .

Suddenly, two enormous lorries came roaring down the road toward them—GM semitrucks of the sort Constantine had seen when he’d visited America. They were coming right at the jeep, at top speed, looming up, about to crash into the jeep and crush it under gigantic wheels. But only Constantine and Brownteeth saw the trucks—since they weren’t actually there.

Behind the wheel, Brownteeth shrieked in terror, triggering confused shouting from his compatriots as Constantine ducked down, bracing himself between front and backseat, his head between his legs—then Brownteeth jerked the wheel of the jeep hard over to the right, trying to veer from the path of the illusory semitrucks.

The jeep spun out, smacking sideways through barbed wire fence and into the muddy field beside the road, then flipping to tumble, again and again, across the muddy field, Constantine cursing himself as they went. “Con—”
bump, bang
“—stantine you blood—”
bang, thump
“—y fucking—”
crack, smack
“—berk!”