He had an accent, but his voice was soft and there was an almost musical lilt to it. He wasn’t wearing his blue uniform, but instead had on jeans and an FSK High T-shirt that looked to be several years old. His arms were sinewy without being bulky, and he looked like he was on springs, ready to move at a moment’s notice. Dana realized that it was his natural state, even though his posture seemed to be casual, even slouchy. It was the kind of feline grace she’d seen in the big cats at the San Diego Zoo.
His smile was slow, too. It was knowing, personal, amused, unconcerned, and yet there was interest there.
“I—I’ve seen you at school,” she said when absolutely nothing else occurred to her.
“I work there,” he said. “Part-time.”
“But you don’t still go there? You look like you’re a junior.”
“I’m nineteen,” he said. “I graduated last year.”
“Oh.”
Angelo turned toward a hand truck laden with cardboard boxes. He took a folding knife from his pocket, flicked the heavy blade into place, and then cut open the top box. He did it with incredible speed and grace, the silver edge slicing neatly and precisely through the packing tape without touching the contents inside. As Angelo folded the knife and put it away, Dana took another quick look at the scars on his arms and hands. Had he gotten them from learning how to use the knife? Or in knife fights? Some of them looked old and some looked like they had been bad.
“I’m working a couple of jobs now,” explained Angelo. “The school, here. Doing some maintenance stuff at the baseball field over the county line at Oak Valley, and picking up a few hours here and there hammering out dented fenders at Porter’s Auto Body.”
“That’s a lot of working.”
He shrugged. “I don’t mind work. Like the auto-body stuff best. I dig cars, but that’s only a few hours a week, because Porter mostly uses full-time guys. He calls me in when he has overflow. Money’s money,” he said, “and I’m trying to pay for college.”
“College?”
His smile suddenly dimmed. “Yeah, poor Latino kids want to go to college, too. Big surprise, huh?”
“No,” she cried. “That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?” he asked, his dark eyes suddenly intense. “You see me hauling bags of trash in school and you think that’s all I’m good for? You ever even know any Latino kids like me?”
“I never said that,” protested Dana. “I know a lot of people like you.”
And the like you hung in the air, as clumsy and awkward as it could possibly be.
“I—I m-mean,” she stammered, “we used to live in San Diego. There were a lot of Mexican kids in school.”
“I’m Puerto Rican,” he said. “Or can’t you tell the difference?”
She tried to organize an answer, but unfortunately every thought that came in her head sounded just as bad as what she’d already blurted.
“Leave her alone, Angelo,” said a voice behind Dana. She turned and saw a man standing there. Sunlight.
“I was just messing with her,” said Angelo quickly.
“She doesn’t know that,” said Sunlight. “Look at her. She’s about to faint. Or run away.”
Shutters seemed to slam down behind Angelo’s eyes. “I didn’t mean nothing.”
Sunlight came and placed a hand on Angelo’s shoulder and then put his other on Dana’s. His touch was surprisingly warm, and there was a tingle as if some kind of electric charge passed from his hand and into her skin. She shivered. From the amused smile on the corners of Sunlight’s mouth, she realized that he understood the effect and owned it.
“Tell the young lady you’re sorry,” suggested Sunlight.
“No,” Dana said quickly. “It was all me. I said something stupid and I’m really sorry.”
“Angelo…?” murmured Sunlight. “Are you going to let the lady take responsibility for all the negativity in the air?”
Angelo’s body language changed. He lost the cat grace and assurance and stood there almost meekly. He was twice as muscular as Sunlight, but he seemed to be less than half as powerful. Sunlight’s energy was very old, too, very adult, and Angelo seemed cowed by it.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
“It’s okay,” said Dana. “Really.”
Sunlight patted Angelo’s shoulder. “That was gracious of you. Now go tell Corinda that Ms. Scully would like to speak with her.”
“How do you know my name?” asked Dana, surprised.
“How could I not?” he said with mild amusement. “One of the famous Scully sisters. Between you and Melissa, you may be Corinda’s biggest customers. I see you two holding court at the booth behind the counter quite often.”
“Oh.”
“And lately Corinda has become fascinated by you.” Sunlight gestured and Dana glanced over to see Corinda at the register chatting animatedly to a very fat, very rich-looking woman with blue hair and lots of jewelry.
Angelo went back to work, taking books from the open box and stacking them on a table. Sunlight lightly touched Dana’s arm and they moved a few yards away.
“I apologize for anything Angelo might have said to offend you,” said Sunlight. “He’s a little thin-skinned.”
“No, it’s totally fine. He wasn’t bothering me,” said Dana. “I knocked something over and he caught it. He grabbed it so fast, before it could fall. I’ve never seen anyone move that fast.”
“Oh, yes, he’s quick,” agreed Sunlight. “But so is his temper. He’s used to being kicked around because of his skin color and his circumstance.”
“Circumstance?”
“He was brought over here as a ten-year-old by his mother, and she died when he was twelve. He went into an orphanage, but that was a particular kind of hell, so he ran away and lived on the streets. Imagine that, Miss Scully, a boy living in alleys and squatting in abandoned houses and yet going to school and getting his diploma. He’s doing his best with what life’s handed him.” Although he was probably less than ten years older than Dana, he spoke in a way that made him seem twenty or thirty years older. Mature, commanding, and self-assured. He had a lot of what Melissa called “personal power.”
“Poverty is an appalling thing,” continued Sunlight, shaking his head. “The fact that we, at our current level of modern civilized evolution, allow it, is unforgivable. Don’t you agree?”
“Y-yes, of course.”
“When I met Angelo, he was trying to live on some piecework at a garage, but it wasn’t enough to live on. Not really. I took him in and gave him a job here, and spoke for him at FSK so they would also offer employment. He’s putting away every dime he can to afford college. Community college, but that doesn’t matter. I offered to pay his tuition, but Angelo is very proud of the fact that he will pay his own way.”
“He should be,” said Dana. “And I feel like a total privileged white girl idiot.”
Sunlight nodded approvingly. “Self-awareness of one’s limitations is a rare and wonderful thing. Most people use pat replies and rely on culturally specific viewpoints, and they never become aware that these are not essential truths in their own experience. This is especially true of people born to some degree of wealth and comfort.”
“We’re not exactly rich.”
“Wealth is relative,” said Sunlight. He gestured toward the booth behind the café cash register, which was the only one open. “Let’s sit for a minute and talk about it.”
She went with him and slid into the booth. Corinda was ringing up a line of customers and said she’d be over as soon as she was free. Sunlight sat across from Dana. He was a strange man. Like someone who did not belong in this century. There was an air of otherworldliness to him. If he were in a Shakespeare movie, he’d be Oberon, king of the fairies, or maybe the sorcerer, Prospero. His bones were delicate, his features sharp except for his full lips, and Dana had never seen eyes of his smoky morning-mist gray hue before. She could understand why Corinda and Melissa were entranced with
him. No doubt a lot of girls and women were under his spell. Dana felt it, too, despite the difference in their ages. A simple desire to be in his company and—as Melissa often put it—to “share in his energy.” Just looking into his eyes was hypnotic.
“Wealth,” said Sunlight after they’d ordered tea and a plate of fruit and cheeses from one of the staff. “We were talking about that. You say you’re not rich, but in many ways you are. You have two parents. You have two brothers and a sister. You live in a nice house on a good street. You have never wanted for food, for warmth, for clothes or books or anything material.”
It took Dana a few seconds to process that, and then she sat back, her brow knotting. “How do you know all that about my family? Oh … Melissa told you.”
Sunlight laughed. Soft and pleasant, with no trace of mockery. “Not at all, Miss Scully.”
“Then how—?”
“Corinda told me.”
“But she doesn’t know about my brothers or where we live, does she?”
“You’ve sat with Corinda. You tell me how she knows what she knows.”
Their food and drinks arrived. Dana took a fat red grape from the plate and ate it slowly, thinking about what Sunlight had said.
“You’re troubled by the thought of someone bending close to look into your life through the windows of your soul,” said Sunlight mildly. “It’s a common reaction, but it gets easier to accept over time. Think of it like this: if you were born into an underground society and never knew about the sun, imagine how much you would fear and distrust it upon first seeing this big, burning ball of superheated gases dominating the sky. But over time you will come to realize that its light makes all things grow, and that it warms your face, and it chases back shadows, and without it even your underground civilization would never have come into existence. The larger world is like that when we each first encounter it. Why? Because those who don’t believe in it, or don’t trust it, or don’t understand it are the ones who teach us about the world. About their limited perception of the world, that is. They think everything that makes up the world can be weighed, measured, metered, quantified, and touched.” He smiled at her, his gray eyes fixed on hers. “But we both know the world is so much bigger than that, don’t we?”
Dana picked up her cup, took an experimental micro-sip, and nodded. “I guess we do.”
A moment later Corinda came around the partition and slid in beside Sunlight. “We have so much to talk about,” she said. “In fact, tell me why the words ‘autopsy report’ keep popping into my mind.”
CHAPTER 42
The Observation Room
6:00 P.M.
Danny unlocked the observation room and reached for the light switch, then jumped and clawed for his pistol when he saw a figure standing silhouetted in front of the wall of screens.
God, was it him? Was it the monster? Was it the angel come to kill him, too?
These thoughts slashed like razors through the technician’s mind. Gerlach had shown him Polaroids of the horrors the madman had committed. The pictures were bad enough, and he never wanted to meet the killer in person. Never.
“Freeze right there!” he roared, forcing anger into his voice to overcome the fear. He held his pistol in both hands, the barrel nowhere near as steady as he wanted it to be. “Hands on your head. Do it now or I will put you down.”
The figure did not raise his hands. Instead he spoke.
“Put the gun down before I take it away and feed it to you.”
Danny’s heart jumped into a different gear.
“Gerlach…?”
The red-haired agent reached into his pocket for his packet of gum. He munched a stick and folded the silver foil very slowly and deliberately. “I won’t ask you again, kid. I don’t like people pointing guns at me.”
Gerlach was not even looking at him.
Danny lowered his weapon, but his fear diminished only slightly. Agent Gerlach was not the same kind of monster as the angel, but he was far from a normal human being. Gerlach was a product of the Montauk Project on an air base on Long Island. The overall project was run by the air force, but there were supposed to be all kinds of black budget departments buried beneath mountains of red tape, disinformation, and veils of secrecy. The scuttlebutt among the agents of the Syndicate was that Gerlach was one of several dozen men who had been taken from orphanages at age ten and then raised by scientists and a brutal cadre of trainers.
Physical torture was only part of the overall process of weeding out the weak–often fatally–and turning the strongest survivors into a kind of super soldier. Some of what went on at Montauk had leaked into the global conspiracy theory networks, which of course distorted the truth. But not as much as people outside the Syndicate might think. That Gerlach was a cold-blooded and efficient killer was obvious to anyone who knew him for more than five minutes. What was less obvious was that he seemed to know things he couldn’t know. Stuff that wasn’t in any surveillance report.
The angel had come from the Montauk Project, too, Danny knew. So there was that. As far as Danny could figure, on the other hand, only one in twenty of the children who went through Montauk lived to reach their teens. Fewer still were alive now as adults. And those who were—both teens and adults—were monsters. None similar to one another, but not one of them normal by any standard.
“You’re thinking bad thoughts,” said Gerlach from across the room.
Danny jumped and yelped. “W-what…?”
Agent Gerlach turned, and in the weak blue-white light from the TV screens, he looked like a ghoul. Like one of those flesh-eating dead things from the movies. What were they calling them now? Zombies? Sure. That fit.
“We have a long night ahead of us, kid,” said Gerlach. “Maybe you ought to go wash your face, take a leak, maybe try some deep breathing to get yourself calmed down. Put that gun away. You won’t need it. He’s not here.”
Danny looked down at the revolver that hung loosely in his hand. He eased the hammer down, engaged the safety, and slid it back into the shoulder holster.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know anyone was down here. I thought the door was locked.”
Gerlach chewed for a moment. “It was.”
Danny shook his head. “Sometimes I think you do this stuff to live up to the rumors.”
“What rumors?”
“The rumors about us. I mean, you do know what they’re calling us these days?”
“Who?”
Danny went over to the coffeemaker and began brewing a fresh pot. “You know, the idiots who write those conspiracy theory books? The ones on the lecture circuit?” He flicked the collar of his suit jacket. “They’re calling us the men in black. How about that?”
“I’ve been called worse,” said Gerlach.
“No, my point is that they know what we look like. We’re always dressed like this. Black suits, white shirts, black ties, sunglasses.” He took a cup from a rack and set it next to the coffeemaker. “It’s like a uniform. I mean, I know we’re supposed to look like off-the-rack government agents, but…”
“It’s a uniform look.”
“That’s what I said,” agreed Danny as he slipped his arms into the sleeves of his suit coat to put it on.
“No,” corrected Gerlach, “we’re not wearing uniforms; we are meant to look uniform. People call us men in black because they remember the uniforms. They’re reacting to the look. But they can’t tell us apart. They could look at five of us and all they remember are the clothes, the sunglasses, the attitude. No one remembers what we look like. That’s the point.”
Danny looked at him. “Really?”
“If we all wore bright red cowboy hats, they’d call us men in red cowboy hats. It’s simple manipulation.”
The tech held his arms up and looked at the sleeves. “Huh,” he said. “I never thought of it that way.”
Gerlach smiled and looked down at the coffeemaker. “What color eyes do I have?”
“What?” ask
ed Danny.
The agent poured coffee into his cup. “What color eyes?”
“Um … green? No, brown.”
Gerlach looked at him. “Blue. Maybe you’d remember my hair color. Maybe you’d say I was a red-haired man—if this is my real hair color and not a dye job; or maybe you’d stop looking after you noticed the suit, but you’ve worked with me for seventeen weeks and you don’t know my eye color, and you’d probably be off three inches on my height and fifteen pounds on my weight. These suits make us invisible. We’re stamped out of the same mold.”
The tech grunted. “That’s kind of cool.”
“It’s efficient.”
“I guess.” Danny glanced over at the screens. “So … where’s our boy tonight? You sure he’s not here in the church?”
“I’m sure.”
“Where is he?”
Gerlach smiled a thin little smile. “Working.”
CHAPTER 43
Beyond Beyond
6:05 P.M.
Angelo Luz carried a carton of sugar packets out of the storeroom and set it down on an empty table, removed his knife, flicked the blade into place, and cut open the box. The music that played from the speakers mounted around the shop were Gregorian chants. Church music. Sad, slow, haunted. The music conjured images of strange angels and dying saints and the light from stained-glass windows.
He moved from table to table refilling the wire sugar racks. While he worked, his eyes kept flicking over to the table behind the café register, where the pretty white girl sat with Sunlight and Corinda. She had such a lovely face, such a long and elegant throat, such fiery red hair.
The doleful music filled his mind.
CHAPTER 44
Beyond Beyond
6:09 P.M.
“How do you know that?” cried Dana. “How do you know anything about those autopsy reports?”
Corinda and Sunlight sat across from her. Neither said a word, letting her work it out.
Dana banged her fist on the tabletop, making the teacups dance. “This is not normal.”