Mission (14 page)

We shook hands. It was obvious that he already knew what had happened.

‘I think you just saved my life,' I said. ‘I don't know how but – '

He shrugged it off.

‘Well, thanks, anyway. Who set me up?' I asked. ‘Was it ‘Brax's mob?'

‘Yes. They know I'm here.' He sensed my alarm and patted me on the shoulder. ‘Don't worry. I'll figure something out.'

‘What about Miriam?'

‘Miriam is going to be all right. Trust me.' His eyes held mine. They were full of strength and sincerity but none of it rubbed off on me.

‘It's easy for you to say that,' I bleated. ‘But what happens if he tries again? I mean, from what you've told me, this is the guy who never gives up.'

‘You're right,' he said. Then shrugged. ‘That's one of the risks you have to take.'

‘Oh, tremendous,' I said. ‘That's all I need.' As if this guy hadn't caused me enough problems already. I wasn't an expert on the early Christian Church but I'd picked up enough to know that few, if any, of the Apostles had lived to collect their retirement pay.

He must have known what was going through my mind. ‘Come on,' he said. ‘Snap out of it. I told you what the score was on Saturday.'

‘Yes, I know. But this is a whole different ball game.'

He smiled. ‘Leo, no one ever said any of this was going to be easy.'

‘True,' I replied. ‘But no one said that it was going to be lethal either.' I mean, what the hell? If The Man had to land on somebody's doorstep, why couldn't he have picked Billy Graham's? The guy had done pretty well out of this stuff. Someone like him should be taking the flak, not me. Then another thought slithered out of the
treacherous recesses of my mind. Suppose the whole thing was a put-up job? Engineered by The Man to persuade me to go along with some unrevealed plan?

I caught his eye and realised that he was reading me like a book. I suddenly felt embarrassed. He deserved better.

He gave me a look that was pure gold. ‘Stick with me,' he said. ‘And I'll do my best to make sure you come out of this in one piece.'

And he did. Though not quite in the way I expected.

I grabbed his arm and steered him towards the street. ‘Come on. I need a drink.'

We went to the Gulf and Western building just a few yards down the sidewalk and took the elevator up to the forty-fourth floor. I rode up without the slightest qualm. The way I figured it, nothing was going to happen to me when The Man was standing right next to me. Even so, I made sure we stepped out of the elevator together when we reached the top. It was then that I think he used a little Celestial magic because when we walked into the bar we got a table right by the huge picture window – something that
never
happened to me before. You get a fabulous view over the West Side to the Hudson River, and the George Washington bridge that links Manhattan with New Jersey.

I ordered bourbon on the rocks for both of us. As the waiter turned away, The Man asked him to add a large vodka and tonic.

‘It's to save time,' he explained. ‘I asked Miriam to join us. But she can only duck out for thirty minutes. Is that okay with you?'

‘Sure,' I said nonchalantly. I didn't even try to get into how he knew when I was going to pick him up, or where I planned to take him for a drink. Or the fact that, if Miriam was already on her way, he must have contacted her
before
I reached his hotel.

It was stunning proof of his powers of precognition but, even so, it was small beer compared to his guardian angel bit on the twenty-second floor.

Miriam arrived at the same time as the drinks but that, I am sure,
was
a coincidence. We both rose to greet her. As I took hold of her hand her fingers tightened briefly round mine and transmitted that special tingle which tells you you're still ahead in the only game in town.

‘Hi…' She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek then went to shake The Man's hand. But he took hold of her shoulders and kissed her on the cheek too. She sat down about a second before her legs gave way.
And any thoughts I had of getting lucky in bed collapsed with her.

The Man picked up his glass and sniffed it. ‘Grain alcohol?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Can your bio-system handle that? I don't want you burning a hole in the carpet.'

He raised his glass to us with a smile. ‘To the years ahead.'

‘Does that mean I can tear up my life insurance?' The question earned me a kick on the ankle from Miriam.

‘Just love one another,' he replied. ‘And let tomorrow take care of itself.'

I like to think that little shaft was aimed at Miriam. She was always making plans. But as we sat there, I couldn't help thinking of another saying of his. At least, I hope it is. Which was –
To find one's life, one has to lose it.
‘Trust me' he had said. And I certainly intended to try, but when you examined his assurances, they fell a long way short of a cast-iron guarantee of safe-conduct through the minefield he'd dropped us into. In his resurrected form, The Man was probably fireproof but Miriam and I were sitting ducks. But let's face it – what were we? Two insignificant ground-vehicles each housing a tiny spark from one of the luminous beings he was so intent on rescuing. We were no different to all the millions of other people on this planet who were playing unwitting host to the trapped Ain-folk. The Aeons whose divine nature now found expression through the human spirit. Perhaps it was for that reason, despite the never-ending catalogue of man-made horrors, it could not be extinguished. But we could. Hadn't he told me that we were expendable? At that very moment, ‘Brax and his heavies might be gathering overhead like a dark storm-cloud. Zeroing in on us from the four corners of the cosmos. Not that I thought for one moment he planned to doing something drastic like levelling New York. But he and his boys could still make life difficult. After all, this was the mob that the Empire had failed to keep the lid on. It was all very well for The Man to talk about a tomorrow but, if he didn't hold all the aces, we might not get to see the sunrise.

Don't panic, I told myself. Any minute now, the yo-yos in the longship who are trying to straighten out the Resurrection may yank him back to Jersualem and that will be the last you'll see of him. But perversely, I didn't want that either. What I wanted was the privileged pleasure of his company without the attendant dangers. The crunch line is, of course, as many have found out before me, there is no way you can come to a comfortable accommodation with Christ.

And then I thought, what the hell? We live in New York. We don't
push our luck. We try and steer clear of trouble. But what guarantee do any of us have that we're going to make it through the day? What does it take? A guy on a bike swallows his whistle instead of blowing it and wraps your spleen round his handlebars. A junkie in search of oblivion tries to cut your wallet out with a knife and takes your heart with it. A terminal cancer case skydives through a fiftieth floor window to save hospital fees and uses you as a trampoline. A .357 magnum ricochet blows away your cheesecake and the face you were feeding it into as you sit at a fast-food counter that fate has positioned opposite a bank heist shoot-out. It can happen. I can give you names and addresses of the next-of-kin. You want to live here, you play the percentages. It's the price you pay for putting the bite on the Big Apple.

As you can see, it doesn't take me long to bounce back. Miriam listened wide-eyed as I related my encounter with the missing elevator and the invisible fist. I kept it low key to avoid alarming her and to reinforce the image I liked to project of myself as a man who, besides being smooth, sharp and sexually magnetic, was also endowed with a certain nonchalant
machismo.
Which meant omitting the fact that I had, momentarily, been scared shitless.

It was touching to see how she accepted the situation without seeking any assurances for her own future safety. What was slightly less touching was the fact that she did not seek any on my behalf either. But then, maybe she knew something that I didn't. Or maybe, women really are different to men in their reaction to danger in that their first thought is for their children. If so, her motherly instincts were not directed at me but at The Man.

‘Will you be all right?' she asked, as I finished my story.

‘Yes, don't worry,' he said. ‘Brax can't harm me now. He can only make things more difficult.'

‘What do ‘Brax's boys look like?' I asked. It was one of those questions that made him raise his palms and shrug his shoulders. Which I now knew meant that I was not going to get a clear answer.

‘They come in all shapes and sizes,' he said. ‘They like to work through people if they can, but they can manifest their power and presence in various ways. They can flatten a city in the guise of a hurricane or they put on their black magic outfit and scare the hell out of people with primal images drawn from the
id – '

‘You mean like the goat-headed rider on the black horse with eyes like red-hot coals,
incubi, succubi,
vampires, hob-goblins, and
assorted monsters from the Pit.'

He nodded. ‘Yes. On the other hand, they can look like the people next door. And often are. That's when it gets a little tricky. It makes them a lot harder to spot.'

‘Are they around all the time?' I asked.

‘Some of them are,' he said. ‘A prison has to have its jailers. ‘Brax has several legions of elementals guarding Earth. There are garrisons scattered throughout the cosmos holding the Secessionist galaxies, marauding packs patrolling the Deeps, and scout ships everywhere. But their main force, under the great Black Princes, is held in reserve to counter any major intervention by the Empire.'

‘It sounds as if they've got you pretty well tied down.' I said.

The Man swallowed some bourbon and allowed himself a quiet smile. ‘It's not as simple a task as it sounds. ‘Brax's power is eternal in the sense that he cannot be destroyed but his degree of power is finite. He can divide it into an infinitely variable hierarchy of lesser beings. Creatures of his will that he can despatch to do his bidding. He can unmake the Black Princes and the Lords of Darkness that were banished with him from the Empire and re-fashion them at his whim. He can destroy life. He can corrupt it. But he cannot create it. Life is a gift of Empire. The only way ‘Brax can increase his strength is by winning the allegiance of the Celestial powers trapped in the cosmos. And he will never do that because the Empire keeps sending messengers in under the wire to bring word to the Ain-folk that they have not been abandoned. Giving them hope, the will and the means to resist through the Power of The Presence. And ‘Brax has an even bigger problem. Although Time is simultaneous the cosmic clock governing the World Below is still ticking. Everything in it is subject to the Law of Lapsed Time. Which, expressed very simply, means that you cannot be in two places at once.'

‘But …' I began.

He held up his hand. ‘I know what you're going to say. Under the rule of simultaneity, I am being born, and crucified while we sit here talking. But
not
in the same
linear
time-frames.' He turned to Miriam. ‘Are you still with me?'

‘I'm just about hanging on by my fingertips,' she confessed. ‘But keep going. Leo can explain it to me later.'

The Man looked at me. ‘Think back to that idea of linear time as a strip of film in which each frame represents a fleeting instant of Time Present that you think of as “now”. When I moved through
from the rock tomb to the Manhattan General I dropped out of that section of the film, then reappeared in the post-Crucifixion sequence some two hours later. The same thing happened over the weekend, and with my trip here today. I'll be missing from a certain number of time-frames in 29 AD. But I could drop out of the linear time dimension and re-enter it
at the same moment
somewhere else. Say – San Francisco.'

‘Yet another paradox,' I mused.

‘Yes,' said The Man. ‘But only because you lack the proper modes of perception. Like me, ‘Brax is not bound by Time and Space but, when he is operating in the physical universe – the cosmos – he is subject to the Law of Lapsed Time like everyone else. Which means that his forces, which as I've said are finite, cannot be everywhere at once. And his war with the Empire is being waged not only along the linear time dimension but also
outside
it. Throughout
all eternity.'

Maybe now you will understand what I said right at the very beginning about being caught up in a big event.

I eyed Miriam expectantly.

‘Go ahead,' she said. ‘I can't tell the Milky Way from a Hershey Bar.'

I swallowed some bourbon to help me get my bearings and focussed on The Man. ‘So what you're saying is, ‘Brax has to keep switching his forces around; moving them through space and time to try and stop you making an input.'

‘Yes. And the bigger the input, the bigger the force needed to counter it. We enjoy a slight tactical advantage in being able to choose the time and place. But against that must be set the difficulties in getting through to the World Below without being detected and the problems of protecting the Time Gate.'

I was beginning to get the picture. ‘So … the name of the game is trying to stay one jump ahead. In order to keep ‘Brax off balance.'

‘Yes. It's a constant battle of wits. But every time we get the upper hand, ‘Brax finds some way to undermine our position.' He thought about it, and shook his head glumly.

‘Oh, come on now,' I joshed. ‘Life isn't
that
bad.'

‘That's very true,' he replied. ‘But who do you think deserves the credit for that – our side or ‘Brax?'

‘Thank you,' said Miriam. As I sat there trying to think of a snappy answer. ‘I always enjoy seeing a smart New York lawyer at a loss for words. It restores my faith in God.'