Conspiracy of Angels (12 page)

Whoever had turned the place upside down hadn’t spared anything here. Even the mattress was slashed. I dropped the leather jacket onto the disaster of a bed and shucked out of the clothes I’d worn for who knew how long. Sand cascaded everywhere when I pulled the T-shirt off, and I tried not to think about how badly I wanted a shower.

Donning a fresh T-shirt and jeans, I managed only to feel slightly cleaner. Riffling through upended drawers, I snagged a couple changes of clothes. Across the dresser lay a T-shirt emblazoned with a memo from Grand Moff Tarkin, reminding all storm troopers to report for mandatory target practice at 0600 hours. Rushed as I was, it still brought a grin. I packed it.

Every article of clothing I owned seemed like it was black or some other dark shade, with the lone exception of a heather-gray hooded sweatshirt. It had a college logo emblazoned across the front.

C
ASE
W
ESTERN
R
ESERVE
U
NIVERSITY

When I picked up the sweatshirt, something tumbled to the floor—a little black-lace bra. That certainly didn’t belong to me. Seized with an overwhelming impulse, I rushed to the dresser, searching among the shattered bits of broken mirror. Receipts, business cards, other junk—then I found what I was looking for. A little strip of images, done up like they’d been taken in one of those old-fashioned photo booths, but it was laser-printer slick—a modern photo. Torn at the bottom, half the images were gone. The first two remained with gut-wrenching clarity.

Against a generic background, my face smiled out at me, wearing a goofy expression I probably thought was funny at the time. Beside me, looking only slightly more serious, was the black-haired woman who’d haunted me in visions. Her skin and features placed her heritage somewhere in the Middle East. She carried the warmth and exoticism of those lands in her knowing smile and arresting gaze.

Lailah.

The bra, the toothbrush, and now this.

I dropped onto the edge of the ruined bed trying to remember how to breathe.

“Dammit, Zack, we don’t have all night!” Lil cried, storming down the hall to retrieve me. She stopped in the doorway when she saw the stricken look on my face.

I wetted too-dry lips.

“You didn’t tell me…” I began. “You didn’t say I was involved with her.”

Lil’s gaze flicked from the lacey undergarment to the torn photo held loosely in my hand.

“She never said you were.”

Lil had carried a book back with her—the one with the torn pages. She tossed it next to me onto the bed. “Pack that. It’s the only one they damaged. I want to know why. The damned thing’s in French.” I didn’t even look at it. Wordlessly, I shoved it in with the rolled-up T-shirts and jeans.

Lil lingered awkwardly in the door. “With Lailah—does it make a difference if you can’t remember?” she asked.

My throat suddenly felt too tight. I swept off of the bed and finished stuffing clothes into the backpack. There was a pair of engineer boots in the corner of the wrecked closet, and I traded up from the cheap shit kickers I’d bought at Wal-Mart. Finally I trusted myself to speak again.

“Yeah. It makes a fucking difference.”

I grabbed my jacket and turned to go, nearly crushing the cordless phone underfoot. It had fallen from the nightstand and lay half under the bed. It looked like something transported from the wrong decade, a digital answering machine built into its base. I froze when a tinny voice announced a date and time stamp. They hadn’t erased the messages.

“
Tuesday, twelve fifty-two
A.M
.
”

My voice, breathless. “
They’re safe. I’m on the run, though. One of those bastards chased me all the way through Rockefeller Park. Some kid saw the shoot-out. Get ahold of Bobby before that turns into a real clusterfuck.
”

Traffic sounds in the distance and a loud click as I hung up. That explained the police bulletin. I wondered who Bobby was. The answering machine didn’t give me time to ponder for long.

“
Tuesday, two-forty-six
A.M
.
”

“
Lailah. If you’re there, pick up. Don’t go back tonight. The Nephilim have anchors all over. They’re watching the place.
”

I didn’t have a fucking clue what an anchor was, but my voice made it sound urgent. The computerized records-keeper made her inexorable advance to the next message.

“
Tuesday, three-thirty-five
A.M
.
”

My voice again, desperate. “
Lailah? Lailah, pick up! Your cell’s going straight to voicemail.
” There was a pause and the wind gusted over the mic. “
Lailah? Fuck!
”

I’d practically been yelling into the phone. The answering machine continued to play.

“
Thursday, four-twenty-five
A.M
.
”

A male voice, flat and uninflected said, “
Lake View, nine
A.M
. The angel. You know the one.
”

Something about the voice or what it reminded me of made all the hairs stand up on my arms. I had no conscious recognition, however. The guy sounded almost as robotic as the automated voice reciting the time and date stamp. The only thing that stood out was a curious twang to his a’s.

His message was the last.

A suffocating silence fell over the room. Lil asked, “Do you know who that was?”

“Nope,” I replied. My pulse thundered. I didn’t want to subject myself to the messages again, especially not the ones where I was calling for Lailah. Still, I steeled myself and hit play. I listened carefully for anything that might offer more information. I could hear cars in the background in each of mine. So I’d been on the move, probably on a cell. In the final message, background noise was conspicuously empty. Not even an echo, like the speaker stood in some soundproofed room.

“You think he’s talking about Lake View Cemetery?” Lil asked.

I shrugged. “I guess.”

“At least we have a timeline,” she observed. “Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

I nodded, the voice of the stranger still rattling uneasily in my head. Before I left, I yanked the wire from the phone and erased everything.

W
e fled to a diner near Ford and Mayfield called Egg Hedz. I wasn’t keen on being someplace so public, but Lil insisted it was safer with people around us, and we needed somewhere to sit and go over what we’d found. She ignored my concerns about the police bulletin, insisting people would only take notice if I acted like I had something to hide. Easy for her to say—she wasn’t the one who’d been spotted in a shoot-out only a few blocks away.

The little greasy spoon was busier than expected, probably because it was so close to University Circle, but we managed to score a booth tucked far away in the back. Despite my clamoring nerves, no one looked twice at us. All the customers seemed to be students from Case Western too intent on scarfing down some breakfast to bother paying attention to anything beyond their smartphones. Few of them bothered looking up from the devices, rapidly tapping out texts or scrolling through their social media and newsfeeds.

“So what do we have?” Lil asked.

I shoveled the last of my “Barn Buster” omelet into my mouth and hastily chewed. “A whole lot of nothing if I can’t decode that cipher,” I admitted.

Lil scowled into her coffee. “Assuming it’s relevant to any of this.”

“No,” I objected, gesturing with the fork. “It’s important. I know that much. I just can’t tell you how.”

“Then you’d better get cracking. What about that meeting at Lake View?”

I shrugged. “No clue. Not even sure I got that message before I ended up in the lake.” Neither of us brought up the issue of the shooting, though it nagged in the back of my thoughts. Who was Bobby and what had I been doing to get chased? Had a shoot-out been my only option?

Lil made a frustrated noise, bringing my thoughts back to the present. “Give me something, Anakim. I’m tired of chasing shadows.”

“Let me grab some paper,” I grumbled. Casting a quick glance around the diner to be sure no one was looking, I reached over to the empty booth across from us and snagged a clean place mat and roll of silverware. Focusing on clearing the space in front of me, I unrolled the silverware, using the spare napkin to wipe off any crumbs and grease that had collected on the table. Then I dug the roll with the manuscript page out of the backpack, holding my hand out to Lil.

“What?” she asked.

“A pen. I need one. Do you carry pens in your purse or is it just for your little peashooter?”

She shot me an unhappy look, but grabbed her clutch-purse and began to dig through its contents. Cigarettes, a lighter, a tube of lipstick, and a compact all appeared on the table in front of her, followed swiftly by a tin of breath mints and another pair of nitrile gloves.

“You didn’t tell me you were carrying around a portable hole,” I commented as a tube of mascara and yet another compact emerged from the purse. “Does that thing
have
a bottom?”

“Here’s your pen,” she said curtly. As soon as she handed it off to me, she focused on the collection of make-up and personal effects spread out on her side of the table. One by one, the items disappeared back into the little purse. It was like watching a magic trick in reverse. Had a live dove suddenly fluttered from the purse’s depths, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

“It’s a TARDIS,” I muttered. “That explains everything.”

“Oh, shut up,” she grumbled. “I’m going to the ladies’ room. Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone.”

I barely acknowledged her. Now that I had a clean workspace, I carefully unrolled the sheet of antique vellum. There was a scent and feel to the page that stirred memories deep in the back of my mind, but I couldn’t waste time with them. Instead, I spread the sheet out and began studying the three rings of numbers added to the design. On a corner of the place mat, I began arranging the numbers in a couple of different orders to see what patterns might emerge.

The more I worked, the more frustrated I got.

There were too many to be a lock combination or a routing number. Latitude and longitude didn’t fit. I tried adding them a couple of different ways, but that netted me nothing but more numbers, none of which seemed significant. I even checked to see if they were part of a Fibonacci sequence, marveling that I even remembered what the hell that was.

Somewhere in the midst of all my mad calculations, Lil came back from the ladies’ room. She took her seat across from me, waved the waitress over for a refill on both our coffees, and watched in silence as I worked.

“I need something to do instead of just sitting here,” she complained.

I glanced up from the page, rolling my neck until it popped. “You could look up the book you threw at me. You have a smartphone.”

“I don’t know French,” she replied with a grimace.

“I probably do.” I dredged the book from the backpack. It had an old leather cover with damage on the spine. The author and title were stamped in worn gold leaf. “
Le Pillage de l’Egypte par Napoléon
,” I read, then translated for her, “Napoleon’s Plunder of Egypt.” I flipped to the title page. “The author is Henri Charles de Garmeaux. Published 1809. It’s number 15 of 100 copies. Shit. They jacked up a super-rare book. I hope they had a good reason,” I said with a frown. I set the book on the table between us, nudging it over to Lil. “It’s a long shot, but maybe it’s in some digital collection you can run a search engine through. Just see what we’re missing between pages 197 and 202.”

“Sure… whatever,” she grumbled, then half-heartedly tapped the information into her browser.

I bent back over the cipher, but the puzzling strings of numbers still didn’t fit anything that made sense. Stretching in the booth, I tried a different vantage point, turning the manuscript page first sideways then upside down. I stopped short of folding the antique vellum to see if there was some physical key to the code.

“No luck?” Lil wondered.

“It’s right in front of me. I just need to get my brain in gear.”

“Well, I’m not finding shit,” she said, shifting around in her seat to tuck her legs under herself. Taking small, careful sips from her steaming coffee, she looked out across the crowded restaurant, eyes gliding vigilantly from one patron to the next.

“I’ll take a look when I’m done,” I said, and I went back over the Latin of the diagram, hoping the key was in the original text. “
Prim ternari ordo
,” I read, “The first order:
Seraphin, Cherubi, Throni
. Ugh,” I added with a grimace. “It’s all names of the orders of angels, but it’s in that mangled Church Latin. It should be
Seraphim
and
Cherubim.
Thrones should be
Ophanim
. The original words are Hebrew, after all.”

Lil rolled her eyes, muttering, “Thank you, Captain Wikipedia.”

I didn’t really hear her. It finally hit me. I hunched back over the page, jotting letters and numbers with feverish intensity.

“Got something?” she inquired, lazing halfway across the booth on her side.

“Hebrew,” I said excitedly. “In Hebrew, every letter is a number. All these numbers. They’re really letters. I just need to switch them to their Hebrew counterparts then back to English to see what they say.”

“Sure. You do that. How long?”

“Give me a few minutes. Hebrew’s basically solid consonants. I just hope I was using the Hebrew to disguise something in English, otherwise this is really going to suck. Could you look up angels in Lake View?”

“No,” she said flatly.

I frowned at her.

“Do you have any idea how many angels are in that cemetery?” she demanded. “I’d have more luck tying a leash around your neck and letting you run through it like a bloodhound.”

“Oh, hell no,” I responded.

She smirked nastily, as if enjoying the image she had conjured. “If you don’t crack that cipher, it’s
exactly
what I’ll do.”

After about ten minutes of transcription, I had a set of three phrases—one for each of the diagram’s rings. Even so, I wasn’t sure if they helped me or not. They read like telegrams from the
Twilight Zone
.