'It stinks, Marty,' I said. 'It stinks on ice. Sooner or later, they'll have a tank at the door, making demands. How long are we here?'
He flipped open his notebook and pushed a button. 'Depends on Ingram, actually. He should be humanized in six to eight days. You and I are going to be in Portobello on the twenty-second, regardless.'
Seven days. 'But we don't have a contingency plan. If the government or the Mafia puts two and two together.'
'Our "contingency plan" is to think on our feet. So far, so good.'
'At the very least, we ought to split up,' Asher said. 'Our being in one place makes it too easy for them.'
Amelia put a hand on my arm. 'Pair up and scatter. Each pair with one person who knows Spanish.'
'And do it now,' Belda said. 'Whoever sent those boys with guns has his own contingency plan.'
Marty nodded slowly. 'I'll stay here. Everybody else call as soon as you find a place. Who speaks enough Spanish to take care of rooms and meals?' More than half of us; it took less than a minute to sort up into pairs. Marty opened a thick wallet and put a stack of currency on the table. 'Make sure each of you has at least five hundred pesos.'
'Those of us who are up to it ought to take the subway,' I said. 'An army of cabs would be pretty conspicuous, and traceable.'
Amelia and I got our bags, not yet unpacked, and were the first ones out of the door. The subway was a kilometer away. I offered to take her suitcase, but she said that would be too conspicuously un-Mexican. She should take mine, and walk two paces behind me.
'At least we'll get a little breathing space to work on the paper. None of this will mean anything if the Jupiter Project is still going September fourteenth.'
'I spent a little time on it this morning.' She sighed. 'Wish we had Peter.'
'Never thought I'd say it … but me, too.'
They would soon find out, along with the rest of the world, that Peter was still alive. But he was in no shape to help with the paper.
Police in St Thomas arrested a middle-aged man wandering through the market at dawn. Dirty and unshaven, dressed only in underwear, at first they thought he was drunk. When the desk sergeant questioned him, though, she found that he was sober but confused. Monumentally confused: he thought the year was 2004 and he was twenty years old.
On the back of his skull, a jack connection so fresh it was crusted with blood. Someone had invaded his mind and stolen the last forty years.
What was taken from his mind corroborated the text of the article, of course. Within a few days, the glorious truth had spread to all of the upper echelons of the Hammer of God: God's plan was going to be fulfilled, appropriately enough, by the godless actions of scientists. Only a few people knew about the glorious End and Beginning that God would give them on September 14.
One of the paper's authors was safe, most of his brain in a black box somewhere. The academics who had juried the paper had all been taken care of, by accident or 'disease.' One author was still missing, along with the agent who had been sent to kill her.
The assumption was that they were both dead, since she hadn't surfaced to warn the world. Evidently the authors had been uncertain how much time they had before the process became irreversible.
The most powerful member of the Hammer of God was General Mark Blaisdell, the undersecretary of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Not too surprisingly, he knew his arch-rival, Marty's General Roser, in a casual social way; they took meals at the same Pentagon dining room – 'officers' mess,' technically, if you can apply the term to a place with mahogany paneling and a white-clad server for each two 'messers.'
Blaisdell and Roser did not like each other, though both hid it well enough to occasionally play tennis or billiards together. When Roser once invited him to a poker game, Blaisdell coldly said, 'I have never once played cards.'
What he did like to play was God.
Through a series of three or four intermediaries, he supervised most of the murder and torture that was regrettably necessary to hasten God's plans. He used an illegal jack facility in Cuba, where Peter had been taken to have his memory stripped. It was Blaisdell who reluctantly decided to let the scientist live, while the five jurors were succumbing to their accidents and diseases. Those five scientists lived all over the world, and there wasn't much to immediately link their deaths and disabilities – two of them were in comas, and would sleep through the end of the world – but if Peter showed up dead as well, it could make trouble. He was moderately famous, and there were probably dozens of people who knew the identities of the five jurors and the fact that they had turned down his paper. An investigation might lead to a re-evaluation of the paper, and the fact that Blaisdell's agency had mandated its refusal might attract unwanted scrutiny to other activities.
He tried to keep his religious beliefs to himself, but he knew there were people – like Roser – who knew he was very conservative, and might suspect, given a whisper of fact or rumor, that he was an Ender. The army wouldn't demote him for that, but they could make him the highest-ranking supply clerk in the world.
And if they found out about the Hammer of God, he'd be executed for treason. He would personally prefer that, of course, to demotion. But the secret had been sealed for years, and he would be the last one to give it away. Marty's group was not the only one with pills.
Blaisdell came home from the Pentagon and put on sport coveralls and went to an evening soccer game in Alexandria. At the hot dog stand he talked to the next woman in line, and as they walked back toward the bleachers, he said their agent Ingram had gone to the Omaha train station the evening of July 11th, to pick up and eliminate a scientist, Blaze Harding. Agent and scientist left the station together – security cameras confirmed that – but then both had disappeared. Find them and kill Harding. Kill Ingram if he does anything that makes you think he's on the wrong side.
Blaisdell returned to his seat. The woman went to the ladies' room and disposed of her hot dog, and then went home to her weapons.
Her first weapon was an illegal FBI infoworm, threading undetected through municipal transportation records. She found out that a third party shared the cab with the agent and his supposed victim; they had stopped the cab on Grand Street, no particular address. The original order had been for 1236 Grand, but they'd stopped early, a verbal cancel.
She went back to the security tapes and saw that the two had been followed by a large black man in uniform. She didn't yet know that there was a connection between the scientist and the black mechanic. She assumed he was a backup for Ingram; Blaisdell hadn't mentioned it, but maybe it was an arrangement Ingram had made on his own.
So Ingram probably had a car waiting, to drive his victim out into the country to dispose of her.
The next stage depended on luck. The Iridium system that provided global communication by way of a fleet of low-flying satellites had been quietly co-opted by the government after the start of the Ngumi War; all of the satellites had been replaced by dual-function ones: they still took care of phone service, but each one also spied continuously on the strip of land it passed over. Had one of them passed over Omaha, over Grand Street, just before midnight on the 11th?
She wasn't military, but she had access to Iridium pictures through Blaisdell's office. After a few minutes of sorting, she had an image of the cab leaving and the black mechanic getting into the back seat of a long black limousine. The next shot was a low angle that showed the limousine's license plate: 'North Dakota 101 Clergy.' In less than a minute, she had it traced to St Bartholomew's.
That was strange enough, but her course was clear. She already had a bag packed with a business suit and a frilly dress, two changes of underwear, and a knife and a gun made completely of plastic. There was also a jar of vitamins with enough poison to murder a small town. In less than an hour she was in the air, headed for the crater city Seaside and its mysterious monastery. St Bartholomew's had some military connection, but General Blaisdell didn't have high enough clearan
ce to find out what it was. It occurred to her that she might be getting in over her head. She prayed for guidance, and God told her in his stern fatherly voice that she was doing the right thing. Stay your course and don't fear dying. Dying is just coming home.
She knew Ingram; he was a third of her cell – and she knew how much better he was at mayhem. She had killed more than twenty sinners in service to the Lord, but always at a distance or protected by extremely close contact. God had gifted her with great sexual attractiveness, and she used it as a weapon, allowing sinners in between her legs while she reached under the pillow for the crystal knife. Men who don't close their eyes when they ejaculate will close their eyes a moment later. If she was on her back with the man above her, she would embrace him with her left arm and then drive the dagger into his kidney. He would straighten up in tetanic shock, his penis trying to ejaculate again, and she would sweep the razor-keen blade across his throat. When he sagged, she would make sure both carotid arteries were severed.
Sitting in the plane, she put her knees together and squeezed, remembering how the last dying thrust felt. It probably didn't hurt the man too much, it was over so fast, and he faced an eternity of torment anyhow. She had never done it to anyone who had taken Jesus as his Savior. Instead of being washed in the Blood of the Lamb, they drowned in their own. Atheists and adulterers, they deserved even worse.
Once a man had almost escaped, a pervert she had allowed to engage her from behind. She'd had to half-turn and stab him in the heart, but she didn't have full force or good aim, and the point of the knife broke off in his breastbone. She dropped the knife and he ran for the door, and might have run naked and bleeding into the hotel corridor, but she had double-locked it, and while he was struggling with the combination of latches, she retrieved the knife and reached around him and slashed open his abdomen. He was a gross fat man, and an incredible mess spilled out. He made a lot of noise dying, while she knelt helplessly sick in the bathroom, but the hotel was evidently well soundproofed. She left by way of window and fire escape, and the morning news said that the man, a well-connected city commissioner, had died at home, peacefully, in his sleep. His wife and children had been full of praise for him. A godless swine too fat to engage a woman normally. He had even pretended to pray before they had sex, currying favor because of her crucifix, and then expected her to use her mouth to make him ready. It was while she was doing that, that she had savored the image of splitting him open. But her hate hadn't prepared her for the multicolored jumble of gore.
Well, this one would be clean. She had killed women twice before, each one a merciful pistol shot to the head. She would do that and then escape or not. She hoped she wouldn't have to kill Ingram, a stern but nice man who had never looked at her with lust. He was still a man, though, and it was possible that this redheaded professor had led him astray.
It was after midnight by the time she got to Seaside. She got a room at the hotel closest to St Bartholomew's, slightly more than a kilometer away, and walked over to take a look.
The place was completely dark and silent. Not surprising for a monastery, she supposed, so she went back to the hotel and slept for a few hours.
One minute after 8:00, she phoned the place, and got an answering machine. The same at 8:30.
She put on her weapons and walked over and rang the doorbell at 9:00. No response. She walked completely around the building and saw no sign of life. The lawn needed mowing.
She noted several places she could break in, come nightfall, and went back to the hotel to do some electronic snooping.
She found no reference to St Bartholomew's in any database of religious activity, other than acknowledgment of its existence and location. It was founded the year after the nanoforge cataclysm that formed the Inland Sea.
It was doubtless a cover organization for something, and that something was somehow connected with the military – in Washington, when she'd typed in the name, working under Blaisdell's aegis, she'd gotten a message that 'need-to-know' documents would have to be processed through Force Management and Personnel. That was pretty spooky, since Blaisdell had unquestioned access to top-secret material in any part of the military establishment.
So the people in that monastery were either very powerful or very subtle. Maybe both. And Ingram was evidently part of them.
The obvious conclusion would be that they were part of the Hammer of God. But then Blaisdell would know about their activities.
Or would he? It was a large organization, with linkages so complex and well-protected that it was possible even the man in charge could have lost track of an important part. So she should be ready to go in shooting, but also ready to tiptoe away quietly. God would guide her.
She spent a couple of hours assembling an Iridium mosaic of snapshots of the place since the 11th. There were no pictures of the black limousine, which was not too surprising, since the monastery had a large garage and there were never any vehicles parked outside.
Then she saw the army truck and bus appear, and watched them reappear as blue church vehicles, and leave.
It would take a long time, and a lot of luck, to trace them through the Interstate system. Fortunately, the powder blue was an unusual color. But before she settled into that mind-numbing chore, she decided to go check the monastery for clues.
She put on her business suit over the weapons and assembled the ID package and pocket litter that identified her as an FBI agent from Washington. She wouldn't get past a retinal scan at a police station, but she didn't foresee going into any police station alive.
Again, no response from the doorbell. It took her only a couple of seconds to pick the lock, but it was dead-bolted. She took out the pistol and blew the deadbolt off, and the door swung open.
She hurried in with the gun drawn and shouted 'FBI!' at the dusty waiting room. She went into the main corridor and started a hasty search, hoping to get through and out before the police arrived. She figured, accurately, that it was possible the folks at St Bart's didn't have a burglar alarm because they didn't want any police showing up suddenly, but she didn't want to count on that.
The rooms off the corridor were disappointing – two meeting rooms and individual dormitory rooms or cells.
The atrium stopped her, though, with the towering trees and active brook. A trash container had six empty Dom Perignon bottles. Off the atrium, a large circular conference room built around a huge hologram plate. She found the controls and turned it on to the peaceful woodland scene.
At first she didn't recognize the electronic modules at each seat – and then it dawned on her that this was a place where two dozen sinners could jack together!
She'd never heard of anything like that outside of the military. Maybe that was the military connection, though: a top-secret soldierboy experiment. The office of Force Management and Personnel might indeed be behind it.
That made her hesitant about proceeding. Blaisdell was her spiritual superior as well as her cell leader, and she would normally follow his orders without question. But it seemed increasingly obvious that there could be aspects to this he was unaware of. She would go back to the hotel and try to set up a secure line to him.
She turned off the hologram and tried to return to the atrium. The door was locked.
The room spoke up: 'Your presence here is illegal. Is there any way you would care to explain it?' The voice was Mendez's; he was viewing her from Guadalajara.
'I'm Agent Audrey Simone from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We have reason to believe–'
'Do you have a warrant to search this establishment?'
'It's on file with the local authorities.'
'You forgot to bring a copy when you broke in, though.'
'I don't have to explain myself to you. Show yourself. Open this door.'
'No, I think you'd better tell me the name of your supervisor and the location of your branch. Once I verify that you are who you say you are, we can discuss your lack of a warrant.'
Wi
th her left hand she pulled out her wallet and turned in a circle, displaying the badge. 'Things will go a lot easier for you if–' She was interrupted by the invisible man's laugh.
'Put the fake badge away and shoot your way out. The police should have arrived by now; you can explain about your warrant to them.'
She had to shoot off both hinges as well as the three bolts on this door. She ran across the brook and found that the door out of the atrium was now similarly secured. She reloaded, automatically counting the number of remaining air cartridges, and tried to open this one with three shots. It took her four more.
I was watching her on the screen from behind Mendez. She was finally able to push the door down with her shoulder. He pushed two buttons and switched to the corridor camera. She went pounding down the corridor in a dead run, the pistol held out in front of her with both hands.
'Does that look like an FBI agent going out to reason with the local cops?'
'Maybe you should have actually called them.'
He shook his head. 'Unnecessary bloodshed. You didn't recognize her?'
'Afraid not.' Mendez had called me when she shot down the front door, on the off chance that I might recognize her from Portobello.
Before she went out the front door, she slipped the pistol into a belly holster, and buttoned just the top button of her suit, so it was like a cape, concealing without restraining. Then she walked casually out the door.
'Pretty smooth,' I said. 'She might not be official. She could have been hired by anyone.'
'Or she could be a Hammer of God nutcase. They had Blaze tracked as far as the train station in Omaha.' He switched to an outside camera.
'Ingram had a lot of government authority, as well as being a nut. I guess she might, too.'
'I was sure the government lost her in Omaha. If anyone had followed the limo, St Bart's would have had company long before now.'