Bleak History (23 page)

“I don't trust him. I'm gonna get out of town but I need some money. I've got ajob lined up. When I bring in the skip, I want to send the money to your account, so I can do this without the CCA being all over me. I'll get the money later. You can keep twenty percent.”

“I will handle the money for you, and I don't need your twenty percent. You sure your phone is okay?”

“Unless they've identified you.”

“No. I have used much power to keep me safe from their eyes. They cannot see me,
cher darlin .
You do your job, have them send the money to me—and come to me, I will give you your money. They don't know who I am.”

Bleak wasn't so sure. But he needed money. He'd take the risk.

He made his other call, to Vince at Second Chance Bail Bonds, then he dropped the phone off the Brooklyn Bridge, into the dark green water far below.

CHAPTER
TEN

Early evening, the same day. On a military transport plane flying over Maine, heading to Long Island.

The big C-l 19D was noisy and uncomfortable, not even designed for passengers.
I'm freight,
Loraine mused, looking up from her laptop. The plane was mostly used to move armored hydrogen Humvees and small artillery pieces, but the metal floor had grooves where seat supports could be inserted, and seats had been fixed in place, in the echoing whale's belly of the transport; Loraine sat in the front, with a view of the cockpit, the open door showing the two AF pilots, the cloud-mist streaming over the windshield.

 She was tired. The plane was drafty and smelled of jet fuel; the trip to the Arctic had tired her out; the revelations on the trip too were a kind of burden to carry. Information that changed the world had a weight of its own. She kept seeing the artifact, in her mind's eye. Dr. Helman had claimed it was all that stood between humanity and chaos.

Helman was sitting on her right, frowningly tapping at a laptop, now and then bobbling his head to himself. On her own laptop she was reviewing the personnel file of a female agent just transferred in, Teresa Caffee; she was supposed to check Caffee out and sign off on her. Any woman was welcome on the team, as far as Loraine was concerned. Only one other woman agent in CCA, in the Washington offices.

She had another window open on the laptop, and she restlessly went back to that page now, to reread a passage from Newton's
Cryptojournal
that Helman had copied to her. The journal had been written in code, which decrypted into Latin, a language Newton sometimes used for scientific treatises; the cryptographer had rendered the Latin into modern English:

Those of us who twine the cross with the rose have long kept accounts, books of the damned, where is written what could not happen and yet did. Much is mere fancy, and superstition. Witches said to be witches are rarely witches. But in the secret corners of the Hidden Earth, magic bloats like a Plague blister, and many of the legends of the past were not legend. Visitors from the Farther Place now penetrate freely; fairies and the less fair are nightly upon us. Now we see events conspire to an increase, and swarms will  rise from the darkness. Powers come upon those with the Blood; some diabolic, some angelic, but none have a place in the new world of men. If God did not want us to contain this chaos, He would not have given us the means: the artifact of the ancients, which Solomon knew, and to which he added his Seals. But it is older than Solomon; it is older than the pyramids. And the [diagrams?] on the Sarmunna [or, Sarmoung] sheepskin tell us how to set about repairing, recommencing its Wall of Force, so that the world is the world of the mind and not of the heart's darkest impulses.

Loraine shivered and closed the excerpt and went back to the personnel file, determined to put it out of her mind for a time. Personnel was busywork, but she was glad to have it. Glad to think about anything but the artifact, for a time; anything but the heart's darkest impulses.

Someone came swaying up from the rear of the aircraft, gripping the backs of a seat to keep his footing in the turbulence: Drake Zweig, in his tight gray suit, tight gray smile on his lipless mouth. Vigorously rubbing his nose, he stood in front of his assigned seating, to the left of her, then let the plane's motion dump him into the seat. “Slam dunk!” he said, grinning at her.

She winced. The phrase
slam dunk was
not pleasant to people working in the American intelligence community.

He buckled himself in, irritating her by leaning over, glancing at her laptop. “You know that pisser back there, it's smaller than the ones the airlines got. Didn't think they could be made smaller.”

“Uh-huh.” She tapped at the laptop, making notes on Agent Caffee, hoping Zweig would give up talking to her.

“That the file on the new agent?” Zweig asked, craning closer. “Yeah, she worked with some guy who telepaths with dogs and cats, for Christ's sake, how useful is that? But I bet you're glad to have another woman in the agency. Funny there aren't that many—but then again it figures, what with Forsythe having an attitude.”

Loraine glanced at him. “Which attitude?”

“Oh, he doesn't like female agents. Just thinks they're too...they get too emotionally involved. Not coolheaded enough. Got to be chill-chill-chill, like my kid says, to be able to, you know, do the  necessary.”

“You've got children?” She hadn't known that.

Sadness drew over his face like a shade drawn over a bright window. “Yeah. Haven't seen the boy in a while. He kind of flaked out on the family, second he turned eighteen.... Anyway”—eager to change the subject—”old Forsythe surprised me, bringing you in. But then maybe it's because of you and that Bleak guy he prizes so much. The whole lure concept...1 dunno why Bleak's such a big deal. I worked around him along the Pakistan border. Half the time he went out, he'd be the only one to come back. What's that about? Well, maybe not half the time, but still...And then he was always giving me shit about my intel sources: 'Not reliable, we could be hurting civilians.' Like that was
his job.
Not a company man, let me tell you. Thinking he could be relied on to work with Sean—” “Wait—Drake, what did you say about a lure concept? You mean
me?
I'm the—” “Zweig!” Helman snapped warningly, leaning forward to glare over at Zweig. “You're violating need-to-know.”

“Hey, I wasn't going to say anything else.” Zweig spread his hands as if to say,
All right, whatever!
And turned his back to Loraine, putting his seat back a little, as if to take a nap, grumbling, “They don't give us any goddamned blankets, even, on these transports. Rather pay my own way and go on a regular commercial flight.”

Lure?Loraine thought about demanding to know what that was about. Then decided that this wasn't the time. She'd talk to Helman alone.

“Loraine,” Helman said softly. “I have something I'd like you to review. Quite another sort of journal entry.”

He handed her a flash stick. “Just insert that into your laptop. The top file in the list...I'd just like you apprised. It'll come clearer later. Or perhaps it's not relevant. To tell you the truth I'm not sure. But I wanted one other set of eyes on it. It's from the general's report of his attempt to...to reach out to the Wilderness...to the Other Side...to gain us, well, allies, amongst UBEs. This was done right before we started to see certain manifestations, like the Gulcher case, not long ago. It's not an accident...1 mean, what happened to Gulcher and...this.”

Puzzled by his manner—a feeling that he was taking a chance, showing this to her even as he'd warned Zweig not to step outside need-to-know parameters—she clicked the wafer-thin flash stick into her laptop and opened the file.

CCA EXPERIMENT #351, NOTES

This is the seventeenth day in my attempts to use ritual magic to contact the Great Powers beyond the Wall of Force. Admittedly experiments of this nature are controversial in the agency. Erlich and Swanson (increasingly a liability, those two) would have us focus on narrowing the gap in the Wall, and controlling those already activated by the increase in AS energies. But suppose we cannot repair the artifact? We must deal with the new reality, and to that end we will need allies. A threat may become an asset, if we learn to control it.

In the course of #E3511 have taken the advice, and some of the formulations, of Eliphas Levi: I have fasted and meditated and honed my mind to single-pointed focus on the summoning. This is how magicians in the past have penetrated Newton's Wall of Force. It can be done, if only passingly. It is like a weak radio signal, coming through the static. But even a weak signal can call a gunship, and a gunship is what we need if we are to overcome our enemies. Today, in Room 32,1 felt the sigils as if the insignia, the names, were all coming alive, like creatures in themselves, like that Kabbalistic idea of letters as living things. The ritual markings were glowing and moving about and I saw a distant place in my mind's eye. Is the stress, my admittedly obsessive focus, making me imagine things? It's not impossible! But I don't think so.

[Another entry, the following day.]

Eureka! I have seen, I have communicated, I have touched the Great Wrath from Outside, the lord of the Wilderness! In contact with it, I have understood it! We see and

think in three dimensions. The fourth-dimensional reality of a UBE is not completely comprehensible to us. But growing up in South Florida, I saw creatures living in lagoons, that also lived outside them, and this is something of that kind: the lagoon is its world; the atmosphere is ours. It can extend part of itself into our world; it can reach through the rift, without quite being here in fullness. It can influence things here. It can send its
i
own version of what, in this world, we call familiars; “independent pseudopods “ Dr H calls them, or Formless Familiars; and till now they 're theory. But some have been released into our world this day, as a result of my contact with the Great Wrath. It has reached out to our world and we will see those human beings who are congruent with its nature light up with its force. I myself have seen the Great Power reaching for me. I seem to see a circle within a circle, and in that circle is an eye that extends itself, an eye that elongates to contact my forebrain. I drew back, instinctively, in the course ofE351 but this time, today, I will not draw back, I will give It access, so that I can learn Its ways, as the Seminole Indians once did with animal spirits. I will be Its means of knowing this world, and in the course of Its knowing, I will know It in turn. Already I have identified It, have learned the name It was called by the ancients: Moloch!

At first, a giant with the red-eyed head of a bull and a man's body, but all made of hot brass. Whenlsawhim, I heard a slow-thudding drumbeat, and infants screaming in pain, as Moloch reached for me.

And then I saw into him, past the shell imagined by men. I saw his truer form, another being, the single yellow eye within many mouths, mouths that turn one within the next, wheels in wheels.

[The following day's entry had only two lines.]

CCA
EXPERIMENT #352, NOTES

Today I am redefined...!

That was the end of the file.

“The phrase 'today I am redefined,'“ Helman said, just loud enough for her to hear over the background grumbling of the big jet. “It puzzles me—what do you think it means? You've read widely in the occult.”

Loraine shrugged. “Hard to say. Makes me think of writing by some of the gnostics. Both notes have that, um, apocalyptic tone. Visionary.”

“I see. Well. Probably not a matter for concern.” Helman glanced over at Zweig, then leaned a little closer to her. “Close the file. Read the second file, on Troy Gulcher. And then—when you've done that—please give me the flash drive back. Do not save these files to your computer...and discuss this with no one else.”

Helman didn't say another word on the trip to Long Island. Loraine watched him from the corner of her eye as he took an orange out of his pocket and incised the peel with one extralong thumbnail, exactingly removing it in an unbroken spiral. Then he frowningly ate the orange, section by section, without spilling a drop of juice. Seeming, to Loraine, haunted by something he couldn't quite bring himself to say.

***

ABOUT THAT TIME, the same evening, Atlantic City.

Gulcher was getting thoroughly sick of the casino. He was even sick of this claustrophobic little room, though it contained ever-growing stacks of money. Jock wanted to pile a van high with that money and just take off. Sooner or later the Baronis' people would come around.

But the whisperer didn't want Gulcher to leave Lucky Lou's Atlantic City Casino.

“Not yet,
“the whisperer had said to him, last night.
“You're needed right here. To focus through. The Great Power hasn 't fed enough yet. Still hungry. We will go to other casinos and take those over too; in other parts of the world. Las Vegas. Europe. All be yours, you wait for it.”

He wasn't going to admit he was scared of the whisperer. And Moloch. But how did you argue with a thing like Moloch—or his whisperer? And Moloch was the only reason he wasn't in prison. But he was going stir-crazy in this place.

“Jock,” he said, staring at the piles of money in the counting room, “I can't believe I'm bored with this money, here.”

Jock leaned on a table stacked with cash, grinning. He was fucked-up again, looked like. “I'm not bored with it. Sure would like to take it with me though.” He reached past the two Chinese guys and took a big, sealed stack of twenties. Tossed it up and caught it.

When would they be able to get out of here? Gulcher tried to call the whisperer, to ask, get some kind of answer. But there was no reply. Hadn't been able to get a response since last night.

“Whisperer,” he muttered. “You there?”

Maybe it was gone. Maybe he was free of it. And maybe that was a good thing. “Boss?” A voice from the air.