Chapter 17
When the hood came off, I was looking at four walls of concrete.
I was intimately familiar of the Town Hall’s interview rooms, though this was the first time I’d been handcuffed to one their tables.
Constantine sat across from me, flanked by two dark suited cohorts. He idly tapped an unopened pack of Kools on the table before him, twisting them in his fingers. I looked at them, then at Constantine, then back at the cigarettes.
“You’ve been busy this evening, Detective Fonseca,” Constantine started, speaking slowly and in a low tone.
Shit! Was he going to give me a cigarette or not? Ten seconds into the interrogation, and already it had escalated to the level of cruel and unusual punishment.
“I don’t know what you think you’ve got on me,” I replied, watching the Kools circle, hypnotically. “But I’ve had a quiet night in, reading a book.”
“How about interception and distribution of Top Secret documents, to begin with?” Constantine smiled.
“That’s crazy,” I snorted.
“And activities pursuant to the undermining of and interference with, the security of the United States of America?”
“Now I’m a terrorist?” I exclaimed.
“You said it, Fonseca, not me.”
“This is bullshit!”
“Breach of security protocols? Unauthorized access to military encryption technology? And that’s just the Federal crimes. Want to start on dereliction of duty? Tampering with evidence? Failure to inform a superior officer of an ongoing investigation?”
“What investigation?”
“What were you doing in that girl’s apartment, Fonseca?” Constantine asked.
“Go to hell,” I replied.
“We’ve got your friend O’Day in the next room. He’s cooperating fully. He gave up where you were hiding out. The lowjack. Says he had no idea how you got your hands on the decrypt key for Dark’s novel. Said you wouldn’t tell him. Care to let me in on the secret?”
“Does it matter?” I shrugged. “The novel is decoded. Everyone can read it now.”
“And you realize it details a highly top-secret, military operation?”
“I do now.”
“And it never occurred to you to ask why Dark encoded the novel?” Constantine leaned forward across the interrogation table. “That perhaps it would have been in the country’s best interests to let the experts process the decoded text before you published it on the Internet?”
“I didn’t know anything about that,” I lied. “That wasn’t my idea.”
“Now the shit has really hit the fan, Detective.”
“Have you read the book?” I asked, shifting uncomfortably against my restraints.
“We’re examining it now,” Constantine said, guardedly.
“Well, when you get around to reading it, you’ll know it’s all bullshit. It’s a horror novel. And not one of Dark’s best. Vampires and shit. It doesn’t detail jack.”
Constantine didn’t react. He just watched me across the table.
“Unless you’re telling me there really are such things as vampires...” I teased.
Still no reaction from Constantine.
“Come on, let me go,” I held up my shackled hands. “We’ve both got a lot more important things to do than fuck around here.”
“Like what?” Constantine said.
“Find Montavez’s murderer for one.” I sighed. “Remember that?”
“Didn’t you decode the book to find that out, Detective?”
“Yeah, maybe,” I hedged.
“But yet, no new leads in a century-old text?” It was his turn to tease.
“Well, no...”
“Perhaps you thought that if you found Q, he would lead you to the girl’s murderer?” Constantine asked, studying my face for a reaction. “Did the book tell you who Q is?”
I stayed silent.
“Anything?”
This was fucked up. Who was this Constantine guy, anyway? “As I said, it’s bullshit. Fiction.”
“Perhaps. But Montavez was attempting to decode it. That’s why she bought that original copy. Whoever killed her, killed her to stop her decoding the book. That’s right, isn’t it, Detective?”
“Sure.” I shrugged.
“So, I’ll ask again: Who is Q?”
“Read the fucking book,” I said, giving Constantine the same answer I’d given Vivian.
“There isn’t time,” Constantine said calmly. “And you’ve read it, right Detective? You were up all night reading it? Why don’t you just tell me?”
That was it, I could see it now. They were both looking for the same thing. Montavez had come to Seattle to find Q, and so had Constantine. All along, he’d known that was the reason she’d been killed. But now it was a race. Who could find Q first?
Did Constantine know she was really still alive? Or dead? Or undead? Whatever. I couldn’t put it past him. He’d come here with an awful lot of guns to enforce a Federal Wardship.
I had to pick a side. NeoCons or bloodsuckers? I didn’t like either of my options. But it seemed prudent not to count myself prematurely amongst the damned. But Constantine was going to have to give me something in return.
“What was going on that Genie basement?” I asked. “That shit didn’t terrify you as much as it should have.”
“The name, Fonesca?” Constantine prodded.
“Answer my question first.”
“The Rosicrucians.” Constantine’s glanced shifted between his two compatriots. “The FBI have been investigating their activities.”
“No,” I shook my head. “Don’t try and softball me. Vivian Montavez wasn’t an agent. But she knew a whole hell of a lot about these Rosicrucians than was common knowledge. She gave, or traded, that original copy of Q to them. That means they were sufficiently friendly to be giving each other gifts. What’s Montavez’s part in all this?”
“Detective Fonesca—”
“If you want to see my cards, Special Agent, I’m going to have to take a peek at yours. I can sit here in silence for the next few hours and let the rest of humanity – all rapidly skimming through Dark’s novel for any clues – learn Q’s identity, or I can give you the name that will get you to Q first. What’s it going to be?”
Constantine considered his options. Luckily, he didn’t have any. “There might be...some familiarity with Rosicrucian ideas among some within the Neo-Conservative movement.”
“Familiarity?” I said in disbelief. “You’re fucking kidding me, right?”
“It’s hardly dogma.”
“No,” I remembered. “You’re a neophite aren’t you? All you Hot Kids. You’re new to the game. But the old guard...what’s wrong? Don’t they invite you to the meetings?”
The FBI agent to Constantine’s left replied for Constantine. He had the look about him of some sort of political officer. He was thin and dark and wore a bluetooth in his ear. “It is true that certain prominent members of the Neo-Conservative movement have affiliations separate and apart from their political views.”
“Like the Montavez’s? Like the senator? And Vivian?” There was no reply, so a soldiered on. “You’re the iconoclasts, aren’t you? The separatist faction. The Rosicrucians who didn’t take the Geneing.”
The NeoCon political officer sighed. “Not separatist, no.” The fact of the matter seemed important to him. “Dark always intended that his novel should be decoded. But his true message got lost along the way.”
“Then the Rosicrucians were created by Dark. To hide the secret of Q.”
“No, the Rosicrucians are much older than Dark. He was a lifelong Mason. An 18th Degree, Scottish Rite. A Knight of the Rose Croix. He understood the Mason’s singular ability to keep secrets. Pass them down through the generations. The secret of Q he entrusted to this 18th Degree.”
“But Dark stole Cain away from 1728 to stop them weaponizing Q. Why didn’t he just destroy him?”
“Because he
was a patriot,” Constantine spoke up.
“And a utopianist,” the political officer added. “He believed there’d be a day when Q would be needed again by this country.”
“Corpus, Cruor, Civitas.” Now I understood. “The body, the blood, the state.”
“Exactly,” the agent paused and glanced at the ceiling, seeming to say a small prayer as I repeated his liturgy.
“And Competence, Community, Compassion?” I added. “C, C, C? Editorial revisions for the rank and file? A watered down faith for the uninitiated?”
No one answered.
“C, C, C,” I repeated. “Competence, Community, Compassion. But C is also the Roman numeral for one-hundred. C, C, C. Three-hundred. Batch 300. The Geneing retrovirus, its marker encoded in its DNA. Dark never meant it as a sacrament, he meant it as a clue...”
“Detective?” Constantine asked, missing my point.
“But Geneing?” I ignored him. “Surely, even you Neocon wackos didn’t mean for that to get out...”
“No,” the officer said adamantly. “We had nothing to do with that.”
“Yet, who else knew about 300?”
“We didn’t—” the Agent started, then stopped. Then began again. “In the 1980s, when Rosicrucians got into positions of command, once they against had access to the Top Secret documentation on MJ-12’s off-book projects. They learned that Dark had not managed to destroy all the samples of 300 the day he absconded with Cain’s body. There were off-site samples. The Army tried to weaponize it during the Korean War, but only met with limited success.”
“Dark mentioned that in his book.”
“Yes?” the Agent seemed surprised. “Well, the samples continued to exist...in a laboratory on Plum Island...an element existed within the Rosicrucian ranks – an element that still exists – that held with the belief that the search for Q was not a physical one, but a spiritual one. Three-hundred was the metaphysical means by which one could discover Q.”
“Rosicrucians willingly took the retrovirus?”
“Yes. And once one subject was infected, his blood served as a carrier for the retrovirus. The outbreak started slow. We quarantined those who’d been infected. But as internecine tensions grew, as some Rosicrucians pushed hard for the decoding Dark’s novel...”
“You couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle. The Gene Genie, to be exact.”
“The only solution was to decode Dark’s novel. That would lead us to Q – to Cain. He is the source, he would be the cure. Dark foretold it.”
“But the virus doesn’t just make you a Genie, does it?” I tried to point an accusing finger at the unnamed agent, but I was still shackled to the table.
“No,” he said solemnly. “There are other...side effects.”
“Vivian Montavez’s body wasn’t stolen from the Morgue,” I said, looking directly at Constantine. “She got up and walked out.”
“Yes,” Constantine wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“Vampires are real.”
No one answered.
“But hundreds of thousands of people in American have been killed by Geneing. Why aren’t we up to our necks in vampires?”
“Introduce the retrovirus to the system of healthy human being, and it has a narcotic, hypnotic effect. Introduce the retrovirus in the minutes after death...”
“What?” I recoiled in disgust. The image of Vivian Montavez in that dumpster. Her body had been so badly beaten. But she hadn’t been murdered. She’d paid the Rosicrucians to do that to her. So she could become...
“They become like him. Q. Cain. The ultraviolet sensitivity, the enhanced strength, the thirst for blood.”
“Fucking vampires,” Constantine said.
“Yes. Fucking vampires,” the Political Officer agreed.
“She’s out there, and she’s one of those things!” I panicked, fighting against my cuffs. “She was in the apartment before you came in. She’s after Q. Uncuff me!”
The FBI agents exchanged concerned glances.
“The name, Fonseca,” Constantine said. “We had an agreement.”
“Michael Elton,” I said, no long concerned with secrecy. “Michael-fucking-Elton. I was about to run a search against death certificates, burial records, when you arrested me.”
“Let’s hope we’re not too late,” Constantine said sliding the pack of Kools across the table. With his hands free, he tapped at his hidden ear phone.
“In his condition, I doubt Cain is in a hurry to go anywhere,” I said, starting to unwrap the cellophane around the cigarettes, my hands still cuffed.