Apocalypse to Go

  “The Warriors,” Ari announced, “are losing badly.”

  “They usually are,” Al said. “I wonder if Don Nelson will ever win that six hundredth game.”

  Sean and I left them analyzing the team and went into the kitchen to talk. Sean took off his suede jacket and hung it over the back of his chair before he sat down.

  “Mike told me you were worried,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Sean said. “I used to get so damn scared when Dad would lecture us on how awful gays were. ‘Homos,’ he called us. I knew even then he was talking about me. Like, from the time I was maybe six I knew what I was. I was sure I was going direct to hell.” He forced out a smile. “Probably even before I died.”

  “Well, Dad had a lot of strong opinions about a lot of things. That doesn’t mean he still does.”

  Sean tilted his head to one side and blinked at me.

  “We haven’t seen him in so long,” I continued, “that we tend to think of him as being exactly the way he was when he was arrested. But prison changes people and their opinions. Who knows what Dad’s like now?”

  “Oh.” Sean considered this for several long moments. “I can see that, yeah. He’s had all these years away, and we won’t know what they’ve done to him till we get him home. Well, if we can get him home.”

  “It’s going to be kind of a crap shoot.”

  “I’ll just have to deal with it. If we do find him, we can’t leave him there.”

  “Right. Besides, there’s Mom. They’ll have a lot of stuff to work through.”

  “That’ll keep him busy!” His grin turned wicked. “Ari’s a lot like him. You’re involved with a guy who’s just like your father. How Freudian can you get?”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at him. Sean displayed his survival sense by changing the subject.

  “Mike must have told you I was helping him with that map,” Sean said. “It’s taking both of us to do it, and it took us forever to find one gate. Now that we’ve got one, though, I know how they feel, or I should say, how I feel when I sense one. We can focus in on the vibes, which means we should be able to find the others faster, well, if there are any.”

  “I don’t understand. You guys knew about the gate in Aunt Eileen’s house already.”

  “That’s what Mike and I thought, that we could use that one to zero in on the others. We couldn’t. It’s different than the others. We know Dad made it, right? Well, someone else made the others. So the vibe’s different. Y’know?”

  “No, actually, I don’t, but I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Okay.” Sean shot me a grin. “And because I’m helping, I was wondering if you could take me on as a stringer for the Agency.”

  “What? You? Looking for gainful employment?”

  “I know I’m a slacker.”

  “Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom.” I folded my hands piously. “Learn, my child, and grow wise.”

  Sean stuck out his tongue at me. “Well, I deserved that,” he went on to say. “But will you? You’re the head of the bureau now, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, and if you weren’t my brother, I could hire you tonight, but I don’t want to be accused of nepotism. I’ll ask my boss about it. They put Michael on stringer status, and my boss mentioned a while ago that they might be interested in recruiting more O’Gradys.”

  “Thanks. It wouldn’t kill me to earn a little money now and then. Al’s birthday is coming up, and I don’t want to buy him a present with his own credit card.”

  The guys left when the basketball game ended. Al had to get up in the morning to go to his government job. I locked up, then sat down next to Ari on the couch. He turned off the TV and looked at me.

  “Ari, there’s something you need to think about,” I said. “You genuinely scared my poor brother when you were waving that gun around.”

  “I never wave a gun around. That’s irresponsible.”

  “Well, okay, sorry. Just seeing it scared him anyway. You don’t know what he’s like when he gets into full panic mode. It could take hours to calm him down.”

  “I needed to make sure that it was them and only them. After all, it’s my job to keep you safe.”

  I don’t know what got into me, the Devil, maybe, but lines from The Tempest floated to the surface of my mind. “Ariel, thy charge exactly is perform’d, but—”

  Ari growled. I don’t know what else to call it but a growl, and his face changed to a dangerous lack of expression. “I hate that sodding play,” he said, and he sounded on the edge of growling again. “And my sodding name, and that sodding playwright, too.”

  I stood up and took a couple of steps sideways to get clear of the coffee table. He got up with the Qi of pure rage swirling around him like the tempest in question. I moved to put the coffee table between us.

  “I’m sorry.” I made my voice as calm as I could. “Ari, I didn’t realize it would bother you so much.”

  He took a deep breath, then another, and shoved his hands into his jeans’ pockets—to keep them safely confined, I figured, like they’d taught him in anger management class. For several minutes we stood on that knife’s edge. Finally, he sighed and forced out a thin smile.

  “I’m sorry, too,” he said. “Every summer when I visited my mother in London, I was teased about my wretched name, and that sodding Shakespeare play always came into it. Airy spirit! Too delicate for—” He stopped, cleared his throat, and breathed deeply yet again. “Well, no need to go into all of that.”

  “There’s not, no. You actually make me think of Ariel Sharon, not Shakespeare.”

  That got me a genuine smile. “Thank you,” he said. “That’s very flattering.”

  “I’ll never mention the play again.”

  “And I’ll try to stop making an ass of myself.” He frowned down at the floor. “I’m honestly surprised I reacted the way I did.”

  I metaphorically bit my tongue to keep myself from bringing up Midsummer Night’s Dream. “It’s getting late,” I said instead. “We’re both kind of tired.”

  “True.” He looked up, back to his usual controlled self. “Almost time for bed. I’m going to go take a shower, I think.”

  “Good idea.” I grinned at him. “I’ll come take one with you.”

  And, as I figured, the logical development from that activity calmed both of us down.

  Monday morning arrived too soon, and with it e-mail, the timesink from Hell. When I logged on, I found a ton of it, most of it about administrative details. One e-mail, however, stood out from the rest.

  It arrived on my non-TranceWeb e-address from AOS14. “I would very much like to meet with you about a matter of some interest to those you work for. Would you be willing to discuss a link between our respective agencies? We can offer you the police and justice capabilities you lack.” That was all it said. It was enough.

  I logged off, got up, and charged into the bedroom, where Ari, dressed only in a pair of baggy gray shorts, was changing into his workout clothes. He caught my mood and took a step back, which put him up against the bedroom wall.

  “You bastard,” I said. “You’ve blown the Agency’s cover. You made some kind of report about us to Interpol, didn’t you?”

  “No, I didn’t.” He sounded perfectly sincere. “They had rumors of your existence before I entered the picture. Why else would they have sent me to your State Department in the first place?”

  “They sent you to the State Department, not direct to us.”

  “Yes, thanks to the rumors, and where did State send me? Oh, come now! I wouldn’t be here if my higher-ups knew nothing about the Agency. They couldn’t assign me to an entity they’d never heard of.”

  “That’s true, but when did the rumors become recognized fact?”

  His face never changed, but his SPP winced.

  “It’s one thing,” I went on, “to send an agent to a point of contact within the State Department in the hopes said contact can link him to someone farther along
the line. It’s quite another to know all the details.”

  “Who says they know all the details?”

  “You’re weaseling, Nathan.”

  He picked up his T-shirt from the bed and put it on before he spoke. “I’m going downstairs to do my workout.”

  I shut the bedroom door and leaned against it with my arms crossed over my chest.

  “I can carry you,” Ari said. “If I wanted to just move you to one side, I could.”

  “Not if you were ensorcelled.”

  He sighed and began to study the pattern on the blue paisley bedspread. I could read a resigned sense of defeat in his Qi as well as his SPP. He looked at me again.

  “Will you forgive me?” he said. “I was under orders to file that report. It’s only accessible by two people, the two I phoned about AOS14.”

  “One of them told AOS14.”

  He blinked a couple of times. “Oh,” was all he said.

  I considered what to do next. Step One: raise hell at the Agency, which would raise hell with State, which in turn would raise hell with Ari’s superiors. Step Two: announce I could no longer work with Mr. Nathan, who had proven himself untrustworthy. Step Three: wave good-bye to Ari as he was hauled back to Israel by the outfit he worked for. Step Four: hear that he’d been killed in Iran because he’d returned there to spy for Israel one time too many.

  Love really sucks when it gets in the way of your job. I considered what other course of action lay open to me. Step Two would be: hear what AOS14 had to say. I took Step One immediately.

  “Okay,” I said. “I forgive you. But after this, I want to know when and where you’re passing intel about me and my Agency. You owe me, Nathan.”

  “I realize that.” He hesitated. “Very well, if it happens again, I’ll tell you.” Again, the hesitation. “I had no idea that they would give that report to a third party.”

  His SPP told me that about this detail he was speaking the truth. I also had the odd intuition that he, too, was thinking that love sucked when it got in the way of one’s job.

  “Should I go live in the downstairs flat?” For that one brief moment he sounded not weak, never that, but vulnerable.

  “No,” I said. “Don’t be a jerk, Ari.”

  He smiled and walked over to kiss me.

  It took us a while to heal the breach, as it were. Once we had, we got dressed, and he went downstairs to work out. I returned to my computer desk, only to find the landline answering machine blinking. The message came from the realtor who handled the building we leased.

  “The neighbors have phoned me twice now,” Mr. Singh’s voice told me. “They complain about graffiti, guns, car thieves, and firecrackers thrown onto the sidewalk. Please call to enlighten me.” He left his business number.

  I thought of several jokes about long-distance enlightenment, canned them all, and came up with a good lie when I returned the call.

  “The firecrackers were the work of the local teen gang,” I told him. “They’re really mad because we keep removing their graffiti. When Ari caught one at it, he tried to arrest him, but the kid got away.”

  “Ah, I see.” Mr. Singh sounded relieved. “Of course, your partner is a police officer. I shall tell the neighbors this. They will be relieved that the gun they have seen is a legal weapon.”

  I returned to the day’s business affairs. Although I offered to videoconference with Mr. Spare14, he preferred to leave the discussion in e-mail. After a few rounds, we had arranged a meeting for Tuesday, the next day. I decided that it would be professional courtesy to let Spare14 know that I knew about Ari’s double-dealing. When I asked about including Ari in the meeting, Spare14 answered that he’d be welcome.

  “I thought he would be,” I typed. “This way he’ll be able to write up the meeting for his superiors.”

  Spare14’s answer came back, “Peccavi. Sorry.”

  “I have sinned” covered too much ground to be an honest admission. Had he badgered the information out of the two higher-ups to whom Ari had originally sent his report? Or had he come by it some other way? I’d have to wait to answer that question until we met.

  When Ari came back upstairs, I logged off and shut down my computer. The strangest communication of the day arrived at that point, not in e-mail, but on the dead black screen. I’d seen IOIs on a powered-off screen before, but this one came from outside my own mind.

  As I watched, the screen brightened to pale gray. A black circle appeared, fringed with seven stylized arrows, four toward the top, three at the bottom: the symbol of an unbalanced form of Chaos magic. The face of a white guy with a shaved head, blue eyes, and an unsettling resemblance to some of my relatives formed in the center of the circle—the entity I called Cryptic Creep. He’d been contacting me against my will ever since we’d moved into the flat. The graffito that so bothered the neighbors, that very same Chaos symbol, was his work.

  Although he looked like the O’Brien side of my family, his voice reminded me of no one I’d ever known: high and fluting. I heard it as if it came from outside my mind, but since Ari paid no attention at first, I knew it was a psychic communication. I, however, answered him aloud rather than risk opening up my mental language level to someone I didn’t know.

  “Nola,” he said, “you’ve been ignoring me.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why not? You always deliver the same old message.”

  “The message is important, that’s why. Find the Peacock Angel. You know about the good news he brings to the world.”

  “I’ve got angels of my own, and their church has been claiming to bring good news for a couple thousand years.”

  “For their sheep, perhaps. This angel speaks to the elite few. He’ll speak to you.”

  I suddenly realized why I needed those old college notes. “Manichees?” I said. “Valentinians? Sethians? Which flock of sheep do you belong to?”

  “Oh, come now, you know better!” He laughed, a dry little mocking mutter, and disappeared.

  The circle lingered a moment more, then faded away. I swiveled the computer chair around to look at Ari. He was staring at me with loving sadness.

  “Who were you talking to now?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I don’t like him much. That I can tell you for sure.”

  CHAPTER 4

  TO MAKE LIFE DIFFICULT for eavesdroppers, Spare14 and I had arranged to meet outside in Golden Gate Park, but well away from the usual tourist areas. To the west of the museums and the Japanese Tea Garden lie the places that we locals use, a string of small lakes and meadows. We picked a grassy picnic area next to Kennedy Drive, just past Spreckels Lake, which would most likely be deserted on a weekday. I debated wearing a business suit, but since we’d be meeting informally, I eventually decided on trouser jeans and an indigo-and-white print blouse with a v-necked rust sweater over it. I carried a leather shoulder bag, into which Ari put a handful of electronic devices. He also stashed a small plastic box in his shirt pocket and another, larger metal box in the inside pocket of his leather jacket.

  “This will let me know if someone’s focusing a listening device us.” Ari tapped his shirt pocket.

  “What’s the other one?”

  “Two extra clips for the Beretta.”

  “Oh.” My stomach clenched. “Are we expecting trouble?”

  “I always do. Better safe than sorry.”

  As usual, I did the driving that afternoon. When we reached the park, I turned into the greenery on a narrow side road that led to the meadow in question. Since it needed repaving, I slowed down, and a good thing, too. From the shrubbery at the side of the road a young boy darted out after a soccer ball—right in front of us. I slammed on the brakes. The car jerked to one side with a squeal and the thump of tires on potholes. Ari swore in Hebrew.

  “Did I miss him?” I was shaking so hard I could barely speak.

  “Miss what?” Ari snapped. “There was nothing there.”

  I simply could not believe him. In m
y memory I could see the boy’s horrified face as the car bore down on him. I unbuckled my seat belt and got out to look. No boy, no ball, no nothing lay in the street except for the skid marks of our tires. Ari got out and joined me.

  “You saw something?” he said.

  “A kid, yeah, running right in front of us.” I laid one hand at my throat. I could feel the pulse at that spot pounding merrily away. “I thought I’d hit him for sure.”

  “Go stand over there.” Ari pointed to the sidewalk. “I’ll park the car.”

  I followed orders. Rather than watch his version of parallel parking, I considered what had just happened. If we’d been going fast on a crowded street, I would have swerved right into a nasty accident. I’d seen an image, obviously, not a real boy. The question was its origin—inside my own mind or some kind of sending?

  I heard the fluting voice of Cryptic Creep. It came from outside of my own mind, all right, and from a long way away.

  I can’t protect you unless you join us. That’s just a sample of what they can do.

  “Who’s they?” I said aloud.

  You know who must fear you now. Belial’s allies.

  “Sure, but who sent the image?”

  No answer.

  “Did you? Why the hell should I trust you?”

  Nothing—no answer, no voice, no presence—nothing. When Ari rejoined me on the sidewalk, he held out the car keys. I shook my head.

  “When we leave here,” I said, “you’d better drive. I have a bad feeling about this.”

  “Do you think it’ll happen again?”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of, yeah. I don’t know anything for sure.”

  He nodded and pocketed the keys. As we walked off, he caught my hand in his. I clung to his grasp.

  In the midst of the sunny green lawn, Spare14 waited for us on a park bench. I recognized him immediately from the photos of the original Austin Osman Spare. Neither tall nor short, squarely built with a squarish face, he had gray hair swept back en brosse and blue eyes. He’d also dressed casually, in a pair of tan chinos, a blue shirt, and a gray cardigan sweater. A battered old-fashioned leather briefcase sat next to him on the bench. He was feeding stale bread to the birds and squirrels mobbing his feet, just another middle-aged man whiling away some time in the sunshine, or so he appeared.