Mercury Rises (19 page)

"Well, I suppose I should let you get back to things," said Eddie. "I had an idea you might be able to help me out with something, but I can see you're busy, so I'll just see myself out." He turned and walked back to the door.

"Oh," he said, turning back to face the monument. "Cody says hi."

As Eddie reached for the door handle, he was greeted by evidence of life beyond the grave. Actually it was not so much from
beyond
as from
under
. For just a second there was a deafening sound like a jet airplane taking off, which caused Eddie to turn back to the gazebo just in time to see something the size of a Volkswagen crash through it from underneath, shoot some twenty feet into the sky, and then fall to the grass a few feet from him. It appeared to be a metal box, about seven feet on each side, now badly dented and misshapen from the fall. Clouds of smoke and debris poured from the hole in the ground.

Eddie stood aghast, evaluating the scene. He noticed, on the side of the box nearest him, a sort of metal bracket, as if the box were a vehicle designed to travel along a track. After a moment, he heard a sound like a person groaning coming from inside.

With angelic grace, Eddie leaped onto the edge of the box and peered down, noticing that the top---or at least the side of the box that was currently facing up---was a sliding metal gate, the sort that used to be used on elevators. Lying inside the box, half hidden by the gate, was the form of a person. He or she was not moving.

Eddie pulled aside the gate and leaped into the box. The figure was a small man with dark skin and a slight frame. He was banged up and barely conscious. Blood streamed from a gash on his forehead.

Sirens wailed in the distance, and Eddie heard someone banging on the door to the hidden courtyard. There were going to be a lot of awkward questions if he didn't get out of here quickly.

"Mr. Lang!" Eddie shouted at the man. "Can you hear me?"

The man groaned almost imperceptibly.

"I'll save you, Mr. Lang! Your daughter is going to be so excited to see you!"

Eddie's assumption that the mysterious man in the box was Colin Lang, while not entirely rational, can to some extent be blamed on the fact that he had not yet had a chance to fully process the events of the previous several seconds. His mind had been forced to make a transition from a purely theoretical consideration of life after death to a very real and pressing real-world-situation in which a man in a steel box had been forcibly ejected from a gravesite occupying a spot of real estate that should by all rights have been a Jamba Juice. It was simply too much for him to take in.

Eddie ran his hands over the man, manipulating interplanar energy to patch up the worst of his wounds. He heard voices outside and what sounded like the jingling of keys. Lifting the man's limp body over his shoulder, Eddie leaped on top of the box. Glancing behind him, he saw the door handle turning.

Eddie crouched and then leaped with all his strength, soaring over the courtyard toward the Burger Giant next door. Uniformed men poured through the door underneath, looking about the area, bewildered. Fortunately, none of them thought to look up.

Eddie was a bit out of practice with flying, and he landed off balance on top of the Burger Giant. Losing his footing, he skidded across the gabled roof and fell to the concrete patio in front of the restaurant, with the limp body of the small-boned-but-surprisingly-heavy-presumed-to-be-the-once-thought-dead-Colin-Lang squarely on top of him.

They had landed on the side of the mall opposite most of the hubbub, but there were still plenty of civilians around to gawk at the site of two men falling to their presumed death from the roof of Burger Giant.

"We've got to get out of here, Mr. Lang!" said Eddie to the once-again-unconscious man, as he hoisted him over his shoulder.

"We're OK!" Eddie declared to the openmouthed crowd of onlookers. "My friend is just tired! From being on the roof!"

Eddie smiled in what he hoped was a reassuring manner and took off running. He ended up running around in circles in the parking lot for a good five minutes, with the hapless unconscious man draped over his shoulder, because he couldn't remember where he had parked the BMW. Eventually he found it, stuffed the small black man into the passenger seat, and drove off.

He couldn't wait to get back to Katie Midford's house and show Cody that he had recovered her father from his own grave, a bit bunged up but definitely alive. "Cody is going to be so happy you're alive, Mr. Lang. She's really great, by the way. Beautiful girl. Tall, blond and, well, I suppose
feisty
is the right word. I don't mean to be disrespectful."

He glanced over at the small, swarthy man with short, tightly kinked grayish-black hair who was slouched unconscious in the seat next to him. He hardly seemed old enough to have a daughter Cody's age. Nor white enough to have a daughter Cody's color.

Eddie reached over and once again harnessed a small amount of interplanar energy to heal the worst of the man's wounds. As the cuts sealed, the man stirred and moaned.

"Between you and me," said Eddie, "I'm pretty good at spotting a narrative thread, but I'm frankly at a bit of a loss as to how this all ties together. I mean, how is it possible that you're even alive, first of all?"

The man blinked and grunted something incomprehensible.

"Don't worry," said Eddie. "We'll get it all sorted out. Cody---your daughter, Cody, that is---will probably be able to piece it all together. She's got sort of a gift for that, I think. Why, she's got this theory about, um, streetcars and Charlie Nyx and the petroleum inferiority complex that would just blow your mind. I mean, I'm not sure I get all the nuances, but Cody..."

"Cody?" the man groaned softly, holding his hand to the bruise on his head. "Who is Cody?"

"Oh, no!" exclaimed Eddie, turning the corner onto Katie Midford's street. "You have amnesia! Do you remember your name?"

"Of course," said the man. "Jacob. Jacob Slater. Who the hell are you?"

"Hmm," said Eddie, concerned. "Let's try for best three out of five. Do you know what year it is?"

"I've got some idea," replied Jacob. "But before I let you in on that little secret, why don't you tell me who you are and what you have to do with all of this."

"All of what?" Eddie asked.

"You know, the CCD and the..." It occurred to Jacob that as an employee of the FBI, he was bound by Bureau protocol and a confidentiality agreement he had signed when he started this assignment. He had no idea whether these bonds extended to his knowledge of a secret particle accelerator beneath Los Angeles, but he figured it would be wise to err on the side of caution.

"What's a CCD?" Eddie asked. "I just went to see your grave because Cody said...I mean, your daughter Cody, she said that you died a thousand years to the day after Saint Culain, and I thought that it was a strange---"

"I don't have a daughter," said Jacob.

"Hmmm," said Eddie. "Wait, so you're not Colin Lang?"

"Who?"

"Colin Lang!" Eddie exclaimed. "That was his grave you just popped out of!"

"Grave?" Jacob asked. "I wasn't in a grave." He thought for a moment. "Was I?"

Eddie nodded. "I can see how you would be confused. They buried you in a strip mall."

"Look," said Jacob. "I wasn't buried. I'm not dead. And I'm not this Colin Lang, whoever that is. My name is Jacob Slater. I work for the FBI. The last thing I remember was being in a tunnel under some church. Now are you going to tell me who you are and what's going on here?"

Eddie nodded. "Sure," he said. "My name's Ederatz. Eddie for short." He paused and bit his lip before going on. He had to take this man's word for it that he wasn't Colin Lang. But did it really matter who he was? Normally Eddie wouldn't tell someone he had just met who he really was, but Jacob had a disarming way about him. He possessed a sort of pained earnestness that one only found in mortals, and only a very few mortals at that. Besides, Eddie's quest for the seventh Charlie Nyx book had led him directly to Jacob. If Jacob knew something about the final book, then there was no telling what else he knew. Maybe he was already fully aware who Eddie was, and he was simply testing him with these questions. Eddie didn't dare risk lying.

He continued, "I used to work for the Mundane Observation Corps. The seraphim had me assigned to report on the decline of the Ottoman Empire, but I was stuck in Cork. I made a deal with a cherub named Gamaliel to get extracted from this plane by misleading Harry Giddings about the Apocalypse, but that plan fell through with the implosion in Anaheim, so when this chick from the Finch Publishing Group came to me, looking for the seventh Charlie Nyx book, I figured---"

"The
what
in Anaheim?" Jacob interjected.

"Huh?" replied Eddie.

"What did you say happened in Anaheim?"

Eddie's brow furrowed. "You haven't heard about the Anaheim Event? It's been all over the news for six weeks. Where have you been, under a rock?"

Jacob gritted his teeth. "I know about the Anaheim Event," he said. "I want to know what
you
know about it. What hasn't been on the news."

"Oh," said Eddie. "Well, let's see. The implosion was the work of a cherub named Izbazel, a servant of Lucifer. He was trying to kill Karl Grissom, the Antichrist. Slight overkill, if you ask me, using an anti-bomb to implode a stadium full of people. And the clincher is, he missed! Karl got away and is safely ensconced on the Infernal Plane."

Jacob's mind did its best to remove the patently absurd parts of this account and ended up holding onto only "implosion" and "anti-bomb." It occurred to him that he would have dismissed these two words as well if he hadn't used them himself in an official briefing only a few hours earlier.

"How did you know it was an implosion?" he asked.

"Oh, the M.O.C. knows everything," said Eddie. "I mean, eventually. Sometimes it takes them a while to piece everything together, but it's pretty much common knowledge what happened in Anaheim."

"Common knowledge," repeated Jacob dimly.

"Oh," said Eddie, "Not on Earth. You mortals are still in the dark, as usual. But in Heaven, everybody knows about the implosion. OK, we're here."

Eddie had pulled the BMW into Katie Midford's driveway.

"Where is here?" asked Jacob, rubbing his head and peering out the window at the palatial residence.

"Katie Midford's house," said Eddie.

Jacob started, "OK, well, I think I'll just call a cab and..." He trailed off as he noticed the statuesque young blond who had just emerged from the front door. His heart quickened. "Who...is that?" he asked.

"That's Cody," said Eddie. "So she's not your daughter?"

Jacob shook his head slowly. "God, I hope not," he said.

Eddie exited the car and Jacob followed.

"Who's the runt?" asked Cody, as they approached.

"Well," replied Eddie, "he's not your father, if that's what you're thinking."

TWENTY-THREE

Once Horace Finch was safely at his residence within the Eden Two dome, he locked the doors, shuttered the windows, and then set about summoning a demon.

Summoning a demon is neither as simple nor as difficult as is often portrayed in popular media. The actual summoning process is straightforward: you simply draw a sigil representing the demon's name on a flat surface
⁹
and then repeat the demon's name several times.

The difficult part is actually getting the requested demon to answer. These days nearly all demons have summoner ID, which allows them to determine who is attempting to summon them, and they tend to ignore unsolicited summonings. Additionally, many demons are on Lucifer's official Do Not Summon list, and attempting to summon them may incur the wrath of the Infernal Communications Commission.

Finch, however, had had contact with this particular demon in the past, and had some reason to believe that he would pick up. In point of fact, his "demon" was still technically classified as an angel, but that would be rectified when Heaven found out what this particular angel had been up to. Merely responding to a summoning was a severe breach of Heavenly protocol; angels were not allowed any contact with humans that hadn't been approved through the proper channels.

After several repetitions of the name, a ghostlike image appeared above the sigil.

"What is it, Finch? I've got a lot of work to do here."

"I apologize, my lord," said Finch. "I thought you would want to know.
I found it
."

"You found it? The apple?"

"Indeed," said Finch. "After thirty years of searching, I finally found it! And right in my own backyard, of all places!"

"Didn't I tell you?" said the figure. "It was between the two streams, just as the prophecy foretold."

"Yes, exactly," said Finch. "I had been looking in the wrong place the whole time. The two streams weren't the Tigris and the Euphrates after all. They were---"

"Yes, yes, I know," said the figure. "Just as I told you. Everything is in place. Have you taken care of the CCD in Los Angeles?"

"I have, my lord," said Finch. "Blew the whole business to kingdom come. Even if those fools in Anaheim manage to dig down to the tunnels before the new CCD is up and running, they will find nothing but rubble. Nothing to connect Los Angeles to me or the Order."

"Good. How goes the problem with your scientist?"

"He's still resisting," said Finch. "But I think I can change his mind. If not, I've got a backup plan."

"Someone else to activate the CCD? I thought there was only one person on Earth who was familiar enough with the design."

"So did I," said Finch. "But it turns out there may be one more. A man named Jacob Slater, who studied under Alistair Breem. He seems to know quite a bit about the CCD. In fact, he was apparently in the CCD shortly before we destroyed it. Our agents reported that he only escaped because he had some help. Supernatural help."

"Angels?"